by Jack Du Brul
This was always the worst, the waiting. He’d been here before, with Eddie in fact, but with other men, too, hurtling into harm’s way, fear like a weight in his stomach, doubt like a nagging headache behind his temples. He’d long ago stopped wondering why he found himself constantly surrounded by danger, but he still questioned how much longer his strange obsession would allow him to live. How many more times could he descend into the earth in some mine shaft in need of immediate repairs? How many times could he climb aboard a helicopter to face someone like Ivan Kerikov and actually return? Pessimism burned hotly behind his ribs.
God, I’m tired.
“Ten minutes to the Pump Station,” Eddie called.
Mercer straightened up, noting the queer look Mike Collins shot him, as if Alyeska’s Chief of Security had been reading his mind. He ignored Collins, leaning forward to peer out the cockpit canopy. In the darkness, the running lights of the two Air Force Hueys looked like flashing jewels, a cold, comforting light signifying the presence of other humans amid the great expanse of forested nothingness below. Thousands of square miles of birch and white spruce separated the Alaskan Range mountains from the Brooks Range, whose foothills they were approaching. The area was crisscrossed by dozens of rivers, streams, and tiny lakes.
“Any traffic on the Dalton Highway?”
“I haven’t seen anything, and we’ve been over it for nearly half an hour. I didn’t even see any police cars where the Alyeska vans reportedly went off,” Eddie replied. “It’s like the road isn’t even there.”
“Call Knoff. Tell him we’re almost there.”
“Already done. His boys are chomping at the bit.”
“Good. I want you to hang back at least a mile until they’ve landed and Knoff gives us the all-clear sign. If Kerikov and his men are still here, Knoff’s troops should be able to handle them. He won’t be expecting this strong a reprisal because of his pyrotechnic display in Fairbanks.”
“Does this mean you’ve lost your death wish?” Eddie teased. “Last time we flew together you had me land at ground zero of a nuclear explosion with about two minutes to go.”
Mercer laughed. “Government cutbacks have slashed my danger pay to below minimum wage again. I only raid liquor cabinets unless given a direct presidential order. Which reminds me, I could really go for a… What the hell?”
A flash of light, like a laser beam, streaked up from the dark ground so quickly it appeared as a solid line rather than a moving object. It intercepted the lead Huey, the two coming together in a violent blast, the helicopter outlined briefly in the fire of its destruction. In an instant, the chopper was falling to the earth in a flaming ruin. The pilot of the second Huey had just started evasive action when a second SA-7 Grail missile rocketed skyward on a brilliant cone of expended solid fuel.
Known by NATO forces to be wholly inaccurate and under-armed with just six pounds of high explosive in its warhead, the Grail was still deadly against low-flying helicopters, especially those with exposed exhaust ports like the UH-1. The Grail fired at the Huey didn’t have the upgraded cryo-cooling unit to aid its infrared sensors at finding hot signatures, yet it still had no trouble locking onto its target against the cold background of the Alaskan night. The second Huey disintegrated.
Mercer was just recognizing the attack for what it was when Eddie Rice banked the JetRanger, applying max power to the turbines and the rotors, eking out every bit of speed as he tried to get them out of range of the shoulder-fired missiles. Debris from the first two choppers fell to the earth like meteor showers, the hulls hitting in explosive wrecks, fuel and metal and bits of their crews thrown up in fountains of flame and shrapnel. Patches of forest around the crash sites were ignited by the burning choppers, pine trees flaring like matchsticks. It would take hours for the rain to douse such a fuel-rich fire.
“Watch for those missiles!” Eddie shouted, jerking the controls first one way then the next in an attempt to foul the aim of the terrorists below them. The JetRanger, designed more for comfort than agility, groaned at Eddie’s flying, the bulkheads and structural members straining well beyond their design specifications.
“I’ve got a launch, starboard side,” Mercer called out, watching with morbid fascination as another missile lifted from the black forest.
“Got it.” Eddie hauled the JetRanger onto its side, tightening his turn so quickly that the helicopter lost nearly a thousand feet in just a few seconds.
