Josh Duffy didn’t know who was on board that second helicopter, but his heart stopped while he stood there, watching along with the group of River Command police.
The first rocket missed; Duff was too far away to know if it went in front of or behind the helo, but either way it appeared to pass by very close before streaking on up into the night sky.
But the second rocket found its target, striking the side of the helicopter, creating a larger flash of light.
Even with the impact, however, the helicopter seemed to continue flying.
The Caracal turned evasively just as the third rocket approached; the projectile sailed below it, and the fourth and last burning projectile looked like it might miss high, but to Duff’s horror it slammed straight into the rotors of the machine flying nearly one thousand feet in the air, and this time there could be no doubt that the explosion was catastrophic. Even from a mile away he could see the helicopter spin to the right, 360 degrees, then violently begin tumbling through the air, losing altitude.
Only now did the boom of the first detonation roll over the dam.
By the way the stricken aircraft fell, it was clear it had no main rotor now; it was essentially a school bus in the sky, and it possessed the same flight characteristics as such.
An onboard explosion rocked the French machine as it fell, and the H225 turned from a twenty-five-million-dollar aircraft into a fireball racing towards the earth. As the American watched helplessly from a distance, the flaming form turned end over end, dropping at over one hundred miles per hour as the second boom reached him where he stood.
The second helicopter to leave the hydroelectric facility then slammed into the center of the river, right at the bend to the west.
Duff knew that with those detonations at that altitude, and with the machine falling at that speed, there could be no survivors of the crash.
Isaac spoke animatedly on his radio now in a language Duff did not understand, and someone else answered back, but Duff tuned it out quickly as the whine of rotors behind him turned his head. Duff’s dread only grew as he looked back and saw that the third helicopter was already in the air, banking over Lake Volta, turning in an arc towards the south.
The pilots wouldn’t have seen the RPG launches, and they likely wouldn’t see a smoke trail in the dark, or even the burning wreckage in the water a mile away from them for several seconds more.
Duff furiously waved his arms in the air as the helo passed a couple hundred feet above him; some of the RIVCOM men around him did the same, but the darkened aircraft flew over the dam and climbed out over the river, its flight crew having no idea of the dangers that lay directly ahead.
Duff grabbed the radio off his rifle sling and pressed the button. “Tremaine! Do not fucking do this!”
He received no response.
Isaac handed him his walkie-talkie. “You know the channel for the helicopter?”
Duff did not, but he knew the channel for the radios he and the other DS men carried. He quickly dialed into it, well aware that his team’s radios were only half a watt and their range wasn’t very far.
Pressing the button, he shouted into the microphone. “Jay! RPGs! RPGs on the west side of the river!”
On the east side of the river, Conrad Tremaine leveled his RPG-7 launcher at the helicopter approaching his position, then shifted to his left to lead the machine a little, hoping for an impact with the cockpit or the open port-side door as it passed.
But just as he put his finger on the trigger of the weapon, the aircraft banked sharply to the left, throwing off his aim.
It was clear to him that the French flight crew could now see the burning wreckage over a half mile away and eight hundred feet below, and they were desperate to avoid the same fate.
The Caracal dove now, banking farther left, back in Tremaine’s direction, and he tried to follow its path, to anticipate its next move. The Airbus’s speed increased as it raced towards the western side of the river.
“Can’t…get…it…” he said as he concentrated like mad, desperate to get the rangefinder in the weapon’s optic on the target so he could calculate the distance.
“He’s speeding up!” Krelis shouted, and Tremaine ignored him because he could see exactly what the pilot was doing.
His rangefinder told him his target was one hundred fifty meters distant, so he then went to work trying to calculate the speed.
In the third helicopter to leave the dam, Nichole Duffy held on to her seat with both hands, tucked her head down, and leaned into Ambassador Dunnigan in a vain attempt to try to steady the woman.
Nichole was a former helicopter pilot herself, and she knew by the way they were flying that the crew had detected some imminent threat and were responding to it. She hoped like hell someone down below had just squeezed off a couple of rounds from a rifle, because that would be a hell of a lot less dangerous to the aircraft than a shoulder-fired missile.
