by Steven Bird
“I believe he pulled the wings off and had it trucked in.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell us that before we pulled that hair-brained move?” Spence asked.
“Then you might have said no,” Jessie replied with a sly grin.
“That’s just like a shepherd,” Spence joked.
“What is?” Jessie asked, curious as to what he meant.
“Earning his sheep’s trust before he leads them off to slaughter,” Spence replied, chuckling under his breath.
With a simple smile, Jessie turned his attention back to the task at hand and continued their climb out toward the southwest to avoid the terrain that lay just ahead of them. As the aircraft continued its climb, the men sat there in silence, enjoying the beauty of the Colorado mountain west down below. For a moment, the cities and towns didn’t look like pits of sorrow and despair. For a moment, everything in the world seemed to be at peace.
~~~~
With Black Mountain to their west at over ten thousand, eight hundred feet tall, and the vast expanse of the southwestern Rocky Mountains to the east, Jessie looked at the others and said, “Okay, guys. We had thirty-three gallons of fuel at takeoff. Let’s call it twenty-five now to be safe. At a fuel-burn of fourteen to fifteen gallons per hour once we get her leaned out at a cruise altitude of around ten-thousand feet, we’ve only got an hour and a half of fuel at best before we need to put her down. At one hundred and forty knots, not taking winds aloft into consideration, that gives us around two hundred miles of reach for this leg. That will put us just past Albuquerque, New Mexico.”
Looking out the window, trying to figure out Jessie’s rationale, Mike asked, “Why not just go straight over the mountains? Wouldn't that be a lot shorter?”
“Technically speaking, yes,” Jessie replied. “However, the Rockies would put us near the altitudes where we would need supplemental oxygen to keep from going loopy, which is something we don’t have onboard. Aside from that, I don’t want to make that long of a stretch over mountainous terrain using autogas. I’m no engineer so I’m not all that well-versed on the technical details, I only know the basics, but I do know we don’t have alcohol-free fuel. As a matter of fact, we’ve got old, stale fuel. I’d rather not risk having to put her down on the side of a mountain if we lose power due to a fuel-delivery problem. It’s cold at the higher altitudes and that damp mountain air could cause us some fuel system icing problems. If we go south and work our way around the terrain toward Albuquerque, we should always be in a position to put her down safely if we lose power.”
With a nod, Mike replied, “Makes sense to me. I’d rather not be trapped in the mountains and have to eat you guys like that soccer team, anyway.”
Piping up from the back, Spence added, “Yeah, we’d all rather avoid that scenario. At least Jessie and I now know to keep an eye on you if we do go down.”
Sharing a laugh, the men settled in, with Jessie focused on managing the aircraft while the other two gazed at the passing terrain below.
As they reached their cruising altitude, Jessie eased back on the throttle and rotated the vernier-style mixture control to lean the engine back to an efficient cruise speed. Looking over to Mike, he said, “Your uncle sure took great care of this old bird. I know he really loved it. He couldn’t bear to part with it after he lost his medical, and here we are now. Like it was meant to be.”
With a simple smile and a nod in reply, Mike looked back out the window at the passing scenery below.
~~~~
Other than the occasional mountainous-terrain-induced turbulence, the ride had been uneventful and quiet, with each of the men pondering what their futures may bring, lulled into a trance-like state by the droning of the big Continental engine.
Diligently studying the sectional chart for the area, Jessie broke the silence by saying, “It sure was easier when the ground-based navigational aids were still working.”
“Not to mention GPS!” Spence exclaimed. “Everyone got so addicted to GPS that no one even had maps on hand when their electronic systems began to fail.”
“At least we’ve got very distinct terrain features in this area. If we make it as far as the plains states, I’ll be totally lost except for basic heading. It all looks the same for a thousand miles in all directions.”
“What’s that?” asked Mike.
“What’s ground-based navigational aids?” Jessie asked to clarify Mike’s question.
“No! That! Down there,” Mike said as he pointed toward the small town below.
