The Ides of Matt 2015 Page 7

  They were going down no matter what.

  No time like the present.

  If they hung up in a tree, they’d be shot before they could climb down.

  If they hit the jungle floor directly, they’d just be dead.

  Emily aimed ten tons of dying Black Hawk helicopter into the crown of a fig tree, hoping it would break their fall, but she wanted to hit it off center enough for them to slide down to the forest floor.

  That all sounded great…if she’d had any control.

  She didn’t.

  One last try on the radios. Nothing.

  “Brace yourself,” a shout to Larry.

  The Black Hawk finally rolled onto its side as they hit the trees.

  Rotor blades hacked at foliage, hit branches, crumpled, and broke away. The twin turboshaft engines, no longer trying to turn the long rotor blades, raced wildly out of control. She managed one T-handle engine cut off and Larry managed the other as the body of the helicopter slammed into the fig tree she’d targeted and tumbled off into an oak on the way to its doom.

  2

  Only after they hit was Emily able to reconstruct where “up” was and that by some miracle they’d landed tail first. The rear of the helicopter had acted as a giant shock absorber as it crushed.

  Then they flopped forward onto the wheels. The shock absorbers managed to bounce and they were parked right side up on the jungle floor. The helo was tipped back and thirty degrees to her side, but they were down.

  A massive root system, which wound and snarled like a thousand giant snakes, was pressed against Larry’s door. She tried to shove her door open. It opened six inches then caught on the jungle floor. Throwing her shoulder into it gained her only another three inches.

  Emily popped her harness, managed to contort her long legs up to the main windscreen and kicked with both boots. The shot-up laminate disintegrated into a shower of a thousand crystalline shards.

  Beyond the shattered remains of their twenty million-dollar hi-tech cocoon lay such a different world that it felt as if she was in some science fiction movie looking through a rip in the space-time continuum.

  All around her the dead helicopter still blinked and wept. She powered down the few surviving systems and the last of the alarms descended into silence, but still-creaking metal and the steady drip of leaking fluids surrounded her.

  Mere feet away stood a shadowed jungle unlike anything she’d ever seen. No training in the swamps of Mississippi had given her a calibration for what she was seeing. Tree trunks a dozen feet across and fifty to a hundred feet high soared above them. The undergrowth was thick with leaves that were as big as she was and seemed as big as her helicopter. The silence of it was breathless. And the smell was—the tang of blood, the bite of hydraulic fluid, and the nasty, sharp, warning stench of kerosene-laden fuel.

  Larry was struggling with his door, unaware of the massive tree-trunk blocking his way.

  Survive!

  The shouted self instruction finally shifted Emily into action.

  “We’re going out the windshield on my side.”

  Larry popped his harness and clumsily followed her out of the helo.

  Once they were out, she leaned back in for her rifle. It wasn’t in the door’s mount anymore. Nor was Larry’s.

  She’d flown beside the Night Stalkers of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment a few times and now understood why they always wore their weapons across the front of their vests even in training flights. It was a practice she would certainly adopt. If she survived this.

  Emily circled around to the crew chief’s gun window on her side of the helo. The open-eyed bloody face that confronted her was identifiable only by which side of the aircraft it was on.

  Down here beneath the forest’s canopy, midday was dusk and the Black Hawk’s interior was midnight. She fished a flashlight out of her thigh pouch and shone it over Vincenzo’s head. Yamota was no better off. Her attempts to wrench open the helo’s side door were futile, it was trapped by the badly twisted frame.

  She considered dismounting Vincenzo’s M240, and then she looked again at the waiting jungle. It was going to be challenge enough without a twenty-seven pound machine gun and the same weight again in ammunition. Her and Larry’s best chances were in evasion, not confrontation.

  Bracing herself emotionally, she tipped Vincenzo back far enough that she could strip him of his holstered sidearm and spare magazines. He had a pair of full water bottles tucked into pockets as well. She took those despite the slickness of blood on plastic. Pretending that it was only red water spilled over the outsides didn’t help in the least.

  Larry was no longer standing at the nose of the helo when she returned. Instead he’d slid down to the jungle mulch and was leaning against the rounded nose cone, the only undamaged panel of the entire aircraft.

  He had wiped his face of the worst of the blood and was blinking normally. But when she waved a hand in front of his eyes, he didn’t react. She leaned back into the helicopter and managed to find her medkit, which she stuffed into a vest pocket. Another future lesson to keep everything she’d ever need on her person.

  It was all very well back in the classroom to believe that you’d have the on-going resources of your downed helicopter and that the instructors had just been blowing their usual smoke. Besides, for every hour of survival training there was a hundred hours of flight training and a hundred more of combat training. That made it easy to discount the one hour that was squeezed in here and there. During Iraq and Afghanistan they didn’t even have time for that.

  After a moment’s debate, Emily removed her helmet. She wanted its protection, but she needed her ears uncovered. The instant she did so, the world came crashing in. Bird calls came bursting to life around her, all commenting on the helicopter that had just plummeted into their midst. And it wasn’t the comfortable check check of a red-wing blackbird or a crow’s sharp caw. The jungle chittered and nattered and the occasional spine-tingled scree! sliced through the air.

