Dark Coup (27 page)

“Maybe,” he said, “probably even.  The problem is the catch-22 we’ve been facing all along.  We need fuel to plant more of the crop to give us more fuel but we won’t get any kind of return on that investment for at least four months.  We have a longer growing season here than some states, but we’re still looking at a net deficit for several months.”

“What if we could supplement the current fuel supply with petro-diesel,” Joel asked.

Randy just looked at Joel, his expression showing that he knew about the loss of the fuel dump on base.

Joel sighed.  “Yes,” he said, “we lost some fuel.”  Joel quickly corrected himself when Randy looked like he was going to interrupt.

“Ok,” Joel said, “more than some.  The point is that we might be able, probably
will
be able to replace what we lost, at least this time.”

Randy nodded.  He didn’t expect the military to tell him what they had up their sleeves, but it was obvious they had something in the works.

“There’re a couple of farms outside the immediate area that have been abandoned,” Randy said.  “A bunch of us have been trying to decide if we need to start cultivating them or not.  Looks like we’re gonna make use of them after all.”

“How big,” Joel asked.

“One is about one-hundred-and-twenty acres,” Randy said, “and the other is almost two-hundred.  We won’t use it all, though–we can’t.  We don’t have the seed stock to plant more than the first farm.  Probably closer to a hundred acres or so.”

Randy made a face as he thought about the logistics and did some quick math.  “We need about five percent of the seeds from each crop for next year,” he muttered, “but we’re using almost all of the remaining seed stock to plant so let’s call it fifteen percent and give us a buffer.”

“If we can get it in the ground in the next couple of weeks,” Randy said, “we can add another fifty-five-hundred gallons of diesel or so, maybe a little more, but not much.”

“How much of that do we lose back to production,” Joel asked.

“About twenty percent to run the machinery and the plant,” Randy said.

“So a net gain of almost forty-five hundred,” Joel said.  “When do you think you can start?”

“I get the feeling that now that I know about it,” Randy said, “I’m late.”

Joel shrugged.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was two-o’-clock in the morning, but Diego was wide awake.  He and the crews of the six Black Hawks on this raid had spent the last three days sleeping during the day for just that reason.  Adrenaline would only work for so long, and they all needed to be as close to their peak performance as they could be.

Originally, he had wanted to head back to Ft. Stewart, but the Black Hawks just didn’t have the range without their external fuel tanks.  The new plan instead called for them to take on Ft. Campbell, whose air-defense capability Ben repeatedly assured them had been disabled before he left.  Nevertheless, Diego still kept one cautious eye on the threat indicator as they approached the base from the north.

Each Black Hawk had been topped off with fuel from the other helicopters they’d left behind, which left the remainder literally sitting ducks if Diego’s raid wasn’t able to get back with what they came for.  The goal: get as many ERFS, or Extended Range Fuel Systems, as possible–which included four two-hundred-gallon external fuel tanks and, if the opportunity presented itself, one or more fuel trucks of JP-8 aviation fuel.

Before the Colonel’s attack on Fort Campbell, Ben had initially focused on getting as much diesel as possible out of harm’s way, and had only been able to get about half of the fuel trucks off the base before the attack commenced.  He’d brought one tanker truck with him, but, again, it was diesel and not JP-8.  It was also the truck that Mathis had chosen to blow up.

Ben also hadn’t considered the ERFS to be worth taking since he’d disabled all of the helicopters through various mechanical means, and he didn’t know that Diego had defected to the other side at the time he’d finally had to abandon the base.

Ben had given them the correct transponder code for the base’s Identify Friend or Foe system, in case it had somehow been re-enabled, but the closer they got to the base, the more tense everyone in the cockpit grew.

“Bandit flight,” Diego said over the mission channel, “this is Bandit One.  We didn’t get a whole lot of practice on this one, but we take turns dropping off the infantry and then back up to provide cover for the next guy.  We should be down over the LZ in less than five minutes.”

