His stomach lining burned. His skin tingled. Shivers ran up his arms to his chest. They were heady thoughts. Fighting. Dying. He wondered what had happened to Stempel. Alive? Dead? He should have called his parents’ apartment.
Andre’s heart was racing.
What the hell am I doing here?
A telephone rang in the duty room. The muffled sound of the old-fashioned bell penetrated the walls. Andre’s senses focused solely on that phone. It was picked up just as the second ring began. Andre stared wide-eyed at the mattress that formed his sky. The distant voice of the duty NCO ended abruptly as the phone was slammed down.
In the terrible few moments of silence that followed, Andre could hear every noise from the two dozen sleeping men. The snores, a sniff, a cough.
The whining wind-up of a helicopter’s turbine.
The door burst open, and Andre just about jumped out of his skin. The flickering of the fluorescent lights overhead announced the coming of a man-made dawn.
‘Let’s go! Mission call!’
Everyone groaned and rolled out of bed. They began to climb into their outer gear. No one moved faster than Andre — the petrified eighteen-year-old.
The brutally cold night air at the helipads was astir in the wash of forty helicopters’ rotors. Andre and his squad scrambled single file out of the barracks in the bright lights of the base. They labored under eighty-pound field packs. All around them brilliantly-lit Blackhawks filled with troops rose into the night sky.
‘Air assault!’ someone shouted over the roar. A smattering of ‘a-a-a-air-borne!’ and other similar calls came in reply. But the enthusiasm was not particularly contagious. In fact, no one in Andre’s squad said a word as they climbed through the open door of the white-painted helicopter.
Bright landing lights flashed across the pads as Blackhawks banked at low altitude and headed off. The sky was alive with red and green running lights and flashing white tail beacons. It was a full battalion-sized deployment complete with 105-mm artillery slung underneath giant utility helicopters.
Andre stood last in line. He stooped involuntarily under the idling rotors’ wash. It was like stepping into a cold shower fully clothed. He could hardly see through his watering eyes. His squad leader — Sergeant Moncreif — stood at the open sliding door. He grabbed Andre’s M-16 and checked to ensure it was safed. He returned the rifle and slapped Andre on the back. Two of his new squadmates helped pull Andre aboard. When all twelve men were on board, a crewman closed the door. It shut out the howling gale and swirling Siberian air.
Andre dropped his field pack and dragged it to the rear wall. He sat on the crowded floor. He hugged the pack to his chest. The wall of muscles along his stomach cramped from their tight clench. He arched his back and took a deep breath. His jaw vibrated, and his teeth chattered from the lingering cold. The engines vibrated through the armored pads on the deck and straight into Andre’s itching testicles. With a lurching, stomach-crushing jolt Andre felt the aircraft leap into the sky. They hovered there momentarily. The deck rocked in the turbulence caused by the rotors.
They pitched forward suddenly. The acceleration in the odd, nose-down attitude was sickening. Gone were the bright lights of the base. All was black through the frosty windows of the Blackhawk. The cabin lights were a dim red so as not to spoil their night vision.
Andre looked around the troop compartment. The walls were lined with the ten men of his squad plus two medics. The center of the cabin was piled high with their gear. No one talked over the noise. They just stared straight ahead. Thinking. Andre closed his eyes. Two medics, he thought.
Time passed. The helicopter hurtled toward the LZ with its engines at full military power. One minute? Two? Ten? The cabin was warm. The initial chill subsided. But Andre couldn’t fully rid himself of an exhausting physical tension. It remained balled into a solid inside him. He resolved to learn to deal with it. To function with it impaled through him there. Stifling his breathing. Cramping his stomach. He’d have to deal with it, he knew, to function on the battlefield. To survive.
There were two loud knocks in rapid succession. The helicopter pitched over onto its side. For just a second Andre thought it was their death spiral, but the sickening dive seemed to be controlled. There was another sharp ‘thwack’ like the sound of a hammer pounded against the helicopter’s thin skin. In that terrible moment Andre realized they were taking fire.
The ballistic mats on the deck jumped with still more hammering blows. Andre felt the string of thuds through his butt. Men raised their feet into the air. They shied away from the ground fire. Andre could smell smoke. The helicopter pitched over the other way, then back. Sparks flew up the wall. A window shattered. Air whistled into the cabin. A heavy thud pressed Andre’s head toward his chest. Everyone was thrown forward.
The door flew open.
‘Everybody out!’
A slow but constant rain of bullets struck home. Holes were being punched through the walls. Men leapt into the maelstrom outside. Andre dragged his pack toward the open door. He ducked as each new hole puckered the bulkheads. Death — ruthlessly random — stabbed into the cabin.
Snow peppered his face through the open door. He squinted and bowed his head against the gale. He judged his odds now from the loud smacking sounds. At the door he was fully exposed. In the red glow of the cabin lights the swirling snow looked like fireflies. It was being blown up — not down — by rotors turning at full power. Andre was the last man in line.
A drumroll of thumps hit the aircraft. It sounded like buckshot fired from a shotgun. The air around Andre was filled with whirring sounds. Two men at the door fell backwards onto Andre.
‘A-a-a-a-a-a-H-H!’ came a blood-curdling shriek. There were screams and sobs in rapid howls made at the limits of a human’s vocal cords. Andre froze in terror in the doorway.
‘Jesus Christ! Give me a hand!’ one of the crewmen shouted at Andre. Bullets smashed into the metal fuselage like rocks thrown against tin siding. Andre helped the crewmen pull the wounded man back into the helicopter. Blood oozed through the man’s hands where his eye had been.
‘Get out!’ the crewman then shouted at Andre.
Andre turned into the snow, closed his eyes and groped blindly for his pack. He dragged the heavy load to the ground with one hand. He held his rifle grasped firmly in his other.
A man appeared out of nowhere to stand in front of Andre. ‘I got hit,’ he said. He was holding his rib cage just below his left breast. He was pale, and his eyes were glassy. But otherwise he appeared unhurt.
Another ‘z-z-z-i-p’ of bullets sent Andre to the ground. Andre dragged his pack in front of him. The force of the downdraft redoubled, and Andre lowered his helmet to the snow. The artificial blizzard subsided. Andre looked up to see that the helicopter and the wounded man were gone.
The noise of the helicopter was replaced by booming explosions and rips of gunfire.
Tracers streaked all through the woods ahead. Some ricochetted off trees and shattered into sparks whose short lives reminded Andre of shooting stars. Grenades lit small patches of the thin forest floor in brief pulses — fiery geysers of snow erupting violently from the earth. One illuminated for the briefest of moments a standing human form. Andre couldn’t tell in the brief snapshot whether the person died in the blast. He couldn’t even tell if he was American or Chinese.
The scene was the same all through the woods that ringed the flat landing zone. A lake, Andre realized. The LZ was on a frozen lake. Forested hills rose on all sides.