Soar (36 page)

“How big?” the sergeant major asked.

“Big enough,” she said, “to bring a decent-sized apartment house down.” That had obviously impressed him, because he’d moved everybody even farther away from the device than they had been.

S
IX-POINT DETONATION
.
Wei-Liu looked at her handiwork and then glanced at the schematic one last time. Okay: all she had to do was cut twelve wires, and the bomb would be rendered safe.
Snip-snip.
End of story.

She sighed. After everything they’d been through, twelve wires seemed so, well, anticlimactic.
But what if she was wrong …

Wrong? She?
Not.
Wei-Liu took the nonmagnetic needle-nose pliers, double-checked to make sure she had both knees on the antistatic mat, took one deep breath, exhaled, and then clipped the six red-taped wires one after the other.

Nothing.
She took another deep breath and clipped the half-dozen green-flagged ones. She set the needle-nose pliers down on the antistatic mat but remained kneeling. Two immense and totally unexpected tears of relief rolled down her cheeks.

144 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0906 Hours Local Time.

“TOC
—L
ONER
.
” Still nothing. Ritzik went forward. He tapped Mickey D’s shoulder. The pilot glanced around for
an instant, then returned his attention to keeping the aircraft level. “Mick,” Ritzik shouted, “you have to take her up so I can pull a signal from Almaty.”

Mickey D didn’t acknowledge Ritzik. But his left hand adjusted the collective, his right played the cyclic control, and the chopper’s nose dipped about three degrees. Mick’s left hand shifted again on the collective and the aircraft began to rise as evenly as an elevator. At one thousand feet, Mick slowed the ascent and the HIP began a gentle sweep to the south. Ritzik pressed the transmit button. “TOC—Loner.”

“Loner—TOC.”

Thank God. “Dodger—sit-rep.” Ritzik listened, tapping coordinates into his handheld and getting them repeated so he knew they were on the money. The Chinese were coming out of Kashgar from the northwest—still only two of them: one HIP and a HIND gunship.

“No sign of the other HIND?”

“Negatory, Loner. It departed Kashgar, but we have no position for it.”

Ritzik didn’t like that at all. But there was nothing he could do about it. Meanwhile, the imagery showed the remaining two aircraft were making a wide swing over the desert. That made sense: they’d make their attack from the east so they’d be coming out of the sun. “Keep me posted.”

Ritzik made his way aft, carefully picking his way around Ty Weaver, who was dry-firing through the open hatch from a sitting position. “How’s it going?” he asked the sniper.

Weaver looked up. “?-Okay, boss.” He watched as the officer moved past him, then slipped back into his shooter’s frame of mind. This sit was A-Okay, all right. It was an AOkay FUBAR.

Weaver was faced with a sniper’s operational nightmare. All sniping is based on a few basic principles. Consistency
is the most elemental of these, because consistency equals accuracy. Breathing, sight picture, spot weld, trigger pull, body position, platform stability, rifle, sight, and ammunition—the more these elements of shooting are kept consistent, the more accurate the sniper will become.

He adjusted the sling, then slipped into an open-legged sitting position. In most circumstances, Ty preferred not to use the sling. But there were times—like this one—when he needed every bit of help he could get. He extended his left leg slightly to provide himself a little more stability as the chopper bounced, pressed his cheek against the stock, swung the big rifle right/left, then left/right, found himself an imaginary target, and eased his finger onto the trigger. As he did, the HIP hit an air pocket and he lost his spot weld. The shot would have gone wild. Solution:
Concentrate, schmuck. And hold the damn rifle more securely.

The rifle, ammo, and scope were no problem. Ty could play this particular 7.62 instrument like a bloody Stradivarius. He’d put thousands of rounds through the MSG90. He knew how it would perform with a cold barrel, and where the rounds would go after two, three, four, five, even ten shots. He’d tuned his own body to the rifle’s unique vibrations, and so was able to read and understand even the most minute variation in the tuning-fork
sprong
that coursed through the gun and through him every time he pulled the crisp, beautifully unfluctuating three-pound trigger. Those things wouldn’t change.

