The high-tech particulates made the smoke different from normal and tended to make the eyes itch, although it was otherwise harmless. There were immediate cries of "NERVE GAS! CHEMICAL WEAPONS!" and any semblance of discipline that remained with the unit vanished. To a man, they turned and fled.
It looked as if Shadow Two and Shadow Four would have a clear run across the perimeter road into the cover beyond, and then a helicopter gunship loomed out of the darkness in a reconnaissance pass before vanishing again.
"Rat shit!" said Kent, and moved their position fifty meters.
"If all they're going to do is look at us, I won't complain," said Fitzduane.
He put out an air threat warning on the net, but as he spoke into the boom microphone his thoughts were of Calvin. He reached for a Stinger.
The damn thing did not feel right.
The missile was full of holes. Well, better it than him.
But there was still the matter of the fucking helicopter. Green tracer began to wink down at them, and if memory served it also carried rockets and bombs.
Calvin, my son, where are you?
Gunfire damage to the SkyEye was a predictable hazard, so the microlight was equipped with a spares kit.
The damaged struts were splinted together with Kevlar tape, and within five minutes Calvin was airborne again. The repair would hold, he thought, provided he could avoid violent maneuvers, but anyway it was the best he could do.
He climbed to 2,000 feet and headed back to the Devil's Footprint and Team Rapier. Fitzduane had stipulated a maximum twenty-minute action before exfiltration, and at full speed Calvin would arrive to provide top cover just as they were withdrawing.
His route took him to one side of the air base, but he was high enough to keep out of harm's way and attracted no fire. He tried the FLIR to see if he could get some reading on damage to the helicopters, but although the magnification was more than adequate, all he could see from this angle was the sandbag revetments and flames from half a dozen fires. He had done considerable damage, he was sure, but the scale was hard to estimate.
Suddenly, he noticed a small helicopter take off. He throttled back and watched it circle as if waiting for something. Thirty seconds later, a much larger helicopter could be seen. The first helicopter had not disturbed him unduly, since it was a militarized version of a civilian Bell and carried, as far as he could see, no heavy weapons. However, the sight of the second helicopter made his heart sink.
It was a Russian-built Mil Mi-4 Hound fitted with a DShK 12.7mm heavy machine gun in the gondola, four sets of rocket pods, and four five-hundred-kilo bombs. Russian helicopters, like their ships, always seemed to carry a horrendous amount of firepower. Creature comfort was always a secondary issue.
The two helicopters formed up and headed for the Devil's Footprint.
Calvin followed, furious at himself for not having risked a second pass and maybe then having destroyed all the helicopters. Steadily, the two enemy machines pulled away from him. They were a good thirty miles an hour faster and would reach the camp a couple of minutes before he could.
He spoke into his radio as he came within range to warn Fitzduane, but there was no response. The radio was dead.
He looked at his remaining stock of weaponry. He still had four RAW projectiles and three hundred-round Ultimax magazines left. He had never heard of a microlight attacking a heavily armed helicopter gunship, but right now he had no better ideas.
He flew on, alone and ill-equipped for the task, but determined. The fear he had felt earlier had completely vanished.
He kept the two enemy helicopters in sight with the FLIR, and ahead of them he could see the smoke, flames, muzzle flashes, and tracer that marked Team Rapier's bloody little war.
As her helicopter powered toward the Yaibo base in the Devil's Footprint, Reiko Oshima finished speaking to the air base and then tried to make some sense of what was going on.
The base commander reported that one other helicopter gunship could be airborne shortly but the remaining two had been totally destroyed, as had four out of the six MiGs. He had been near apoplectic with rage. No one had expected a raid this far from the Tecuno border. They were supposed to be safe.
He blamed it on the Mexican armed forces. Oshima was not so sure. The commander had reported that the damaged helicopters and jets had been riddled by some new type of weapon. Several of the aircraft had looked intact until you got up close; then it could be seen that they had been riddled with thousands of small holes as if fired upon by some giant shotgun.
Special weapons, to Oshima, suggested special counterterrorist forces, and her mind turned immediately to who might be involved. Given the distances to get to this isolated spot, the logistics problems were immense, and that suggested the Americans or the Israelis.
Both had many reasons to want Yaibo out of existence. Delta, in particular, harbored a grudge. She had blown up a civilian plane with 340 passengers on board three years earlier to kill an eight-man Delta team who happened to be on board returning from the Middle East.
U.S. or Israeli special forces suggested air involvement. She turned her mind to how they operated and where they might operate from. This was a raid on the lines of Entebbe. How had that been carried out?
She pulled out a map. Air involvement imposed its own parameters. You could parachute in, but who would you get out? There had been no mention of helicopters, U.S. Special Forces' favorite toys.
Curious. The intensity of firepower suggested more than infantry. What could a special-forces aircraft carry? Tanks? No, they were far too heavy for this kind of mission. Heavily-armed jeeps? Yes, it would be something like that. She started looking at routes and possible landing fields.
Oshima had survived for as long as she had because she was very quick and very smart and she studied the ways of her enemies.
The pilot of the helicopter gunship had been trained by Russians who had fought in Afghanistan.
They taught him well, and they had warned him in particular about the threat of handheld SAMs, surface-to-air missiles. The arrival of the U.S.-made Stingers had not eliminated Russian use of helicopters, but it had forced them to fly high and to adopt new tactics. Unfortunately, most of these tactics required the involvement of several gunships, and he was on his own. Oshima's little Bell was not worth shit in terms of firepower and was totally unarmored.
He decided to climb to 5,000 feet and prep the area outside the two camps with his 12.7mm. The camps were obviously the target, and that gave him a clear idea of the general area where the enemy must be. Unfortunately, he had no night-vision equipment, but he was still able to orient himself by the road below and by the burning wrecks of tanks and armored cars.
In his low recce maneuver he thought he had detected some movement in the suspect area below, but he had no idea what he had seen.
He had just been able to make out some vague black shapes, and then they were gone. They were in the right place for hostiles, but it was hard to be sure. Their tracer would have helped, but they did not appear to be using it. Other gun flashes were too brief to really help adequately.
At 5,000 feet he leveled off and opened fire with the 12.7mm and salvos of rockets. The 12.7mm could be seen vanishing into the black smoke, and seconds later there were brief bursts of flame as the rockets plowed into the ground. He wasn't sure he was hitting anything, but at least he would be distracting any enemy force and taking some of the pressure off the camps.