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  The fireball was impressive.

  With her left hand she rammed the collective down to hold the DAP Hawk in place as the shock wave rolled over them. With the right, she shed her goggles and slid her visor back into place.

  And on the tactical display saw that she was in hell.

  She was the last one on the ground, so she yanked up for max lift, tipped her nose down as soon as she was aloft to gain speed and carved a climbing turn.

  To the north, three helos, all Kamov KA-52s, and a fast mover jet.

  To the south, two helos, both now identified as Mil-28 Havocs.

  To the east, a pair of fast movers out of Berdyans’k.

  Five of Russia’s most advanced attack helicopters and three fighter jets. The way her luck was running…

  Kara managed to ID the jets from her drone’s feed: two Sukhoi Su-27s and an Su-30.

  Would asking for a couple of nice thirty-year old MiG-21s fighter jets really be asking too much?

  She had an overloaded Mil-17, three Kamov gunships, the DAP Hawk, and a drone.

  They didn’t stand a chance in hell.

  This wasn’t some stupid Hollywood tale where the good guys would eventually triumph. Or the noble few of the Magnificent Seven, who would survive to ride another day.

  Even if this wasn’t A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger was going to plant his axe in the end zone.

  She and the rest of her crew were about to get their asses kicked straight into their graves.

  Chapter 8

  “The thing you don’t appreciate, Lola,” Mark was finally out of his snotty lecture mode, and was speaking as the commander…former commander of the most successful SOAR company in the regiment’s history. A company he had built from the ground up.

  This was a man she respected almost as much as his wife, if such things were possible. Which they weren’t, but he did pretty well despite that handicap.

  “You have a strategic mind. The 5D can’t be commanded by a tactician. Tacticians always get thrashed when it gets really ugly. Keep your people at the forefront of your priorities. That’s always the way through the problem.”

  Then he’d cracked that megawatt smile of his. “A’sides, worst that cain happ’n is y’all end up down a six-foot hole.”

  She’d already finished her sandwich, but the mug of ice tea had still been full enough to serve her purpose.

  Chapter 9

  “You want out-of-the-box, Mark?” she said between gritted teeth and hauled up on the DAP Hawk’s collective, pouring every trick she had into gaining max climb rate.

  “What?” Tim asked from beside her.

  She ignored him.

  “You want stupid frickin’ Hollywood? Fine, I’ll give you stupid frickin’ Hollywood!”

  Tim, being a good copilot and a wise husband, kept his mouth shut.

  The helicopters were a problem, but the jets were a disaster. They could move at Mach 2 and maneuver better than a BMW Mini. Even the DAP Hawk could only go one-fifth the speed of a Sukhoi.

  “Okay, folks,” she got on the general frequency. “It is time to do what we do so well. Flight level is one hundred feet,” though she kept climbing for all she was worth. “I want you to form up in a circle.”

  One thing Mark Henderson had always done a great job of was give the perfect amount of direction. A royal pain in the ass on the ground, but he was the master of the air. He never left a need for questions. But he also never said too much, thus trapping the flyers’ actions into narrow boundaries.

  “You are going to circle at one hundred feet above ground level as fast as you can go. Topography goes down, you go down. It goes up, you climb. If they come at you from above, Kara and I will take them.” Or do our damnedest. “They come at you from the side, don’t break formation to chase them. Your main firepower is facing forward. You shoot dead ahead as you circle. When they’re out of your sights, they’ll be in the sights of the helo circling right behind you. Trisha.”

  “Here, boss.”

  “You’re my chaos demon,” which was definitely what the woman was. “I want everyone on her tail. She circles more to the east, you shift with her. She circles to the south, you follow. Trisha keep that circle moving back and forth so they can’t get a fix on you.”

  “Roger that.”

  Already Lola could see them setting up a four-helo spinning top; one Hind and three Kamovs. When they fired their weapons they’d be like a spinning buzz saw of rockets and flying lead.

