“Fleming—” David began, then the plane exploded behind him. He covered the flier’s body with his. Flaming debris fell all around them, but they went untouched. In the sullen glow, David could see the raw fear in the boy’s dark blue eyes. “Fleming, listen to me—”
“God . . . God help . . . me!” Fleming whispered, and David could hear the liquid in his lungs through his gurgling voice.
David’s heart wrenched, but he made his voice sound calm. “Fleming, listen to me. I really don’t know how bad you’re hurt. But I have to ask you this right now. Are you a Christian? Do you know Jesus Christ?”
He swallowed hard, but the result was only more blood seeping from his nose.
David watched him, trying to decipher the dying man’s last breaths.
“No.” The single gasped word was desolate.
“Okay, I can help you. I’m going to pray now, and if you want Jesus to come into your heart and save you, you have to pray it yourself, do you understand? He’ll understand that you can’t talk right now, but He knows your heart, Fleming, do you get it?” David took his right hand in both of his. “If you understand, squeeze my hand.”
“I . . . under—” Fleming broke off into another coughing fit, but managed to squeeze David’s hand. “Help me . . . I’m . . . scared . . .”
David closed his eyes and prayed, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on this boy and ease his pain. God, hear his cry as he confesses that he’s a sinner, and has no hope except from You. Come into his heart as he asks You to do, and fill him with Your holy joy and everlasting peace. Heal him, or take him home, Lord. Thy will be done.”
David paused and opened his eyes. He was surprised to find Deac Fong and Colonel Ben-ammi standing over him quietly, along with a few other men. Then he looked back down at Fleming. The boy was dead.
No longer was his mouth wrenched in pain, but it seemed that there was a ghost of a smile visible through the smeared blood. A figure moved to the other side of Fleming, and David saw a strong, meaty hand reach out and put two fingers to the side of the boy’s neck.
“He’s gone,” Colonel Darkon Ben-ammi told David sadly.
To Ben-ammi’s surprise, David smiled a little. “Yeah, and I know where.”
Ben-ammi eyed him curiously, but merely said, “They’re on the way with a stretcher, Sergeant. Guess there’s no hurry now, though.”
“It’s all right,” David said, gently wiping the boy’s mouth and arranging his broken hands. “It doesn’t matter to him now, for sure.”
If Darkon hadn’t seen what he’d just witnessed with his own eyes, he would have scoffed at anyone trying to tell him about it. He’d watched the young pilot while David had prayed over him. He’d seen the peace come into the shattered face, he’d seen the awful pain and terrible fear disappear as if they’d never been . . . he’d seen this boy die in real peace, without pain.
Darkon Ben-ammi had seen badly injured men die before. He’d never seen them die happy.
Though he’d never mention it to anyone, not even a fellow New Zionist like Vashti, Darkon had always been a little wary— almost afraid—of Christians. They had no ceremony, no formalities. Here they were in the middle of a massive power blackout of unknown proportions, an attack could come at any second, a $2 billion plane had crashed, and David could call on his Jesus to come into the heart of a boy he didn’t even know. How crazy was that?
It’s too connected with supernatural levels, with spiritual things, for an old earth-loving, life-loving soldier like me, Darkon thought. There is only here, and now, and life, and this breath—
And death, of course. This boy’s death.
Where is he now? Exactly where is David Mitchell so sure, so confident, so happy, that this boy is now?
The evidence of David’s faith was as plain as the peace on Fleming’s face. And the evidence of Darkon Ben-ammi’s confusion was, too, plain on his. As he always did, however, he denied it. This was not the place, and now was not the time. It never was.
“Colonel?”
With an effort, Darkon looked up from young Fleming to Deac Fong’s anxiety-filled face.
“The Apache? I mean, we can’t do anything else for him.”
“All right, Lieutenant.” Darkon turned to David and said, “Lieutenant Fong is, how do you say, busting to check on his beloved Apache. Are you coming?”
David slowly shook his head. “I’ll stay with him until the medics get here with a stretcher. Then I’ll be along.”
