Their lives before oddly no longer mattered. Her dad was some government bigwig, though she declined to say which one. His was a game-software engineer. Her mom: socialite. His: grade school teacher. It didn’t matter. They were soldiers now and moving up through the ranks of the 101st Airborne.
The racing truck engines were close now. Even the jungle didn’t muffle them.
Then brakes squealed, tires skidded on gravel. A raking slash of machine-gun fire sent bullets whistling through the leaves overhead. Birds screamed in surprise and departed in noisy flocks.
Emily was pulling on his arm, dragging him to the side, ducking for cover.
He didn’t need the urgency transmitted through her guiding arm, still locked around his waist, to know they only had seconds to find cover. He’d scream in frustration if he dared. Blind. Unable to help. Deadweight.
4
Emily blessed every time Larry managed to place one foot in front of the other; he was far too big for her to carry.
He’d been beer-belly bound when she first met him, as wild as most of the pilots in the 101st. Dangerous as hell and on the road down. At least she’d thought he was. Then he’d begun working out more, drinking less, and was soon as fit as he was handsome. He’d also been an exceptional flyer; she’d learned a great deal from Larry Engstrom.
And now he was proving himself to be far above the standard soldier with how he was fighting against the pain and blindness, helping as much as he could.
The pointless gun fire slicing over their heads continued killing leaves.
By the sounds from the vehicles, she’d made a crucial mistake. She’d headed straight from the helicopter back toward the poppy fields. Of course, that was exactly the route the bad guys would take from their vehicles to look for the helo. Should’ve arced.
Stupid!
It didn’t matter that she was a city girl from Washington D.C., she wasn’t allowed stupid. Not when the slightest mistake was going to kill them.
Taking advantage of the masking noise of the gunfire, she twisted due north to get out of their direct line of approach toward the crash site.
The gunfire sliced off as if cut with a knife. The sudden silence of the jungle thundered down on them and she froze in place. There wasn’t a single bird call. Not even a rustle of something moving through the undergrowth.
Then the shouts in Thai began—so close to hand she almost answered their calls to each other.
Under cover of their shouts, she dragged Larry sideways into a particularly dense clump of undergrowth. Banana, papaya, or Dr. Seuss Truffula trees—she hadn’t a clue.
Dragging him down to the jungle floor didn’t take much effort. The adrenaline of the crash and their race through the trees could only last so long and it was collapsing out from under her.
She landed hard, but stifled her grunt. Larry fell too, mostly on top of her.
He started to move, but she held him close as a pair of feet and many curses crashed through the brush not a half dozen paces away.
5
Larry tried to do the decent thing, but he was so tired.
He couldn’t hear much of anything through the helmet. Someone shouted from a distance away, but he had no way to tell how far. Or how angry.
But while he could neither see nor hear, he could absolutely feel. Despite service revolvers, flight vests, and circumstances—against all odds he was finally holding Emily Beale tightly in his grasp and he was loathe to let go.
Even with all the gear they each wore, he could feel how they would be in each other’s arms.
He was past fear now. And, he realized, far past any shred of common sense. It was easy to pretend for a moment that they were on some tropical island—preferably one where no one was trying to kill them—and they could drift together. Turquoise water.
First signs of shock from blood loss, some distant part of him noted. Which was odd, there was no more blood running down his face from the scalp wound, but he was past caring about that.
Larry’s nose was still working just fine. He could smell the dark richness of the decaying plant matter that made up the jungle floor—a thick, soft mattress of duff. And also the scent of Emily Beale that he’d know among a thousand flowers: rare, elusive, enticing.
“Don’t move,” her whisper was just loud enough to penetrate his helmet, but no more.
“Be still my heart,” he whispered against her neck and cursed the helmet he wore that let him get no closer.
But her vest had ridden upward off her waist when they’d tumbled to the ground. His hands slid up past her sidearm and wrapped around her waist. Again he imagined what it would feel like to make love to Emily Beale as he had done through a thousand cold showers.
Not some hurried, frantic tumble like with most women found in soldier bars. It was as if they were seeking desperately to cling onto a life, any life, because they didn’t have one of their own. Emily wasn’t like that. Emily was life. She was perhaps the most alive person Larry had ever known.
To make love to her wouldn’t be a matter of minutes, hours, or even days. It was a task that could stretch out as a constant discovery over years.
Larry had never thought about years before when it came to women, but the one in his arms now made it seem totally natural.
He snuggled against Emily the best he could, and breathed her life in.
6
Emily wasn’t surprised when Larry clung so tightly to her. His feelings for her had been clear from the moment she’d deplaned into the mayhem of Bagram Airfield.
Her efforts to keep him at a distance had slowly weakened. Once he stopped drinking so much, she began to know the immensely skilled flyer. And once he got over the macho, testosterone-poisoned standards that were clearly a pre-req for applying to the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, she had discovered that Larry Engstrom was a thoroughly decent man. A discovery that seemed to surprise him as much as it did her.
