Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  “Keep your head down, Moose!” Parker yelled from over Paul’s shoulder. “We’re not done yet!” Apparently thinking that the GPC was the main event, Kurt had peeked around the corner. At Parker’s command,the prisoner’s face retreated quickly.

  From the officers’ quarters, he heard three more gunshots and voices yell, “Clear!”

  Paul pulled the trigger, launching a twelve-gauge slug that fractured the lock, shearing the metal hoop so cleanly that it looked as if it had been dispatched with bolt cutters. Paul slapped the lock away and charged into the cell, where he flung himself atop the prisoner, protectinghim from the shrapnel and debris that continued to rain in from the outside.

  Kurt thought it was over when he heard the explosion in the hall. In the darkness cut only by the light beams on the rifles, nothing he saw made sense; everything was about noise and smells. He heard shouting and gunshots, and then when the explosion shook the entire floor, he naturally assumed that they’d blown the cell door off the hinges. When he peeked around the corner, even in the smoky night he could see the posture of a soldier aiming a shotgun in his general direction.

  “Keep your head down, Moose! We’re not done yet!”

  Kurt had the odd sense that maybe this was all a very realistic dream. There was an unearthly quality to it all that was at once euphoricand unnerving. After the single report of the shotgun, he heard the slam of metal against concrete, and then suddenly there was a big man on top of him, not hugging him so much as pressing him into the floor.

  “Are you all right?” Paul asked. Above and behind him, the other rescuer fumbled with a rucksack, out of which was born a Kevlar vest and helmet.

  Just as quickly as he’d been pounced on, he was released again and lifted to a standing position. They wrestled him into the vest and fastenedthe front for him. Next, they dropped a Kevlar helmet on his head and cinched the chin strap tight.

  “This is it, Moose,” Parker said. “We’re here to take you home.”

  Two more commandos appeared in his cell. “Hallway’s clear,” one of them said. “One dead.”

  Kurt knew that it had to be the corporal. He tried to muster up some sympathy for the son of a bitch, but it just wouldn’t come.

  A soldier said, “Let’s go,” and an instant later they were moving, Kurt being driven along by a hand that had grabbed a fistful of trousers at the small of his back, and by hands clenched around both arms at the biceps. The Delta operators formed a human wall around their charge, protecting him with their bodies and their lives from any yahoo with a weapon who decided to take one last shot. He had the feeling that his feet were barely touching the ground as they herded him down the hall and up two levels toward the roof. Before they’d even reached the first flight, someone said, “PC secured. X-Ray ready for exfil. Enroute to your location.”

  Kurt was vaguely aware of a hog-tied soldier on the floor at the base of the first flight of steps, but before he could take real notice, he was all but airborne, more carried than led up the pitch dark stairs, his head swimming in the emotion of freedom and in the disorientation caused by the bouncing and spinning muzzle lights on his rescuers’ rifles.With each new flight, their numbers grew, until finally they numberedtwenty-four.

  On the final landing, Kurt saw the remains of a mangled steel door all but embedded in the concrete wall. To his left and up, he could see the portal that the door had once guarded, wide open and inviting. Suddenly, the muzzle lights were no longer needed. Beyond the rectanglethat was the cupola door, the sky burned like an autumn dawn. As his rescuers whisked him the rest of the way onto the roof and reintroducedhim to the fresh night air for the first time in over nine months, he understood where the dawn light was coming from. The Comandanciawas completely in flames, great tongues of fire billowing from the windows on all sides and from giant gaping holes in the roof. The night continued to be filled with explosions and the darkness streaked with tracers. Each blast brought a strobe-flash of light. The humid air reeked of acrid smoke and of cordite. It occurred to Kurt there on the roof of Carcel Modelo that there was a certain twisted beauty to the devastation of war. For so many, it would spell death, but for at least one, it spelled a new lease on freedom. He made a conscious effort to savor the moment, soaking in every emotion and image. Precious few people walked the earth who could tell the story he would be able to tell at the end of this night, and he wanted everything to be as vivid as it could possibly be.

  Kurt never heard the Little Birds return. One moment the roof had been barren of the machines, and the next, there was a swarm of them, lined up nose to tail rotor.

  Pressing on Kurt’s head to bend him at the waist, the rescuers rushed him to the first bird in the procession. Kurt didn’t know where to look, alternating his gaze from the helicopter to his feet, in the ridiculous fear that he might trip over something. Even if he’d lain out flat, the Delta operators would have continued carrying him. In fact, had it not been for his efforts to keep his feet moving, maybe it all would have progressed faster.

  His last thought before being rushed to the chopper and deposited inside was, Holy shit, there’s no way I can fit through that little door.

  As Jim and his assault team rushed the precious cargo toward the helicopter,he couldn’t help but wonder if the door would be big enough.

  Didn’t matter. Kurt Muse was being stuffed into that Little Bird even if it meant leaving his shoulders behind. They ran him across the roof the way that bodyguards all over the world, from the U.S. Secret Service to the thugs of tin-pot dictators in the third world, whisk their charges to safety while under fire. They kept Kurt’s head down and his feet moving constantly; no time for second thoughts, no time for the PC to reconsider his situation.