Darkon patted his shoulder, and then joined Fong in a dead run for the helo yard. Being twenty years older than the hotshot lieutenant, he steadily lost ground in the race, but Darkon knew that the young pilot was as worried about his Apache as he would be about a sick puppy. He checked his watch and was astonished to find that only twenty minutes had passed since the power outage. It seemed as if it had been hours.
The thought of his beloved homeland crossed Darkon’s mind. Was Israel, too, under this smothering carpet of darkness? What about his wife, Shira, and their four children? Were they frightened, were they hurt? The hunger to know threatened to consume him, but of course there was nothing he could do about it. A blackout this severe meant complete communication shutoff from the rest of the world, and there was no telling when power could be restored. Until then . . . well, until then Darkon would send prayers to the God of Abraham for his family, a God in whom he had never pretended to believe. Still, just in case . . .
Just keep them safe for me, God. If You will do this for me, I promise to learn more about You from David. Darkon shook his head in chagrin as he puffed and jogged along. That sounded weak even to him, and he doubted that Yahweh made deals like that. So be it . . .that is my plea.
Signs that the base was taking on some form of order were evidenced by the beefy MP who stopped him at the gate of the helo yard. He looked at Darkon’s bronzed mideastern features suspiciously, then raised a wicked-looking double-edged bayonet. “What’s your business, sir?”
Darkon raised his hands to signify innocence, saying, “I have papers right here in my pocket—”
“Corporal!” Deac Fong shouted, already halfway to his Apache. “He’s on my team, let him through!”
With another uncertain glance at Darkon, the MP stepped aside. Deac waited for Darkon, and together they raced to their bird. Deac automatically hit the power switch to activate the door, and when it didn’t open he slammed it angrily with his fist.
“Lieutenant . . . ,” Darkon began, but he was interrupted by a dapper captain who was passing by, his face sorrowful.
“Forget about it, Lieutenant. They’re all dead,” the captain said sadly.
Deac looked at the man, but acted as if he didn’t hear. He knelt down under the door and felt around for the manual override catch.
“Did you hear me, Lieutenant?” the captain asked in irritation. He was a slender man, with a thin mustache.
“H-U-A, Captain,” Deac confirmed, and his face lit up when he found the catch and activated it.
“Then what are you doing? I just told you—”
Deac stood and put his hand on the door latch. “You don’t mind if I check her myself, do you, Captain?” Though Deac was short and wiry, his demeanor had somehow turned dangerous.
The captain stiffened and took a step toward Deac. “Now, listen here, Lieutenant,” he began, but then he stopped. The anger slowly melted from his face, and he sighed. “Never mind. Carry on, son. I know just how you feel.” He turned sharply on his heel and marched away.
Deac wasted no time in lifting the door and stepping inside. Ben-ammi watched, fascinated, as Deac reached up and flicked some switches, then put his hand over the dark ignition keypad. “Come on, princess,” Deac crooned. “C’mon, baby girl. You’ve never let me down, never . . .”
Darkon was amazed that Deacon Fong could even think there was hope in starting the Apache. Hadn’t he seen what was going on?
Deac closed his eyes, sucked in his lower lip, and lovingly punched
in the ignition code numbers. He hesitated with his finger over the Power Up button, and Darkon could clearly see the hope and anticipation in his normally impassive Oriental features. He pressed the button. When nothing happened, he quickly entered the code and pressed the button again. Then once more. And again.
Watching Deac’s face became painful even for a hardened soldier like Colonel Ben-ammi of the Israeli air force. Besides that, he was a member of Fire Team Eclipse, and this was one of his men. Deac’s smooth forehead accordioned, his eyes squeezed shut even tighter, and the corners of his mouth sagged. “Lieutenant,” Darkon said softly. Deac’s fingers were still racing over the keypad, performing the ignition start-up over and over again. Darkon lightly laid his rough hand over Deac’s fine, sensitive one. “Lieutenant, she’s not going to start.”
