Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

47 THE CHEESE

After some discussion, it was decided that the key observer’s position should be an earth-covered trench to provide thermal shielding, thus countering any use of FLIRs. They also decided to bury the commo wire just a few inches under the ground. Then two more trenches with overhead cover were constructed—one for Alan at the east edge of the opening, and one for Phil at the north end. Each of these took the four men a full day to construct and camouflage.

The “cheese” for their trap was a smoky campfire. Stan, who was the fastest runner of the three, had both the hazardous and tedious task of keeping the campfire going and walking back and forth to the cable ambush site, doing his best not to leave a trail. His hide, ninety feet north of the east end of the cable, was the only vertical entrenchment. It had a unique tablelike top cover with a waterproofed sod covering that afforded him a view of both the landing zone opening and the smoke plume from the bait camp.

Once they had the entrenchments and the “cheese” camp set up, they had Malorie translate and transcribe a short handwritten note composed by Claire. The original had read:

The note, in a sealed envelope, was passed to a gate guard at the new Williams Lake UNPROFOR Headquarters (the old Service BC building on Borland Street) by an eleven-year-old boy on a bicycle.

The Gazelle arrived the following afternoon. The pilot wasted no time and began orbiting the bait camp, which was in heavy timber six hundred yards northeast of the cable ambush opening. Predictably, as the Gazelle orbited in a counterclockwise direction, the door gunner poured four hundred rounds of 7.62 into the vicinity of the base of the smoke plume at the “fromage camp.”

The Gazelle then swung into an even wider orbit and headed for the opening that Team Robinson had rigged. Phil waited until the helicopter slowed and its skids were about to touch ground. The cable was about eight feet ahead of the helicopter’s nose. With a diameter of thirty-three feet, six inches, the rotor disc made for a big target.

Phil whispered to himself, “Perfect,” and twisted the handle on the ten-cap blasting machine. The explosives at the base of the big larch tree went off with a loud bang, and the tree fell. Before the Gazelle pilot could react, the cable snapped up out of the grass just as planned. In an instant, the cable caught in the rotor, the helicopter spun violently, and the three fiberglass composite rotor blades were sheared off. Two men were thrown out, and the fuselage pitched violently over on its side. The helicopter’s fuselage thrashed around violently on the ground like a gored beast, and it spun 270 degrees before coming to a halt. The stubs of the rotors, now hitting the ground, were further shortened as the rotor mast shuddered to a stop amid a cloud of dust, dirt clods, and tufts of grass.

One four-foot-long shard from one of the helicopter rotor blades came bouncing across the meadow directly toward Phil’s hide. Though it passed harmlessly overhead, it made Phil gasp. If the shard had flown a few feet lower, his fate would have been much different.

Either the pilot had shut down the Turbomeca turbine engine, or some automatic safety feature triggered a shutdown, because it soon was quiet enough for the ambushers to hear shouts from inside the Gazelle’s fuselage.

There were four ALAT personnel still onboard. The two others who had been thrown free in the crash were not moving. One of them was clearly dead—since the top half of his body was fifteen feet away from his pelvis and legs.

The fuselage was lying on its side. The shorn rotor mast had stopped spinning. A wisp of smelly white smoke was coming from the engine compartment, apparently from leaking oil that had reached something hot. The door gun’s muzzle was pointed straight upward. After more shouting from inside the helicopter, the pilot, copilot, and door gunner all crawled out in rapid succession. They were apparently not badly injured in the crash. The pilot and copilot started shooting wildly at the tree line with PA-50 9mm pistols. Meanwhile, the door gunner was reaching up, attempting to detach his FN-MAG-58 light machine gun from the mount.

Phil had a good angle on the pilot, and Alan had line of sight to the copilot and door gunner. With deliberate neck shots, all three of the men were shot down and bleeding out in less than twenty seconds.

The ambushers quickly advanced on the downed helicopter, firing coup de grâce head shots once they were within forty feet. Inside, they found another crewman dead, apparently from a broken neck. His weapon was a FAMAS bullpup, but it had a bent barrel and a broken stock. They decided to bring it with them to use for spare parts.

Phil exclaimed, “Hoo boy! This is better than a box of Cracker Jacks. I always wanted an M240, and here’s a MAG-58, which is almost identical.”

He detached the machine gun from its dogleg mount and examined it. Except for a scraped flash hider and a gouge in the pistol grip, the MAG had survived the crash intact. Once it was detached, it could be fired from its bipod. The door mount included a four-hundred-round ammo box of linked ammunition, but the gun could also be operated from a teaser belt and a Bulldog two-hundred-round camouflage nylon shoulder bag that they also found onboard. In addition to the four hundred linked rounds in the ammo can and the two hundred linked rounds in the Bulldog bag, there were one thousand rounds of ammo in narrow, brown-painted European-style two-hundred-round ammo cans. All of the ammo was FN-made 7.62mm NATO, a four-to-one alternating mix of ball ammo and tracers.

Ray warned, “Okay, the clock is ticking. We need to strip anything useful off this bird, burn it, and get out of here before they send anyone to investigate.”

They worked quickly. There wasn’t any time to remove the Gazelle’s built-in avionics. They did strip a notebook and a callsign/frequency card from a clear pocket that was built into the pilot’s flight suit, just above his knee. They also took a satchel that held a sectional aeronautical chart and a notebook. The loose belt of ammo for the door gun, ammo cans, six extra FAMAS magazines, the two pistols, and the broken FAMAS carbine were all distributed and stowed in their backpacks. Almost as an afterthought, Alan pulled out the helicopter’s plastic first-aid chest and stuffed it into his own pack, along with one of the two-hundred-round ammo cans. Phil carried the twenty-eight-pound MAG and the Bulldog bag. Since he was also carrying his M4, his combined load was almost eighty pounds.

They walked thirty-five yards to the tree line at the north end of the opening. Phil got down prone and pulled back the cartridge from the loose end of the MAG’s teaser belt and clipped on the first cartridge from the Bulldog bag. He fired two short bursts from the MAG into the Gazelle’s fuel tanks. The tracer bullets (interspersed every fifth round on the belt) soon set the fuel ablaze.

A year before the Crunch, Phil had the chance to buy a nearly new semiauto version of the M240 light machine gun, made by Ohio Ordnance Works, but he had balked at the eleven-thousand-dollar price tag. In retrospect, when the purchasing power of his savings dropped to nearly nothing and the value of an M240 soared to an incalculable level, he wished that he had bought it. Now, with the capture of the MAG, he felt redeemed from his previous mistake.

Alan shouted, “As they often say in the French army: ‘Nous devons fuir!’”

They did just that. They ran away, heading into the dense timber to the north. They didn’t slow down until an hour and a half later, when they had covered five miles of rough ground.