by Joe Buff
Conversation was impossible now. The crew chief told his passengers what to do by using hand signals. The other passengers, junior officers and chiefs who were strangers to Jeffrey, seemed to know the routine. By privilege of rank and standard navy etiquette, Jeffrey got in last. He took the place reserved for him, among several running down the center of the fuselage and facing sideways, so he could look out a window. He buckled in, then shifted to get more comfortable on the black vinyl sheets of his seat.
The crew chief stowed the luggage; his assistant slid the door closed. The crew chief came around and quickly checked everyone very carefully. He pulled Jeffrey’s seat-harness shoulder straps uncomfortably tight, then gave a firm tug to the chin strap of his helmet. Jeffrey and the crew chief made eye contact. The navy didn’t salute indoors, but the chief had seen Jeffrey’s ribbons. The chief gave Jeffrey a look of acknowledgment, and extra respect. Jeffrey, never more rank conscious than he needed to be, returned the look and gave a quick nod. The chief’s eyes showed a special hardness that couldn’t be faked, and the gauntness of premature aging that no one could hide, which proved he’d been in combat in this war. In comparison, the other passengers looked too fresh faced, their eyes in an indefinable way much too naive for them to be combat veterans.
Couriers, perhaps, Jeffrey thought, or some other essential administrative jobs.
He felt heavy vibrations through the deck and through his backside. The muffled noises getting through his hearing protection grew louder and deeper in pitch. Outside the windows the ground receded, then the Seahawk put its nose down so the main rotors could dig into the air and grab more speed. The helo turned west, inland.
Immediately, two other helos closed in on the Seahawk, one from port and one from starboard. Jeffrey knew these were the shuttle’s armed escorts. They were Apache Longbows, two-man army combat choppers. Jeffrey saw the clusters of air-to-ground rockets in big pods on both sides of each Apache. He watched the chin-mounted Gatling gun each Apache also bore, as the 30-millimeter barrels swiveled around, slaved to sights on the helmets worn by the gunners.
These escorted shuttle flights were necessary. The Axis had assassination squads operating inside the U.S., targeting military personnel with high-level expertise or information. They’d almost certainly been pre-positioned and pre-equipped secretly, during the long-term conspiracy that had led to the war. Some of the teams were former Russian special forces, Spetznaz, now in the pay of the Germans and willing to die to accomplish their tasks. The schedule of the helo shuttles varied randomly, and their flight paths varied as well, to stay unpredictable.
Jeffrey forced himself to relax. He was well protected now.
The passenger compartment smelled of lubricants, plastic, and warm electronics; there was no solid bulkhead between the passengers and where the pilot and copilot sat, and Jeffrey could see the backs of their heads if he craned his neck to the right. The compartment was stuffy from the aircraft having sat in the sun before, so the crew chief’s assistant slid open a couple of windows. A pleasant, slightly humid breeze came in.
Built-up urban and then suburban areas petered out, and the land below was more forested, the road net thinner. The helos descended to just above the treetops without slowing, and the tips of southern pines tore by in an exhilarating blur. The Apaches both wore camouflage paint with blotches of green and black and brown, so they became harder to see against the foliage. Jeffrey’s helo, with its plain gray paint job, would blend in much better against the sky for anyone looking at it from the ground. He assumed this tactic was intentional.
He folded his arms across his chest, lulled into a semi-doze by the Seahawk’s steady, reassuring rotor and transmission vibrations and engine roar. He still felt pangs of regret for finally ending his on-again, off-again relationship with Ilse Reebeck, a Boer freedom fighter who’d joined him on several classified missions. Once, Ilse had broken up with Jeffrey, saying they came from different cultures on separate continents, and with his seeming death wish in battle, Jeffrey could never be Ilse’s choice for a lifelong mate, someone to father her children. But then she’d wanted to get back together again, and Jeffrey had been more than willing. The passion that resumed, whenever they were on leave together, quickly became as stormy and edgy as ever—and eventually Jeffrey had simply had enough. He realized that the two of them were in an emotional co-dependency, that the same things that drew them together also triggered deep-seated resentments.
