Gray corrosive smoke hung in the air, carrying the scent of burnt chemicals.
Spent brass, broken glass, and blood covered the floor.
There were large groupings of strike marks on sections of the walls.
Tyson was unresponsive with feint heartbeat and losing blood quickly.
Layton and Harris both suffered minor injuries.
Weaver was somehow the only to come out of it completely unscathed.
Even Nolan, who had stayed hunkered down in the corner, had taken a hit, a ricochet to his arm, and was bleeding, but it was a superficial wound, and none of the surviving DEA agents could be pressed to dress it now.
They counted their rounds and re-filled magazines. They’d expended a lot of precious ammo and were down almost one magazine per man, but they’d also significantly reduced La Empresa’s manpower.
Weaver retrieved weapons and ammo from the dead Empresa at the back of the building. Their ammo wasn’t compatible with the MP7’s specially designed round, but the agents now had a few assault rifles with spare magazines to use once their submachine guns ran empty.
The enemy contact barely lasted two minutes, leaving the rescue team still over ten minutes out. Layton knew his men wouldn’t survive another assault, but he outwardly encouraged his men. No matter how bleak the situation, they’d never succumb to defeatism.
The Blackhawks flew east, one hundred fifty miles per hour, a thousand feet off the rural landscape. The titanium blades chopped the moist, humid air in a fifty-three foot diameter. Due to the high density of the air and the low atmospheric pressure, the pilots were forced to increase the blades’ angles of attack, which in turn increased rotor drag and required greater throttle and engine power, burning more fuel faster. This was enough to noticeably hinder aircraft performance, costing precious seconds that quickly added up.
Seven minutes into the flight, the ops room reported that the Colombian army was organizing a quick reaction force with armored vehicles, but their ETA was over thirty minutes as army forces were still responding to the mortar attacks across the city.
Looking out through the open cabin door, past the gunner’s shoulder, Avery felt the blast of air whipping against him from the circling rotor disc four feet above. The air smelled pleasantly of sea salt and rain, and there was a light mist spray against his face.
He watched the grassy fields whipping by below eventually shift into the marshy swampland of the muddy coastal lagoons, which then soon receded into the clear, rippling surface of Buenaventura Bay. In the distance, he saw the bridge that crossed the bay to connect Cascara to the continental mainland, its lanes in both directions congested with traffic. Moments later, rundown, shanty slums and concrete buildings came into view, with the large port facilities visible on the far end of the island. Ships dotted the bay, plowing through the waves as they headed out to sea. Thick curtains of black diesel smoke hung in the air from the trailer-trucks travelling to or from the ports.
Over the city, the pilots reduced collective input, gradually decreasing their altitudes, taking the helicopters just a couple hundred feet above rooftop level.
The four Empresa shooters on the rooftop heard the rotor wash when the inbound Blackhawks were just over a mile out. Helicopters were an irregular sound over Buenaventura, and the Empresa men diverted their attention from the street below and searched the sky, soon finding the black shapes fluttering across the sky like flies.
The Empresa squad leader shouted instructions to his men, and then radioed the commander on the street outside the besieged apartment building.
An Empresa lifted an RPG, and set it on his shoulder, angling it into the sky. He tracked one of the approaching helicopters through the launcher’s rail-mounted sight. The other Empresa scattered across the surface of the roof to take up firing positions. One was armed with an M60 machine gun with ball ammunition, enough firepower to damage a small, low-flying aircraft.
The RPG gunner held the launcher steady, intent on keeping the sight’s red dot aligned with his target. He squeezed the trigger, felt the launcher kick, and the searing heat of the back blast. His eyes followed the rocket as it cut a path through the sky, leaving behind a long, gray smoke contrail in its wake. He saw the helicopter begin to turn out of the projectile’s path, and knew he’d fired too soon, just twenty-five hundred feet from the helicopter. The pilot saw the launch and was already evading. The unguided rocket continued through the air, below and past its intended target until its motor burned out past three thousand feet and the warhead exploded in the sky.
In the Blackhawk’s cockpit, Warner yanked her cyclic hard and banked sharply out of the way of the resultant spray of shrapnel, tossing her passengers against their safety restraints, but saving the aircraft.
As the Empresa man re-loaded the launcher, the Blackhawk whipped fast around in an arc, and the door gunner opened up on the mini-gun, directing a stream of 5.56mm slugs into the RPG gunner, ripping him apart. The launcher fell against the rooftop, the hand of a severed arm still holding onto it.
The other Empresa soldiers fired bursts from their AKs and the M60 at the helicopter as it swept past. When the second Blackhawk passed, its gunner took apart another Empresa shooter, reducing him to bits of red, pulpy gore splashed across the rooftop.
Stray rounds from the helicopters’ mini-guns punched effortlessly through the roof, riddling the top-floor apartments, which had been safely vacated by the frightened residents once the Empresa arrived and the first shots were fired.
The remaining two Empresa on the rooftop fired their rifles ineffectively at the helicopters.
Atop a neighboring building, a second, two-man RPG team emerged from the rooftop access hatch. They’d been on the street below conferring with the assault leader when they’d first heard the helicopters over the city.
One shooter took up position to provide cover fire with his M60 for the RPG gunner, who tracked the nearest Blackhawk eighteen hundred feet away. Aiming the RPG in the general direction of his target, he squeezed the trigger, unconcerned with precision, because he had shortened the time-fuses on his warheads from the default 3.5 seconds to 2.75 seconds. A tactic used effectively in Iraq against American helicopters, this resulted in the warhead detonating early in an airburst before it had a chance to hit its target.
The orange and yellow explosion blossomed in the sky some sixty feet from the Blackhawk.
Metal shards ripped across the side of the cabin and a portion of the underbelly. Shrapnel just narrowly missed an auxiliary fuel tank, but this did not spare the helicopter. One jagged, golf ball-sized fragment went through the tail rotor, spewing sparks and throwing the Blackhawk out of control.
The helicopter jerked and sputtered in the air. Safety restraints prevented crewmen and the two Colombian Special Forces passengers from being thrown out the open cabin.
The pilot fought to stabilize their flight and keep the Blackhawk in the air, while maneuvering away from the incoming bullets now pelting the fuselage, punching the cabin floor and walls full of holes.
One flight engineer took a round of 7.62mm through his hand, blasting the appendage apart. One of the Colombian soldiers, clutching the shrapnel wound that penetrated his vest, took two bullets through his thigh and another to the side of his head. He slumped forward, dead.
Leaving a trail of black smoke in its wake and suffering severe avionics damage, the pilot radioed to Major Warner his intention to break off from the engagement and directed his bird away from the battle. He was able to regain control and hold the chopper somewhat steady, and was reasonably confident in his ability to get her back to base intact.