by Jacob Hammes
“So it was no coincidence that John showed up where he did?” Marcus asked. If the address had been printed on the box even before John left Afghanistan, at least one mystery would be solved. John didn’t just head to the shop because he needed an artifact cleaned, he was following an address.
“No, I don’t believe so,” Henry said over the earpiece. The rest of the crew exchanged looks of surprise. “And it looks like our next stop is China. We need to get to this shop and see just what this guy is hiding.”
Marcus nodded to himself, thinking of the long trip ahead. This was turning out to be more in depth than he had given it credit for. If there were an address on the side of the crate containing whatever Relic John had his hands on, it stood to reason there would be more relics in the shop, too. That, and the owners had to know something more than they were letting on. It would explain why the sole survivor was so calm about the situation.
Perhaps they were about to walk into one of the most important finds the UOD had ever seen. Marcus and Henry debated when and where to fly into China from over the next few minutes while the rest of the team listened in. There would be a high amount of difficulty, and stress, were the team to try and fly out the same day. It was still a two hour flight on a helicopter before they could even board the plane. There and back could not get any quicker than it was already going.
The city that John had been spotted in was Xian, a northern city nestled at the foot of a mountain range just to the south. It was one of the four ancient capitals of China and was known for some of the most beautiful architecture, temples, and landscape as could be found anywhere in the world. The area sports five major museums, hundreds of interesting sites to visit, including the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda and Mount Hua, one of the great mountains of China.
China is dotted with historical sites, but the Terracotta Army being just under fifty miles away seemed rather suspicious in itself. Not that it was a point of major concern for the UOD, but hundreds of clay figures buried for hundreds of years seemed pretty ominous when compared to a man who had apparently died and was reborn.
Marcus could feel that there was a bigger picture unfolding before them.
He told Henry that they would be leaving immediately upon their return. They would do whatever they could in the cave, which Marcus felt would be very little, and head out. Just a few clues as to what the Special Forces team and John had come into contact with would at least give them a handle on what type of activity they would be expecting. Anything would help.
The team now had their work cut out for them.
The helicopter flew on through the brisk morning air with little turbulence, its guardian in close tow. The Apache’s weapons glinted in the morning light like the spears that gladiators had once used. The entire machine was a deadly weapon, flying through the air just like a dragon ready to spew its fire on the enemy. The rotating bulb on the bottom of the craft was capable of switching between thermal and night vision cameras. Its fiery eyes could see in any condition.
One of the pilots caught Marcus’ glance through the little windows and gave him a thumbs up. Marcus returned the gesture, though he doubted the pilot would see it. Soon, the pilots started bleeding off altitude in preparation for their first stop, the fuel depot. It was a forward operating base in the Badakhshan province, a mere twenty minutes from the cave where the team was headed.
The post came out of nowhere. One minute they were flying low over the land like they had done when first they had taken off, then they were above a post. It was in between two large hills, and roads led away in either direction. High walls made of cement and sand-filled barricades surrounded the post and all of its residents keeping them safe from everything but rocket fire and mortars.
The pilot set the aircraft down easily on the small helipad. It looked like a few tents surrounded by five acres of concrete from overhead, but Marcus knew it was smaller than that. Tanks lined one side of the base, trucks both big and small the other. Everyone had a weapon, even the guy filling the helicopter. No one spoke to the team. They had done this more than once.
Everyone remained in their seats and the helicopter was quickly filled even while the rotors blared away. Within a few minutes, the helicopter was idling off away from the fuel source, waiting for the Apache to finish its turn with the fuel truck. Once filled, they left the small post in the dust.
Not two minutes into the flight and the pilots started giving orders. The crew chief was ordered into a better position, near a forward opening in the Blackhawk to assume a firing position, just in case. He complied with a quick confirmation and was squeezing between the wall and Cynthia within moments. The guy looked like a kid, grinning under a paste on mustache behind the weapon he was slinging from the roof. It was an M-240 automatic, crew serve machine gun. The weapon shot bigger rounds than the M16 and the famous SAW, packing a whopping two hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammunition into a box magazine.
A few seconds later and a window was cracked open so the weapon could stick its huge barrel outside.
“We have been assured there’s no insurgent activity in the area,” one of the warrant officer pilots had said. “But just to be safe we are going to be flying in low and fast. If anything happens, hang on tight.”
Marcus didn’t feel very assured. It was like watching a documentary on plane crashes for your in-flight movie.
“Thanks,” he remarked.
“We will have to gain a little altitude as we come up on the mountains,” one of the pilots said. “If there are any hostile forces in the area, we’ll be open targets for them. Intelligence changes daily, guys. I’m just saying, take it from a few experienced officers that there’s always a possibility.”
Marcus felt a knot in his stomach tighten. It felt like the first time he had flown. It was always that small possibility that something would happen that sat poorly in the empty space between his belly button and his crotch.
Happily, the warning was just that, a warning that something might happen while the helicopter gained altitude. The pilots made their five minute notification without incident and the crew chief locked his weapon into a firing position and pushed the window fully open. The helicopter would circle once searching for a good place to set down before actually making the descent. It was the eventuality the pilots had warned the team of.
