“You know the reporting procedure,” Paz advised. “Take good care of her.”
Ortiz saluted yet again. “Like a virgin on her wedding night, Major.”
Paz watched Ortiz climb into the cockpit and fire up the jet-powered engines. Seconds later, the Hind lifted gracefully, straight up with a slight list to the right. Paz held the green cap over his stubble-covered head as the ship’s huge propellers sliced through the wind, driving it straight forward. Ortiz steadied her fifty feet up and headed out over the airfield as he climbed gracefully on his planned northeasterly course.
Paz was still watching the Hind’s shrinking shape vanish in the distance when a jeep pulled up alongside him. Its single passenger, garbed in flight gear, emerged from the backseat.
“Lieutenant Manuel Ortiz, sir, reporting for flight duty,” the man announced, saluting.
The major’s mouth dropped as he looked back once more at the horizon where the Hind had already disappeared.
Blaine McCracken cut in the turbo boosters and watched the Hind-D’s airspeed indicator climb toward 250 knots. The cockpit was still strange to him. He had spent several weeks drilling on the basics of the mission, from perfecting his Spanish to mastering the Hind’s elaborate control panel from reconstructed pictures.
Damn Russians, though, didn’t know when to leave well enough alone. The control panel he was facing now was altogether different from the one he had drilled on, which wouldn’t have been so bad if not for the fact that all labels and instructions were in Russian. He had already lost critical time trying to pick up airspeed while keeping his altitude low to avoid being tracked on radar. The plan was intricate, the timing much too fine to lose even a second.
“Move it, girl,” he said under his breath, “or I’ll have to pinch your behind.”
Blaine checked his coordinates: an hour of flying time to the landing site where he would be meeting his partner on the mission, Johnny Wareagle. Blaine was heading fast for the Tuma Grande River when a warning panel he recognized as the intruder alert screen flashed with three green blips.
“Well, girl,” he said softly, “looks like we got company.”
“Red leader to base. Red leader to base.”
“This is base,” returned Guillermo Paz.
“We have the enemy in our sights. Repeat, the enemy is in our sights. Should we engage?”
“Negative, Red leader. I will have Green, Blue, and Yellow units rendezvous in your sector immediately. Stay on his tail. Repeat, stay on his tail.”
Paz gave the appropriate instructions to the rest of his units and breathed easier. Imagine losing a Hind. … His career would be ruined. He had resisted the initial temptation to stalk the stolen Hind with more of her sisters, opting instead for four units of three standard helicopter gunships each. Certainly they would be sufficient to get the job done in this case. After all, where did the thief plan to fly the stolen Hind? There was no possible way he could get out of the country, none at all. Paz reminded himself that he must remain calm. If need be, he could still order his gunships to destroy the Hind and then fabricate a story to cover the truth. Accidents did happen.
Paz stroked his mustache and dialed up a fresh frequency. “Acoyapa base to Falcon One,” he said to the man piloting the Hind. “Surrender or die.”
McCracken did not acknowledge the warning. The three choppers were holding their positions behind him as he expected they would, waiting for others to mass from different directions to box him into a forced landing. He had no chance of reaching his destination. Unless….
Blaine turned his eyes to the targeting controls, range finders, and dual joystick handles. Thankfully, the weapons systems’ positioning remained just as he had studied it. He switched on the AUTO switch and practiced rotating his head. Beneath the wings the air cannons turned with him. His 128 unguided missiles were laser-aimed and made for air-to-air combat. Comfortable with the control panel, Blaine took a deep breath and brought the big agile bird around.
“Red leader to base! Falcon One has turned and is coming at us in an attack run. Repeat, attack run!”
Paz slammed his callused hand down on the desktop. This thief was surely insane. What could he possibly hope to gain from such a display? Reenforcements would be closing by now. The thief would know that. An act of desperation obviously. Well, Paz would just have to stop him here.
“Destroy him, Red Unit,” Paz ordered. “Repeat, destroy Falcon One.”
“Roger, base.”
The three choppers had moved into an attack spread when Blaine locked the middle one into the firing grid sketched over his face mask. Blaine fired a burst from his wing-mounted air cannons; the chopper exploded into a jet of orange flames as the remaining two converged on him from opposing angles, guns clacking. It would take a perfect shot, however, to disable the heavily armored Hind. Blaine could feel the bullets banging off the ship’s steel hull, but he knew they were merely distractions to allow the smaller ships to draw close enough to achieve sure hits with their missiles.
The strategy was wise. Each carried two missiles and only one of the four would have to impact to force the Hind-D into an unscheduled landing or worse.
The choppers whirled closer.
Blaine could take one out easily, but in the impossibly short period of time for a man unfamiliar with the controls, two seemed a long shot. But there was a chance.
McCracken dipped evasively to buy the time he needed, swinging round to the north once more. The choppers corrected their attack angle and started in again.
Blaine went into his swing. It was not something an intelligent pilot would have done, but then Blaine was hardly a pilot at all. Gnashing his teeth from the G-forces, he somehow kept both thumbs poised on the firing buttons of his twin cannons, sending a non-stop barrage that scarred the sky as Blaine circled around behind his targets.
Blaine could only hope he had figured the remaining choppers’ positions properly. An explosion pounded his eardrums and shook him forward against the safety straps. He felt the Hind whirling out of control, and when the second explosion came it was all he could do to keep his hands on the navigational stick. His trembling hands held on to it desperately as the Hind swooned lower, treetops directly beneath him now, a vast green blanket into which he seemed sure to be wrapped.
Guillermo Paz sat anxiously by the radio. Over one minute had passed since Red Unit’s last report, an eternity in battle. Already he was dreading the call he would have to make to Managua if the impossible happened and the bastard somehow got away. More than his career was at stake.
Crackle, crackle, crackle….
“Base, do you read?” came a garbled voice through the static.
“This is Base,” Paz returned, squeezing the microphone’s base.
“He’s down, Base. We got him. Down ourselves but….”
Crackle….
“Where? Request coordinates.”
Crackle…
“North of … north …” crackle … “of Santo Domingo….”
It was enough to go on, plenty. Somewhere north of the town of Santo Domingo. The rest of Paz’s fleet was already in the area. He might be able to salvage this mess after all.
The Green Unit leader saw the white wing protruding from the ground brush and radioed in.
“We’ve got him, sir. Down in the brush, two miles north of Santo Domingo.”
“Land and report.”
Six of the nine choppers landed in an open field eighty yards from the brush that concealed the stolen Hind’s carcass. The soldiers grouped together and approached, warily, with leveled guns.