Captain Engstrom was an easy man to respect, but Larry had become a friend. And despite the dangers of fraternization within the U.S. military, she’d begun leaning toward finding a common vacation spot for their next leave. Hawaii always sounded like the right place for something like that.
Also, letting him cling to her served to keep him quiet.
She knew it wasn’t his fault, because he was blind, but he’d stumbled over every single obstacle like a bull in a china shop no matter how carefully she’d guided him.
There were more shouts. They’d reached the helo which couldn’t be more than a few hundred meters away; she and Larry had not been moving quickly.
They bought the ruse. The sounds of the pack of Thai bandits went hying off into the distance like a pack of rabid hounds—music to her ears.
She kept listening, ignoring how it felt to have Larry’s hands tight about her waist. It felt good—too long since she’d been held close by a man.
Then he shifted and kissed her.
It wasn’t some intense or passionate kiss as she’d imagined. Neither was it testing and teasing. It was nice, but it was as if Larry wasn’t really all there for it.
A harsh rattle of the big M240 broke them apart. Someone had climbed aboard the downed helo and was having fun with the weapon.
There were numerous shouts and curses.
Larry didn’t try to reengage, not that she’d encourage it under their present circumstances. But while she listened for any approaches that circled too close to their hideout, his condition began to worry her.
While they’d been on the move, he’d done well enough. But his hands were no longer holding her as tightly.
7
Larry felt as if he was floating when someone…Emily, rolled him onto his back.
It felt so good to lie here beside her.
If only it wasn’t so cold.
“When did the Thai jungle get s
o cold?” He fought against a shiver.
There was a distant zing of pain as someone…Emily? Yamota?...pulled off his helmet.
He was glad to be rid of the weight.
Also, with the removal of the helmet, the pinch of pressure that had been giving him a splitting headache eased off. With a spinning flash of color, so sharp that it gave him a moment of vertigo, vision returned to his left eye.
And the view was lovely.
Emily’s elegant features, framed by her straight, white-gold hair, hung just inches above him.
“Hi, babe.”
“Shh, Larry. You have to stay quiet.”
“Right. Bad guys.” Oops, he’d been speaking aloud. “With guns.” Shit! Shh.
So, he occupied himself with lying still as Emily inspected him.
“Cold,” he whispered.
He could see the worry on her face. He didn’t like seeing that. So instead he focused on her neck. And imagined the rise of breast he would encounter if he were to start a hand there and slide it inside her flightsuit. Any number of hot, sweaty training sessions done in t-shirts had left little enough to the imagination. So, he preoccupied himself with imagining that last bit.
Emily-of-the-perfect-breasts moved out of his view. He felt her fingers poking and prodding him with what he recognized as a medical assessment.
Her sharp hiss drew his attention back from imagining his mouth tracing down that neckline toward heaven.
“Shh,” he reminded her. “Bad guys. With guns.”
8
Emily opened the medical kit that she knew was useless and looked in it anyway.
With five tons of medical supplies in the back of the helo, none of them had thought about loading up full combat med kits. The kit she’d recovered from the pocket of her copilot’s door didn’t have thread and needle to attempt to put Larry back together, even if she’d known how. The small tube of skin glue wasn’t going to make much difference either.
The pantleg of his flightsuit was soaked in blood. It wasn’t arterial, but under the circumstances that might have been a mercy. If the shot that caught him had cut an artery, he’d have bled out in a few minutes. Instead a line of bullets had passed through his thigh. Through-and-through meat shots and he’d been bleeding out of them the whole time.
She could stop those…maybe. He’d be weak and shocky from blood loss, but she could glue and bind him up in time if she hurried.
It wasn’t only lack of vision that had him stumbling so badly. The adrenal miracle was that he’d walked on that leg at all.
Then she’d spotted more blood up at the webbed belt that his knife and holster hung from. Just a small blotch of it. A bullet had ricocheted off his sidearm, slipped in beneath the edge of the belt, then been covered and held closed when they’d climbed out of the helo and the belt had settled downward over the hole. The hole wasn’t the problem.
Using his knife, she sliced open the flight suit to expose his belly. The tumbling bullet had torn up his internal organs. His stomach was dark and distended with massive internal bleeding.
Larry was already dead.
9
Larry tried to pull Emily back into his arms.
She resisted for a moment and then lay down beside him.
“My beautiful Emily,” he remembered there was some reason to whisper, he just couldn’t quite recall why. He brushed a hand—so heavy to lift it—over her cheek and she struggled to smile for him. He could see it was hard.
Had he been too forward?
Then she took his hand in hers and pressed its palm against her cheek. His fingers left a blood-red imprint on her perfect skin.
“Are you bleeding?” he struggled to get up and check her for injuries.
