Survive Until the Final Scene

by M. L. Buchman

  “We’ve got to go and look, right?”

  “Bring them back, dead or alive,” the Delta operator was awake and checking her weapons—as if she hadn’t been dead asleep moments before. He’d expected a Delta to be a bristling armory. But she wore just two handguns, a big knife on her thigh, and her rifle. Nothing else. Her vest had a small med kit, a water bottle, two radios, and a lot of extra magazines of ammunition.

  “Alive is better,” he told her.

  “Your job,” she nodded. “Mine is making sure you come back alive.”

  “Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

  She offered him a sliver of a smile.

  As if Delta Carla had woken on some magic cue, the pilot called out. “Two minutes. Then we’ll see how fun this is going to be.”

  3

  Dusty, burnt, and bloody, she’d switched movies: Air America was now totally The Flight of the Phoenix.

  Kandace hadn’t landed in the fireball of the plane crash—about the only thing that had gone right.

  However, the superheated ammo had all lit off the moment that the plane had actually impacted with the desert.

  She’d still been descending under her chute, trying to ignore the headache from banging her helmet so hard against the tail’s horizontal stabilizer. Kandace forgot about that in short order.

  It was the blast of the explosion itself that had driven her clear of the fireball or she just might have landed in the wreck. Of course, it slapped her with a superheated shockwave that had singed her flightsuit almost black. It had also steamed her in it like a tamale in a banana leaf. The LPP, low-profile parachute—designed specifically for pilots and crews of planes without ejection seats—was only moderately steerable. She’d landed at the fireball’s whim.

  But before that, while she was still aloft, the destruction of all the ammunition had fired a bullet at her.

  She’d been shot in the leg—by her own plane. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

  Bleeding profusely, she’d landed hard against the broken-off tail empennage she’d banged her head on less than thirty seconds earlier. It had landed less than a hundred feet from the rest of the plane.

  The CPR training kicked in first.

  Pulling out her survival knife, she slit open the thigh of her flightsuit.

  At that moment, a secondary shock wave had caught her still-billowing parachute. It actually lofted her another hundred feet or so into the brush before it snagged on a scrub tree.

  She managed to keep her knife, and as a bonus didn’t stab herself with it as she was plunged into the nest made by her parachute caught up in the tree’s branches.

  This time she unharnessed from the chute first.

  “You’re in the desert, recover everything, Kandace.”

  And that’s how she knew that she and Jimmy Stewart were in the same movie. In The Flight of the Phoenix he’d crashed in a Saharan sandstorm hundreds of miles off course. He and the other survivors were going to die in the desert. Their solution? A gargantuan task: rebuilding their twin-engine, twin-boom Fairchild C-82A Packet plane as a simple single-engine monoplane.

  Not really an option for her.

  Other than the tail section, the largest remaining part of the plane was probably the shot-up Number Two engine, wherever it had fallen.

  So, she dropped out of the tree, and managed to drag the chute down with her. Kandace gauzed her leg with supplies from her survival vest’s med kit, then bound it as tightly as she could with a long strip of parachute Kevlar. A tourniquet, alone in the desert, was the same as losing a leg. If she did, she couldn’t fly again. Not acceptable. So the binding had better be enough.

  The continuing fire and smoke plume, reaching a thousand or more feet into the fading sunset, told her the exact direction of the plane, though it was masked by the scattered trees. Perhaps she’d been blown farther aside than she’d thought.

  The plume.

  It was etched against the fading afternoon sky.

  ANISOM forces would know exactly where to look for her.

  Then, from where she lay huddled in the shade of her tree, she saw a battered pickup truck go racing toward the plane. In the back was a circle of men with bandoliers of cartridges and more rifles and RPGs than an entire platoon of Marines.

  Al-Shabaab. Maybe she would crawl the other way.

  Like Captain Harris in Phoenix, she would walk into the desert seeking help she already knew she’d never find. And unlike the Trucker Cobb character, she hoped that she wasn’t going to die out here in the dust.

  That’s when she remembered her radio.

  Nothing when she tried it.

  She peeled off her helmet. The radio cord was still plugged in.

  Following it down she found the emergency radio—half of it anyway.

  Kandace rubbed at the line of pain across her chest, a line that passed through the center of the radio. Her chest must have hit the edge of the tail section while she’d been busy headbutting it.

  She gave the half-radio and her helmet a quick burial, and a briefer funeral, in the red sand. She’d liked that helmet.

  Did it count as a half radio or a no radio? Like in Wall Street when Lou tells Bud, “You can’t get a little bit pregnant, son.” So if it wasn’t a half radio, that meant it was…

  Kandace shook her head to clear it—and regretted it immediately. Her headache was more like she’d been concussed despite her helmet.

  She crawled…away.

  Simply…away.

  4

  “Site is empty,” the majors reported. “Zero heat signatures outside the heart of the fire. Not much left of the fire or the plane.”

  “Maybe she’s under something.” Bob really hoped so because the other options were beyond anything he could fix. Dead or taken by al-Shabaab.

