He kept his feet and knees together as he landed.
Collecting his rucksack and knife, Matt pulled a compass from his vest, set an azimuth north, and began walking quickly to the wreckage.
Chapter 3
Just to move maybe a kilometer had taken him nearly an hour. Where the terrain was moderately level, it was choked with dense undergrowth. Where there was less vegetation, there seemed to be impossibly jagged and steep volcanic rocks and cliffs.
Matt took a knee on the rock ledge that he had just ascended. His beacon had been the bright spot in the offing, like town lights reflecting off the clouds, though his goggles, when he could wear them, had differentiated the subtle nuances of the burning crash up on the face of the mountain through the triple-canopy forest.
Finally, he put his goggles up to his eyes and saw the smoldering ruins of half a fuselage. Looking to his left, he could see the direction from which the aircraft had flown, or tumbled, and cut a wide swath of destruction. To his right it looked like the debris field continued on another fifty meters or so until a flat wall of rock had blocked any forward progress.
Matt stood and walked carefully, scanning with his goggles in both directions as he stepped lightly over hot chunks of metal scattered about. He had seen airplane crashes before, and they were never remotely comprehensible. Could anyone ever imagine the terror or horror of plummeting in a plane into the ground? In a way, he hoped that someone could tonight; it would mean they were still alive. On the thought, he touched his rucksack, which he knew contained his first-aid kit.
He stepped over a full propeller, knelt next to it, and touched the blade. It was warm, but not hot. The friction of the crash and the jet-fuel spillage had created fire and heat, but not everything burned.
All I’m asking for is one person to be alive, Matt thought to himself. Just one.
He moved toward the blackened hull of the aircraft, which was surprisingly intact, but split wide open, like a lobster tail. He entered the fuselage from the rear and immediately saw a body. The heat and smell pushed him back outside. For the first time he noticed the crackle of the fire still burning rubberized pieces of material.
Matt saw the man’s hands first. It was an odd visual display as the body was actually outside the aircraft, tethered by a deployed parachute.
The flashlight that Matt shined on the scene revealed a charred static line tracing from the door of the aircraft onto the rock ledge. From there Matt saw the metal ring at the apex of the parachute and some charred silk. His eyes followed the suspension lines to the risers, which were surprisingly intact.
The hand was splayed upward toward the riser as if reaching to pull a slip. Matt moved the flashlight beam farther down the body and could see a U.S. Army combat uniform.
Shit. He sighed.
He moved quickly next to the man and saw the name tag: Peterson. Matt checked for pulse and airway, but got negative reports on both accounts. He visually inspected Peterson and saw that he had been rigged to jump and that the airplane must have crashed as he was trying to exit.
Matt saw the arrowhead patch of the U.S. Army Special Forces on the man’s shoulder sleeve with airborne and Special Forces tabs above. No one told me Americans were in this thing, he said to himself. What the hell is going on?
Returning to the moment, Matt shook his head. The seconds between life and death were so arbitrary. Why did Peterson not make it, while apparently everyone else did? His search of the surrounding area had yielded two pilots and a loadmaster. As tragic as their deaths were, Matt knew they were Filipino, which mattered, but somehow did not have the same impact on him that kneeling there looking at Peterson did.
“Who are you, Peterson?” he whispered. And why wasn’t I told about you?
Again, he checked for pulse and any sign of life, shining the flashlight into Peterson’s wide eyes. The pupils were nonresponsive, so Matt used his thumb and forefinger to slide the eyelids shut. He saw that Peterson had not been burned badly; really, just the heat from the fire had burned his parachute. The man must have died from blunt-force trauma during the crash or as he was flung from the rear cargo door.
Matt looked up and saw that the starboard wing had been sheared off and was probably a kilometer or so back in the debris field. He stood and made another lap around the airplane and into the split fuselage. He moved the bodies of the two pilots and the crew chief onto the rock ledge near Peterson’s body. He pulled a GPS locator beacon and put it in the mouth of one of the men, then shut his jaw tightly. Human scavengers would be picking the place clean in less than twenty-four hours, and the last place they would look was in the throat of a dead man. Filipinos were not known for their gold fillings.
Regardless, he would send a report back to the station chief in Manila and get word to the Armed Forces of the Philippines that they had three men located in the jungle.
He could only carry one.
He carefully removed the parachute harness from Peterson and checked him one last time for signs of life.
Again, he was denied. Climbing his way out would require two hands, and so he took three twelve-foot ropes from his rucksack and slid them under Peterson’s upper back, lower back, and buttocks, leaving enough rope on either side for his purposes. Next he laid himself face up on Peterson, wrapped Peterson’s arms around his chest, then tied the ropes around their bodies. He rolled to all fours with Peterson on his back and then pulled his hands down and tied them with the trail ends of the lower rope. When he stood, he felt the full weight of his rucksack, which he had secured to his chest, and Peterson on his back. But his arms were free to move and pull his way out of the wreckage. To the casual observer it would appear that Matt was conducting a tandem jump or giving Peterson a piggyback ride.
Looking up at the cliff he needed to scale, Matt silently wished it were a tandem jump.
Matt heard a noise below the crash site, perhaps one and a half kilometers away. He had been at the site for an hour and knew it was time to move. He would go to high ground, as he would surely run into opposition if he initially went lower.
With Peterson on his back, he stepped into the first of many foot ledges in the rock wall that angled away from the crash site. While Peterson’s weight was almost unbearable, Matt determined that it was the least he could do.
“Never leave a fallen comrade,” he whispered to himself. And while he wasn’t an Army officer, such as his brother Zachary, whom Matt had last seen while undergoing Langley’s immersion training and a near face-lift in preparation for his current assignment, he thought that was a pretty good credo to live by. And he knew damned well that if it was Matt Garrett at the end of that parachute harness and Peterson had found him, Matt would expect the same thing.
Never leave a fallen comrade.
On that thought, he pulled and scraped his way out of the crash site until two hours later he had to stop.
The sun was beginning to crest the ridge in the east, and he had reached some sort of plateau by climbing almost straight up. He had a hole in the forest canopy through which a helicopter would be able to lower a jungle penetrator. He determined he would stop there, make contact, then figure out his next move.
He sat down awkwardly with Peterson on his back and untied the ropes. Peterson had gone to full rigor and looked strange sitting there, dead, as if he were driving an invisible car, his arms and legs outstretched.