Jeffrey was startled when the helo suddenly banked sharply into a very tight right turn. The power-train vibrations grew harder and rougher as the helo’s deck tilted steeply to starboard. The g-force pressed Jeffrey into his seat; outside, the world slid down away from view and he could see only the sky. Jeffrey’s gut tightened. He grabbed wildly for armrests that weren’t there and felt afraid and didn’t know what to do with his hands. The others in the compartment also showed worry . . . except for the crew chief and his assistant, who were amused. The Seahawk leveled off and everything returned to normal.
Jeffrey realized that this was simply a course change. The crew chief pointed out the starboard side of the aircraft; Jeffrey turned his head as far as he could. Through a window, he barely made out a city on the horizon. He concluded that the helos had passed well south of Richmond, and now were flying northeast, toward Washington. Below Jeffrey, the trees sometimes gave way to open, rolling fields, many recently plowed and planted—with food in short supply nationwide and the transportation infrastructure overstrained, every spare acre of available soil was farmed.
Sitting back again, and looking out the port side, Jeffrey noticed hints of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, paralleling his flight path. Both army Apache gunships flew near the Seahawk in a loose formation.
Jeffrey began to think about what sort of meeting awaited him at the Pentagon. He assumed he hadn’t been told anything for security reasons. He took for granted that the meeting was vital, or he wouldn’t have been torn away from supervising the work on his ship. He guessed it had something to do with another combat mission. Jeffrey dearly hoped this was so. He ached to get back in the thick of it, to defend American interests and give the Axis one more bloody nose—or maybe in this round knock their teeth out.
Through his earcups, and above the noises of flight, Jeffrey noticed a strange new sound. He lifted one earcup, and even over the deafening turbine engines mounted not far above his head, he heard a nerve-jarring siren noise in the cockpit. The crew chief and the assistant, whose flight helmets—unlike the passengers’—were equipped with intercoms, seemed agitated. They began to stare very nervously out both sides of the aircraft.
The Seahawk banked hard left and almost stood on its side, buffeting Jeffrey in his harness. The helo leveled off but kept turning and stood on its other side, wrenching his neck so he almost got whiplash. Both engines were straining now, and the siren noise continued. Jeffrey was afraid they’d had a control failure and would crash. Then Jeffrey heard thumps, and felt bangs. Oh God. We’re disintegrating in midair.
The Seahawk turned hard left, again. It fought for altitude. Through the window Jeffrey saw multiple suns, hot and almost blinding. Then he saw something much worse.
Two black dots approached the Seahawk, fast, riding bright-red rocket plumes that left billowing trails of brownish smoke. Jeffrey understood now: Those little suns were infrared decoy flares. The Seahawk was under attack from shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. There were Axis assassination teams at work somewhere on the ground.
Either they somehow learned my helo’s flight plan, which wasn’t set till the last minute, or they were camped there for a while, knowing they’d have a shuttle pass within range eventually—and today they got lucky.
Jeffrey felt more thumps and bangs. His heart was pounding and his hands shook badly, even though his mind was crystal clear. The crew chief and his assistant gestured for everyone to grab the straps of their shoulder harnesses—to steady themselves and avoid arms flailin
g everywhere—as the pilot and copilot pulled more violent evasive maneuvers. Jeffrey did what he was told, and it helped, but not a lot.
He hated feeling so defenseless. Any second a missile could strike the Seahawk, or its proximity fuse could detonate. The helo’s tail could be blown off or its fuel tanks be hit and explode or shrapnel could shred the unarmored cockpit. Shattered and burning, pilotless, the Seahawk would plunge into the earth.
There was a sharp blast somewhere close, but the Seahawk kept flying. It made another hard turn, and Jeffrey saw that one of the missiles had been fooled by the decoy flares. A ragged cloud of black smoke mingled with the heat flares floating on small parachutes.
The other missile was rushing off into the distance, with a perfectly straight red beam from nearby seeming to shove it away, like a rod of something solid. Jeffrey realized this was an antimissile laser, designed to confuse the heat-seeker head and homing software of the inbound enemy weapon. What Jeffrey perceived as a magic rod was the nonlethal laser beam lighting up fine dust and traces of smoke in the air. The laser came from one of the Apaches.
