Warrior Class by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers, Adventure fiction, Suspense Fiction, Espionage, McLanahan; Patrick (Fictitious Character), Air Pilots; Military, Petroleum Industry and Trade, Russia (Federation)
ISBN: 9780425184462
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2000-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Borispol Air Base, Kiev, Republic of Ukraine

That same time

The landing was anything but pretty—in fact, it was more of a controlled crash than anything else. With most of his hydraulic system gone, Major John Weston had no control of most of the flight surface, engine nacelle control, or landing gear systems. He was able to use the emergency blow-down system and got one good main landing gear and the nose gear out of the sponsons. But it didn’t matter—since he had no control of the engine rotating system, he couldn’t switch to helicopter mode. They were going to hit hard no matter how good the Trash Man was.

Borispol Air Base was a large combined Ukrainian air force and army aviation base. Weston got a general layout of the base from his flight information publications. The northeast side of the base housed the army aviation eskadriyls, with Mil-8 and Mil-6 heavy transport helicopter squadrons and one Mil-24 attack helicopter squadron; the south side had a mixture of fixed-wing air defense, attack, bomber, and transport planes. Weston used the large runway to get oriented, then slowly, carefully, diverted over to the taxiway opposite the blast deflectors beside the mass helicopter parking ramp. If he lost any pieces of his Pave Hammer aircraft, at least they probably wouldn’t hit any Ukrainian aircraft, and he wouldn’t close the runway by crash-landing on the main runway.

“Hang on!” Weston shouted behind him over the roar of the windblast and engine noises. “Prepare for a hard landing!” Normally he would’ve said, “Prepare for a copilot landing,” but he didn’t think the shades of his dead copilot would appreciate the humor. As he touched down, traveling at least thirty knots beyond normal approach speed to maintain controllability, the first to arrive were the tips of his rotors, chewing huge double gouges into the taxiway. As soon as the rotors stopped, all lift ceased, and the MV-22 slammed into the pavement. The landing gear collapsed instantly, and the Pave Hammer aircraft began a long, ugly belly-slide, stopping four hundred feet later in the dirt between the taxiway and runway.

Weston had all of the major systems shut off several seconds before they landed. Ignoring the emergency escape system in the cockpit, he leapt out of his seat, stepping carefully over the body of his copilot in the aisle, and went to assist his surviving crew members in the evacuation. But Wohl, Briggs, Fratierie, and the surviving PJs had quickly evacuated Linda Mae Maslyukov out of the already-extended aft cargo ramp the moment the aircraft stopped, and had moved her several hundred feet upwind from the crash-landing site.

The aircraft was not on fire, just smoke belching from each seized engine, so Weston accepted the grisly but important task of carrying his copilot’s body out of the aircraft. He half dragged, half carried him as far upwind as he could, then laid him on the grass as carefully as possible. Exhausted, shaking from the buckets of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream, very glad to be alive, Weston collapsed on the grass upwind of the aircraft.

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