Trace again tried moving and a low moan escaped her lips — no way she was using her left leg. She grabbed the edge of the control panel with both hands and pressed. It ignored her attempt. She tried again.
Nothing.
She checked her legs as best as she could. The bleeding appeared to have stopped, for which she was thankful; the specter of bleeding to death was all too real under these circumstances.
Trace then reached up and switched the radio frequency to the emergency band. She pushed the send trigger on the collective but there was no rewarding hiss of broken static indicating she was transmitting. She tried again. Silence.
Trace switched frequencies. Still nothing. After five minutes, she finally gave up. The impact must have broken the radio. At the very least she knew the condition of the helicopter meant the antenna had been sliced when the tail boom was cut off.
She cast her mind about, searching for a way out of her situation, but the options were not just limited, they were nonexistent. She would have to wait and hope.
“What now, recondo?” Trace asked herself out loud.
These very hills on the military reservation were where she had earned her “Recondo” badge her second summer at West Point. Billed as a mini-Ranger school, the eight-daylong Recondo training was designed to introduce “yearlings’ ‘ to the basics of patrolling but, more fundamentally, was designed to introduce cadets to the military practice of being forced to perform difficult mental and physical tasks while under the influence of stress, and sleep and food deprivation.
“Good training” Boomer would call it, and Trace knew he was right.
Combat was one of the highest stressors a human could go through and it was almost always under the worst possible conditions.
Despite her predicament. Trace had to grimly smile as a freezing rain began to fall outside. It seemed things were getting even worse.
Trace leaned back in the pilot’s seat, as comfortable as she could be with immobile legs. She forced her mind away from her pain and discomfort and traveled back. She remembered Camp Buckner and the time her patrol of twenty-six cadets had charged a small hill defended by a squad of 82nd Airborne soldiers. They’d run screaming at the top of their lungs up the grass-covered slope to be met by a barrage of smoke’ and CS grenades. Hacking and coughing from the tear gas, they’d turned and run back downhill as swiftly as they had advanced. All except one classmate. Trace’s bunkmate, Linda Greenberg, who’d simply frozen, standing still among the stinging gas.
Since the powers-that-be had not thought to issue the cadets gas masks — and the 82tei was not supposed to be using the gas — the cadets could only stand at the bottom of the hill and watch as Linda gagged and vomited all over herself, until finally the gas dissipated. At which point, not to Trace’s surprise — she’d already seen enough in her first year at West Point — her male classmates had gathered around Linda and ridiculed her for embarrassing them in front of the enlisted men of the 82nd squad who were laughing from on top the hill at the spectacle of the female cadet covered in puke. They were especially thrilled when it was discovered that Linda had also lost control of her bladder under the effects of the tear gas.
Trace had taken Linda away from the jeers of their classmates and cleaned her up as best as she could in a nearby stream, giving her the extra set of fatigues from her rucksack to wear. A week later, just after the formal graduation from Recondo training where the cloth patches denoting successful completion of the training were given out by the cadre from the 10th Special Forces Group, the cadets of Trace’s company had held their own ceremony where they gave out their own awards. Linda was issued a pair of rubber panties and a vomit bag.
Trace was given a Recondo patch made of moleskin — the medic’s tool to treat blisters — a reflection on the six runs she’d missed with foot problems during the summer training.
It was sexist and it was brutal and most certainly “politically insensitive” in modern jargon, but as Trace sat there pinned in the pilot’s seat, she also knew it was reality.
The Academy had not been designed to prepare cadets to enter the normal world. It had been designed to prepare them to lead in combat and that in itself was the most brutal of all man’s endeavors, despite such trappings as glory and honor. That cadets could be so nasty to those who failed to live up to their own standards was not surprising.
A moan escaped Trace’s lips. Her leg was throbbing again, even stronger than before. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Trace suddenly remembered the plastic case. She twisted her head and looked between the seats where she had jammed it on takeoff. It was still there.
That was all that mattered right now. Trace reached for the case, but the pain that jolted out of her right leg was enough to blanket her mntitin darkness.
Trace hacked and coughed her way awake. Her chest felt terrible and she had a pounding headache. She blearily opened her eyes and quickly closed them. In the pale gray daylight, her current predicament was all too real. She could see the rock wall just in front of the cockpit and the tangle of metal.
She opened her eyes again and looked down at her legs.
There was a dull throbbing pain coming from her left leg and although it was much less than it had been last night she knew if she didn’t get help soon, that the situation was going to be very serious. She tried the radio again, on that faint optimism people in grim situations have that something might have changed for the better. It hadn’t.
She glanced around, inventorying everything within reach. The survival vest with its knife. The plastic box. The crushed instrument panel.
The overhead controls.
Very carefully. Trace reached down with her left hand and picked up the box. She drew the knife from the survival vest hooked to the right wall behind her and slit the layers of duct tape around the seam. It took her a while and she was glad to have something to keep her mind off her situation although it took an inordinate amount of attention for her to do this simple task. With the tape gone, she found that a small clasp kept the two sides closed. She unfastened it and opened the box.
Inside, an object wrapped in black plastic awaited her gaze. She drew out the object and slowly began peeling away the inside layers of protection. Whoever had hidden this had certainly wanted to make sure that it was protected from moisture. With her fingernails. Trace tore open the last thin sheaf of plastic’ and touched leather. She completely uncovered the object, and a leather-bound diary rested in her hands. On the cover, embossed in gold, were the initials: BRH.
With grimy fingers. Trace flipped open the cover. There was an inscription in large, flowing script on the inside:
To my son, Benjamin, on this most happy day of your life, may the words you write within tell a tale of service and honor.
Love mother. 12 June, 1930
“Hooker, you asshole,” Trace muttered. The effort it had taken to open up the case had exhausted her. She put the diary back inside and slumped back against the seat.
After a few minutes she passed into an uneasy slumber.
Trace started awake. For a few brief seconds her mind consoled her with the illusion that she was someplace else.
Then she saw the crumpled cockpit surrounding her and felt the throb of pain from her legs and she returned to reality.
She knew she was close to hypothermia. The lower half of her body was in especially bad shape. Besides the broken leg, she was damp, having been forced to urinate where she sat.
Trace wrapped her arms tighter around herself and tried to keep her teeth from chattering so loudly. This time of year the training area was deserted and Trace knew the odds of someone stumbling across her location were slim. Looking at the grim side of the equation, she also knew that if no one came before nightfall, she didn’t think she could make it through another night.