The Secretary of Defense was on her cell phone, speaking to the commander of the F16 squadron out at Joint Airforce Base Andrews, telling him that the F16s were to locate and maintain a visual of the JetRanger and nothing more.
Her voice was raised above the whir of the Black Hawk’s rotor blades.
Three simultaneous blasts lit up the velvety black sky.
Tom’s heart raced with disbelief. He didn’t need to look out the helicopter’s window. He’d flown helicopters in Afghanistan in 2003. He knew that sound well. It was an AIM-120 AMRAAM — Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile — being fired.
Nor did he have to check and see if they hit their target.
The AIM-120 AMRAAM was a high-supersonic, all weather, Beyond Visual Range, fire-and-forget air-to-air missile. It used a high-explosive warhead and relied entirely on active radar homing for the final stages of flight, meaning if the pilot pulled the trigger, it was going to reach its intended target.
That target, in this case, was a JetRanger with Sam Reilly on board.
No chance it would miss and impossible to believe that anyone would survive when it did.
In a dark and deadly-sounding voice, the Secretary said, “What the unholy fuck were they thinking? I ordered them not to fire!”
Nobody in the helicopter dared respond.
Tom licked his lips. The helicopter flew closer to the wreckage site. A ball of smoke still hung in the air. More rose from the ground where the helicopter had crashed.
Tom chewed on his lip as the helicopter circled around a second time.
“Take it down,” the Secretary said.
“Where?”
“Anywhere you can.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The pilot circled the wreckage, before heading off to the north in search of a landing site.
Tom shook his head. He was going to have to break the news to Sam’s parents. His eyes turned to the Secretary. If her look was any indication, heads were going to roll.
Chapter Seventeen
Sam recognized the white-top of the converted VH-60 Black Hawks of the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion’s Executive Flight Detachment as it circled above the crash site nearly two hundred feet away. He tried to take a deep breath, but his chest hurt where multiple thick branches had clashed and almost certainly fractured his ribs on his way down. It was the dense foliage of the forest that had reduced the speed of his fall to somewhere within the vicinity of survivability. He exhaled slowly, gritted his teeth, and shuffled his back up against the trunk of a large poplar tree.
The blaze from the downed helicopter sent a soft glow radiating across the fuselage of the VIP helicopter. Sam’s eyes were swimming, but he could make out the vibrant sky blue of the DoD seal on the side of the bird.
Was the Secretary of Defense on board?
His eyes narrowed.
Did she order the F16 pilots to shoot him down?
He shook his head. There would be time to find out what happened and why, but right now he needed to conserve his strength and energy in order to escape.
Sam’s eyes tracked the VIP helicopter as it flew overhead without stopping and continued farther along and into the valley. He expelled a deep breath of air. It was impossible for anyone above to spot him through the forest’s dense canopy. He shook his head. Someone had tried to kill Ben Gellie. That wasn’t a warning shot. Those pilots were ordered to hunt Ben down and take him out. There was no attempt to get him to land the helicopter and surrender. No negotiations. Just cold-blooded murder. His bloodied lips curled upward into a determined grin as the realization struck him every bit as hard as the branches — someone had tried to kill him.
They knew that he was on board the JetRanger. His own people knew that he’d been taken hostage and that he was piloting the helicopter. They were flying over Shenandoah National Park, away from any populated region, which meant there was no risk of direct terrorist threat. No reason why the F16 Fighting Falcon pilots couldn’t attempt to force them to land. But there weren’t any communications…
They had just tried to kill him!
Sam tried to blink away the blur of disorientation.
Why had someone from the Pentagon ordered his death?
The skies were now empty of any aircraft, leaving him to the silence of the forest. Scattered among the chirping crickets was a distinct glow up ahead where the crackling of fire from the downed helicopter was threatening to start a wildfire.
If the blaze took hold, it could engulf the forest and race up the valley faster than he or Ben could possibly outrun. They needed to get moving — quickly.
His eyes raked the ground, searching for any signs of his captor, turning skyward before settling on a dense section of foliage in the canopy high above to the south where something moved. It could have been an owl or a squirrel. He couldn’t be sure.
“Ben?” he said, more remembering the fact of his existence than trying to find the guy.
There was no reply.
Sam stood up, grimacing as blood rushed through his aching legs. It hurt but he could bear weight and all his limbs responded to his instructions. He might still have damage to his internal organs and for all he knew, he was bleeding to death internally, but at least his spine was intact.
The fire crackled in the distance.
It was starting to take hold on the nearby poplar trees. Whatever injuries Sam had could wait. If they didn’t get out of there soon, those injuries would be the least of his problems.
He cupped his hands and shouted, “Ben! Are you alive?”
“Up here!” Ben’s voice came back.
Sam stared at him through squinted eyes, his brow furrowed. Ben was stuck approximately 25 feet in the air on the upper branches of a birch tree.
“You okay?”
“Fine,” Ben replied with a rueful grin. “First they lock me up for donating blood and tell me I’m America’s terrorist suspect number one. Then, when I escape and take you hostage, they shoot us down without so much as a warning shot! At your suggestion, I just jumped out of a moving helicopter, fifty feet off the ground!”
Sam grinned. “You’re welcome.”
Ben wasn’t finished yet. “Now, the fall that was supposed to kill me, leaves me stranded up here to take another gamble with my life. So how do you think I feel?”
Sam ignored the question. “Can you move?”
“I’m twenty-five feet off the ground. What do you think?”
“The fire at the crash site is starting to ignite the forest,” Sam said. “It’s struggling to take hold this early in the spring, but it won’t be long — and when it does, we’ll have no chance to outrun it. So, I think you’re going to have to work out a way to get down!”
Ben’s gaze snapped round toward the rising conflagration. He cursed. “All right, all right! I’m going to try to see if I can reach that branch over there.”
Sam ran his eyes across the lower branches of the birch tree. There weren’t many. It looked like the lower half of the tree had been intentionally stripped of its branches years ago, either by bears or National Parks Rangers in an attempt to clear the canopy and make way for some of the other nearby trees to grow.
Either way, it looked like there was a lot of empty air between Ben and the ground.
“What branch?” Sam asked.
Ben didn’t reply.
Instead, he bent his legs, gritted his teeth, and set his eyes on the fork of a nearby poplar tree. It looked like seven or eight feet. A distance difficult to make with a run up, but almost certainly impossible from standstill.
You’ve got to be kidding me!
“You sure you want to go for that one?” Sam asked.
“No,” Ben replied. Then, glancing at the blaze from the nearby wreckage of the helicopter, he said, “It looks like I’m going to have to anyway.”