by Tom Clancy
It was slow getting off. The helicopter had several tons of new weight, was at over five thousand feet of altitude, and trying to fly with reduced power. Forward, PJ cursed the balky machine. The Pave Low struggled up a few feet, still taking fire.
On the ground around them the attackers were enraged that the men whom they wanted to kill were escaping, and ran for one last attempt to prevent it. They saw the helicopter as a trophy, some horrible apparition that had robbed them of success and their comrades of their lives, and each of them determined that this should not be. Over a hundred rifles were trained on the aircraft as it wavered, halfway between ground and flight.
Ryan felt the passage of several rounds—they were coming right through his door, going he knew not where, aiming for him and his gun. He was past fear. The flashes of rifle fire were places to aim, and that he did. One at a time he selected a target and touched his trigger, shifting rapidly from one to another. Safety, what there was of it, lay in eliminating the danger. There was no place to run, and he knew that the ability to respond was a luxury that everyone aboard the aircraft wanted, but only three of them had. He couldn’t let them down. He moved the gun left to right and back again in a series of seconds that stretched out into hours, and he thought that he could hear each individual round the minigun spat out. His head jerked back when something hit his helmet, but he yanked it back and held the trigger down, spraying the area in one continuous blast of fire that changed as he realized that he had to bring his hands up and the muzzles down because the targets were dropping away. For one brief contradictory instant it seemed as if they and not he were getting away. Then it was over. For a moment, his hands wouldn’t come off the gun. He tried to take a step back, but his hands wouldn’t let go until he willed them to. Then they dropped to his side. Ryan shook his head to clear it. He was deafened by the noise from the minigun, and it took a few seconds before he started hearing the higher-frequency screams of wounded men. He looked around to see that the body of the aircraft was filled with the acidic smoke of the guns, but the rapidly increasing slipstream from forward flight was clearing it out. His eyes were still suffering from the gun flashes, and his legs were wobbly from the sudden fatigue that comes after violent action. He wanted to sit down, to go to sleep, to wake up in another place.
One of the screams was close by. It was Zimmer, only a few feet away, lying on his back and rolling around with his arms across his chest. Ryan went to see what the problem was.
Zimmer had taken three rounds in the chest. He was aspirating blood. It sprayed in a pink cloud from his mouth and nose. One round had shattered his right shoulder, but the serious ones were through the lungs. The man was bleeding to death before his eyes, Ryan knew at once. Was there a medic here? Might he do something?
“This is Ryan,” he said over the intercom line. “Sergeant Zimmer is down. He’s hit pretty bad.”
“Buck!” PJ responded at once. “Buck, are you all right?”
Zimmer tried to answer but couldn’t. His intercom line had been shot away. He shouted something Ryan couldn’t understand, and Jack turned and screamed as loudly as he could at the rest of them, the others who didn’t seem to care or know what the problem here was.
“Medic! Corpsman!” he added, not knowing what it was that Army troops said. Clark heard him and started heading that way.
“Come on, Zimmer, you’re going to be all right,” Jack told him. He remembered that much from his brief few months in the Marine Corps. Give them a reason to live. “We’re going to fix this up and you’re going to be all right. Hang in there, Sarge—it hurts, but you’re going to be all right.”
Clark was there a moment later. He stripped off the flight engineer’s flak jacket, oblivious to the screech of pain that it caused from the wrecked shoulder. For Clark, too, it was too much a return to years past and things half-remembered. Somehow he’d forgotten just how scary, how awful this sort of thing was, and while he was recovering his senses more rapidly than most, the horror of having been helpless under fire and helpless with its aftermath had nearly overpowered him. And he was helpless now. He could see that from the placement of the wounds. Clark looked up at Ryan and shook his head.
“My kids!” Zimmer screamed. The sergeant had a reason to live, but the reason wasn’t enough.
“Tell me about your kids,” Ryan said. “Talk to me about your kids.”
