headset and settling into a seat closest to Acosta on the right side minigun.
“Here we go!” Schiavo shouted, signaling with a twirl of her upraised finger that we were taking off.
The Sea Stallion shook and rumbled, then half of that noise and shuddering seemed to drain away as the craft was enveloped by air. Floating. I felt the sudden lightness as it was transmitted through me. It was a slightly unsettling sensation, different from that one experiences in a plane. For lack of a better description, it was as though I wasn’t being thrust into the sky, but pulled toward the heavens.
A moment later, someone tried to send each and every one of us to that very place.
Eleven
I happened to be looking past Hart on the left door gun when a flash bloomed in the dead woods beyond the smoldering lighthouse.
“RPG!”
Someone screamed the warning. I don’t know who it was. Hart let out a burst from his miniguns as the pilots reacted, the modified Sea Stallion jerking hard to the left, turbines screaming overhead as they tried to shift the aircraft clear of the unguided missile streaking toward it.
They were unsuccessful.
The warhead impacted at the extreme front of the helicopter when it was barely thirty feet off the ground, exploding through the cockpit. A shower of flame and shrapnel and body parts sprayed into the cabin, engines suddenly spinning down, controls destroyed, both pilots obviously dead. I grabbed for a handhold as the aircraft rolled to the right, away from the direction it had been turning, nose coming up. I saw Elaine steadying herself across from me as the Sea Stallion tipped slowly forward.
“We’re going down!” Schiavo yelled.
“Brace!” Lorenzen shouted.
I looked away from Elaine for a moment, toward the front of the bird. Most of what had existed forward of the side gunners was gone, just shredded metal and sparking wires remaining.
And the earth. I saw that, too. It was what we were heading for, open ground near the edge of the tree line, not far from where the RPG had been fired. Once more I turned to Elaine. She was fixed on me, forcing a smile. Some gallows humor version of joy on her face. Maybe an acknowledgment that, after all we’d come through, we were going to die in, of all things, an aircraft that had been shot down in battle.
Then, something odd happened. As the engines continued to slow down, rotors above chopping through the air at a reduced rate, the helicopter began to right itself, the nose coming up, as if we’d reached the bottom of some arc and were about to head up again.
“Autorotation!” Hart shouted, his death grip still on the controls of the left side minigun.
Autorotation. I knew vaguely what that was. It was, for helicopters, the equivalent of an airplane’s dead stick landing. A distant cousin of a gliding touch down. The Sea Stallion’s rotor, as I recalled, while without power, was still spinning enough to provide some lift, and as the chopper neared the ground, pulling back on the stick and flaring the bird could, sometimes, allow something approximating a survivable landing. In our case, physics had taken over where the pilots, now gone, would have initiated the maneuver. The balance of the helicopter, heavier aft now with the cockpit and its structure blasted away, equalized, with the nose coming up as we neared the ground.
Which is precisely what happened just before we hit. Hard.
There was no explosion. Not any like we’d experienced recently, in any case. But gears and engines and metal stiffeners in the fuselage came apart with showers of smoke and sparks. The rear of the Sea Stallion buckled, a great gash opening across the top of the fuselage just above the loading ramp.
Then, everything began to tremble. I’d never been in an earthquake larger than a small shaker, but what I felt then was more than I could imagine even tectonic plates unleashing. The rotor spinning above, which had sheared partially as we hit and its blades flexed,
“Here we go!” Schiavo shouted, signaling with a twirl of her upraised finger that we were taking off.
The Sea Stallion shook and rumbled, then half of that noise and shuddering seemed to drain away as the craft was enveloped by air. Floating. I felt the sudden lightness as it was transmitted through me. It was a slightly unsettling sensation, different from that one experiences in a plane. For lack of a better description, it was as though I wasn’t being thrust into the sky, but pulled toward the heavens.
A moment later, someone tried to send each and every one of us to that very place.
Eleven
I happened to be looking past Hart on the left door gun when a flash bloomed in the dead woods beyond the smoldering lighthouse.
“RPG!”
Someone screamed the warning. I don’t know who it was. Hart let out a burst from his miniguns as the pilots reacted, the modified Sea Stallion jerking hard to the left, turbines screaming overhead as they tried to shift the aircraft clear of the unguided missile streaking toward it.
They were unsuccessful.
The warhead impacted at the extreme front of the helicopter when it was barely thirty feet off the ground, exploding through the cockpit. A shower of flame and shrapnel and body parts sprayed into the cabin, engines suddenly spinning down, controls destroyed, both pilots obviously dead. I grabbed for a handhold as the aircraft rolled to the right, away from the direction it had been turning, nose coming up. I saw Elaine steadying herself across from me as the Sea Stallion tipped slowly forward.
“We’re going down!” Schiavo yelled.
“Brace!” Lorenzen shouted.
I looked away from Elaine for a moment, toward the front of the bird. Most of what had existed forward of the side gunners was gone, just shredded metal and sparking wires remaining.
And the earth. I saw that, too. It was what we were heading for, open ground near the edge of the tree line, not far from where the RPG had been fired. Once more I turned to Elaine. She was fixed on me, forcing a smile. Some gallows humor version of joy on her face. Maybe an acknowledgment that, after all we’d come through, we were going to die in, of all things, an aircraft that had been shot down in battle.
Then, something odd happened. As the engines continued to slow down, rotors above chopping through the air at a reduced rate, the helicopter began to right itself, the nose coming up, as if we’d reached the bottom of some arc and were about to head up again.
“Autorotation!” Hart shouted, his death grip still on the controls of the left side minigun.
Autorotation. I knew vaguely what that was. It was, for helicopters, the equivalent of an airplane’s dead stick landing. A distant cousin of a gliding touch down. The Sea Stallion’s rotor, as I recalled, while without power, was still spinning enough to provide some lift, and as the chopper neared the ground, pulling back on the stick and flaring the bird could, sometimes, allow something approximating a survivable landing. In our case, physics had taken over where the pilots, now gone, would have initiated the maneuver. The balance of the helicopter, heavier aft now with the cockpit and its structure blasted away, equalized, with the nose coming up as we neared the ground.
Which is precisely what happened just before we hit. Hard.
There was no explosion. Not any like we’d experienced recently, in any case. But gears and engines and metal stiffeners in the fuselage came apart with showers of smoke and sparks. The rear of the Sea Stallion buckled, a great gash opening across the top of the fuselage just above the loading ramp.
Then, everything began to tremble. I’d never been in an earthquake larger than a small shaker, but what I felt then was more than I could imagine even tectonic plates unleashing. The rotor spinning above, which had sheared partially as we hit and its blades flexed,
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