Kill Zone (A Spider Shepherd Short Story) by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2013-02-07T18:30:00+00:00

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Just before four that afternoon, the six-man team jogged over to the concrete hard standing where a Chinook waited, its twin rotors already turning idly. The cargo area of the massive helicopter, normally big enough to house two Land Rovers, was almost entirely filled by a huge additional fuel tank. It gave the Chinook the range and the time in or near the target area to complete the mission and make the long return flight back to Bagram. Six mopeds were already lashed to the tailgate and the SAS men clambered up with Lex, each with an AK74 carried on a sling around his neck with the folding butt closed. Their pockets were jammed with spare clips for their weapon and their bergens were loaded with more ammunition.

As the Chinook’s crew completed their final checks before take-off, the SAS settled themselves, sitting or lying on the tailgate among the mopeds. Lex sat down next to Shepherd. He grinned and nodded at Shepherd but there was no disguising the apprehension in his eyes. Shepherd winked at him.

The din of the rotors increased to a nerve-jangling roar and the Chinook shook and rattled as it began to move, almost invisible inside the fog of dust and dirt stirred up by the groundwash. As Jock had predicted at the briefing, the heli did not rise vertically into the air but began to rumble down the runway like a fixed wing aircraft, so heavily laden that its only means of getting airborne was to build enough forward momentum to generate the necessary lift.

With the engines screaming and the whole airframe vibrating and rattling like a boiler about to explode, the Chinook finally lumbered into the air, its dispensers punching out clouds of chaff and flares to deflect any missiles that might be launched at them. Even above the most fortified and heavily protected military base in the country, the threat of terrorist attacks was never underestimated.

The Chinook rose high into the sky as it cleared the immediate area surrounding the base, and set a course heading due west. Once safe from the prying eyes of the Taliban spies - who watched all air traffic in and out of the base and reported the heading of any troop carrying helicopters - the Chinook descended to low-level and swung round on to its true course, making for the tribal areas.

The first part of the flight was in the low sun of the remaining minutes of daylight. To the north, Shepherd could see the aquamarine ice fields and glaciers high on the slopes of the mountains of the Hindu Kush, with spindrifts of snow spilling from the ridges in the ferocious winds at those heights. He tapped Lex on the shoulder and pointed at the beautiful but forbidding snow-capped peaks as they caught the last rays of the setting sun, turning gold and then deep blood-red as it sank to the western horizon. ‘Wow,’ mouthed Lex. ‘That’s awesome.’

The Chinook flew on, so close to the ground that the wash of the rotors shook the trees.

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