by Sharp, Zoe
“With half the police force gone, New Orleans has one of the highest crime rates in the country,” Capt Neal said. He did not sound proud of the achievement. “We got half the police force and a population down by two-thirds, but there’s still the same number of arrests. Times like these, seems only the lowlifes prosper.”
I skimmed the other faces. Their expressions were largely turned inward, sombre.
“This was a tragedy,” Gabe Baptiste said, as if a news crew was there to record his concern for posterity.
If you care so much, why haven’t you been back before now?
Blake Dyer leaned forwards to catch Baptiste’s eye. “Son, look around you,” he said. “It still is.”
Capt Neal started to take us up, guiding the helo onto a new course.
“I’ll take you out over what’s known as the funnel,” he said. “The storm surge came up the Mississippi about fifteen feet high, as well as into the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and through Lake Borgne, and it all converged in the funnel. Then as the eye passed over, it pushed colossal storm surge down Industrial Canal from Lake Pontchartrain as well.” He shook his head. “This area got hit every which way.”
I peered out of the far window. Below I could see the wide canal, just beyond what looked like the world’s largest scrapyard.
And just as we started to pass over it, Sean—sitting by the near window—went rigid and let out a yell.
Just one word—possibly the word nobody in a low-flying helo ever wants to hear. I certainly didn’t.
“INCOMING!”
You can’t shout something like that to a pilot with combat experience and not expect an instant, visceral response. Capt Neal was a decorated veteran who had lost none of his instincts when he’d returned to civilian aviation. He jinked, almost a nervous twitch of hands and feet on the controls. The cabin tilted wildly and lashed sideways.
I looked left. The view through the side window was almost straight down into the street below. I was just in time to see the streaking exhaust of the shoulder-launched missile heading straight for us.
Eighteen
Time slowed, the way it does for me at moments of high-intensity stress. The rocket-propelled grenade seemed to hang in the air, climbing so slowly I was almost certain the pilot’s split-second reaction would get us clear.
It didn’t, of course.
Shoulder-fired RPGs have a relatively low muzzle velocity—around three hundred metres per second. Half the speed of an average rifle bullet.
Still much too fast to miss a large, near-static target less than a hundred metres away—barely a quarter of the weapon’s maximum effective range.
Capt Neal’s manoeuvre saved us a direct hit, but didn’t turn it into a miss.
There was an explosive impact somewhere aft of the cabin. The whole airframe shuddered like a harpooned whale, staggered to the side and went into a violently uneven lateral spin.
This close to the ground there wasn’t much anyone could do, least of all the pilot. He fought gravity and physics all the way down, yanking up on the collective just before contact to bring us in as gently as he could. It was a losing battle.
We made a rough landing—worse than any bike crash I’ve ever had. And I’ve had one or two.
I’d already jammed my head back against the rest to protect my neck, and wrapped my arms tight across my body, but even so we impacted with an almighty buckling whumph that jolted the breath right out of me. I was aware of screaming, male and female, and unsecured limbs jerking around in my peripheral vision.
The Bell continued to spin viciously, ripping the skids loose. The sheer rotational force of the main rotor dragged us round in a horrendous graunching scream of tearing metal on the stony surface. The aircraft kept turning even after we hit, as if trying to screw the wreckage right into the earth. Dead and buried all in one move.
The Bell was wrenched across the ground. It lurched onto its right-hand side. As the rotor blades hammered into the earth and debris they shattered in all directions like flashing daggers in a psycho circus act. One piece sliced through the skin of the cabin right in front of my face. I swear I felt the swish of hot displaced air as it hissed past.
For a second after impact nobody moved. It took that long to recognise we might just have made it down alive, if not exactly unscathed.
The cabin was at almost ninety degrees to vertical, canted over onto its starboard side. I was hanging suspended from my seatbelt and I stretched out my feet onto the cabin wall before releasing the buckle. The turbines were still shrieking and the slop-slop of spilling jet fuel was an acid chemical burn on the back of my tongue. The potential for fire reared up in my mind with nightmare intensity, a visceral response to a primal fear.
I ripped the useless cans from my head and twisted up towards Dyer, still hanging half-above me. I hit the release for his belt and half-caught, half-slid him onto his feet next to me, then ran fast hands over him looking for obvious injuries. There weren’t any. He was shaken but basically unhurt.
“Blake, you with me? Blake! We need to get you out, sir, right now!”
He baulked. “But, the others—”
“Sir, with respect, they can go fu—”
“We’ll get everyone out.” It was Sean who cut harsh across the pair of us. “Nobody gets left behind.”
He’d cut himself loose. Before I could argue, he’d gripped the interior grab handles and jacked his body, using both feet to punch the upward door open like a giant flip-top sunroof.
