Operation Southern Cross - 02 (26 page)

So, unless the circumstances changed dramatically, they had no choice but to fight it out here.

What followed was one of the fiercest gun battles Autry had even seen. It was impossible to tell just how many gunmen had encircled them—there was still a lot of snow blowing around, and the bright sun made it even harder to spot the enemy in their polar combat gear. The fusillades going back and forth were incredible, though, as the two sides, well-armed, really let it rip.

Autry spent the time crawling around the mountain’s summit, peeking down at the gunmen and trying to gauge their strength. Just by the sound and the rapidity of fire, he could tell they were all using AK-47s, the most prolific assault weapon in the world. But this seemed to be the extent of their armament. He could neither see nor hear any evidence of higher-caliber guns, rocket launchers, or—thank God—RPGs or mortars.

Still, XBat was trapped, and woefully ill-prepared for this sort of combat. If another storm came sweeping through, that might be the ball game.

At the end of that first ten minutes, the XBat troopers had killed about a half dozen of the gunmen, all around the mountain, fools who’d been shot trying to change their firing positions or sticking their heads up too high to aim their weapons. None of the copter guys had been hit yet. But then again, trading body for body wasn’t what this firefight was about. It was about keeping XBat stuck on top of the mountain until they either ran out of ammunition or froze to death. The gunmen, well-insulated by their own polar clothing, seemed content to bring about either outcome. The way things were now, XBat probably would not survive the night.

It was at that moment that the radio inside his copter started to beep. Autry made his way back to the copter, jumped inside and answered the call. It was McCune. The connection was terrible; he could hear McCane better than McCane could hear him. Typically though, McCune started to tell him everything that had happened to him since they last spoke. Autry had to cut him off. He told the young pilot as succinctly as possible what was happening atop Mount Usborne and immediately he heard McCune’s demeanor change. McCune was the most aggressive pilot in the unit by far, the guy who
always
came to the rescue. Autry could hear the fury building in his voice.

They began to discuss what should happen next, but the radio started fading out. McCune quickly double-checked the mountain’s coordinates and then suggested Autry tell the rest of the men to keep their heads down.

The cavalry was on its way.

HAD IT BEEN ANYONE ELSE, AUTRY WOULD HAVE
taken McCune’s suggestion as part bravado, part exhaustion.

But he’d been around McCune for almost a year now, and he knew that Higher Authority’s decision to remove the young pilot from the Iraqi theater for overly aggressive behavior had not been a mistake. McCune would come in all guns blazing, there was no doubt about that.

So as soon as Autry got off the radio, he rolled out of the copter and started yelling at his men to stop firing and hunker down.

“Captain McCune is on his way in,” he announced. That was really all he had to say. His troopers immediately began pulling back from their positions and making their way to the most solid cover they could find. The many outcrops of jagged rocks on the mountain’s peak provided plenty of this.

They heard him coming just a minute later, dampened engines not so quiet in the chilly air. The gunmen must have heard him too, because all fire being directed at the top of the mountain suddenly stopped, and was directed nearly straight up instead.

McCune’s copter roared over a moment later. He came up and over the north side, an unexpected angle of attack, and as advertised, he arrived with all guns firing.

McCune’s copter was a DAP, meaning it had rocket launchers hanging off both sides, twin cannons in the nose and quad 50-calibers on either side of the cockpit. He also had his four gunners in the back, each firing his own 50-caliber. Usually a DAP’s commander wouldn’t have all of these weapons firing at once, but McCune was not a typical pilot. He sprayed the north side of the mountain with cannon and rocket fire, turned off the weapons for the two seconds it took to roar over the top of the peak, and then turned the copter 180 degrees and started strafing the south side, all without missing a beat.

The troopers on top kept their heads down, hugging the icy dirt, letting their colleague do his thing. Back in Vietnam, when U.S. troops were in very tight spots, they used to call in air strikes on their own positions. This wasn’t that desperate, but it was close.

