Black Ops Bundle: Volume One

by Allan Leverone

  “Great to be back,” he mumbled. “But I’m not sure how long I’ll be here.” He felt woozy and his stomach rolled. “How bad is it?”

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “It’s bad. I’m not even sure how you’re conscious right now. Mitchell’s second shot struck you in the head.”

  “Who’s flying the plane right now?” he asked, struggling to stay conscious.

  “No one. I managed to straighten the wings and return us more or less to a straight flight path, but we’re slowly descending.” Her voice sounded thin and reedy and she was clearly fighting panic.

  “Have you radioed for help?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

  “Right. Sorry about that.” Stan nodded and instantly regretted doing so. The pain in his head, which had diminished slightly, returned full-force. The battering ram had taken a break and a sledgehammer took its place. He closed his eyes and concentrated on settling his upset stomach. He knew if he tossed his cookies, the pain would explode and he would probably lose consciousness. If that happened, he doubted he would ever reawaken.

  Stan forced himself to focus. The lure of sleep was almost overwhelming; he wanted nothing more than to let go and leave this nightmare behind. But it was obvious the CIA agent wasn’t a pilot and would never be able to land the B-52 herself. It was impressive that she had managed to straighten the wings—the BUFF must have been in the slightest of rolls—but after that she had clearly run out of ideas.

  He opened his eyes. The pain rolled back in like a massive tsunami but stopped just short of unmanageable. “Let’s get this big hunk of metal on the ground, shall we?” His vision blurred and then cleared.

  She sighed, her relief palpable. “Absolutely. What do I do first?”

  “You get the hell out of my way and let me fly.”

  15

  May 30, 1987

  11:27 p.m.

  Atlantic Ocean, 70 miles off the coast of Maine

  The badly injured pilot was out of his seat, crumpled on the floor, and Tracie knew sliding him upright would be a risky proposition. He had already lost a lot of blood by the time she reached him, and she had been forced to pick one of his two bullet wounds to apply pressure to. The choice had been easy—the head trumped every other part of the body in terms of importance—but blood continued to ooze sluggishly from his shoulder wound whenever he moved.

  She would have to let go of the jacket she was pressing against Wilczynski’s skull in order to lift him. He was not a huge man, but she was much smaller, and although she had no doubt she could lift him, she knew she could never manage it one-handed.

  The same thought seemed to occur to Wilczynski and he said, “Wait. We have a first-aid kit aboard the aircraft. I think you should bandage my head wound before we try to do anything else.”

  Tracie felt the steady descent of the B-52 and her panic began rising again, threatening to overwhelm her. “How much time do we have?”

  “It depends on how much altitude we’ve lost. You’ll have to check the altimeter.”

  She craned her head but couldn’t read the instruments from her position, crouched over Wilczynski’s seat. “You’re going to have to maintain pressure on the jacket yourself for a second. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” Wilczynski answered. He was clearly trying to avoid any movement of his head. He looked pale and weak.

  “Okay. I’ll go as quickly as I can.” She waited until the injured pilot had lifted his hands, then removed hers and helped him position his in what she hoped was the best location. The amount of blood soaking the jacket was frightening. When he indicated he was ready, she stood and scanned the instrument panel, amazed at the sheer number of gauges, dials and switches.

  Finally she found the altimeter. “Twenty-three thousand, five hundred feet,” she said.

  “And how long has the plane been flying itself?”

  Tracie thought hard. It seemed like forever, but in reality was probably not long at all. “Ninety seconds,” she guessed.

  “Okay,” he answered, then was silent for a moment, obviously trying to calculate a rate of descent. “We have maybe five minutes before we hit the water.”

  Shit. At the rate the color was draining out of Wilczynski’s face, Tracie wondered if he would last five minutes. “Where’s the first-aid kit?” she asked, conscious of the seconds ticking away.

