Hard Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  Just get this night over with and get us back on the ground.

  “My second tour I was driving Thuds, Republic F-105s, great old iron-horse birds, well past their prime and not worth shit at high altitude, but great down on the deck. I was out of Takhli in northern Thailand. Got hit by triple A near the old Dien Bien Phu, cripped my ass over into Laos, landed on a road the goddamn NVA and Pathet Lao were building toward a hush-hush CIA station on a mountaintop. The CIA boys and their little Hmongs come to my rescue. That bird got torn up for scrap metal by the CIA and locals. Ass-end of the world, that place. Take my word for it.”

  Elliot Rose did not want to hear anymore, but Haliday was on a roll. “Aren’t we getting close to the Garden?” Rose asked.

  “Nah. I just want you to relax, Rosey. My third tour was also in Thuds, Wild Weasel two-seater, our job to go in ahead of the strike force and try to get the bad guys to shoot their SAMs at us so the gaggle could come in when the enemy was out of ammo. Sort of like tonight. We hit us the fucking jackpot one night. Frickin’ secondaries all over the frickin’ landscape, it looked like the surface of planet Mercury below us, shit cooking off all over the place, flak all around us, and goddamn if a flak fragment didn’t hit my GIB smack in his plastic hat, I shit you not. The bird got hit numerous times but kept flying, and I took her back to Laos, hooked up to a tanker, and we siphoned his fuel directly through us until he got us over the Fence, and I put her down hard at Naked Fanny. Two hundred or more holes in the bird, but my Guy In Back got a chunk in the head. He survived, sort of. Lost part of his brain, and now he makes sounds like a baby deer and drools like a Newfy, poor bastard.”

  Jesus, what is his problem? “Are you trying to tell me we’re gonna crash?”

  Haliday laughed. “Hell no, Rosey, au fricking contraire, I just want you to understand that hard flyin’ and hard landings don’t have to be lethal.”

  “What about the men who were with you?”

  “Bullshit. Crashes didn’t get them boys; chance got ’em both, bad ticker and a bad-luck frag. You got to listen closer, son.”

  Rose gulped, couldn’t find his voice.

  “Here’s the deal, Rosey,” the pilot said over the intercom. “The ­DeRoche brothers have a place in the swamp near Three Humps. They run all their illegal shit out of there. Place is on a finger ridge surrounded by a black spruce swamp. I thought we’d drop down, say howdy to those boys, show them we can be real neighborly.”

  Haliday’s voice was calm, rational, matter-of-fact, no big deal, but beneath the chummy facade, Elliot Rose sensed hard steel and pent-up anger.

  The DeRoche brothers, Rose knew, were the Garden Peninsula’s worst human malfunctions—outlaws whose operations reached to Chicago, Detroit, and even Cleveland. Their specialty was fish and dope with rumors they were also wholesaling illegal venison. The four brothers kept to themselves, had seldom been pinched, and what the department knew of them was largely secondhand and hearsay, neither of much value in getting good warrants, much less making unimpeachable cases for a court.

  Dark now, stars above, and the sparsely populated Garden Peninsula was largely black below them, a few lights in Garden Village visible to the west.

  “Two One Twenty-one, Air One, blink your headlights once.”

  Rose saw headlights flash below them.

  Haliday radioed, “You know the back road into the DeRoche camp?”

  “Negative,” CO Tom the Boss Davey radioed back.

  “Well, drive about a hundred yards from where you’re parked now, and you’ll see two giant birch trees in a tag alder line. Pull up to the easternmost tree, and you’ll find an old tote road directly behind it. They don’t use it much and usually come into their camp off the grade. The tote will take you right into their camp. I walked it last week. Good and hard, no water hazards or sand. Get your two trucks on that road and wait for our signal.”

  “Air One, what signal?”

  “You’ll know it when you hear it,” Haliday said, chuckling. “I’m guessing thirty minutes from now, give or take.”

  “Two One Twenty-one copies.”

  “Two One Thirty-two copies,” another voice said. Vairo.

  “What’s up?” Elliot Rose asked. “I don’t remember this being briefed by Sarge.”