In the cabin there was nothing for her to do but continue to hope. While others on board screamed and prayed, flares fired out from the side of the big aircraft; it banked violently left and right as it dove for the deck.
She could picture the inputs the pilot was giving his ship: left and right rudder, left and right stick, slamming the collective down to drop altitude.
Nichole thought of her children, and of her husband, and she prayed along with the others.
Conrad Tremaine pressed the trigger of the RPG-7 when the French helicopter was only about two hundred meters in front of him and two hundred meters below. The rocket screamed out of the front of the tube; the backblast of smoke and fire sprayed behind him into the jungle, and then he handed the launcher to Junior for a quick reload.
As soon as he fired, however, the French helo reversed its bank, went hard to starboard, and the rocket sailed through the flares ejecting into the night and impacted with the river below.
Krelis stood nearby now, his walkie-talkie in his hand, and he spoke into the microphone. “Copper, be advised, our first rocket missed. The target is descending and evasive, over.”
“Understood.”
Nichole didn’t see the RPG that had narrowly missed her helicopter; the screaming projectile was lost in the shower of bright flares in the air in the split second when it passed. They were banking to starboard now, the helicopter almost on its side as it flew, and she had the sensation they were still in a dive.
Soon they banked back to port, racing towards the west, and flying almost perpendicular to the river. She knew there was a massive hill on this side of the water and more hills to the south, and she prayed the flight crew knew what they were doing, because it felt to her that at this vector they were going to impact terrain in a matter of seconds.
She heard Dunnigan reciting the Lord’s Prayer next to her, and Nichole followed the ambassador’s lead, praying aloud now herself as the helicopter began to accelerate and climb.
Junior handed the launcher back to Tremaine, and the Sentinel commander put his eye back in the rubber eyecup of the sight, searching for the helicopter to fire again. The helo was well to his south now, so he ran forward out onto the edge of the rocky outcropping to keep line of sight of it. He aimed through the sight hurriedly, knowing the Caracal would be out of his view in just seconds, probably trying to thread its way through the hills to get out of the line of fire, the crew trusting their flying skills to save them.
As he put his sight in front of the helicopter, it stopped banking suddenly; it needed level flight to pass over a narrow saddle between the hill Tremaine stood on and the next one to the south, and Tremaine knew this was his opportunity. He fired, leading the craft by sixty meters, and the rocket left the tube with a roar, then raced south over the riverbank.
As soon as the flash left his eyes he saw four more rockets fired from the opposite bank, far to the south, and this told him Copper and his men had at least seen the fleeing helicopter, even if they were likely too far away to hit it from their position.
Josh Duffy had never felt more helpless in his life than he had in the last thirty seconds. The third Caracal had avoided one rocket, and now it flew towards a lower part of the hillside to the west, just skirting the trees and rocks there by a few meters as it tried to get out of the line of fire. Then he saw another rocket streaking from a prominence high on the hill to the helicopter’s left.
There was an impact and an explosion, but Duff couldn’t tell if the helo itself had been hit or if the ground below it had. Suddenly, however, four more RPGs sailed from the river bend farther to the south. All four hit the hillside, but one of the explosions was close enough to the low-flying Caracal that he couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been damaged.
As he watched the rear half of the helicopter disappear from his view around a jungled hill, however, his worst fears were realized.
He saw a smoke trail behind a ball of flame as the tail of the big machine burned.
Nichole Duffy hadn’t felt the impact of a missile, but she’d both heard and felt the shredding of metal below her, and she knew the helicopter had taken some damage.
They’d been low to the ground; it had been too dark to tell how low until an explosion out the open port-side door of the helicopter revealed a jungle canopy just a dozen or so meters below them, and a hillside that climbed high above on that side.
The trees ignited in a ball of fire, and shrapnel tore through the fuselage.
It was too dark in the cabin to see who was hurt, who was alive, who was dead. She reached over and grabbed the ambassador, put her arms around her to check her for injuries, and realized Chad Larsen was doing the same from the other side, so she got out of his way.
