Wind River Protector

by Lindsay McKenna

  Heart sinking, she remained near the tree, unsure what to do. Her radio wasn’t working, so no one would be able to find her. All she had on her flight vest were a few protein bars in her thigh pockets. And no water. This didn’t look good.

  “Hey!”

  Whirling around, Andy stumbled and nearly fell. Her heart banged in her chest, her throat closed as the deep male voice came out of the night.

  “I’m friendly, don’t shoot!”

  Her hand was already around the grip of the pistol as she righted herself, eyes huge as a dark shape—at least six feet tall—emerged from the inkiness of the ravine. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Lieutenant Dev Mitchell. Are you the pilot from that A-10?”

  Gulping, relieved, her eyes narrowed as the man came toward her. She could barely see the outline of his flight suit. “Y-yes. You’re from the Black Hawk that crashed earlier?”

  He halted. “I am. The only survivor. Who are you?”

  “Captain Andrea Whitcomb, US Air Force. I was flying that A-10 until I got hit in both engines.”

  He gripped her arm. “Are you injured? Can you walk?”

  She felt the strength of his fingers around her upper arm. Under ordinary circumstances, she’d have jerked away. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances at all. “I’m okay . . . just bruises. Shook up for sure.”

  “Did you hide your chute?”

  “Under this tree here. My GPS radio is damaged. No one can find where I’m at.”

  “I found you.”

  She saw his teeth white against the deep shadows of his craggy features. “How?”

  He pointed to a set of NVG goggles around his neck. “These. Where’s your helmet? Are the NVGs good on them?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I took them off my helmet before burying it. They are here, around my neck.”

  He released her. “We gotta get the hell outta here. The Taliban will come in at dawn, looking for us, searching for black boxes on both aircraft. We can’t hang around here.”

  “B-but,” she stammered, fear rising in her, “don’t you have a GPS radio?”

  “I do and it works, but we can’t stay around these wrecks. Even a SAR, Search-and-Rescue, crew can’t land in the middle of the Taliban closing in on where those birds are located. We have to leave. I’m in touch with them. SAR will track and follow my GPS coordinates until it’s safe to come in and pick us up. This is very heavy enemy territory. We gotta leave. Now.”

  She turned, then moved to beneath the boughs of the tree, trying to stay out of the wind. So much of her fear had abated because the other pilot was there. And he sounded like he knew what he was talking about. “You seem to know what to do.”

  Again, that cocky grin. “Yeah. Not my first rodeo, Captain. You good enough to travel? The farther away we get from here at night, the better off we’ll be. It’s August; the sun’s gonna come up early. We need to find a cave or someplace to hide when dawn comes. Right now we’re in Taliban central. We need to head west,” and he pointed across the ravine. “There’s a firebase about forty miles as the crow flies in that direction. We have to climb up and over the mountain range to reach it.”

  “Forty miles?” she managed, her voice raspy. “We’re walking to it?”

  “Yeah. It’s that or stay here and get hunted down by Taliban, who will sure as hell behead us, and we’ll show up on videos across the internet. I don’t think you want that.”

  “Hell no!” She heard him give a low chuckle.

  “You saved our ass after we unloaded that SEAL group. They got away and blended into the wall of the canyon and made their escape. Thanks.”

  “What about your other crew?”

  She heard his voice lower, a lot of hidden emotion behind it. “Dead. We crashed. I was the only one who got out.”

  “Oh, God . . . I’m sorry, so sorry.”

  “Ready?” he rasped. “We’re going to go down into this ravine and climb up the other side. We have about five hours of night to hide us, and then we’ll have targets on our backs.”

  “Roger that.” Andy settled the NVGs into place over her eyes. The wind shifted, and she could smell his flight suit, the strong odor of smoke and grease contained in it. “Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”

  “Some first degree burns on the back of my neck and top of my ears is all. I’m okay. I have some water bottles in my leg pockets. Are you thirsty?” He pulled on his NVGs and then gripped her gloved hand with his.

  “No, but I’m sure I will be. I have no water on me.”

