The machine gun just below him erupted, a deadly spray that knocked sparks off the hurricane fence surrounding the pad as the chopper slowly revolved around. Somewhere now off to his left came a new burst of automatic fire. He found himself in a full-scale firefight, trapped like a tormented bull in a pen.
But the Hind was up and hovering . . . and also beginning to slip sideways because of the damaged wing. He grappled with the collective pitch lever in his left hand, trying to regain control, but he didn't have the experience. The chopper was now poised about ten feet above the ground, its engines bellowing, nosing around and drifting dangerously.
He'd lost control. As it tilted sideways, the fence began coming up at him, aiming directly for the nose bubble. Even more unnerving, though, was the heavyset terrorist in a black pullover who was standing directly in front of the bubble and firing his Uzi point-blank. Worse still, he was handling it like second nature.
The plastic splintered with a high-pitched shriek as the rounds caught it head-on. The curvature had helped before, but now the gunman was able to fire straight into it. The game was about to be up.
He ducked for the floor of the cockpit just as the bubble windscreen detonated, spewing shards of plastic both outward and inward. Now the helicopter was coming about and lifting off again, pulling up strands of the wire fence that had gotten tangled in the landing gear.
No time to worry about it. He rose up, grasped the collective, and urged more power, trying to compensate for the torque. But the mottled gray behemoth was increasingly unstable, shunting sideways, drifting over the security fence and spiraling upward toward the mountain that bristled with SatCom's communications gear. The gunner holding the Uzi slipped in another clip and raised up to finish him off, but at that instant Vance squeezed the fire button one last time and the man danced a pirouette, disappearing from view.
As he started to spiral in earnest, more automatic fire ricocheted off the fuselage. Then came a sickening whine.
The stabilizer, he thought. They must have hit the damned stabilizer. This is going to be a very short trip.
Panic caught him as the Hind started into autorotation, round and round like a bumper-car ride at an amusement park.
He cut the power—hoping he could bring her down using the energy stored in the blades—then quickly put the right pedal to the floor, held the collective down, and tried to keep rotor speed in the green. He was drifting to the east now, headed for a copse of trees halfway up the mountain.