But Ty knew he could forget about platform consistency. The platform was the chopper deck, which was not only vibrating from the engines and rotor blades, but moving left, right, up, and down. Not to mention the ear-shattering noise. Body position? He could shoot offhand—standing up—but only if the chopper remained in a steady hover. Not bloody likely in combat. Shooting from a prone position
was out of the question, because the field of fire from the chopper would be way too narrow. That meant he’d be reduced to using a kneeling or a sitting position. Sitting also restricted his field of fire to some degree. But it was a lot more stable than kneeling—especially given the chopper’s constant bumpy motion.

Sight picture was another important element of consistency. But it, too, was going to be problematic. Back at the CAG, Ty had worked for hours to maintain the consistency of his sight picture. His spot weld—the placement of his cheek against the rifle’s stock—was exactly the same whenever he pulled the trigger. That uniformity produced the exact same eye relief—the distance from his eye to the scope’s rear lens—every single time he put the rifle to his shoulder. Consistent eye relief, in turn, resulted in an identical sight picture through the scope. Today, the HIP’s motion would make maintaining consistent spot weld and sight picture problematic. Not impossible: Ty had worked to develop sniping proficiency from virtually any kind of platform, including choppers. But the HIP added hugely to the degree of difficulty he’d be attempting.

Follow-through was also going to be a predicament. In normal circumstances—like the ambush at Yarkant Köl—Ty had been able to maintain the consistency of his shooting through the stability of his follow-through, which meant that between the time he fired the shot and the bullet actually left the gun there was no movement of the barrel. Stability ensured that the sight picture never changed, not even by a hairbreadth, in the roughly quarter of a second between the trigger pull, the sear release, the firing pin striking the primer, and the bullet traveling down the MSG90’s 23.62-inch barrel and emerging from the harmonic stabilizer or the sound suppressor. Proper follow-through was going to be difficult when, even though the rifle might not
move, the platform was guaranteed to shift between trigger pull and bullet departure.

Then there was angle compensation. It is easiest to shoot straight across a flat space—shooting on a target range, for example. The flatter the angle, the less the shooter has to compensate for uphill or downhill trajectory, which has to be figured differently from bullet drop, crosswind, or temperature and humidity fluctuations.

At an uphill angle of forty-five degrees, for example, you can put your crosshairs dead center on the target, pull the trigger—and your shot will miss its mark, going high by about eight inches. The difficulty of shooting from the chopper would be compounded because Ty knew he’d be snap-shooting at extreme angles of thirty, forty, even sixty degrees as Mickey D maneuvered the HIP under battle conditions. It would be kind of like trying to shoot ten out of ten bull’s-eyes while riding a roller coaster. No—it would be like trying to shoot from one moving roller-coaster car to a target sitting in a second moving roller-coaster car. All things considered, Ty thought, the situation was nasty enough to make a man take up the “spray and pray” shooting technique, or think about forgetting everything he’d ever learned, and reverting to “Kentucky” windage.

0912.
Ty sensed Ritzik moving past him. He was shouting, but the sniper paid the major no mind. He was completely focused on his own situation, working Zen-like to exclude every bit of extraneous stimuli, until only he and the rifle remained. If he could accomplish that much, he’d be able to overcome the physical obstacles and do what he had to.

Suddenly the chopper hiccuped, knocking him out of position. The HIP dropped like a stone, recovered, twisted into the sun at a forty-degree angle, fighting its way into the
sky. The sniper was slapped to the deck and rolled aft. He fought to maintain what was left of his balance, cradling the big rifle to keep it from smashing into a bulkhead or seat. Oh, this was not going to be any fun at all.

“L
ONER,
TOC.
Your bogeys are coming in from the east. Distance is twenty-two miles and closing.”

“Roger that, TOC.” Ritzik hand-signaled Gene Shepard to hang on. He worked his way forward to the cockpit, stepping around the sniper, who was focused, trancelike, on a spot somewhere outside the aircraft.

“Mick,” Ritzik shouted, “let’s do it.”

“Hoo-ah, boss.”

Ritzik’s fingers whitened around the cockpit support struts as the HIP dropped. “Mick?”

“Yo?”

Ritzik’s knees flexed as if he were shooting a mogul course as the craft twisted violently, recovered, shot upward, and finally veered to its left, turning into the sun. “Get us in position for Ty to take the other pilots out before they discover we’re not friendly.”