  He grunted. “You’ll have it whenever you want. Come on.”

  Andy could barely see Mitchell’s face. It was his soft voice, with almost, she swore, an Irish lilt to it, that helped her steady her own fear. She wished she could see his face. Was he married? Have a wife and kids at home? Most likely. What must they be feeling right now? She knew without a doubt that her own parents would be receiving a call from the Pentagon that she was MIA, missing in action. Andy’s heart filled with anguish; she knew it would tear them up, and her three adopted siblings.

  His hand was strong and guiding without hurting her fingers. He led her down the steep, rocky slope, and they were quickly devoured from anyone’s sight beneath the scrub trees that stubbornly lived in the unstable ravine. There was no time to talk and no time to look around. She could see his broad set of shoulders against the nap of the trees sometimes. He was four inches taller than her, his stride ground-eating. Picking up on his urgency, very soon she was out of breath, rasping and forcing herself to keep up with him. They were at a high elevation and her body wasn’t used to it. All she could see around them was darkness and the outlines of trees. The NVGs made everything a grainy green, and she kept her gaze down so she wouldn’t stumble or trip over the rocks, some of them the size of cantaloupes and watermelons. It was a hard, rugged landscape, no question about that.

  * * *

  Dev Mitchell cursed silently as the Air Force pilot who had saved his life struggled to keep up. They had spent three hours on the run, getting as far away from the crash sites as they could. She was a trooper, had grit and never complained or asked him to slow down. The price of physical weakness would be capture, something he wanted to avoid at any cost. Once they breasted the first ridge, he stopped and told her to sit down and rest under a group of pine trees. Handing her a bottle of water, he stepped out to get the best radio signal he could find and called Bagram.

  No stranger to the routine of being found by a SAR crew, Dev gave their GPS location. The answer he got in return chilled his blood. He had stepped away from Captain Whitcomb to make the call. She was green to what it meant to crash and then survive in this hellish country. Oh, he knew she had gone through all kinds of training, but this was the real thing, which was very different. Pulling out his notebook, he quickly wrote down some coordinates, shoving the pen back into his shirt pocket. Signing off, he quickly moved back to the pilot. Through his NVGs, he could see she had an oval face, a clean-looking nose and a nicely shaped mouth. Maybe in her mid-twenties at most. He was twenty-six himself. Liking her self-reliance, her pluck and determination, he knelt down in front of her, pushing up his NVGs.

  “I contacted Bagram,” he said in a low tone, his face inches from her, not wanting his voice to carry in case Taliban were nearby. “They’ve given me coordinates for a place for us to hole up. It’s about a mile down the other side of this ridge.”

  “Hole up?”

  He heard the fatigue in her voice. The alarm. His mouth thinned for a moment. “I was informed we’re right in the middle of Taliban central. Where those birds crashed? We were a mile away from a large group of one hundred soldiers. Bagram has our location. They want us to go to a tunnel complex just down a mile on this ridge and hide out there. They can’t bring in a Search-and-Rescue, SAR, to fly us out until the Taliban leave this area so it’s safe enough to pick us up.”

  Groaning, she said, “How long?”

  “As long as it takes. N
o one knows. We’ll be safer resting in a cave or a tunnel complex during daylight hours.”

  “Yeah, but the Taliban use them, too. Did they tell you that?”

  He grinned. “Yes. This isn’t going to be easy, Captain Whitcomb.”

  “My name’s Andy.”

  “Call me Dev. Nice to meet you. Are you hydrated? Are you ready to hoof it?”

  She nodded. “Let’s go.” She handed him half a bottle of water. “You need to drink, too.”

  Taking it, he stood up and backed out of the grove, drinking the water she’d saved for him. There was a lot to like about this feisty female pilot. She was a team player; she thought of others and not just herself. As she joined him, he stuck the emptied plastic bottle into one of the thigh pockets of his flight suit. He didn’t want to leave evidence behind. The Taliban would spot an American water bottle like a hawk spotting his next meal. It would tell them they were on the right path to finding them and he wanted to avoid that at all costs.

