by Clay Martin
“Get on, it’s time to go. Now!” Nick’s voice cut across the radio.
I yelled into my headset to get above the noise of the firefight. “Everyone on board. I’ll give him the go once I’m sure.”
Gabe fired a last RPG and took off. Paul, John, and the others peeled out of position and up the ramp while Jim hammered away with the 50. His belt ran empty and I grabbed him by the pant leg.
“You next. Time to go.”
Hands moving at an inhuman speed, he continued loading a fresh can into the gun. Even in that moment of chaos, he looked like a practiced tailor at work. “Someone has to cover the take off. We both know it. Not a chance in hell if I don’t.”
“Fuck that, Jim. Get on the goddamn plane. We are getting out of here. All of us,” I said back, but I knew he was right. I also understood that fatalistic look on his face. He was set, and nothing was going to change that.
As he hammered the feed tray cover closed and racked the bolt, he said his final piece. I can still hear him like a whisper in my ear.” My best friends are already in the Ramadi Ghost Brigade. I’m going to join them tonight.”
All further conversation would have been lost in the muzzle blast of the 50 cal, stitching up the night with a furious thunder. As I ran up the ramp, I cast him one last glance. Outlined in the flash of high velocity death, he looked like a demon incarnate. He just saved all of our lives.
“GO! GO! GO!” I yelled at Nick, and felt the aircraft lurch forward. The brakes had been barely holding us in place, and we were screaming down the runway. Rounds ripped across the fuselage, tearing basketball sized holes in the planes skin, but we didn’t slow down. I was on all fours scrambling forward as the nose tilted up, and felt the familiar wobble as the plane broke free of the ground.
Nick put us into a hard bank as pulled away from the Earth and the Hell we had known for the past few weeks.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I let out a triumphant yell as we leveled off, picked up by everyone inside. Being in the air was a huge relief, but we were a long way from out of the woods. Back on my radio, I started issuing orders.
“Scott, confirm head count.” Not that I could do anything about it if we left someone, but better to know now.
“Willie, damage assessment. Get the Air Force guys checking.” Not a lot to do about that either, but we needed to know.
“Frank, Steve, anyone hit?” It wasn’t actually uncommon to miss a gunshot in the heat of the moment, and best to have the medics checking. And then my world started to unravel.
I opened the cockpit door, intent on congratulating Nick on a job well done. As soon as I looked at him, I knew we were in trouble. His face was mashed into a mask of pain, one hand on the yoke, the other holding his chest. I could smell the blood, which told me there was going to be a lot of it.
“Nick, you hit?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“On take-off,” he choked out. “Take the other seat.”
Fuck my life. Few things scared me more than a fiery death by plane crash, and I knew less about flying than I did about the inside of Ms. January’s panty drawer. As I strapped into the co-pilot chair, I hit the radio.
“Frank, Steve, cockpit, ASAP.”
They busted in the door, and without a word understood what was wrong. Frank put together the cascade of problems before us fastest.
“Derek, can you fly?” he asked, already ripping open his med bag.
“Not a bit,” I retorted, fingers dancing on the edges of the yoke. Nick was still in control, but my hands were poised to take over in a split second. Not that I would know what to do then, but at least I would have something to hang onto as we lawn darted into the Earth at the speed of gravity.
Steve was looking over Nick with a blue lens flashlight, so as not blind him, while Nick continued flying the plane. Steve and Frank stepped back into the hallway to confer. It didn’t sound good, the bits I picked up in between imagining our burned out wreckage on the desert sand. Eventually they came back with a prognosis.
“Tension hemothorax, and likely some other bad shit.” Steve announced.
“English please. This isn’t the time for a bed side manner,” I shot back.
“Big round, lots of damage, and his chest cavity is filling up with blood,” Frank translated. Nick was turning whiter, whether from the assessment or blood loss, I didn’t know.
“Can you patch him up?” I inquired. Special Forces Medics are miracle workers, but I wasn’t sure exactly how far that extended into the present situation.