The Grail passed behind them, its infrared sight unable to lock onto the exhaust ports of their chopper. Its rocket motor ran out of fuel and toppled the missile back to earth. During the violent maneuver, no one saw another Grail hurtle into the air.
It was almost directly ahead of them, its guidance system seeking them out with single-minded resolution. At last finding the heat signature it had been hunting for, the fifty-three-inch-long missile slightly altered its attack vector, shallowing its approach so as to come up under the Bell helicopter.
“Oh, God!” Mike Collins shouted, while the young soldier in the copilot’s seat screamed and screamed.
Mercer let himself go limp. The fear that had squeezed his chest when the first two helicopters were hit released him at this last moment so he could face his death calmly, watching it happen with almost clinical dispassion.
Of them all, only Eddie Rice hadn’t given up. The moment before the warhead struck the underside of the JetRanger, he again jerked the craft hard over, presenting the now tilted bottom of the chopper to the missile. It struck a glancing blow where the secondary rotor boom attached to the fuselage, and exploded.
Most of the blast was directed away from the helicopter because of Eddie’s quick thinking and exceptional reflexes, yet the JetRanger was mortally wounded. Smoke filled the cabin even as the chopper was thrown violently through the air, turned almost completely upside down by the explosion. The electrical system failed and a second later the turbine skipped, caught briefly, then began faltering as it starved for the fuel gushing from the severed lines. The raw stench of avgas gagged the four men as they struggled to regain proper seating in the bucking aircraft. Mercifully, it hadn’t ignited. Yet.
Relying on instinct alone, Eddie managed to get the JetRanger onto an even keel; the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t see the instrument panel only feet from him. They had started to auto rotate as they fell to the ground, the chopper spinning on its own axis in a tightening circle, pressing the men outward against the fuselage. Eddie used this to his advantage, slowing the descent by using what little lift remained in the still-spinning main rotor.
“I can’t see,” he shouted above the jarring noise of the fragmenting helicopter.
Mercer leaned forward, groping blindly through the smoke until his hands felt the cold metal of the Heckler and Koch MP- 5 submachine gun the sergeant had lost when the chopper was hit. Straightening, he cocked the weapon. “Cover your face!”
Aiming over Eddie’s shoulder, he loosed a hail of bullets against the windscreen.
The Plexiglas starred, then lost all integrity, flying into space in nearly one whole chunk. A few fragments whipped into the cockpit, one dagger-size shard burying itself in the shoulder of an unconscious Mike Collins. The swirling torrent of wind sucked the smoke out of the cabin, taking with it the paralyzing smell of avgas. Once again Eddie could see, his hands taking tighter control of the spiraling aircraft.
“We ain’t gonna make it,” Eddie yelled over the din.
A thousand feet below, the ground was a featureless, dark abyss, the starless night revealing nothing. They couldn’t tell if there were rocky mountains or a soft field or water below them. Eddie would have to try to make the landing blind, not even able to rely on the altimeter to get a fix on their position. It had frozen when they were hit.
“There!” Mercer shouted, pointing to their left.
Out of the gloom came a stand of tall, straight spruce trees, their high pyramidal tops like medieval church spires. The grove appeared tightly packed
and would soften the controlled crash of the falling helicopter. Eddie banked toward the site, the engine coughing as the remaining fuel was burned up at a prodigious rate.
“It ain’t happening, man. It looks close, but it’s at least half a mile away,” Eddie shouted. Rain soaked them all. The soldier used a sleeve of his BDUs to wipe the water from Eddie’s dark face because the pilot couldn’t afford to take his hands from the controls for even a second. Suddenly Eddie was struck with an idea. “Both of you, your doors have emergency release pins on the hinges. Pull them and let the doors drop away.”
Mercer and the sergeant did what Eddie asked, tugging at the large red handles and kicking the doors outward. More rain surged through the cabin, wild eddies swirling in all directions at once. The wind reached a banshee pitch.
“I can hold it for only a second, and the drop is still gonna be about twenty feet to the tops of the trees, but it’s the best I can do.”
