“We don’t get Sugar Mountain, the colonel’s going to be mad, no?”
“You want to hit it while Dixon’s still there?”
“No way.”
“Then we better make sure he gets out, right?”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
Walking made Doberman feel better. So did having a plan. So did knowing he was going to get Dixon the hell out of that shit.
“Hey, listen, I’m sorry,” he told A-Bomb.
“Yeah, my ass you’re sorry.”
“I got the shots,” Doberman told him. “No offense, but you know I’m better than you.”
“I ain’t offended, Dog Man. You’re Mr. AGM.”
“You got that cross thing Tinman gave you?”
“Um, well, kinda,” A-Bomb said.
“Kinda?”
“The little doohickey spring that connects to the batteries in my CD player snapped. I thought it was the batteries, but it was just the little spring.”
“You used the cross to make the connection?”
“Hey, it’s silver. Best conductor in the world. But listen, I can probably find something else.”
It was just a goddamn superstition, Doberman thought. “Don’t worry about it.” He took a step and stopped, reached down and yanked off his boot”
“Whoa— what the hell are you doing?” yelped A-Bomb.
Doberman held the small penny he’d found on the tarmac the first day of the air war. Luck? Power? Spirit world? Nightwalkers?
All bullshit.
He flung the coin into the desert.
CHAPTER 64
This wasn’t going to be too bad. Sure, the ground looked like a splotch of her grandmother’s old blankets and her teeth were already chattering with the cold, but Rosen was sure she could make the jump. Captain Wong claimed to have done this hundreds of times, and Wong wasn’t the type to exaggerate.
Which cast his comments about the location of the base in a certain light hard to ignore, though she was trying her best to.
A lone crewman waited with them in the rear of the MC-130E. The plane had dipped to ten thousand feet and started a banking turn, which Wong had warned her would signal they were approaching the drop zone. She cinched the strap on her helmet and put her hands up as the captain snugged their two-place harness tight; there was no backing out now.
He nudged her and Rosen waddled over to the rear ramp. The crewman lugged her packed tool kit, which had its own parachute and static line, alongside them. Rosen had expected to be almost sucked out of the plane, but standing on the open ramp she felt no more pressure than she might have on a diving board.
Nerves, though, that was something she felt. Wong folded his arms around her waist and pushed his legs into hers. She stiff-legged toward the edge, then closed her eyes.
He’d told her to relax and above all not push off when they jumped; parachuting was more a surrender to the wind than a dive into the air. Besides, if she moved too sharply she would whack him in the “testicular region,” as he put it.
Rosen tried to make her body limp as she felt the ramp disappear beneath her right foot. In the next instant, she felt the air squeezed from her chest and her stomach mushroomed. Eyes closed, she started to flail with her elbow then stopped, realizing she was falling.
Or flying.
She opened her eyes. Becky Rosen was truly flying, the brown earth spreading out all below her, clear blue sky surrounding her head. Her head floated in Nirvana. She felt her jumpsuit ripple against its cuffs as the wind gusted. Wong had told her about arching, and how to spread her arms and legs in the basic free-fall position; she realized now that her body had naturally moved there, arms and legs bent perfectly, as if she had done this a million times. Wong’s body surrounded her, holding her much more tenderly than she would have imagined.
It was like being in a dream, this falling.
Then she felt herself being yanked backward, from the waist and then the shoulders and then her legs. She stood up. She remembered Wong was behind her. She felt a different kind of tug and once more they were flying, though this time much slower and in an upright position. Rosen could see only the leading edge of the oversized chute above her head, but she could feel the captain maneuvering it, steering the chute through the air as if he were a glider.
The earth was no longer a blob. She saw a flat space before her, long and narrow. There was a large lump and several smaller ones at one end.
They had fallen quite a ways before she recognized that the large lump was a helicopter under a camo netting. The objects nearby were shelters dug into the dirt.
Wong steered the chute around into a miniature landing pattern as they approached. He had told her something about landing, but she was damned if she could remember what the hell it was.
Run?
No.
Roll?
No.
That was what he didn’t want her to do.
Step off like an escalator had been what he said.
Unfortunately, she remembered too late, after he had flared the chute and plopped onto the ground in what would have been a perfect, one-mile-an-hour landing into the wind. Rosen lost her balance and fell over. Wong lost his balance and tumbled on top of her; the chute pushed them along the runway toward a group of Special Ops soldiers who were trying hard not to give themselves hernias from their laughter.
“You’re a girl,” said one of the soldiers, helping her up as Wong unsnapped the tandem harness.
“Wow, something weird must have happened on the way down,” Rosen told him, pulling the shoulder straps away.
“You’re a fucking girl,” repeated the trooper.
“Well I’m not fucking you, Sherlock,” said Rosen. “Or anyone else up here. You gonna stand there gawking, or are you gonna get me to that helicopter you want fixed?
CHAPTER 65
William James “BJ” Dixon had spent a great deal of his life wishing to become a fighter pilot, and then working toward that goal. It had taken a lot of sacrifice on his part, hard work, and once or twice some decent luck to accomplish his goals. He had always been willing to do whatever it took; the dream had defined him, and he would sooner have thought of slicing off his arm than giving it up.
He had never, in all his life, dreamed of being a ground soldier, much less a commando. A year ago, even a week ago, the idea of running around with a gun deep in enemy territory would have seemed as unlikely as playing quarterback for the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl.
But he was here, and his life was now defined by two irrefutable facts:
The man with the SA-16 had to be eliminated.
The only one who could do it was him.
He expected Leteri to protest when he told him what he was going to do; Leteri did, suggesting that he go instead. But it was obvious to Dixon that the corporal would never manage to get across the ledge and around the mountain to surprise the Iraqis.
Leteri also mentioned another alternative.
“We can just bug out.”
“How the fuck are we going to do that?” Dixon asked him.
“I’m not saying we should,” said Leteri. “I’m just saying it may be better than committing suicide.”
“You gonna leave Winston?”
“No.”
“If Hawkins sends a helicopter for us, these bastards will nail it,” Dixon said. “Those shoulder-launched missiles are tough to get away from. Even the Hogs will be in trouble.” He got up. “I’ll leave you the M-16 and grenade launcher. I can’t use it for shit anyway. You okay?”