“Seven—I got seven kids—I gotta, I can’t die! My kids—my kids need me.”
“Hang in there, Sarge, we’re going to get you out of here. You’re going to make it,” Ryan told him, tears clouding in his eyes at the shame of lying to a dying man.
“They need me!” His voice was weaker now as the blood was filling his throat and lungs.
Ryan looked up at Clark, hoping that there was something to be said. Some hope. Something. Clark just stared into Jack’s face. He looked back down at Zimmer and took his hand, the uninjured one.
“Seven kids?” Jack asked.
“They need me,” Zimmer whimpered, knowing now that he wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t see them grow and marry and have their own children, wouldn’t be there to guide them, to protect them. He had failed to do what a father must do.
“I’ll tell you something about your kids that you don’t know, Zimmer,” Ryan said to the dying man.
“Huh? What?” He looked confused, looked to Ryan for the answer to the great question of life. Jack didn’t have that one, but told him what he could.
“They’re all going to college, man.” Ryan squeezed the hand as hard as he could. “You got my word, Zimmer, all your kids’ll go to college. I will take care of that for you. Swear to God, man, I’ll do it.”
The sergeant’s face changed a bit at that, but before Ryan could decide what emotion he beheld, the face changed again, and there was no emotion left. Ryan hit the intercom switch. “Zimmer’s dead, Colonel.”
“Roger.” Ryan was offended by the coldness of the acknowledgment. He didn’t hear what Johns was thinking: God, oh God, what do I tell Carol and the kids?
Ryan had Zimmer’s head cradled on his lap. He disengaged himself slowly, resting the head down on the metal floor of the helicopter. Clark wrapped his burly arms around the younger man.
“I’m going to do it,” Jack told him in a choking voice. “That wasn’t a fucking lie. I am going to do it!”
“I know. He knew it too. He really did.”
“You sure?” The tears had started, and it was hard for Jack to repeat the most important question of his life. “Are you really sure?”
“He knew what you said, Jack, and he believed you. What you did, doc, that was pretty good.” Clark embraced Ryan in the way that men do only with their wives, their children, and those with whom they had faced death.
In the right-front seat, Colonel Johns put his grief away into a locked compartment that he would later open and experience to the full. But for now he had a mission to fly. Buck would surely understand that.
Cutter’s jet arrived at Hurlburt Field well after dark. He was met by a car which took him to Wing Operations. He’d arrived entirely without warning, and strode into the Operations office like an evil spirit.
“Who the hell’s in charge here?”
The sergeant at the desk recognized the President’s National Security Adviser immediately from seeing him on television. “Right through that door, sir.”
Cutter found a young captain dozing in his swivel chair. His eyes had cracked open just as the door did, and the twenty-nine-year-old officer jumped to his feet quite unsteadily.
“I want to know where Colonel Johns is,” Vice Admiral Cutter told him quietly.
“Sir, that is information which I am not able to—”
“You know who the hell I am?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you trying to say no to me, Captain?”
“Sir, I have my orders.”
“Captain, I am countermanding all of your orders. Now, you answer my question and you
do it right now.” Cutter’s voice was a few decibels higher now.
“Sir, I don’t know where the—”
“Then you find somebody who does, and you get him here.”
The captain was frightened enough that he took the route of least resistance. He called a major, who lived on post and was in the office in under eight minutes.
“What the hell is this?” the major said on the way through the door.
“Major, I am what’s going on here,” Cutter told him. “I want to know where Colonel Johns is. He’s the goddamned CO of this outfit, isn’t he?”
“Yessir!” What the hell is this ... ?
“Are you telling me that the people of this unit don’t know where their CO is?” Cutter was sufficiently amazed that his authority hadn’t generated immediate compliance with his orders that he allowed himself to bluster off on a tangent.
“Sir, in Special Operations, we—”
“Is this a fucking Boy Scout camp or a military organization ?” the Admiral shouted.
