“You damn fools!” John screamed, making a universal rude gesture as Forrest, one-handed, stretched out and grabbed the back of John’s harness to help pull him back in. Even as he did so, Maury pitched the chopper hard to starboard, causing John to tumble back in, landing hard on the floor, which was splattered with Lee’s vomit.
Kevin Malady unbuckled himself from his safety harness, half crawled over Forrest, and slammed the portside door shut.
“We okay?” John shouted.
“Sons of bitches!” Forrest yelled and pointed to the side of his helmet. It was dented in, a bullet having creased it.
John looked at it, a bit shaken. A couple of inches farther down and his friend would be dead, and he realized that for the bullet to have entered thus, it must have snapped past him by a margin of only a few inches as well.
“We okay?” John shouted again, Danny looking back at him.
They were past the perimeter of the airport, heading east. Danny returned his attention forward and was obviously saying something to Maury, pointing toward the instrument panel. John unclipped the safety harness and crawled up between the two.
“Problems?”
“Yeah!” Maury shouted. “I think we’ve been hit. And look off to your right. An Apache that was up in the air is peeling off toward us.”
He looked to where Maury was pointing and caught the flash of rotors. The narrow profile of the Apache was hard to see, but he could discern it was headed their way.
“They’re ordering us to come back, land, or we’ll be shot down.”
“Can they?”
Maury was silent for a moment, attention focused to where Danny was pointing at one of the gauges.
“One of the turbines might have taken a hit; it’s heating up a bit, RPM dropping. They’re designed to take punishment; let’s just hope it holds together. Supposedly, you can fly this thing on one engine, but I wouldn’t want to try it right now.”
Maury banked again to port, taking them on a direct easterly heading, away from the Apache.
“Can he catch up to us?” John asked.
“Don’t know!” Maury shouted. “I remember the Black Hawk is a bit faster than the Apache—at least it was when I was flying these things. Wait a second.”
Maury pulled his headphone down over his left ear, listened intently, spoke, and then pushed it back up so he could talk to John.
“Told them we want to come back but call off that Apache first. Telling them that might buy us some time.”
John looked to the glint of rotors from the Apache; it was still on course toward them. It was hard to judge distance, but he appeared to be at least several miles off.
“If he’s got an air-to-air, we’re screwed!” Danny shouted.
Maury looked back at John, raising a quizzical eyebrow, passing the decision on to him.
Air-to-air? He mulled that over for a few seconds. The Apache was doing ground support. Besides, air-to-air was not usual armament for a helicopter unless one was expecting to tangle with enemy air assets. Fredericks didn’t have anything like that; otherwise, the L-3 would have been toast.
“Just keep going straight east for now,” John replied.
“And pray both engines keep turning,” Danny added.
“Can we outrun him?” John asked.
“So far so good,” was all Danny said before focusing back on scanning the instrument panel.
John fell silent, letting them do their job, looking back over his shoulder to see that Forrest had his helmet off, had passed it over to Kevin to examine, the two of them talking away as if this were just another typical day.
“We got any kind of warning if something is coming up our tail?” John shouted.
Danny pointed at the blank computer screen. “It’s all in there,” he replied, “but I’ll be damned if I know how to run it. Besides, what the hell can we do if they have an air-to-air? We’re toast.”
“Thanks for the reassurance,” John replied, and he backward crawled to his seat, trying to avoid the mess that Lee Robinson had splashed onto the floor and to which he had added in the last few minutes.
John strapped himself back in and settled down, trying to block out the smell. He knew there was an old saying with pilots that no matter how good an engine you have, when flying at night or over water with no place for an emergency landing your engine always starts to sound rough. It had been years since he’d last been up in a helicopter, and he tried to compare what he was hearing now versus back then. Something did sound “rough.” And looking forward, he could see that Danny was focused on the instrument panel and saying something to Maury, who just kept nodding in reply.
Maury was all but flying nap of the earth, at least as far as his skills allowed. John figured they were at least ten, maybe fifteen miles out from Roanoke, and if anything was going to come up their tail, they would be scattered wreckage by now. He was about to say something when Maury banked sharply, turning southwest, Danny craning to look back over his shoulder and shouting that if the Apache was still following he could no longer see him.
Maury began to gently nose up, trading off a bit of speed for some altitude. They had gone over the flight plan before taking off, figuring from the weather pattern that higher up the prevailing winds would be west to northwest. Gone were the days of clicking on a computer for flight service info, at least for the one helicopter of the State of Carolina. So it had been decided that for the return flight they would stay at a thousand feet or lower to avoid a strong headwind. When in a small plane, John always felt safer the higher up they climbed. If the engine quit, the plane just turned into a glider, and the higher up one was, the farther they could glide to an open field or nearby airport for a safe landing.
In a helicopter, he always felt the exact opposite, having witnessed during a training maneuver in Germany a helicopter having a full engine failure while more than half a mile up. According to the book, the chopper should have easily autorotated down to a landing one could at least crawl away from. Halfway down, the rotor seized up completely, and it dropped like a rock, killing the crew and the six troopers on board.
“Know where we are?” Lee said, looking over at John.
“Heading home.”
“Thank God,” Lee gasped. At least this time he managed to use a baggie and seal it up. Groaning, he just leaned over while Forrest and Kevin looked at him with at least some pity, even as they traded a joking comment.
John settled in, suddenly realizing that his left hand was absolutely numb from the cold. He unzipped his jacket and slid it in under his armpit and closed his eyes, trying not to listen too closely to the engine, for there was something definitely wrong. Maury shouted he was throttling back to put less strain on it, dropping their airspeed down to a hundred miles an hour. John mentally clicked off the miles; with each passing minute in the air they were subtracting an hour of laboriously walking through the winter snow to get home.
Was this trip really necessary, he wondered, or just a folly on his part? He had harbored a fantasy that perhaps, just perhaps, he would hear Bob Scales’s familiar voice on the radio, inviting him to come in, land, and talk things over. Tucked into his vest pocket, he had even brought along a photograph taken of Jennifer and Elizabeth the year before the Day.
What did happen over these last few minutes, he was prepared for as well, confident of the decision not to land but still disconcerted that they had been fired upon.
He closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, the adrenaline rush over with, now just trying to look calm as they clicked off the passing minutes for what should, he hoped, be the hour-and-a-half flight back home.
At least the message pod had been dropped, and he saw someone running over to pick it up. He had thought it out carefully the night before, writing the message on his old Underwood typewriter: