Line Of Honor

The Sudan

The wind roared through the open door of the helicopter cabin. Mack Bolan’s knuckles went white on the grips of the M-134 minigun as he watched the armor-piercing incendiary cannon shells streak past the cabin like green laser lines in the predawn. He shouted into his throat mike to reach Jack Grimaldi in the cockpit. “Jack! Do something!” The Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot close air support jet was flying right up Dragonslayer’s rear and seemed intent on ripping the girl a new one.

Dragonslayer screamed into emergency war power in response.

The Executioner’s stomach dropped as Grimaldi hauled back on the stick and the helicopter went nose vertical. The Sudanese jet streaked past underneath. The Stony Man pilot shoved the stick forward and kicked the collective. Bolan swung on his chicken straps like a hammock in a gale and caught sight of the glowing red lanterns of the Su-25’s twin Tumansky turbojets. He brought the minigun around and squeezed the trigger. The weapon’s motor whined, and the six barrels spun in a blur. Bolan’s own red laser lines scored the night, and he saw bullet strikes sparkle on the Frogfoot’s fuselage. The minigun could fire up to 3,000 rounds a minute as the electric motor whirled its six barrels at dizzying speed. The problem was that the Executioner was firing .30-caliber rifle bullets, and the boys at the Sukhoi Design Bureau sheathed their attack planes in titanium.

The Su-25 was firing 30 mm cannon shells and just one would light up Dragonslayer like the Fourth of July.

For this particular mission, Dragonslayer was stripped to pass foreign inspection and speed; her mission was search and rescue. Bolan’s gun station was a last-second add-on for hostile-landing-zone suppression.

They had never made it to the landing zone.

The Su-25 fighter pair had dropped out of the sky on them like God’s wrath. Fortunately these Sudanese fighter pilots had no experience in dogfighting. The Sudanese air force had spent the past two decades mostly strafing defenseless villages and refugee camps. The lead Su-25 had made the lethal mistake of trying to go low and turn and burn with Dragonslayer. Grimaldi had simply spun the chopper on its axis and given Bolan a lane of fire. The Executioner had ripped about three hundred rounds right up the Frogfoot’s port-side air intake and put paid to the Sudanese pilot’s account.

Wingman wasn’t having it.

He had intuited the situation. His plane could approach six hundred miles per hour. His 1990s vintage Russian Doppler radar was a joke, but helicopters weren’t exactly stealthy. Dragonslayer was a nice vibrating blob on his screen and the sun was coming up. The Su-25 was twice as fast than his prey and taking advantage of that fact. The Frogfoot pilot was climbing high and then screaming down for gun runs and zooming away before Bolan’s ineffectual return fire could have any effect.

The soldier watched the Su-25 bank hard around in the purple light. “Jack, we’re going to have to do this the hard way!”

“What are you suggesting!” Grimaldi shouted.

“Let’s surrender!”

Bolan could almost hear Grimaldi smiling into his mike. “Okay! Let me see, Su-25, export version, his stalling speed has gotta be, what? Eighty-five? Ninety klicks per hour, give him a nice comfortable…”

Dragonslayer dropped altitude and noticeably began slowing as the pilot throttled back. The Su-25 continued its hard turn in the distance to come up on Dragonslayer’s six again. Sunlight began to pour over the Nuba Mountains to the east. Grimaldi held the aircraft in suicidal-level flight as he continued to drop speed. Bolan had a nice visual on the Frogfoot as it began to close.

“You want me to turn belly-up, as well?”

“No! But let’s lose the ordnance!”

“Right!”

Grimaldi flipped a switch and the explosive bolts holding the M-134 on its mounts snapped like firecrackers. He tipped Dragonslayer just slightly to be helpful, and Bolan shoved the minigun out the door. The soldier hoped the enemy pilot was paying attention. Grimaldi held Dragonslayer steady at six hundred feet and 150 miles per hour. Bolan leaned back in his straps and lodged himself behind the cabin door frame. He reached back and slid his hand around the grips of his grenade launcher.

Bolan waited for the Russian 30 mm gun to blow him and Grimaldi to hell.

Even over the thunder of Dragonslayer’s rotors he heard the roar of the twin jet engines. The Frogfoot attack fighter pulled up alongside Dragonslayer like a traffic cop pulling over a vehicular offender. Morning light continued to spill over the mountains, and Bolan could see the Su-25 pilot pointing at Grimaldi and then pointing down at the ground.

