Hal Briggs suddenly appeared beside Luger, and he shook Luger’s shoulders and his hands until Luger rolled his eyes in pain. “Dave Luger! Goddamn it, Luger, you’re alive… I mean, damn, man — it’s good to see you!”
“Hal … Hal Briggs? God, I don’t believe it. You’re here, too?” He looked at McLanahan and said, “Can I see Wendy and Angelina now?”
“Not for a while, partner,” McLanahan said, thinking Luger looked like a kid at Christmas. “We’ve got a long way to go yet.”
“You got that right, Colonel,” Wohl said.
Luger looked at McLanahan. “Colonel? You made colonel?”
“Quit gabbing and save your questions until later, Lieutenant,” Wohl said. “We ain’t out of this shithole yet.”
Luger’s face turned very tight and grim, and he leaned his head back as if resigned to die — as he always thought he would.
“Don’t let him get to you, Dave,” Briggs said with a smile. “He’s a Marine. He has that effect on everyone.”
“You can button it too, Briggs.” Wohl watched as the corpsman finished his work, then asked, “Is he okay to move?” The corpsman nodded, then turned to examine Luger’s head. “Then let’s get the hell outta here, boys.”
McLanahan and Ormack first led two Marines to where the injured jumpmaster and the last Marine security team member were, then made their way upstairs to the ground floor.
Gunnery Sergeant Trimble was with the radioman when he saw the group emerge from the subfloors. He stood as they approached him and said, “Report, Wohl.”
“Second squad and I, along with Captain Briggs, made a search of the first subfloor, as you directed,” Wohl replied. “During our search we found a door-jamming spike and activated infrared tape with Colonel McLanahan’s ID number on it. We tracked McLanahan down to the second subfloor and found McLanahan and General Ormack with this individual, whom they’ve identified as REDTAIL HAWK.”
“Well, no shit,” the big Marine exclaimed. Trimble stepped over to where Luger was lying on the floor beside the other injured Marines. “Your name?” he asked.
“Myeenya zahvoot Ivan Sergeiovich… I mean, my name is Luger, David,” Luger replied. He turned, smiled still in disbelief at Patrick McLanahan, then added, “United States Air Force.”
“Why is this man speaking Russian? Are you sure you got the right man, McLanahan?” snapped Trimble.
“He’s the right one,” McLanahan said. “He’s been brainwashed into thinking he’s some Russian scientist.”
Trimble looked completely unconvinced. “Right. We’ll interrogate him later. Search him for weapons or transmitters.”
“Search him?” McLanahan asked. “He’s not wearing anything but a pair of torn-up trousers, Trimble.”
“I don’t care if he’s buck naked. He’s a foreign unidentified individual until an intelligence team tells me otherwise. Search him, handcuff him, and post a guard. And that’s the last outburst I’ll tolerate from you.” Trimble turned away from McLanahan and checked Lieutenant Marx. “What’s the one-L-T’s condition?”
“Looks like a severe head injury, Gunny,” the corpsman replied. “He needs to be medevaced immediately. Sergeant McCall will be okay. Major Cook has a broken left leg and head injuries also.” He motioned to the copilot, whose face was being covered by someone’s fatigue jacket. “Captain Brandt was KIA.”
McLanahan looked down the corridor and saw another four covered faces and three more wounded. Out of a total of forty-eight Marines on this mission, including the air-crew members, eight were dead and eight were injured badly enough to place them out of commission. He could see several others, perhaps a dozen, with bandages wrapping head, hand, leg, and shoulder wounds.
“We sure took a beating just for one Russian-speaking flyboy,” Trimble said, shaking his head angrily. He glanced at McLanahan and Ormack and added, “At least you went back and got the injured.” That was all the thank you they were likely to get. “All right, children, we’ve got thirty-two Marines to hold this building until our pickup arrives. I’ve got four SAW squads and a Stinger squad on the roof. I want two in the stairwell. I want the subfloor door sealed and booby-trapped. I’ll set up a four-man patrol to check floor to floor. The rest will be on station on the ground floor. We’ll set up SAW squads on each side of the hallway and in front of the main entrance.
“You three,” he said to Briggs, Ormack, and McLanahan, “will go through each and every desk and each and every file cabinet in this building, upper floors only. You will have one B-4 bag each, and you will report to me when your bag is full. That bag becomes your responsibility, and it adopts a higher priority than yourselves — if there’s no room on the chopper, you stay and the bag comes with us. If we have to sacrifice Marines to get you in there, dammit, you’re going to make it worth our while.”
Briggs was ready to chew on Trimble for those remarks — speaking like that to an officer, even a noncombatant, was far, far out of line — but he held his anger in check. Trying hard to keep his temper, Ormack asked, “How long do we have until the Sea Hammer comes back?”
“Hammer Two landed in the embassy grounds for fuel and some repairs,” Trimble said. “They are scheduled to be back over the roof in fifteen minutes. Since we’ve lost one SEA HAMMER, he’ll need to make two trips — the first will be for the wounded and dead and for the BCT, and the second for the security team. You should have about thirty minutes altogether.”
“Thirty minutes!”
“What the hell did you think, sir?” Trimble retorted. “Did you think the MSB and the Commonwealth were going to give us a week or two to go through their shit? We’ll be lucky if you get ten minutes. My Marines aren’t accustomed to sticking around when a job is done, especially when the bad guys know we’re here — we kick ass, then split. But not tonight. Now we have to wait on you three. Now get moving, sir. You will collect important data on this Soviet stealth bomber until I order you to cease activities and report back to the roof for evacuation. Is that clear, sir?”
“When do we go to the aircraft hangars?” McLanahan asked. “The bomber itself is supposed to be—”
“If you want to go there right now, sir, be my guest,” Trimble interrupted, maintaining his version of military decorum by remembering to append “sir” to most of his sentences. “You may get your ass blown off, but you’d have your adventure. This complex has not been secured.”
“But the aircraft itself is the real target,” Ormack said. “If we get pictures of the Soviet stealth bomber, it’ll be the biggest intelligence coup—”
“Besides, this is just the security facility,” McLanahan interjected. “They may have some documents in storage here, but they’re bound to be outdated or useless to us. The stuff we need to see is in the offices in the hangars. We need to—”
“Dammit, sir, I’m not interested in your coups or what you think is the real target,” Trimble growled. “Your opinions don’t mean shit to me — can’t you officers get that into your thick skulls? My orders were to rescue REDTAIL HAWK and allow you time to search for records pertaining to this experimental aircraft. No one said a word to me about taking pictures or seeing a stealth bomber, and they did not specify how long I had to stay to allow you to rifle through desks. They left that decision to Captain Snyder and me. Now move. When I call you upstairs to get on the chopper, your bags should be as full as Santa Claus leaving the North Pole.”