Being unable to see exactly what Mike was referring to from his vantage point, Jessie asked, “What do you see?”
“It’s a light. Like a signal light. Coming from that cluster of houses.”
“I see it, too,” said Spence, having shifted in the back seat to Mike’s side of the plane. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said with bewilderment.
“What?”
“That’s Morse code for S.O.S.”
Looking back at Spence, Jessie asked, “Seriously?”
“Yep, I’m positive. I’ve had a lot of time on my hands to study up on this stuff, living all alone. It was that or just stare at the corner and go nuts, so I chose to study.”
Turning back in the direction of the light, positioning the airplane so that he could get a look, Jessie looked at his chart and cross-referenced it with an old highway atlas. With his finger on the atlas, he said, “That appears to be a place called Counselor, New Mexico. We’re just northwest of Albuquerque now.”
Circling high overhead, Jessie looked at the others and said, “That’s definitely a distress call of some sort.”
“What do you want to do?” asked Spence.
After a moment of silence, Jessie replied, “Let’s descend and take a closer look.” Looking at the fuel gauges, he then added, “But we can’t loiter down here for long. We don’t have enough fuel to mess around. We also have to consider what we’ll end up burning just to climb back up to altitude as well.”
“I agree,” replied Spence.
Beginning his descent, Jessie adjusted his fuel mixture and eased back on the power, pointing the nose down below the horizon while holding a right-wing-low spiraling descent so that both Mike and Spence could keep their eyes on the light.
“The light just stopped,” said Mike.
“Yep,” confirmed Spence.
Unable to see for himself, being on the left side of the airplane, Jessie asked, “Can you see anything else? Anyone who may have been sending the signal?”
“Nope. Not a thing,” Spence replied.
“Wait,” Mike shouted abruptly. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted, seeing several muzzle flashes from several of the buildings on the ground. By the time his words of warning reached Jessie, bullets had begun pinging into the thin sheet-metal skin of the aircraft.
As Jessie shoved both the throttle and the mixture fully forward, and initiated a sharp turn to the left away from the threat, a bullet penetrated the bottom of the plane, entering Mike’s lower jaw and exiting through the top of his head, splattering blood and brain matter all over the cream-colored interior of the aircraft.
Drenched in Mike’s blood, Spence was at a loss for words, frozen in place in his seat.
As bullets continued to strike the airplane, black smoke began to billow out of the cowling, almost entirely blocking Jessie’s forward visibility. “There goes the oil pressure,” he shouted. “We’re going down. I’ll put us on that road. Get our gear ready to make a run for it after we touch down.”
Hearing no reply, Jessie looked back to Spence, seeing him covered in Mike’s blood, and shouted, “Spence! Get our gear ready to run!”
Snapping back into the moment, Spence muttered, “Yeah... Yeah, of course,” as he began reaching into the cargo compartment behind the back seat, pulling their packs and rifles onto the seat alongside him.
“Seatbelts and brace!” shouted Jessie as they neared the road, still barely able to see in front of him from the thick, bil
lowing cloud of oil smoke and oil droplets spewing from the damaged engine, completely covering the windshield.
Using the visibility from his side window, Jessie attempted to steer them toward the small paved road. He controlled the rate of descent by pitching the nose for the aircraft’s best glide speed, the propeller now completely stopped as the engine finally succumbed to its damage and seized.
As he neared touchdown, Jessie flared slightly to arrest the decent rate, attempting a three-point touchdown in the old tail-dragger. Misjudging slightly, the tailwheel struck first, initiating a slight bounce that brought the mainwheels down hard. Unbeknownst to Jessie, the right front mainwheel tire had been struck and blown to pieces by the barrage of bullets that had killed Mike, causing the aircraft to swerve violently to the right. Unable to control the yawing motion with rudder alone, the Cessna ground-looped, striking the left wingtip on the ground. As the aircraft continued its deadly spin, the tail spun completely around and the old Cessna flipped over on its top and slid violently to a stop.