“Roger that. What side is he shooting from?”

“Port side. Port side.” Ritzik squinted through the windshield as the chopper regained even flight. Then he turned and staggered aft, holding on to whatever he could find for support.

Sam Phillips’s stomach queased as the HIP abruptly lost altitude. He fought the nausea, finally regaining his equilibrium as Mick brought the craft around. Instinctively, he reached up and snugged the shoulder straps that held him against the seat back. Sam had never much liked flying, and choppers made him a lot more nervous than planes. They were, he thought, complicated, hard-to-fly aircraft that required total concentration on the part of their pilots. Indeed, as he’d watched Mickey D familiarize himself with the HIP’s responses, he’d been amazed that the pilot could keep the big bird in the air at all, single-handedly. And when Mick hovered the HIP the first time, Sam swore he could smell the tension rolling off the pilot’s body and permeating the cockpit.

“Sam, Sam!”

Mick’s shout brought Sam back to reality. He pulled off the headset. “Yo?”

“Sun visor.”

“Gotcha.” The spook reached over, swung the lightweight plastic around, and rotated the visor screen down across the windshield. “Okay?”

“Roger that.” Mick glanced down at a screen on the console that sat in the middle of the nose, right between the two seats. “Sam, turn that second switch to your left.”

Sam put his hand on a black knurled knob on the console’s bottom row. “This one?”

The pilot’s chin thrust forward. “One row up.”

“This one.”

“Yup.”

Sam turned the knob. A green radar screen flickered to life. Mick checked it, then shouted, “Right-hand switch, top row. Throw it.”

Sam moved the toggle upward. “What did I just do?”

“If I remember correctly, you turned the manual IFF transponder shutoff switch to its off position.”

The move made no sense to Sam at all. “Why did I do that?”

“So I can convince the other aircraft we have transmission problems.” Mick eased the HIP into a shallow descent, skimming the aircraft no more than a hundred feet above the nap of the land. “When I yell, flip it the other way.”

“I’m gonna put the headset back on,” Sam shouted, his hands miming earpieces.

Mick’s head bobbed up and down. “Roger.” He paused as he adjusted the chopper’s attitude. “Remember—”

“What?” Sam adjusted the head strap and pulled the bulbous mike close to his lips.

“Double orders of pot stickers and Hunan beef—extra spicy.”

0914.
Gene Shepard ran a gloved hand over his safety strap, which was turnbuckled to a bulkhead strut. He’d attached the webbing to his belt. It allowed him side-to-side movement, but was short enough to ensure that his body would stay inside the aircraft even if the HIP were to bank at a sixty-degree angle. He adjusted his own communications gear, then swung around and double-checked Ty Weaver’s safety straps. The sniper’s tether was shorter than Shepard’s so that he could use his weight and its natural tension to steady himself.

When he was satisfied, he shook the sniper’s shoulder.
Ty
gave him an upturned thumb, then settled down facing the open port-side doorway, his rifle in the crook of his arm.

Shepard waited until his teammate was in position. Then he stepped to the aft side of the doorway, unsecured the machine gun, and swept the weapon left and right, up and
down, to make sure it had full play. He’d be the first one firing at the IMU convoy. But once the PLA aircraft hove into view, he’d have to stay clear of the sniper’s field of fire.

Ritzik stood just aft of the cockpit, watching as his men prepared for battle. It was at times like this that he was conscious of how great a blessing God had bestowed on him because He’d allowed him the chance to go to War with men like these not once but dozens of times. At Delta, there were few renegades, few rogues, few prima donnas. They just didn’t last. Oh, there were personality conflicts aplenty. And Delta, like other SpecOps units, had seen a small but still unsettling share of domestic-violence cases. And sometimes people just plain pissed one another off—and settled things with their fists. But once they’d passed the Selection for Delta and been through the battery of psychological exams, the men tended to find their own place, then stay with the unit for years. Some, like Rowdy, had been there more than a decade. Which was why, when it came down to times like this, there were no better Soldiers on the face of the earth than these Warriors with whom Ritzik was privileged to serve. And his true gift from God was that he’d been allowed to know and understand that fact.