  Also, now that she’d shed her helmet, she could hear the racing engines of pickup trucks as they roared across the poppy fields in their direction. As well as Emily could judge, she and Larry still had a few minutes, but “few” was the operative word.

  She considered removing Larry’s helmet, but didn’t think she’d like what she found there. Besides, his blindness—whether temporary or permanent—meant he needed protection to not batter his face against branches as they forged into the undergrowth.

  There was no question that’s where they were going. To stay by the helicopter would only guarantee their doom.

  “C’mon, Larry. Let’s get a move on.” He stumbled uncertainly to his feet when she pulled on his arm.

  “What about Vincenzo and Yamota?”

  “We need to get going if we don’t want to join them.”

  “Shit.” Not even emphatic enough to earn an exclamation point. The four of them had flown two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no way to encapsulate or deal with such a loss in this moment. Focus on the next task. Survive.

  Their Black Hawk had a transport configuration, but it wasn’t all about moving howitzers and supplies. They’d flown hundreds of infantry delivery and retrieval missions, combat search and rescue, and pretty much everything under the sun that wasn’t covered by the Special Operations guys of the Night Stalkers. They’d even flown a few special ops missions when SOAR was strapped for resources in a particular region.

  To survive all of that and then lose two men on a flood-relief flight halfway around the world was too painful to elicit external emotion, the internal anguish was far too great.

  As was the need to survive.

  Emily pulled Larry’s arm over her shoulder and locked her arm around his waist. It would be easier to guide his steps that way.

  She stared at the thick undergro
wth and wished for a machete. Then she thought better of it. That would just make them that much easier to track.

  With that in mind, she tossed her helmet toward the far side of the clearing punched by the Black Hawk’s crash. It landed against the edge of a small gap in the branches. Maybe the bad guys would think they’d gone that direction, deeper into the jungle.

  Deeper into the jungle. That’s exactly what they’d expect.

  Never do the expected, some drill Sergeant’s voice echoed out of her past. McCluskey?

  “I’d pay good money right now to have taken SERE.” The Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course was mainly for Special Operations guys.

  “Probably be real handy at the moment,” Larry agreed. “When it really hits the wall, Emily, you leave me and take off.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Exactly. Don’t be an idiot. If they’re going to catch one of us or both of us, make it only one.”

  Emily kept her mouth shut. There was no chance in hell she was going to be leaving a live man behind.

  “So, where are we going?”

  “Back to the poppy fields,” she checked the compass on her wrist. Who ever thought that a helicopter pilot would have need of a simple, mechanical compass. But the sun was straight overhead, she could barely see even that much through the thick canopy of branches and leaves, and it offered no indication of east or west.

  “We’re doing what?”

  “You need to keep your voice down.” The approaching roar of the truck engines reinforced her.

  They’d been in the clearing under a minute. It had already been too long.

  She led them around the tree that was pressed hard against Larry’s door, and ducked under a massive leaf that dripped with the thick moisture despite the heat. Away from the helo her nose was assaulted with the foreignness of the jungle. Life so thick that she couldn’t sort flower from fruit from rotting debris that rustled beneath their boots but also hid their footprints.

  Because their arms were wrapped around each other, Larry had little choice but to follow.

  They disappeared into the shadowy foliage.

  3

  Captain Larry Engstrom stumbled in a haze of red and gray shadows. He’d wiped his eyes clear of the blood, but it had made no difference. While Emily had scouted, he’d tried covering and uncovering his eyes to no effect. The play of light was from his optic nerves, not from his eyes.

  He’d started to remove his helmet, but the slicing pain had added stars to the red and gray shadows. It had also taken his legs out from under him, dropping him to the jungle floor until Emily had hauled him back to his feet. His body screamed in a dozen places, but he was alive and that was all that mattered.

  His father had begged him to get out. Begged him to do anything else, even something non-practical like music. His mother had simply looked sad and suddenly old. They had grown up protesting the Vietnam War. He had grown up in a different world where the United States was no longer the invader but now the invaded. The twin towers of the World Trade Center had gone down on his sixteenth birthday. He was twenty-two when he graduated from West Point and both Iraq and the Afghanistan Wars were in their fourth-year of constant escalation. His country had called and he’d answered.

  A branch clunked hard against his helmet and sent him staggering into Emily.

  He heard a whispered, “Sorry,” over the ringing in his ears.

  “Just stung for a moment,” his head was still ringing but he didn’t want to upset Emily. His beautiful Emily. He’d follow her to the ends of the Earth, if he could only make his feet work.

  Larry had been stumbling along through his career much as he was now stumbling along the Thai jungle floor. Bravado, broads, and beer—the three “B”s of the Army. He took stupid risks and buried them in alcohol and his dick in willing women…until Second Lieutenant Emily Beale had boarded his Black Hawk.