“Yes, but this is bad. Real bad. At the very least, he needs a chest tube. And at worst, we need to actually crack his chest to find the bleeder.” Steve said slowly. Making sure we understood.
I have been present for a couple of chest tubes, and it is about the least fun thing imaginable. I counted myself very fortunate I was just handing over instruments, and certainly wasn’t on the receiving end. In grunt speak, basically the procedure is this. First, they find a gap between your ribs, preferably a large one. Then they cut a hole in it, all the way into your chest cavity. Then, with a set of hemostats that look like needle nosed pliers, they force a big assed drain tube into that hole, sinking it about 6 inches deep. All in all, it looks like a very slow stab wound taking place. I asked a question I was pretty sure I already had the answer for.
“Can you do that while he is flying?”
“Not a fucking chance. I don’t care how tough you are Nick. Nobody can take that without serious narcs on board, much less keep a plane in the air while it happens,” Frank responded.
We were all quiet a moment, while Nick processed the information.
“How long would I be down?”
Steve ran some calculus in his head, came back with a less than stellar conclusion. “We have no way to regulate that. Enough drugs to make it possible, plus the trauma of the procedure, no idea. Hours at best, provided we don’t kill you in the process.”
Nick thought for a long moment, and resigned himself to his fate. “Then not now. The bird is shot full of holes, which means we can’t go about 12,000 feet or we all pass out from oxygen deprivation. We can’t pressurize. And the sun is going to be up any minute, which means we are sitting ducks above 300 feet. Iraq, Syria, and Jordan all probably still have air defenses. Nap of the Earth is the only way through, or we get shot down for certain. Also, I have to teach somebody how to fly this plane, or else we aren’t going to make it anyway. So what are the other options?”
I saw an orange glow on the horizon, he was right about the sun. I had lost track of time in all the excitement. Frank and Steve hosted another conference in the hallway, and came back with a compromise.
“Outside of the chest tube, alternatives are pretty slim,” Frank began. “We can patch up the leaks on the outside, but that doesn’t actually do much. With air in your chest, we could fix this pretty easy with a needle decompression. With blood, it is a lot harder obviously. The longer it sets, the worse it is going to get, until eventually you bleed out, or it collapses your lungs. So the only real solution is to keep you full of blood, and hope you last long enough to get Derrick spun up. Then, we have to crack you open and scrape the congealed mess off your chest walls, fix the bleeder, and hope we can put you back together.”
Well, that was a rain cloud on the picnic. Nick confirmed that he was sure, it was the only way. I needed five minutes to assess the rest of the situation, so Frank took my seat while I went to the rear of the plane to find Willie and Scott.
Willie was struggling, holding a section of the black rubber fuel bilvet off the floor while an Air Force kid crawled around on the floor below him. Sweat was pouring off his trembling forearms, while John pressed with his legs against another section. Scott was taping up the holes in the walls as best he could, an insane task with 150 mile per hour wind pouring through. I noticed an unquestionable odor of
jet fuel in the air. The Air Force kid hopped up, and Willie and John collapsed in a heap. Noticing me, Willie, Scott, and Paul converged on my position. Paul was livid.
“We left Jim. What the fuck happened?” he yelled.
“We didn’t leave Jim. He left us. Refused to board. And we wouldn’t have made it without him,” I yelled back.
That seemed to take the fire out of his eyes, which is what I needed for the moment. It must’ve been fitting for Jim’s personality, because Paul didn’t question me again.
“What else is wrong? Because I have a shot up pilot flying this heap, I need you to make it quick.”
“Everyone else is accounted for,” Scott answered, for which I was at least grateful. I could live with Jim. He made his choice. At least we didn’t abandon anyone.
“Multiple holes in the fuselage, obviously. A couple hydraulic leaks that the Airmen assure me are minor. One of them is figuring out how to fill them as we speak. Couple of nice holes in the fuel bladder. Some we have contained, some we can’t find. Still leaking out the bottom by the look of it.” Willie finished.