They already had maps of the base from the initial raid they’d abandoned, and Ben had provided the detail they needed to pinpoint where the stores of supplies
should
be and where the fuel trucks ought to be parked.  As his mother had been fond of saying while he was growing up, they’d crossed all their Is and dotted all the Ts.  No plan ever survived contact with the enemy, though.

They could see lights on the horizon now, which would hopefully help them identify individual buildings.  No activity…yet.

“Two minutes to landing zone,” Diego said.  He was flying half by instruments and half by sight from the three-quarter moon.  He hated night-vision, and avoided it at all costs unless he absolutely had to use it.  The eerie, flat green, with no depth perception always freaked him out and it took him a good couple of minutes to get used to normal vision again when he took off the headset.

The threat indicator was still silent; so far, so good.

His co-pilot and navigator started picking out landmarks as they got close enough and calling out directions.

“Bandit flight on me,” Diego radioed.  If this went south, it would be his fault and no one else’s.

“Starboard,” the co-pilot said, “thirty degrees.”

The one concession Diego had agreed to was the visor on his helmet.  It would allow him to see the infrared laser designator his co-pilot was using to mark buildings so there was no doubt as to which one he was talking about.  In this case, a green triangle appeared on a building to his right and he headed in that direction.  His co-pilot was even pretty good at keeping the marker centered as he changed course.

Diego could see a number of other Black Hawks on the tarmac now, arrayed in their normal pre-flight parking pattern.  There would be plenty of room to set down and unload one at a time, but not more than that.  Unfortunately, guards were already trickling out of the building.

Diego flipped the switch for the external loudspeaker.  “Stand Clear,” he said, his voice booming over the pavement.  He could see the guards flinch at the volume.  “You’re outgunned and probably outnumbered at this point.  Nobody needs to die tonight.”

The first guard started to back up a little, but the second stood his ground. 
“Your funeral,”
Diego thought to himself and brought his bird in to hover just over the LZ.  Just as he was almost down, the guard who refused to back up brought his rifle to his shoulder.

“Fine,” Diego said, and pulled back on the collective just a touch to raise the nose of the Black Hawk, bathing the guard in prop wash, which knocked him down and caused him to drop his rifle.

A few seconds later and Diego was back in position, the doors were open, and the infantry were out of the hold.  A few more seconds and the landing zone was as secure as it was going to get in hostile territory, as the guards were now prisoners.

Diego took off and took the place of Bandit Two.   The process was repeated five more times, and sixty heavily-armed members of the Third Infantry Division began looking for things to loot.

…

Helicopters cannot hover in one spot indefinitely.  Physics aside, it’s a
really
bad idea, tactically, to sit in one place for too long when you’re in enemy territory.  It was going to take a while for the men to find and move everything they were hoping to take back with them and Diego just couldn’t get the warm fuzzies by sitting still for an hour or more.

The plan was to find and bring back as much aviation fuel as they could, along with as many full sets of external fuel tanks for the Black Hawks as they could find.  If all went well, they would be able to outfit all thirty birds when they got back to Promised Land.

Ten minutes after Diego had dropped off his load of troops, he got a call from the Sergeant in charge on the ground.

“They’re finally mounting some resistance,” Sergeant Steve Nichols said.  “Only a few shots fired so far, but that’s probably not going to last long.”

“I’m not going to second-guess you, Steve,” Diego said, “but where are they?”

“Other side of the base,” Nichols said.  “We have a half-a-dozen patrols looking for anyone putting up a fight.  I think we surprised them.”

“Any casualties,” Diego asked.

“Not yet,” Nichols said, “on either side.  You know how it goes, ninety percent of the rounds are going to go wide or be fired in haste.  We were a little more entrenched when we ran into them, but it’s almost like they’re only putting up a token resistance.”

“Depending on where they’re from,” Diego said, “that may actually be the case.  Bragg was in on the raid and they’re as deep in the rebellion as we are.”

“Point,” Nichols said.

“Any luck finding the base commander,” Diego asked.

