by Dale Brown
He’d give up everything to walk again. Everything.
Bree? Not Bree. Bree he wouldn’t give up.
She danced in front of him. The dream began to fade.
His legs continued to hurt.
Dreamland Command Center
1055
DOG PUT HIS HAND ON THE LIEUTENANT’S SHOULDER, steadying the young man as he worked the com gear and flicked back and forth between the different feeds, trying to locate the helicopter wreckage. There wasn’t much more they could do from here.
“Feed pending from General Magnus,” the lieutenant told Dog.
“Yes, I see. Keep it there. Don’t open it.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door to the secure room opened and Major Cheshire entered, carrying a tray of coffee and dough-nuts. “Hey, Colonel,” she said lightly.
“Major.” Dog stared at the screen.
“Lost the connection with the general,” said the lieutenant.
“What’s up?” asked Cheshire.
Dog took the coffee and filled her in. “We’re hoping they survived,” he said, his voice soft. “Only one missile at long range. It wasn’t even certain that it hit.”
“Friendly fire,” she said, a comment, not a question.
“Definitely.” Dog glanced back at the screen at the front of the room, which showed a satellite image of the mountainous terrain. At maximum resolution, the houses on the hillsides looked like small cubes of sugar.
“You okay, Colonel?” asked Cheshire.
“I’m fine,” he told her. “General Magnus needs to be filled in. Probably, he’s not going to like it.” Cheshire nodded.
“Lieutenant, see if you can get that line open to General Magnus.”
“Trying, sir.”
Dog looked back at the screen. From the perspective of the mini-KH, it looked almost like a little piece of heaven.
Aboard Quicksilver,
over Iran
2001
NO LONGER WORRIED ABOUT THE IRANIAN LASER OR IRAQI missiles, Breanna brought Quicksilver into an orbit at fifteen thousand feet, just high enough to avoid the mountain peaks. Chris worked the video cam in the nose, scanning for wreckage, while Habib snooped for Iraqi radio transmissions.
The Megafortress’s radar was not designed to sweep the ground, and even if it had been, the jagged peaks and cliffs would have made it difficult to sort through the clutter of irregular returns. Nonetheless, Torbin was giving it the old college try, routing the radar through his station and fiddling with the filters designed to find very low-flying planes in look-down mode. He was still somewhat tentative, unsure of himself in a non-Dreamland way, but Breanna saw that he seemed to be willing to try to figure things out; he flipped back and forth between override, manually tweaking the radar sweeps.
“How we looking, troops?” she asked.
“Village two miles off that main road,” said Chris.
“Otherwise uninhabited for miles. You sure this is the place?”
“These are the coordinates the F-15s gave us.”
“Maybe try farther north. Raven‘s coming up from the south.”
“Mack’s going to take that.”
“East, then,” suggested Chris.
“We’ll give the track one more run, then we’ll try that.”
“Iraqi command radio,” said Habib.
He paused a second, then punched up a location two miles to the south of them. The coordinates flashed on a grid map in Breanna’s left multiuse display area.
“What are they saying?” she asked.
“Coordinating some sort of attack.”
“Mention our helicopter?”
“Negative. I’m having a little trouble picking it up and translating on the fly.”
“You have anything, Torbin?”
“No, ma’am.”
“All right, let’s go see if we can put some pictures with Habib’s words,” said Breanna, changing course.
On the ground in Iraq
2006
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, DANNY PUSHED AGAINST THE metal and got nowhere. He clawed and he fought. He rolled to his stomach and then around to his back, but the Hind had twisted itself into a cocoon around him. He could hear voices nearby and felt, or thought he felt, the others moving, but it was impossible to see anything. He tried pushing his arms under himself and crawling forward; when that didn’t work, he began to shimmy sideways and got a foot or so before getting stuck again. Finally, he pushed his arms under his stomach and levered the front part of his body up with his elbows. His helmet pushed against something hard. He pushed back, slipped, tried again, felt something give way. Danny pushed again. Pain flashed through his injured knee and shin; he felt himself being pulled forward into fresh air.
