Six Minutes To Freedom

by John Gilstrap

  “Let me have a weapon!” Kurt shouted. The entire world was shooting at them right now, and the least he could ask for was a way to shoot back.

  Brian hesitated.

  “I was in the Army,” Kurt assured. “I know this part of the city. I know how to shoot.”

  “It’s not the how I worry about,” Brian said. “It’s the who.” Nonetheless,he pulled a .45 from his thigh holster and handed it over, butt first. “It’s cocked,” he warned, “and the trigger’s got a lighter pull than you’re used to.”

  “I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”

  Brian backed out of the hatch first, then waited for Kurt. “We’re gonna find cover and stay there,” he advised.

  Free of the hatch, Kurt turned, and in that instant he heard a horriblewhop and saw Brian’s head flail violently to the left as his body dropped to a heap on the ground. The momentum of his fall took Kurt to the ground with him. Shit! Sniper!

  A bead of blood traced down Brian’s face from an unseen head wound. “Hey!” Kurt yelled, wishing that he knew this man’s name. “Hey! Are you okay? Wake up!”

  The man didn’t move.

  Sure that Brian was dead, and equally sure that the sniper who killed him would soon zero in on Kurt as his next victim, Kurt lay on his belly with his left hand—his shooting hand—propped on Brian’s chest for support. If he saw a muzzle flash, he’d do his best to return fire.

  The Little Bird was still alive, its fractured rotors turning in a lazy, dying circle. The air reeked of spilled fuel, gunpowder, and blood. Brian’s lifeless face was just inches away from Kurt’s own. Try as he might not to look, it was impossible. Such a terrible way to—

  Brian’s eyes snapped open. “Moose! Are you okay?”

  Kurt nearly jumped clear of his skin. “Jesus! What happened to you? I thought you were dead.”

  “Damn rotor blade hit me in the head.”

  Suddenly, Kurt was keenly aware that he’d lost his own helmet in the crash.

  “This is a shitty place to be,” Brian said.

  They needed cover. As they started to move, though, it was clear that the wiring between Brian’s brain and his feet had been damaged by the impact of the rotor blade. Saying nothing, Kurt slung the operator’sarm over his shoulder and headed for the side of an apartment building, where the wall looked stout enough to provide some cover. It took a year and a half to stumble across the street, but they made it, collapsing together onto the sidewalk.

  In the nighttime, in the middle of a war, Kurt tried to become invisible.

  A few seconds later, Kurt heard movement in the street and he looked up to see an operator he recognized from the hallway of the prison. It was Chris, the commander. He recoiled from the sight of Brian’s face. “Jesus. Are you okay?”

  “Rotor blade,” Brian said simply. “Hell of a headache, but I’m functional.”

  Chris turned to Kurt. “What about you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “That makes you better than most, then.” He turned back to Brian.

  “You guys can’t stay here. It’s too exposed.” He pointed to something only he could see. “We’re sheltered up across the street and have a perimeter established.”

  Without discussion, they were moving again.

  Trying to jog across that street with bullets streaking the sky took Kurt back to the worst kinds of childhood nightmares: needing to run from mortal danger when his legs couldn’t possibly pump fast enough. Those twenty-five yards grew to be a hundred and twenty-five.

  G Team had taken up a defensive position along the side of the road, on the sidewalk, really, with a brick wall behind them, and parallelparked cars serving as barriers in the front. A jeep Wagoneer was the largest of the barricades and by far the most substantial.

  The operators were all a mess. Brian’s head continued to bleed, but the one who concerned Kurt the most was the man he already knew as Parker, the first man to appear in the doorway of his cell. A bullet had ripped through Parker’s thigh and he was bleeding badly and clearly in unspeakable pain. He was doing his best to do his job, but Kurt could tell that he was flagging quickly.

  Of the seven men huddled there in the dark, then, four were criticallyinjured. They had to get a ride out of here and fast. Only Chris, Chief Wolff (the pilot of the Little Bird), and Kurt were whole and largely unhurt.

  “Where’s Jim?” one of the commandos asked, clearly concerned.

  Chris shook his head. “Haven’t seen him, and he hasn’t answered up on the net.”

  Jim Nelson was not dying on the street tonight.

  Pulling as hard as he could accomplished nothing. He was still as stuck under the weight of the chopper as he’d been since the first momentsafter the crash. Part of the problem was the awkward angles. He could neither sit nor lay flat. Certainly, standing up was out of the question. And with all the other wounded among them he knew that the team did not have the available manpower to charge out here and pull him away.

  If it had been just him and the team, then maybe. Or even if it had been an entirely military crew. As it was, the object of this mission—their precious cargo—was still in harm’s way. Until Kurt Muse was safe, he, not Jim Nelson, was the man to protect. It was all about beinggood soldiers, and Jim was one of the best in the world.

  As he started kicking at the skid again with his right foot—his good foot—he couldn’t help but think of the stories about how a fox will chew off its own leg to escape a trap. Well, Jim wasn’t going to chew, but he wasn’t going to die, either. But he was getting ahead of himself. He was still a few options away from drawing his knife.

  He slammed his foot over and over again into the steel skid, and on each impact, he could feel the bones in the good foot straining, even as the length of his left leg screamed in agony. It wasn’t just the foot. It was the damn bullet in the back of his knee. That was hurting like hell, too.

  Wait a second, he thought. How can someone be shot in the back of the knee, yet have the front of his knee remain intact? He didn’t care what you were shooting, there’s not enough structure in a knee joint to stop much of anything.

  Then he got it. The bench. He remembered clearly that the bench reverberated when the bullet struck. Perhaps the wood slowed it down enough to—

  In all the concern over his ruined foot, he’d neglected to even check the bullet wound in his leg. Pausing long enough to grope the knee, he could scarcely believe what he found: He could actually feel the ass end of the bullet protruding from the crease behind his knee. There wasn’t much there—it was buried pretty deeply—but it hadn’t turned his knee into the blooming rose that most such injuries resembled. With a little digging through the fabric of his BDUs, he was actually able to remove the round from his flesh. He felt it slide free and then he lost his grip and the dislodged bullet got lost in the folds of cloth.

  Maybe it was just the minor victory, or maybe it was the fact that he no longer had a hunk of lead pressing against the structure of his knee, but the relief from pain was immediate.

  He took it as a sign that he’d been right all along: he truly was not meant to die tonight.

  He started kicking again. Harder and harder, each time leveraginghis foot a little farther out of its trap. The pain was exquisite, blinding, as the skid’s crushing force advanced from his instep to his toes and beyond. He could actually feel the bones crumbling. He kept kicking.

  Finally after twenty, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand kicks, he finally pulled himself free. And he was the only friendly in sight.

  He saw movement ahead and on the left. He rolled to his belly, to a prone position and drew a bead, preparing to fire.

  Jim had to smile. Even in the darkness, and even with the Kevlar vest in place, there was no missing that bright green Polo shirt that the PC had decided to wear tonight. It looked like he and two operators—he was pretty sure one was Chris, but it was so hard to tell from this distance—were dashing across the street to some temporary shelter.
/>   He started crawling that way. It was an endless, excruciating trip as he dragged the mangled, shredded foot behind him, inching his way toward the assault team that had turned itself invisible behind its barricades.

  He was still fifteen yards out when Chris dashed out of their hiding place to help him to safety.

  “We’ve been worried about you,” Chris said, lifting his wounded colleague by his bandoliers and helping him hobble on one leg.

  Jim locked his jaw against the pain. “Yeah, well, I’ve been a little worried about me, too.”

  Kurt watched, stunned, as Chris dashed out to retrieve his brother in arms.

  Back inside the barricade, Jim found a spot on the sidewalk where he could guard his leg even as he brought his weapon back up to his shoulder to cover the team.

  Chris spoke a mile a minute into his radio, but in the cacophony of the raging battle, Kurt couldn’t make out any words, only the passion that drove them. It was that very passion that inspired Kurt to draw his weapon again.