Deac snatched his arm out from under Darkon’s hand and slowly leaned forward until his forehead rested against the dead instrument panel. Shocked, Darkon thought he was actually going to cry. “It’s not right,” Deac whispered. “My poor princess, my sweet baby, it’s not right.”
Now Darkon became a little uncomfortable. The pilot was grieving as if he’d lost a comrade or a loved one—he was actually talking to the helo. With a start, Darkon realized that Fong was talking to a loved one. He’d seen the way the Apache performed in Deac’s capable and, yes, loving hands over the months. He’d seen the pure joy on the helo pilot’s face when he got the waspish and agile helicopter to perform a particularly dashing maneuver. Right or wrong, Lieutenant Deacon Fong was in love with the Apache.
Darkon suddenly remembered when he was Deac’s age and considered himself the hottest pilot to graduate from the Israeli ranks. He could still remember his first fixed wing, a British P-12 Centaur. Aircraft were indeed like people, in that they all possessed little quirks here and there. The Centaur had been unusually touchy on banking right, and much more sluggish on the left. There was absolutely no logical or mechanical reason for the plane’s peculiarities, and Darkon doubted that any other pilot would notice it, but it did have those personality traits. And it was, after all, his plane, and Darkon had come to understand her as he had his own wife.
A wife, yes, he reflected as he watched Deac lightly slide his fingers over the dark instrument panel. That is how much this Apache means to Deac. Strange, but true.
Darkon’s meditations were again interrupted, because that’s when the shooting started.
Sergeant Rio Valdosta had been on his forty-seventh push-up when the lights went out. He jumped to his feet at once and reached for his TechStar MK-20 laser rifle he’d left leaning against his bed after cleaning it. The barracks room he shared with David Mitchell had no windows, but even in the pitch blackness he found the door and opened it.
The barracks complex that Fire Team Eclipse occupied housed seventy-five men, most of whom were tech-heads. Rio didn’t think they were a bad bunch. They were just wimps. He supposed that in some way their jobs were important, but they and their little chores didn’t concern him. The only entity that mattered was his own fire team. Some of the tech-heads came out of their rooms and naturally drifted toward him in the hallway, where dim starlight came from a few skylights spaced at intervals along the ceiling.
“What’s going on, Rio?” a sergeant named Masters asked.
“Hey, you’re the tech-head, you tell me.”
“I’m a tactical systems engineer,” Masters responded in an offended tone.
“Whatever. With a fancy title like that, seems like you ought to be telling me how to turn the lights back on.” Rio heard some shouting outside and ran to the door, with the others following in a bunch like bewildered sheep.
When they’d stepped outside, they all stared in wonder.
“Whoa!” Masters said. “I thought it was just our barracks. It looks like the whole complex is out.”
“That’s not possible, is it?” another man asked.
Masters answered smartly, “No. Guess it’s a figment of our imaginations.”
Rio’s thoughts turned to his fire team, scattered who-knew-where around the quadrant. If the whole base is down, then . . .
“We’re nekkid, ladies,” he told the others.
“Huh? What do you mean?” Masters blustered.
“I mean no radar, no satellite protection, no weapons . . .” Rio stopped, and with a sinking feeling looked down at his TechStar rifle. Flipping off the safety, he raised the rifle into the air and pulled the trigger. No laser bolt, no recoil. He engaged the laser sight, but no thin red line shot up into the sky.
A group of grunts trotted past them and noticed what Rio had done. They stopped as one, and everyone looked at the TechStar in Rio’s hands with awe.
“It doesn’t work?” one of the grunts asked in disbelief.
“’Pears not,” Rio answered grimly. “Where did you guys come from?”
“The airstrip.Nothing works—no tracking grids on the artillery, no Scorpions, even the Vees won’t fire up. Now the TechStars don’t work?”
“Were there any officers where you were?” Rio asked.
They looked at one another. One said tentatively, “I think I saw a colonel standing around and scratching his head.”
Masters looked warily around the base and said, “We could be attacked at any time. What do we do, throw rocks?”
Rio was thinking. Everything they had was useless because it all depended on electricity and power cells. What didn’t? Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “PSA’s. Any of you guys got PSA’s?”