The Seahawk jinked, and he caught a glimpse of an Apache unloading a rippling salvo of rockets at the spot where a missile plume still lingered, rising from its launch point on the ground. The rockets streaked like meteors and pulverized an area of trees in a series of flashes and spouts of dirt. But Jeffrey saw no secondary explosions—he was sure the attackers would have more missiles, and they’d relocate themselves quickly after making that initial telltale launch. They probably even had all-terrain trucks, disguised with freshly cut greenery so they’d be mobile and harder to see.
The other Apache emitted a different-looking solid red rod from its chin. This, Jeffrey knew, was a burst of cannon tracer rounds from its multibarreled Gatling gun. The thing could fire three thousand rounds per minute. The gunner and pilot were after something. The Gatling gun fired again, and this time there was a brilliant, heaving eruption on the ground. Flames and debris shot high into the air.
Scratch one group of bad guys.
But how many other groups are there?
Jeffrey heard the siren alarm again. More missile launches had been detected by the Seahawk’s warning radar.
The view outside was confusing. Missile trails and rocket trails and laser beams intertwined in the sky, and fires burned in several places on the ground—including ones from the infrared flares. Jeffrey knew now why the shuttle’s flight path was set to avoid populated areas. Every piece of ordnance fired had to land somewhere or other, and civilians on the ground could be injured or killed.
There was another hard blast from outside, much closer. The Seahawk shuddered, but continued to fly.
The whole thing started to seem unreal. Jeffrey knew this sensation: It was panic taking hold. There was nothing he could do but stay imprisoned in his flight harness, and everyone in the passenger compartment exchanged increasingly desperate looks. Jeffrey felt like he was in some battle simulator gone wild, or immersed in a demonic video game. The Seahawk pulled hard up and went for more altitude. Jeffrey saw an antiaircraft missile coming at them from the side, rising fast enough to stay aimed at the helo.
At the last possible second, the pilot rolled the Seahawk so that its bottom faced the missile. The sickening roll continued, until the helo was upside down. The helo dropped like a stone, the heat of its engines shielded from the missile by the bulk of the fuselage. The missile streaked by harmlessly above them, through the spot where the helo had flown moments before.
The falling helo finished the other half of the barrel roll. Jeffrey was completely disoriented. He looked out the window to try to regain situational awareness. At first he was looking straight down at the ground—more treetops, very close—and then the Seahawk leveled off, regaining speed.
There was another large explosion on the ground. The air was an even more confusing tangle of tracer rounds and laser beams and heat decoys and smoke trails coming up and going down. The ground now had the beginnings of a serious forest fire.
Another missile was coming right at the Seahawk. The Apaches did what they could to divert it with their spoofing lasers. The Seahawk popped two more heat flares, but then ran out. It had lost too much altitude to maneuver aggressively now, and the enemy missile still bore in.
The missile warhead detonated. Jeffrey felt its radiant heat through the windows a split second before the shrapnel from the warhead battered the helo. He was sprayed by a liquid, and was terrified that it was high-octane fuel or flammable hydraulic fluid. But the color made him recognize it as arterial blood. The crew chief’s head had been nearly severed by something that punched through the fuselage wall. Jeffrey watched the assistant crew chief look on, horrified, as his boss died quickly; the young and inexperienced kid went into a trance from mental trauma. Some of the other passengers were bleeding from wounds—Jeffrey wasn’t sure how bad. Pieces of smashed window Plexiglas covered everyone and everything. The Seahawk kept on flying, but the vibrations were much rougher and more ragged. Jeffrey had to do something.
He unbuckled and grabbed fittings to steady himself. He worked hand over hand the few feet toward the rear of the aircraft. He pulled off the assistant crew chief’s helmet, with its intercom headset, placing his own on the kid’s head as best he could. He put on the better-equipped one and spoke into the intercom mike.
“Pilot, your senior passenger. Crew chief dead, and wounded men back here. What are your intentions?”
