The threat scope had come alive a few minutes later as the CV-22 crossed the coastline — the search radar at Liepaja got a solid skin paint on them when they climbed to their highest altitude, three hundred feet, when Fell yanked the aircraft up to avoid a transmission tower that the AN/APQ-l 74 terrain-following radar suddenly detected directly ahead. Soon afterward plenty of VHF radio transmissions and fast-sector radar scans were detected.
The bad guys had spotted them.
The Marines had sprinted off into the forest as soon as the helicopter appeared. Lobato dragged RAGANU along after him as though the young CIS Army officer had been a sack of dirty laundry. Quickly, the Marines had turned the tables on the chopper pilot — eight sets of MP5 submachine guns were trained on the helicopter’s cockpit and engine compartment, ready to send it crashing to earth in a blazing fireball. The chopper, a Kamov-27 “Helix-B” amphibious-warfare helicopter, was fitted with a rocket pack on one side and a 12.5-millimeter gun pod on the other. Seconds after it popped on its searchlight on the group, it suddenly sped off into the night, extinguishing the searchlight and all other external lights.
“Move out!” Lobato shouted. “Scatter!” There was something else he remembered about the Helix — it had a bomb bay. With one hand firmly under RAGANU’s left arm, and his other hand holding his MP5, Lobato scrambled off into the forest.
Just then the chopper could be heard coming back. Lobato quickened his pace, his pulse thrumming in his ears. When he heard the chopper almost directly overhead, he wheeled left, ran hard until the throb of the chopper’s rotors seemed to replace the heartbeat in his chest, then dived behind a tree opposite the sound. He dragged RAGANU behind the tree with him, closed his eyes tightly, and yelled “Cover!” just before a series of loud explosions tore into the forest. The Helix had dropped two explosive mine canisters and the four hundred tiny bomblets began ripping the foliage into green shreds.
RAGANU was screaming like a wounded lamb, and Lobato had to put a hand over his mouth. “Shut the fuck up!” yelled Lobato. RAGANU seemed to understand — Lobato wanted RAGANU alive, but he would not put himself or his squad in any more danger because of the Lithuanian soldier; the Marines had RAGANU’s briefcase, the contents of which were probably as important as the man himself. As he listened for a follow-on attack, Lobato followed RAGANU’s hand up his arm and felt blood.
Lobato unrolled a thick field-dressing pad from a pouch on his web belt, pressed it onto where he thought the center of the wound was, put the Lithuanian soldier’s free hand on the wound, and tightened the man’s fingers around it. “Press hard,” Lobato ordered. “Hard!”
Once Lobato was convinced that RAGANU was finally helping himself, he raised up to a knee and tried to scan the area with his night-vision goggles. The device was useless, broken in a desperate race to get away from the mines. Unaided vision was an exercise in futility. Still, Marines had fought for decades without them. …
The area underneath the chopper’s flight path was probably strewn with delayed-arming antipersonnel mines, so Lobato reminded himself to avoid it. He shouted, “Assemble foxtrot two, foxtrot two! Assemble!” then ducked and listened. After a few minutes he heard the familiar rustling of feet behind him and he knew his men were on the move.
Time to get the hell out of Dodge.
“Ladybug, target ten o’clock, three miles, altitude seven hundred feet, climbing, airspeed one-zero-five knots,” the radar controller aboard PATRIOT reported. “Target turning left … target turning left to intercept…”
The chopper appeared out of nowhere, but fortunately its appearance was telegraphed by a series of small flashes on the ground ahead — and then Fell wondered if the Marines might be down there under those flashes. But there was no time to think about them.
Fell saw that the chopper was doing more than turning to intercept — a second later he could see tiny winks of light and a few bright-yellow lines arc in the night sky. “Target shooting!” he cried out. He hauled back on his control stick, zooming up and over the tracers. The helicopter tried to climb and keep its muzzle pointing at Ladybug, but it didn’t have the airspeed that the CV-22 did. Seconds later, after climbing less than two hundred feet, it suddenly lowered its nose again and banked hard to the right.
Fell was expecting that right turn — the pilot sits on the right side of most helicopters, even Eastern Bloc helicopters, so that’s the direction chopper pilots prefer to turn — so Fell was banking hard left and descending as soon as he saw the hostile helicopter couldn’t pursue. “Stinger coming on-line,” Fell shouted as he flicked the weapon-arming switch on his control stick. After one more turn to the right to line up on the helicopter, Fell heard the growl of one Stinger missile’s seeker head locking on to the helicopter’s hot exhaust. “One away!” he warned Watanabe as he pressed the trigger. The CIS chopper banked once more, hard to the right, but the tiny Stinger missile tracked it easily. There was a small puff of white flame, a tiny flicker of fire, then darkness.
“Ladybug, splash one,” PATRIOT reported. “Area clear of airborne targets. Steer heading one-five-four for pickup, range six miles.” Fell did not acknowledge — flying the suggested heading was acknowledgment enough, and there would be plenty of time to thank the crew of the E-3B after the assault team and RAGANU were safely on board the Valley Mistress. He re-engaged the TFR system and resumed his nap-of-the-earth flight back to the pickup point.
The small dirt road they had worked around all night had a peculiar hairpin turn in it that showed up remarkably well on satellite photos they studied while planning this extraction, and now Lobato knew why — there was a small religious monument, a janseta, in the curve. This was the “foxtrot two” assembly area, the closest one away from the area where the Helix attack chopper could have strewn mines. Lobato took up a position south of the janseta and sat and waited. After five minutes he used hand gestures to tell RAGANU to stay put, and he carefully inched his way toward the monument.
Stealth and patience were more important now than in almost any other time in the mission, but after the helicopter attack Lobato’s men were really anxious to get out of the country. No sooner had Lobato reached the monument than the seven other members of the team came in — the last, Corporal Butler, practically sprinting. Lobato took them back into the forest and set up a security watch. Except for a few serious-looking scrapes and one possible broken wrist from a fall, the rest of the team members appeared well.
The arrival of the CV-22 a few minutes later was like watching an angel descend from heaven. Four Marines guarded the front and rear of the landing zone and two others carried RAGANU up the cargo ramp. Ladybug was on the ground less than thirty seconds before lifting off again and tree-hopping away back to the Baltic. RAGANU was given water, a life vest, and careful medical attention by the team’s corpsman. He had received a deep, six-inch-long gash in his right bicep, and a three-inch piece of metal was embedded in the wound — one last chilling reminder of what would probably be his last moments in the CIS.
The CV-22 took the long way back to the Valley Mistress this time— giving the Gagarin-class research vessel a wide berth and avoiding all large vessels and shore radar sites, it took twice as long to get back to the salvage ship as it did to reach shore. As soon as Ladybug touched down on the helipad, crew members were on deck doing an engines-running refueling, checking for damage, and removing the weapons pods from the aircraft. All possible evidence of the incident had to be erased.