by Cindy Dees
“Ahh. You’re in luck. That affliction falls within my limited medical expertise. I’ll be right back.” He crawled away and returned in a few moments with a canteen and four white pills. “Take these.”
“What are they?”
“Muscle relaxants and painkillers.”
“They won’t knock me out, will they?”
“No. We need to be alert in the field.”
She took the pills and shuddered away the bitter taste. “So. The truth comes out! You guys aren’t superheroes after all. You use painkillers to keep you going!”
Tom grinned at her. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Your secret’s safe with me, Clark.”
“Thanks, Lois. Those pills should hit in about two minutes.”
“Actually, now that you mention it, I’m already starting to feel better.”
Tom repositioned himself at her feet and reached for one of her calves. “This’ll help, too.”
He grasped her leg and rubbed her calf with a circular motion. Gradually he built up the pressure until it was almost, but not quite, painful. “A massage helps break up the lactic acid buildup in the muscles,” he commented.
Warmth flowed outward from his hands. It started as relief from pain, but evolved into exquisite pleasure. “That feels wonderful. How long did you say your men were going to be gone?”
“Not that long, I’m afraid.”
“Drat.”
Silence stretched out between them as Tom worked his way all the way up her right leg and then started on her left foot. Apparently his truce was progressing rapidly toward a full-blown peace treaty. She wished she could talk to him about it, but it would have to wait until they reached safety. She wasn’t about to draw his attention away from keeping them alive.
“What’s the plan, Tom?”
He crawled up to her side. “For you to roll over so I can work on your back.” His hands settled on her shoulders and began to work their magic. He commented, “The guys are out picking spots to set explosives tonight. We’ll wait until almost daybreak tomorrow and light the place up.”
“Why wait so long?”
“People are the most tired between four and five in the morning. It’ll create the most confusion to do it then.”
Talk about confusion. Tom’s hands were doing things to her that had nothing to do with sore muscles. Liquid heat was building low in her belly and spiraling outward at an alarming rate.
There was a slight rustling at the edge of the netting, and Tom whirled away from her, a pistol suddenly in his hand.
Tex poked his head into the tent. “Hi, honey. I’m home.”
“Shut up, Tex,” Tom growled.
Tex grinned and crawled inside. He shrugged out of a ghillie suit made of the same material their tent was. He picked grass out of his hair and boots.
“So, how’s it looking?” Tom asked.
“It’s gonna be a right pretty fireworks show.”
AND IT WAS.
Tom woke her up about a half hour before the charges were set to detonate. Tom’s men had peppered the airport with grenades, incendiaries, booby traps, and C-4 explosives.
When the first flash went, they were perched at the top of the embankment and ready to move. Moments later a secondary explosion shook the ground as a million-gallon fuel storage tank went up in flames.
“Too bad it was almost empty,” Howdy commented blandly.
Annie thought the white-orange mushroom cloud rising into the night sky was spectacular enough. And it had the desired effect. Sirens went off, and fire trucks careened across the runways. Silhouettes of men scurried back and forth, black specks against the roaring flames of the fires.
A dozen more explosions went off, and the chaos was complete. Annie wriggled through the hole in the hurricane fence around the runways that the guys had cut earlier. She jumped to her feet and took off running after Tom’s tall shape.
If she got out of this nightmare alive, she was never going to run another step as long as she lived. Doggedly she pressed on. They hugged the far side of the runway away from the ramp where the fuel tank and several airplanes were on fire.
Shells started exploding randomly. Apparently one of the burning airplanes had been loaded with ammunition. Streaks of light zipped every which way, and more airplanes caught on fire.
Annie was so engrossed in watching the show and running at the same time that she all but tripped over Tom, who was stretched out on the ground in front of her. He grabbed her leg and yanked her to the ground.
Now what?
“Stay flat,” he hissed.
She was about to ask why, when a beam of cruelly bright light passed over their heads.
Mac swore. “Dammit! The tower’s got a floodlight. Should I take it out?”
“No!” Tom answered sharply. “You’d have to wait until it was pointed at us to hit it, and then they’d know there were snipers out here and what direction we were shooting from.”
Annie risked a glance around. They were about three-quarters of the way down the runway. A bunch of airplanes were parked directly across from them.
“Get out the nets,” Tom ordered.
Annie didn’t know much about this kind of work, but this couldn’t be good. Tom expected them to hunker down right out here in the open.
This time the nets lay directly on top of their bodies. There was no room to maneuver.
Tom murmured from beside her, “Don’t move unless you absolutely have to, Annie. If you have to scratch your nose, move at the speed of a snail. Literally. Quick movements are easy for the enemy to spot.”
The ground was cold, and before long, dew had seeped into her clothing, chilling her through. Her muscles cramped with inactivity, and she was downright miserable in a matter of minutes. To make matters worse, the sun was rising, and it was getting light out. Black smoke billowed from the fires, and it was torture trying to suppress the coughing fits a lungful of it caused.
Annie prayed for their safety and tried to breathe between gusts of smoke. The morning warmed up around them, and her damp chill was replaced by steamy, hot discomfort.