  “How you holding up?”

  “Sore and tired. You?”

  “Same. If we get lucky, we’ll find a place to hole up and then we can sleep.”

  She snorted. “Someone has to stay awake and play guard dog.”

  “I’ll take first watch,” he assured her, smiling. He pulled down his NVGs, seeing that pretty mouth of hers twist into a wry grin. She was a good partner to have. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The first time she actually saw Dev Mitchell was when he located a series of tunnels and found a cave that had a water source in it, plus light coming in from the top of it through a craggy, broken opening. It was the gray of dawn when he led her into it, after going in first, pistol drawn, to ensure no Taliban had taken up overnight residence in it. The place was empty.

  The first thing he did after getting her in the cave was to walk outside, call Bagram, and give them their GPS. When he returned, she saw the exhaustion in his face. He had red hair and the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. His beard darkened his oval face and strong jawline. There was nothing weak-looking about Dev Mitchell. The darkness beneath his eyes, however, told Andy he was suffering over the loss of his crew. As he took off his gloves, she saw they, too, had been burned, his hands reddened with first degree burns, as well as his wrist area, where his Nomex fire-retardant flight suit had ridden up to expose his flesh. Her heart was heavy for him.

  “Bagram has a Reaper drone at ten thousand feet flying over our area. It has a camera and it knows our GPS. The operator is watching for any Taliban wandering into our area and they’ll call us if that happens.”

  “How long until they can rescue us?”

  Shrugging, he put his NVGs on a rocky ledge near where the water seeped into a small nearby pool. “Unknown. This place is crawling with Taliban because it’s close to the Pakistan border.” His mouth flexed. “They think in a day or two.”

  “I found two protein bars in my pocket,” she offered.

  He gave her a one-cornered quirk of his mouth. “I have four. We’ll share.”

  “Well, I wanted to lose a few pounds anyway.”

  “I like your spirit, Andy.”

  She warmed when his voice dropped to a deep, almost velvety sound. “Black humor comes with being in the military.” She pointed to his reddened wrists. “Those look like more than first degree burns.”

  He sat down, leaning against the wall, tipping back his head and closing his eyes as he stretched out his long legs. “The wind blew the Black Hawk into the slope. We crashed on the right side, the pilot’s side.” Grimacing, his voice soft, he rasped, “I couldn’t save him. And our crew chief died on impact. Fire was everywhere. I cut his harness and tried to drag him out, but the fire drove me back.” He opened his eyes and touched one of his blistered ears. “I couldn’t do it. I was choking on the smoke, couldn’t see, and I finally fell back and out the sprung door. I crawled away and made it to safety before the main explosion occurred.” He rubbed his face wearily. “It was a bitch of a mission. If you hadn’t been on station to suppress the Taliban fire, the SEALs wouldn’t have gotten into the brush and escaped.”

  “I couldn’t pull it off,” she offered quietly, giving him a sympathetic look. “Whoever those guys were on the ground? They had armor-piercing rounds. Usually they don’t. But this group did.”

  “Yeah, believe me, when those rounds came tearing into our Hawk, we knew we were in trouble.” He gave her a grateful look. “You tried to save us. I saw how low you flew, taking their gunfire away from aiming at us. You put yourself in the line of fire so we could get away.”

  She sighed and nodded. “It wasn’t good enough. I’m sorry. So? You had only one crew chief on board? Usually there are two.”

  “There were supposed to be,” Dev admitted. And he lifted his chin, holding her gaze. “I guess the only good news is our other crew chief stayed behind because his wife was having a baby and they had her on a video feed.”

  “Thank God,” Andy whispered unsteadily. “At least he didn’t die. And you didn’t either, so that’s the second piece of good news out of all of this, Dev.” She wanted to use his name, and it rolled easily off her tongue. Almost like a prayer. “You saved me, too. I didn’t know where the hell I was, my radio was broken and I knew how much trouble I was in.”