  Her tactical display said less than thirty seconds until bad news arrived. And the Russians had set up the pincer well, they’d be arriving from three directions at once; no chance of escape.

  “Tighten it up. Keep close together. I want your gap under one rotor between helos.”

  Even as she said it, they tightened up. They were now moving fast and began rolling back and forth over the river valley and the steep banks. Every ten to twelve seconds they made a full spin, shifting back and forth along the river like the circle itself was alive.

  Nobody but a SOAR team could fly like that.

  Chapter 10

  One of the Sukhoi fast movers came in fast and low, thinking the four helos spinning over the landscape like a psychotic, whirling dervish were an easy target.

  Trisha fed it a Russian Vympel R-73 air-to-air missile from her KA-52’s spread of weaponry before it knew what was happening.

  Dennis killed the first enemy Kamov attack helicopter, and Lola didn’t have time to spare to see what happened to the other three attack helos that came in low, but there was a hell of a lot of fire being exchanged in her peripheral vision—enough to light up the wide river valley in brilliant stroboscopic splashes that wreaked havoc on her helmet’s night-vision display.

  Her real concern was up high and she kept climbing for the DAP Hawk’s service ceiling and to hell with the fuel reserve as she clawed for altitude.

  Lola was trying to set up the sleight-of-hand, knowing the most dangerous attack would be coming down from high above, if only she could get up into position in time. She had dealt the game for the bad guys to see, four cards face up along the river valley and spinning in their circle.

  But she’d kept two cards hidden up her sleeve.

  The apparently easy target was the circling helos…to anyone at their altitude. Viewed from above they were an easy and, more importantly, an obvious target.

  Two of the jets and one of the massive Mil-28 Havoc gunships came in high to do just that.

  The stealth DAP Hawk had been built for only one reason, to shoot better than anything else on the planet. Only SOAR had the Direct Action Penetrators and as far as Lola knew, the Vengeance was the only surviving stealth model—after the loss of one in bin Laden’s compound, and the other that had almost killed the now-retired Majors.

  Of the two jets who’d thought to attack from above, the first one had come in very high.

  Kara’s drone carried four Hellfire missiles and she launched them all.

  Two of them tore up the Sukhoi Su-23.

  That left a jet and a helo attacking from above, and Lola had a single drone with no more ammunition and her own DAP Hawk.

  The formidable Su-30 jet rolled into a dive, aimed straight down at the spinning circle of helicopters from above. That was the reason Lola had Trisha shifting them side-to-side, to make them a harder target in case Lola’s plan didn’t work. Not that it would buy them more than a few seconds of life, but it might be all she needed.

  The second jet flew right past the DAP Hawk never realizing it was there. Tim sent a phalanx of six Hydra 70s into the belly of the beast as it plunged downward.

  Three connected and blew off its wing, sending the jet into a death spiral.

  The Mil-28 Havoc pilot who had come in high was good, very good. The Havoc dodged hard when he saw the Su-30 get shredded.

  But Lola’s bird cast almost no radar image and regrettably for him, he guessed wrong about her location. The Russian helo ate a barrage from T
im’s Vulcan 20mm cannon.

  But before he died, the Russian pilot managed to launch an Igla-1V missile straight down at the buzz saw of helos still alight with their own battle.

  Lola put herself between the missile and her people. She couldn’t risk flares or chaff, because if the missile decided to ignore the distractors, it would hit her team circling below.

  She couldn’t force the nose of her helo to bear on the missile in time. So she rolled the DAP Hawk onto its side, exposing herself broadside to the missile.

  Lying on her back in the crew-chief’s seat behind Lola, with her minigun pointed straight up and firing six thousand rounds a minute, Connie killed the missile only a few rotors before it would have slammed into the Vengeance.

  The heat blast was intense. The shockwave of the exploding missile flipped them out of the sky like they were a swatted fly.

  Engines flamed out.

  She and Tim fought to restart them.