  Jim and his team timed it perfectly. The instant the lead bird’s skids touched down on the roof deck, Kurt was there. He seemed to pull back a bit when he saw where he was headed, but at this point, Kurt had no more of a vote in what was going down than did the rifle in Jim’s hand. They stuffed the big man through the doorless opening and dropped him onto the chopper’s bench seat, in the tiny space between the pilots’ seats and the aft bulkhead.

  With the PC planted, another Delta operator slid into the seat next to Kurt to keep him out of trouble as Jim’s assault team boarded the benches for the flight back to the safety of Howard Air Force Base. Even as his ass hit the seat, Jim could feel the weightless sensation that comes with being light on the skids. The pilots of their bird were ready to go, right by-god now. Jim barely had time to tether himself to the bench before they were moving again.

  The total elapsed time from touchdown to dust off was six minutes. But the night was about to get a lot longer.

  53

  The images on television were the most frightening that Annie had ever seen. Alerted by friends—some of them in Panama—that the war had begun, Annie could actually make out the image of Modelo Prison right in the thick of the raging battle.

  The first bullet was for Kurt.

  Once the phone started ringing, it didn’t stop. Everyone Annie knew in Panama was calling her with updates on the invasion. When talking on the phone with Rita Prieto, Annie could actually hear the boom of explosions and the chatter of gunfire. Still, the point of the call was not to deliver news, but to solicit it. Had Annie heard anything? Did she know anything?

  People meant well, but as much as she appreciated the gestures of kindness, there are times when talking actually makes things worse.

  The television networks were all covering the invasion now, and they were going wall to wall with it, even at this ridiculous hour, and even though they had nothing to report. When they did, they would say nothing of Kurt. It had been nine months already, and none of them were interested in Kurt.

  With explosions blooming in the background, sad-faced anchors speculated on developments and spoke to experts who had not been in on the planning, and therefore took five-minute segments to say that they didn’t know a thing.

 
It would be a long night.

  She opted to let the children sleep.

  Kurt’s world was now a swirling nightmare of noise and cordite. In the cramped spaces of the chopper’s backseat, he could see virtually nothingof the battle, but there was no missing the tink, tink of bullets from the ground piercing the aircraft’s skin. The pilots cursed with each impact.“We’ve got to get going!” the right-seat pilot yelled to whoever might be listening. “We’ve got to get off of this roof.”

  Even before the rest of the operators were on board, Kurt could feel the chopper hovering just millimeters off the roof deck. It reminded him of the way he used to hold a hill in his Volvo by hanging on the partially engaged clutch.

  Finally, everyone was on board and it was time to go. The pilot twisted in power as he pulled on the collective pitch lever, and suddenlythey were airborne. Kurt felt a cheer forming in his throat, but before he could make a sound, a tink was followed by a bang, and suddenlythey were falling like an anvil tossed off a bridge.

  If they’d had the element of surprise on their side on the way in, they had none of it now. Every gun in Panama seemed to be trained on this one Delta troop. At this early point in the invasion, there were no good guys on the ground, so if somebody was even thinking about holding a weapon, he was dropped without a moment’s thought.

  From where Jim Nelson sat, in his same slot on the front seat of the Little Bird’s port side, the exfil flight was like the wildest amusement park ride ever created. Three feet past the edge of the roof, the chopperpilot dropped the bird into a nose-down dive that first nearly had them smashing into the prison yard concrete, and then again into the prison yard wall. Honest to God they missed the wall by inches.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled over the engine noise, but if the pilots heard, they weren’t paying attention.

  On the far side of the wall, the chopper landed in the middle of the street, just a block away from the flaming Comandancia. Jim heard something wrong with the engine, and right away knew that things had taken a shitty turn. Before he could say a thing, Chris’s voice said in his headset, “Form a perimeter. Give me a status report.”

  Terrific. Eight guys and a civilian were now going to slug it out on the ground with the entire PDF. This was about to get ugly.

  Behind him, Paul and Parker undid their lifelines and fanned out to engage whatever targets they could find. Jim had a hard time with his tether, however, and fell three or four seconds behind his teammates. Before he could recover, Chris’s voice returned in his ear.

  “Negative! Negative! Back onboard. Everybody back onboard.”

  Whatever was happening, they were going to make another run at getting airborne. Jim provided covering fire from the bench while his teammates dashed back to their positions on the benches. Someone on the net yelled, “All aboard. Go! Go!”

  Seconds later, they were moving again. The aircraft shook violently as the rotors tried to bite into the humidity, but the overloaded bird was too damaged to lift them straight off the ground. When they were barely light on the skids again, the pilot poured on the power and started propelling the aircraft down the streets of the Chorrillo neighborhood.As they gained speed, but no altitude, Jim Nelson cursed underhis breath, “Holy shit, we’re driving home.”

  Operation Just Cause wasn’t yet ten minutes old, but already the PDF resistance was beginning to show some signs of organization, spurred in part, Jim supposed, by the possibility of shooting down a helicopter that was flying less than two feet off the ground.