“AWACS has vectored us north to a well-patrolled area. Ground-attack fast movers inbound.” Fighter-bomber jets, for extra support. “ETA fast movers fifteen minutes.” An eternity. “Apaches both still with us, sir.”
“Can your ship make it to Washington?”
“I might need to put down in the next field we come to.”
“That would make us sitting ducks if there are more bad guys out there.”
The pilot hesitated. “Er, understood, sir. . . . How bad are the wounded?”
The wounded were another good reason to not land in the middle of nowhere. “Wait one. Where’s the first-aid kit?”
The pilot told him, and Jeffrey spotted the big white box with the red cross on the cover. What’s left of it, he thought. The first-aid kit had taken a direct hit from behind from a fragment of shrapnel, which went straight through and embedded itself in the opposite fuselage wall. The visible edge of the shrapnel was shiny metal, razor sharp. The first-aid kit was useless, with most of its contents either broken or torn to shreds.
The deck of the helo was becoming slippery, with blood. The wounded sat in pools of it. “We need a hospital, fast,” Jeffrey said into the intercom. “It’s a disaster back here.” He took off his life vest; it would just get in the way as he worked.
Three of the other passengers looked very pale and sweaty, and their unfocused gazes kept flitting around, definite signs that they were going into deep shock from their wounds. One suffered ever-worsening respiratory distress. A chief, unharmed like Jeffrey, also got up to help the other passengers. Together, he and Jeffrey searched for sites of bleeding. They bandaged limbs, abdomens, punctured chests as best they could. The overhead was so low they had to move around stooped over. Pieces of loose bandage, and shreds of fuselage insulation, flapped and blew in the wind coming through the open or smashed windows. Sunlight shone through holes that hadn’t been there before the attack. The coppery smell of blood was growing thicker.
Up close, Jeffrey caught the stench of other men’s raw fear. Even though they were strangers, his being so close to them—watching their faces while he worked, offering words of comfort—created a bond. Pleading, agony, stoic resignation, despair and then renewed hope roller-coastered through the passenger compartment, dragging Jeffrey each inch of the way.
When will the next missile finish us? How long until the transmission quits, or a big rotor piece comes off, or one of the engines catches fire?
He stumbled as the helo tilted.
“
Uh,” the copilot’s voice came over the intercom, “we’ve been vectored to a hospital with a helipad. Local fire department is rolling to meet us. Our ETA is six minutes.”
Jeffrey glanced forward into the cockpit. Many panel lights glowed yellow or red, which couldn’t be good news. Jeffrey had visions again of the helo crashing.
“Can you stay in the air for another six minutes?”
“Keep your fingers crossed, sir.”
As he bandaged serious shrapnel wounds, Jeffrey tried to think only positive thoughts. He noticed that his uniform ribbons were thoroughly soaked in other peoples’ blood.
Chapter 2
Thanks to some heroic and desperate flying, Jeffrey’s helicopter barely landed safely at the hospital in Virginia. He helped off-load the wounded onto gurneys already waiting. While the Apaches circled overhead to stand guard, the casualties were rushed into the emergency room. Firefighters foamed down the damaged Seahawk, just in case. The dead crew chief was put into a body bag; his assistant, still dazed from the whole ordeal and barely coherent, was walked inside the hospital by two nurses. Jeffrey was vaguely aware of someone holding a video camera.
Inside, at the nuclear-biological-chemical decontamination point federal law required all hospitals to have, Jeffrey stripped and took a thorough shower. Blood had soaked through to his skin, and only as he scrubbed himself did he realize that some was his own. His cuts and scrapes were minor, but needed attention nonetheless. Then a doctor made sure Jeffrey rehydrated; the energy drink was exactly what he needed.
The next problem was clothing. Jeffrey’s uniform was useless, stiff from caked and drying gore. Even his shoes and socks were ruined. Someone thought to get him a hospital janitor’s clean beige coveralls; beige was close enough to khaki to look military, and the jumpsuit was much like the one-piece outfits submariners wore on patrol. The repeatedly laundered cotton was comfortable, considering that Jeffrey lacked underwear. The local fire chief gave him a spare pair of boots.