  He watched as Chris dug through his rucksack for something that looked a lot like a flashlight, but without the beam, and held it high over his head. Kurt would learn later that the device was an infrared strobe—a signal device that remained invisible to the naked eye, even as it was impossible to miss for anyone wearing night vision gear.

  “Help should be on the way soon,” he said.

  As if on cue, a giant Blackhawk helicopter made a low pass directly overhead. It pivoted a turn at the end of the block, and then made anotherpass, this time rocking back and forth in the ancient aviation traditionof acknowledging friendlies by waggling wings.

  As the noise of the Blackhawk dopplered away, it was replaced by the relatively higher-pitched buzz of a Little Bird gunship swooping in for an attack run. The birds themselves were invisible in the night, but the fiery flashes erupting from the muzzles of their side-mounted Gatlingguns could be seen for miles. Directly across the street from G Team’s barricade, a parapet atop the roof of an eight-story apartment building erupted in great chunks of blasted concrete. Another bird followedin its wake, doubling the destruction.

  There would be no threat of snipers; at least not from that rooftop. The gunships stuck around, though, no doubt keeping an eye out for any yahoo with an urge to meet his maker.

  Paul started to stir, making ugly growling, gurgling noises on the sidewalk. “I’ll shoot the son of a bitch,” he said.

  Chris knelt down next to him. “Paul, you’re hurt,” he said. “You’ve been hit. You need to stay down and be quiet.”

  “I’ll shoot him,” he said again.

  Chris pulled Paul’s rifle out of reach and handed it to Chief Wolff. “We’ll shoot whoever needs to be shot,” Chris assured. “You don’t have to worry about any of that. Just stay put.”

  Paul wanted none of it. Equal parts adrenaline and delirium, his anger was hotter than his skills right now, and his wounds were seriousenough that too much movement might well cause him to bleed out.

  “Moose,” Chris barked. “Take care of Paul. Keep him down. Sit on him if you have to.”

  On the surface, it seemed like such a simple assignment: just keep a man from hurting himself. But when the man was a trained killer with twice the strength of his caretaker, the equation took on a whole differentmeaning. But what could Kurt say? Everyone else had a job to do, a flank to cover; all he had to do was stay down and try not to get shot.

  He knelt next to Paul and Chris. “Hey, buddy, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Paul spat.

  “No, you’re not.” Kurt tried hard to keep his voice calm. In the midst of all this madness, he worked hard to quell his growing panic. “You’re all broken up inside. You need to take it easy. They’ve called for help and we’ll be out of here soon.” From my lips to God’s ear.

  “Hey, Chris, we got something,” Brian said, pointing out into the night.

  Chris stood, leaving Kurt alone with the wounded soldier.

  “It looks like a local,” Brian continued. “Out at twelve o’clock. He’s bobbing and weaving among the cars.”

  Kurt stood to see what they were talking about, momentarily abandoninghis post with Paul. What he saw froze his breath in his throat. In the wildness of the night, amid the strafing runs and the uninterruptedgunfire, a guy—just a Panamanian guy—was approaching them in the darkness, moving from car to car, popping up to see what he could see and then ducking down again to move one car length closer.

  “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Chris asked whomever might care to answer.

  “I can take him,” Parker said, his voice knotted with pain. “Next time he pops up, I can clean his head from his shoulders.”

  “No,” Kurt said. His voice was emphatic enough to carry weight among the warriors. “He doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “And just how do you know that?” Chris asked.

  “He saw the crash, and he’s here to see the sights. He’s got no weapon.”

  “You can’t see his hands.”

  “No, but I know these people. He doesn’t mean any harm.”

  The man popped up and disappeared one more time.

  “Well, then you’d better let him know that he’s being an idiot. Send him home before we fry his ass.”

  Kurt nodded and stood. “Hey, you!” he yelled in Spanish. “You behindthe cars. What are you doing?”

  The man popped up again, this time close enough that Kurt leveled the .45 at his chest. The man saw the weapon and disappeared again. “Stop! Are you out of your mind? These are American soldiers. If you take another step—if you don’t turn around and run home right now, we’re going to shoot you.” For a long moment, nothing happened.

  “What did you say?” Chris asked.

  Kurt gave him the translation. “I think I scared him onto the ground.”

  “Tell him to show himself one more time, and then to run like hell. Make sure we can see his hands the whole time, or I swear to God I’m going to blow him away.”

  Kurt translated the command, emphasizing the parts about the shooting and the running. After only a very brief pause, the man rose to his full height from behind the cars and reached his hands as high into the air as they could possibly stretch.

  “Okay,” Kurt soothed him in his native language. “We see you’re not armed. Now, run home.”

  The man did exactly that, only the word “running” doesn’t really give justice to what he did. He sprinted. Dashed. Evaporated. Learned his lesson and lived to see another day.

  54

  The Little Birds’ and the Blackhawks’ strafing runs and constant vigilance had kept the war away from G Team’s barricade, even as they continued to rain hell on the Comandancia. Perhaps becauseof the unrelenting assault on Noriega’s headquarters, the army and police units were too distracted—or their ears were ringing too badly—to pay much attention to this clutch of mangled operators and their precious cargo.

  Paul had slipped back into unconsciousness and Parker was close, bleeding so profusely that it was difficult to pinpoint the source. Jim Nelson, likewise, had begun to slip from blood loss and pain, made even worse as the adrenaline began to subside. Despite the pain, however,and the graveness of their injuries, those who were conscious remained vigilantly on station, their weapons played to every visible compass point, waiting to engage any targets who were foolish enough to enter the killing field.

  In this lull, Kurt’s job was to take care of Paul, to make sure that he kept breathing and to shout out if he stopped. He sat Indian-style on the sidewalk, cradling Paul’s head in his lap, absorbing his blood into his clothes, into his skin, into his heart. With the imminent danger gone, Kurt had time to think about the scene around him—really think about it. These seven men whom he had never met had willingly risked their lives—continued to risk their lives—for no higher cause than to rescue Kurt Frederick Muse, a nobody. You expected that from the Secret Service on behalf of the president of the United States or
others whose lives truly made a difference on a global scale, but never in a million years would he have expected it for himself. As thrilled as he was to be free of Modelo Prison—even if it meant dying here on the street—he found himself struggling to understand the why of it all.

  In the distance, he heard the rumbling of what could only be tracked vehicles of some sort. In his mind, he conjured up images of tanks, and in so doing, he felt his spirits soar. The PDF had no such vehicles. The cavalry was on the way.

  Two minutes later, he learned that he’d been both right and wrong. It was, indeed, the cavalry coming with tracked vehicles, but where he’d expected to see tanks, he instead saw a parade of two M-113 armoredpersonnel carriers (APCs) crushing a path through the parked cars to come rescue them. Little Birds hovered overhead providing close support as the APCs lumbered to within yards of their location then swung around ass-first to drop the steel personnel doors and invitethe assault team inside. A .50 caliber machine gun sat atop each vehicle, manned by a soldier whose head and shoulders were fully exposedthrough a hatch in the roof.

  “Wounded first,” Chris said, but everyone seemed to know instinctivelywhat to do.

  “Time to move, Paul,” Kurt said.

  The team members who were well enough to shoot covered those who were not, with the help of the APC gunners and the ever-intimidatingLittle Birds.

  Kurt waited his turn as the pilots of his rescue ship helped to wrestleParker and Jim Nelson into the first vehicle. When it was time, Chris returned for Kurt and Paul.

  “How’s he doing?” Chris asked.

  “Not so good. In and out.” Kurt slid from under the commando’s weight and worked with Chris to carry Paul to the open maw of the closest APC.

  The M-113’s interior was long and narrow. With an advertised capacityfor eleven troops plus a driver and gunner, half that number made it feel cramped, with soldiers sitting knee to knee. Jim Nelson was already inside, his mangled leg stretched out on the right-side bench, leaking blood everywhere. They laid Paul on the floor between the parallel benches, all the way to the front of the troop compartment, and seconds later, the remainder of the team—the two pilots—scrambledin and raised the door.