There were no trees, just scrappy looking shrubbery up the side of the mountainous slope they had flown out here for. It was an unforgiving landscape, a place that man would try his hardest to live in and eventually fail anyway. He did see a winding road, however—a switchback making its way up the side of the mountain that had been weathered by who-knew how many years of disuse.
“At least the place was not all barren,” Marcus thought.
Then, as the helicopter’s noise changed pitch from the normal droning he had become accustomed to, to a high squealing that sounded like something was going drastically wrong, three things happened simultaneously. First, that pit in Marcus’ gut tightened rapidly as the altitude of the helicopter changed. The pilot had juked to the right, tilted the helicopter nearly on its side and now the belly of the aircraft was facing the side of the mountain and Marcus was caught looking straight down through a window a few hundred feet to a rocky ground.
That was when the second thing happened. Contrails were visible through the glass. There were three, maybe more, rockets screaming upwards through the cool morning. The hot air they left in their wake immediately turned into something like what a jet leaves behind. Marcus watched as they flew upwards, then past the helicopter. It seemed like it was quicker than the blink of an eye, but the rockets had missed the helicopter and sailed off into the sky.
Third was the most troubling. The pilot yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs was audible even without the aid of the headset. Alarms and flashing lights looked like they had appeared all over the cockpit, screaming and flashing like some version of a horrible science fiction film depicting a spaceship in trouble.
No one needed to be told to hang on, everyone was attached with white knuckles to anything they could get their hands on, including each other.
“Shit that was close,” the pilot said, trying to level out. The crew chief was spraying bullets from the side of the helicopter as fast as the weapon would let him. The clink-clink of the bolt and the booming rounds exploding from the barrel was deafening even with the huge earphones on. Marcus saw the Apache doing the same thing through the window, blowing rounds from the 30 caliber chain gun in short and controlled bursts.
“Goddamnit,” one of the pilots shrieked and suddenly Marcus felt the helicopter roll again. This time, the maneuver was accompanied with something like a sledgehammer smashing through the bottom of the aircraft. The shrieking of steel being ripped from steel briefly filled the cockpit before it was replaced with something new.
Where the crew chief, Sergeant Grant, had been standing was now a sizeable hole through which air and smoke were rushing. Something had blown up through the bottom of the aircraft just where the man was standing, taking him and part of the roof with it. It was immediately clear that a rocket had impacted the bottom of the helicopter. Marcus found himself wondering for just a split second where the sergeant had gone to before realizing he would never live to see the ground.
He felt like a bobble head doll as he watched the rest of the team hang on tightly. Every maneuver caused their heads to move in unison, bounce up and then down, then back and forth like a well-rehearsed, choreographed dance for some stupid commercial. He could feel his teeth chatter with the bone jarring vibrations.
The helicopter had to be out of control. It spun rapidly showing him first the mountain and then a valley in quick succession. He could feel himself being plastered against the wall with the centrifugal force of the spin. The Apache was visible in one turn, and more rockets could be seen streaking up to devastate the gunship.
It did not look, in that brief flashing instance, that there would be any escape for the Apache gunship. It was surely doomed to the same fate, if not worse, as that of the Blackhawk the team was currently in.
Marcus could only hope, and believe, as the helicopter descended to the side of the mountain that he would not die and no one would be wounded too severely. Whether it was his intuition or his trust in the pilots or the sheer denial of death, Marcus did not know, but he trusted the feeling and hung on tight. The spinning made it hard for him to see what was happening, so he closed his eyes.
“We’re coming in hard,” one of the pilots said over the intercom. “Everyone brace for impact.”
Marcus could hear all sorts of things in the dark. Henry was coming over the intercom, yelling hoarsely for an update on what had happened. He would have to wait for an answer, if there would ever come one. The helicopter itself seemed to be screaming in agony as the pilots asked the impossible from it. He could hear wind coming in through the gaping hole where the man once stood and even hear his own heart in his ears. Strangely, it was not beating as fast as he had thought it might.
A last screeching roar bellowed from the engines just before a sudden jolt shook the helicopter nearly in two. It was more of a crash than a landing, but somehow the pilots managed to keep the aircraft in the air long enough to bleed off any excess velocity before smashing into the only flat portion of the mountain; a dirt road.
Marcus was amazed that he was alive and that the machine was still, somehow working. The blades still beat the air overhead, the alarms were still wailing away, and everyone inside was thanking their lucky stars to have finally touched down, regardless of how back-breaking the landing might have been.
The pilots’ hands were a blur of motion, trying to shut the helicopters spinning blades down before they spun out of control and flew from their welds. They worked feverishly, shutting down the entire system and cutting the fuel supply while Marcus checked his crew. The team seemed okay, for the time being. Brenda had gone even whiter than usual and David had his head buried beneath his arms, but no one was hurt.
The helicopter did something unexpected then. Whatever had blown a hole in the side of the aircraft had apparently taken the landing gear with it. With the helicopter losing all power and shut-down procedures taking place, it began slowly listing toward its missing landing gear. At first, Marcus thought the pilots might be trying to take off again, having regained their composure, but the tilt became more and more severe with every passing moment.