  “This here’s our deal, nav, not your damn sarge’s—no offense to Brownie.”

  “How can it be our deal when I don’t know what we’re doing?”

  “Don’t be no whinging nitpicker, Rosey. I’m gonna make you almost famous.”

  “I don’t want to be almost famous,” the backseater said on the intercom.

  “Sure you do. Everybody does.”

  “Even you?”

  “Hell, I’m already famous. Listen, as we get close to the camp, I’m gonna turn off our engine and glide down in stealth mode.”

  Glide? Stealth mode? No engine! Jesus! “Turn off the engine, you mean . . . like turn off the fucking motor?”

  “Roger. It ain’t no big deal.”

  “You can do this, turn it off and restart it while we’re flying?”

  “Almost always.”

  The next thing Elliot Rose knew, they were angled steeply nose down, then suddenly pulling out of the dive, and the engine stopped, leaving them only with the sound of air coming through the open windows. He even heard frogs in the swamp below them, and Haliday was hanging precariously out his window as the aircraft floated along, sinking like a stringless kite.

  Rose never saw the pilot light a string of M-80s, but he caught a glimpse of the sputtering fuse as Haliday dropped it. The aircraft continued to float and descend, and Haliday lit and tossed a second string, then turned on the engine, which sputtered momentarily before catching. Haliday took them steeply upward, with Rose looking behind him, watching multiple flashes on the ground where they had passed overhead.

  Haliday called on the interphone, “Shacked that shit, eh, Rosey? Now, let’s go see if we pissed those suckers off.”

  “Air One, Two One Twenty-one, those bangs our signal?”

  “Negative, wait for the volley.”

  Rose thought, Volley? What volley?

  Haliday descended to the treetops, jerking the aircraft muscularly and confidently. “Okay, nav, I think we’re lined up pretty good. Two hundred feet off the ground, those assholes won’t be able to help themselves.”

  Rose had no idea what was happening. At least the crazy bastard has the engine on this time. Which is when he saw dim orange lights in a building and several blinking white stars and an occasional red or green tracer round. His mind screamed, Fuck! Kalashnikovs on automatic!

  Haliday said, “Know what them are?”

  Before Rose could answer, Davey radioed, “We hear AK-47s on full auto, and we’re rolling, Air One.”

  Haliday laughed. “Ain’t you the smart one, Boss. They opened up on us as we flew over. Three weapons, I’d say, could be four.”

  “Two One Twenty-one and One Thirty-five are going in fast and black.”

  “Air One copies.” Switching to the intercom, Haliday said, “I’m gonna bank hard, come down at them from another angle, switch their attention to us as our colleagues charge.”

  The pilot immediately descended, the fuselage brushing against treetops, shaking the small aircraft.

  “Right in their britches this time,” Haliday said, laughing.

  Bullets came through the fuselage with sharp pings that made Rose flinch and hold his hands over his nuts as the metallic clicks continued. The plane slid left sharply, and Haliday said calmly, “No sweat now, nav, I got this baby. C’mon, baby, c’mon, baby.”

  The pilot continued to chant as the nose came up, and they got above the treetops. Haliday said over the radio, “Two One Twenty-one, Air One has sustained battle damage, and we have a smidge of a
control problem. We’re gonna make an emergency let-down on some high-ground humps about a mile northwest of your position.”

  “Are we crashing?” Rose yelled up to the pilot.

  “Ain’t you been listening?” Haliday yelled back. “Buck Rogers don’t crash. What we got us is some teensy control issues, but I got us a dandy alternate picked out. Always remember that, Rosey. In the air or on the ground, with your girlfriend or your squeeze, always have you an alternate, every time, every moment, every situation. Pay attention, nav. This here’s one you’ll be telling your grandkiddies.”

  “Air One, Two One Thirty-five, say your problem.”

  “Nav, handle our commo. I’m getting kinda busy up here. C’mon, baby, c’mon, baby, you can do this one last dealie.”

  One last dealie. Rose felt sick. “Two One Thirty-five, Air One, we’ve got a situation up here, no details, copy?”

