Twelve Mile Limit df-9

by Randy Wayne White

  I knew then that we were in trouble.

  The helicopter was equipped with some kind of a radar-detection system. As the craft turned, I began to hear a steady beeping noise. I leaned to look into the cockpit and could see a flashing red light on the control panel. If I hadn’t known what the noise was, I could have guessed what it meant when the pilot began jinking wildly, making hard lefts and rights, as if trying to do evade.

  The beeping alarm meant that something on the ground was tracking us.

  For the Anfibios, it wasn’t so bad. Except for the commando belted to the M-60 machine gun, the rest were strapped tight onto the bench seat across from me. From old habit, though, I chose to add an extra layer of protection between my butt and the chopper’s thin armor. Any kid with a rifle can shoot up through the belly of a helicopter. From what I knew about Colombia, there were bound to be a lot of people down there with rifles. Probably eager to use them, too.

  I was sitting on the briefcase that Harrington had provided me. I, too, wore a seat belt, but the surface of the briefcase was slick, and I began to slide violently one way, then the other, as the chopper jinked. I kept myself steady by holding on to the nylon strap overhead until, during a unbelievably sharp turn, the strap broke.

  The fuselage of the chopper wasn’t the only thing that was outdated.

  From the flight deck, the beeping horn changed to a loud, high-pitched warble, as I heard the pilot yell, “They’re firing at us, those sons of bitches just fired!”

  And I thought to myself: Stinger missile.

  You’re dead, Ford. Dead.

  The Stinger is a man-portable, shoulder-fired, infra-red, heat-seeking guided missile that travels faster than the speed of sound. It weighs less than forty pounds and comes with a disposable firing tube.

  In Afghanistan, mountain people used Stingers to shoot down a couple hundred Russian MIG fighter jets. For a computer-controlled missile sufficiently sophisticated to discriminate between background clutter and an actual aircraft, this old chopper wasn’t much of a challenge.

  Our door gunner had opened fire: a deafening staccato clatter, tracers streaming through the darkness, and spent brass casings ringing bell-like against the fuselage.

  There was no way the gunner had a target. No way he could see what he was shooting. When the adrenaline is in you, when you’re scared, you squeeze the trigger. That simple.

  Chaos.

  In the cockpit, the radar alert had changed again, this time to a loud and steady shriek. I knew the missile had locked on to us and was vectoring toward the exhaust pipes of the craft’s overhead engines. There was now no escape.

  We went into a steep dive, then the cabin began to rotate wildly beneath the rotor. It was a sickening replay of my previous crash landing in a helicopter. Now the nightmare was repeating itself. Could this really be happening?

  I held tight to the handle of the briefcase, trying to stabilize myself, knowing that I was about to die, the realization of it roaring in my ears, feeling it as a weight on my chest.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace! Hail Mary, full of grace!”

  Across from me, one of the commandos was saying his catechism by rote, and I could see Lieutenant Martinez, wide-eyed, gripping his rifle for support, the centrifugal force tremendous. He held my eyes briefly: Bad, very bad.

  Which is when my seat belt broke. I was ripped free, weightless, and clawed the air wildly as the velocity of my own body carried me backward, somersaulting, out the open cargo door.

  Then I was tumbling in darkness… then in space, falling, falling, beneath an explosion so close that I could feel the heat, could feel the shock wave like an expanding bubble, my body tensing for impact when I would soon hit the earth.

  Impaled on a tree.

  That image was in my mind…

  Then I did hit, crashed into a blackness, cement-hard, that crushed the wind out of me and nearly knocked me unconscious.

  I came up splashing, spitting, completely disoriented until I realized what had happened: water. I was in water. I was swimming.

  To my left and ahead of me, I watched the old Huey, already aflame, auger itself into the jungle. It disappeared momentarily behind a silhouette of trees, then exploded, creating a bright halo of flame.

