by Cindy Gerard
The radio operator repeated the base commander’s original declaration to return to base, assuring him that gunships were on the way.
Gunships that were still a good thirty minutes from target.
Mike made a decision. “I can’t read you. You’re breaking up. Over.”
Then he cut radio power.
“Shit. You lose them?” Taggart looked anxious.
Mike shook his head. “They called us off.”
Cooper’s face said it all. “That’s bullshit.”
Taggart looked ready to spit nails. “We are not leaving them.”
“You’re right. We aren’t.” Mike looked at Webber.
When the copilot nodded in agreement with his decision to disobey orders, Mike spun up the main rotor.
“Don’t be shy on that mini.” He hitched his chin toward Taggart, who’d climbed back into position behind the gun.
The big turbine engine whined as he glanced over his shoulder at Cooper, yelling to be heard above the roar. “Fire at anything with a turban and a rifle.” He lifted off, hoping to hell they got there in time.
Mike’s stomach dropped as he flew over a final ridge then dove close to the ground, his NVGs casting the confusing and grisly tableau in ghostly green light.
All he saw were bodies. Piles of them. Heartsick, he could make out Crenshaw’s big prostrate form lying facedown in the dirt next to the bodies of several villagers.
“Fuckers!” Taggart roared and leaned on the mini, scattering the Taliban fighters. The cartridge belt pumped out two thousand to six thousand rounds per minute as Taggart strafed the ground.
Mike banked the Black Hawk into a tight turn and looped around, zeroing back in on the village center, sickened and riveted by the carnage. So riveted he didn’t see the ball of fire heading toward them until a split second before Hondo yelled, “RPG! RPG! Break right!”
“Brace!” he yelled—but it was too late.
The bird jolted, lurched sideways, plummeted twenty feet, then spun a hard three-sixty. Fire surrounded the cockpit, filling it with smoke. Coughing and struggling to see, Mike fought the collective, the cyclic, trying to steady the bird. But when he lost control of the rudder pedals, he knew they were going down.
Not like this. Jesus God, not like this. Not with his team already dead on the ground, and the possibility of innocents in the path of the out-of-control Black Hawk.
Behind him, Taggart roared like a wild dog and clutched his leg; Cooper yelled out a prayer. Mike heard it all on a peripheral level as he fought to right the chopper. The crippled bird spun wildly, dipping and dodging, and finally succumbed to gravity. They dropped like a meteor and the earth roared up to meet them.
The noise was deafening. The stench of hydraulics and burning fuel choked him. And the pain. Holy God, the pain paralyzed him as the rotors sheered through adobe walls and tile roofs, hurling chunks of debris and fog-thick dust while the engine screamed until, with an agonizing jolt, the chopper jerked to a stop.
The impact stole his breath.
And then all was suddenly still.
All but the ping of the hot motor and the groan of the men in the bird with him. Except Webber. Webber was silent. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth; his head dropped to his chest at an unnatural angle.
Mike reached over, felt for a pulse in his carotid. Nothing.
God, oh, God. Webber was dead. Like they’d all be dead if they didn’t get out of the burning bird. Flames licked at his feet, hot and hungry and mean.
Had to get out.
Had to ignore the pain that seared through his shoulder like an axe blade.
He tasted blood. Choked on smoke and fumes and pain but managed to unbuckle his seat belt with his uninjured arm.
Taggart and Cooper were alive. He could hear them moaning. He had to get them out before they went up in the flames that rolled across the windshield.
He stopped thinking and just moved. Somehow, he freed Taggart.
“My leg. I… I think it’s broken,” Taggart gritted through clenched teeth, strangling a scream as Mike dragged him out of the wreckage and away from the fire. Then he went back for Cooper. The Marine was barely conscious when Mike reached him. Blood poured from a gaping wound near his hairline and he was nonresponsive. Gritting through the pain, Mike grabbed Cooper’s arm, steered him toward the hole where the cockpit door had been, yelled at him to stay awake, to move. They had to get away from what was left of the Black Hawk before the fire shooting out the leaking fuel tank blew the bird sky high.
