Except this time Mickey D had suckered the HIND broadside to the IMU missile launcher. Broadside meant that the gunship’s jet exhausts, located amidships, just forward and above the chopper’s stubby wings, were now exposed to the missile’s sensors. And just like scissors cut paper but rock breaks scissors, the fat, round, hotter-than-hot exhaust from twin Isotov TV-3-117 turbines trumps chaff every single time in the missile-sensor playbook.
Frankly, Mick didn’t give a rusty F-word whether the IMU was firing an ancient Soviet SA-7, or a newer Strela-2, or a stolen Chinese HN-5. All he knew was that every one of those missiles was an old-fashioned heat-seeker. To work properly, they required a heat source — the exhaust — to lock on to, and a minimum range of five hundred meters for the fired missile to arm itself. Which, Mick noted with satisfaction, was just about what the HIND pilot had allowed, intent as he was on blowing the crap out of the HIP.
Because the HIND was so low, the missile’s flight time was less than one-two-three seconds. Which was when the contact fuse of the kilo-and-a-half high-explosive warhead grazed the exhaust vent and the rocket detonated just inside. There was a brief, explosive hiccup as the engines disintegrated. A violent blast jerked the HIND onto its side. A millisecond later there was another flash, which broke the chopper in two. Rotors shattering, the gunship’s front end cartwheeled, then dropped stonelike onto the desert floor, bursting into a huge fireball that was immediately enveloped in a funnel-shaped cloud of thick, black smoke.
From the starboard doorway, Ritzik saw the dark plume and then a series of vivid white-and-orange explosions as the chopper’s rockets blew up.
Then it was all wiped from his field of vision as Mick rotated the HIP clockwise and accelerated, flying low to keep the dunes between them and the IMU as the pilot headed due west. The Chinese were still out there — prowling and growling. Ritzik had to get his people out before the PLA chopped them all to bits.
Ten hundred fifteen hours. That was the cutoff Rowdy Yates had set for himself. If Ritzik wasn’t back, they’d get the hell out of Dodge and head for the Tajik border. But now there was a chopper in the area. He heard the
The radios, Rowdy thought, were indicative of the problems faced by people like him, who risked their lives using equipment designed and built by idiots. Just once, Rowdy thought, it would be nice to go into battle with gear that had been designed by people who’d actually put their hides on the line with it, instead of engineers who test everything in a vacuum. His hand brushed the pommel of the ten-inch bowie knife suspended on his combat harness. Rowdy’s bowie had never failed him. But then, it hadn’t been designed by some shirtwaist marketing expert or a self-styled expert with a Ph.D. in edged-weapons design, but by actual Warriors — the Bowie brothers — who knew what a fighting knife should be because they’d had ample opportunity to field-test the design under the full range of combat conditions back in the early days of the nineteenth century.