“Sir, this is a military organization,” the major replied. “Colonel Johns is off TDY. I am under orders, sir, not to discuss his mission or his location with anyone without proper authority, and you are not on the list, sir. Those are my orders, Admiral.”
Cutter was amazed and only got angrier. “Do you know what my job is and who I work for?” He hadn’t had a junior officer talk to him like this in over a decade. And he’d broken that one’s career like a matchstick.
“Sir, I have written orders on this matter. The President ain’t on the list either, sir,” the major said from the position of attention. Fucking squid, calling the United States Air Force a Boy Scout camp! Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on—Admiral, sir, his face managed to communicate quite clearly.
Cutter had to soften his voice, had to regain control of his emotions. He could take care of this insolent punk at leisure. But for now he needed that information. He started, therefore, with an apology, man to man, as it were. “Major, you’ll have to excuse me. This is a most important matter, and I can’t explain to you why it is important or the issues involved here. I can say that this is a real life-or-death situation. Your Colonel Johns may be in a place where he needs help. The operation may be coming apart around him, and I really need to know. Your loyalty to your commander is laudable, and your devotion to duty is exemplary, but officers are supposed to exercise judgment. You have to do that now, Major. I am telling you that I need that information—and I need it now.”
Reason succeeded where bluster had failed. “Admiral, the colonel went back down to Panama along with one of our MC- 130s. I do not know why, and I don’t know what they’re doing. That is normal in a special-ops wing, sir. Practically everything we do is compartmented, and this one is tighter than most. What I just told you is everything I know, sir.”
“Exactly where?”
“Howard, sir.”
“Very well. How can I get in touch with them?”
“Sir, they’re out of the net. I do not have that information. They can contact us but we can’t contact them.”
“That’s crazy,” Cutter objected.
“Not so, Admiral. We do that sort of thing all the time. With the MC-130 along, they’re a self-contained unit. The Herky-bird takes maintenance and support personnel to sustain the operation, and unless they call us for something, they’re completely independent of this base. In the event of a family emergency or something like that, we can try to contact them through Howard’s base ops office, but we haven’t had to do so in this case. I can try to open that channel now for you, if you wish, sir, but it might take a few hours.”
“Thanks, but I can be there in a few hours.”
“Weather’s breaking down around that area, sir,” the major warned him.
“That’s okay.” Cutter left the room and walked back to his car. His plane had already been refueled, and ten minutes later it was lifting off for Panama.
Johns was on an easier flight profile now, heading northeast down the great Andean valley that forms the spine of Colombia. The flight was smooth, but he had three concerns. First, he didn’t have the necessary power to climb over the mountains to his west at his present aircraft weight. Second, he’d have to refuel in less than an hour. Third, the weather ahead was getting worse by the minute.
“CAESAR, this is CLAW, over.”
“Roger, CLAW.”
“When are we going to tank, sir?” Captain Montaigne asked.
“I want to get closer to the coast first, and maybe if we burn some more off I can head west some more to do it.”
“Roger, but be advised that we’re starting to get radar emissions, and somebody might just detect us. They’re air-traffic radars, but this Herky-bird is big enough to give one a skin-paint, sir.”
Damn! Somehow Johns had allowed himself to forget that.
“We got a problem here,” PJ told Willis.
“Yeah. There’s a pass about twenty minutes ahead that we might be able to climb over.”
“How much?”
“Says eighty-one hundred on the charts. Drops down a lot lower farther up, but with the detection problem ... and the weather. I don’t know, Colonel.”
“Let’s find out how high we can take her,” Johns said. He’d tried to go easy on the engines for the last half hour. Not now. He had to find out what he could do. PJ twisted the throttle control on the collective arm to full power, watching the gauge for Number Two as he did so. The needle didn’t even reach 70 percent this time.
“The P3 leak is getting worse, boss,” Willis told him.