McCune and his men were making more noise and firing off more weapons than a squad of attack copters, all while flying the Black Hawk as if it were a jet fighter, swooping, turning, twisting. And while at first the tracer fire in the air was frightening, it quickly grew less and less, until it was obvious that the gunmen weren’t shooting at the copter anymore. Like the XBat guys on the summit, they were hugging the ground and holding on for their lives.

His colleagues knew McCune could keep up something like this all afternoon. But suddenly, as he was going over for his sixth strafing run, his helicopter’s engine changed its timbre. The copter shot overhead, and those on top saw that the DAP was wobbling badly. They could hear the Black Hawk’s engine begin to sputter, then backfire. Both were sure signs the aircraft was in trouble.

McCune turned the gunship over, delivering both rockets and machine-gun fire into the east side of the mountain. Then, with his engine smoking badly, he went over the top of Usborne one more time, swooped down low over the gunmen to draw their scattered fire away from the summit, raced along the flat plain that ran to the southwest, and finally set the copter down with a bang on top of a much smaller mountain about a half mile away.

What had happened? Had the Black Hawk been hit by ground fire? Autry tried mightily to get McCune on the radio but heard nothing but static. After a few minutes of uncertainty, someone saw a light flashing from McCune’s position, a mirror reflecting the bright, near-polar sun. The young pilot and his crew were sending a message via Morse code. They hadn’t been shot down, the blinks said. They had simply run out of gas.

Now, this was a
real
situation. A total of four crews stranded atop two mountains, with just one workable copter between them. They were getting low on ammunition, and the fuel in Autry’s aircraft was running out. Because they were at the bottom of the Earth, dusk arrived about 2
P.M
. and even now, they could feel the sunlight begin to fade.

Another message from McCune, flashed from a half mile away, said it all:
I think we’re screwed…

But at that moment, when Autry might had tended to agree, he heard a beautiful sound—above the sporadic gunfire, above the cry of the brisk wind, above the sound of his own copter’s engine, coughing slightly as the last of its fuel began to drain down.

Above all this, he heard the sound of another helicopter.

It was Mungo.

He flew in from the west, apparently unaware that a fierce battle was going on around the mountain.

The gunmen saw him and started firing at him right away, but undaunted or uncaring, Mungo circled the summit of Mount Usborne once and then came in for a snowblown, windy landing.

Autry was ready to rip into him. Landing in a hot LZ was not the thing to do in this combat situation—that’s why McCune wound up on the next mountain over. But as soon as Mungo bounded out the copter’s door, he beat Autry to the punch.

“I’ve found it,” he told the XBat CO excitedly.

“Found what?” Autry asked him in exasperation.

“The killer laser,” Mungo replied. “I know where it is. We were looking on the wrong island.”

Autry looked back at him like he was from another planet. In the midst of the murderous cold and the fierce firefight, he’d forgotten about the fucking laser.

“Are you sure?” he asked Mungo.

Mungo looked his straight in the eye. He said, “Colonel, I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

They put together a quick and imperfect plan. Mungo had his men get off his copter and add their weapons to the firefight. Their addition was a welcome shot in the arm for the mountain’s defenders. Mungo’s guys had boxes of ammunition with them, as well as a SR-60 “Streetsweeper,” essentially a machine gun that fired small hand grenades. This upped XBat’s firepower significantly.

Autry told all his men to conserve their ammo and hold the position.

Then he climbed aboard Mungo’s copter and the two of them went off to find the killer laser.

THERE WAS ANOTHER RELATIVELY TALL HILL IN THE
Falklands.

At 2295 feet high, it was just five feet shorter than Mount Usborne. It had a protected south face, which was good because that’s the direction most of the storms in the Falklands seemed to blow. It was also in a place that was even more isolated than Usborne, if that was possible.

It was called Mount Adam; it was located on West Falkland, the lonelier of the two main islands. And it was here that Mungo claimed to have found the killer laser.

Autry had questions though. If Mungo found the laser, why didn’t he just take it out as soon as he spotted it? Why did he come to Mount Usborne and report it first?

