“Yeah, I think so.”
Vermullen checked the GPS strapped to his right wrist, and again tugged at the risers, trying to turn northward, but they were still too far south of their desired landing point. He released his equipment bag and let it dangle from a ten-foot lanyard. “Release your FAMAS and be ready to use it,” he told Williams. He felt Williams move as he freed the stubby, eight-pound assault rifle strapped to his chest.
Williams swung the FAMAS to the ready position, its sling around his neck and over his left shoulder. He charged a round. Like Vermullen, he snapped his NVGs into place. “Ready.”
“The wind is stronger than expected,” Vermullen told him. “It’s blowing us to the south.” He searched for their original objective, the bridge on the north side of town leading to the airport a mile to the north. He found the river and followed it, finally seeing the bridge. His GPS confirmed they were still drifting to the south. He checked his altimeter — 4500 feet. With the unexpected wind out of the north and their rate of descent, they would never make it. He pulled a riser, and they cut a huge swooping turn around the town as he searched for a new place to land.
“Do you have Bard in sight?” Allston asked his copilot. The two C-130s were stacked in a racetrack pattern twenty miles north of Bentiu. At 28,000 feet, they were still above the cloud deck but it was starting to break up and he caught an occasional glimpse of the ground. It always amazed him how many lights marked the barren land at night. But he couldn’t see the second C-130 piloted by Bard Green, which should be stacked a thousand feet above him. For a moment, he wondered if he had misjudged the first lieutenant. No way, he told himself. After Marci Jenkins and Dick Lane, Green was his best aircraft commander. But where was he? For a moment, Allston considered breaking radio silence but discarded that as premature. He forced himself to wait for the one-word radio call from Vermullen that would set the next phase in motion.
It was a quiet moment and, like so many, thoughts of home captured him. He hoped Ben, his sixteen-year-old stepson, turned out as well as Bard. As for Lynne, his beautiful daughter, he was sure she would set the world on fire, much like Marci. What happened to Marci? he wondered, coming back to the overwhelming reality of his life. The pilot had been gone fifteen days and was due back. The raw hurt of G.G. was still there and he would never shake a feeling of responsibility for his death. He forced it aside, promising that he would always remember. He was grateful that Marci had volunteered to escort G.G. home. In the quiet lull, he mused how the Air Force had changed. Twenty-years ago as a second lieutenant, he never would have believed he would be relying on two women so much. Make that three, he told himself. His chief of maintenance, the difficult and irritable Susan Malaby, was indispensable. He laughed out loud over the intercom.
His copilot looked at him. “What’s up, Boss?”
“I was just thinking about the ‘indispensable woman theory,’” Allston replied.
“Colonel Malaby?”
“Yep. It amazes me how she keeps these crates flying.” Ahead and above them, a rotating beacon flashed in the night and then disappeared. Bard Green had just announced his presence and then went back to running with lights-out. “Good man,” Allston murmured. It was time to pay attention to business. He called the loadmaster. “MacRay, how the jumpers doing?”
“They’re ready to go. Getting kind of antsy.”
“I can’t blame them. Are the trucks still leaking?” The two rattletrap trucks they had on board were leaking gasoline and oil.
“We got the gas leaks stopped, but the fumes are still pretty heavy. It’s venting. Not a problem.”
“Stay on top of it,” he told MacRay. He checked his watch. Vermullen should have checked in. Is this turning into a goat rope? he wondered.
Vermullen forced himself to be calm as he searched for a place to land. The original plan called for them to land in the riverbed a mile south of the runway and destroy the bridge to seal off the airport and create a diversion. That could still happen, if they could land close enough to the bridge. He scanned the terrain through his NVGs, wishing the greenish image allowed better depth perception. Then he saw it. A branch of the Bahr el Ghazal cut around the southern side of the town, effectively making the town an island during the flood stage in two months. Fortunately, the branch was dry. Unfortunately, the town and another bridge was between them and their original objective. He pointed to a spot in the dry riverbed. “We land there.” He tightened up his turn and spiraled down.
“Relax, relax,” he told Williams, his voice barely above a whisper. He waited to hear the equipment bag dangling ten feet below his feet strike the ground. When he heard the soft whump, he pulled on the risers and stalled the parafoil. It would have been a near perfect, standing touchdown, except they landed on the equipment bag and stumbled, falling to the ground as the canopy collapsed behind them. Williams groaned under Vermullen’s weight. “I’m sorry,” Vermullen said as he stood. He pulled Williams to his feet.
“Pas de tout,” Williams replied. He gathered up the canopy as Vermullen shouldered the heavy equipment bag.
They hunched over and ran for the bank, finding cover in the heavy brush. They quickly shed their heavy jumpsuits and buried them along with the parachute and their harnesses. Vermullen checked his GPS. They were exactly 2.32 miles from the bridge. “Merde,” he breathed. It was further than he had hoped but he wasn’t going to quit. He motioned Williams forward, to the edge of the riverbed. Ahead of them, loud music he had never heard blared from a CD player and grated on his nerves. The two men stopped at the base of the steep bank the river had down-cut during flood stage and caught their breath. Vermullen silently crawled up the bank and got his bearings.
They were on the edge of an open area with brightly lit buildings on the other side. A tanker truck was parked in the open area. They watched as a car drove out of the town and stopped beside the tanker. A man got out of the car and pulled a hose from the side of the tanker. Within a few minutes, he had refueled his car and banged on the door of the truck. A hand came out the window and the man pressed a wad of money into the open palm. He walked back to his car and drove off, leaving the hose on the ground. Because of the angle of the hose, Vermullen realized they were on high ground and the terrain sloped down and northward, away from them and into town. He smiled. It was almost too easy.
Vermullen stood up, handed his FAMAS to Williams. “Cover me,” he said. He ambled towards the buildings and looked around until he found an open sewer. He hid in the shadows as another car drove up and went through the refueling routine. Again, money exchanged hands with the sleepy driver in the cab. The car drove off. They had found an ambitious entrepreneur selling stolen petrol. Vermullen pulled the fuel hose out as far as it could go but it didn’t reach the sewage ditch. He thought for a few moments, drew his knife, and walked back to the truck. He pounded on the door. This time, the sleeper stuck his head out and slurred a fine curse in Chinese about chicken-legged whores mothering misbegotten black bastards. Vermullen’s hands flashed. His right hand came up, driving his knife into the soft skin under the man’s jaw as his left hand slammed the man’s head down onto the blade. Vermullen jerked hard and severed the man’s thorax before dragging him out the window.
He dropped the twitching body on the ground and rolled it under a wheel. Without a word, he got in and backed the tanker up twenty feet, rolling over the man. He got out and fiddled with the hose nozzle before getting it to lock on. He laid it in the open sewer and watched for a few moments. Not satisfied with the rate of flow, he went back to the tanker and started the engine. He played with levers and valves until fuel gushed out of the open nozzle and into the ditch.