  Hydraulic systems failed as shrapnel sliced through crucial lines.

  Backups kicked in. Stabilized. Held.

  It took her fifteen thousand feet of tumbling freefall to recover. No time for fear. She leveled out only moments before she would have augered in—right through the center of her team’s spinning circle.

  Lola achieved a stable hover less than two rotors above Trisha’s dervish and scanned the tactical display.

  The other helos still whirled at top speed, rolling back and forth over the landscape. And, thank god—there were still four of them.

  Scattered far and wide across the river valley there were fires and, Lola’s night vision revealed, piles of overheated wreckage. No one was moving. No parachutes had deployed. There would be no witnesses to the bloodbath that had occurred on the bottomlands of the Kalmius River this night. No one to report who had actually been here.

  “Status?” she managed—against a very dry throat—to ask those circling below her.

  Two of her crewmembers were hit but alive. One of their prisoners had been killed when a 30mm round passed through the cabin of the Hind right where his head had been, but the others were alive.

  Kara reported the airspace clear from her view high above.

  Lola lined them up, gave a big sigh, and they turned once more for the coast, moving fast and low.

  She would raise her next glass of beer in a toast westward, where the Majors had retired to fight forest fires in Oregon and raise their daughter in safety. That was in her and Tim’s future, but not yet.

  Lola now knew that Mark and Emily were absolutely right. The way through any problem? Protect your people, no matter what the personal cost. And against all odds it had worked; they’d survived.

  “How did you think of that buzz saw thing anyway?” Trisha’s radio call broke in on Lola’s train of thought.

  She blew out a long, slow breath and made sure she kept the adrenaline shakes out of her voice as she did her best to imitate Major Mark Henderson’s notoriously bad fake Texas accent.

  “W’all…”

  Everyone recognized it right away and laughed, some more shakily than others.

  “I jes had y’all pull them wagons inta a circle, don’cha know.”

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  Target of the Heart (excerpt)

  Major Pete Napier hovered his MH-47G Chinook helicopter ten kilometers outside of Lhasa, Tibet and a mere two inches off the tundra. A mixed action team of Delta Force and The Activity—the slipperiest intel group on the planet—flung themselves aboard.

  The additional load sent an infinitesimal shift in the cyclic control in his right hand. The hydraulics to close the rear loading ramp hummed through the entire frame of the massive helicopter. By the time his crew chief could reach forward to slap an “all secure” signal against his shoulder, they were already ten feet up and fifty out. That was enough altitude. He kept the nose down as he clawed for speed in the thin air at eleven thousand feet.

  “Totally worth it,” one of the D-boys announced as soon as he was on the Chinook’s internal intercom.

  He’d have to remember to tell that to the two Black Hawks flying guard for him…when they were in a friendly country and could risk a radio transmission. This deep inside China—or rather Chinese-held territory as the CIA’s mission-briefing spook had insisted on calling it—radios attracted attention and were only used to avoid imminent death and destruction.

  “Great, now I just need to get us out of this alive.”

  “Do that, Pete. We’d appreciate it.”

  He wished to hell he had a stealth bird like the one that had gone into bin Laden’s compound. But the one that had crashed during that raid had been blown up. Where there was one, there were always two, but the second had gone back into hiding as thoroughly as if it had never existed. He hadn’t heard a word about it since.

  The Tibetan terrain was amazing, even if all he could see of it was the monochromatic green of night vision. And blackness. The largest city in Tibet lay a mere ten kilometers away and they were flying over barren wilderness. He could crash out here and no one would know for decades unless some yak herder stumbled upon them. Or were yaks in Mongolia? He was a corn-fed, white boy from Colorado, what did he know about Tibet? Most of the countries he’d flown into on black ops missions he’d only seen at night anyway.

  While moving very, very fast.

  Like now.