Mungo had several answers when Autry put the question to him: He claimed that they’d spotted the laser from such a distance away that he was actually closer to Mount Usborne than he was to the spot where he believed the laser to be. He also didn’t know if the site was heavily defended, so he didn’t want to risk his entire crew by attacking it. Plus, with the radios out, he didn’t want to attack it without the rest of the unit knowing. If the attack failed and they were shot down and killed, no one would ever know what had happened to them.

By the time Autry heard all three explanations, he didn’t know which one to believe. Which was why Autry had insisted on going back with Mungo. If this was going to be another one of the pilot’s famous disappearing acts, Autry was going along for the ride.

They were soon across Falkland Sound and flying above West Falkland Island. One thing Mungo said proved true: The place was even more barren than East Falkland.

They flew about fifteen miles inland, soon getting Mount Adam in their sights. But then Mungo did something strange. They were about ten miles away from the tall bump on the landscape when he started to push the copter toward the ground. Before Autry could say anything, Mungo had put them in a landing profile.

“What’s the reason for this, Captain?” Autry asked him harshly.

Mungo just kept his eyes on the mountain in the distance. “Bear with me, Colonel,” he replied. “It will all make sense soon.”

It was at that moment that Autry really questioned what the hell he was doing out here. Mungo was a weirdo. They were in such an isolated place, Mungo could easily shoot him here, and then take off for places unknown, finally making the getaway that everyone was always suspecting him of cooking up.

As these paranoid thoughts were going through Autry’s weary head, Mungo scrambled out of the copter, stepping down into the foot-high snow. He still had his helmet on, and after taking two steps away from the copter’s door, activated his night-vision goggles via a long extension cord stretching out of the cockpit. Autry was totally confused at this point. NightVision technology was moot in the daytime. So what was Mungo up to?

It took a few seconds, but then Mungo started shouting to Autry, who was still sitting inside the copter.

“There it is!” he yelled. “I can see it!”

Autry just shook his head, and seriously considered whether he was in dereliction of duty for leaving his men behind to go on this ghost chase. One thing Weir’s mission report clearly stated was that they would not be able to see the killer laser while it was in operation. It was just not that kind of laser.

But Mungo was insistent. So Autry climbed out of the copter and walked over to where the pilot was standing. He looked in the direction of Mount Adam, but saw only a clear blue sky that was slowly going to dusk.

“I don’t see anything,” he told Mungo sternly.

“That’s because you’re not wearing NVGs,” Mungo replied.

Without asking, Mungo took off the NVG helmet and jammed it onto Autry’s head. Autry was about to throttle the man, when suddenly he saw it too.

It defied logic, but even though it was daylight, with the NVG turned on, he could see a long, thin green beam of illumination going up into the sky.

He couldn’t believe it. Mungo was right: He’d found the killer laser.

TWO MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE IN THE AIR AGAIN.

This was no time to be subtle. They flew over the area where they could see the laser beam emanating from. There was more than a tent up here. There was a small wooden hut ringed by a high rock wall and some shrubbery applied on top to cover it all. This hut, though looking like nothing more than a glorified ice-fishing shack, had several satellite dishes on its roof.

There were gunmen here too. Clothed in the same arctic wear as their colleagues on East Falkland, they started shooting at the Black Hawk right away. Autry and Mungo didn’t hesitate: they started shooting back.

The DAP had no missiles, just a few cannon shells. It had plenty of 50-caliber ammunition, but only the nose-mounted guns were loaded. With Mungo at the controls, they did several strafing runs, walking gunfire up the side of the mountain, and bouncing a few shells off the stone-enclosed hut itself.

Working the copter’s weapons together, Autry and Mungo managed to suppress all the gunfire after just three passes. But then a warning light began blinking and an emergency buzzer started crying at the same time. Autry looked down at the copter’s fuel gauge and swore. Now
they
were out of gas.

Mungo showed some real brilliance in the next few seconds. He brought the copter down on a ledge about two hundred feet below the hut. It was a controlled crash, but Autry suffered nothing more than a bump on his helmet on landing.