Fire Force(47)
‘How’s she running?’ asked Chris.
They were standing on a small, military airstrip ten miles north of the barracks. Steve, Chris and David had been driven straight out here after the meeting broke up. David was the most experienced pilot in the unit. Steve could fly a chopper if he had to - it was part of standard Regiment training - and so could Dan, but David was the man with the most flying hours on his CV so it would be he who took the controls. Wallace had introduced them to Josiah Katana, the chief engineer of the air base, who had taken them out to check the Alouette.
‘Perfectly,’ answered Katana immediately. ‘We don’t have a huge Air Force here in Batota. If we have a machine like this, then we look after it.’
Gazing around the airstrip, Steve could see that that much was true. There was a pair of MIG fighters and an elderly Antonov troop carrier and a Pakistani-built Nanchang trainer aircraft, but otherwise Ibera seemed largely undefended from the air. A modern, well-equipped Army could take this place in a couple of days, he reflected. If they wanted to.
‘How about armour?’ he said aloud. ‘We could be taking some heavy incoming fire as we approach the fort.’
‘It’s got steel plating right along the underside,’ explained Katana. ‘The Alouette can absorb a huge amount of incoming fire, that’s one of its main strengths. You can take any number of bullet-holes to the skin, and so long as the pilot is alive, you’ll be OK. Punch a hole in the rotorblade and she’ll stay up. Even if the tail rotor fails you can still get clear of the battlefield and bring her down safely.’
‘So what are her vulnerabilities, would you say?’ asked David.
Katana thought for a minute before replying. ‘A direct hit to the engine or to the main rotor gearbox is going to finish you off. Those are the two parts of the machine you need to protect.’
Steve looked across at David. He was the man who was going to be flying the machine. Ultimately, it was his call. He spent a couple more minutes poking around inside the engine, then checking the blades. ‘We’ll take it,’ said David finally.
Together with Wallace, the three men climbed inside the compact cabin. The Alouette held six men plus the pilot at standard capacity, but this one had had two of the passenger seats removed to create more space for loading kit on board or for evacuating wounded soldiers. At the side, there was an FN 7.62mm MAG machine gun, again a leftover from the old Batotean Army, which had bought most of its armaments from the Belgian manufacturer Fabrique Nationale. David pulled back on the throttle, letting the powerful rotor swing into action, and in the next moment Steve could feel the machine start to jerk into the air. It wasn’t built for comfort, he could remember that much from the time he’d flown in an Alouette in Pakistan. It stuttered on its climb, the engines filling the cramped cabin with a deafening roar. But it took off cleanly and quickly, accelerated fast, and could drop out of the sky with terrifying speed. For the job in hand, it would do just fine.
The Alouette had a top speed of 124 miles an hour. David swung it out over the fields that lay to the north of Ibera, opened up the throttle to take it up to full speed, then brought it back towards the Sixth Brigade barracks, landing it neatly on the parade ground. As he climbed out of the cockpit, he looked pleased enough.
‘She flies fine,’ he said tersely. ‘She’ll get us in, and hopefully out again, in one piece. And that’s all that counts.’
By the time they got back to the Operations Room, Ollie had already started drawing up more detailed plans of the way they wanted the raid to unfold. It was a second-by-second plan: a raid like this was going to depend on precise timing. David would fly the chopper and Steve, Ian, Maksim and Dan would drop down from the air. Ian would create some homemade stun grenades to lob as they came in for the assault: the more disorientated the troops were, the less resistance they’d offer, and the easier it would be to take them out.
They’d fly out tomorrow to a small town called Gull’s Wing, about 100 miles up the lake from Elephant’s Foot, and the closest piece of territory controlled by the Government. The fort there would give them shelter for the night and a chance to ready themselves for the attack. There was a twenty-five-foot, armour-plated cruiser they could use for the assault from Lake Hasta. The KPV could be fitted onto its front. Ollie, Newton, Nick, Ganju and Chris would lead that charge, blasting the side of Tshaka’s stronghold with rockets and machine-gun fire.
‘There are probably about a hundred things that can go wrong,’ said Ollie, when he’d finished drawing up the first draft of the battle plan. ‘But with any luck, only about fifty of them actually will. And in that case, we should get out of there alive.’