Cold by Fleming Ian (by John Gardner)

Author:Fleming, Ian (by John Gardner) [Fleming, Ian (by John Gardner)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

THE HIGH ROAD

Back!’ Bond whispered. ‘Crawl back towards the choppers.’ Behind them, the general was still shouting, raving, telling his men to blast Bond out. As they began to crawl, on hands and knees, through the trees, shrubs and bracken, a fusillade of shots went down behind them. Clay’s men were aiming very low and they could hear the bullets thumping into the trees and ground a few feet to their rear.

The reason for the low shooting became obvious as they reached the edge of the trees. In a comparatively small space directly behind the treeline the three helicopters were ranged in arrow formation, their rotors slowly turning at idle. Clay was obviously using the Cobra gunship as his personal aircraft, painted in a flat matt black with the weapons pods on the stubby wings fully loaded. It stood some twenty feet from where they crouched.

The Cobra had two cockpits, one – the pilot’s – mounted above the other, which was the gunner’s position. The pilot’s cockpit was empty, but looking at the forward gunner’s position, a figure was visible, slumped, head down, hanging on the straps of the safety harness. There was no doubt in Bond’s mind: from this close he did not need to see the face, but it was unmistakably M.

He could not tell if his old chief was alive or dead, and he glanced towards Fliss, trying to calculate if she would be able to squeeze into the gunner’s position and crouch down with M. Even if she could, it would be a bumpy ride.

The two Russian-made choppers behind, and to the left and right of the Cobra, looked ungainly, somewhat sinister, monsters with their twin rotors, a capacity for twenty-four passengers, and clam-shell doors at the rear which enabled light vehicles to be driven on board. Their fat, clumsy bodies packed a devastating firepower.

He dug back into his fading memory of Russian aircraft of the Cold War and recalled that the ‘Hip-F’ had an odd cockpit configuration. The view was excellent and covered a full 180°, but the instrumentation was laid out so that the captain of the big helicopter was seated in the right seat, not the more usual left. He lifted his head, peering to both left and right of the Cobra. A pilot sat in the right seat of each of the two ‘Hip-Fs,’ but because of the triangular p young womanEeither attern in which they had landed, Bond could see that if they ran from the treeline directly to the front of the Cobra they would not be visible to the ‘Hip-F’ pilots. If Fliss could get into the gunner’s position, they would still be able to move the canopy. The pilot’s canopy was already open so Bond would be visible only for a very short time, climbing up and getting into the cockpit.

There was, of course, an unknown factor: were the two ‘Hip-Fs’ still carrying troops on board? Clay had half a dozen with him in the graveyard, and the bigger helicopters had a combined capacity of forty-eight.

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