With smoke billowing out from the engine compartment, Jessie frantically grabbed the cockpit-mounted fire extinguisher and began discharging the bottle through the now broken windshield in a desperate attempt to stop the hot splattered engine oil from catching fire.
“Get out! Get out!” he shouted to Spence as a vehicle came to a screeching halt approximately twenty yards away.
Among the unintelligible shouts, Jessie clearly heard the phrase, “Allah be praised,” in Arabic, along with other celebratory chants.
Being only able to see the boots of the men as they approached, still hanging from his seatbelt and pinned down in the wreckage, Jessie reached for his Colt, flipped the leather retaining strap off of the hammer, and cocked it. Only six shots, but I’ll make’em count, Jessie thought as he feared the worst.
As the men neared the wreckage, Jessie whispered to Spence, “Don’t let them take you.”
“Same to you, Jessie. Good luck,” Spence softly replied.
As Jessie heard the familiar sound of an AK-style rifle chambering a round, gunshots began to ring out all around them.
Expecting a barrage of bullets to start ripping through the thin aluminum aircraft fuselage, Jessie heard only a few direct hits. Confused about what was going on outside of the plane, the man standing closest to Jessie fell to the ground, and now lay dead, blood draining from his bullet-riddled corpse. The man, appearing to be in his mid-thirties of undeterminable ethnic origin, with a long beard and loose-fitting clothing similar to middle-eastern attire, lay with his back to the pavement, his eyes wide open and seemingly devoid of life, staring directly at Jessie.
Within moments, the gunfire subsided as Jessie and Spence both heard the coordinated movements and commands of several men outside.
Hearing one of the men shout, “Clear!” followed by several more, Jessie noticed a pair of tan desert boots jogging over to the fuselage.
“Are you okay in there?” a voice in English with a standard American accent asked.
Jessie responded, “Two survivors. One dead.”
Seeing a man drop to his knees and look through Jessie’s side window, the two made eye contact as the brown-haired, blued-eyed man in his early thirties said, “Hang on. We’ll get you out. We’ve got to move quick.”
Almost instantly, Jessie’s door was aggressively pulled open, exposing the aircraft’s interior to the daylight. “Come on,” the man said as he reached out to take Jessie’s hand.
Putting one hand above his head against the crumpled ceiling to arrest his fall, Jessie released his seatbelt buckle and rotated sideways, exiting the aircraft. Looking back toward Spence, he saw two of the men pulling Spence through the side cargo-door opening.
“The other one is dead?” one of the men stated, looking for clarification.
With a nod in the affirmative, Jessie acknowledged the sad fact as the man then said, “Okay, we’ve got to move before they send backup.”
As a desert-tan Humvee pulled alongside the crash site, the men led Jessie and Spence to the cargo area in the rear, as it was set up in the M998 cargo/troop transport configuration. As soon as they were all aboard, the Humvee, along with a second one directly behind them, sped away from the smoldering scene of the crash.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Running down the road at what appeared from the back to be the Humvee’s maximum speed, one of the men, with a medium build, sandy brown hair and brown eyes, looking to be in his late twenties to early thirties, said to both Jessie and Spence, “My name is Denny. Are either of you hurt?”
“We can’t leave him there, Denny,” Jessie insisted.
“What?” the man said over the roar of the engines and the noise generated by the off-road tread tires of the Humvees.
“We can’t leave him there,” Jessie said, this time shouting.
“Sir, there was nothing we could do. We barely had time to get you out of there, much less extract the body. Our spotters have already indicated that backup arrived on scene just after we left.”
“Who? Who are they? Whose backup?”
“We’ll explain more when we get to where we’re going. For now, you two just take it easy and try to relax.”
“We just freakin’ got shot down,” Spence shouted. “That doesn’t just happen every day. We’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Like I said, we’ll be able to explain more when we get to where we’re going. For now, sit tight,” the man said as he turned his attention back to the men in the front of the Humvee.
“Are they Army or Guard?” asked Spence, looking to Jessie with concern.
