Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

at the controls in the cockpit of a military helicopter can vary from – hopefully at the very least – competent up to excellent. And just a handful of the very best of the very best chopper pilots are recruited to serve in various specialised units like the Queen’s Helicopter Flight and the JSFAW, the Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing.

Major David Charles North, late of the Special Air Service and currently something of a wheel in the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, was sitting in one of the passenger seats of a dark blue Eurocopter AS365N3 Dauphin II helicopter being flown by a warrant officer from 658 Squadron Army Air Corps and taking remarkably little notice of where he was or what was happening outside the aircraft. He had spent a significant proportion of his working life sitting in aircraft of one kind or another, most of them helicopters, and the experience of entrusting his life to an aluminium box carried aloft by a rotor disk powered by some kind of jet engine had ceased to either bother or interest him. He knew that the JSFAW pilots were among the best in the business, and that the aircraft were maintained to military standards, so he normally just relaxed and let the pilot get on with the job of flying the thing.

The SRR was a kind of SAS lite, meaning its tasks involved identifying, observing and following potential terrorists and other undesirable threats to the people of the United Kingdom rather than tracking them down and then shooting them, though the SRR personnel were perfectly happy to do that as well if the situation demanded it. Right then, North was en route from Stirling Lines, the SAS headquarters at Credenhill near Hereford, to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire to attend a classified briefing in one of the hardened underground rooms at the RAF station.

The pilot was flying VFR – visual flight rules – which meant he was self-navigating and taking his own avoiding action against other aircraft in the area, but he had also been in contact with the Brize Norton air traffic control LARS, the lower airspace advisory radar service, on 124.275 MHz. He’d been passed a weather update – fine with clear skies and light winds – and given the controller his ETA.

It was near the end of a routine, no pressure flight of the kind that North had made countless times in the past.

The pilot slowed and descended the aircraft, aiming towards the hardstanding where the local controller had given him clearance to land, and North felt the slightly increased noise level as he lowered the landing gear.

And then, suddenly and utterly comprehensively, the flight turned to worms.

The warrant officer emitted a kind of gasp that was just audible over the noise of the engines and rotor blades and his head slumped forwards, his arms dropping limply to his sides.

Dave North had been looking forward through the cockpit windows towards the hardstanding and immediately saw what had just happened.

The Eurocopter was single-crewed, with only North and the pilot on board, and the warrant officer had had manual control of the aircraft as it approached for landing. It was probably at an altitude of about five hundred feet and suddenly the ground appeared to be rushing upwards at considerable speed. It looked as if the pilot’s left hand had pushed the collective down as he lost consciousness.

‘Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ North muttered, ripping off his headset and wincing at the sudden increase in noise level. He unclipped his seat belt and scrambled forwards to clamber clumsily into the left-hand seat of the helicopter.

On civilian versions of the AS365 there’s a partition between the cockpit and the passenger cabin, which is typically equipped with about half a dozen comfortable leather seats suitable for the large and wide backsides of corporate heavyweights, heavyweights in both senses of the word. The military version dispenses with such niceties and crams in more than twice that number of very basic seats to accommodate a clump of hairy-arsed soldiers and also dispenses with the partition, which was just as well, because if it had been fitted North’s life expectancy would have been measured in seconds.

At the rate the Eurocopter was going down he might still be dead in seconds, but at least he had a chance. Vanishingly small, but still a chance.

He dropped into the seat and immediately reached down and to his left, pulling firmly up on the collective, the lever that controlled the angle of attack of the main rotor blades and hence the lift generated by them. North didn’t know much about helicopters but he did know that it was the collective that kept the aircraft in the air.

The helicopter shuddered and lurched, the aircraft reacting badly to his clumsy action, but at least it had stopped dropping like a large, heavy, extremely expensive and very fragile stone.

North glanced to his right, hoping that the warrant officer would have recovered his senses, but the man was clearly still out cold.

He looked ahead and grabbed hold of the second control, the cyclic, with his right hand. That was equivalent to the control column in a fixed wing aircraft. The collective kept the helicopter in the air and the cyclic pointed it where the pilot wanted it to go. That was about all North knew. Right then he also knew that he needed to get the helicopter on terra firma. And he didn’t much care where.

The ground below him was typical of almost every airfield he’d ever seen, a mixture of runways, taxiways, hardstandings and grassed areas.

North could feel himself starting to sweat.

The Eurocopter was designed to be flown from the right-hand seat and almost all the instruments and controls were either in front of that seat or in the horizontal panel between the two seats. The left-hand seat just had a scattering of essential flight instruments in front of it, and the helicopter’s navigation kit sat in the centre of the wide instrument panel, an incomprehensibly