Whoomp-whoomp, in the distance. Ted went silent, holding his breath. There was a slight breeze, but that was it. The crickets and the critters below were too far away to hear up there in the air.
Whoomp-whoomp.
Helicopter.
Ted stared hard into the darkness. The helicopter was out there all right, and there was a little moonlight, but he could not see anything. He squinted harder. The sound was out there, northeast, yes, it was coming from the northeast.
The pitch of the sound changed. It slowed – descending? It was somewhere northwest, a mile or two from town. Ted had a mental picture but consulted his map to be sure. He took his radio mic. No interference at the moment. He keyed it.
“Calico, this is Boxcar, you have a helicopter in your area of operations maybe dropping a recon team, over.”
“Boxcar, this is Calico,” came a woman’s voice. “We hear it and we’re on it.”
The helicopter was back to its normal sound and moving west. Then the sound changed again.
“Budweiser, this is Boxcar, over,” Cannon called.
“Boxcar, Budweiser, go ahead, over,” came the answer.
“Helicopter descending in your AO, over.”
“Roger, checking. Out.”
Probably fake drops – a helicopter would mask a real insertion with a half-dozen fake ones. But maybe not. Each of those areas had a team insurgents assigned and each team was comprised of locals who knew the terrain because they had grown-up playing army there. The PRA recon units were at a disadvantage.
Cannon called in three more potential insertion sites when he saw the flashes and the occasional tracer from Budweiser’s area. The sound of the shooting took a moment to reach him – and there was plenty. Then nothing.
“Boxcar, this is Budweiser, over,” came the call.
“Budweiser, this is boxcar, go ahead, over,” Ted replied.
“Boxcar, we got three enemy KIA, over,” said the voice. The enemy recon team was dead. “We have one KIA and one WIA of our own, over.”
They had lost one of their own people and another was wounded. Ted knew everyone on Team Budweiser. Someone he knew, probably for all his life, had just died. Who? He could ask, but then he thought better of it.
He put it aside and acknowledged. Then he called in medical evacuation.
An hour or more – or perhaps less – passed. Ted Cannon stared out into the darkness to the north. He had listened in to another firefight on the radio, somewhere much farther north. They had gotten the recon team, but lost another guerrilla. Someone’s dad or mom, sister or brother, a friend or neighbor.
He could not believe it had come to this.
How the hell had it come to this?
But it had.
Helicopter sounds, different, and more. At least two. Inbound from the north, fast. They weren’t like the others, which were almost certainly Blackhawks. No, this was some different kind of helicopter, more powerful, more… angry.
“Ah, shit,” he said, as the pair of malignant, insect-like choppers roared past the water tower at high speed. He keyed the mic on the command frequency, which thankfully was not jammed.
“Control, this is Boxcar! You have Apache gunships inbound!”
The gunships followed a course roughly along Route 231 right into the center of Jasper, but the GPS location of their initial target was already fed into the weapons system. Power was intermittent below – it seemed it was coming from generators, since the electricity had been cut off to the whole region. Much of the town was dark, but the aircraft had forward-looking infrared viewers that gave the pilots a look at what was happening below.
What was happening was panic.
The roar of the helicopters sent people running for cover, and their speed over the town made it hard to react before they had disappeared over the neighboring rooftops.
The Apaches banked right, their weapon systems feeding the pilots the targeting data and they fired. A Hellfire missile came off of each helicopter’s rails, shooting over the rooftops and slamming into the abandoned PSF station.
The two missiles punched through the walls, detonating inside. The blast ripped through the walls and lifted the roof up, then set it down, collapsing it.
“Sierra-one one, main target destroyed, over,” the lead plot radioed.
“Roger, continue mission, out.”
The Apaches swung over the town, seeking targets of opportunity. The problem is there were so many. People were scattering and running, and at least a dozen vehicles were moving.
Plonk!
The lead pilot knew that sound from flying gunships in Afghanistan before the Split. These people were shooting at him.
“We are taking small arms fire, over,” he called.
Plonk plonk!
A round struck the lead pilot’s canopy and cracked it a bit. The aviator was not worried – the cockpit was set inside a titanium tub designed to protect the crew from bullets and the glass was thick and strong. Much of the rest of the craft’s critically vulnerable parts were likewise armored. The Apache was not invulnerable to small arms fire, but it was a damn hard nut to crack.
“Looking for targets… armed targets firing in open. Engaging!”
A band of four guerrillas had taken cover behind some cars along North Newton, firing with various types of AR15 knock-offs. The lead pilot swept the sight over them and engaged the M230 30 millimeter cannon mounted under the pilots. The gun slaved to where the pilot’s eyes fell and the ship shook as a burst of ten rounds tore downward, followed by another ten.
The cars were ripped to shreds, and the effect on the four guerrillas was worse. There was not a lot left, but the Apache dumped another burst into the area just to make sure.
There was still a great deal of firing from individual shooters. The Apaches swept across the town, engaging and firing at anything that looked hostile. One of their targets was the high school – they put a Hellfire missile into the administration building, which at least gave some of the local kids something to be happy about.
But the fire kept coming from the ground, and some of the rounds hit. One of the Hellfires took a bullet in its canister and would not launch. Both canopies were peppered with cracks.
The lead Apache unleashed two bursts at the fire house – several firemen were firing on it – and destroyed the ladder truck. It swung starboard when the call came in from its wingman.
“Hey, I’m losing hydraulic pressure, over.”
“What is it, over?”
“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe a bullet cut a line. I gotta return to base, over.”
“Roger, expend your ordnance on the way out, over.”
“Roger.”
The helicopters broke off their attack and began flying north. On the way out they saw several suspicious vehicles, and wiped them out.
Ted Cannon saw them fly by again, this time heading north. He had watched their attack on Jasper from his vantage point, and as they passed he unloaded a clip at them from his AK.
They didn’t notice.
Turnbull hopped out of the pick-up in the Courthouse Square. There were fires around town, and several people under sheets in the square.
“Apache gunships,” Davey Wohl said, his face tight with anger. “They just came in here and lit us up. And there was nothing we could do.”