Dead Centre - Andy McNab [77]
His hand came up.
I was pissing him off. I needed to wind my neck in.
‘All in good time, Mr Nick. Look more closely.’ He bent from the waist and I followed suit. He pointed. ‘Lower.’ It was definitely a command, not a request. I knelt in the sand. Under the canopy of spikes I could now see curls of razor wire, guarding a profusion of twisted metal shapes. Then I spotted US Army initials, black on dark green.
The carcass of a Black Hawk.
‘Your father …?’
‘My father shot this down. It was the first. My dad is famous.’
He turned and shouted, and one of the lads came running over with an RPG launcher.
‘He used one of these.’ He rested the weapon on his shoulder and pointed it at the sky. ‘My father – a great man.’
I looked back at the wreckage under the cacti. A multi-million-dollar machine, taken out by a $310 kick up the arse.
The Black Hawks had flown low over the city with snipers on board to support the attack on the Olympic Hotel. The intelligence guys had determined that RPGs did not represent any air-defence threat. They thought that if you aimed the weapon into the sky, like Awaale was doing, the back blast would hit the ground and take out the firer – and no way would the clans fire it from a rooftop because they would be spotted immediately and hosed down. But Aidid knew better – and he knew that the best way to hurt the Americans was to shoot down their helicopters. The Black Hawks were like the Apaches in Afghanistan – the symbol of the US’s power and the clans’ helplessness.
Aidid had planned his ambush well. He had smuggled in Islamic fundamentalist soldiers from Sudan who’d fought against Russian Hind gunships in Afghanistan. They showed men like Awaale’s dad how to modify the RPG so they could fire from the street. All they had to do was weld some curved piping on the end to deflect the back blast – adding that extra ten dollars to the original $300 cost.
Something else. RPG grenades burst on impact, so it’s hard to hit a fast-moving target with one. The ‘advisers’ fitted the detonators with timing devices to make them explode in mid-air. That way, they wouldn’t need a direct hit to bring down a Black Hawk. The mujahideen also taught Awaale’s dad and his mates that the heli’s tail rotor was its most vulnerable spot. They taught them to wait until the Black Hawk passed over, and to shoot up at it from behind.
The whole operation to capture Aidid from the Olympic Hotel had been supposed to take no more than thirty minutes, a typical enough time for an SF op. Instead, once this Black Hawk had come down, it had spiralled into eighteen hours of urban combat, as US units tried to fight their way in to rescue the crews and shooters. Then another $310 dollars’ worth brought down a second Black Hawk, and the nightmare was complete. Two posthumous Congressional Medals of Honour, the equivalent of our VC, were awarded for that night’s action. Aidid wasn’t touched. It wasn’t until three years later that he was killed in the city during a clan battle.
I stood up and brushed the sand off my hands. ‘Where’s your dad now? Is he still alive?’
‘He’s a taxi driver in Minneapolis.’
‘You went with him?’
He nodded.
Now I knew where the accent came from. The US had stopped their aid to Somalia, but they hadn’t turned their back completely. As the cactus allotment sprouted and grew, the US had opened its borders to refugees, especially the educated or moneyed ones. The vast majority of them joined their mates in Minneapolis. Before long, it was the biggest Somali population on the planet outside Somalia itself. Even Easton couldn’t compete.
I stood there as the RPG was handed back. If Awaale was telling the truth, the guy who took down the first Black Hawk was now driving Americans home from the airport. I guessed his war stories weren’t part of his cabbie chat.
‘Why are you smiling, Mr Nick?’
‘You must be very proud.’
‘Sure I am.’
There were shouts. He looked