  “Good job, Rosey; never let them hear you shit your pants,” Haliday said over the intercom.

  “Air One, Two One Twenty-one, we have four very, very angry, very surprised, and extremely drunk individuals in custody. County is en route to transport. Say your status and location.”

  “Uh, still flying,” Rose radioed. “I think.”

  Haliday laughed out loud. “Tell ’em we’re on high final and sign off with over.”

  “Two One Twenty-one, Air One is on high final, over.” Rose felt the gear drop down and lock.

  Haliday said, “Okay, nav, the moment of truth approaches. See them big-ass trees up ahead?” Haliday wrestled the nose slightly starboard and illuminated the trees with a hand spot as Rose craned to see. “We’re gonna set her down right on top. I’m gonna pull the nose up real high and slide through the air bleeding off our airspeed aerodynamically until we lose our lift. Then I’ll gently ease the stick forward, and we should plop gently on the treetops like a big yellow bird. You scared?”

  Rose tried to say something but only gagged.

  Haliday laughed. “Me too, Rosey. Anybody ain’t scared in deals like this is psychotic or lives in their mama’s basement. Okay, nose coming up, power coming back. Wish us luck, son.”

  Rose held his breath, tried to remember his Hail Mary, and failed. It felt like his back was pointed at the ground, his face at the stars, and the airframe was creaking and moaning and making all sorts of what he thought were stressful sounds, yet they floated on.

  And floated and floated.

  Until Haliday said, “Moment of frickin’ truth, Rosey. Let’s hope I got this right.”

  The nose dumped forward.

  The engine stopped, and the air filled with sounds of metal tearing.

  And then it was still, and a whisper breeze was wafting through the windows.

  “Keep your headset on, Rosey. You okay?”

  Rose opened his eyes. “I think so.”

  “We’re good and secure,” Haliday said, making the plane shake to test it. “Let’s just sit here a few minutes and let our heart rates normalize. Then I’ll climb out and see where we can get down with our tree penetrators. You ever use one?”

  “Never even heard of one,” Rose said.

  “Piece of cake. Attaches to clips on your harness, two-point connection with one line attached to a pulley secured to a good branch. Release the brake and down you go. Harder you pull, the slower you go. Designed it myself. You get on the ground, release the two connections, and I’ll come down behind you.”

  Rose felt anger welling. “You planned this, you fucking maniac. You planned to crash!”

  “Don’t be a crybaby, Rosey. There ain’t been no crash; we just made us an emergency let-down.”

  “You’re a fucking maniac, Haliday!”

  “I guess I won’t argue a moot point, nav. But I gotta say, you done great! Bean counters in Lansing are dumping us pilots. I got me a job dropping smokejumpers out to Coeur d’Alene. Fuck the bean counters and suit dogs. This pilot is outta here!”

  “You could’ve killed me!”

  “You got to get your head out of negative mode, Rosey. It ain’t healthy, and you’re alive. Look around, man.”

  Thirty minutes later the two men were on the ground by a two-track, using the 800 MHz radio to bring Two One Twenty-one into position to pick them up. Davey pulled up and looked around. “Where’s the crash site?”

  “Landing site,” Haliday corrected him. “Put your spotlight on the treetops a hundred meters south of us.

  Davey lit the top of the trees and whispered, “Holy fuck.”

  “Get me away from this madman,” Elliot Rose said.

  Haliday said to Davey, “Ignore the boy. They’re always a little unsettled their first time. He ain’t got a scratch.”

  The two patrol trucks drove back to the DNR office in Escanaba, where other officers gathered to await their return. Local radio was already reporting a DNR raid that captured four major poachers with four automatic AK-47s, seventy illegal deer, hundreds of pounds of dope, and other contraband—and the raid resulted in a DNR aircraft sitting atop a grove of trees near the site of the raid. “No word from the state yet on what happened with that—or who’s gonna fly the plane off the trees,” the local reporter quipped.

  Elliot Rose looked at Buck Rogers and made a fist.

  Haliday grinned. “Go ahead, kid, you get one free shot. But remember this: You punch me now, you lose the glory that goes with this kind of close call. It’s your choice.”