  25

  It took me several long, bewildered seconds before I realized what had happened. When my seat belt broke, I’d been dumped out the chopper’s cargo door. I’d fallen a hundred feet or so and landed in the river we’d been following.

  The river seemed to be one of those deep and narrow, slow-moving rivers. The moon had drifted toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see that the watercourse was fifty or sixty yards wide and was bordered by a high, abrupt canyon of forest.

  Deep jungle has a density that muffles sound and magnifies odor. This was deep jungle, a biosphere of vine, limb, earth. It was cellar-cool, and the river created a narrow corridor of light through the mountainous tree canopy.

  Drifting there, I heard a second loud explosion, then a series of smaller explosions: ordnance going off.

  The silence that followed the explosions seemed a reflective pause.

  It did not last long. Soon the night was filled with sound, wild with peeping, croaking frogs, humming insects, and the howling of monkeys from distant trees. The jungle’s reply to an unusual intrusion.

  I straightened my glasses, glad for the fishing line I’d used to tie them in place. Then I began to swim toward the bank where the chopper had crashed. As I did, my brain sent out the careful little search requests: Did I feel pain? Were all my body parts in place? Had I suffered some terrible injury that I was still too stunned to realize?

  My left shoulder hurt like hell. I’d probably banged it on something when my seat belt broke. And my right ear was adding a tinny, roaring effect to any noise it processed.

  I’d probably broken an eardrum when I hit the water.

  Not the first eardrum I’ve broken.

  Other that those few aches and pains, though, I felt pretty good.

  As I moved toward the bank, I congratulated myself-I’d been damn lucky to survive.

  The sense of good luck didn’t last. I remembered that a day from now, I had to be in the village of Remanso with a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, or they’d kill Amelia, and the others, too-if Janet, Michael, and Grace really were still alive.

  I had no idea where I was or how far I had to go to get help.

  I began to swim faster.

  The briefcase had been catapulted out the door with me. I found it drifting high and dry, only a few dozen yards downstream.

  I used it as a float, pushing it ahead of me toward shore.

  The riverbank was steep, a congestion of roots and overhanging limbs. At one place, I grabbed a low branch and tried to pull myself out. As I did, I felt what seemed to be a heavy sprinkling of sand on my face… but then the sand began to burn like tiny hot coals.

  Fire ants. I was covered with them.

  I dropped back into the water and submerged until they were gone.

  Finally, I found an opening, and crawled out. The first thing I did was take the satellite phone from my pocket and try it-maybe Harrington had equipped me with some new generation of indestructible communications system.

  But no. It didn’t work.

  I tried taking out the battery and drying it. No luck.

  Tossing the phone into the river seemed to underline how completely cut off I now was from what I considered the civilized world. I watched water-rings created by the phone expanding in darkness, then I walked toward the orange glow that I knew was the burning helicopter.

  As I did, the sky above me disappeared. No more moonlight, no more stars. I was in a cavern of trees, the ceiling a hundred feet overhead. The canopy was so tangled that light could not penetrate, so nothing grew below. The ground was springy with rot, and slippery, too.

  Yet I could still see. It was as if the jungle generated a very low-voltage luminesc
ence. The blanket of forest overhead was black, but the trunks of individual trees were gray or pewter.

  It allowed me to walk fairly quickly.

  Within a few minutes, I was close enough to the crash site to hear the roar of burning aviation fuel and the crackle of burning wood.

  But then I heard something else, and stopped, frozen where I stood.

  I heard voices speaking a loud, drunken Spanish.

  Of course. The guerrilla troops or drug runners, whoever had shot us down, would be converging on the crash site, too.

  How was I going to get around them?

  There were six of them: five men and a young Indio girl. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.

  The men were older, in their twenties, a couple probably in their late thirties to forties. They wore mismatched military fatigues and carried both M-16s and old Soviet-designed AK- 47 assault rifles.

