Chapter 21
Central Anatolia, Turkey
Conza sat on the steel floor in the Black Hawk’s passenger compartment, the big side door open to the rushing night.
It was a sideswipe vista he had experienced countless times during his years with the Teams. In the dim moonlight craggy hills and arid grassland whisked past in a blur.
The steppe of the Anatolian plateau felt deeply familiar, an echo of places he’d operated back in the day.
The hot zones of Africa and the Middle East. The familiar visual was reinforced by chill night air swirling through the open door.
Altogether, it was raw and exhilarating. Just as it had always been.
Conza was glad he’d volunteered for this flight.
“We have received another possible target to check on,” the copilot announced through the intercom.
Conza had been given a spare helmet with a boom mic.
There were three crew members, the two pilots and a crew chief.
The pilots spoke solid English, but the crew chief’s grasp was limited—a vocabulary drawn from Tom Cruise and Hugh Jackman movies.
But even that was light years beyond Conza’s ten words of Turkish.
“Copy that,” Conza replied, pressing the push-to-talk button. Hot mikes were off the table given the noise level in the cabin. “Do you have a visual?”
“Not yet, but we are still three miles away.”
The mission, operating as Hawk 11, turned out to be more productive than Conza had expected.
The pilots were in constant communication with their command authorities, who in turn were coordinating with law enforcement agencies to locate vehicles that could conceivably be tied to a suspected electronic attack two nights ago in Bodrum.
Encouraging as all that was, the parameters of the search, as Conza understood them, seemed hopelessly vague.
The Turks were using traffic cameras and witness interviews to locate a vehicle that might not even exist.
After one landing for fuel at an army base, they had been airborne for over an hour.
In that time, they’d made two interventions.
The pilots had chased down two vehicles whose descriptions had been forwarded—a container truck and a large work van.
Once identified, the intervention tactics were rudimentary.
The pilots switched on the Black Hawk’s searchlight and landed so as to block the road.
Their bird wasn’t loaded with any ordnance—the day hadn’t started as a combat mission, and contrary to Hollywood depictions, military aircraft didn’t fly with live loads unless there was a specific mission requirement.
Once the two vehicles had stopped, Conza and the crew chief had approached them with the only weapons on board, a pair of Turkish-made short-barrel MPT-55K rifles.
They’d searched both vehicles, found nothing worrisome, and sent two rattled truck drivers on their way.
Feeling like a glorified traffic cop, Conza expected that was how the rest of the night would roll.
But at least there was a method to the madness.
The Turkish regime had long existed on a knife-edge—an attempted coup d’état in 2016 had nearly succeeded.
Ever since, the military had put a high emphasis on countering internal threats.
Scouring remote roads for potential terrorists?
That would be standard tasking for a military helicopter crew.
“I have a lock,” the copilot said.
Conza edged forward and looked past the right-seater’s shoulder to see his tactical display.
The pilots weren’t wearing night vision gear—on a clear moonlit night that wasn’t necessary.
For this mission, however, they had something better.
On the helo’s chin was an ASELFLIR-400 electro-optical reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeting system.
The system sensed shortwave infrared that fed to a gray-scale tactical display.
Centered in the targeting reticle, Conza saw a midsize box truck heading east. There were two other vehicles half a mile ahead of it, both traveling in the same direction.
The road was the E80, a desolate stretch of highway east of Ankara.
There were no other headlights or taillights visible in either direction.
“What’s the intel on this one?” Conza asked the copilot.
“A witness saw a truck near the Bodrum airport the day before the crash. This one is the same model and color. It was picked up by a road surveillance camera an hour ago. Our orders are to investigate.”
“Sounds pretty iffy,” Conza replied.
“Iffy?” the crew chief parroted, clearly put off by the slang.
“Doubtful.”
The crew chief, a swarthy superior sergeant with a broad mustache, shrugged and went to retrieve his rifle. The MPT wasn’t Conza’s weapon of choice, but it was lethal enough. And it would definitely impress a truck driver.
Conza kept an eye on the tactical display as the Black Hawk swept into a wide arcing turn, its targeting pod rotating on gimbals to maintain lock.
The pilot said, “I will fly one mile ahead. Once the two cars pass, I will land on the road.”
Conza saw the helo’s searchlight snap on. The light slewed until it boresighted to align with the FLIR, a nice feature that illuminated their target. If the truck’s driver didn’t already know he was being watched, he knew it now. Conza thought, Maybe he’ll stop because he’s blinded.
The wide turn put the helo’s flight path directly over the leading vehicles.
Conza guessed they were about five hundred feet above the ground.
The Black Hawk’s engines powered back and they started to descend.
He could easily make out the truck’s headlights through the front windscreen.
Conza sensed the aircraft slowing, settling. And then everything went to hell.
“Missile launch!” the copilot shouted at a volume that didn’t need the intercom.
A warning light flashed on a circular cockpit display, a red triangle at the five o’clock position.
Right where those two cars must be, Conza thought fleetingly.
—
The missile was an SA-18, NATO code name Grouse.
At five feet long and less than three inches wide, the Russians referred to it as “the needle.” By any name, the SA-18 was as ubiquitous a handheld surface-to-air missile system as existed in the world, tens of thousands having been produced, sold, and licensed.
Like all MANPADs, the SA-18 had a maximum range.
But at that moment, a few hundred feet over the E80, minimum range was more of an issue—the missile had to stabilize for a fraction of a second after launch to acquire its target.
The nitrogen-cooled infrared seeker blinked its eye open milliseconds after leaving the tube and had no trouble locking on—the Black Hawk’s side-by-side exhaust plumes stood out like dual moons against the night sky.
The SA-18’s two guidance fins worked furiously to track the helicopter.
By design, the missile rolled to give the canards authority in multiple axes.
With the helicopter less than a quarter mile away, the projectile never got near its maximum speed of Mach 1.
9. Two seconds after launch, and before any countermeasures could be expended by the crew, the nose cone impacted the right-engine exhaust can.
At launch the missile weighed twenty-four pounds and, even after expending a portion of its rocket fuel, the combination of mass and velocity resulted in a jarring impact.
The warhead did the rest. Just under one pound of high explosives detonated by a delayed contact fuse—the magnetic proximity fuse, a backup in case of a near miss—had not been necessary.
A secondary charge in the missile’s rear body simultaneously set off the remaining rocket fuel.
An explosion on top of an explosion.
The propulsion system of a helicopter is an intricate array of machinery. Jet engines, mechanical hubs to translate power, giant spinning rotors. When a blast sends a disk of shrapnel in the middle of it all, shards traveling at thousands of feet per second, the only possible result is devastation.
—
The Black Hawk shuddered from the impact.
Conza was thrown to the deck, rolling to his left and nearly tumbling out the open door.
He swept a hand out blindly and found the empty mounting bracket for a door gun.
He held on for all he was worth as the aircraft gyrated wildly, the momentum of the rotors and fuselage slewing in different directions.
He heard shouting from the flight deck, mostly in Turkish. Then someone yelled, “Prepare for impact!”
Conza searched blindly for footholds and found one with his prosthetic left leg.
He pried himself away from the open door, scrambling for purchase against the spiraling forces.
He tried to claw his way toward his seat; if they were going to crash, he wanted to be strapped in.
He caught a glimpse of the crew chief on the floor behind him.
He wasn’t moving and there was blood on his flight helmet.
Conza reached the olive-drab webbed seat and pulled himself up into it.
He saw the world spinning through the open side door, a scene from an out-of-control carnival ride.
He had two points of the five-point harness latched when the aircraft slammed into the desert.
Conza’s helmet struck something hard. He saw a brilliant flash.
And then everything went black.