  Rose exhaled, unclenched his fist, and extended his hand. “Good luck out west, you maniac.”

  The Dry Spell

  Last Independence Day, Lurleen Turco had arrested mental midget Bobo Kokko with 20.4 ounces of skunk weed and fifty-three corncob pipes. Despite all the evidence, Kokko’s slimebag lawyer from Oscoda got him released on his own recognizance, and he was free, the trial having been pushed back three times, the last rescheduling set for this fall.

  Even with the trial hanging over Kokko, a good tip suggested that the dickhead would be at something called Fender Camp in southwest Alger County. Word to CO Turco was that he was gathering another load of dope, this one grown mostly by local folks, down in the Garden Peninsula.

  The tip came from Rocky Tidd, who sold Indian sweet grass to tourists, many of them now stopping to ask if sweet grass was a (wink) euphemism for medical marijuana. Kokko was among the fool callers. He had shown up high and ranting he’d “buy every fucking pound of the good shit” Tidd had. Rocky had to explain to the lunkhead that “sweet grass” wasn’t what Kokko wanted, and somehow the dumbass had let drop he was working on “like, a massively massive score at Fender Camp in Alger.” What a tool.

  Rocky wasn’t the straightest arrow in the quiver, or the smartest, but he was mostly honest, and he was clean. CO Turco called the county drug team with the tip, but they said they had something big going on and asked her to handle it. She had agreed, even though she loathed drug cases and felt they were outside what a true a game warden’s purview ought to be.

  On the other hand, her lack of a personal life was such that more work actually sounded good. It beat the hell out of sitting alone in her house watching fricking reality shows. Twice divorced, she had dated, but she had never been without sex so long, in this instance 388 days and counting. It had gotten so bad that she had to stop herself from trying to size up every stranger she met for his quickie potential.

  The array of reasons her dates didn’t make love to her begged credulity, and someday she assumed she’d laugh about it, but right now being perpetually horny nearly all the time was not what she’d call fun.

  One of her “suitors” always placed two couch pillows over his crotch protectively like the Chinese Great Wall designed to keep invading barbarians out of the middle kingdom. He announced to her that he believed sex was bad for society. She’d countered with, “Syllogistically, no se
x, no people; therefore, no society.”

  He had countered lamely, “You know what I mean.” But she didn’t, not in the least.

  The next would-be paramour had been a room-stopping handsome Mormon, who told her sex with her before marriage would consign his soul to the outer ring of darkness, which she guessed by his tone was a nasty place to be. “Men who make love with me tell me it’s heavenly,” she tried to reason with him.

  “They’re not Mormon,” he shot back.

  No argument there.

  One of the strangest ones was a recovering sex addict, and she distinctly remembered upon hearing his confession, “Thank God, finally!” But he’d been three years without sex and didn’t want to “fall off his bed of nails. Otherwise I’d have to go back to scratch one,” he told her, explaining, “You have to understand, I was a total satire.”

  Obviously, Mr. Scratch One/Total Satire was a literate recovering sex addict. Even so, missing out on that one probably hurt the most, as much from pure curiosity as sexual need.

  More work would be just fine, even if she donated time to the state, which had no budget for overtime. Boyfriends came and went. Only the job persevered.

  She telephoned CO Jock Gillian in Munising. “You know the Fender Camp?”

  “Ya, it’s the one owned by family claims they’re related to the guitar people, but that may or may not be bull-pucky. You know how camp owners love to bullshit. Something up?”

  “Could be. People who own it are named Fender?”

  “Nope, Gavrilaitis, Greeks or Turks, I tend ta get those two mixed up. The story I heard was that old man Gavrilaitis worked for Dow Chemical and sold car lacquers to Fender for their gitfiddles. The old man got rich and retired. One that owns the camp now is a grandson, I think, lives out to Rancho Somethingorother in California, spends May through October at the camp. Word is he has a full electronic recording studio out there.”

  “You been out there on business?”

  “Nah, all I know is local gab. Not sure the Fender Camp bunch fishes, hunts, or even walks in the woods. Why?”