Major Pete Napier of the 160th Night Stalkers 2nd Battalion B Company hovered his MH-47G Chinook helicopter ten kilometers outside of Lhasa, Tibet and mere millimeters off the tundra. A mixed action team of Delta Force and The Activity—the slipperiest intel group ever—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 three meters up and twenty 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 all I need to do is 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 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. Not really, but it felt that way.
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 who were both very protective of their airspace, 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 20 mm chain guns and the crew chiefs had miniguns which was some comfort. His twin-rotor Chinook might be the biggest helicopter that the Night Stalkers flew, but it was the cargo van of Special Operations and only had two miniguns and a machine gun of its own. Though he’d put his three crew chiefs up against the best Black Hawk shooter any day.
While the action team was busy infiltrating the capital city and gathering intelligence on the particularly brutal Chinese assistant administrator, Pete and his crews had been squatting out in the wilderness under a camouflage net designed to make his helo look like 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-plus 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 disseminated 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—over fifteen hundred mph—to fry his sorry ass. He knew there was a pair of them parked at Lhasa along with some older gear that would be equally 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.
