Gambir Train Station, Merdeka Square
2349 Hours; Zone Time, October 31, 2008
Corporal Jambul Hadiah took a cautious peek over the roof parapet. The storm of fire from the walls of the American embassy that had killed the other three members of his heavy weapons team had ceased. Why Allah had allowed him to live while the others had died, he did not know. He could only recall lying tightly curled in a fetal position behind a roof ventilator while the sniper fire had picked off his teammates one at a time. Hadiah, a brave man by his own estimation, had been terrified – as the urine-soaked crotch of his fatigues could testify.
However, he was also the kind of man within whom fear could swiftly turn to anger. And now, as he watched the odd-looking helicopter climbing out of the American embassy, he was filled with a searing, white hot rage.
A few feet away, his friend Lelang lay sprawled over the tube of a French-made ACL-STRIM anti-tank weapon. Hadiah lunged for it, dragging the rocket launcher out from under the body. Whipping it to his shoulder, he took half a second to aim and squeezed the trigger.
What Hadiah hadn’t thought through was the possibility that American snipers had had been positioned elsewhere in the city, outside of the embassy walls. The Indonesian never experienced the triumph of seeing his rocket slam into the tail of the fleeing helicopter before an explosive .50 caliber bullet, striking from above and behind, tore him in half.
*
At Sky Island Alpha, Stone heard the Special Forces sniper swear as he failed to get his shot off in time. In horror, the Marine watched as the fire trail of the AT rocket streaked through the night sky to kiss the tail duct assembly of the Air Commando SPEED Hawk. The entire back end of the compound helicopter dissolved, the loss of anti-torque thrust tossing it into a wild, flat pinwheel spin.
“Foxtrot is down! Foxtrot is down! We lost one!” Stone was yelling into his headset even before the doomed helo slammed into the ground.
*
The same view was being seen from overhead in the Shenandoah’s Landing Force Operations Center – and, for perhaps the first time in her life, Amanda Garrett had no words to speak, no orders to give. A single soft animal noise of despair and agony rose from somewhere within her as one of her darkest, deepest nightmares unfolded before her eyes.
Then there was a strong arm around her, in the darkness, keeping her knees from
buckling and Elliot MacIntyre’s bellow rang in her ear, “Commit the crisis flight! Get those people out of there!”
*
The first thing Christine Rendino noted was how quiet everything had gotten beyond the ringing in her ears. All that could be heard was the occasional human moan and distant gunshot. She popped her eyes open and shook the sparks from her vision, finding with some amazement that she was still alive.
The evac helicopter had been stripped of its passenger seats to gain greater payload capacity, and no one in the cabin had been strapped down. Fate and centrifugal force had intervened in her favor. She had been crouching directly beneath the rotor hub when the compound helo had gone into its death spin. Thus, she had been the last thrown onto the mass of humanity piled up behind the pilots’ seats and her fellow evacuees had cushioned the impact of the crash.
The air smelled of burnt insulation, kerosene and blood – and she felt faint movement beneath her. She rolled off the bodies of the Marines and got to her hands and knees. Everything hurt but nothing seemed completely broken.
Instead of being flipped on her side by the residual torque of the rotors, the SPEED Hawk’s wings had kept her upright when she had pancaked. In the faint light leaking in from outside, Christine could make out that the side hatch had sprung open in the crash. She crawled to it and, using the bent door gun mount and the unconscious body of the gunner strapped behind it, she pulled herself to her feet.
They’d piled up against the base of the MONAS spire. Everything in Merdeka Square was so deathly still; only the dancing flame light from the burning buildings moved. Then, dimly, Christine heard the chatter of tank treads – distant, but drawing closer.
“We are so totally screwed,” she murmured with no one to hear her.
The Landing Force Operations Center, USS Shenandoah
2349 Hours; Zone Time, October 31, 2008
There was no fireball. The overhead NiteBrite imaging from the circling drones showed an intact fuselage and not a scattered debris field at the crash site. Even that wisp of hope was all that Amanda Garret needed.