“No way, Eddie,” Mercer shouted. “I’m not leaving you and Collins.”
“Mercer, either we all die in the crash or just maybe I can save the two of you. Don’t take that chance from me, goddamn it.”
Mercer didn’t argue with Eddie’s dying wish. Bracing himself near the open doorway, his clothes rippling and snapping around him, he watched as Eddie brought them to the edge of the forest, just above treetop level. Echoes of the beating rotors kicked back from the hard earth below. On closer inspection, the evergreens were not nearly as dense as he’d first thought. There were huge gaps between many of the trees, and a straight fall from this height would split a man like a dropped sack of cement. He held the MP-5, waiting for Eddie’s signal, one hand clutching the empty door frame as the wind tried to suck him into the void.
“Jump!” Eddie screamed, reining in the chopper to an unsteady hover for an instant. He then turned the JetRanger away so when the rotors hit the trees and flew apart, the fragments wouldn’t slice into Mercer and the sergeant.
The soldier hesitated for a second, not launching himself until the helicopter was already heeled over. The delay threw off his timing and he missed his intended tree, his body falling through space, picking up speed exponentially so that he barreled into the loamy ground at eighty miles an hour. The impact broke his skull, spine, ribs, shoulders, hips, arms, and legs. He was dead before his nervous system could perceive the injuries.
Mercer had been watching Eddie and jumped the moment the African-American opened his yellow-toothed mouth, not waiting to even hear the order. He tumbled only eleven feet before crashing into the topmost branches of a particularly tall tree, the thin boughs grabbing at him as he fell, each impact jarring him mercilessly but nonetheless slowing his descent. He hit the first thick branch with his shoulder, the rough, scaly bark rasping against the layers of his leather jacket.
Downward he plunged, branches whipping him like switches, flaying his hands and face, one catching him in the stomach, knocking the air from his chest, another on the thigh, deadening his entire right leg from groin to toes. The ground rushed at him too fast. Each new contact was a torment, the tree tearing at him like a wild animal even as it saved his life. Finally, after almost forty feet of torture, he fell onto a larger branch. Scrabbling to hook his hands around it, he missed but managed to clutch the next one down, arresting his descent with only six feet to go before he dropped from the tree’s canopy and plummeted to the ground. He hung there, exhausted, one arm and a leg hooked over the bough, dangling like a gibbon, blood dripping from his face and hands.
Then he felt the JetRanger crash, the rotor blades chopping through the tops of nearby trees and then coming apart, spiraling outward like scythes, sending bits of wood and whole branches swirling in their destructive path. A bit of the rotor passed only a foot above Mercer’s position, and rather than chance another close call, he let go, falling the last few feet and landing in a tangled heap.
The helicopter struck the high canopy so violently that the weakened tall boom separated and fell independently, cutting a six-foot gouge in the earth. The rest of the aircraft became enmeshed in the thick branches of several closely packed trees, the fuselage never actually hitting the ground but hanging up nearly twenty feet in the air, swinging precariously as the trees resettled themselves.
Mercer lay on his back. The rainwater that struck him in the face was slightly acidic because of its contact with the spruce tree. It burned his eyes and forced him to turn over. It took a minute for him to gather enough strength to actually stand, moaning as his back and shoulders cracked and popped from the strain they’d just endured. When he heard a clear call for help, he moved quickly, gathering up the machine pistol that had landed next to him and taking off at a fast trot. Torn bits of metal and whole sections of newly cut trees littered the ground.
After only a couple dozen yards he came upon the crushed body of the sergeant. Mercer needed only a quick, gruesome glance to tell that the young soldier had not been the source of the distress call. Continuing on, he came upon the crash site, or more accurately, he stumbled underneath it. Looking up, he could see the main cabin of the JetRanger tangled over his head, the chopper secured by tightly entwined branches. Eddie shouted again and then coughed wetly.
“Eddie, what the hell are you doing up there?” Mercer forced levity into his voice. “Don’t you know when you crash you’re supposed to hit the ground?”