“No, Larry. You are.” Her whisper close beside his ear was the gentlest caress. He’d always imagined it would be like this with her. Then he made sense of her words.
“Me?” He saw the flash of pain inside those ice-blue eyes it had taken him so long to learn how to read. “That’s alright then. As long as it isn’t you.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re better than okay. You’re my idea of a perfect wom—”
10
Emily clamped her hand over Larry’s mouth.
The stealthy footstep sounded along the pathway she and Larry had battered through the undergrowth as she led them back toward the poppy fields.
She held her breath as she watched the entrance to their tiny bower. She didn’t dare even reach for a gun or knife, because she didn’t dare uncover Larry’s mouth.
His lips were moving against her palm, way past knowing he shouldn’t speak. Thankfully his muffled vocalizations were very weak. Too soft to understand even though she lay close against him.
The steps neared.
Larry, finally understanding that he shouldn’t speak, looked up at her with his one good eye. The other eye tried to look up too, but kept drifting aside.
The steps moved past them as Larry’s one good eye struggled to convey some message. But the drug lord’s soldier had stopped to listen, or light a cigarette, or scratch himself.
There was a splashing sound.
He was taking a piss not three meters away. In moments she could smell it on the air.
Larry stared at her with his one eye as if trying to memorize her face.
Emily studied his face, knowing it was his last message, but she couldn’t read it. Couldn’t find what was important enough to be his last words.
Then he moved his lips one last time against her palm. He formed a kiss, closed his eyes, and died with a final sigh the same moment the soldier finished his business and moved farther off through the brush.
11
Emily never cried, it wasn’t in her. But her eyes burned for a long time as Larry’s hand cooled in hers through the afternoon and evening. The rescue force arrived in the darkness.
She never heard the helos that must have delivered the Combat Search-and-Rescue team. A group of the drug lord’s men had camped at the jungle’s edge, close enough that she could see their campfire’s light through the trees and hear their soft talk.
Then there had been a series of soft spitting sounds, each accompanied by the distinctive click of a bolt returning on a silenced weapon. She listened, but couldn’t hear any more Thai voices from the campfire.
She slowly, silently as possible, pulled the small velcroed patches aside that would reveal infrared-reflective patches. They would glow brightly if the person was wearing night-vision gear, identifying her as a “friendly.”
Emily never heard the soldier approach. One moment she’d been alone with Larry’s cold corpse and a moment later she knew she wasn’t.
“First Lieutenant Emily Beale,” she read off her service number to the silent darkness in a whisper.
“SEAL Commander Luke Altman, Lt. Beale. Pleasure to find you among the living.”
“The only one.”
His answer was a grim silence.
“The downed helo is another two hundred meters just south of west.”
He transmitted the information to some of his colleagues.
Emily was at a loss as to how to move Larry when a rifle was pushed into her hands.
A moment later Larry’s body was gone from beside her. With a grunt the SEAL shouldered Larry in a fireman’s carry and then reached to take back his rifle. “Hang onto my belt and I’ll lead you out of here, ma’am.”
Emily walked into the darkness, trusting to the man to lead her just as Larry had trusted her. One hand on the SEAL’s belt, the other once again holding Larry’s chill hand—frozen with lifelessness despite the heat of the still, jungle night.
When she had considered being with Larry, she’d been forced to contemplate the possibility of losing the right to serve in the military. This morning, before his death,
there had been a choice.
There wasn’t any longer.
With simple gestures, a sudden rise of hip or a sideways shift, the SEAL led her around and over obstacles in the jungle. Having led Larry over the jungle floor, she could appreciate how effortlessly the SEAL guided her.
She had done all she could to save Larry. The man…it was hard to even think it…the man whose last message on Earth had been one of love. Love, like tears, wasn’t in her, but the ache in her chest ran deep.
When they emerged beneath the starlight, she knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
It wasn’t to pay back a debt. Nor revenge. It was a thankfulness. A thankfulness for Larry’s love, for the SEAL’s effortless guidance, for being alive. If she could one day be the person to stand outside a jungle bower and find not one living soldier, but two, it would be worth it.
When the black helicopters of the 160th SOAR descended through the night sky she let go of Larry’s hand and thanked him silently.
Prior to this day, Emily had not known what she wanted to do next with her life. A West Pointer. An officer of the U.S. Army. A helicopter pilot for the 101st Screaming Eagles. She now understood that had been merely her preparation.
As she climbed aboard the Night Stalkers Black Hawk helicopter, she knew exactly what she was going to do next, even if the 160th SOAR didn’t accept women.
When the pilot introduced himself over the intercom as Captain Mark Henderson, she considered informing him of who she was and that she would be flying beside him in a few years—female or not.
But she would let that wait. She’d let her actions speak rather than her words, for Larry had taught her how full and how much more important silence could be.
Beale's Hawk Down Page 2