With a sudden fury, the blades dug into the side of the mountain they had moments before been hovering above. They smashed to pieces against the rocky hillside, toppling the helicopter onto its side like a child’s play toy. Chunks of rock and red dirt blasted into the air as large chunks of steel and graphite blasted themselves apart. The ditch the rotors dug was growing deeper by the second. The ferocious beating did not stop until the blades were blasted into a thousand flying pieces of debris and the crew found themselves suddenly turned on their sides.
Though the movement had stopped, the shuddering vibrations through the helicopter remained. It seemed like the thing was in its dying throes. Finally, it coughed its last cough as the engines gave in to the stress and quit working.
The pilots were yelling frantically, telling the team to try and get out of the helicopter as soon as possible. They had their own escape route through a busted window up front and chose to use it rapidly. They knew that Jet A, the rocket propellant used in helicopters, would burn relentlessly with just the slightest spark. Sparks Marcus knew would be falling if any wires were ripped apart.
Suddenly, his mind was working faster than his hands would let him. He unbuckled his safety belt and hung on as his weight shifted down toward the rest of his crew. All but he and Cynthia were in a pile on the side of the helicopter now serving as a floor. Brenda had it worst. Somehow she had managed to find her way beneath everyone and as she was the smallest looked as if her head would pop at any moment.
Marcus grabbed the door and pulled hard to the side. He straddled the rest of the team by shoving his feet into the seating on either side and had enough leverage to move the door open enough to slide out. The cool air felt good against his skin, but he had no time to acknowledge the small blessing. He did not realize that he had worked up a sweat beneath the body armor and cold weather gear. It had been cool inside the chopper the last time Marcus had checked. He blamed the fact that he had water dripping from his eyebrows on the stress of almost dying.
The pilots had retrieved their own M4 rifles from the cockpit and had taken up defensive positions overlooking the side of the mountain. One was bleeding rather intensely from a gash in his leg but paid it no attention. He was more concerned with where those rockets were coming from than his own cut leg. He was chirping noisily into a black radio.
With a helping hand, Marcus pulled Bishop from the wreckage. He had a cut over his left eye and was oozing blood into a blond eyebrow. Other than that, Marcus assumed that Bishop was okay. He even managed a wink and a smile before they both reached back down to pull Cynthia up and out of the hole.
She jumped down off the helicopter, luckily escaping any sort of injury.
Next was Stephen; the man simply reached up and pulled his muscular hulk through the opening with no help from the two. Once up, he pulled the door the rest of the way open and reached down with one hand to grab David by the back of his body armor. Though he couldn’t quite lift him all the way up and out of the wrecked helicopter, he did a fair job of relieving any pressure Brenda may have been feeling. Marcus and Bishop helped lift the unconscious man the rest of the way out of the helicopter. David was breathing, but blood was leaking from an open puncture wound on his shoulder and he was out cold.
Brenda was trying her best to catch her breath. She had been thoroughly crushed beneath David and the rest of the crew, one leg was bent at an awkward angle below some of the luggage that had spilled out. She was trying hard not to scream in agony, but tears of pain streamed down her face.
She di
d not know whether it was better to grip her possibly broken leg to relieve the pain or stay still so as not to aggravate her injured ribs. Either way, her body was in agony.
“Brenda, stay calm,” Marcus said. “Just give me your hand and we will pull you out.”
The words were reassuring at least and Brenda nodded her head. Were it not for her injured leg, she would be up and out of the helicopter spry as a pixie, but in her present state it would be a miracle if she could even put weight on her injuries. It caused a pain like fire in her ribs to extend her hand, trying hard to meet Marcus halfway. He leaned in and covered the rest of the distance with help from his muscular counterpart, Stephen.
Stephen merely picked Marcus up by the belt and lowered him down into the aircraft.
It was easier for Marcus to lift the one-hundred and twenty pound Brenda free of the aircraft than it was to hear screaming in agony over her twisted leg. In a few moments, she was free and clear, lying on her back in preparation for the next part of the journey, getting down. Between Stephen and Bishop, Brenda was lowered tenderly into the awaiting arms of Cynthia.
“Are you okay?” Stephen asked her, obviously distressed.
“No,” she tried her hardest to smile, but the grimace that crossed her face was alarming. “I think I chipped a nail.”
With the crew safe, Marcus jumped back down into the helicopter’s corpse and started feverishly passing weapons up through the hole. He dislodged the six weapons the crew brought and handed them barrel first to an awaiting Bishop, who then handed them to Stephen. Next was the luggage. The tactical backpacks brought from the airport earlier in the day not only had important information on the mission but extra ammunition, water, and food.
Marcus knew he would be working up an appetite very soon, seeing as how they had already nearly died.
The last backpack was almost through the door when Marcus heard something familiar. The loud thwack, thwack, thwack of a rotary winged aircraft. A helicopter was circling just out of sight. The familiar drone of its blades matched that of an Apache gunship.