“Helen! Kaddiri!” Chandler shouted, his gun poised to fire. “Get up! Now!” He was afraid she would be too weak to act, but she heard him and had enough strength to roll free of the soldier’s grasp. Chandler dropped the second soldier on his first shot.
He ran to her. “Come on!” he said. “I’m going to try to get you away!”
Heavy machine-gun fire rippled the ground not five feet away from them, shot from one of the helicopters on the flight line. Chandler fired two rounds toward the helicopter, picked Kaddiri up, and ran for the rear of one of the hangars. Placing her on the ground behind the hangar, he tried to make a run for one of the submachine guns dropped by the soldiers who had taken Kaddiri, but a burst of gunfire drove him back to cover. Two soldiers had dismounted from the helicopter and were headed straight for them. Chandler took aim and fired but his gun clicked empty. He threw it away, looped one of Kaddiri’s arms up over his shoulder, and ran down the ramp behind the hangars. It was their last, their only, chance.
“I’ve got one of the helicopters lined up!” the pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft called out on interphone. “Give me permission to shoot!”
“No!” Jon Masters shouted. “Helen might be in one of those choppers!”
“Put me right over the lead helicopter,” McLanahan radioed. “Target the second helicopter’s tail rotor with the cannon. Try to keep it on the ground, but don’t hit it!”
The MV-22 was flying about sixty miles an hour in helicopter mode as it swooped across the two parallel runways at Mather toward the R amp; D center. Patrick knew their altitude, about thirty feet above ground, and their speed. He relied on his experience as an Air Force bombardier for the rest.
As the MV-22 swept in on its targets, Patrick stepped out through the left crew door onto the left main landing gear sponson and steadied himself against the left weapon pylon. At just the right moment, he let go and flung himself out into space, jumping right down onto the spinning rotors of the first UH-1 Huey helicopters.
He looked like a doll tossed from a speeding car onto a busy freeway when he hit the rotor disk. He landed right-shoulder-first onto the left side of the rotor, but the BERP suit protected him from being sliced into hamburger. His body skipped across the rotor disk, hitting again on the blade tips just forward of the cockpit canopy before being thrown a hundred feet into the air.
The helicopter’s blades bounced like palm fronds in a hurricane. One blade snapped and flew off into space; the others dipped so low that they struck the ground and then the tail, snapping off the tail rotor. Unbalanced, the entire main-rotor assembly cracked off the hub and shattered. The transmission screamed into high rpm’s, then it too shattered and disintegrated. The transmission burst into a globe of shrapnel, shelling out the turbine engine with a huge explosion.
Patrick landed up against the steel post of one of the facility’s ballpark lights. He knew he was alive because the ferocity of the electrical surges through the suit had set his entire body on fire. He writhed in pain and tried to relax his muscles, let the energy move through him and dissipate; but the more he tried to relax, the harder the waves of electricity came.
It felt like hours before they stopped. He didn’t dare move at first, thinking he was sawed into pieces. The vision of those rotor blades rushing up to his face was imprinted on his eyeballs. But when he opened his eyes, he saw hangars, lights, and gray cloudy skies. He was alive.
He got to his feet and looked over the R amp; D facility flight line. Soldiers were streaming out both crew doors of the disabled Huey, some holding injured comrades. The MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor was directly over the second one-it could fire straight down with its chin-mounted Chain Gun, but no one on board the Huey could shoot straight up because they’d be shooting through their own rotor disk. The second Huey’s tail rotor began to disintegrate as 20-millimeter rounds chewed it to pieces, and in seconds it was unflyable.
Soldiers began firing at the MV-22. “Hal! You’re taking ground fire!” Patrick shouted into his helmet radio. “Get out of there now!” As the MV-22 moved away, Patrick hit his thrusters, aiming straight at the soldiers firing on it. He plowed into them going full speed, knocking them over like an out-of-control truck.
Then he heard shouts of “Halt!” in German through his omnidirectional microphone-and cries of “Help!” in English. He hit his thrusters in the direction of the cries, jumping across the ramp behind the second hangar. He could see two soldiers chasing someone and recognized the running figure of Tom Chandler, carrying a woman down the fenceline behind the hangars. The soldiers had fired a warning shot in the air, but Chandler wasn’t stopping. One of them raced after him as the other knelt down and began to line up his shot.
Patrick hit his thrusters again but discovered they hadn’t recharged yet. He ran toward the kneeling soldier, shouting, “Chandler! Gun! Behind you!” with his electronically amplified voice. Chandler turned, pushed Kaddiri to the ground next to the fence, and raised a pistol. At last, a “Ready” indication. Patrick hit his thrusters and speared the kneeling soldier with his flying body just in time. The other soldier had thrown himself on the ground when he saw Chandler’s gun, trying to find cover.
Patrick got to his feet, made sure the one he had downed was out cold, and yelled “Stop!” at the second soldier. But he was too late. Chandler went down just as Patrick reached the guy and put him out of commission.
Patrick went over to Helen, lying where she had fallen when Chandler dropped. She looked semiconscious. “Helen! It’s Patrick! Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes. “Patrick?” she said groggily. “Patrick! I… I think I’m okay.” She turned her head toward Chandler. “He saved my life, the son of a bitch. How is he?”
Patrick checked him over. He had a bullet in his upper chest and left shoulder. “Not good,” he said. He tore off one of Chandler’s pant legs and stuffed the cloth into his chest wound to stop the bleeding. They heard the sirens of approaching police cars and fire trucks. “We’re going to have to get him out of here. And you need to be checked over too.”
The MV-22 had swooped over the R amp; D facility, firing at soldiers on the ground, but now it touched down on the ramp behind the second disabled Huey. Patrick carried Chandler out onto the ramp, with Helen hobbling beside him, just as the Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol cars and county fire trucks roared up. The officers ran out, weapons drawn, and aimed at Patrick. “Put him down,” they ordered. “Hands in the air!”
“Hold on, hold on!” It was the commander of the Highway Patrol’s SWAT team, Thomas Conrad, who ran up, followed by Masters and Briggs. “Let him go, boys. He’s one of us.” Then he pointed to Chandler, still in Patrick’s arms. “But not that man. He’s under arrest. Get him to the hospital but keep an officer with him at all times. And this lady needs medical help too. But hold it just a sec…” Conrad went over to where Chandler was lying, withdrew something from his pocket, and put it in Patrick’s right hand. “Here,” he said. “You deserve this a hell of a lot more than he does.”
Patrick looked at it. It was Chandler’s gold captain’s badge.
Jon Masters was focused only on Helen. He took off his jacket and gently wrapped it around her. “Oh God, Helen,” he kept saying. “Are you all right? Oh Helen, I’m so sorry…”