As far as the eye could see, it was a vast landscape of heavily wooded hillsides, with fog nesting in the valleys and a light drizzle blurring the more distant, higher mountains of the Kettle River Range.
Over the past year, Troy had aced the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT), and despite being a C-plus student at UCLA, he had come through the more than three months of Officer Training School (OTS) near the top of his class — a class in which four out of five who started didn't make it out at all.
Flight training at Laughlin AFB in Texas had gone well for Troy, who had cleared all the hurdles and qualified for a coveted slot in the track wherein fledgling pilots graduate as fledgling fighter pilots.
Then, these fledgling fighter pilots were dropped into combat survival training at Fairchild AFB near Spokane. After a couple of days of deceptively cushy classroom work, they suddenly take you up over the Colville National Forest in a C-130, tell you to survive, and kick you out the door — and there's one more thing, you also have to evade capture by the teams of 22nd Training Squadron instructors who play the role of bad guys for the fledglings.
The Combat Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) exercise is just as difficult as it is straightforward. All you have to do is parachute into a national forest and walk out. The not-so-easy parts include the terrain and the fact that under the best of conditions, it's a four-tofive-day hike.
To be captured means four days of browbeating interrogation in a mock POW camp. Here, the mock bad guys from the 22nd were tasked with tormenting their captives with experiences that simulated the worst that might be inflicted upon them in a real prison camp. The point of SERE is to prepare downed pilots to be captured, but most of the people who go through it do their damnedest not to be captured.
A lot fewer than four out of five who start actually evade capture — almost nobody ever does.
Most get caught.
"We better get going," Troy said. "It's gonna be dark soon."
"Man, I just need to rest awhile longer," Hal Coughlin complained. "We been climbing this ridge all day."
"So have they," Troy said, nodding at their unseen foe, who were somewhere below them on the slope. "And they aren't stopping for anything until they catch us. They're better equipped than us, and they know this country like the backs of their hands. They know all the shortcuts, and they probably know where we are."
"How could they see anything in all this clutter?"
"I bet they do," Troy said grimly. "I'll bet you ten bucks they got their binocs locked on us right this minute. If we get across that ridge, we'll be out of sight. We'll also be going down while they're still going up. We can move faster than them."
"Maybe we should just let 'em catch us?" Coughlin suggested. "They'd have to feed us… I'm starved…. wish we hadn't lost all our gear… and rations… in that stream yesterday. Even an MRE would taste good right now."
"Shut up, you're making me hungry." Troy laughed. He was hungry, and he was so cold that he was shivering and yearning for some calories. The only good thing about the light drizzle was that a drink was always as close as the nearest large leaf.
"Let's just let 'em catch up to us, then. We gave a good go. We've outrun 'em for two whole days. We did pretty good."
"You want to go through that interrogation they do when they catch you? Man, that's a bitch."
"This is a bitch," Coughlin whined. "It's a cold, wet bitch."
At least Coughlin had gotten up and they were moving again. Every step took them closer to the top and extended the distance between them and those who were trying to capture them. Troy and Hal knew that for those guys, it was a matter of pride to catch every single little bird who was dropped into this wilderness.
"What would your daddy say if he heard you wanted to give up?"
"Don't bring my father into this," Coughlin snarled. "Sorry," Troy said, half meaning it. He knew that he had touched a nerve — a very raw nerve.
Hal's father, Illinois congressman Halbert Coughlin, Sr., was the chairman of the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee and a powerful force inside the Beltway. He had pulled a lot of strings for Hal through the years, but he could pull no strings out here.
In the early days, Hal relished the fact that strings were pulled on his behalf. He had gotten into a good Washington prep school and had gotten out of it quite smoothly, despite some hijinks whose consequences his father's string-pulling made go away. Ditto with Northwestern. Hal probably wouldn't have gotten in without the congressman's off-the-record phone calls, and he certainly would not have graduated.
Since being in the Air Force, though, Hal had begun to see and understand the downside of Daddy's influence, and he had come to yearn for the opportunity to do things for himself — on his own.
He craved the opportunity to get out from beneath his father's shadow, to make his own choices, to guide his own life. Most fathers would encourage this, but the Illinois congressman had been more interested in molding his son as he thought best than in allowing Hal to develop as his own man.
The two men resumed the climb without speaking, concentrating on grabbing branches and half-pulling themselves up the slope. As the sopping wet brush got thicker, climbing the hill was almost like swimming upstream.
The injury to his arm that Troy had suffered when he made a bad landing in his parachute two days earlier made this whole process difficult and painful. He wasn't about to complain, though — certainly not to Hal Coughlin.
They made the crest of the ridge before dark, as Troy had hoped, and started down the other side. On this side of the ridge there was significantly less brush, although the grade was slightly steeper. At least they now had gravity on their side. They were headed down, while the bad guys were still climbing.
Nightfall came quickly, its black glove hastened by their descent into thicker forest in the lower reaches of the canyon. Not far below, they heard the rattling of a stream running off the hillside.
"Ouch! I can't see a thing," Hal complained. "Just almost poked out my eye on a branch."
There was a quavering in Hal's voice that he could not control. Troy had been recognizing the signs of hypothermia in his fellow pilot since early afternoon. Crashing through wet brush all day had soaked them to the bone, despite the water-resistant flight suits they were wearing. When darkness came, the plummeting temperatures didn't help.
"Keep moving," Troy said, repeating a phrase that he had been using and abusing all day long.
"Move where? I can't see where I'm going."
"Down," Troy said as he paused to catch his breath. "Down where?"
"Stop your bitchin', Hal."
"I'm serious, man. How the hell do we know where the hell we're going?"
"We're going down," Troy repeated patronizingly as he nodded toward the nearby sound of running water.
"On this side of the ridge, all the streams lead down to the Kettle River, and the Kettle River leads out of here." "You want to follow a stream?"
"Yeah, it's the road out of here. Not only that, the noise of running water will mask the sound of running pilots."
They clambered down a few dozen yards and took a look at the stream. It was very dark, but the trace of ambient light from a mist-shrouded moon highlighted the stream well enough for them to make it out as it cascaded down a narrow V-shaped crotch in the hillside.
"There ain't no riverbank on it," Hal exclaimed. "It's too steep. We can't follow it without falling into it."
"So that's the way it'll have to be," Troy said impatiently.
"We'll get more soaked than we already are!"
"You more afraid of a little water or a lot of interrogation?" Troy asked. "They're gonna do a Gitmo on your ass if you get caught."