  The girl’s skin was earthen, and she had thick black hair tied in a ponytail that hung to the middle of her back. She had a rough blanket folded over one shoulder and wore a copper-colored traditional blouse I’d seen before in South America, a garment known as a huipil. Her skirt was short, sarong-like, blue, and showed her thick legs. She was barefooted and wore bracelets on her wrists and around both ankles. On her ankles were also black decorative tattoos.

  One thing I didn’t doubt: The girl wasn’t with these men by choice. She had a subdued look of fear and emotional resignation. It is an expression I had seen before on the faces of captives and new prisoners.

  It would not be pleasant to be in the control of men such as this, especially for a girl her age.

  I moved quietly from tree to tree, ducked low and kept in the shadows. When I was close enough to hear the soldiers clearly, I knelt and opened the briefcase. I was wearing my SIG Sauer on my hip, belted into a holster I’d borrowed from Ron Iossi. I was surprised that the force of my fall hadn’t ripped it free, but the holster snap had held.

  Now I took out the little submachine gun, locked the dual magazines in place, and pushed the little indicator switch until it was on full automatic.

  I waited.

  Not surprisingly, the guerrillas were looking for anything they could find of value among the wreckage. They’d collected a few things on the perimeter, not much: a couple of weapons and a can of ammo that had somehow been thrown clear of the fire.

  I decided they sounded drunk because they were drunk. One of them had a bottle of cloudy liquor and was passing it around.

  I listened as over and over they replayed what had happened, how it had happened. Among male hunters, it is a very old ceremony: elevate and institutionalize the success of a hunt. I listened to them argue among themselves about how they’d first heard the chopper, how they’d run to get into position, and how the youngest of them-a kid named Marcos-had been so damn nervous to be shooting his first Stinger at a real live target.

  “You made a mess in your pants!” they chided him. “But thanks to our help, you scored blood!”

  That was bad enough, but then it abruptly became worse.

  Suddenly, they all stopped talking at once, heads tilting in unison as if straining to hear.

  Then I heard what had given them pause: a low, moaning sound from the nearby trees, louder than the bellows wind from a burning fire. The men grew more silent, weapons at ready, as the moaning grew louder, and then they all took a step back when, into the circle of light, stumbled what had to be a human being but who looked like no human I had ever seen.

  One of the commandos had survived the crash. Or maybe it was the pilot. I couldn’t tell. His clothes and his skin had been burned off him, and, but for one terrible bright and agonized eye, his face was gone.

  Apparently, he’d been hiding but could no longer stand the pain, for he walked toward them, mummy-like, arms outstretched, still smoldering, calling, “I need a doctor, I’ve been injured! Please help me! Mother of God, please help me!”

  When they realized what this aberration was, the rebels visibly relaxed, even seemed to find the situation funny.

  One of them turned to the silent girl and yelled, “Where is your tribe of cannibals? We have a cooked meal for them!” as he stuck out his leg and tripped the injured man.

  Hilarious.

  I was already up and walking toward their group, moving before I realized what I was doing, the little submachine gun in my left hand, the 9mm pistol in my right. I stepped into the clearing, into the light of the fire. It was the only way I could instantly change the angle of my approach and put the girl out of the line of fire.

  She was the first to see me. I saw surprise register on her face, then maybe just a flicker of hope.

  Whap-whap-whap.

  One of the rebels had touched his automatic weapon to the back of the burned man’s head and fired the three-shot volley.

  The man’s body quivered, a muscle-reflex response to severe trauma. I found myself relieved when he finally lay still.

  But there was no going back for me. I’d committed myself. So I continued walking toward them, the MP-5 at hip level, but sighting over the top of the pistol that I held outstretched toward them. I didn’t yell, because I wanted my words to communicate meaning, not emotion.

  Speaking just loud enough for them to hear me clearly, I said, “Drop your weapons. Now, or you’re dead.”

  I was surprised by the calmness of my own voice.

  So were they. The men turned as one, the woman watching all of us, backing away, as her captors stood frozen, weapons slung over their shoulders or held low.

  I fired a short burst with the machine gun, over their heads-but not by much.