“No smoking then I suppose,” I said back to Willie. “Keep looking; I’ll ask Nick to figure out the loss rate. He is hit bad. He’s teaching me to fly this heap, which tells you we are in deep shit. Do your best, and keep the parachutes handy. I have no idea if we can even keep this heap in the air.”
With that, I turned and headed back to the cockpit. Frank and I exchanged seats, but he stayed close to monitor Nick. And pick up anything I missed from flight lessons. This was going to be drinking from a fire hose, so two brains were better than one. As the sun lit the sky, Nick put us into a steep dive. “Hang on to your asses girls, here we go....”
Nap of the Earth is a terrifying flight on the best of days, much less with a pilot leaking blood in an airframe you both know he is unfamiliar with. The idea is to stay close to the ground, to limit your exposure to ground fire. While you are a lot closer to that ground fire, they have less of a window to hit you. It also reduces your radar signature to near zero, with the side effect of potentially taking your wings off in the trees. I flew into the invasion this way, and my butthole stayed puckered for the next week. Compared to that experience, I am pretty confident I could have turned coal into diamonds using only the power of my sphincter during Nick’s wild ride.
For the next few hours, we flew at max speed straight at sand dunes and palm trees. The effect was a lot like a never ending roller coaster that has gone off the rails. Just when I was sure we would hit a terrain feature, Nick would jerk the nose up, following the contour of the ground, then down the other side. Considering neither of us had a clue what was on the other side, it was all instinct and reflex from Nick. Considering the g forces pushing us around, he was also clearly one tough son of a bitch. That must’ve hurt like hell with shards of rib poking out.
Crossing over the Zargos Mountains into Syria, I saw a shepherd so close outside my window I could’ve high fived him. We took a little sporadic fire near the top, but nothing even close. Just a friendly reminder of what the world looked like now. Nick zig zagged us around population centers, and finally we popped out over the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean. A few miles off the coast, Nick pulled us back up to 9000 feet. He looked relieved, even in his banged up state. He relaxed in his seat, wincing from the pain in his side. He had been so focused he must’ve forgotten about it. No one had spoken a word since he put us into a dive back over Iraq.
“Alright, lesson one...” he began. I wished I had a note pad.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Over the water, you could almost forget how desperate a situation we had been in. Still were, if you had any sense. I had a white knuckle grip on the yoke in the co-pilot seat, Frank having taken Nick’s. Once I had proven to Nick I wouldn’t immediately crash, he had given me the 6 minute abs version of flight school. He all but slapped my hands when I tried to turn the plane like a car, and gave me a rudimentary understanding of the rudder pedals. Then he passed out. I was flying ugly, but dammit, I was flying.
Frank and Steve pulled him out of his seat and took him in the back to attempt the chest tube. With the low supply level of materials in their aid bags though, it was a lost cause. He was too far gone, and nothing they did could tip him back to the land of the living. Thirty minutes later, Frank was in the pilot seat. Nick had sacrificed himself to give us a shot. Now it was up to me and Frank to insure that wasn’t in vain.
Neither of us had a clue what we were doing, but somehow we stayed airborne. We were burning a lot of fuel by flying at low altitude, but we looked like we would make it. A real pilot would have flown north to the narrow part of the Earth, and then south to the destination. Shorter that way. But I had zero confidence in our ability to pull that off. It made for a longer flight, but we were straight like an arrow. Or straight like a drunk arrow, close enough.
We couldn’t figure out the planes navigations system, so we improvised. There we were, flying a multimillion dollar airframe, with a Garmin GPS taped to the dash. Between that, the compass, and the altimeter, I was pretty confident we could find North America. Eventually.