The action drew instant automatic weapons fire from outside. He ducked back immediately and swore under his breath.
From what little I could see of the outside world, we’d come down in the middle of the giant scrapyard I’d seen just before we crashed. Ahead of us was a small mountain of crushed cars and twisted trucks. There were even a couple of old yellow school buses.
At a rough guess, the direction of fire was away to our left, which put the helo’s floor between us and our attackers. The 429 model’s corporate spec included a lot of bells and whistles, but I very much doubted battle-hardening the under-shell was one of them. We were sitting ducks.
“Hey, guys—a little help here?”
It took me a moment to realise the calm voice came from the blonde, Autumn. I glanced down, found her crouched against the far door, which was now the lowest part of the cabin. She was leaning over the inert form of Baptiste’s bodyguard, John Franks. He was crumpled against the frame, pale and unconscious, lying half on top of Baptiste. I’d known he was loose in the cabin during the crash, but my responsibility was to my principal, so I’d blanked him out.
Baptiste himself was pale and silent, eyes closed. There was a little blood trickling from a cut above his eyebrow, though, so I judged he was unconscious rather than dead.
But Franks had been the only one not wearing his seatbelt at the time of the crash and had been thrown around the cabin like a medicine ball as we went in hot. The rest of us were lucky he hadn’t crushed us to death in the process.
As it was, to begin with I thought Autumn’s poppy-covered dress had acquired a few more flowers than I remembered. Then I saw the belt she was heaving tight around Franks’s thigh just above the knee, both hands wrapped in the leather, tanned arms taut.
As she shifted position I saw he’d clearly suffered a double compound-fracture of his tib and fib, the jagged ends of the bone jutting out from the lacerated flesh of his lower leg. Even with Autumn’s makeshift tourniquet, he was losing blood fast—too much of it. The broken bones must have severed an artery. He had minutes—if he was lucky.
I met Sean’s eyes. Franks must have weighed a good two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. We didn’t have the sheer muscle available to move him, but—if we wanted to survive—we couldn’t stay put either.
“You’re going to have to leave him,” Sean told her roughly.
“He’ll die.”
“So will we all if we don’t get us the hell out of here,” said Capt Neal.
He was still dangling half sideways from his harness in the pilot’s seat. “I don’t suppose one of you boys has a spare pistol, do you? Only, I left mine in my other pants and we got hostiles a’coming in.”
I reached down and took Franks’s gun off his hip. He wasn’t in any state to use it. The gun was a Glock nine. I couldn’t see a pro carrying it empty or safe, but as I handed it past the forward row of seats I checked the weight and slid a finger across the loaded-chamber indicator just to make sure.
“There’s one up the spout all ready to go,” I told the pilot.
“Much obliged,” Neal said, like I’d just passed him the salt. “Might want to cover your ears, folks.”
With that, he swung the gun towards one of the plexiglas windows in what had been the floor of the cockpit beneath his feet and kept pulling the trigger until the action locked back empty—standard US military operating procedure. The Glock held seventeen rounds and one in the chamber. Even with the warning, it was horribly loud inside the tin can cabin.
“That should keep their heads down a little longer,” Neal said with a tired smile. “I’d appreciate an assist with debussing, though. I think I busted both my ankles when we set down.”
Nineteen
John Franks didn’t make it. Even with Blake Dyer lending his weight to put pressure above the gaping hole caused by the sheared bones, the wounded man continued to bleed out at a ferocious rate. By the time Sean and I had heaved Capt Neal out of the pilot’s seat, it was clear the big bodyguard had already passed desaturation point.
“He’s gone,” Dyer said quietly, putting one bloodied hand on Autumn’s shoulder as she knelt by Franks’s side.
She hesitated long enough that I thought she was going to raise objections about leaving his body behind, but she simply nodded tiredly.
“What about Gabe?” Dyer asked. The baseball player had remained with his eyes closed, still and quiet throughout, even while the pilot got his gun off.
Before anyone could stop her, Autumn reached across and slapped Baptiste across the face a couple of times, not lightly. He began to groan instantly, eyelids fluttering.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He fainted when he saw the blood, is all.”
Sean was supporting Capt Neal, one arm under his shoulder to keep just about all the man’s weight off his broken legs. No strain showed on Sean’s face, only that narrowed down focus I’d seen so often before.
“Charlie, you’re going to have to take point.”
I nodded, reached for my discarded headset and poked it carefully up through the open door, just a fraction, skylining it.
A single shot pinged off the door frame about half a metre from my hand. I yanked it back down again.
“Well, that’s encouraging, I suppose,” I said dryly. “Not only do they not have an unlimited supply of ammo, but they’re also shit shots.”
“Why we trying to get out?” Baptiste demanded. He’d come round enough to scrabble his way greenly out from under his bodyguard’s corpse and was now trying very hard to keep his gaze anywhere else.