“Not yet,” Nichols said, “we’re looking, though.  If we can find him, then maybe we can keep this from turning into a bloodbath.”

…

It took almost an hour for Diego’s and Nichols’s men to gather external tanks–and the associated hoses and couplings that turned their stub wings into the Extended Range system–onto pallets, and load it all onto the five flatbed trucks they would be…liberating from the base.  They had also identified three 10,000 gallon tanker trucks of JP-8 jet fuel that could be used by both the Black Hawks and virtually
all
of the current military vehicles currently in use back at Promised Land.

Having the full JP-8 tankers would free up the diesel they had for any civilian vehicles, and the farmers.  The Black Hawks would be providing air support and cover for the drive back, which Diego sincerely hoped would be as uneventful as the flight up had been.

The first thirty minutes of flying cover over the base had been more than a little stressful.  Diego’s biggest worry usually came from his threat indicator, but being inside the base’s perimeter and so low to the ground, he knew he and the rest of his birds were particularly vulnerable to shoulder-fired surface-to-air, or in some cases even surface-to-surface missiles.  If someone decided to take a shot at him, those shoulder-fired missiles would give him absolutely no warning prior to the inbound warhead.

Nichols radioed in to let him know about a new minor skirmish on the ground every five minutes or so.  Several times, Diego could make out gunfire on the ground from the muzzle flashes in the dark.    The defense was hasty and, while fairly well organized, ultimately almost totally ineffective; after all, they really hadn’t expected someone to do exactly what Diego and his men were doing right now.

Half of the engagements had ended when the defenders were caught from behind by some of Nichols’s men.  The other half were still going on when they found the base commander, who had been leading a squad of defenders, and convinced him to call off the defense.  The longer it had gone on, however, the more convinced he was of what he’d told Nichols earlier.

It really did seem like the defenders were only putting up a token resistance so they could, in good conscience, say that they’d fought for the base.  Of course not
everyone
seemed to be playing by those rules, but the overwhelming majority appeared to fall into the category of ‘just enough to make it look good…and for heaven’s sake, don’t
kill
anybody.’

Egress would be the tricky part, as it always was; getting everyone back into the birds while keeping them covered, and not letting the defending guards get a shot off while they left.  Diego didn’t have any delusions about the guard that had tried to prevent him from landing in the first place.  It wasn’t often that you got knocked on your butt by prop-wash, but when you did it had the tendency to create a little animosity between you and the pilot who’d knocked you down.

…

Diego was a firm believer in not asking his men to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.  To put that into practice, he’d been the first to put his bird down and would be the last to pick up his troops.  The last had just gotten in and the door was shut when he heard his co-pilot swear.  He looked over to where his co-pilot was looking and saw that the original guard—the one who wouldn’t stand down—was readying a shoulder-mounted missile.

“Designate,” Diego said to his co-pilot, flipped the switch for the external loudspeakers again, and turned the Black Hawk to face the guard as soon as it cleared the ground.

“Don’t do it,” he said.  “I swear you won’t get the chance.”

The co-pilot had designated the guard with a red teardrop that looked like a drop of blood.

“Nice,”
Diego thought. 
“You have got one
sick
sense of humor.”

Diego had a pod of 70mm rockets and a 7.62mm machine gun on each stub wing on either side.  The rockets were already active and tracking the designator.  Realistically, if he launched one it would tear the guard apart as it went through him since it couldn’t–literally
couldn’t
–detonate at less than five-hundred-and-fifty yards.

“And if I unleash the 7.62’s,”
Diego thought, and shuddered.

The guard and the Black Hawk faced off for several seconds until one of the trucks belched as the driver put it into gear.  Apparently, he’d waited long enough and was getting out of there while Diego and the guard played chicken.  The other trucks followed his lead and the movement seemed to break the guard’s will.

Diego couldn’t hear what the guard screamed at him but he could read his lips just fine.  The guard hurled the missile launcher at the helicopter and it bounced off the nose.

“Gonna have to throw that one out,” his co-pilot said, “probably cracked the propellant.”