The darkness over the Atlantic was horrifying. I could see stars on the horizon, but all else was inky blackness. No matter what your brain tells you about being surrounded by water, the imagination conjures mountains on the horizon. After my third emergency pull up, Frank took the yoke for a while. Which left me to imagine us trying to escape a watery grave if our altimeter was lying. I spent many stressful hours with my eyes glued to the gauges, warily searching for any deficiency.
Still, we had it better up front than the guys in the back. As night set in over the ocean, the temperature dropped drastically. They were huddled up near the cockpit fuselage, using every scrap of insulation that wasn’t tied down. None of us had thought to pack sweaters for this adventure.
When the GPS said we were approaching the East Coast near South Carolina, I made the announcement to the crew. Everyone crammed around windows and into the cockpit to see. It was like nothing we had ever witnessed. Instead of a sea of light, like the Eastern Seaboard usually represents, only scattered pockets shone. Pulling up to 11,000 feet only gave us the edge of a forest fire raging to the South. This was wrong, way wrong. On we flew, toward what I hoped was a solid drop zone.
Three hours outside of the DZ, Scott started his HALO drop for dummies course, for all the non-HALO guys in the crew. At least all of us had jumped some kind of parachute, the Air Force crew was getting a baptism by fire. At what I calculated to be the target area, I put plane into a huge circle pattern. Scott and Willie ensured everyone was rigged up, then gave me an all clear. I kept circling as long as we had fuel, praying for the sun to come up. Like most of my recent requests, it was denied. When we got down to fumes, I gave a final reminder.
“Remember, the plan. Until sun up, nobody moves. Once it rises, head toward the highest point you see. If you fail to make link up after 48 hours, the secondary rally point is the wreckage of the plane. Best of luck gentlemen.”
The plan was pretty simple. With some extra chutes, we had rigged all our extra equipment into a poor man’s pallet drop. We didn’t have any real cargo chutes, so Scott had rigged the Cyprus AAD fail safes to pop at 3000 feet. If might work, and it might not. All the non-HALO guys were going first, if for no other reason to ensure we got them off the plane. Standing on the ramp can do funny things to a man, and this was not the time to be a jump refusal. Boots to asses if necessary. Scott instructed them to pull their parachutes as soon as they were stable. It was a trade off, but the safest way we had. The upside was, hopefully no hit the Earth at terminal velocity. A night drop is sketchy even for experienced troops. The downside was, if they did it right, a bunch of guys with zero experience steering parachutes would be 11,000 feet in the air under canopy. Which meant they could drift up to 10 miles.
Putting the new guys out first
also meant they could not possibly get above us. If someone hits your parachute from above at dive speed, you both die. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. My crew was going out together, and also popping chutes as soon as possible.
We had never figured out how to engage the auto pilot, so the exit was dicey. Once Scott gave me the all clear of cargo and the first drop, it was our turn. I got up from my seat, while Frank steered from behind the other seat, chute already donned. Scott and Willie got me dressed, and it was time to party. I grabbed Frank by the shoulder with one hand, and my radio mic in the other. On my go, Scott sent the rest of the crew out as Frank and I raced down the aircraft body. It was already lurching as my feet found the ramp, spring boarding me into the unknown darkness.
Even after all we had been through, the jump was the worst of it. I always hated parachuting, which means I picked a pretty stupid line of work. My HALO wings should have come with a Valor device, since it was a force of will to jump for me, every single time. I knew plenty of people that loved it. In fact, Scott was probably enjoying the hell out of himself right now. But I would take a firefight any day over an airborne drop.
Tumbling through the air like a ninja star, I forced my elbows out and my knees wide, stabilizing my spin. Level, I reached over and pulled my all too familiar rip cord, and was rewarded with a canopy bursting to life off my back. I found my toggles and settled in for the ride to the ground. I wasn’t sure what I would find there, but at least we would be home. I thought, at the time, we would find safety and security. But I was about to find out, that no longer existed.
<<<<>>>>
AFTERWORD
There are many people that need a massive thanks for helping me get this book off the ground. First and foremost, my agent Bob Diforio, for navigating the waters of publishing.