Meng rubbed his eyes wearily. He had that much time before the walls came crumbling down. He prayed the attack had moved the Old Men, even if just a little.
The ship's doctor finished examining and cleaning the wounds. He'd never seen anything like them. The tall, silent man who'd accompanied the patient into the infirmary had been uncommunicative so far.
"What the hell happened to you?" the doctor asked as the patient finally came out of his drug-induced unconsciousness.
Despite being fuzzy headed from the morphine and loss of blood, O'Shaugnesy managed a weak smile. "I tripped over my rucksack."
Devito smiled and turned to the doctor. "He got mauled by a bear. I've got him on morphine, last injection was one hour ago. He's been taking whole blood for the last two hours. We need you to finish rebandaging him and give him some more antibiotics. We're taking off in a little while to take him to Korea and get him into a regular hospital."
The doctor was just finishing those procedures when three other men, dressed in the same black outfits and carrying exotic-looking weapons, came into the infirmary. They looked at the tall man, who shifted his gaze to the doctor. "Well, Doc? What do you think? Can he take another four-hour chopper ride back to a real hospital?"
The doctor considered. The tall man definitely knew something about medicine, the doctor could tell from what had been done so far, and had probably made up his own mind about the answer to that question. He was most likely just asking out of professional courtesy.
"I think getting him to a hospital as soon as possible is the best treatment he can receive right now. I really don't have the facilities here to do much more for him. Whoever's been treating him so far has done a super job. I've done as much as I can do."
"Let's take him on up, guys."
The doctor wondered where these men were going, and where they had come from. But he had a feeling he really didn't want to know.
Trapp supervised as they carefully loaded O'Shaugnesy onto the bird. The cleanly dressed naval officer who had met them when they landed was nowhere to be seen. Trapp expected as much. He climbed on board. The refueled Blackhawk lifted into the sky and turned to the southwest.
Hooker and Hossey watched the Blackhawk touch down and roll toward the hangar. The cover story had already been released by the aviation detachment commander at Misawa Air Force Base in Japan. In fact, the U.S. and Japanese navies and air forces were presently conducting a search for survivors in the location where the helicopter supposedly had been lost.
In the hangar, with the doors shut behind it, the Blackhawk rolled to a halt. The ambulance crew, which Hossey had called, ran forward as the cargo doors opened. They loaded O'Shaugnesy onto a stretcher for his final ride to the hospital.
Hossey ticked off the faces in his mind as he watched the men offload: O'Shaugnesy, Trapp, Devito, Reese, Lalli, and Smith. Both Mitchell and Riley, he thought. Goddamn, not both. Which sparked a new thought in the colonel's mind: I'm going to have to see Mitchell's wife and tell her. He didn't look forward to that.
He looked at the dejected, beaten faces of the six who had made it home. Hossey walked over to Trapp. "What happened, Jim?"
Hooker edged up next to the two of them, forestalling Trapp's reply. "Sir, why don't we wait until we're in the isolation area and get some hot coffee and food."
Hossey nodded. As always the sergeant major made sense. The group walked across the hangar to a van. The team loaded their gear on board, and Hooker drove them and the pilots to the isolation area.
Hooker had dismissed the communications men, and the only ones now in the room were the six team members, the two pilots, and Hooker and Hossey. In the center of the operations center was a large table; on it were the maps Team 3 had used to plan the mission.
After the team members and pilots grabbed a cup of hot coffee, Hossey stood up to begin the debrief. "My first concern is what happened to the other aircraft." He turned to the chief pilot. "Where did they go down, how, and is there any chance of survivors?"
Hawkins leaned over the map and pointed. "They went down somewhere along here."
Hossey winced as he saw that it was over land. Hopefully, there were no identifiable pieces left, which also meant that the team members wouldn't be identifiable. He berated himself sharply in his own mind for such a coldhearted thought.
Hawkins continued. "We were flying up a draw, following it into the Changbai Mountains, where we figured we'd punch over the top, then drop right down and sprint for the sea. C.J. was leading me by about a hundred meters. You've got to remember that we were all under goggles." Hawkins described what had happened and his suspicions as to cause.
When he was done, it was Hooker who repeated the question nearest to Hossey's heart. "Do you think there might be survivors?"
Hawkins' answer was blunt. "No. That thing exploded as far as I could tell. We weren't too high up, probably eighty feet AGL. If it had just been an engine failure, C.J. probably could have autorotated into the trees. But an explosion, with all that fuel we had on board… " Hawkins shook his head. "I did a sweep back across where they should have gone down and all I could see was a fire under the trees."
Hossey asked the next question that had to be asked from the point of view of mission success. "What about wreckage? Do you think it will be identifiable?"
Hawkins was exasperated. Didn't these idiots understand what he was telling them? 'The damn helicopter blew up, sir. There probably aren't enough pieces left to figure out what the hell type of aircraft it was, never mind identify its source."
Hossey hung his head. Trapp spoke for the first time. "What are you going to do about the wreckage, sir?"
Hossey looked up. "What do you mean, what am I going to do?"
"You're not going to check on it? There still could be somebody alive back there."
Hossey rubbed his head as he considered the problem. "Now that we have a good fix on location, I'll have the SFOB run satellite imagery on the next pass over, which will probably be in a couple of hours. There's not much else we can do right now." He turned to Hooker. "Finish the debrief while I contact the SFOB and give them the grids for the crash site."
Meng sat at the master console. Tunnel 3 was quiet. The SFOB staff was down to only a watch officer. All that was left for the USSOCOM people to do was the debrief the next day. Meng had sent Wilson home with instructions to handle that tomorrow. He looked as a new message from the real FOB appeared on his screen. He transcribed the location of the crash and sent a request next door to the NSA for the imagery to be forwarded to the FOB. There was no sense in alarming the FOB commander, Meng reasoned, by not answering this request.
Hossey looked over the faxed imagery with Trapp. The resolution and quality were unbelievable. Even so, the remains of the helicopter were hard to distinguish. The only reason they knew it was the location where the helicopter had gone down was because of the burn marks. There was no large piece of wreckage, just a few burned fragments barely visible through the trees. If that had happened before landing, then no one could have survived, Hossey knew.
He looked up and addressed Trapp. "Tell me again what you told me after the debriefing."