  The idea was to achieve transitional lift by gaining ground speed, and then use that lift to take the wounded bird off the street and into the sky where it belonged. The problem was the block that ran betweenthe prison and the Comandancia compound: It was too short to get the job done, and an eight-story tenement loomed at the end of the block. The pilot backed off the throttle as he reached the end of the block, causing them to lose whatever momentum they’d gained, and swung a flat turn—a pivot—to face a much longer block.

  The bullet-torn engine whined miserably as the pilot poured on the power again and propelled the Little Bird down the tenement-lined street that felt to Jim Nelson to be much like the canyons in the old cowboy movies—the ones from which the Indians always launched devastating ambushes. The presence of dozens of PDF defenders at every compass point only added to the allusion. Overhead, Little Bird gunships did their best to keep the enemy’s heads down, but the concern over killing innocents meant that they were far more bark than bite, and the bad guys seemed to understand that.

  For Jim’s part, the rules of engagement meant less than the steadily diminishing chance of staying alive. There were places in the world where he was willing to die, but this fetid backwater alley was not on the list. Not tonight.

  Behind him, Paul struggled to stay on the bench, straddling the wood and locking his ankles to keep from falling off as his hands continued to feed and fire his weapon.

  It’s hard to judge speed in conditions such as these, but to Jim’s eye they were going pretty damn fast and pulling a lot of damn fire as they raced down the long street in search of takeoff velocity. Two-thirds of the way down, about the time that Jim had begun to think it was time to back off the throttle or prepare to eat a tenement building, the ground started to drop away. Suddenly, they were looking down on the first-floorwindows instead of looking up at them. This was one hotshot pilot. The second floor windows flashed into view. They were going to make it.

  And then somewhere, a Panamanian machine gunner found his aim.

  The first burst caught Paul in the chest, piercing his Kevlar vest and knocking him off the bench. Jim Nelson watched in horror as his teammatepivoted sideways and dropped like a stone twenty feet to the grimy roadway below. He slapped the transmit button clipped to his own vest to tell the pilots to stop their climb, but before he could say a word, a 5.56mm bullet slammed through his bench from below and drilled into the back of his left knee. The impact knocked the breath out of his lungs and made him lose his grip on his weapon. But for the sling around his shoulder, his rifle would have dropped, and but for the tether around his waist, he would have followed it. I’m screwed, he thought.

  He had no idea.

  Time slows when you know you’re dying. What plays out in fractionsof seconds has the clarity and detail of an event that occurs over long minutes.

  The Little Bird seemed to hesitate in midair as yet another burst of gunfire raked the engine cowling over Jim’s head. In retrospect, it happenedin silence, but in real time, it had to have been loud as hell. Chunks of metal and bullet fragments littered the night air and the aircraftjolted as if smacked with a giant hand.

  The chopper banked hard to the right, the rotor disk catching the block wall of a tenement, and from there it was all about the laws of physics.

  They were falling. Twenty feet, forty feet, no one would say for sure, but there was nothing graceful or dignified about it. No autoro-tationthat the chopper boys praised so loudly whenever they got the chance. This bird might as well have been a rock.

  It fell fast and hit hard, bouncing once and then coming to rest uprightbut listing pitifully, its starboard landing skid snapped free. Parker and Chris went flying on impact, tumbling out onto the street, but the kinetic energy that tried to launch Jim into the night merely threw him to the end of his tether and then yanked him back again. For a second, Jim thought that the safety line had cut him in half. As he rebounded, he skidded hard across the macadam, and as the Little Bird landed for the last time, Jim felt a lightning bolt of pain erupt from his leg. He screamed in agony and tried to roll away, but realized he was trapped. Lying as he was, flat on his back, and looking up at the shooters in the windows lining the street, it took him a moment to realize what had happened.

  His left foot, just a few inches south of the joint that had already been ruined by a bullet, had been essentially cut in two. It was with a special horror that he realized that his crushed foot was trapped u
nder the chopper’s good landing skid.

  A war that he’d helped to ignite was raging all around him, and he was stuck helpless in the middle of the street, pinned under a couple thousand pounds of future scrap metal.

  Bullshit.

  He was getting out of here. Planting his right foot—his good foot—against the skid for leverage, he started to pull.

  All Kurt knew was that they had crashed and that they were in some seriously deep shit. He’d heard the curses from the pilots as their aircraftwas shredded by bullets, and he’d heard shouting from the benches that was somehow even louder than the gunfire that found them. An instant later, he felt a brief sensation of weightlessness, and then they hit the ground. The impact rattled his core, bouncing him first off the floor and then off the ceiling, just one more bit of flotsam in a swirling cloud of wreckage.

  Finally at rest, the noise was just beginning. The attackers had downed their prize, and now they wanted to make sure that it was dead. Gunfireraged all around, both incoming and outgoing, and while Kurt didn’t know what to do next, he knew that staying in the chopper was nowhere on the list. Someone was calling his name. “Moose! Moose! You okay?”

  “I’m all right!” Kurt shouted back. He recognized the voice as belongingto his seat mate in the back of the chopper. Much later, he’d come to learn that his name was Brian.

  “We’re down for good!” Brian yelled. “Get the hell out.”