The Stony Man pilot was waving back and grinning in a friendly fashion.

Bolan swung out on his straps. The M-32 Multiple Grenade Launcher was a 6-shot weapon. The soldier put the reflex sight slightly in front of the Su-25’s port-side air intake and fired. The fragmentation grenade hit the Su-25 wing about six feet back and detonated harmlessly. Bolan dragged his sights forward to increase his lead and fired again. His second frag grenade detonated against the pilot’s armored cockpit glass. Its only effect was to make the man nearly jump out of his seat. Bolan split the distance as the pilot yanked on his stick and fired the launcher four times in rapid succession. The soldier had front-loaded the M-32 with four frag grenades followed by an antiarmor round and white phosphorus.

The third frag missed.

His fourth bomb, the antiarmor and the incendiary grenades arced in the flight and were sucked up by the turbojet one-two-three like golf balls being eaten by a wet-dry vacuum. The Su-25 pilot had the unwitting decency to dive for the deck and take Dragonslayer out of collateral-damage range. Bolan had seen more explosions in his life than most men had had hot dinners. His eyebrows rose slightly as the Frogfoot shot a fifty-yard tongue of white fire from its port-engine nacelle.

Seconds later the Sukhoi disappeared as 3,000 liters of jet fuel came into violent contact with superheated gas, molten metal and a cloud of burning white phosphorus expanding in her belly to fill every internal crevice. Bolan watched as a ball of orange fire and white-and-black smoke fell from the sky like a slow-motion meteor. Bits of jetfighter with less drag fell from the fiery mass in little smoldering black streamers.

“Gosh…” Grimaldi observed. “Nice shot.”

“Thanks.” Bolan leaned back in his strap, broke open the smoking grenade launcher and reloaded. “I don’t suppose we have a fix on our target anymore.”

“No.” Grimaldi sighed. “We lost our window. We’re going to have to wait until target reestablishes contact.”

Bolan snapped his weapon shut on a loaded round. Odds were they weren’t going to get too many more chances. “Take us home.”

“Copy that.”

The Executioner glanced backward and watched the molten mess that had once been an airplane become a smoking hole in the dust of the Sudan.

All of this begged the question of just how exactly two Su-25s had gotten the jump on them. The Sudanese air-defense grid wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art. Grimaldi had flown them in out of Uganda well under their 1980s vintage Soviet radars. For that matter, Dragonslayer had the most sophisticated electronics suite of any helicopter in existence. If the Sudan had been hammering the sky with their radar, Grimaldi would have known it. They hadn’t detected anything until the Su-25 duo had suddenly swooped out of nowhere. Bolan and Grimaldi had been caught flatfooted. There was really only one explanation and it wasn’t a happy one.

Someone had tipped off the authorities.

Lokichogio Airport, Lokichogio, Kenya

GRIMALDI WAS INCENSED. “Okay, someone tattled!”

Bolan pulled a sweating brown bottle of Tusker lager out of the ice chest and wiped it across his own sweating brow. The U.S. Military General Purpose Tent didn’t have climate control. He cracked the bottle and shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”

“Somebody did.”

“You checked her for bugs?”

The pilot scowled. He had gone over every inch of the aircraft before takeoff and triple checked after the Sudanese dogfight debacle. “Nah, you’re right, I should have thought of that.”

Bolan tapped the sat-phone icon on his tablet. He had already given Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman a debriefing and was hoping for some follow-up.

“Bear, what have you got for me?”

Kurtzman came on the line instantly from the Computer Room at Stony Man Farm, Virginia. “Not much. That was a very interesting story you told me. I’d have to say the most interesting development is that there have been no new developments.”

“No reaction from the Sudanese?”

“Not a peep. Nothing about unauthorized incursions into their airspace, much less any fuss about losing two of their attack fighters.”

“So the question is, who knew about us?”

“Someone tattled!” Grimaldi muttered.

Kurtzman had clearly heard the pilot. “Striker, unless you think Farm security has been compromised, I’m putting tattling on the low-order-of-probability list.”

“Then we were spotted, raised red flags, and someone put the tell-tale on us,” Grimaldi stated.

“That’s the way I see it, too, but I’m finding it kind of hard to fathom. Did you check Dragonslayer for bugs?”