Operation Southern Cross - 02 (21 page)

This was getting interesting, and not in a good way. There was only so much maneuvering Autry could do within the confines of all the sky-high construction; the Pucara was much more nimble. Plus, Autry’s copter had no weapons that could fire to the rear. It was only because he’d been able to keep one step ahead of the prop plane that they weren’t a stain on the street by now.

But the Venezuelan was catching up, all this happening within a few seconds, and Autry had to think quick. He banked hard right again, nearly clipping the side of a half-built skyscraper. The Pucara followed, firing a combined burst from its four 50-caliber machine guns, some of which went right through the spinning rotor blades, impacting on some of them and sending a bone-chilling shudder through the copter.

While all this was going on, Autry could still hear the pilots of the other copters over the city, reporting on their own efforts to escape the Pucaras. Up until now, the escaping copters had stayed true to their flight plan of heading north, though their zigzag flight paths made for some roundabout routes. Autry knew he was so close to getting shot down, he had to change this pattern. So, with the Pucara still on his tail, instead of banking left again, Autry just kept going right, essentially doing a circle around the half-completed building. His guys in back got the idea. The Pucara could only shoot straight ahead; the XBat gunners hanging out the right side of the copter were able to shoot through the building’s steel framework. They opened up with everything they had. Only about half their fusillade made it through the skeleton of steel, but it was enough to tear one side of the Pucara’s fuselage in two.

The Venezuelan pilots never saw it coming. Their plane broke in half, the rear section striking the building itself, the other half plummeting to the street below. It was all over in a flash. One Pucara down, five to go.

No sooner had he started flying north again when he saw another Chinook with three Pucaras pouncing on it—and the gunners on board shooting back like the crew of a B-17 engaging the Luftwaffe. This was getting crazy now. Autry looked at his watch.

We’ll never get out of this,
he thought.

He pushed his copter over and came up behind one of the Pucaras. The prop fighter was going slowly, keeping pace with the Chinook in front of it. This was supposed to be the genius of sending prop planes against copters. But what the VAF didn’t take into consideration was that at these slower speeds, the copters could attack.

Autry came right up on the trailing Pucara, and without even waiting for his order, the copilot opened up on the prop plane. It was strange. Cannon rounds that were made to fire at targets on the ground went across the divide separating them from the Pucara in a very haphazard fashion, certainly not like dogfights in the movies any of them had seen.

It was more of a hosing approach than a stream of laser guided bullets, but the effect was the same. The big cannon shells tore into the prop fighter’s twin tails, shredding them right before their eyes. The plane immediately fell off to the left. The troopers in the back fired on it all the way down. It crashed into the fountain in the famous Los Caobos Park.

This action took no more than five seconds, and one more Pucara was out of the way. Trouble was, the two prop fighters in front of Autry were really tearing up the second Chinook. Autry gunned his engines, firing his nose cannons madly now, again hoping to get the attention of the two attacking aircraft. But this time, his distraction tactic seemed futile.

Again, it came down to the mathematics of flight: speed, distance and the closing rate between. Put all together, Autry knew it would be impossible for him to catch up in time to help this second Chinook.

Then, suddenly…one of the Pucaras simply exploded on its own. It was strange. One second it was there, the next it was a ball of flame and debris. This happened just as the Chinook and its two attackers passed by another forest of skyscrapers, this one closer to the middle of the city.

Autry was still flying all out, so he went by this group of buildings just seconds later. He only had an instant to look to his left, to see if he could find any clue as to why the Pucara suddenly blew up—and something caught his eye. He thought he saw another helicopter hovering between two of the skyscrapers. He even thought he saw smoke pouring out of cannon muzzles in the front, the result of having been fired a few seconds earlier.

But it all went by so fast that, before Autry even had a second to think about it, he had to go back to concentrating on what he was doing. He had to catch up to the stricken Chinook and get the attacking plane off its tail. Still the blurred image of the object between the two buildings remained behind his eyes.