“Jeez, Cap, we thought you got crushed,” said Powder.
The Whiplash trooper helped Danny upright. Liu ran over, tugging at Danny’s helmet to take it off as the captain began walking. They reached a large rock a few feet away; Danny patted it as he sat, resting and catching his breath. There were two or three inches of snow on the ground, a small, unmelted patch. Danny reached over and took a handful, smearing it on his face.
“Bitch of a landing,” said Powder. “Missile blew through the engine, just about, and threw us down like a frog getting its brains bashed in on a rock. Good thing Egg didn’t know how to fly too high, huh?” “Egg’s legs are broken,” said Liu. “The Marine corporal’s got internal bleeding and isn’t conscious. Bison has a busted arm, maybe some other problems. Otherwise we’re cool. Helicopter isn’t going anywhere, though.”
“All right.” Danny, still dazed, looked over at his injured men, huddled near a cluster of rocks about ten feet away from the helicopter, which lay smashed against the hillside a few yards beyond them. It looked as if a large hand had grabbed its fuselage and crumpled the sides.
Danny couldn’t imagine how he’d made it out—or how no one had been killed.
Bison glanced over, then held up the Marine’s M-16 to show he was all right.
Danny realized that his leg didn’t hurt that bad anymore. In fact, it felt almost as good as new.
He decided he must be in shock.
“All right,” he said. “Survival radios—what’s working?”
“We’ve broadcast on everything we got,” said Powder,
“including an old Prick-90 Pretty Boy had stuffed in his ruck. Nothin’ comin’ back at us.”
“The spins—five minutes after the hour,” said Danny, referring to the broadcasts for searching aircraft.
“Gotcha, Cap.”
“Sooner if you hear anything. But remember, those batteries may have to last awhile.” Danny shifted his weight, again balancing against the rock. “All right. What do we have in the way of a perimeter here?” Powder laid it out for him. The hill they were on backed a sheer drop of about two hundred feet; below that was another deep gully. Pretty Boy and Gunny were checking the base of the hill below them; they would report back in ten minutes.
“Gunny’s idea,” added Powder. “For a Marine, he ain’t too dumb. We gave him Egg’s helmet, but damned if he couldn’t fit his head into it.”
“Shoulda given him yours,” said Nurse.
Danny reset his own helmet and tried tapping into the Dreamland circuit but got nothing. It was impossible to tell whether it had been damaged in the crash or if he was just in a bad position to get the satellite.
The cold bit at his face as he pushed his way up the slope, trying to get a sense of where they’d crashed. A shallow ridge across the way blocked his view south, and he couldn’t lean far enough away from the rocks to see much east or west.
Liu and Powder, meanwhile, worked to extricate the stolen equipment from the belly of the helicopter. They began making a pile a few yards below the wreckage.
“Fuckin’ commie metal ain’t worth shit,” said Powder as he bent the Hind’s sides back to get more gear. “Where’s their quality control? Look at this—fuckin’ paper.”
“Rig some explosives to blow the gear,” Danny told them. “My gun anywhere in there?” As he tried to duck down to see, he heard the rumble of an aircraft running through the mountains nearby.
Aboard Raven,
over Iran
2010
FENTRESS SAW THE HELICOPTERS AS HE TURNED WESTWARD. They looked like cockroaches scurrying across a dirty kitchen floor.
He could feel the adrenaline shoot into his stomach. He wanted to nail those suckers badly—too badly, way too badly. If he stayed this excited, he was going to fuck it up.
“Bandits in sight,” he said over the interphone. He tried to think of how Zen would say it, the offhand tone he’d use.
No, he wasn’t Major Jeff Stockard, war hero, fighter jock. There was no sense even trying. He had to be himself—a little too shy, a little too ready to salute. Hesitant at first, but once he was into it, damn good.
Damn good.
“Four Iraqi helicopters on two-eight-zero heading, edge of our box, right at the edge there, moving fifty knots,” he told Alou. “I’m positioning to engage.” He cleared his throat, pushed upright in his seat.
The computer gave a warning—five seconds to disconnect.
“Raven, please hang with me,” he said.