The grunts and techies looked blank. “What’s a PSA?”
“Personal Side Arm, dummies. You know, guns? The little ones? The ones they give you when you get out of basic?”
“Oh, I forgot about that,” the apparent leader of grunts finally answered. “Nah, I didn’t take one. Why take a clunky old 9 mm when we had a TechStar?”
Rio was stupefied. “You mean they were going to give you a gun—for free!—and you turned it down?”
Upon completion of basic training, recruits were offered the old 9 mm laser-sighted pistol as a backup in case the TechStar malfunctioned. Captain Slaughter had insisted that every member of his fire team receive full training on the weapon. “You just never know,” had been his simple explanation. He even had his grandfather’s old Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun he’d let Rio fire a few times. Rio Valdosta, a true modern-day Paladin, had loved it.
Rio stuttered in disbelief, “You mean to tell me not one of you dummies has a nine-mil?”
“I think I do,” one of the grunts finally said, and eventually one or two more thought they might have kept the old guns, if they could just remember where they’d put them.
“Okay, you girls that are armed, go fetch your guns and bring ’em out here to me. I know you don’t know how to shoot ’em, so I’ll shoot one or two of them to show you. At least the nine-mils should still work.” With that, he dashed off to his own room and rummaged around in his foot locker, donning his NVG’s and finding the nine in the bottom, gleaming dully. Pulling back the slide and injecting a round in the chamber, Rio whispered, “I sure hope you work, old man.”
Outside, the tech-heads stared at him and the weapon with trepidation. “I’ve never fired one of those antiques,” Masters sniffed. “They’re just for parade dress, you know.”
“Too bad for you, you don’t know what you’re missing,” Rio said, grinning. To the pistol, he whispered, “Come on, baby,” and raised it in the air. The explosion caused all of the tech-heads to jump in fear. “It works!” Rio cried, then fired off another round out of pure joy. More grunts emerged from their barracks and began testing their nines. A bullet whizzed by Rio’s head, way too close. “Hey, stupid, watch where you’re aiming!”
One of the grunts, a youngster with a shaved head and a goofy grin, said, “Sorry, Sarge. I’m used to having the laser sight. How are we supposed to aim these things?”
“Just point and shoot but not at human targets, you idiots!
T
he bullet goes in the direction the barrel’s pointed, you know! If you can’t even hit the sky with it, give it up!”
“Hey, Rio,” Masters called, “you got any more of those things?”
Rio remembered the other weapons his team had, but said, “What’s the matter, Masters? Your fancy TechStar not good enough for you now?”
After a little more satisfactory shooting, and taunting the tech-heads who didn’t have weapons, Rio slipped away from the group and returned to his room. Rummaging through David’s footlocker, he found his nine and pushed both pistols into his belt. Each team member had been issued three boxes of shells, so Rio grabbed his field pack and stuffed the boxes inside.
In Captain Slaughter’s room, he found his nine, pocketed it, and gingerly lifted the shotgun out of the footlocker. “Gotta be careful with this thing,” he told himself, “I know what kind of damage you can do, Mr. Remington.” He also found three bandoliers of shotgun shells, each loop filled with a brass-based load. “Oh, yeah!” he breathed, stringing the bandoliers over his neck and shoulder and placing the 9 mm shells in the backpack.
Rio found Ric Darmstedt’s and Deac Fong’s pistols and stuck them in his belt, too. After gathering the boxes of shells, he immediately began thinking of where to find more ammunition. After all, in a weird situation like this you could never have too many bullets. “Quartermasters, quartermasters, o’ course,” he muttered, and, weighted down with his distinct burdens, he went back outside.
“Rio?” Captain Slaughter called from his right just as he burst through the door.
“Captain, sir!” Rio did stop in his headlong run long enough to salute snappily.
Con Slaughter raked his gaze up and down his sergeant, taking in the beltline crowded with the handles of nine millimeters, the three bandoliers of shotgun shells, the bulging backpack, and the Remington itself. “Planning on starting your own little war, Rio?”
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 29