"Дон Пендлтон. The Libya Connection ("Палач" #48) " - читать интересную книгу автора

downward momentum.
It was an old trick that worked... sometimes.
It was the only trick he had right now.
The silent Huey went into a descending glide, the air from its downward
speed rushing up through the blades, keeping them spinning.
The other gunship opened fire with its machine guns, sending a twin
stream of tracer bullets that arced only inches from the plexiglas near
Bolan.
All of Bolan's attention centered on the flight controls and
life-or-death gauge readings of the aircraft he was attempting to land.
His Huey was sailing in at a fast, steady, dangerous descent.
He glanced at the tachometer. As the speed of his chopper's drop
increased, the autorotation of the blades registered as climbing rpm. The
needle edged back into the safe zone.
Bolan's copter angled downward at about seventy knots. The trickiest
part was yet to come.
Bolan closely monitored those rpm. The collective pitch-control lever
to his left and the cyclic-control stick to his right both gouged deep
furrows into Bolan's palms.
The mother ship of the mission, carrying Kennedy's official number two,
Doyle, plus the cargo and the knowledge of Eva Aguilar's whereabouts, was
long gone. Gunship number two was probably aiming to land on the desert
floor close below, waiting for Bolan and Hohlstrom to crash - and waiting to
kill them if they survived.
Bolan flicked on his landing lights, illuminating the first traces of
rocky sand dunes beneath him. Once Bolan had fixed his position, he punched
off the lights.
At some fifty feet from the ground, still descending with gut-wrenching
speed, Mack Bolan ripped back on the cyclic lever.
The Huey nosed sharply upward until the helicopter almost stood on its
tail. The rate of dive was arrested as if a tug wire had been yanked,
bringing Bolan's tipped machine to a momentary midair stop.
This was the critical point of a dead-engine landing.
Truth time.
At the precise moment that the Huey had air-braked with its nose at a
new upward forty-five degree angle, the warrior in the cockpit shoved the
cyclic forward again.
The chopper's rounded nose dropped into a level position. Bolan was
fiercely aware of the blood pounding in his ears from the pitching rate of
descent followed by the sudden halt.
The Huey was now only fifteen, twenty feet above the desert floor.
Hanging there. The rotors still going.
Bolan eased in on the collective once more, very gently.
The ground came up toward the ship like a hurtling wall. The helicopter
hit zero with a crunch, a stunning stop made mad by all the framework and
the components and the carried objects continuing on down as if headed for
the center of the earth.
It was a stubbornness of physics that led to a grinding, screeching
crash as a full load of metal-toting gravity collided with the surface of
that earth.