This was not good. Gillis began crawling back to the cockpit. He’d wished the bags were leaking instead of the gas smell coming from the engines. If they had a fuel leak in the power plants, the possibility of an explosion increased about tenfold.
Gillis had trouble getting back into his seat, that was how much the big chopper was jumping all over the sky now. He looked at the fuel-take-on meter and saw they were only halfway through the refueling. The smell of gas was so bad, and the engines’ power dropping so quickly, he couldn’t imagine them surviving this flight.
“Should we disconnect?” Ricco yelled over to him.
“We’ve only taken on five hundred pounds,” Gillis yelled back. “That’s nowhere near enough. We’ve got to hang with it!”
So that was what they did. They stayed on course, took on gas for the unit, all the while waiting for the bright flash and the searing flames that would so horribly end their lives.
But it never came. The next two minutes passed like an eternity, but finally, the bladders had reached their full point. Now came the tricky part: disengaging. Ricco started easing the chopper away by reducing throttle. With the precision of a surgeon, he gently began extracting their receptacle probe from the fuel hose.
But then Gillis saw a bright flash off to their right. For a moment he thought he was seeing double. Suddenly he realized there was another plane next to the tanker. Another plane that looked just like it.
Another C-130…
There was another flash. Then another. And another.
It was on that third flash that Gillis finally realized what was going on.
“Damn!” he yelled. “It’s the freaking ArcLight!”
Ricco looked up and sure enough, saw the ghostly black gunship riding right next to the refueling tanker. Its guns were blazing away at it.
“Christ! Disconnect!” Gillis was yelling.
Purely on reaction, Ricco hit the full-disengage button. The Hook’s receptacle opened up and the tanker’s fuel hose came out, spraying aviation gas everywhere.
The tanker blew up an instant later.
The explosion was blinding. All Gillis could see were pieces of metal and wire and glass flying right at him, all of it on fire.
Somehow Ricco was able to pitch the big chopper away from the gigantic fireball. But it was a very violent maneuver. The fuel bags went one way and the chopper went another, and soon they were looking straight down at the Persian Gulf rushing up at them.
“This is not good!” Gillis was yelling out.
Ricco was battling the controls, but it was already hopeless. The Hook was falling way too fast and weighed too much to get under control.
They’d lost all sight of the ArcLight by now. The sky around them was filled with the burning debris of the C-130 tanker plane. And they were falling with it, very rapidly.
It was strange then, because Ricco just looked over at Gillis and extended his hand. Gillis took it and shook it heartily.
“Sorry, buddy,” Ricco said. “I really am….”
Gillis just shook his head as the Hook went nose-over.
“Not your fault, pal,” he said calmly. “Not at all…”
Chapter 24
If possible, things were even worse back at the Bat Cave.
It was now 0630 hours. The fuel chopper was so overdue, the unit had given up on it.
What had happened to the Pumper? There was no way of knowing. The unit had no means of getting the Hook on the radio or of getting a message sent by the fuel chopper back to them.
But an even larger problem had arisen.
By an incredible stroke of bad luck, there had been a traffic accident on the one section of the desolate highway that ran closest to the mouth of the cave on Ka-el. It had happened about an hour after the fuel chopper left. A large truck carrying some kind of liquid had flipped over on the curve, completely blocking the roadway not a half mile from the base of the mountain.
The screech of the truck’s brakes had nearly deafened the Marines monitoring the listening devices along the cliff’s edge. Immediately turning their NightScopes oh the wreck, they saw the driver stumble from his smashed cab and collapse on the side of the road. The Marines simply couldn’t believe it. The first vehicle of any type to travel the highway since the unit reached the cave had crashed just a sneeze’s length away from their hideout.
Smitz, Chou, Norton, and Delaney were immediately summoned to the ledge. Scanning the area with powerful NightScope binoculars, they could see the truck couldn’t have wound up in a worse position: lengthwise, with its cab lodged firmly between two boulders on the north side of the highway and its trailer, twisted and split in two, dug deeply into the asphalt on the south side. The truck was also leaking something—maybe even gasoline, ironically enough. If that ignited, the glow would be seen for miles.
Norton and the others were appraising this sudden crisis when another ominous noise was picked up by the Marines’ super-long-range eavesdropping devices. This was a low rumbling sound, mixed with the hum of generator-produced electrical energy. The Marines had heard this combination before. It was the sound of many heavy vehicles moving at once.
All NightScopes turned west, and sure enough, coming over the next hill were the lead elements of an Iraqi military column. With twenty-one T-72 tanks on flatbed trucks out front and dozens of troop trucks bringing up the rear, it was at least a battalion on the move. As the Americans watched helplessly, the column slowly approached the accident site. The lead truck nearly plowed into the wreck. This caused a series of bumper strikes and a storm of screeching brakes all along the convoy. In this manner, the column came to an abrupt stop.
That had been nearly thirty minutes ago, just as the sky was beginning to brighten. Now the highway was simply jammed with Iraqi military vehicles and their occupants, many of whom were out and walking around, trying to figure a way to dislodge the wrecked truck from the roadway.
But it was clear, even from a half mile away, that the Iraqis didn’t have a clue what to do. The crashed truck’s front half was wedged so firmly between the two rocks, no amount of pulling and pushing could budge it. The trailer itself was so deeply embedded into the macadam, even a hundred men could not move it either. And apparently there was no means to get one of the tanks off its flatbed to do the job.
So, short of turning the column around, the Iraqis were stuck.
All this put the Americans in a very precarious position. They had no fuel left in their choppers, and with no choppers they had no way to get off the cliff. If the Iraqis happened to spot them, it would be a bloodbath. Just the tanks alone carried enough firepower to take out the cave, the cliff, and everyone on it. And if that didn’t work, the column’s commanders could call in air strikes to finish the job.
What made the whole thing excruciating, though, was the fear that by some cruel miracle, Ricco and Gillis would finally show up. The irony of that possibility was as thick as the early morning mist now rising from the desert. If the tanker pilots didn’t return, that meant something catastrophic had happened to them and the unit was stranded. But if by some act of God they did appear, the unit’s position would undoubtedly be compromised—and they would be trapped and discovered.
Either way, it would be a disaster.
Of course, there was also the possibility of a third scenario.
“You know, those assholes Ricco and Gillis could have just cut out on us and landed somewhere friendly,” Delaney hissed over to Norton as they remained crouched in a hidden position along the cliff’s edge.