Step by agonizing step they reached Taggart, who had managed to stand, balancing unsteadily on his good leg.
“You’re burned.” Taggart looked at Mike through a smoke-blackened face, his eyes unfocused, like he didn’t understand what was happening.
Mike looked down at his own leg. His flight suit had protected him from the worst of the fire, but part of it had melted into his thigh when he’d crawled back inside for Cooper.
“Wait here,” he shouted above the roar of the burning Black Hawk, and with Cooper’s arm slung over his shoulder, walked him as far away as fast as he could. Then he went back for Taggart.
They had to take cover. Hard to tell how many Taliban were on the ground and had survived the aftermath of the crash. All they had were their pistols—not much firepower against AK-47s. Pain screamed through his shoulder like a vicious bitch as Mike managed to get the two men to an irrigation ditch that ran parallel with the village center. He was about to dump Cooper into the ditch when the Black Hawk exploded.
The blowback caught them in a blast of blazing hot air, lifted them off the ground, and dumped them into the shallow ditch water.
Mike landed coughing, spitting, fighting to right himself.
Cooper was totally unconscious now. Taggart was barely with the program. Swearing, sweating, Mike helped them up toward the lip of the ditch, and partially out of the water.
There he clung, watching as a huge fireball blasted into the night and everything within a tenth of a mile of the village center shot up in flames.
What the hell?
The Black Hawk alone couldn’t have made that big of an explosion.
“It’s an ammo dump,” he muttered and ducked for cover as the entire village lit up to the sound of screams and thousands of rounds of ammo cooking off.
The adrenaline that fueled him let up long before the cache of munitions shot itself out. Pain screamed through his leg and shoulder as he twisted around and searched the site of the crash.
Utter devastation. His men were down there. The sickening smell of burned flesh and gunpowder and an acid smell he didn’t recognize mixed with the billowing jet fuel smoke that blackened the already dark night air. The taste of blood and dirt and despair filled his senses.
That’s when he heard the distant whoop, whoop, whoop of a chopper.
Taggart roused for a moment, swore through his pain. “Flare. Send up a flare.”
Mike reached into the pocket of his flight suit for a flare and was about to crawl out of the ditch and light it, when a sixth sense warned him something wasn’t right.
He shielded his eyes and squinted up at the night sky. Toward the rapidly approaching chopper, not trusting what his eyes were telling his brain.
The bird wasn’t theirs.
How could that be?
The flames from the fire illuminated a chopper covered in camouflage paint as it sat down a safe distance away from the scene of the crash. It was a Russian-made Mi-8 twin-turbine transport that had been converted to double as a gunship.
He stared, still disbelieving even as he knew exactly what he was seeing. What the hell was a Russian transpo chopper doing out here? Tonight?
The Afghan army had a few Mi-8s, but Mike knew every fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft between here and Kandahar, and there weren’t supposed to be any in this area of operations. Even if for some unknown reason there were, the Afghan army wouldn’t be skulking around in the dark on the wrong sid
e of a mission gone sideways.
Keeping his head low as the sliding door on the starboard side of the fuselage opened, Mike peeked above the rim of the ditch, wishing for the NVGs he’d lost somewhere after the crash. Making do with the light from the fires, he watched the action as four men jumped to the ground.
All four carried Russian assault rifles. Two were bearded and dressed in Shalwar kameez, traditional loose trousers and long tunics typical of the region. Their faces were hidden behind balaclavas. The other two wore western camouflage fatigues. And they weren’t Afghani, they were Caucasian. No mistaking that fact. And they were clearly in charge.
Hoping like hell they weren’t spotted, he listened in troubled silence. He couldn’t make out what they were saying above the whine of the chopper’s turbine engine, but he could tell they were speaking Pashto to the Afghanis who were shouting toward the village.
