"Who the hell are you?" Lemester shouted over the whine of the helicopter engine shutting down.
"Listen, we've got a wounded American here. Just get the damn stretcher!" the tall, powerful-looking man yelled back.
Lemester had had enough of taking orders on board his own ship. "First, I want to know who you people are."
Trapp glared at the officer standing in front of him in his clean white uniform. He grabbed his M79 grenade launcher from his vest and pointed the gaping 40mm muzzle at the navy man's face. "You've got ten seconds to get me a stretcher and get that man to your infirmary."
Behind Trapp, the four other members of Team 3, standing under the slowing rotor blades, brought their weapons to the ready.
Lemester was a by-the-book man, but he wasn't stupid. His curiosity was rapidly diminishing. These men didn't look like they were bluffing. He ordered the stretcher brought up, then confronted the tall man. "What about the other helicopter? When is it going to be here? My orders are to wait for it, then I can get out of here."
"There isn't going to be another helicopter."
Trapp cornered Hawkins in the small stateroom that Lemester had provided the team. They waited there while O'Shaugnesy was being worked on in the infirmary. Devito was also down in the infirmary to make sure that the wounded man didn't say anything about the mission while the navy doctor was treating him.
"What the hell happened to the other bird, and where are we going now? I thought you were supposed to fly us back to Osan from here."
"We are supposed to fly you there, but neither me nor my copilot are up to it right now. I've got to wait until my nerve comes back. Give us an hour or so, then we'll take off again.
"Also, I figured you'd want to get your man into the infirmary here rather than let him wait another four hours in the air. C.J. — he's the guy who was piloting the other bird — and I, before we left Japan, decided that if we had any wounded, we'd drop them off here. That isn't what our captain told us to do, but screw that jerk. I'm not going to fly wounded men four extra hours when they can get taken care of sooner."
Trapp agreed with Hawkins' logic, and his respect for the pilot rose another notch. That had been some damn fine flying back there. The pilot's reasoning concerning O'Shaugnesy had mirrored his. If Hawkins hadn't shut down once he landed, Trapp had been prepared to do some weapon pointing at him also, so they could offload O'Shaugnesy and get him some proper care as soon as possible.
"Yeah, OK. What about the other bird though? What the hell happened to it? I didn't see any ground fire. How come you didn't hang around longer searching?"
Hawkins sighed. Since the explosion he'd thought about the same thing, replaying the scene in his mind innumerable times. He hadn't seen any fire from the ground either. C.J.'s bird had just exploded. He gave Trapp the only explanation that fit. "Going in we damn near ran into a Soviet patrol boat. As a matter of fact, the other bird did run into it. It looked to me like it hit the ship's mast. Any number of things could have been damaged that would lead to an explosion.
"I figure it was one of two things. They probably had a blade strike, which means that the transmission might have momentarily seized up, causing some damage to the gears. That damage could have become catastrophic and the transmission finally seized up for good, causing the rotor blades to stop immediately. Centrifugal force would have caused the transmission to separate from the aircraft, and the shrapnel would have punctured the external fuel tanks, causing the explosion we saw."
Hawkins considered what he had just proposed and ran the explosion through his mind one more time. Somehow that explanation still didn't feel right. "I'm not sure if that would have caused the type of explosion we saw, though. Another, more likely, possibility is that one of the external fuel tanks or lines might have been damaged in the collision and developed a small leak. The reason it took so long to blow is that the fuel probably got ignited by static electricity."
Trapp didn't believe it. "You're telling me they flew for almost six hours with a fuel leak and it took that long to explode?"
Hawkins tried to explain. "Static electricity builds on a helicopter as it flies. Sometimes it discharges into the atmosphere. Sometimes into the helicopter itself. That may have happened this time. With all the fuel we were carrying, both aircraft were an explosion waiting to happen. I don't think we'll ever know what really occurred.
"I didn't have the fuel to hang around searching. All I could see was a fire under the trees. There wasn't enough left of the other bird to search for. That thing disintegrated in midair. Plus, there was no place to land around the crash site."
Trapp had to accept the inevitable — the explanation didn't really matter. The bottom line was that the other aircraft hadn't made it out. He grabbed Lalli and the two of them went out to the fantail where the helicopter was sitting. While Lalli set up the SATCOM, Trapp wrote out the hardest message he ever had to write.
The brief, coded message had come in from the team two minutes ago. Hossey reread it and felt the chill settle deeper into his gut.
ZEROFI
LOSTON
TLOSTO
TDEGRE
TWODEG
LPRESU
RTZERO
VEEXFI
WAYOUT
NWAYOU
ESTWOT
REESTH
MEDKIL
TWOONE
LONTIM
XXREPE
TVICLO
HREEMI
REEZER
LEDXXR
FIVEZU
EONEAI
ATONEA
NGONET
NUTESL
OMINUT
EFUELI
LUXXXX
RCRAFT
IRCRAF
WOEIGH
ATFOUR
ESXXAL
NGDEPA
Hossey's trained eye broke out the message from the six-letter groups. MESSAGE: NUMBER 05. Exfil on time, one aircraft lost on way out, repeat, one aircraft lost on way out, vicinity longitude 128 degrees 23 minutes, latitude 42 degrees 30 minutes. All presumed killed. Refueling, depart 0215 Zulu.
One aircraft, Hossey thought. Half the team and two pilots dead. Eight men. Hossey listlessly handed the message to Hooker, then sat down at his desk. He knew he should immediately forward the information to the SFOB, but he needed a few moments to let the reality of the loss sink in. They wouldn't find out who had been killed until the survivors landed here in three and a half hours.
Down the corridor in Tunnel 3, General Olson and his staff were celebrating the successful exfiltration of the Special Forces team and the completion of their exercise. All had gone well in the simulation; the mission had been a success.
In Meng's office, the emotions were much different. Meng looked at the message about the lost aircraft another time. This was real. Eight men were dead because of his manipulations. He wasn't sure what to do. It was only a matter of time before the curtain of his deception was torn asunder. Questions would be asked. Meng thought he could control the FOB relatively well for a while yet. The surviving Blackhawk would drop the rest of the team at Osan and then, after a debrief and some rest, fly back to Misawa and down to Okinawa. Meng wondered how well the cover stories would work that had been concocted in the oplan against the possible loss of a helicopter. Would they work against the people who had written them?
Meng considered the situation. The aviation detachment commander from the 1 st Special Forces Group was supposed to report the aircraft lost at sea during classified training. The FOB commander was supposed to back him up on that. The problem would come when someone at USSOCOM put two and two together and came up with five. Meng ran the scenario through his computer. The answer was that he had anywhere from thirty-six to seventy-two hours, with a statistical mean of forty-eight, before someone started asking questions.