  He pointed to a metal box clipped to the side wall behind what had been Mitchell’s seat, then quickly returned the hand to his head. Tracie leaned over the dead bodies of Mitchell and Berenger, unclipped the kit, and then returned to Wilczynski’s side. She opened the metal box and rummaged inside, pulling out a roll of gauze.

  She gently removed Wilczynski’s hands and lifted the jacket away from the head wound. Blood surged out of a ragged, splintered hole where the side of his skull used to be. For the second time since discovering Wilczynski alive, she wondered how in hell he was still breathing.

  She anchored one end of the gauze on the back of his head with her left hand and began unrolling it, wrapping it expertly around and around with her right, moving as quickly as she dared. She finished wrapping Wilczynski’s head and secured the bandage, then examined her handiwork quickly, anxious to move the pilot. The portion of the gauze located directly over his injury had already begun darkening, changing from a pristine white to a frightening maroon, but the patch job looked secure enough, at least for now.

  She nodded and forced a smile. “There. Good as new.”

  Wilczynski grimaced and the effect was ghastly. A thick smear of blood coated the side of his face and his teeth had been stained a blackish-red from all the blood he had swallowed. “I appreciate the lie.” He closed his eyes and Tracie knew he was steeling himself against the pain to come.

  Finally he opened his eyes again. “Let’s take our seats and get this thing on the ground.” Tracie nodded and knelt over his prone body, straddling his legs. She slipped her hands under his armpits. His flight suit was sticky with blood. She eased the pilot’s body up and forward, until she had gotten him into a sitting position on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, next to his seat.

  He had maintained a grim silence through all the jostling, despite the pain he must be feeling. This is one tough bastard, she thought. But things are about to get a lot worse. She looked him in the eyes and could see he knew.

  “Are you ready?” she asked quietly.

  He nodded.

  She hooked her arms under his armpits at the elbow, locking the two of them in an awkward embrace, then struggled to a kneeling position and began rising, her legs screaming in protest as they took the brunt of the two-hundred-pound man’s dead weight. When she had lifted his body to where his butt was level with the flight seat, Tracie took a half-step left, then dropped the pilot as gently as she could into the seat.

  He groaned and his eyes rolled up into his head and his body began sliding back toward Tracie. She used her small body to brace his larger one in the seat and then buckled him into his harness.

  Wilczynski’s eyes were closed and his pallor had turned a sickly grey. A thin sheen of sweat coated his features, mixing with the drying blood and forming a hideous Halloween mask. His head slumped against his chest. Tracie feared he was dead. She placed two fingers lightly against his neck, just under his right ear, and felt for the carotid artery. The pulse was steady but faint. Wilczynski was still alive. For now.

  Stay with me, please. I can’t fly this thing on my own. Tracie wondered how fast they were descending. She pictured the Atlantic Ocean, vast and empty, sliding beneath the aircraft, waiting to swallow them whole if they didn’t begin climbing soon. The darkness outside the wind screen was immense, the blackness unbroken. There was no way to tell how close they were to the water; it could be twenty feet or twenty thousand. She fought back panic.

  She lifted her head and glanced at the altimeter. Two thousand feet. And dropping. She closed her eyes. Take a deep breath. Steady
yourself. Do what you have to do. She had to try to reawaken Major Wilczynski. He had been lucid prior to losing consciousness. If she could wake him, maybe he could fly the airplane.

  She hoped.

  Another look at the altimeter. Twelve hundred feet. Still dropping.

  She bent and slapped Wilczynski’s face lightly, more of a light open-palmed tap than an actual slap. Two taps to the right cheek and then two to the left. Right, left, one more on each side. Wilczynski stirred and muttered, but his eyes remained closed.

  Nine hundred feet.

  She tried again, this time increasing the force of the blow and speaking loudly. “Stan, wake up! Stan, we’re dropping into the ocean. You need to wake up and fly this airplane!” More mumbling and his eyes fluttered, but they were vacant and unfocused.

  Five hundred feet.