  “Three pieces of good news out of this,” he agreed tiredly. “Look, you need to eat a bit, drink water,” and he handed her a bottle, “and then go to sleep. I’ve got purification tablets to put into our bottles to keep the water in this pool from giving us some parasite. Plus, we’ll refill the bottles tonight before we leave. Water is everything.”

  “Wake me in two hours? I’ll take over the watch.”

  “No, I’ll let you sleep four hours.”

  “Can you stay awake that long?” she asked, opening up her protein bar. She ate half and gave Dev the other half.

  “Fear will keep me awake,” he answered wryly.

  She laughed softly, not wanting the sound to carry. “You’re tough, Mitchell. Really tough.” Her heart expanded when he gave her a little-boy smile, his face lighting up. Most of all, she liked the freckles across his nose and cheeks. Surely of Irish descent? Maybe they’d get time later to talk.

  “I think it’s called a will to live instead of die,” he responded drily, quickly eating the other half of the protein bar. He pulled out the third bottle and drank half of it, then offered her the rest. Andy took it and thanked him.

  “Even though we’re Army and Air Force, we’re getting along pretty good together,” she teased, finishing off that water.

  Dev dropped tablets into the three empty bottles and held them under the small stream coming out of the wall of the cave. “Yeah, we are.” And his eyes sparkled as he gave her an intense look. “I’m just sorry I didn’t meet you under better circumstances.”

  Chapter Two

  Four years later

  June 3

  “Andy, look out! Drone! Three o’clock!”

  There was no time to react. A drone smashed into the side of her Black Hawk Los Angeles Police Department helicopter. It hit with such force, it shattered the drone, the plastic pieces raining down across the cockpit window. Instantly, the helo sagged, the power in one engine suddenly quitting on her.

  Andy didn’t even have time to curse.

  Bob Covington, her copilot, shot his gloved hand on the throttles located above their seats in the overhead, instantly shutting off the fuel line to the lost engine above them.

  They were at three thousand feet, heading for home over the sprawling California city near dusk. Her feet danced on the rudders, her hands tight around the cyclic and collective as the bird sagged downward. They could fly with one engine, but she had no idea if the drone that struck them had sent shrapnel into one engine or both.

  “Where to land?” she demanded, working to keep the Black Hawk steady. They were slowly losing altitude. Luckily, they weren’t over the skyscrapers in central LA, but in a suburb.

&
nbsp; “Open baseball field at six o’clock, Andy. About a mile away.”

  “Roger that.” She banked the helo gently, not wanting to stress the only engine any more than she had to. In the helmet she wore, the visor down to protect her eyes, she heard Bob putting out a Mayday with their helo terminal in the city. He rattled off the GPS and told them a drone had struck very close to the rotor assembly on top of their bird.

  Would they make it down okay?

  Shades of the past came racing back to her as she watched her altimeter continue to unwind. The crash of her A-10 in the mountains of Afghanistan hit her full force. After getting rescued, she’d left the Air Force, wanting something safer. She’d learned to fly a helicopter and was immediately hired by the LA Police Department. She loved the varied routine of a law enforcement officer.

  “We’re set for a hard landing, if need be,” Bob said, his voice tight.

  “Roger that. I see the landing area,” she replied. It was an empty green baseball field, used by the nearby high school, she would bet. Fortunately, it was Sunday and dusk, with no game and no people around. The vibration she normally felt as comforting made her anxious, and she stuffed the feeling deep within her. They were moving lower and lower. She watched for the electric lines and any other flight issues as she guided the limping Hawk toward the field.

  They were twenty feet from landing when the second engine suddenly quit.

  Too late!

  “Brace!” Andy yelled out. They were too low to pull up the nose and catch air to soften the landing.

  This was going to be a nasty, hard landing.

  The helo slammed into the field, nose first. The Plexiglas exploded inward, showering both of them. She was jerked hard, her neck snapping back against the seat. The bird had augured in, the nose buried in two feet of plowed-up dirt. She’d yanked her feet off the pedals just in time. The nose had buckled and part of it caved in an inch from where she’d pulled up her flight boots. If her feet had been on the rudders, she’d be trapped, or they might have been cut off.