They’d been immobile for several hours when, out of the clear blue, something painfully obvious dawned on her. It looked for all the world like a Huey helicopter was parked not too far from their position. “Tom, do you have a pair of binoculars?” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
“I need them.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m serious.”
He sounded dubious. “This’ll take a while.”
She waited impatiently until he eased the binoculars out of a pouch and over to her. The action took a good two minutes to complete. She mimicked his extreme slow-motion movement and inched the binoculars up to her face. She focused the lenses and sure enough, it was a Huey.
She tried to glimpse the instrument panel, but couldn’t get a clean look at the whole console. But what she saw looked reasonably familiar.
“What’s up, Annie?” Tom murmured into his throat mike.
“There’s a Huey helicopter over there. I know how to fly it.”
“And?”
“Why don’t we go take it and fly out of here?”
“Are you out of your mind?” he demanded.
Tex interjected. “Yeah, I see it from here. It’s only about a hundred feet beyond the runway. That’s about four hundred feet from our position.”
“It would be way too dangerous.”
Annie argued, “If we can get into that bird unseen, I ought to be able to fly it out of the airport.”
The other team members jumped into the discussion. Two things emerged from the whispered argument. One, they couldn’t stay here for long or they’d be discovered, and two, Annie’s idea was as good as anything else they could think of.
With a heavy sigh Tom asked, “Annie, are you sure you can fly that helicopter? We’re dead meat if we climb into it and you can’t start it.”
And there it was. The moment Tom had been talking about. Could he believe her now or not? Annie listened in agony as the silence stretched out. She could practically hear Tom wrestling with the decision in his head.
“I know what I’m doing, Tom. And I’m telling you the God’s honest truth. My neck depends on this one as much as yours does.”
Of course, she was assuming the helicopter wasn’t broken or out of gas or otherwise unflyable.
The silence lasted a few more seconds. Tom asked, “Howdy, do we have enough ammo to blow up some planes and create another diversion?”
“Yeah. One more diversion. But that’s it.”
“Then pick your target wisely,” was Tom’s only reply.
The sniper slithered off into the grass, as stealthy as a snake.
Tom’s voice interrupted her amazement at Howdy’s silent departure. “Annie, how much time are you going to need in the seat before you can get off the ground?”
She reviewed the engine start procedures in her head, weeding out the unessential preflight checks. “Ninety seconds.”
“We ought to be able to hold them off for that long. Okay here’s the plan….”
Annie couldn’t believe they were actually going to do this. They’d just laid all of their lives in her hands. What in the heck had she been thinking to volunteer for this crazy stunt? But before she could call the whole thing off, an explosion rocked the ground. She risked lifting her head to see what had happened.
Howdy had picked his diversion well. He’d shot a grenade down the intake of a fully fueled fighter jet. Flaming JP-4 fuel spewed all over the far end of the ramp, and the plane’s ammunition was starting to ignite and fire off in random directions. Annie took off running.
It was arguably the fastest four-hundred-foot sprint ever recorded by a woman. She crouched down beside the Huey’s door and reached up to open the latch. It was locked.
Oh, God.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tom skidded to a halt beside her. He took up a crouching stance and started firing.
“Let’s go,” he urged between bursts of gunfire.
What was she going to do now?
The SIG-Sauer pistol. Fumbling at her belt, she pulled the gun out. She shot out the door latch and all but cried in relief as the door swung open. She leaped into the seat and took a fast look around the cockpit. Everything critical to flight was in relatively the same place she was used to. She started flipping switches as fast as her hands would go.
Ping. Ping, ping.
She ducked.
A spray of bullets flew into the cockpit, piercing the tempered glass windshield on the copilot’s side, leaving three small holes with spider cracks spreading outward in jagged radials.
She sat upright again and flew through the engine start sequence. The overhead rotor started to turn sluggishly in an arc overhead. “Hurry, hurry,” she begged the helicopter.
The back door slid open. She reached for the pistol at her belt. It was Dutch and Mac.
The two men stood in the rear door of the Huey and took turns firing while the other reloaded. They were laying down a veritable curtain of lead. At that rate, their ammunition wouldn’t last long.
But then, if her plan failed they wouldn’t have long, anyway. Thirty seconds were left of the ninety that Tom had promised her.
She only prayed there was a reasonable amount of fuel in the Huey’s tanks.
Dutch and Mac fell back into the helicopter’s interior, and Doc and Tex took their places in the door.
The RPMs started winding up on the engine, and the tail rotor began to hum. The fuel gauge wound up. A full tank, thank goodness.
Howdy materialized in the doorway.
Where was Tom? She wasn’t leaving without him. She looked out her door, and he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
The overhead rotor revved up to full speed, and she flipped on the radios and remaining navigation equipment. None of it would be properly aligned, but she could glean enough information to get them north to the ocean.
“Tom!” she called into her throat mike. “Come on! Let’s get out of here!”
