Snowbound

"DIVE LEFT! Dive left!" Corporal Chet Beltran screamed into his microphone.Marine Corps Captain Tahcha Grant, pilot of the mighty CH-53E Super Stallion, instantly took evasive action. Her aircraft, the largest military helicopter operating in Afghanistan, groaned and shuddered as she gripped the collective tighter, working the rudders. Dammit!The stress of the unexpected maneuver caused the huge engines to shrill. Out of the corner of her eye, Tahcha saw the missile, a bright yellow light emanating from the barren brown desert below. Her heart rate soared. Her mouth went dry. It felt as if she were going to burst apart from the sudden adrenaline pouring through her body."It's a surface-to-air missile!" the crew chief yelled, his voice cracking with terror. "It's comin' right at us!"Tahcha wheeled the large, unwieldy helicopter to the left, knowing there wasn't much chance of outwitting the missile. Her team was in the mountainous region near the Pakistan border, flying a special ops mission. They had flown under cover of darkness from their air base out on the plains. Hedge-hopping over the peaks of the high mountains, they would sink into the valleys and fly nap-of-the-earth maneuvers to avoid being seen by any Taliban, who lived to shoot down a helo. It was a dangerous business.With night-vision goggles, a pilot could see through the darkness and fly close to the earth. The only problem was Taliban soldiers watching for such maneuvers, who could nail them with SA-7s--Soviet-made shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles. The Taliban's favorite targets were slow-moving helos coming in for a landing, hovering while they unloaded cargo or personnel, and taking off again.Cursing to herself, Tahcha feverishly worked the controls. Her copilot, Lieutenant Jed Reynolds, grunted. "It's locked on to us!"With only five hundred feet of clearance from the ground, Tahcha was hemmed in. Dawn was a lurid red band accentuating the jagged mountain peaks on the horizon. Above it she could still see glittering stars. Everything slowed to single frames, as if she were watching a movie unfold. Only it wasn't a movie. It was real life--her life, and the lives of the people on board, for whom she was responsible.Aware of her heart thudding in her breast, Tahcha felt her breath jam in her lungs. She swung the Super Stallion in a hard left turn. The six blades thumped violently above them to compensate for the unexpected escape strategy. Through the earphones in her helmet, she heard Chet, who was manning one of the side door machine guns, gasping for air.Sweat popped out on her upper lip. Her mouth became a tight, grim line. Tahcha felt the pull of gravity against the straps of her harness. The light was bad. She'd already pushed the night-vision goggles to the top of her helmet.Her team had almost reached their objective: a mountaintop forward base, where ten Marines were going to be off-loaded, along with a month's worth of supplies and ammunition. And the ten Marines who had manned the base for thirty days would be brought on board and returned to their unit. Right now, the added weight of the ammunition made her aircraft a helluva lot less maneuverable than she'd like.Tahcha glanced in horror toward the missile still streaking toward them. Her gaze leaped back to the green glowing instrument panel, then to the deep, gaping canyon below. The air was cool in the high mountains, which hadn't yet unleashed the nasty winds frequently stirred up during the heat of the day. Mind racing, Tahcha saw that there was a mountain peak less than half a mile away. And it was much higher in altitude than their current flight path.She didn't have the power or distance needed to climb up and over it; the SA-7 would take them out. The heat-seeking missile would lock on to the engines of the Super Stallion; and if it hit them, they were dead. The information scrolled through Tahcha's brain as she continued the tightMcKenna, Lindsay is the author of 'Snowbound', published 2008 under ISBN 9780373837229 and ISBN 0373837224.