the operation so far. A small, lightly armed force was flying into the unknown, tasked with holding a patch of flat, featureless terrain for three days and nights so the rest of the Squadron could be ferried in.
As Grey waited for the helo’s rotors to spool up to speed, his mind drifted to thoughts of his wife and kids back home. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was the mission that was going to get him. It was rare for him to feel as anxious as he did now; in fact, he couldn’t think of another moment in a lifetime of elite soldiering that had unnerved him so much. It was ominous and unsettling.
He glanced at Mucker squatting by his quad, but the tough northerner seemed to be showing no special signs of nerves or of tension. He, too, had a wife and young children back in the UK, so by rights he should have been equally worried. As for the Dude andMoth, Grey figured they were the lucky ones right now. Sure, they lacked operational experience, but at least the young guns didn’t have the added burden of a wife and kids on their shoulders.
The turbines screamed deafeningly above them, and the Chinook clawed into the air for the next leg of the insertion. As the pilot banked the big helo round and set a course heading north, Grey could see his men checking and rechecking their weapons. Two of his team were untried and untested in combat, and he hoped and prayed that they weren’t about to fly into a patch of desert packed with a hidden enemy, one that their scrutiny of the satphotos had somehow failed to detect.
The Chinooks were operating on black light and the aircrew were flying fast, at treetop level. They were throwing the massive, cumbersome machine around like a sports car, and the effect in the rear was electrifying. They were going in blind to a potentially hot LZ, they had no one on the ground to guide them in, and they were unsighted and defenseless—apart from the door gunners hunched over their miniguns.
Following the experience of Afghan ops in 2001 and 2002, the Chinooks had been upgraded with a fantastic NEP (night enhancement package), which enabled the pilots to fly nap-of-the-earth missions even in extremely low light. The NEP included specialist night-vision technology that showed the terrain over which they were flying in glowing near daylight, on laptop-like computer screens mounted in the cockpit. It also included a moving mapping package that displayed a 3-D contour map of the ground they were crossing.
The pair of helicopters tore ahead at near-maximum speed—approaching 250 kph—the terrain flashing past barely a few dozen feet below the porthole-like windows. There was a momentary glint of moonlight on water below them, which had to be the Euphrates, as the pilot dropped the Chinook down to hug the surface of the river. They powered across that mighty waterway, putting the barrier it represented well behind the advance force of M Squadron.
Seeing that water, for a moment Grey was reminded of the MV Nisha assault. He’d sat by the Chinook’s open ramp in the howling,icy draft thrown up by the wind-whipped sea. Just as now, that Chinook pilot had brought them in at ultra-low level, the wave tops seemingly tearing at their undercarriage. The assault had been carried out in the midst of a raging gale, but still the pilot had held the Chinook rock-steady as it hovered over the deck and the men went down the ropes.
Grey had every confidence in the highly trained Special Forces aircrew doing a similarly sterling job on their insertion into Iraq. As they thundered across the desert, leaving the expanse of the river behind them, and with little sense of what they were flying into, the one comfort Grey felt was in the caliber of the men flying the helicopters: the MV Nisha assault had more than proved them the best in the business.
The noise in the Chinook’s cavernous hold was thunderous—the throbbing of the rotor blades plus the roaring of the wind from the open ramp—and it made it
As Grey waited for the helo’s rotors to spool up to speed, his mind drifted to thoughts of his wife and kids back home. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was the mission that was going to get him. It was rare for him to feel as anxious as he did now; in fact, he couldn’t think of another moment in a lifetime of elite soldiering that had unnerved him so much. It was ominous and unsettling.
He glanced at Mucker squatting by his quad, but the tough northerner seemed to be showing no special signs of nerves or of tension. He, too, had a wife and young children back in the UK, so by rights he should have been equally worried. As for the Dude andMoth, Grey figured they were the lucky ones right now. Sure, they lacked operational experience, but at least the young guns didn’t have the added burden of a wife and kids on their shoulders.
The turbines screamed deafeningly above them, and the Chinook clawed into the air for the next leg of the insertion. As the pilot banked the big helo round and set a course heading north, Grey could see his men checking and rechecking their weapons. Two of his team were untried and untested in combat, and he hoped and prayed that they weren’t about to fly into a patch of desert packed with a hidden enemy, one that their scrutiny of the satphotos had somehow failed to detect.
The Chinooks were operating on black light and the aircrew were flying fast, at treetop level. They were throwing the massive, cumbersome machine around like a sports car, and the effect in the rear was electrifying. They were going in blind to a potentially hot LZ, they had no one on the ground to guide them in, and they were unsighted and defenseless—apart from the door gunners hunched over their miniguns.
Following the experience of Afghan ops in 2001 and 2002, the Chinooks had been upgraded with a fantastic NEP (night enhancement package), which enabled the pilots to fly nap-of-the-earth missions even in extremely low light. The NEP included specialist night-vision technology that showed the terrain over which they were flying in glowing near daylight, on laptop-like computer screens mounted in the cockpit. It also included a moving mapping package that displayed a 3-D contour map of the ground they were crossing.
The pair of helicopters tore ahead at near-maximum speed—approaching 250 kph—the terrain flashing past barely a few dozen feet below the porthole-like windows. There was a momentary glint of moonlight on water below them, which had to be the Euphrates, as the pilot dropped the Chinook down to hug the surface of the river. They powered across that mighty waterway, putting the barrier it represented well behind the advance force of M Squadron.
Seeing that water, for a moment Grey was reminded of the MV Nisha assault. He’d sat by the Chinook’s open ramp in the howling,icy draft thrown up by the wind-whipped sea. Just as now, that Chinook pilot had brought them in at ultra-low level, the wave tops seemingly tearing at their undercarriage. The assault had been carried out in the midst of a raging gale, but still the pilot had held the Chinook rock-steady as it hovered over the deck and the men went down the ropes.
Grey had every confidence in the highly trained Special Forces aircrew doing a similarly sterling job on their insertion into Iraq. As they thundered across the desert, leaving the expanse of the river behind them, and with little sense of what they were flying into, the one comfort Grey felt was in the caliber of the men flying the helicopters: the MV Nisha assault had more than proved them the best in the business.
The noise in the Chinook’s cavernous hold was thunderous—the throbbing of the rotor blades plus the roaring of the wind from the open ramp—and it made it
Similar Books