“You smell anything over that cologne you wearing?” Capt Neal demanded. “That’s jet fuel, son. Those cowboys want rid of us, all they have to do is toss a cigarette in that growing pond out there, and we’re toastier than hell on a real hot day.”
For a moment I thought Baptiste was going to make a dive for the open hatch regardless of the dangers. Autumn must have thought the same, because she put a hand on his arm that was both reassuring and restraining.
“Best way out is probably through the canopy—unless they got the nose covered, too,” Capt Neal said. “There’s an axe clipped just under the front of my seat.”
“You carry an axe on a helicopter?” I asked. “Did your horoscope this morning warn you to expect a bad day at work?”
“Hell no, or I’d’ve called in sick.”
Carefully, leaning past the edge of the passenger seating, I worked my arm around the base of the pilot’s seat and found a blunted handle of what felt like a short fireman’s axe. It was held on quick-release spring clips. One wrench had it free.
Without a pause I swung the axe backhanded into what had been the upper part of the canopy above the co-pilot’s seat. The clear plastic dome cracked without breaking. I hit it again in the same place, and a third time. A fourth.
I’d always assumed the plexiglas canopies on aircraft were designed to withstand bird strikes at a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour, so there was no way it was going to give in gracefully to a small Brit with an axe—even one as pissed off as me. In reality, I was surprised how easily it all gave way after half a dozen decent swings.
Our attackers couldn’t fail to miss what we were doing, and they didn’t like it much. More shots poured in, striking sparks off the road surface around us and pummelling into the body of the stricken Bell. I widened the hole in the plexiglas along the edge of the frame until it finally crumpled outwards. Incoming rounds punctuated every beat.
“OK, people,” Sean shouted above the gunfire. “Get ready to move.”
“They’ll just pick us off as we go out,” Baptiste objected.
I don’t care how talented he was at throwing a ball, I was getting kind of tired of this guy.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I told him. “But if we stay where we are they’ll pick us off for sure.”
I scrambled out of the cockpit first, the SIG in my hands, and took the luxury of maybe half a second to orientate. The landscape was bizarre and alien, a mass of twisted metal from industrial and domestic machinery, all mixed in together. In front of me I could see old truck rims, chain-link fencing, and fancy wrought-ironwork like the front of the derelict house we’d been looking at only minutes before.
We’d come down at the base of the mountain of half-crushed cars, leaving no safe escape route that way. Climbing up would have been too slow and too exposed. I already felt like I had a target pinned to my chest. What was left of the rotor head was jammed up close into the side of a pickup truck. Given enough time and the right tools we probably could have built ourselves an armoured car out of the bits lying around. Shame we didn’t have either.
To one side of us was a storage shed, surrounded by long grass, twisted weeds, and huge lumps of rusted metal. They were so big it took me a moment to realise they were engine blocks. Some of them were bigger than a family car.
Could be worse, could be better. We’ll just have to make the most of it.
Autumn climbed out next. I pushed her down into a crouch next to the collapsed pickup while I pulled first Baptiste then Dyer out of the downed helo, then helped Sean haul Capt Neal through the jagged aperture.
All the time, intermittent shots thunked into the underside of the Bell. It was almost inevitable that eventually something would spark hard enough to ignite the spilled jet fuel. It had pooled into the muddy ground around us like snow-melt from a mountain in spring.
“We got fire!” Autumn called, sounding remarkably calm.
I looked in the direction of her flung arm, saw the first of the flames licking around the back of the cabin, stealing up on us around what was left of the tail section.
“We head for the shed over there,” Sean said. “Charlie’s on point. Autumn, stick with her.” He looked at the two men. “You’ll have to carry our pilot.”
“Sure,” said Dyer.
“What?” said Baptiste. “Who you carrying?”
“The rest of you,” Sean told him shortly. “I stop anyone shooting you in the arse while we’re getting to safety. Now move it!”
I didn’t stop to see if Baptiste obeyed, just ran in a sideways crouch, keeping the SIG up. Autumn had slipped out of her high-heeled strappy sandals and was holding them as she ran with me, those long legs effortlessly keeping stride. No fuss and no complaining. I looked at the wicked debris lying around and hoped her anti-tetanus booster was up to date.
As soon as we cleared the flames licking around the tail, the gunfire switched target from the Bell
to us. I took a bearing and returned fire in two-round bursts, enough to suppress their aim rather than with serious intent.
The fire was now giving off heavy smoke, which would work in our favour on all kinds of levels as far as both rescue and evasion was concerned.
I thought of Franks, whose body still lay in the burning wreckage, then let it go. There’d be time for the dead later. Right now my mind was focused on how to keep the rest of us from joining him.