We crossed a river as I looked out the window and saw the half-moon reflected on the water, broken up by the waves running across the surface. We began to descend and I caught sight of cliffs rising out of the water below, hilly terrain on the opposite bank that looked nothing like the smooth fields and woods that surrounded the Directorate. Trees stood out on the edge of the embankments, rough shapes in the dark, shadowed boughs reaching up for us as the pilot took us down a little at a time.
We continued about five minutes past the river to a site where flames were visible in a clearing below us. The helicopter circled, bringing us around for another look before the pilot began a steep descent toward the clearing.
“How many helicopters does the Directorate have, anyway?” Scott asked as we approached the ground, crosswinds causing the whole chopper to buck. I felt the press of my restraints and the chop the closer we got to the ground. Jackson got up and stepped past me, clinging to handles mounted on the ceiling as he slid open the door. I felt one of the wheels touch the ground and Jackson was out, on the ground, sweeping ahead with his weapon. Kurt followed, next out of the chopper while Scott, Zack and the other agent went out the other door.
I unfastened my restraints, realizing I was behind, and stepped off the side of the chopper, nearly wiping out; it was higher off the ground than I thought it would be. I recovered and landed as nimbly as I could given the circumstances, and was on my feet a second later. Helicopter wreckage surrounded us, and trees were visible in all directions, rising up on the sloped ground. We stood in a hilly clearing, underbrush and smaller trees dotting the rocky landscape. The chopper’s landing lights were active but not a lot of help for distance vision. A couple small fires remained on the outline of Reed’s crashed chopper, but they were dying down.
The area was calm save for the rushing wind around us. My gun was up, the safety off, and I minded my footing as I followed along behind Kurt and Jackson as we wended our way toward the front of the helicopter. A spotlight turned on, giving us a better view of the crash site, casting illumination over the wreckage of the downed helo and forcing me to squint my eyes while they adjusted to the brightness of the spotlight.
The chopper was the older Huey model, smaller than the Black Hawk we had arrived in. The tail was snapped off, the broken remainder a segment only a couple feet long that was sticking into the air at a forty-five degree angle from the fuselage. The nose was buried, caught in rocks; from where I stood I could look through the door on one side and out the other onto the ground behind it. No bodies were visible in the passenger compartment, the light playing off the dull gray paint job.
“What the hell happened here?” I heard Scott say in my earpiece. I snugged the butt of the gun against my shoulder, felt it push, like the touch of an old friend. It was comforting in the dark. I felt a chill unrelated to temperature; something about being in the woods after midnight, holding a gun, made me tense. I was waiting for something to happen, and I didn’t know what. Also, my last experience in the woods hadn’t gone so well, and that was in the middle of the day. Night was worse.
“Gonna guess the tail rotor went out,” Kurt said, his head swiveling around. “Looks like they spun in.”
“What are you, a crash expert?” Scott said, looking in disbelief at the wreckage. “How do you know that?”
“He’s right, sir,” Jackson said to Scott, more deference in his voice than I would have bothered with. “Looks like they skidded sideways into where it’s lodged.”
“What does that tell us?” I asked. “If the tail rotor went out, we’re not betting it was a mechanical failure, are we?”
“Not unless we’re stupid,” Zack said under his breath, but his mic picked it up. He cleared his throat when he heard Kurt chuckle and realized what he’d done. “I mean, it seems unlikely.” His eyes scanned the site. “Especially since Parks and Reed are missing.”
“Looks like the pilots aren’t missing…” Scott said, craning his neck to look in the cockpit. “Urk. I take that back; they’re missing…some things…”
“Like a head,” Zack said, causing me to keep my distance from the wreck. I didn’t even bother to make the excuse that I was watching the perimeter; if they’d asked, I would have told them flat out I didn’t need to see any more dead bodies for a good long time. “And a neck in the co-pilot’s case.”
“This can’t be from the crash,” Scott said, a slight static hiccup marring his words. “There’s nothing here that would have caused this kind of damage.”
“Oh, you’re a forensic pathologist now, are you?” Kurt said. “This from the guy who can’t even tell that a helicopter went down sideways.”
I listened to them bicker as the clouds blew over the moon, and I shuddered again, a kind of gut-deep nervous tension that was causing my insides to shake, almost like they were clacking together. I hated it, especially because I had nothing to direct it toward. I blinked, felt the fatigue held back by adrenaline from being up when I should have been sleeping, and my eyes watched the woods past our helicopter, which was still sitting about twenty feet away, rotors still spinning, waiting for us. The blades were killing all the ambient noise around us, disrupting any chance I had of gauging any activity. I wanted the pilot to circle and come back, but at the same time I thought that was probably the stupidest idea I could have had; who wanted to send away your escape route when you’re alone in the woods at night and something has already knocked one of your helicopters out of the sky?
I saw the movement of the trees as the wind picked up again. It was a cooler wind than at the Directorate, probably because it was blowing west from the river. My skin prickled under my shirt, and my hands tensed inside my gloves, the leather against my flesh giving me no comfort. I kept my finger off the trigger like I’d been taught.
I tasted bitterness in my mouth, and I felt a buzz in my head that I couldn’t define, something that was causing all my senses to twitch. “Guys?” I said, and I heard their discussion cease; I had stopped paying attention to it a few minutes earlier. “Something’s…wrong here.”
“Yeah, our helicopter’s down and our people are dead or missing,” Scott said, explaining in a tone that told me he thought I was an idiot.
“Beyond that,” I said, taking a deep breath and letting it exhale slow. “You think they just sacked the wreckage, killed the pilots and took Parks and Reed with them? Whoever shot down the chopper, I mean?”
“Sounds about right,” Kurt said. “Probably burned out afterward.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said, and took steps closer to them, avoiding the front of the helicopter, where the pilots were, and looked into the back. One of the things that was bothering me was now clear, something I’d seen without noticing before. “There’s no blood in the passenger compartment and the doors are wide open.” I clicked my teeth together, trying to find an outlet for my nervous energy. “If it went down, whoever was in the back doesn’t look like they were injured, which means—”
“Parks wouldn’t have gotten caught easy,” Zack finished for me. I felt him next to me, at my shoulder, looking into the compartment for himself. “He could morph into a wolf and outrun almost anyone. And your buddy Reed—”
“He’d ride the wind and blow the hell outta here,” Scott said. “Or at least put up a nasty fight; it’d look like a tornado went through the clearing. So, they got out. Where would they go?”
“They’d have to know we’d send help,” I said, cautious, and I turned back to the woods, looked at the outline of the darkened trees all around us. “They’d want to hang nearby so they didn’t miss rescue.”