White Wasteland, Jeff Kirkham [ebook reader with highlight function TXT] 📗

“Heads up boys,” JT yelled over the intercom in his helo. “They’re shooting at us, so we need to get them first. We won’t get more than one or two bites at the apple, so let’s make the first one count.”

While JT warned his two gunners, he’d flown out over Utah Lake, away from the battlefield and away from the two enemy helicopters hammering their friends.

“I’m going to climb like a bastard and drop on them. I want their gunners to have to shoot through their own rotor blades to hit us. That should make ‘em think. You don’t need to hit the fuselage of those Bells, boys. You just need to run bullets through the circle of their rotors. If they lose a blade, those helos will eat themselves. We have a huge advantage: it’s their mission to shoot our guys on the ground and that means they have to stay low. Our only job is to kill those helos. Don’t worry about their infantry. Got it?”

Both his men acknowledged and JT spiraled upward.

“Evan. There’s a guy hauling ass up the road on a motorcycle with a string of trucks a mile or so behind him. What do you want me to do? I’m guessing the guy on the motorcycle is that Chad dude you told me about.” Sean Wheaton release the PTT button and waited for Evan’s reply.

“Shoot him or blow him up. Whatever works. I don’t care.”

“Seriously?” Wheaton asked.

A moment passed. Evan replied. “No. Not seriously. Don’t blow him up. Maybe just wing him a little. ”

“Take cover!” Jeff shouted as the helicopters roared by, spraying .223 rounds into his men from a five hundred feet overhead. The Jersey barriers provided no protection and the helos were too high to shoot with ARs.

“Evan!” Jeff radioed. “Shoot those copters down! Evan… Evan… EVAN…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Evan barked over the radio. “I’m working the problem.”

Jeff looked into the sun. Tracer rounds arced over the valley from Evan’s Ferret. The AR-15 rifles and their light .223 rounds couldn’t reach the helos, but Evan’s 1919 could potentially waste them if he got a lucky hit. Jeff figured the distance at over 2,000 meters from Evan, so getting the Kentucky windage and the elevation right would be tricky. At over a hundred miles an hour, the helos would be tough targets.

Several of Jeff’s men had taken hits from the strafing run and Jeff could hear the familiar commotion of wounded and dying men.

“Make yourselves small, boys. They’re coming back around!” Jeff yelled.

Jeff raised his big .308 Robinson rifle and led the first bird by three lengths. He dumped a twenty-round box mag before the helicopters roared by, hitting several more of Jeff’s fighters. The helos didn’t waver and as much as Jeff prayed for it, there was no sign of black smoke.

“Here we go!” JT announced to his gunners. He hadn’t felt the jitters this bad since Mary Jane Gillespie let him get in her pants in the seventh grade. Most likely, no man on earth had ever taken a civilian AStar into a gun battle. Once again, JT was a trailblazer. This time, if he cocked it up, there would be a long fall involved.

He’d learned to fly helicopters on a lark, and he never imagined going into battle aboard the delicate bird. He ticked off an inventory in his head about how many bits of the helicopter would not mix well with bullets. The hair stood up on the back of his neck.

“Three seconds! I’ll line you up on the second bird!”

JT dropped the chopper a little harder than he should’ve. The lurched triggered a rush of adrenaline pounding in his ears. He leveled off to intercept the helos, one behind the other.

“JT. What about our guys? Aren’t we shooting toward them?”

“We’ll apologize later. Kill that second bird… Now!”

JT’s AStar pulled into a hover a thousand feet over the enemy helos. His men cut loose out both doors with a snarling waaaaaah. JT gave each guy some target time, rolling the helicopter to favor one door and then the other. They fired the M60 belt-feds from the Homestead gun collection. The heavy .308 rounds would definitely fuck a bird up if one of them connected.

The enemy helicopters did nothing to avoid the twin threads of bullets. They probably hadn’t imagined being fired upon air-to-air. Both ropes of bullets dropped well behind the enemy helos—a total miss.

“Lead ‘em longer! Let ‘em fly into your rounds,” JT shouted.

He lurched forward and caught up to the Bell 206 flying in second position, giving his port side gunner a full four seconds to hit him. The tracers again lagged behind the aircraft. He didn’t blame the gunner—JT had started them too far away—still two miles out. He wanted to catch them by surprise, but he’d have to sacrifice surprise for position or his gunners would spend all their ammo playing catch up.

The enemy helos seemed oblivious to the threat, even after JT cut across their path. He was a thousand feet above them. Apparently, everyone on board the Mormon helos was watching the ground fight instead of looking for threats from above.

JT smiled and quoted the movie Avatar: “Toruk is the baddest cat in the sky. Nothing attacks him. So why would he ever look up?”

He pushed the stick forward and dove toward the unsuspecting enemy birds. Even as they rocketed through the sky, JT’s second gunner fired a perfect line, starting a quarter mile ahead of the second helo, and drifting the rope of tracers right down the middle of the airframe.

What happened next took JT’s breath away.

A small chunk of the rotor flung free, a tiny speck drifting through the sky, barely visible. The enemy helicopter shuddered, like a person getting the chills. The shudder became a violent shaking. The fuselage of the Bell 206 rattled off chunks in a death spasm of increasing violence: the doors, the blades,