ARMAGEDDON'S SONG (Volume 3) 'Fight Through' (16 page)

A chunk of metal taking off Don’s right
leg below the knee during a hot extraction in Helmand province ten years later
was the only reason he had left, not because he wanted to but because the army
was downsizing and younger, 100% fit AC’s were preferred over the prosthetic
limb owning variety.

Lifting tree trunks out of the woods kept
his mind focussed but flying personnel and equipment from A to B was as
interesting as watching traffic signals change, at least he was still flying
though.

‘My T Oak’ won the ESA contract to clear
the jungle from around the facility and other small jobs appeared in-country
too, mainly at the behest of the Governor’s office to clear trees around the
small marine bases on the Suriname and Brazil borders, and the legion camps of
course. Being a Vet and having seen combat went a ways to establish a
cordiality with the normally frosty legionnaire’s that led to a respect for his
flying skills, so it was to him and not his boss, that they had come to request
assistance with boarding  the fleeing freighter
Fliterland
a hundred miles out in the Atlantic. Don’s ‘Pinnacle’ manoeuvre, keeping
station on the moving vessel without making contact but close enough to drop
off troops,  had allowed fifteen Legionnaire’s to step off the lowered
rear troop ramp and straight on to one of the bridge wings and seize the vessel.

Tonight, at the logging camps
accommodation near the airstrip outside Kourou,  Don had been dozing in
front of the communal TV set with his prosthetic limb beside him, lightweight,
strong alloy tubing instead of something pretending to be a living lower leg.
The false leg sensibly allowed one handed operation in its attachment and
removal as the designers realised the owner may not always be in a position to
sit whilst performing those tasks. The free hand could prevent the owner from
falling on his ass.

Don was called to the telephone in the
office and told it was urgent, so having hopped one legged to the ‘phone Don attached
it as he listened. On the other end was the legions operations centre and the
duty watch keeper, a major, explained their Puma was still tied up on the
border so could Don take the platoon of reservists from Kourou up to the
Soyuz
site as there had been an attempt to infiltrate all the launch pads. Once he
had dropped them off he wanted Don to collect one of the Cayenne reservist
platoons and deliver it to the ESA final assembly building.

Don was practically rubbing his hands
together. All he needed was assurances that the company had been informed
because they had torn him a fresh one after the
Fliterland
incident.

He roused his co-pilot and crew chief, a
pair of French Canadians with attitude, that is to say they considered
themselves more French than the French. It would be fair to say that Don’s
enthusiasm for the evening’s unscheduled flying was not shared by them on any
appreciable level.

Half a dozen members of the Kourou
platoon were already at the airstrip when Don arrived, hobbling on his false
leg but keen as mustard nonetheless.

The Chinook was only a half dozen years
younger than Don but older than both his co-pilot and his countryman. He set
them to carry out the pre-flight walkabout as he settled himself into the right
hand seat.

Checking that nothing had fallen off
since the aircraft had last been used was a job he had once carried out
himself, religiously, but he was not that nimble anymore.

Don attached night vision goggles to his
flight helmet; they were absolute essentials here in the equatorial tropics
where day does not gradually become dark over a couple of hours, the transition
will occur in scant minutes. Airfield lighting with a backup generator was also
in short supply in these parts so that was another good reason to be able to
see in the dark whenever necessary.

Cars were arriving all the time now, a
pick-up truck with eight middle aged men crammed into the back was the last to
arrive.

The platoon commander, a grossly
overweight baker, and possibly his own best customer, was pulling on combat
trousers over pyjama bottoms as the senior NCO got the men in three ranks and
called the roll.

Don counted twenty three men in total,
the Chinook seated fifteen but he would bend the rules under the circumstances
and deliver them in one trip.

His co-pilot took his seat and buckled up
as the crew chief finished seating
‘Pères
Armée’
and stood outside the aircraft
ready to spot any problem visually during the start-up.

Don spoke aloud as he ran through the
‘before engine start’ and start-up checklists because even under the
circumstances he wasn’t about to bend the rules for that!

It was only thirteen miles to the
Soyuz
site, but forty five from there to Cayenne. He left the troop ramp down for the
three minute hop to the launch pad.

No sooner had they left the ground when
they were diverted south to check the jetty and bridge guard across the Kourou
River. The four man guard of reservists were not answering their radio and
there may be a problem at the gatehouse to the nearby ESA dock. The local
gendarmerie patrol car was not answering its radio either or they would have
sent that instead, he was told.

Don was enjoying himself. Not a problem,
had been his response, he banked around and overflew the gatehouse and jetty.

“I found your police car…a bunch of armed
men and two for-godamned-real submarines…we got ground fire from the bridge and
the subs!” he reported a minute later.

“Far be it for me to tell you your job,
but do you want me to put these guys on the ground at the clearing between the
town and the jetty and then go fetch the rest from Cayenne?”

The Governor had been alerted to the
Chinese troops in Foreign Legion garb and now on learning that there were two
surfaced submarines at the jetty with more troops on the ground he could be
forgiven for wondering, just briefly, if an invasion force had somehow been
missed?

There were troops guarding the launch
pads and they had destroyed two groups attempting to infiltrate. They were
stood to and that was the best he could hope for under the circumstances. This
‘new’ force though, for that is how he thought of them, needed to be engaged,
to spoil whatever they intended or delay them until regular forces could be
brought to bear.

