Lars’s arms and chest disintegrated, his legs melting to flaccid bands of flesh. He threw his right arm literally around the control column, and with his left punched DiRiggio. He hit him as hard as he could, once, twice, then felt the yoke slam back hard against his jaw. With his knees and elbows and chin he smothered the controls, urging the plane upright, willing it into something approaching stable flight. The ground loomed, an optically-enhanced blur of oblivion. A stall warning sounded. A million thoughts occurred to him, a checklist of possible evasive action; he even considered popping the landing gear and wheeling in. But all he did was hold on, riding it out like a surfer caught in a monster tsunami.
The surfer would have swamped. The Herk somehow managed to level off inches from the gritty dirt. A moment later they began to climb.
“All right,” he said over the interphone circuit, which connected to the others in the plane. “All right. All right.”
He repeated the words several more times. Kelly, the flight engineer reached forward from his station and held him on the shoulder.
“The engines, do I have the engines?” Lars asked.
He did — he had to, or the plane wouldn’t be reacting as smoothly as it was.
“Captain, we’re fine,” said the sergeant.
“We’re fine,” repeated Lars.
“You’re right on course,” said the navigator. He spoke funny, as if half of his mouth had been Novocained — he’d been slammed violently as Lars struggled to control the plane. “Is the Major okay?”
Lars forced a glance toward DiRiggio, who was slumped back in his seat.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think — he may have had a heart attack.”
“Definitely.”
“I had to hit him. I had no choice.”
“Couple of guys banged up in the back, but no serious injuries,” said Kelly. “I think I busted my finger.”
He continued talking but the words bounced around Lars’ helmet, not truly registering. A crewman gave a fuller report from the back but he couldn’t make out any of it. He just flew, staying in their pre-set track but pulling up to three thousand feet, judging that the risk of being detected was worth the leeway with the plane. What he really wanted to do was take it to fifteen angels, to twenty, to thirty — get the hell up there, climb and keep climbing.
Climb and go home.
The flight engineer and navigator pulled DiRiggio from his seat, lifting him over the center control console and past the flight engineer’s seat. His head flopped down against Lars’ arm as they pulled him out, skin ghost-white, eyes rolled back like a bizarre toy. The two men took him back off the flight deck to the rear crew area, where the two paramedics aboard quickly began working on him.
Or at least Lars assumed they did. He was alone, sitting in the middle of a precarious bubble, struggling to keep himself afloat. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think — he ripped off the helmet and goggles, prying them away. His head rushed, as if he’d just surfaced from the bottom of a deep lake. He blinked at the massive wall of instruments in front of him, numbers and needles floating in space. He readjusted his seat restraints, felt his heart calming. Slowly, he began pushing the plane back towards the earth, flying in the track they had briefed.
“DiRiggio’s on oxygen,” said Kelly, returning to the flight deck ahead of the navigator. “We have to get him help. Fast. Real fast.”
Lars kept his eyes fixed on the dark landscape in front of him.
“Captain?”
The flight engineer leaned over the console. Lars cocked his head so he could see him from the corner of his eye but said nothing.
“We got to go back, don’t you think?” said Kelly. The middle and ring fingers on the engineer’s left hand were taped together.
“We really have to go back,” said the navigator.
Lars concentrated on the plane, working into his bank south. The border was less than twenty miles south; it would take at least — at least — thirty minutes to reach a base with a hospital big enough to handle something like this. He wasn’t even sure where that be; maybe King Khalid.
He could cut almost a straight line there out of this leg of his pattern. There’d be one tricky point near the border, but otherwise it was an easy run. And he could get an escort — hell, he could get half the Air Force.
He wanted to do it. He wanted to get the hell out of here.
But should he? If he left now, the three-man Delta team he’d dropped would be stranded. There were no other STAR-equipped C-130s available; if there had been, he wouldn’t be here.
They could scramble SAR assets. That was the backup plan. Send a helo.
Not really. Certainly not while the SA-11s and the other SAMs were still down there. The SAMs would make mincemeat of a helicopter. They’d factored that in already — that’s why Herky Bird was here.
They could divert planes, take out the SAMs, put real force down there. Hell, they should have done it that way to begin with.
But they hadn’t. And the truth was, this probably put less people at risk. Working at night, quietly, slipping in and out — that was the best way.
As if SAMs wouldn’t mince him up. As if the Herk didn’t just miss getting smashed to pieces by that flak — forget about the missiles.
Two night grabs — he had to do it twice. Five hundred feet in the pitch black, reel them in, go back, do it again. All at the edge of the acquisition envelope of one of the most powerful surface-to-air systems in the world.
No way. No way.
Lars had done it in an exercise, though. He had done it. He’d ducked under a Hawk radar without being detected and evaded a Patriot battery as well — at least as difficult as the mission tasked here.
But that was long before he came to the Gulf, long before he knew fear.
“Captain?”
Lars stared into the darkness. It was his call to make. Who did he owe — three men on the ground, or the pilot in the back of the plane?
Three men who had the odds against them anyway?
Or a fellow officer and Herk pilot, a nice guy with a family back in the States, a guy more or less like him?
Go home. Get the hell out of this. No one was going to blame him for running away now.
Lars reached down and pulled his radio gear back on.
“Major DiRiggio has had a heart attack,” he told the crew, though of course they all knew by now. “We’re going to complete our mission as best we can, and then we’re going to go home. The men on the ground are counting on us.”
He meant to say something else, something about DiRiggio wanting it that way — a lie maybe, but the kind of lie men often need to hear. But fear choked off the rest of the words.
No one said anything. Lars hands shook so violently as he began to bank in his pattern that he feared he’d roll the plane.
CHAPTER 33
Knowlington read the altimeter ladder in the HUD, making sure he was low enough to be heard from the ground. Then he glanced at his watch and the map, trying to figure out exactly where Vulture Three had been when he sent the call. There was of course no guarantee that the pilot had had his position correct, nor was it possible to know precisely where he had been when he pulled the eject handles. But search and rescue was basically about taking logical guesses. Skull began to turn the plane south, figuring it as the most likely direction.