An hour later Riley took stock of the situation in the growing daylight. They were still only thirty meters away from where the helicopter had crashed, but there was little to indicate that a helicopter had impacted on that spot. The explosion had scattered pieces in a hundred-meter circle and had scorched the forest.
Comsky finished sewing up the captain as best he could. Earlier, the medic had set Olinski's broken leg and arm. These two men had sustained the only serious injuries from the accident. The other team members were banged up but functional. Somehow, training and instinct had held fast and everyone had their weapons in hand. Those, in combination with the ammunition and grenades on their vests, meant that the beat-up outfit still had some bite left.
Riley walked over to Hoffman, who had been working with the insides of the black box for which he had risked his life. "What do you think? You gonna be able to do anything with that?"
Hoffman squinted up at Riley from behind his slightly bent glasses. "Hmm. I think so. Olinski still had the PRC68 on his vest, so I've cannibalized some stuff off that. There'll be two main problems. The biggest is that we don't have a power source. It takes a lot of juice to transmit high-frequency radio. The battery from the 68 won't even warm the wires of this thing. The second problem is we'll only be able to send, even if it does work. We won't be able to receive. I'll send using two wires as a kind of telegraph key. It's rigged to go now, if we only had a power source. I don't think it will be good for much beyond one shot."
Riley nodded. "That was real good thinking, Dan."
Hoffman was pleased with the compliment and the unexpected use of his first name. Riley really meant it. In the excitement of the crash, Hoffman had had the presence of mind to leap back into the helicopter and tear the aircraft's high-frequency transmitter out of the right rear panel of the cargo compartment. Using the transmitter, in combination with the small FM radio that Olinski had kept, Hoffman had jury-rigged something they could possibly use to send out a message. Where they'd send, and to whom, and on what frequency, Riley wasn't quite sure yet. He'd worry about that when they found a power source.
Riley turned his attention to the wounded. He walked over to the tree stump where Comsky was now setting the broken right arm and hand of the pilot. All the bones in that hand were fractured from the tremendous force C.J. had tried to exert on the cyclic during the crash. The arm had snapped during the helicopter's impact with the ground.
The pilot extended his left hand to Riley. "We haven't had the opportunity. I'm C.J. Mclntire. You all can call me C.J." He looked at the lean sergeant. "I appreciate what you did back in the bird. I'd have done it myself but with this arm I couldn't get at my holster."
Riley accepted the hand and the thanks. Shooting the copilot had been an act of mercy. Burning alive wasn't a fate Riley would wish on anyone. There was no body to recover and bury. The fire and explosion had taken care of that. "I'm Dave Riley. That's Comsky who's doing the honors on you. The man messing with the radio is Dan Hoffman. Tom Chong is up there on that outcropping keeping an eye out for visitors. The man with the splints on his leg and arm next to you is Lech Olinski. And this over here is our team leader, Captain Mitchell." Mitchell painfully raised himself slightly on one arm and nodded.
C.J. returned the nod. "Well, Captain, what now?"
Mitchell gingerly sat up. He was pale from loss of blood. A twelve-inch gash ran from just under his right arm to above his hip. Although not deep, it was painful, and the sutures Comsky had put in threatened to tear open with any movement, starting the bleeding again.
"I thought you might be able to tell us what we'd do next. Were you able to get anything out over the radio before we crashed?"
"Hell, sir, I had about three seconds before impact, and my time was kind of full, what with keeping us from inverting and landing on the blades. If we'd turned over, none of us would be alive now."
Riley persisted for Mitchell. "What was the backup plan? The other bird saw us go down. What was the plan for a downed aircraft? They going to send another bird in here to the crash site?"
C.J. sighed. "There isn't a plan. There is no backup. We're on our own, unless we can get ahold of somebody. The way that fuel tank exploded, they probably think we're all dead. We should be, too. We're just lucky it blew away and didn't ignite all the rest of the fuel." C.J. shot the problem back to the team leader. "What was your backup plan for this?"
Mitchell shrugged. "We had a lot of contingency plans. Unfortunately, we didn't have one for the helicopter crashing on the way out. Since we didn't know what your flight route was going to be, and didn't even get a chance to talk to you all during isolation, it was kind of hard to plan."
The words sank in to everyone in the clearing.
Riley broke the silence. "We need to think this through. The Chinese definitely have a reaction force moving by this time. Now that it's daylight we can expect to see choppers pretty soon. It might take them awhile to work this far to the southeast, but they will eventually."
He reached into his pants cargo pocket and pulled out his 1:250,000 large-scale map of Manchuria. He unfolded the map and handed it to C.J. "Show me where you think we are."
C.J. studied the map, then pointed. "We're right here. We were flying up this draw."
Riley looked around. The terrain fit in with the location that C.J. had pointed out. "OK, this means we're about three kilometers west of the crest of the Changbai Mountain Range. We've got it downhill all the way, once we make it over the top. That's the good news. The bad news is that once we get over the top we'll still have a hundred and fifty kilometers to the coast."
He checked with Mitchell. "Can you walk?"
"Hell, yeah. It only hurts when I laugh or Comsky touches it. As long as we don't try to move too fast, I think I can make it."
Riley looked at Olinski. "We'll have to carry you, Ski. We need to get out of here. We've already been here too long. Let's sterilize the area. Maybe the Chinese will think everyone died in the crash when they find it, but we can't count on it. Comsky, make a litter for Olinski. You and I will start out carrying it and rotate with Chong and Hoffman. It's 0700 now. I want to put as much mileage between us and this spot as we can before we start spotting Chinese helicopters. Let's go!"
Carrying Olinski, they moved very slowly up the mountainside. Comsky had made a stretcher out of two long branches and a poncho he always carried in his vest butt pack.
Chong scouted ahead to make sure the way was clear. Riley didn't like moving in daylight, but he knew they needed to get away from the crash site. He also knew that carrying Olinski at night, over rough terrain, would be a tricky proposition at best.
It took more than four hours, scrambling over the rocks and keeping under the cover of trees as much as possible, to make it to the crest. As they crossed over the top, Riley took a last look back to the west. He still couldn't see any sign of a search in that direction.
He led the team a kilometer down the eastern slope, then stopped under a thick stand of pine for a rest. Moving downhill was a bit easier; it had taken them a little less than an hour to do the last kilometer.
General Yang carefully examined the information available on the Daqing pipeline explosion. The most glaring fact was that General Haotian's duty officer had bungled things, but that would be dealt with later. The more immediate and pressing problem was tracking down the terrorists who had done this.