  Last try. She grabbed his good shoulder and shook him, not wanting to take the chance of worsening his head injury but not knowing what else to do. “Stan, listen to me, we’re going to crash if you don’t wake up right now! Stan!” This time his eyes fluttered and remained open for a couple of seconds. “That’s it,” she encouraged. “Stay with me, Stan.” Then his eyes rolled up into his head again and he was gone.

  Two hundred feet.

  It was too late. They were going to drop right onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, where the giant B-52 would be ripped to shreds by the resistance of the water. Tracie cursed and leapt into the right seat, the one most recently occupied by Tom Mitchell.

  She scanned the instruments desperately, trying to remember what she had seen pilots do in the past. Increase power with the throttles. Raise the nose of the aircraft with the yoke. Do something with the flaps—she couldn’t remember what. Raise them? Lower them? Goddammit!

  Fifty feet.

  Tracie reached for the throttle with a shaking hand. She would shove the throttle forward and raise the B-52’s nose and hope for the best. She would not go down without a fight.

  She placed her hand on the lever and was surprised to feel not the cold metal of the throttle but the warmth of another human hand. She turned in surprise and saw Stan Wilczynski staring back at her, his face drawn and grey, his lips trembling from the exertion of staying conscious, but his eyes clear and lucid.

  “Get your hands off my airplane,” he said.

  16

  May 30, 1987

  11:32 p.m.

  Atlantic Ocean, 35 miles off the coast of Maine

  Wilczynski added power and placed the aircraft in a shallow climb, moving slowly and deliberately. Tracie guessed he was mentally reviewing a checklist, although she doubted his Air Force training had ever included flying a B-52 with part of his skull blown off and the rest of the crew lying dead in the cabin. His face was ashen and his lips were white. She wondered how long it would take for him to pass out again; it seemed inevitable.

  “Fifty feet,” he said thickly. “That’s what I call cutting it close.”

  “Too close for comfort,” Tracie said, her hands shaking.

  “I need you to call air traffic control and let them know we’re in trouble.” Wilczynski lifted the radio mike off a metal stand and handed it to her.

  “Who will I be talking to?”

  “Everybody.” The pilot tuned the radio to UHF frequency 243.0. “This is the emergency frequency. Every ATC facility monitors it. Everyone within range of our transmission will hear it. In a few seconds we’ll have more help than we know what to do with. Just make a Mayday transmission. Identify us to the controllers as Bulldog 14.” Wilczynski closed his eyes and slumped in his seat and Tracie feared he had lost consciousness again, but a moment later he reopened them and began adjusting power settings.

  Tracie keyed the mike. “Mayday. Mayday. This is Bulldog 14 with an emergency situation.”

  The response was immediate. The radio crackled to life. “Bulldog 14, this is Boston Center, we’ve been looking for you. You missed checking in at a compulsory reporting point. What’s the nature of your emergency?”

  Tracie looked at Major Wilczynski. “What do I tell them?”

  “Tell them the rest of the crew is incapacitated and we need a vector direct to Bangor International Airport. It was a SAC base in World War II and it’s the closest airport with a runway big enough to land this beast on.”

  Tracie relayed the message and the controller said, “Roger that, Bulldog 14. Radar contact seven-zero miles northeast of the Bangor Airport. Cleared to Bangor via radar vectors. Fly heading two-five-zero, climb and maintain one-six thousand. Bangor altimeter two-nine-eight-seven.”

  “You get all that?” she asked Wilczynski. He nodded.

  “Roger,” she said into the mike.

  “What assistance will you need when you land?” the controller asked, and Wilczynski said, “Tell them we’ll need ambulances and the crash crew standing by. We’ll need everything they’ve got.”

  Tracie relayed the message and as the B-52 gained altitude, climbing steadily and reassuringly, she said, “Bangor? As in Maine? Isn’t that city tiny?”