  A tall, slender blond who should have been on a fashion runway, not a militarized mess like Bagram. At first he’d convinced himself that she was a heat mirage or a magical genie, like I Dream of Jeannie sprung to life. Barbara Eden had been hot back in her day, but Emily Beale, a soldier with a steel spine and the integrity to match, totally dusted her.

  He’d cleaned up his act to meet her standard. And once he had, he couldn’t believe the shit he’d done in the past or his low-life taste in women. Beale had kept their relationship strictly professional—right through two tours and her promotion to First Lieutenant and his to Captain—but at least on the few occasions he went womanizing, he’d shown a much better taste in women and been more respectful. With the Beale gold-standard for comparison, it wasn’t hard.

  She was hurrying them along and he did his best to keep his breathing quiet though it sounded loud and ragged despite the insulation of his helmet.

  Lately things had been shifting between them. Over the last year they’d grown closer. She’d let her hair down a few times and they’d talked over a beer and pizza about their careers and a little about their lives before.

  Their lives before—

  With a loud tonk that seemed to echo through the jungle, Larry caught his boot on a tree root and had to wrap both hands around Emily to keep his balance. She felt so good that it was hard to let go of her. He could feel her determination when he felt so little of it remaining. He knew he was injured and only adrenaline was keeping him upright, adrenaline and, again, the need to meet her standard.

  Their lives before oddly no longer mattered. Her dad was some government bigwig, though she declined to say which one. His was a game-software engineer. Her mom: socialite. His: grade school teacher. It didn’t matter. They were soldiers now and moving up through the ranks of the 101st Airborne.

  The racing truck engines were close now. Even the jungle didn’t muffle them.

  Then brakes squealed, tires skidded on gravel. A raking slash of machine-gun fire sent bullets whistling through the leaves overhead. Birds screamed in surprise and departed in noisy flocks.

  Emily was pulling on his arm, dragging him to the side, ducking for cover.

  He didn’t need the urgency transmitted through her guiding arm, still locked around his waist, to know they only had seconds to find cover. He’d scream in frustration if he dared. Blind. Unable to help. Deadweight.

  4

  Emily blessed every time Larry managed to place one foot in front of the other; he was far too big for her to carry.

  He’d been beer-belly bound when she first met him, as wild as most of the pilots in the 101st. Dangerous as hell and on the road down. At least she’d thought he was. Then he’d begun working out more, drinking less, and was soon as fit as he was handsome. He’d also been an exceptional flyer; she’d learned a great deal from Larry Engstrom.

  And now he was proving himself to be far above the standard soldier with how he was fighting against the pain and blindness, helping as much as he could.

  The pointless gun fire slicing over their heads continued killing leaves.

  By the sounds from the vehicles, she’d made a crucial mistake. She’d headed straight from the helicopter back toward the poppy fields. Of course, that was exactly the route the bad guys would take from their vehicles to look for the helo. Should’ve arced.

  Stupid!

  It didn’t matter that she was a city girl from Washington D.C., she wasn’t allowed stupid. Not when the slightest mistake was going to kill them.

  Taking advantage of the masking noise of the gunfire, she twisted due north to get out of their direct line of approach toward the crash site.

  The gunfire sliced off as if cut with a knife. The sudden silence of the jungle thundered down on them and she froze in place. There wasn’t a single bird call. Not even a rustle of something moving through the undergrowth.

  Then the shouts in Thai began—so close to hand she almost answer
ed their calls to each other.

  Under cover of their shouts, she dragged Larry sideways into a particularly dense clump of undergrowth. Banana, papaya, or Dr. Seuss Truffula trees—she hadn’t a clue.

  Dragging him down to the jungle floor didn’t take much effort. The adrenaline of the crash and their race through the trees could only last so long and it was collapsing out from under her.

  She landed hard, but stifled her grunt. Larry fell too, mostly on top of her.

  He started to move, but she held him close as a pair of feet and many curses crashed through the brush not a half dozen paces away.

  5

  Larry tried to do the decent thing, but he was so tired.

  He couldn’t hear much of anything through the helmet. Someone shouted from a distance away, but he had no way to tell how far. Or how angry.

  But while he could neither see nor hear, he could absolutely feel. Despite service revolvers, flight vests, and circumstances—against all odds he was finally holding Emily Beale tightly in his grasp and he was loathe to let go.

  Even with all the gear they each wore, he could feel how they would be in each other’s arms.

  He was past fear now. And, he realized, far past any shred of common sense. It was easy to pretend for a moment that they were on some tropical island—preferably one where no one was trying to kill them—and they could drift together. Turquoise water.

  First signs of shock from blood loss, some distant part of him noted. Which was odd, there was no more blood running down his face from the scalp wound, but he was past caring about that.

  Larry’s nose was still working just fine. He could smell the dark richness of the decaying plant matter that made up the jungle floor—a thick, soft mattress of duff. And also the scent of Emily Beale that he’d know among a thousand flowers: rare, elusive, enticing.

  “Don’t move,” her whisper was just loud enough to penetrate his helmet, but no more.