  They ducked reflexively as I yelled, “Drop your weapons!”

  They all did-except for one.

  The man carrying the liquor bottle was the same one who’d shot the burned commando.

  Some people get a taste for killing. They like it.

  He was a tall guy with a very black, very thick beard and baggy fatigues. He wore new Nikes-a modern touch. As the others slowly unslung, then dropped their rifles, black-beard remained motionless, staring at me, AK-47 in one hand, the bottle in the other. His expression was familiar, a mean-drunk look, defiant, dumb.

  I fired another short burst, yelling, “ Do it.”

  As I did, I saw his expression change, knew what was going to happen, understood the sudden decision he’d just made, and hated it. He tossed the bottle away, probably to divert my attention, as he snapped his rifle upward toward me, already firing.

  I leaned toward him, squeezing off four fast shots with the pistol, and watched the rounds knock him backward, contorting his face and body as if he were taking blows from an invisible bat. He continued firing wildly as he fell.

  I dived to the right, rolling as I did, still focused on their small group. Two of his own men-one of them the kid named Marcos-were backpedaling drunkenly, both of them hit by black-beard’s fire. The other two had dropped to their bellies.

  I screamed, “Get your hands away from those weapons!” as black-beard hit the ground and the firing stopped. I sprayed another short burst just above them to make my point. Then I got to my feet, heart pounding.

  The girl was still there. I was surprised by that. Why hadn’t she run-let these crazy men fight it out among themselves?

  The two rebels who’d been hit were writhing in the dirt, crying for help. They’d both taken rounds in the back and legs. Black-beard was still moving, too, trying to get to his stomach, trying to crawl.

  I could see that the two healthy rebels were giving it some thought, trying to decide what to do, so I walked toward them yelling, “Hands behind your heads! Hands behind your heads!”

  As I repeated it a third time, black-beard tensed, then his body seemed to deflate.

  I didn’t want to get so close that they could use their hands to try to trip me, so I said to the girl, “Do you speak Spanish?”

  In the orange light of the burning helicopter, her eyes
were black pools, her face a brown mask. She nodded.

  “Are you hurt? Did they hurt you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Okay. Then I want you to walk behind them, take their weapons, and place them over there, near the wreckage. Be careful, they can go off. Don’t throw them. Put them down carefully.”

  She stared at me for a moment, thinking about it. Her voice was deeper than I expected to be, but still girlish. A teenager in the rain forest. “You’re not going to kill them?”

  I shook my head. “We get their weapons, throw them in the river, they’re not going to bother us anymore. I’ll help you. I promise. You can trust me.”

  Once again, she gave me a considered look that seemed void of emotion. Then she walked quickly to where the guerrillas lay on the ground. At black-beard’s body, she paused, touching him experimentally with her bare foot.

  He did not move.

  I said, “I think he’s dead.”

  Her response surprised me. “Too bad.”

  Then I watched her kneel and pick-up the AK-47 that black-beard had used. She looked at the barrel, looked at the trigger, then looked at me.

  Why was she behaving so oddly?

  “Hurry up! We need to get moving.”

  The two wounded guerrillas were still groaning, calling for help, and she looked at them, rifle in her hands, before looking at the two men on the ground at her feet. Then, before my brain could process what was happening, she shouldered the rifle, and shot both of them in the back and head with short bursts.

  “What are you doing?”

  I was running toward her as she turned and emptied the rifle into the bodies of the two wounded men.

  “Stop it!”

  Then she looked at me, as if I might be next, but I could see her brain processing it. No, she would not shoot me… and so she threw the weapon away from her, her eyes staring into mine.

  I stopped running, looked at her through the jungle’s vacuum of silence, and heard her say. “Good. They’re all dead now.”

  Then she turned to black-beard. “I wish you had not killed this pig. He was the worst. Him, I would have taken back to my village and given to the old women for a night. They know the ways to deal with bad men. Then I would have taken his head.”