0748 Hours Local Time. FROM EIGHTY YARDS AWAY, Ty Weaver’s 168-grain boat-tail bullet caught HIP One’s pilot in the philtrum—that small indentation between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip. The shot was catastrophic: the target’s central nervous system was destroyed and he was brain-dead before he even realized he’d been shot. The chopper lurched vertically ten yards. The HIP’s sudden movement shook three Chinese off the rope ladder. They fell hard, twenty-five feet onto the road below. One scrambled away. The other two lay stunned. The sniper moved the crosshairs of his sight to his left, found his secondary target—the copilot’s throat—and squeezed the trigger. Weaver saw the man’s head snap sideways. Then the HIP corkscrewed to the right and dropped stonelike forty feet, smacking hard onto the roadbed and shearing its port-side tire off. The chopper bounced once, then twice, crushing the two soldiers who’d fallen from the ladder. Ty squinted through the ten-power scope, and wasn’t happy with what he saw: the copilot in profile, blood oozing from his neck, still alive, working frantically to operate the controls and save his aircraft.