Autry found himself thinking,
Was that a Killer Egg?

THE CHINOOK BEING CHASED WAS THE HOWITZER
gunship, probably the heaviest copter in the unit. The crew knew going into this dash across Caracas that they might have the most difficult time getting away, a prediction that was coming true. The Pucara was still on its tail, still pouring fire in its direction.

But that’s when McCune came back into the action. He’d done a sort of parabolic maneuver and was back down among the skyscrapers again. He saw the howitzer ship’s plight, and cleverly started flying a course parallel to the chase. At just the right moment, he banked hard right and then hard left and found himself on the Pucara’s tail—and not that far ahead of Autry’s ship.

No doubt startled, the Pucara pilot froze for one moment—a deadly mistake. Autry and McCune knew the Venezuelan was going to bank either right or left, so they both opened up with their nose cannons. The Pucara pilot chose to go left—banking right into the storm of cannon shells coming from McCune’s bird. The barrage tore the wing off the prop plane. It hit a new skyscraper five times on the way down.

McCune went right and put himself on the tail of the howitzer ship—and here he would stay, marshalling the heavier copter out of the area.

Autry, meanwhile, went to wipe his face under his helmet and found it dripping with sweat. Everything was happening so quickly in among the skyscrapers—yet, the buildings seemed to go on forever. He could see the high-altitude streaks of VAF fighters above them, adding to the drama.

Were they were afraid to come down, or were they content with letting the Pucaras do the work? He had no desire to find out. He jumped into the tailwind of McCune’s Chinook and kept heading out of the city.

He checked his watch. Despite all the action, they’d been over the city less than two minutes. Autry could see the green canopy of the Avila National Park dead ahead, just on the other side of a line of skyscrapers, these finished.

And beyond that, the blue sea.

And beyond that? Atlanta…

It was strange how it happened, because in the next moment, Autry couldn’t see McCune’s Chinook, nor the skyscrapers or the forest or the sea. All he could see was smoke, and fire and the streaks of tracer fire crossing his nose.

He heard one of the guys in back yell something, then all hell broke loose—again.

It was a Pucara. Where it came from Autry had no idea—either it had been flying high, watching everything unfold below, or had been flying low, looking up. It didn’t matter. The swift prop fighter was now coming at Autry at his ten o’clock position, machine guns blazing—and Autry had no way to turn the Black Hawk to fire back, or even get out of the way.

They were cooked.

But then, another bright flash. Autry thought sure the Pucara’s bullets had found his main fuel tank, and that his Black Hawk was blowing up in agonizingly slow motion. He couldn’t stop himself from closing his eyes, waiting for the end…but several moments went by and he felt nothing unusual. His eyes opened and he realized that it was the Pucara that had blown up, not him.

How?

From the left he saw another flash. Another copter had come up beside him, its forward guns having just been fired. It was a Killer Egg—but not the unit’s remaining OH-6. The tiny copter was already over the Avila forest.

This was the XBat’s second Egg. Behind the controls: Captain Dan Mungo.

Autry thought he was seeing things. Mungo was wearing a USS
Lexington
jacket, obviously from the veteran carrier, but he’d certainly not been wearing it before. How could this be? Had Mungo pulled off the oil-refinery diversion and come back for them? Or had he gone directly to the ship, and the VAF had just started guarding the oil plants on their own? Autry hated himself for even thinking it, but with Mungo, there was always that little bubble of doubt.

Yet he’d just saved Autry’s butt and everyone else on Autry’s aircraft—and not for the first time. Autry now realized that the blurred shape he’d seen between the two skyscrapers just a minute before
had
been a Killer Egg—
this
Killer Egg—and that Mungo had downed another Pucara then, saving McCune’s Chinook as well.

So was he a coward or a hero? Or both? Or neither? Autry’s brain was close to overload, his gum all but gone, he’d punished it so much.

Some things would have to be sorted out later.