  Carla nodded a maybe. “Drop us half a klick east.”

  “But—”

  “A helo tells any bad guys in the area exactly where we are. I’d rather they didn’t meet us at the wreck right away.”

  Bob supposed that made sense.

  “Once you dump us in the dirt,” she called to the pilots, “work a ten-klick perimeter. Let us know if anyone is showing undo interest.”

  “Roger that,” Tim called out. “Ground in five, four…”

  Bob grabbed his med pack. For a moment he debated between a stretcher and his rifle…but decided he was more likely to need the latter.

  The helo didn’t actually stop at “One.”

  A crew chief slid aside the side cargo door. Carla grabbed the shoulder of his uniform, and they stepped down together. The step that he’d expected to be eighteen inches was five feet.

  He did a face-plant into the sand as the helo continued on its way, blasting them with sand and blown grit.

  “Those two have a low sense of humor,” Carla helped him to his feet.

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry.” She stayed on her feet despite the unexpected drop. He pulled down the night-vision goggles on his helmet and switched them on.

  “In my tracks,” she pointed close behind her.

  At his nod, she led off, zigzagging until he’d lost all sense of direction. When the plane suddenly loomed before them, it was such a surprise that he almost landed on his face again.

  “Not seeing any traps,” Carla reported. Which finally explained the crazy back-and-forth course.

  He zeroed in on the cockpit. Not much left of it.

  “No body,” he told her when she joined him. There was also no windshield, but there were parts of the console and the two pilots’ seats. “Seat belt is unbuckled. That’s a good sign.”

  Carla nodded.

  It took surprisingly little time to inspect the fuselage. The fire had burned hot and hard. There wouldn’t have been much identifiable remains left of a pilot. But whatever there might be, they didn’t find it. And their safety window here was probably counted in minutes not hours.

  “Come on.” Carla headed north past the tail section.


  “But—” His protest was cut off when she grabbed his sleeve and dragged him under the first trees.

  “Sit. Here. Don’t move.” She was barely five-four, but she sat his ass down as effortlessly as a six-four MP. Deltas really were a breed apart.

  Then she was gone into the night. Even with his night vision on, she seemed to fade from view.

  Not daring to move from where she’d planted him, he did his best to make a sector by sector search of the wreckage site. A twist of metal could have been an arm…but wasn’t. A curve of a battered tin that might have been a Number 10 can of tomatoes wasn’t a helmet. Maybe that—

  He yelped when a hand landed on his shoulder from behind.

  “Shh!” Carla dragged him to his feet. “I walked the whole perimeter. A lot of tracks in and out, but they’re all vehicle tracks. Mostly civilian personnel transport. At least three with tires so bald that they shouldn’t still be intact. Lotsa bad guys in pickups. No footprints.”

  “So she’s in there somewhere.” He nodded toward the wreckage and tried not to be sick. The chance of Captain Kandace Eversmann surviving that was minimal.

  But…he had seen something.

  “Hang on.” He trotted back toward the tail section.

  He’d been right. Bob lifted up the mangled remains of a military-grade radio than had gotten tangled in the sharp edge of the elevator mechanism.

  “Do you think al-Shabaab got her?” If they had, the chances of her survival were painfully low.

  Carla knelt where he’d found the radio and looked around.

  Everything was covered with scorch marks and dust.

  “No footprints.” Carla rose slowly to her feet inspecting the face of the big tail. It rose almost two stories.

  About ten feet up, there was a crease in the leading edge and…

  “That’s blood splatter,” he’d seen the pattern often enough to know it. “Bad wound, but not a spurter.” Arterial flow would have smeared over the entire tail section.

  “So…” Without explaining, Carla dragged him away from the plane.

  “Will you cut that out!”

  “Shh!” She stopped a hundred yards from the site. Then she shoved him back—to sit.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Sit, Bob. Stay, Bob. Good boy, Bob.”

  Carla’s smile looked a little feral as it flashed in his night vision. Then she was gone again.

  The wait this time was agonizing.

  Long enough for him to question why he’d joined the military at all. Because Mom and Dad had both loved the service.

  Why had he gone medical? Because Mom’s best friend in the Army had died when an IED had taken out her Humvee. Their patrol had no medic because there weren’t enough of them. A trained one could have saved her.

  Mom had retired and a lot of the life had gone out of her.

  Why had he stayed in?

  Bob stared back toward the crash site.

  Because the first time they’d inserted him into a hot zone, he’d saved two guys’ lives. Sent one back to his wife and kids, and the other back to his parents. Maybe not walking tall, but not in body bags either.

  He’d done that. A real life-saving hero.

  “Top that guys!” He stuck his tongue out at Batman and Superman.

  “Careful you don’t bite it off,” Carla whispered from inches away.

  He nearly did in his surprise.

  She held up a mangled bit of electronics and a battered helmet. It had an insignia on the side that seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place right away.

  “What’s that?”

  “The other half of her radio.”

  She didn’t have to grab his shoulder to get him moving this time.

  5

  Safety in distance could only motivate her so far. And it had only worked for Katniss Everdeen until fire had chased her back into the game.