A single glance at the Alpha tactical display revealed that the Rebel armored column had entered the free-fire zone of the government district. Rolling down Jalan Veteran’s Avenue, the enemy vehicles were on the verge of entering Merdeka Square.
Amanda smashed down the send key on her command headset. “Arkady!” she yelled. “I need you! Now!”
*
Orbiting at ten thousand feet, Arkady had been tracking the Indonesian convoy, mentally setting up and knocking down a series of strike templates for taking it down. He and Pinkerton had arrived over Merdeka Square in time to see Foxtrot Flight crash and he was already coiled and posed when Amanda’s release call rang in his helmet phones.
She had been right in her call as usual. He had been needed for this one specific moment. Arkady kicked his SPEED Cobra up and into a screaming split-S, rolling three-quarters inverted as he pitched through into his dive.
The laser-guided missiles under his wings were useless. He could not kill enough fast enough with them. Nor were his pods of Hydra rockets. Where he was going, he’d die in the back blast of his own warheads. This would be gun work. As the Jeannie II accelerated in her mad dive, he rolled the coolie hat controller under his thumb, calling up both his integral 20mm tri-barrel and the 25mm grenade launcher pod on his centerline hard point, mating both weapons to his main stick trigger.
Nor was what he was about to do something that could be plotted out and acted upon with deliberation. Instead, it had to be felt through, using earned and inherent instincts – and a combat aviator’s experience-sharpened eye.
Arkady felt a mirthless grin tighten his face. Use the Force, Luke!
Arkady bottomed out of his dive over the center of the Square at a bare hundred feet. The MONAS spire blurred past his right wing while, ahead and to the left, lay the battered Presidential Palace complex. Directly ahead lay the mouth of Jalan Veteran Avenue and the inbound armored column.
The column commander had been canny, first keeping to the residential streets and then snaking his force between the high rises to mask them from air attack. But now, wedged in between the concrete wall of the Palace grounds and a row of stacked office buildings, his tactics backfired. He was trapped in a road column, unable to disperse his vehicles in the face of the berserk flying buzz-saw roaring in on him from the night. Nor could his vehicles clear their forward firing arcs to shoot at their ground-hugging attacker without hitting their own comrades. They could only perish with a great suddenness and violence.
As he swept down the length of the convoy, Arkady held down the primary trigger, emptying his magazines in a single, barrel-melting burst, the buzzing roar of the Gatling gun blending with the heavier, hoarser chug of the grenade launcher. With night-vision enhanced eyes, he saw the blocky greenish outlines of the enemy AFVs flashing under his aircraft’s nose, the dazzling white fire of his shell bursts flowing over them. Without seeing, he was aware of the glass office fronts blurring past a mere arm’s reach from his starboard wing and rotor tip.
Holding his strafing line, he ignored the imminent possibility of a ground strike that would snap him out of existence in an instant.
He felt the buffeting of explosions and the flicker of tracers out of the corners of his eyes, but knew they came from bursting fuel tanks and ammunition magazines. The enemy was dying too fast to shoot back.
Then the grenade launcher thermal-jammed and the Gatling’s power drive clattered on empty chambers. All of his ammo was gone.
A cliff of darkened glass and steel glass rose before him. Jalan Veteran’s Avenue dead ended at a T intersection beyond the Haji Juanda canal; there was no way out but up.
Arkady hauled back hard on the stick. The Jeannie II’s nose went vertical – but the residual energy from the dive and strafing run still carried her on toward the building. Arkady overrode the flight management system and slammed a massive burst of power into the rotors. A surge of horizontal ground effect reflected off the building face, the rotor blast imploding windows on the upper storeys as it shoved the Jeannie II away from a collision.
Then he was pulling through the upper half of the Immelman loop reversal and rolling into conventional flight. Below, Jalan Veteran’s Avenue was a river of flame. The rebel armored force had been cut in two … lengthwise. No kill like a gun’s kill, Babe!
“Well … that was fun,” the conversational voice said over the TBP channel.