With a wag of his machine, Mungo went up and over and headed north, falling in line behind the rest of the unit. And Autry fell in behind Mungo. He was now the last in line of the fleeing copters.

Or so he thought. He took a quick count of the XBat aircraft he could see in front of him and realized something was wrong: One of the DAP gunships was missing.

He called ahead to the AWACs ship, asking if they had any indication of the DAP. The radar copter had just made it over the huge Avila forest, free to burn rubber, with most of the Pucaras having been dealt with. They did a sweep of the city behind them and reported they could only see Autry’s copter, two Chinooks and a Killer Egg. There was no sign of the missing Black Hawk.

Autry whacked himself upside the head. Once more he yelled for his crew to hang on.

He was going back.

IT WAS THE PILOT, WSO JENNINGS, WHO FIRST REALIZED
that his DAP gunship was in trouble. He was flying at the tail end of the column when it left the jungle, trying to keep an eye on the slower howitzer gunship—at least that was the plan. But as soon as they entered the forest of under-construction skyscrapers, and the Pucaras showed up, well…it became a very confusing five minutes.

Jennings had tried to sneak down an avenue that was somewhat removed from the building boom of downtown Caracas. He found himself flying over thousands of the protesters, some so angry they threw bricks and stones at the aircraft.

They went right over a huge marketplace, having to fly sideways for a moment to get through a narrow space between two very old buildings. Even through the haze of battle, and miles of clotheslines with clothes hanging on them, Jennings could see most of the unit ahead, speeding toward the sea. For the moment, it actually looked like they were going to pull this off.

But then, as he rose out of this neighborhood, gunning his engines in an effort to catch up with the unit, he found a Pucara flying right above him.

The first barrage of machine-gun fire arrived a moment later. Jennings heard the impacts all over his rotor blades and engine mounts. Five explosions, right in a row, went off inside his copter. They sounded like small nukes detonating inside the gunship. An electrical shock wave went through the helicopter. When Jennings looked down at his flight computer’s readout screen, it blinked twice and went out.

They started losing altitude a second later. The only thing below them was a very crowded street.

AUTRY FOUND JENNINGS’S BLACK HAWK ABOUT A
minute later. It had crashed near the corner of
Avenida Urdaneta
and a place called
Norte 5
, a side street.

Its rotors were aflame and they had stopped spinning. Its cargo bay was smoking heavily. Autry counted a half dozen men on the ground outside the copter, three on each side. As it was a DAP gunship, with six people aboard, everyone had gotten out. But it was obvious that all of them were injured—some seriously.

The noise of the crash and the explosion that followed attracted hundreds of people right away. Many were protesters from the night before, and some of these people were armed. It was clear, even from above, that their anger had turned 180 degrees and now saw the North Americans, and not the Caracas cops, as the enemy. By the time Autry overflew the copter the first time, it was surrounded by a mob of angry, armed civilians.

Autry felt his breath catch in his throat. One word flashed through his mind:
Mogadishu.

The nightmare of anyone connected to the Nightstalkers family.

Autry couldn’t let it happened again.

He brought his copter down to treetop level and buzzed the length of the street where the crash had happened. This sent a few people scattering, but not many. The protesters were veterans of street battles for the past week, at least—a copter buzzing them like some big bug was no big deal.

Still, Autry turned the copter around and tried again, but even as he passed over the stricken copter a second time, he could see the mob getting closer to the wreck and the injured men on the ground.

What could he do? Fire on a crowd of Venezuelan citizens? There was no way he was going to allow his men to be torn apart by the mob.

As these thoughts were rocketing through his mind, he saw that one of the other unit copters had turned around and was coming back. It was a Special K troop truck. He could see the weapons of the troopers onboard sticking out of every opening—but they were holding their fire too. Like Autry, they were at a loss as to what to do.

The Special K joined Autry in buzzing the crowd. The sight of two helicopters was a bit more intimidating, but not much more. All the noise, all the posturing only seemed to be delaying but not stopping the crowd from closing in on the wounded gunship crew.