The ambo seemed okay, so she returned her attention out the port-side hatch.
The helicopter flew straight, narrow, and fast for several seconds; she felt sure they were now out of the line of fire, she just didn’t know how much damage they’d taken from the near miss.
More explosions erupted higher on the hillside to port, and again she heard the terrifying noise of more small pieces of metal or wood or rock biting into the fuselage.
They were moving fast now, probably close to one hundred twenty knots, and just as she began to think they might be okay, she felt a shimmy in the tail rotor that she herself had felt once before, shortly before her own helicopter had crashed in Syria.
The shimmy grew, and she looked back at the pilots behind her, willed them to slow the aircraft down because she realized they were in more danger crashing at speed than they were of getting hit by another rocket.
She knew what was coming next, but knowing made it no less terrifying. The shaking from behind worsened by the second, and then the helo began turning to the left.
The pilot applied the right rudder pedal, but the turn only accelerated.
Nichole realized she was likely the only person on board other than the flight crew who understood that the tail rotor had come off.
The pilots began dramatically slowing down; the nose pitched up, but the spinning continued.
Nichole looked out to port now but saw nothing but black; she didn’t know their speed, their altitude, or what obstructions might be in their way, but she knew one thing with absolute clarity.
She knew they were going down.
Josh Duffy saw a glow illuminate on the hillside, and this told him that somewhere in the hills, the third helicopter had crashed. He couldn’t see the impact point, but it couldn’t have been more than three miles or so away from where he stood.
He grabbed Isaac by the arm. “What’s over there?”
“It’s jungle, just a valley. There are some dirt roads, that’s about it.”
“I need a vehicle.”
Isaac said, “We’ve got more rebels on the road to the south of the main gate. Akosombo police have responded to them, I picked it up on the radio. I’ve got to stay here till the second-shift RIVCOM captain arrives. Should be any minute. You can wait for me or—”
Duff cut him off. “I’m not waiting. This truck?”
He pointed to the pickup parked there.
“Yeah, man. Good luck. Go with God.”
Conrad Tremaine stood on the rocky outcropping with a freshly loaded rocket launcher, but he was no longer focused on the south where the helicopter had disappeared. Instead he leveled the rocket and pointed it down, across the riverbank. He took several seconds to steady the weapon, and then he aimed the sight on the switchyard, choosing a cluster of massive transformers right in the middle of the location.
“Backblast clear!” he shouted, and then he fired a rocket.
A sparkle of light leading a smoke trail raced from the tube and sailed over the black water of the Volta River a quarter mile south of the dam. A huge explosion, a powerful shower of sparks, and then equipment began tipping and falling, lines bursting with more sparks.
The power went off immediately, enshrouding the area in darkness.
Tremaine instantly handed the RPG to Junior. “Load it up. Gonna hit it again.”
Duff had been running to the pickup Isaac told him to take to the crash site, but when he heard the first explosion behind him, he turned back around and raised his weapon. Walking back to the river’s southern edge, he looked through his sights, scanning the hillside for a target.
Isaac stepped up to his shoulder, though it was so dark on the top of the dam now Duff could barely see him.
The Ghanaian said, “I think it was another RPG. They wanted to shut off the power.”
“Fired from the hill again?”
“I didn’t see it.”
Just then there was a flash on the hill; flame illuminated the trees and a rocket sailed across the water, slamming into the switchyard, blowing up more equipment and critical infrastructure, and starting a fire.
Duff instantly raised his weapon higher, aimed in on the launch site of the rocket, judged the distance to be about four hundred yards, and put the optical sight of his weapon a quarter inch above a rocky outcropping just visible in the moonlight.
He fired semiautomatic rounds so he could keep control of the weapon, but he squeezed them off in rapid succession.
He heard gunshots next to him, realized Isaac was firing his AK in the same direction, and soon more men on the dam opened up on the same spot of hillside, dumping dozens and dozens of rounds in the general area the RPG had been fired from.