children’s toys.
While the women continued stashing heroin packets, men unloaded the heavy barrels of dangerous chemical precursors and transported them gingerly to the heroin-processing lab with the help of the wheezing tractor.
The Afghan in charge of the mobile heroin-processing station, Ahktar Hayat, was a twenty-four-year-old gray-eyed Pashtun with a chemistry degree from a university in Peshawar, Pakistan. He and Cluzet had worked together before.
Cluzet’s team was spread out around the camp, cleaning weapons, eating food, or catching up on sleep, including the Ingush mercs he’d hired for the job—murderous Caucasian cousins of the Chechens. Two of his men he kept on sentry duty. His walkie-talkie crackled with chatter in Pashtun. One of Hayat’s sentries called in over the radio:
“A Devil’s Chariot! Ten kilometers out!”
* * *
—
A Devil’s Chariot—the Afghan term for the hated Mi-35 Hind helicopters flown by the Afghan Air Force—was bad news for Hayat, Cluzet knew. His wasn’t a Taliban combat unit, per se. Hayat’s job was to cook heroin, bag it, and ship it on. His small band had only AKs and RPG-7s for defense against bandits or rival gangs. The forty-millimeter rocket-propelled grenades were powerful enough to blast away a rotor assembly even on the heavily armored Russian helicopter, but the RPG-7 had an effective range of only two hundred meters. Every helicopter pilot who had ever flown in Afghanistan over the last forty years knew to stay high off the deck, especially in the mountains.
Cluzet didn’t wait for Hayat’s panicked call. An attack by the heavily armed machine—called the “Flying Tank” by the Russians who built them—would be catastrophic.
A lone Hind, though, likely wasn’t on a combat mission. Quite possibly it was on a surveillance run, or even just a training exercise. But discovery of their operation or his convoy when it pulled out in the morning would be equally disastrous.
Either outcome would interrupt his assignment, something both he and the Iron Syndicate took very seriously. Failure was not an option.
The Hind had to be destroyed.
The lookout called in the incoming direction of the Hind as Cluzet whistled up his number two and designated spotter, the German, an ex-KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte) sergeant named Manstein. The two of them jogged over to the back of a Range Rover. Cluzet grabbed the FIM-92B Stinger MANPADS from its locker in the back of the vehicle and Manstein fetched range-finding binoculars.
The two of them scrambled to higher ground as the mountains began to echo with the whirring doom of the Hind’s rotors beating the thin, cool air.
“Got him,” Manstein said, pointing toward the southwest. “I’d say one thousand meters elevation above our position.”
With the five-foot-long launcher balanced on his shoulder, Cluzet slammed home the battery cooling unit into the stock’s pistol grip and twisted it, powering up the missile with a thermal battery and cooling the seeker to operating temperature with argon gas.
He lifted the launcher in the direction Manstein was pointing and glanced over the top of the sight.
“Yes, I see him. About four kilometers out and one kilometer altitude.” Well within range of the fearsome Stinger.
“Confirmed.” Manstein kept his binoculars fixed on the Hind.
Cluzet raised the launcher even higher and put his eye to the sight. In order to set the UV/IR tracker, he lined up the sight above the helicopter against the clear blue sky as he pressed down and in on the safety and actuator switch. This immediately initiated a howling tone over the small speaker that also shot through his skull, thanks to the vibration of the small transducer pressed against his cheekbone.
He lined up the Hind in the “canoe” between the forward range ring and the rear reticle. Once the tracker locked in the “negative UV”—the light blocked out by the chopper—the tone changed sharply, telling Cluzet his missile was also locked in.
Cluzet uncaged the missile with the press of his left index finger, releasing the missile’s seeker eye to follow the Hind independently. He super-elevated the launcher at an exaggerated angle and depressed the trigger, holding it until—
WHOOSH!
The missile’s small ejection motor fired, spitting the twenty-two-pound missile out of the tube, just far enough to clear away safely from Cluzet before falling away. The now powerless missile dropped a few inches before the second, more powerful two-stage solid-fuel flight motor engaged, driving the missile toward the Hind at nearly 2,400 feet per second, almost ten times faster than its target. A plume of white rocket exhaust trailed behind the speeding Stinger.
The Hind instantly fired countermeasure flares and chaff, but the Stinger’s UV/IR