The nearest regular troops to the Kourou
river bridge and the ESA Jetty were the commandant of the jungle warfare school
who was in a little Peugeot P4 utility vehicle, the French ‘Jeep’, enroute to
check up on his students. However, he had only the schools sergeant major and
his driver with him.

The legions commanding officer was
ordered to start moving troops to the ESA launch facility, and his Puma and
small Gazelle were the obvious means but the process would take over an hour
before the first men arrived.

One corvette was at sea and had been
turned about, its sister ship was preparing to sail.

The corvettes were on detached duty from
Toulon and their crews enjoyed the Cayenne nightlife when on a stand
down.  The gendarmeries visited the bars with commandeered taxi cabs in
convoy behind the police cars, spreading the word, rounding the crew up and
filling the cabs. 

The patrol boats were based at Cayenne
though; the crews had homes in many cases and were summoned by a telephone
call. One boat readying to leave, the second patrol boat was on the slips
having a shaft replaced as the old one had been struck by a hidden deadfall
whilst manoeuvring in the Mahury estuary. It was a constant hazard, colliding
with the dead falls, the trees that had toppled into the river to be washed out
to sea. The most dangerous were those waterlogged trunks that were not yet so
saturated as to settle to the bottom, but instead sailed just below the
surface, invisible in the muddy brown river water, mother nature’s own
malicious timber torpedoes.

She wasn’t going anywhere for a few days.

Both Atlantiques had only returned two
days before. Losses to the NATO maritime patrol fleet had seen them called away
to assist with fighting the convoy’s through the waiting wolf packs. Staging
out of Shannon airport in the Republic of Ireland they had flown around the
clock.

Since their return the crew’s had been on
a maintenance stand-down as both hard working aircraft and crew members
received essential TLC.

Now of course panels were being secured, and
pre-flights already underway before the ground crews had even finished securing
engine covers back in place. 

So Don was told to put his load on the
ground at the clearing where the reservists would receive radio orders. He was
then to lose no time in bringing the other reserve platoon, currently mustering
on a football pitch at Cayenne, to join with the first load of reservists.

“This is what makes life worth living!”
he whooped, and laughed at the expression on his co-pilots face.

The sound of the Chinooks twin engines
echoed through the jungle and along the river. It was a typical moonless
tropical night, the jungle seeming to suck every iota of light out of the
universe.

It was on the ground now, that much was
certain, but what was it doing?

Unloading troops was a safe bet, and
probably the Kourou reservists, but although they were potentially less of a
threat than they probably had been twenty years before when the men were in
their prime, Li would have been a lot happier if whatever his two troopers had
done to the helicopter had worked.

Neither of the Strela operators was in
position yet.
But the helicopter would
not be likely to turn back towards the jetty on take-off, not unless the pilot
was an idiot. It was a case of stable doors and horses already bolted.

As soon as the reserve platoon had
disappeared down the troop ramp and into the trees Don applied power and pulled
gently on the collective, lifting the machine straight up until he saw the
rotor blades were clear of the tree tops whereupon he eased the cyclic forward
and slightly right.

Down through the chin windows at his feet
the jungle canopy was all varieties and shades of green in his night vision
goggles, the dense jungle slipped just beneath the Chinook as he banked it
carefully around, away from the guns at the jetty and as the trees gave way to
the surface of the river below them he raised the troop ramp, aiming to make as
fast a run as possible to Cayenne and back.

A blast of heat and a shockwave threw him
violently forwards against his harness and suddenly he was starring vertically
downwards at the river rushing up at him.

The impact was indescribable, his
co-pilot screamed all the way down and then the river burst in.

Don was on automatic pilot, carrying out
ditching drills he had never before had to perform for real but which he had
undertaken many a time in dunker training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. What made
this different though was that the disorientation was complete. The bone
jarring contact with the river, the shock, the absolute blackness as the silt
heavy water engulfed them and the voice at the back of his head which
whispered.
“No safety divers this
time!”

He released his straps and felt to his
right for the door release but the door was gone, ripped off in the impact and
his hands instead met the uneven and slippery surface of a deadfall tree trunk,
covered in weed and algae, barring the way. He groped straight ahead, where the
front canopy screen had been and again he touched slimy bark. To his left was a
body, his co-pilot still strapped in and so with panic threatening he pulled
himself back into the troop compartment, or at least where the rest of the
fuselage used to be.

The cockpit was upside down at the bottom
of the river, facing back the way it had come, the heavy front rotor assembly
having obeyed the laws of gravity and had turned turtle the front half of the
aircraft.

The rest of the aircraft, the troop
compartment, simply was not attached any more.

Air trapped inside Don’s helmet showed
him the true way up and he broke the surface coughing and sputtering.

The night vision goggles
had been ripped off in the crash but there was some
light, the flickering of flames and he turned to face the north bank, wreckage
only recognisable by a broad rotor blade standing straight up out of the river
like a grave marker.

The crackle of flames from aviation fuel
doused jungle growth and black, oily smoke gave no clue as to what had brought
them down, but then Don spotted something moving in the river, something which
had already spotted him.

His artificial limb was not designed as a
swimming aid but primal fear, the dread of being eaten alive spurred him on,
desperately making for the south bank with the damn thing acting like an anchor.

The jungle overhung the banks, jagged branches
seeming to seek to both impale him and also to fend him off like medieval pikes
thrusting at unwelcome horsemen. Beneath these was a steep bank, perhaps three
feet high, its lip beyond his grasp even if he could reach the damn thing.