  The inside of his visor was painted with overlapping readouts. A pre-defined terrain map, the best that modern satellite imaging could build made the first layer. This wasn’t some crappy, on-line, look-at-a-picture-of-your-house display. Someone had a pile of dung outside their goat pen? He could see it, tell you how high it was, and probably say if they were pygmy goats or full-size LaManchas by the size of their shit-pellets if he zoomed in.

  On top of that were projected the forward-looking infrared camera images. The FLIR imaging gave him a real-time overlay, in case someone had put an addition onto their goat shed since the last satellite pass, or parked their tractor across his intended flight path.

  His nervous system was paying autonomic attention to that combined landscape. He also compensated for the thin air at altitude as he instinctively chose when to start his climb over said goat shed or his swerve around it.

  It was the third layer, the tactical display that had most of his attention. At least he and the two Black Hawks flying escort on him were finally on the move.

  To insert this deep into Tibet, without passing over Bhutan or Nepal, they’d had to add wingtanks on the Black Hawks’ hardpoints where he’d much rather have a couple banks of Hellfire missiles. Still, they had 20mm chain guns and the crew chiefs had miniguns which was some comfort.

  While the action team was busy infiltrating the capital city and gathering intelligence on the particularly brutal Chinese assistant administrator, he and his crews had been squatting out in the wilderness under a camouflage net designed to make his helo look like just another god-forsaken Himalayan lump of granite.

  Command had determined that it was better for the helos to wait on site through the day than risk flying out and back in. He and his crew had stood shifts on guard duty, but none of them had slept. They’d been flying together too long to have any new jokes, so they’d played a lot of cribbage. He’d long ago ruled no gambling on a mission, after a fistfight had broken out about a bluff hand that cost a Marine three hundred and forty-seven dollars. Marines hated losing to Army no matter how many times it happened. They’d had to sit on him for a long time before he calmed down.

  Tonight’s mission was part of an on-going campaign to discredit the Chinese “presence” in Tibet on the international stage—as if occupying the country the last sixty years didn’t count toward ruling, whether invited or not. As usual, there was a crucial vote coming up at the U.N.—that, as usual, the Chinese could be guaranteed to ignore. However, the ever-hopeful CIA was in a hurry to make sure that any damaging information that they could validate was dissemina
ted as thoroughly as possible prior to the vote.

  Not his concern.

  His concern was, were they going to pass over some Chinese sentry post at their top speed of a hundred and ninety-six miles an hour? The sentries would then call down a couple Shenyang J-16 jet fighters that could hustle along at Mach 2 to fry his sorry ass. He knew there was a pair of them parked at Lhasa along with some older gear that would be just as effective against his three helos.

  “Don’t suppose you could get a move on, Pete?”

  “Eat shit, Nicolai!” He was a good man to have as a copilot. Pete knew he was holding on too tight, and Nicolai knew that a joke was the right way to ease the moment.

  He, Nicolai, and the four pilots in the two Black Hawks had a long way to go tonight and he’d never make it if he stayed so tight on the controls that he could barely maneuver. Pete eased off and felt his fingers tingle with the rush of returning blood. They dove down into gorges and followed them as long as they dared. They hugged cliff walls at every opportunity to decrease their radar profile. And they climbed.

  That was the true danger—they would be up near the helos’ limits when they crossed over the backbone of the Himalayas in their rush for India. The air was so rarefied that they burned fuel at a prodigious rate. Their reserve didn’t allow for any extended battles while crossing the border…not for any battle at all really.

  It was pitch dark outside her helicopter when Captain Danielle Delacroix stamped on the left rudder pedal while giving the big Chinook right-directed control on the cyclic. It tipped her most of the way onto her side, but let her continue in a straight line. A Chinook’s rotors were sixty feet across—front to back they overlapped to make the spread a hundred feet long. By cross-controlling her bird to tip it, she managed to execute a straight line between two mock pylons only thirty feet apart. They were made of thin cloth so they wouldn’t down the helo if you sliced one—she was the only trainee to not have cut one yet.