  Kandace decided it was time to go all-in on The Hunger Games. It seemed like a good idea, despite their aircraft being aerodynamically ridiculous, though they cleaned them up a bit by the third installment in the series, Mockingjay.

  A fresh strip of Kevlar should mask any blood trail.

  That gave her an idea.

  After cutting off all of the parachute cords and tucking them away in a thigh pouch—on her good leg—she bundled up the Kevlar.

  She tossed the parachute off to the side from her earlier track. It unfurled like a red carpet, that happened to be sky blue. Kandace slithered across it.

  Much easier than clawing through the gritty sand, she should have thought of this earlier. The water park at the end of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It didn’t have any planes, but it did have a great water slide scene. What she wouldn’t give for a nice cool water slide at the moment. The desert night might be cooling down, but she couldn’t really tell. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so hot if she peeled off her flightsuit. Seemed like too much effort.

  Instead, she tried to count a flying movie that had been released each year of her life—performing a toss-and-slither once for each film.

  Air America and Die Hard II. Both in the year she was born. “Damn straight.” Slither across the parachute.

  Then gather it from behind and toss it ahead. Another parachute length for the second movie.

  Memphis Belle. Or had that been the same year. Didn’t matter, it was another parachute span from her earlier trail.

  She drew a blank for a few years, but Executive Decision and Fly Away Home meant she had to do two toss-and-slithers for 1996.

  Con Air and Air Force One gave her another doubleheader.

  She kind of forgot to think of any movies until she reached eleven years old: Jodi Foster in Flightplan.

  What was her own flight plan?

  Crawl across the Somali desert all of the way back to Djibouti? A thousand miles of hostile desert and salt pan. One chute-length at a time could take a while.

  She wanted to just pull the chute over her like a shroud.

  Didn’t James Bond do that once to avoid being rescued by a plane at the end of some movie?

  Or had he used the Fulton Skyhook where he’d raised a balloon and been swept aloft by a passing B-17 with a massive line catcher on its nose?

  Or was that two separate movies?

  Why couldn’t she remember?

  And maybe…

  She reached for her water bottle. But it wasn’t in her thigh pocket.

  Kandace had been parsing out the water by the scant mouthful, but no matter where she looked it was gone.

  It had been…

  She reached for the thigh pocket again and had to bite back a scream when she grabbed her wound.

  On the other side, she found the correct pocket, and pulled out…paracord.

  She’d taken a drink while cutting the cords off her parachute. The bundled cord had gone into the empty pocket.

  Then she’d slip-slid away, with the comforting pressure of a half bottle still in its place.

  Except it was back there.

  In the sand.

  She couldn’t even be sure of the direction.

  Kandace managed one final toss-and-crossing. But lost in the desert without any water, she knew that even James Bond wasn’t going to get her out of this one.

  It took everything she had left to dig a hole in the sand, line it with the chute, and lay in it. It was tricky, but she managed to bury herself.

  With only her face showing, she felt the world closing around her.

  It was quiet. Peaceful.

  Like the end of Top Gun. Hopefully without the ending credit in memory of the stunt pilot who’d died during the filming of the flat spin.

  6

  “We’re pushing on time here,” Tim called down from their helo. “We’ve got a company-sized force moving in your direction, and ANISOM confirms it isn’t them.”

  “Roger that,” was all Carla answered.

  The trail had been easy to follow, though a steady onshore wind was erasing the tracks fast enough to be
a real challenge soon.

  Carla double-timed her way forward.

  Bob did what he could to keep pace with her.

  They were getting closer. He’d seen the heat along her track…the heat of blood.

  By the amount he’d seen smeared on the plane’s tail, and then again where her trail had magically appeared on the ground, he knew she’d be tapped out soon. Any rational person would have stopped long ago.

  There was a tenacity there that he really appreciated. It reminded him of why he did this. Of why he’d stayed in, at least so far.

  She’d become a talisman for him.

  If he could save her, then he’d know that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

  If not? Well, maybe there really was a reason he hadn’t signed his re-up papers yet. Maybe he’d see what the civilian side was like. Be like Batman and drop out of the superhero business—with a girl he didn’t have.

  “Shit!”

  This time he did run into Carla’s back and knocked them both to the sand.

  She didn’t even complain.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked when he saw her scouting around.

  “The trail just ended.”

  “Just…ended?”

  “Listen to my words. Ended. As in doesn’t continue,” Carla sounded pissed. An angry Delta operator was not a good sign.

  Bob began scouting as well. Behind a low thorn bush he found two things: a water bottle, and the tip of a bloody Kevlar strip sticking up out of the sand.

  He inspected the latter carefully. “Point wound. Not a slice. The stain pattern says that the wound was covered in gauze. That’s one tough pilot.”

  “One tough pilot who is out at the edge enough that she forgot her water.”

  “But figured out how to disappear,” he reminded her.

  There was no heat signature under the bush or up any of the few nearby scrub trees. Their night-vision goggles were sensitive enough that they should be able to trace even a footprint for several hours after it was made.