Free Coup D'Etat by Ben Coes

out-of-control fireball burned on the landmass where Yagulung once was.
    As the chopper approached, it bore down toward the flames and smoke. The lead chopper went to the left, away from the billowing clouds of smoke. The pilot moved the Mi-25 closer. The outline of flaming huts, more than a dozen small square wood and mortar shacks, their skeletons aflame, the fires recently set.
    “Northern Command Leh, this is Wing Five,” the pilot barked into his mouthpiece as he angled toward the inferno.
    “Go Wing Five,” came the voice of Colonel Durvan, watch commander at the Indian base in Leh.
    “We’re at Yagulung. The entire village is on fire. It’s completely destroyed.”
    “Destroyed?” asked Durvan over the radio.
    “Everything is gone.”
    “Gone, Wing Five? Describe the scene.”
    On the ground, in the midst of the flaming buildings, the bodies of villagers could be seen. On one side of the small square at the center of the village, a stack of bodies was alight in a smoldering hill of flames.
    “There are bodies everywhere,” said the chopper pilot as he swung down and to the right of the fire to get a better view. “They were piled up, then set on fire. It looks like a massacre.”
    The heat from the flames caused a warning beacon to ring out within the lead chopper. The young Indian pilot abruptly pulled up. The chopper lifted away from the heat. Then, with an abruptness that caused the young pilot to scream, the steel of the nose cone at the front of the chopper was struck by a violent gust of wind shear created by the intense heat of the inferno below. The powerful air current had the velocity of a hurricane. It blasted against the ten-ton chopper and knocked it sideways. The chopper jerked left and skyward, flipping nearly vertical for a split second. In the blink of an eye the chopper ripped across more than 1,500 feet of vertical air zone. It spun through the air toward the second chopper, whose pilot yanked back on the cyclic and the collective in an effort to avert the collision that was now inevitable.
    The first chopper’s whipping steel rotor blades caught the tail boom of the second chopper midway down. The blades ripped through the steel of the second chopper like scissors through paper. Both Mi-25s were torn instantly from the air in a helix of flames and metal that shot the two machines toward the ground below. The carnage fell in a swatch of plain just beneath Yagulung, spreading burnt flesh and twisted metal across a quarter mile of walnut groves, which quickly sparked into flames fueled by gasoline from the destroyed attack choppers.
    *   *   *
    Colonel Durvan, who was monitoring the radar screen over the soldier of a young officer, stared at a suddenly empty radar screen.
    “Wing One,” the officer barked. “I’ve lost COMM link. Are you there, Wing One?”
    Silence.
    “ Wing One, Wing Five, ” the young officer repeated, insistent now. “I need some response. Are you there?”
    Behind the young dispatcher, Colonel Durvan stood, eyes affixed to the screen in front of the young officer.
    “What happened, Lieutenant?” asked Durvan.
    “I’ve lost COMM link, sir,” the dispatcher said. “I was just talking to them.”
    “Get Shelby One in the air,” said Durvan. “Now.”
    Within four minutes of Durvan’s order, a MiG-29 attack jet, one of half a dozen positioned at Leh, was airborne. The jet took off as the morning sunlight was cropping at the eastern horizon. The jet lifted off from Leh and was soon scorching through the sky at Mach Two, more than 1,200 miles per hour. Within sixteen minutes, the MiG was in sight line of Yagulung. The first sight he saw was a pirouette of smoke in a wavy black line reaching like a tendril into the sky.
    Dawn had come. The early morning light made visibility nearly perfect. The pilot eased off, taking the jet in an arc down toward the base of the mountain, toward the smoke and flames. The pilot was soon flying in a southerly zag