  “The city is small, yes, but the airport is huge. It’s the former Dow Air Force Base, and although they only have one runway, it’s mammoth. Eleven thousand feet, with a one thousand foot overrun at each end. That’s almost two-and-a-half miles of pavement for us to land on, and the way I feel right now, we’ll probably need every last inch of it.”

  Tracie fingered the letter to President Reagan. She had removed it from her jacket and placed it in the back pocket of her trousers before using the jacket to stanch the blood flowing from Wilczynski’s head wound. The envelope was flecked with spatters of blood but otherwise appeared undamaged. The aircraft—and thus the letter—seemed to be out of danger, at least for the moment, but Tracie knew the odds against Major Mitchell’s sudden deadly rampage being unrelated to the secret communique from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were astronomical. Those kinds of coincidences just didn’t happen.

  “Uh, isn’t there a military base we could divert to? Wouldn’t that be more secure?” She recognized the lack of logic inherent in the question—after all, this flight had originated from a United States military base and had been manned entirely by U.S. military personnel, and they had still nearly ended up in the Atlantic Ocean after a bloodbath inside the plane. If the attack was the result of someone trying to prevent delivery of that communique, that someone’s influence was obviously far-reaching. And deadly.

  Tracie knew all that, and she knew landing at a military base might not make any difference. She didn’t care. It had to be safer than landing unprotected at a civilian airport.

  Her question became moot, though, with Wilczynski’s answer. “Well, there is Loring Air Force Base, in northern Maine. It’s a SAC base and it’s got plenty of runway. Problem is it’s in the wrong direction if you’re trying to get to Andrews, and it’s farther away from our current position than Bangor. And that’s why I don’t want to land there: I don’t know how much longer I can stay conscious. The way I feel right now, our best bet is to get this Big Ugly Fat Fucker on the ground ASAP.”

  Tracie knew the flight commander was right. She had no way of ascertaining the extent of his injuries, but having seen the gaping head wound, with the splintered skull bones and massive blood loss, she realized his actions were nothing short of heroic.

  “Bangor it is, then,” she said.

  ***

  May 30, 1987

  11:49 p.m.

  Bangor, Maine

  Runway 17 at Bangor International Airport stretched out in front of the B-52 like a ribbon, visible to Tracie on this moonlit night even from probably twenty miles away. The weather was clear, but the controllers at Bangor Tower had lit the airport up like a Christmas tree. The approach lights glowed and the sequenced flashers stabbed through the night, an insistent finger of light pointing toward the approach end of the runway.

  In the few minutes since Major Wilczynski had regained control of the aircraft, the flight had proceeded smooth
ly but his condition seemed to deteriorate steadily. Blood continued to soak the bandage wrapped around his head and now it seeped through the gauze and ran slowly down the side of his face, disappearing under the collar of his jumpsuit. He had stopped talking and seemed to be focusing all his energy on landing the plane.

  He moaned softly and his head bobbed onto his chest before bouncing back up sluggishly. He wavered in his seat.

  “Hang in there, Stan,” Tracie said. She squeezed his hand and he nodded weakly.

  The B-52 turned onto a long final approach, wobbling unsteadily as Wilczynski struggled to maintain control. He had asked for at least a fifteen mile straight-in, explaining to Tracie that although the goal was to get on the ground as quickly as possible, he didn’t trust his ability to get the aircraft stabilized if they turned any closer than that. Through the wind screen she could see flashing emergency lights lining the runway on the side closest the control tower. At least one rescue vehicle had been placed at each runway intersection, Tracie assumed, to provide for the quickest response no matter where along the two-mile stretch of pavement they landed.

  Or where they crashed.

  The wings rocked and the aircraft shuddered, the runway sliding from left to right and then back again as Tracie watched anxiously. Wilczynski was struggling to keep the B-52 lined up with the runway centerline. He shook his head and cursed and grabbed the microphone. “Wind check,” he demanded, and the controller’s response was almost instantaneous.

  “Wind two-zero-zero at eight, cleared to land.”