“Raven. Go for it, Hawk leader. I’m alerting the rest of the troops.”
Aboard Wild Bronco
2018
MACK CHOPPED HIS POWER AS CLOSE TO STALL SPEED AS he could; gliders went faster than the plane was flying.
They flew higher too—he was less than two hundred feet over the rocks and scrubby bushes that passed for vegetation. The OV-10 Bronco had been designed for taking a close look at the ground; it was arguably one of the best forward air control aircraft ever designed. Still, picking things out from the air was a difficult art. Not for nothing were Bronco crewmen in Vietnam considered among the bravest guys in the service.
And just maybe the craziest.
Maybe he was looking in the wrong place. Mack held his course about a mile farther, then spun back. He began tacking west, checking the INS against the paper map he had spread over his right knee. He’d used a grease pencil to plot his search area; he double-checked it now against the coordinates he’d written on the canopy glass. From what he figured, he was maybe two miles north of the spot where the Eagle pilots had nailed the Hind. He plowed through the imaginary X, banked, and brought his speed up to 160 knots, close to what he figured the helicopter would be traveling.
Helo pilot is lower than this, he thought. Radar has him here, missile coming there, maybe he sees it and freaks.
Mack pushed his nose down, sliding even closer to the jagged rocks.
Missile tracking. Maybe the guy in the helo hasn’t seen it yet. Maybe the helo deked it a bit, because, let’s face it, the helicopter is what, twenty feet off the ground? Even an AMRAAM is going to have trouble in all this clutter.
So maybe it has to cut back, pilot tries to duck around.
Mack jerked his stick up as he came unexpectedly close to a rising slope. He pulled close to five g’s, blood suddenly catching in his throat. Another rift opened to his left, a shallow collection of brown hills topped by splotches of white snow, ice, a runoff stream, roads in the distance.
And a ruined helicopter near the top of a hillside five hundred yards on his left, three miles farther west than anyone thought it would be.
“Wild Bronco to Quicksilver—check that, to Coyote AWACS, to any allied aircraft. I have the wreckage in sight. Stand by for my coordinates.”
On the ground in Iraq
2019
DANNY COULD TELL THERE WERE AIRCRAFT NEARBY, HE just couldn’t see them. Nor could they raise them on the radios. So when Gunny and Pretty Boy reported back that they had seen two trucks coming up the highway in their direction, he realized he had to find a way to make the team visible to the aircraft real fast.
“Liu, you and Powder go to the top of this hill, fire some pencil flares. Whatever is flying is probably ours, and even if it’s Iraqi, it’ll bring our guys. Once you can see the plane, the damn radios ought to work, even that Prick-90. Especially that. Gunny, you and Pretty Boy get the others ready to evac. Blow the laser shit if we can’t get it out.”
“Gotcha, Captain,” said Pretty Boy.
“Wait. Where’s that bazooka thing? You got any missiles left?”
“The bunker buster? The SMAW?”
“Yeah. I’m going to take the trucks out while you guys get picked up.”
“Fuck that,” said Gunny. “I’ll go.”
“They may need you here,” said Danny.
“Come on, Captain. Those pussies are wet for us down there,” said the sergeant, who scooped up the weapon as well as a Minimi and started downhill.
Aboard Wild Bronco,
over Iraq
2020
MACK HEARD ALOU SAY THEY WERE GOING TO SPLASH THE Iraqi helicopters and cursed. The one thing he could probably—make that definitely—nail, and they were a stinking fifteen miles south. Two Sidewinders—pop, pop.
That would make their day. If only he had them.
Stinking wimp Iraqi bastards.
He passed low over the wreckage, circling around the peak and keeping the area on his right wing. He still couldn’t tell if those were people near it, but they sure as hell looked like people, and damn, what else could they be? Moving trees?
He fought the Bronco a bit around the peak, the mountain air beating the wings like a driver whipping the back-side of a horse. The plane drifted to the left but otherwise hung with him after he kissed the throttle. As he tucked back right, white light flashed in the distance, and for a long, cold second he thought they’d been wrong about where the laser was—he thought he was about to be fried.