“These are Guard Humvees, but these aren’t guardsmen. Well, they aren’t at the moment, at least,” Jessie replied as he looked around trying to get a mental grasp of what had just happened.
Noticing that the men wore a mix of civilian and military attire, and carried what appeared to be MIL-SPEC select-fire M4’s, as well as each of the men wearing a load-bearing vest supporting numerous STANMAG 5.56 NATO magazines, Jessie knew there must have been a government connection at one point.
As Jessie watched the men in the front of the Humvee, one of the men talking on the vehicle-mounted radio tugged on Denny’s shoulder, seemingly notifying him of some sort of incoming news. Quickly looking behind them at the Humvee in trail, Denny scurried back to Jessie and Spence in the rear and said, “They’re on us. There are two vehicles chasing from behind. They’re gaining on the other truck. We’re gonna split up so that we can take them on our terms. With luck, they’ll split up and follow us both. Hold on.”
As Denny took a seat and held on tight, the Humvee veered hard left, nearly sliding Jessie across the back of the cargo area and into Spence’s lap. Becoming slightly airborne over a rise in the terrain off to the side of the road, Jessie watched as the other Humvee split off to the right and led both pursuing vehicles to the other side of the road. Both Humvees now having departed pavement and heading in opposite directions, Jessie, Spence, and Denny watched as gunfire erupted between the three other vehicles. To their horror, a shoulder-fired, rocket-propelled grenade was launched from the bed of one of the pursuing pickup trucks, striking the Humvee. The impact knocked the severely damaged Humvee off course, sending the vehicle, now engulfed in flames, rolling and flipping violently end over end until it came to rest on its top.
A look of sheer horror came over Denny’s face as they drove away, out of sight and over the next hill, with the knowledge that their friends in the other vehicle had been killed before their eyes.
Silence consumed the men as the Humvee maintained its course off-road, speeding and bouncing along, until reaching a ravine with a dry rainwater wash at the bottom. The Humvee drove into the ravine and handrailed the wash, struggling over the harsh terrain until reaching a point where they could cross, climbing the hill on the other side and up onto an old dirt road.
Following the dirt road to the north for another half an hour, they finally reached a small ca
mp hidden from plain view by large rocky outcrops in the terrain. Without saying a word, Denny jumped out of the Humvee and ran toward camp as several other men ran out to greet him. “Jӧrgen!” he shouted to one of the men.
“Where’s the other truck?” Jӧrgen asked with an obvious Swedish accent.
“We lost them.”
“Did they follow you here?”
“We’re not sure. Their trucks were stock four-wheel-drive pickups. They could outrun us on the road, but they’d have a hard time coming the way we did.” Pausing and looking back to the direction from where they came, he then said, “They could follow on foot or with some other vehicles in the very near future, though. We’ve got to go.”
“Right,” said Jӧrgen as he turned and shouted the order to break down camp to several others in the camp.
With practiced precision, the group immediately began breaking down and packing up their tents. Most of their gear, already being in large portable containers, was thrown onto an old International flatbed truck.
“How can we help?” asked Jessie.
“Watch our backs while we pack,” Denny said, tossing Jessie an M4. “Do you know how to use that?”
“Absolutely,” replied Jessie.
“Great,” Denny replied as he opened one of the containers, removed another rifle and tossed it to Spence. “You guys get on that hill over there and keep an eye out. When we’re all packed up, we’ll call you in and you can bug out with us. Got it?”
“Got it!” Jessie replied.
As Jessie and Spence watched for any sign of activity off in the distance, the others frantically packed their gear onto the flatbed truck, into the remaining Humvee, and into an old Jeep Wrangler. Both the flatbed and the Wrangler appeared to have been painted desert-camouflage in a very rudimentary fashion.
Once the gear was all loaded, Jessie heard a whistle and turned to see Denny waving them down. “Come on, guys. Let’s go!”
Running down the hill, Jessie and Spence climbed into the back of the Humvee with several others, as the vehicles sped away.