Arctic Wargame

Chapter Twenty-seven

Carrie held her left thumb over the firing button of the Seahawk machine gun as she flew over the front lines of the Danish troops and gave them a fierce pounding. The helicopter completed a daring descent over the runway. She brought up the Seahawk to escape any backlash from the troops her onslaught had spared. Several metal-on-metal clunks came from underneath the helicopter. The Seahawk was hit. Flying instruments issued no warnings about any noticeable damage. Time to bring out the big guns. Carrie smiled.

She leveled the Seahawk at a thousand feet. The Twin Otter was far behind over the airstrip. Carrie surveyed the Danish troops for the place where a Hellfire missile would cause the most casualties. There was some movement at the center of the vanguard, a few men pressing ahead. She tapped a couple of switches, calibrating the missile for air-to-ground combat. Entering a series of numbers, she set the striking coordinates for the laser-guided weapon. Then, she flipped a switch to the right of the throttle.

“May God have mercy on their souls,” she muttered and pressed the missile launch button.

The missile screamed as it whooshed off the left launcher of the weapons pylon. A dense cloud of white smoke swallowed the underside of the helicopter. The missile tore the sky’s veil with its orange glowing trajectory. Less than a second later, the Hellfire missile stabbed right through the heart of the Danish camp. The blast fragmentation warhead exploded with a hailstorm of metal shrapnel, brash ice, and rock fragments, scattering everything outward in a wide ring of death. The missile blew a large crater in the ice sheet — about fifty feet wide — as well as many smaller pockets. Nothing seemed to be moving around the explosion site.

Before Carrie could savor her success, two electronic alerts beeped throughout the Seahawk’s cabin. She grasped the throttle, jerking the helicopter upwards, before glancing at the control system.

“Crap,” she shouted.

The tail rotor had taken a hit.

One of the crossbeam blades was clipped severely, and the rotor shaft was also damaged according to the control panel instruments. Once the tail rotor blades stopped spinning, the Seahawk’s airborne balance was at risk. There was nothing else left in the helicopter to counteract the torque force of the main rotor. The Seahawk would pinwheel its way to a crash because of its downward yaw movement.

The altimeter needle swung sharply to the left. The helicopter plunged tens of feet in a single second. Carrie pressed the throttle, trying to keep a high speed while flying forward. This maneuver could allow her to use the helicopter’s tail as if flying an airplane, while she picked a safe area for the crash-landing. As soon as she began this emergency maneuver, the radar informed her the Twin Otter had closed the distance. The enemy airplane was tailing the Seahawk at the unsafe distance of less than a thousand and five hundred feet.

Carrie had no time to blurt out a string of curses. The left side window cracked, the bulletproof glass stopping the incoming bullets. More bullets clobbered the helicopter’s metallic frame. The alarms blared from almost all the control panel sensors.

“I get it, I get it,” Carrie yelled at the machine. “We’re gonna crash. We’re gonna freaking crash. But not yet. Not yet.”

She silenced the angry alarms with quick gestures of her hands, and prepared to launch the second Hellfire missile. She fed into the system the coordinates and pressed the launch button without any further delay.

“Take that you pricks,” she shouted.

The Hellfire missile darted forward for a brief second. Then, it took a left turn and aimed for its target. Carrie pirouetted to her right, just as the missile slammed into the cockpit of the Twin Otter. A million pieces of scorched debris rained over the ground.

Carrie allowed herself a brief moment of celebration. A new electronic beep, sharper and louder than the previous ones, warned her of a new failure. This time, it was coming from the main rotor. Other bullets had damaged its blades. The Seahawk dropped fast, spiraling about thirty feet each second.

A controlled crash-landing had become impossible. The Seahawk pirouetted another time, gravity driven. For the first time in hundreds of hours of flying, Carrie began to feel dizzy. Her eyes became blurry. She tapped buttons and switches and levers, uncertain of the one controlling the emergency jettison of the pilot’s door.

Her efforts failed. The door’s lock mechanism was damaged and had jammed the door. The ground approached. The helicopter plunged fast, swinging uncontrollably while falling to its imminent crash.

Carrie cursed the door, realizing it was useless to try and pry it open. She reached for her Browning 9mm pistol. With the Seahawk taking its last twirls, she aimed the gun at the door latch and pulled the trigger. She emptied the thirteen bullet magazine in a rapid burst of fire. The latch and the encircling glass burst into pieces. Carried threw her body against the door.

The door swung open.

She found herself falling through the air and the black smoke. The helicopter swept across the sky. Its main rotor blades wheeled slower and slower, while the ground approached faster and faster. The helicopter took another final twirl before crashing into the ice sheet. Carrie plopped into a deep snowbank, just as the Seahawk’s explosion rocked the entire hillside.

Sharp metal pieces from the helicopter’s wreckage, ice, and rock slivers flew all over the field. Then, the freezing waters of the crater devoured the Seahawk’s burning remains. The ice sheet began cracking with a blaring noise, eating up adjacent hills, ridges and snowbanks.

Kneeling by the Toyota truck, Amaruq held the orange flare gun in his left hand. He double-checked to make sure it was loaded properly. He glanced at the last charge of dynamite he had just finished connecting to the electrical detonator box by his feet. The only thing left to do was to signal Joe by firing the flare gun.

Amaruq pulled the trigger and watched the yellowish trace arch over the Danish camp. A similar flare rose up from the other side a moment later, indicating Joe was in position and the blast was forthcoming. He reached for the detonator controller, a yellow plastic box, which fit easily in his palm. He pressed a white button labeled CHARGE and held his thumb on the switch. The device began creating the necessary electrical charge to light up the detonators.

Amaruq was not certain if Kiawak had synchronized the blasting caps for a simultaneous explosion of all charges or if the long row of dynamites would go off one charge after the other. In any case, he would have to cover at least two hundred feet, to escape the explosion’s range and to survive the blast of the dynamite charges.

His thumb pressed hard on the detonator switch, Amaruq began crawling toward safety. But he was exposed to the enemy, who had noticed his bright signaling flare. Bullets circled around him. He kept moving forward, his head a couple of inches off the snow, his body half sunk into the snow.

“You’re almost there, keep going,” he encouraged himself. “Right behind—”

A bullet ricocheted off an ice boulder, striking Amaruq in his left foot. It skimmed over his pants, carving a flesh wound. He brushed it aside. But the next bullet hit him in the shoulder, pinning him to the snow. He screamed and turned sideways, trying to push his body deeper into the snow. A third bullet snuffed the air out of his lungs.

Amaruq looked at his bleeding chest then glanced at the detonator. His fingers were still wrapped around it in a fierce grip. The red indicator light was steady. It meant the explosive charges were ready for the blast.

He tried to lift his right shoulder, but a gut-wrenching pain zapped through his entire body. He was running out of breath and he could not even crawl an inch. He was stuck within the deadly range of the explosion. Another screaming bullet shattered his knee cap, forcing Amaruq to make a decision.

With great strain, he slid his trembling index finger until it rested over the DETONATE button, while keeping his thumb over the CHARGE switch. He took a deep breath, knowing it was his last. Once he was certain his fingers were not going to fail him at the last moment, he pushed the DETONATE button and began the countdown in his mind. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

The simultaneous explosions made the earlier Hellfire blast and the helicopter crash resemble fireworks at a New Year’s party. Kiawak had coordinated the blasting caps to detonate all at once. Joe’s team set off their string of dynamite charges at the same time. The explosion not only split open the entire ice surface of the lake, but also blew away rocks from its bottom. The ice sheet caved in piece by piece, starting at the sides and dragging underneath everything and everyone still over it.