Distracted, he came through his bank much tighter than he’d intended, and so passed directly over the peak before he could get a good look at the ground. As he turned back he realized the flash had come from glass or a mirror that had caught the sinking sun.
This time he had a good long look at the crash site.
Two men were standing on the slope above the helicopter, waving their arms. He dipped his wings, then clicked the radio to tell the others that he definitely had people on the ground. At the same time he changed course to find out what had caught the sun.
Aboard Raven,
over Iraq
2021
THE FACT THAT HE HAD TO KEEP HIS SPEED BACK TO STAY close to Raven helped Fentress more than he would have imagined, corralling some of his nervous energy. Four helicopters were flying in an elongated and slightly staggered diamond pattern ten miles off his nose. He had a perfect intercept on the chopper on the east wing, the second in line. The computer had them ID’d as Russian-made Mil Mi-8 Hips, general-purpose troop-carrying birds that could also carriage missiles; his attack should be prudent but not overly cautious. The computer’s tactics section had a course plotted that would allow him to machine-gun the two wing helos, accelerating past and then around for a rear-quarter attack on the survivors.
That would expose him to possible antiair fire from only one of the aircraft while maximizing the damage on the formation. But Fentress realized that might not accomplish his main objective, which was to protect the ground team—the first helicopter would be within four or five miles of the wreckage at intercept; by the time he recovered and caught up, it would be in a position to disgorge its troops.
So he decided on his own plan. He’d take a few quick shots at the wing helo, but then concentrate on the leader, slashing close enough to the formation to scatter it, at least temporarily. The computer acknowledged, dotting the course for him and then stepping into the background as he closed. Fentress tried to deepen his breathing, pacing himself through the long wait—all of twenty-three seconds, counted down by the computer.
“Raven, I’m about to engage.” He had the wing helo on visual.
“Raven. Kick ass, Hawk leader.”
“Nail the mot
hers, Curly.”
Zen’s voice caught him by surprise. Before he could turn to see if he had truly heard him, the computer gave him a prompt, claiming it was in range to fire.
OBJECTS FLEW AROUND ZEN’S HEAD WITHOUT ANY LOGICAL sense. He saw Breanna dancing, saw himself walking, saw his wheelchair tumbling as if lost in a zero-gravity orbit around his head. He fought to get away from riddled unconsciousness, swam toward reality, the seat on the Flighthawk deck of Raven. Fentress was there somewhere. Fentress needed his help.
Fentress stood with a pair of Colt .45s, taking potshots on the shooting range. Clay pigeons morphed into real pigeons, which morphed into hawks, which morphed into helicopters.
Helicopters, enemy helicopters.
“Nail the mothers, Curly,” he shouted. “Lead helo first.
Knock the others off course. Go!” AS THE FIRING BAR FLASHED RED, FENTRESS REMEMBERED Zen’s advice about the computer being slightly optimistic. He started to count off three seconds to himself, but his adrenaline got the better of him; his finger depressed the trigger after one. Just under a hundred 20mm bullets perforated the engine and then the cabin and then the engine of the Hip; the chopper dipped and then fell below his target pipper. Fentress let off on the trigger, pushing right for the lead helicopter. The cannon’s recoil had stolen some of his momentum, but he managed to turn tightly, and found his target on his right wing. The bar flashed red and he began firing immediately, the bullets trailing downward as the Hip jinked left. Flares shot from the rear of the helicopter. Fentress managed a quick angle shot but couldn’t hope to maneuver behind the helicopter.
He hit the gas and boogied away, gaining speed and altitude for a second run. Turning his wing for a dive back, he saw one of the helicopters streak across his view to the left, and he hesitated a moment, surprised that it had managed to get by him. The hesitation cost him a shot on a second Hip, which came at him from less than half a mile away, chin gun blazing. Reflexes took over; Fentress tucked over and dove for the ground, spinning into a tight turn to put his nose back in the direction the helicopters had taken. At the same time, the AWACS controller warned that the rescue chopper, an MH-60 spec ops craft, was zero-one from pickup.