“I see it.” They worked to get maximum lift off the rotor, but though they didn’t know it, that, too, had taken damage and was not delivering as much lift as it was supposed to. The Pave Low labored upward, reaching seventy-seven hundred feet, but that was where it stopped, and then it started descending, fighting every foot but gradually losing altitude.
“As we burn off more gas ...” Willis said hopefully.
“Don’t bet on it.” PJ keyed his radio. “CLAW, CAESAR, we can’t make it over the hills.”
“Then we’ll come to you.”
“Negative, too soon. We have to tank closer to the coast.”
“CAESAR, this is LITTLE EYES. I copy your problem. What sort of fuel you need for that monster?” Larson asked. He’d been pacing the helicopter since the pickup, in accordance with the plan.
“Son, right now I’d burn piss if I had enough.”
“Can you make the coast?”
“That’s affirmative. Close, but we ought to be able to make it.”
“I can pick you an airfield one-zero-zero miles short of the coast that has all the avgas you need. I am also carrying a casualty who’s bleeding and needs some medical help.”
Johns and Willis looked at each other. “Where is it?”
“At current speed, about forty minutes. El Pindo. It’s a little place for private birds. Ought to be deserted this time of night. They have ten-kay gallons of underground storage. It’s a Shell concession and I’ve been in and out of there a bunch of times.”
“Altitude?”
“Under five hundred. Nice, thick air for that rotor, Colonel.”
“Let’s do it,” Willis said.
“CLAW, did you copy that?” Johns asked.
“That’s affirm.”
“That’s what we’re going to try. Break west. Stay close enough to maintain radio contact, but you are free to evade radar coverage.”
“Roger, heading west,” Montaigne replied.
In back, Ryan was sitting by his gun. There were eight wounded men in the helicopter, but two medics were working on them and Ryan was unable to offer any help better than that. Clark rejoined him.
“Okay, what are we going to do with Cortez and Escobedo?”
“Cortez we want, the other one, hell, I don’t know. How do we explain kidnapping him?”
“What do you think we’re going to do, put him on trial?”
Clark asked over the din of the engines and the wind.
“Anything else is cold-blooded murder. He’s a prisoner now, and killing prisoners is murder, remember?”
You’re getting legal on me, Clark thought, but he knew that Ryan was right. Killing prisoners was contrary to the code.
“So we take him back?”
“That blows the operation,” Ryan said. He knew he was talking too loudly for the subject. He was supposed to be quiet and thoughtful now, but the environment and the events of the evening defeated that. “Christ, I don’t know what to do.”
“Where are we going—I mean, where’s this chopper going?”
“I don’t know.” Ryan keyed his intercom to ask. He was surprised by the answer and communicated it to Clark.
“Look, let me handle it. I got an idea. I’ll take him out of here when we land. Larson and I will tidy that part of it up. I think I know what’ll work.”
“But—”
“You don’t really want to know, do you?”
“You can’t murder him!” Jack insisted.
“I won’t,” Clark said. Ryan didn’t know how to read that answer. But it did offer a way out, and he took it.
Larson got there first. The airfield was poorly lit, only a few glow lights showing under the low ceiling, but he managed to get his aircraft down, and with his anticollision lights blinking, he guided the way to the fuel-service area. He’d barely stopped when the helicopter landed fifty yards away.
Larson was amazed. In the dim blue lights he could see numerous holes in the aircraft. A man in a flight suit ran out toward him. Larson met him and led him to the fuel hose. It was a long one, about an inch in diameter, used to fuel private aircraft. The power to the pumps was off, but Larson knew where the switch was, and he shot the door lock. He’d never done that before, but just like in the movies, five rounds removed the brass mechanism from the wooden frame of the door. A minute later, Sergeant Bean had the nozzle into one of the outrigger tanks. That was when Clark and Escobedo appeared. A soldier held a rifle to the latter’s head while the CIA officers conferred.