“Oh, man, did anyone get the license of that truck that just hit me?”
“How you doing?”
“Not bad, considering. A branch came into the cockpit and snapped off about ten of my teeth. I think my jaw’s broken too. Shit, I’m probably as ugly as you now.” Eddie paused, fighting off waves of blackness. “Collins didn’t make it. I can see his neck is broken.”
“The kid didn’t make it either. But two out of four is better than none. You did real good. Can you hold on up there until the cavalry arrives? I’ve got no way of getting you down.”
“Don’t worry about me, but if you’re in any shape to go on, kill those motherfuckers for me, will you?”
“Doesn’t matter what shape I’m in. They’re gonna pay.” There was a flinty edge to Mercer’s voice. The hidden spring of his endurance had just been tapped, and the doubts he’d felt before were gone. “Eddie, the sergeant had a combat harness in the cockpit with him. It was on the floor by his feet. Do you see it?”
“Hold on.” A second later Eddie called back down to the ground, “Yeah, I got it.”
“Throw it down; I’m gonna need it. But keep the pistol for yourself.” The heavy harness came crashing through the branches, almost hanging up a couple of times before landing a few feet from Mercer. He picked it up, looping the nylon suspenders over his shoulders and cinching the belt around his waist. Along with a knife, med kit, flashlight, and most important, a compass, he had four additional clips for the machine pistol.
“Eddie, it may take a while for the Air Force to send out a search and rescue team. I doubt we were on radar when the missiles hit. But when they do arrive, use the Beretta to signal to them. You know the distress call, three rapid shots. Just in case I fail at the pump station and Kerikov sends out a party to make certain none of us survive, be sure it’s the good guys before you call to them.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow over drinks at the Great Alaskan Bush Company,” quipped Mercer, mentioning Anchorage’s most famous strip joint.
“You’re buying,” Eddie laughed back, but Mercer had already taken bearings from the compass and moved off.
The heavy rain masked the sound of him moving through the trees, allowing him to break into an easy loping run. His eyes were very sensitive to even minimal light, so he could find a clear path, avoiding stumps and thick brambles and anything else that might slow him. He figured that Eddie had flown at least two miles from the area where the missiles had been fired, so he didn’t worry about stumbling into a recce patrol.
Ignoring the aches that cramped his b
ody, he made it to the Dalton Highway in just thirty minutes, the last quarter mile being a ragged struggle up a steep defile. Calling it a highway was presumptuous — it was nothing more than a tightly packed gravel strip originally built as the haul road for the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Mercer was badly winded, and sweat mingled freely with the rain that soaked through his clothing. The temperature was hovering just over thirty-five degrees, and as wet as he was, he ran a real chance of becoming hypothermic, his skin leaching away his core body heat until he collapsed and died.
The pipeline was on the other side of the road, held off the ground by spindly supports, the VSMs. In the rainy darkness, the forty-eight-inch pipe had a silver, maggoty sheen as it stretched north and south into both murky horizons. The gravel of the highway had been heavily compacted by years of fully loaded semitrailers tracking to and from the oil-rich Prudhoe Bay fields. Along its verges, fireweed grew, the countless purple blossoms all but wasted by the summer so that the topmost parts of the stalks were barren, sticking in the air like arthritic fingers.
Somewhere to Mercer’s right was Pump Station Number 5, an unknown number of terrorists holding it, armed with rockets and God alone knew what else, while to his left was an open stretch of road leading back to civilization. He would find help only a few miles away, a warm ranger’s cabin, a cup of scalding coffee, a bed. He snicked off the safety of the H&K and turned to the right, continuing northward into the unknown, relying on his superior eyesight and instincts to keep him from falling into an ambush.
The second mile on the Dalton Highway merged with the third and into the fourth, Mercer’s mind all but shutting down, conserving his energy to keep his feet running. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been so utterly exhausted, both mentally and physically. His stamina was waning and, with it, his coordination. He found himself stumbling more, lurching forward and one time pitching to the ground, the gravel digging deeply into the already torn meat of his palms.