A figure emerged from the far side of the village square. One of the Taliban fighters. He sprinted for the chopper and jumped inside. Several more trotted toward the bird, AKs in hand, and at least a dozen men boarded the bird before the original four climbed back inside.
One of the guys in camo stood surveying the scene for several long moments, then crouched below the slowly winding rotor blades, making certain there were no survivors.
Before he turned and stepped up into the chopper, Mike got a good look at his face. It was a face he would not soon forget. He made Mike think of a ferret. Eyes deep-set under bushy black brows. Narrow jaw. Thin, sinister lips. Sunken cheeks below prominent cheekbones.
Apparently satisfied with the slaughter, he finally ducked inside the chopper and it lifted off, heading north.
What the fuck?
Cooper moaned, still unconscious, and Mike turned back to see what he could do for him. He checked Cooper’s vitals—not good—and willed a Black Hawk to set down soon. With shaking, smoke-blackened hands, he fished a bag of quick clot from a pocket, dumped it on Cooper’s wound, then wrapped a pressure bandage around his head. Then he got to work immobilizing Taggart’s leg.
Ten minutes later, he breathed a sigh of relief at the unmistakable sound of a Black Hawk scooting in fast from the south.
This time he set off the flare.
Only then did he let himself close his eyes and knuckle under to his own pain.
12
Eva’s heart started racing the moment Mike began to tell his story. It still raced like she’d run a marathon when he stopped. She’d felt his fear. His pain. His despair over his lost team. Eight years after the massacre had taken place, he’d taken her back in time to that tiny village where so many had died.
Including Ramon.
A tear trickled slowly down her cheek. Only when she reached up to brush it away did she realize that she’d covered the hand Brown had fastened in a deathlike grip on the armrest while the words had tumbled out of him, slowly at first, then lightning fast, as though he couldn’t stop the runaway train of memories.
And only as she reluctantly pulled her hand away, feeling the absence of his warm palm against hers, did she realize that somewhere during the telling, he’d turned his hand over and linked his fingers with hers.
As if just now realizing the intimacy they’d shared, he straightened in his aisle seat, rolled his shoulders.
“Well,” he said, attempting to inject a lightness she knew he couldn’t possibly feel, “I’m thinking that right about now you’re sorry you ever asked.”
Not sorry. Horrified. But relieved, too. She knew the truth now. She hadn’t realized how much it would hurt to hear how her husband had died.
Just as she hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted to believe Mike Brown.
When had a fact-finding mission transitioned into this desperate desire to prove his innocence? Maybe when she’d finally realized that he worked too damn hard to mask his innate decency behind that smart-ass grin. Maybe because he hadn’t been able to conceal a primal, masculine rage that she’d sensed from the moment she’d made contact with him in the cantina. A rage that dated back eight years. The rage of an innocent man.
Reading his pretrial statements from the pages of the OSD files hadn’t prepared her for the reality. Those pages had only told half the story. They hadn’t detailed the fear, the grief, the utter sense of desolation. Those pages hadn’t made her believe.
Brown had.
The trouble with believing, however, was that it opened up an entire new line of questions.
“I don’t understand why your CO didn’t stand up for you. Why he let it get as far as court-martial proceedings.”
Brown stared at the seat back in front of him. “You have to look at it from his angle. The Afghani government was all over the U.S. Joint Command demanding explanations—and justice. There was a village full of dead civilians, dead U.S. military personnel, a downed Black Hawk. Added to that, neither the Afghani or U.S. military radar had any record of an unaccounted-for chopper in the area that night—which left my story full of holes.”
“But you saw it. Why wouldn’t it show up on their tracking system?”
“Because that terrain sucks for radar detection. Even the antimortar radars have a problem with the mountains and valleys. And let’s face it—the Taliban have no air game.”
“So, they decided you were making it up?”
“That was the consensus, yeah. Webber was dead. Taggart and Cooper had been unconscious or too disoriented to know what had gone down. I was the only one telling the story. And remember, I was already guilty of disobeying a direct order. They pegged it as CYA—cover your ass—all the way.”