She started violently when the copilot’s door slammed open. The dark-skinned face and red beret of a rebel soldier appeared, along with the muzzle of his rifle. Hate glinted in his eyes, and Annie stared into the face of Death.
He was going to shoot her, and nobody else would be able to fly this bird out of here. The whole team was going to die because she went and got herself killed. And then there was a flash of steel under the soldier’s chin. A fountain of blood sprayed all over the inside of the cockpit. Its warm wetness splashed her face and she tasted blood.
The soldier’s body fell aside, and Tom stood in his place. He leaped into the cockpit, shouting, “Let’s go!”
Annie was pulling back on the collective before he even closed his door.
“Strap in,” she ordered. “And close that door back there, guys. This is gonna get rough, and I don’t want to dump any of you out.”
Her own door wouldn’t latch, but she’d taken a precious few seconds to buckle herself in already.
Ping, ping.
Bullets ripped through the floor.
Annie slammed the throttle forward, and the helicopter picked up speed. Its tail tilted up sharply as she flung the craft forward, barely clearing the airplanes below her. The ground skimmed past in a dizzying blur as the helicopter’s engine screamed. She shoved the throttles all the way to the forward stop, not caring if she oversped the engine.
The airport fell behind in a matter of seconds, and she yanked up hard to clear a treeline that rushed toward them at 150 miles per hour.
“God, Annie, that was close,” Tom gasped as the trees flew past barely beneath their feet.
“I know how to fly, Tom.”
He leaned back in the seat. “Thank God.”
“Where to?”
“North. The U.S.S. Independence has pulled within twenty miles or so of shore. I don’t know exactly where, but we ought to be able to find an aircraft carrier, don’t you think?”
Annie banked the helicopter to the left and started a 180-degree turn that carried them well wide of the airport and toward safety. She eased the throttles back. “I’ll crank up the radios and get the Navy to vector us in.”
She didn’t know the standard Navy frequencies, so she tuned the VHF radio to a general emergency frequency. Chatter abruptly filled the cockpit. It was American voices. Panicked ones. Yelling about their position being overrun by rebels. Screaming for help.
Tom picked up the microphone. “Unknown rider, unknown rider, identify yourself. This is Major Tom Foley of the United States Air Force.”
“This is U.S. Marine Squad Delta Tango. We’re getting the snot shot out of us! We’re outgunned and outnumbered ten to one.”
Annie gasped. “That’s the marine detachment at the American Embassy!”
“Say your location, Delta Tango,” Tom ordered tersely.
“We’re on the roof of the American embassy in St. George. We’ve got some sandbags and furniture up here for cover, but they’re about to come through the emergency hatch on to the roof. We’re done once they get up here.”
Annie looked over at Tom.
“How long?” he asked.
She glanced outside for reference points to orient herself. “Five, maybe six minutes, at top speed.”
“Firewall it.”
Annie shoved the throttle all the way forward again. She banked hard back in the direction they’d just come from and flew like a bat out of hell across the treetops.
Tom transmitted to the Marine, “We’ll be at your position in five minutes. Conserve your ammo and hang on.”
The voice responded, “If you don’t mind my asking, just who in the hell are you, sir?”
“Spec Ops. We’ll be coming in on a Gavronese Army painted Huey…” He released the mike button. “What’s the tail number, Annie?”
“Four Five November Yankee.”
“…on a Gavronese helicopter, tail number Four Five November Yankee,” Tom finished.
“Roger.”
Tom keyed his throat mike to his men in the back. “You guys copy what’s up?”
“Yes, sir,” Tex answered. “We’re loading up. There’s a nice little fifty-caliber machine gun back here with a crate of clips, compliments of the Gavronese Army.”
Annie breathed a sigh of relief at that news. Tom and his men had to be getting way low on ammunition after the gun battle back at the airport.
Tom looked over at her. “Have you ever practiced combat maneuvers in one of these things?”
“I’m familiar with the basic idea. Run parallel to the threat so the gunner can do his thing out the side door. Any of your guys ever work out of a helicopter with a machine gun?”
“Standard issue training for us.”
“I sure am glad you guys are on my side.”
“Let’s go rescue us some Marines.”
She streaked across St. George, painfully aware that every second was crucial. She took more than a few risks, but she got there in five minutes and ten seconds.
The embassy was hard to miss. As they neared the building, a column of black smoke rose from the residence building next door.
“The bastards are trying to burn the Marines out,” Tom growled.
“The main building’s stone. They’ll have a hard time lighting it up,” Annie replied.
“Excellent.” Tom voice was steady, reassuring. “Here we go, guys. Get the fifty-cal ready.”
The back door slid open, and Howdy swung out the door in a gunner’s harness.
“Bank it up,” Tom directed her.
Annie slowed the craft and banked toward her open door, giving Howdy the best possible angle to shoot from. The helicopter shuddered as he loosed a barrage of lead at the rebels surrounding the embassy building.
Initially the soldiers scattered and ran every which way, unsure of where the hail of bullets was coming from. She completed a circle around the building.
“Better get over the roof, Annie. They’ll start shooting back any second,” Tom directed.