To the Sound of a Storm Ch. 1
By Matt Lawson

Meanwhile, in Rwanda…..

They called him the Archer.

It was an honorable title, though his countrymen had cast aside their reflex bows over a century ago, when they had learned about firearms. In part, the name reflected the timeless nature of the struggle. The first of the invaders, for that was how they thought of them, had been Alexander the Great, and more had followed since. Ultimately, they had all failed. The Afghan tribesman held their Islamic faith as the reason for their resistance, but the obstinate courage of these men was as much part of their racial heritage as their dark pitiless eyes.

The Archer was a young man, and an old one. On those occasions that he had both the desire and the opportunity to bathe in a mountain stream, anyone could see the youthful muscles on his thirty-five-year old body. They were the smooth muscles of one for whom a climb over barren hills or mountains covered with jungle trees was as unremarkable a part of life as a stroll in an English park.

It was his eyes that were old. Three years ago, he had been a teacher of mathematics, a college graduate in a country where most deemed it enough to be able to read the holy Koran. He had married young, as was the custom in his land, and had two children. But his wife and son were dead, killed by rifle fire from an agent of Shadowloo. His daughter was gone. Kidnapped.

After the drug lords had razed the village to the ground, setting fire to every house, they killed the remaining adults and swept up the remaining orphans for shipment to wherever they hid themselves, where they would be served as slaves or brainwashed as part of their army. All because a drug meeting which Shadowloo was involved in had been fired upon by mudjaheddin (freedom fighter) a few kilometers from the village. On the day he'd learned this, a week after it had actually happened, the teacher of algebra and geometry had neatly stacked the books on his desk and walked out of the small town of Ghazni into the hills. A week later, he'd returned to the town after dark with three other men and proved that he was worthy of his heritage by killing three Shadowloo soldiers and taking their weapons. He still carried that first FAMAS.

But that was not why he was known as the Archer. The chief of his little band of mudjaheddin was a perceptive leader who did not look down on the new arrival who had spent his youth in classrooms, learning foreign ways. Instead, he had trained him personally, and within a month he'd become the most ruthless, and most effective, man in the band, clearly an expression of Allah's fury.

It was he who, the leader had chosen to represent the just cause of freedom against the drug lords of Shadowloo in Rwanda, where he could use his knowledge of science and numbers to learn the use of surface-to-air missiles. The first SAMs with which the quiet, serious man from the foreign island had equipped the mudjaheddin had been in fact a Soviet SA-7, known in Russian as strela, or 'arrow', which was also owned by Shadowloo, who had acquired them during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first 'man-portable' SAM, it was not overly effective unless used with great skill. Among them the arithmetic teacher was the best, and for his successes with the Russian 'arrows,' the men in the group took to calling him the Archer.

He waited with a new missile at the moment, the American one called Stinger, but all of the surface-to-air missiles in this group were merely called arrows now: tools for the Archer. He lay on the knife edge of a ridge, a hundred meters below the summit of the hill, from which he could survey the length of a muddey valley. Beside him was his spotter, Lanre, who carried two additional missiles for his launcher and, more importantly, had the eyes of a falcon. They were burning eyes. He was an orphan.

"There." Lanre said quietly, pointing.

"I see it."

The sun glinted briefly of the Mi-24s glass covered nose, enough for them to see it, ten miles off, skirting over the ridgeline. It was one of Shadowloo's Hind attack helicopters, loaded with rockets and cannon shells, obviously being used to scan for any suitable drug meetings, raids or any other illegal activities.

The Archer watched the helicopter zigzag in flight as the pilot surveyed the land and chose his path. As expected, the pilot approached from leeward so that the wind would delay the sound of his rotor for the few extra seconds that might be crucial. Slowly, the Archer raised the launcher and trained its two-element sight on the approaching helicopter. His thumb went sideways and down on the activation switch, and he nestled his cheekbone on the conductance bar. He was instantly rewarded with the warbling screech of the launcher's seeker unit. It was time to let loose his arrow.

The Archer's hands tightened on the launcher. The helicopter was sideslipping right at him now, expanding around the inner ring of the sight. It was now in range. The Archer punched the forward button with his left thumb, 'uncaging' tthe missile and giving the infra-red seeker-head on the Stinger its first look at the heat radiating from the Mi-24's turboshaft engines. The sound carried through his cheekbone into his ear changed. The missile was now tracking the target. The Hind's pilot, unwittingly and unknowingly, turned his jet exhaust almost right at the Archer as he warily surveyed the hills for any sign of potential action.

The missile screamed its readiness at the Archer now, but still he was patient. He put his mind into that of his target, and judged that the pilot would come closer still before his helicopter had the opportunity he wanted. And so he did. When the Hind was only a thousand meters off, the Archer took a deep breath, super-elavated his sight, and whispered a brief prayer of vengeance. The trigger was pulled almost of its own accord.

The launcher bucked in his hands as the Stinger looped slightly upward before dropping down to home on its target. The Archer's eyes were sharp enough to see it despite the almost invisible smoke trail it left behind. The missile deployed its maneuvering fins, and these moved a few fractions of a millimeter in obedience to the orders generated by its computer brain, a microchip the size of a postage stamp. The helicopters threat warning had barely started beeping before the missile struck.

The missile ran directly into one of the helicopter's engines and exploded. The helicopter was crippled instantly. The driveshaft for the motor was cut, and the Hind began to spin violently to the left while the pilot tried to autorotate the aircraft down, frantically looking for a flat place while his gunner radioed a shrill call for rescue. The pilot brought his engine to idle, unloading hiscollective to control torque, locked his eyes on a flat space the size of a tennis court, then cut his switches and activated the onboard extinguishing system. Like most flyers he feared fire above all things, though he would learn the error soon enough.

The Archer watched the Mi-24 hit nose-down on a rocky ledge five hundred feet below his perch. Surprisingly, it didn't burn as the aircraft came apart. The helicopter cartwheeled viciously, the tail whipping forward and over the nose before it came to rest on its side. The Archer raced down the hill with Lanre right behind. It took five minutes...

The Shadowloo pilot fought with his straps as he hung upside down. He was in pain, but he knew that only the living felt pain. The Hind was a newer model with improved safety systems built in. Between those and his own skill he'd survived the crash. Not his gunner, he noticed briefly. The man in front hung motionless, his neck broken, his hands limply reaching for the ground. The pilot had no time for that. His seat was bent, and the chopper's canopy had shattered, its metal frame now a prison for the flyer. The emergency release latch was jammed, the explosive release bolts unwilling to fire. He took his pistol, a Glock 17, from the shoulder holster and started blasing at the metal framework, one piece at a time. He wondered if the base had gotten the emergency call.

The pilot cut his hands to ribbons as he prised the metal away, giving himself a clear path out. He thanked his luck again that he was not ending his life in a pillar of greasy smoke as he released his straps and climbed out of the aircraft to the rocky ground.

His left leg was broken. The jagged end of a white bone stuck clear of his flight ssuit; though he was too deeply in shock to feel it, the sight of the injury horrified him. He holstered his empty pistol and grabbed a loose piece of metal to serve as a cane. He had to get away.

He hobbled to the far end of the ledge and saw a path. It was three kilometers to friendly forces. He was about to start down when he heard something and turned. Hope changed to horror in an instant, and the pilot realised that a firery death would have been a blessing.

The Archer blessed Allah's name as he withdrew his knife from its sheath...