Rough Diamonds (A Spider Shepherd short story) Read Online Free PDF Page A

themselves for the storm that was to come once the Liberians realised what was happening.
     Jerzy pressed the button to start the engines and they whined and then rumbled into life. The sudden noise provoked a flurry of action among the guards at the gate. Under cover of the noise, Jimbo put a double tap into the dead guard’s head, so that even his mother could not recognise him, then sprinted for the Hind. As he dived into the cargo bay, Jock slid the door shut behind him.
    Lights went on in the buildings around the airfield and within seconds the first fusillades of shots rang out of the darkness.  Rounds bounced off the armour plating of the helicopter and ricocheted away into the night. 
    The noise of the rounds hitting the Hind was deafening and made everyone on board flinch, but so far at least, the armour plating had held firm. Shepherd shot a glance over his shoulder at Jerzy, who was sitting in his separate cockpit behind and above him.  Jerzy’s face was a couple of shades whiter than usual, but he was managing to maintain his focus on his task, his hand hovering impatiently over the controls as he waited for the engines to come up to running speed. Rounds were still crashing against the helicopter and eventually Jock could take no more. He slid open the cargo door and began blasting away at the muzzle flashes, the dotted tracks of his tracer rounds written on the darkness like a deadly Morse code. His fast and accurate shooting suppressed a lot of the incoming fire and bought Jerzy a little extra time to get used to the controls and to get the gunship airborne. 
    Jerzy wound up the engines and then raised the collective. The helicopter staggered off the ground, its engines screaming as it dragged itself clear of the ground effect. A stray round struck sparks from the whirling disc of the rotors. Still familiarising himself with the controls, Jerzy steered an erratic course across the airfield and out over the perimeter fence. He was rapidly gaining confidence with the controls and brought the Hind round, gaining a little more height, in a slow turn back towards the airfield.
    ‘Right you bastards,’ Shepherd muttered under his breath. ‘Let’s see how you like a taste of your own medicine.’ Using the Hinds’ electronic selection and aiming system, he opened up first on the parked Hips, watching as each in turn disintegrated before his eyes when the rockets slammed home and engulfed them in flames.
    He saw aircrew sprinting towards two of the Hinds. He held his fire as the crew scrambled aboard and he saw the rotors of one begin to turn slowly. Then he opened up with the wing rocket pods. The first Hind disappeared in a ball of boiling flame. The second was just beginning to lift clear of the ground as the rocket struck it. It slewed sideways, its rotors bit into the concrete and the helicopter went into a frenzied spin around its own axis before smashing into the ground and erupting as its fuel tanks ignited.
    Jerzy eased the helicopter around to allow Shepherd to bring the rocket pods to bear on the remaining two Hinds in the hangar and he let loose with two more rockets, obliterating them in an instant and turning the inside of the hangar into an inferno.  Only then did he turn his attention to the guards who were still trying to bring down the Hind with ground fire.  A couple of bursts from the nose cannon quickly knocked the fight out of them and Jerzy turned the helicopter north-west on a bearing which would take them back across the border, making directly for the diamond mines in the Kono district of Sierra Leone.
    They crossed the border and flew on, still at low-level. As they cleared the last ridge separating them from the Kono mining districts, Jerzy brought the Hind into a hover and landed in a clearing, where they quickly re-armed the gunship. 
    At the foot of the ridge, lit by the full moon, they could see the mine workings and spoil heaps that sprawled before them as far as the eye