“Your decision was mission critical. You couldn’t leave those men there to die.”
He shook his head wearily. “Everyone was covering their asses. The Afghan government was all over Com Cent. They wanted a fall guy—it became real clear real fast that it was going to be me.”
“I still don’t understand why you let it happen.” She couldn’t keep the frustration from her voice.
“You weren’t there, okay? So don’t judge me.”
“Then I’m judging your CO. He never should have signed off on that report.”
“You think he wanted to? Look, Henry Brewster was a stand-up guy. He ran the FOB, for God’s sake, yet he took time to come to see me in the brig. Told me he was sorry I was taking the heat and the rap, and assured me that after some time passed it would blow over and all go away.”
“So you agreed to plead no contest?”
“Hell no. I didn’t agree to anything. Not then. I waited. I counted on Brewster coming through. Then I got sent back stateside. To Bragg.”
“Wait.” She held up a hand interrupting him. “Fort Bragg? You were Navy. Why were they holding you at an Army base?”
“The One-Eyed Jacks team fell under Joint Special Operations Command. JSOC is based at Bragg. And JSOC is all about command and structure. I was a fault line in that structure that threatened their very foundation. They wanted me gone, incident forgotten, end of story. The base commander at Bragg—James Slockem—made sure it happened.”
“And Brewster didn’t stop it.”
“He did what he could,” he repeated defensively. “He was still in Afghanistan. Dealing with the troop surge, a complete operational reorg, and a bump from one to two stars—so yeah, he was a little busy.”
“Too busy to stand up for his own men?”
His jaw clenched. “Let it go.” He stared her straight in the eye. “You’re barking at the wrong dog. Brewster was… he was the man, you know? The One-Eyed Jacks was his pet project. He fought for the unit, put it together. No one went to bat for us like he did. No one would have let us get by with the shit we pulled but him. He had our backs time and time again.”
“Just not when it counted.”
He closed his eyes. “Especially when it counted. Who do you think arranged for the plea deal? Brewster set it up. He pulled the strings, pulled in markers. He made the file go away. He made it all go away. He
did the best by me that he could. If he hadn’t, I’d be rotting in a military prison somewhere.”
“He could have exonerated you.”
He swore wearily. “Enough. I don’t want to hear any more about it. It was all on me, okay? I’m fucking guilty. That kind of weight doesn’t transfer. Not to Brewster. Not anyone else. I didn’t save them. That’s the bottom line.”
She got it. He felt tremendous guilt because he hadn’t saved his men. For him, there would never be any getting out from under that guilt. She, however, wasn’t saddled with that particular problem. And whether he liked it or not, she was looking into Brewster. The man might be a god to Mike, but she wasn’t worshiping at his altar.
She understood something else, too. Mike needed to believe in Brewster. If not his CO, then there was no one he could believe in.
And maybe he was right. But she was going to follow up, and then they’d both know.
“The bottom line remains, someone sold you out,” she said quietly.
He swiped a hand over his jaw, an action she’d noticed he used when he felt pressured. “Let’s say I was a casualty of war. My JAG attorney convinced me that I wasn’t going to beat the rap. He said Brewster had moved heaven and earth to get the military to even consider a plea. So I buckled and went for the less than honorable discharge instead of the court-martial.”
Her father had been a JAG attorney before he’d retired two years ago. She couldn’t help but think that he’d never have let this happen to Brown.
“Taggart and Cooper?”
His eyes looked bleak. “Got caught in the crossfire. The deal was, I took the plea and they walked with me. If I fought it and lost, we all faced a death sentence.”
“Do they know that?”
His silence answered that question. No. They didn’t know.
“I didn’t sell them out. I saved their lives.”
He’d done what he’d done to protect them—and to this day they hated him because they didn’t know the whole story.
Well, that was something she could rectify. And she would, as soon as they got their feet under them in D.C. She figured she owed Brown that much for the Ketamine alone.