“He looks like he’s okay, just unconscious,” Annie said as she began to examine him. He was securely bundled up in the cold-weather gear she’d seen him put on. She saw a big scrape against the left front side of his helmet and guessed he must have hit a tree face-first. “I don’t see any broken bones. He’s just unconscious,” Annie repeated.
“If he’s still in his parachute, unfasten his risers and drag him as far as you can away from there,” Patrick said.
Annie unclipped the parachute risers from Dev’s harness, then retrieved his survival pack, laid it on his chest, then grabbed his parachute harness near his shoulders and pulled. Although Deverill was tall, he wasn’t very big, but he wouldn’t budge. She pulled harder, throwing her weight into it, and finally broke him out of the crust of snow so he would move. But she could only move him a few inches at a time, and soon found that she couldn’t keep him from sliding down the embankment toward the road. This was not going to work. If she kept on moving him, he’d eventually slide all the way down, and then whoever was in the truck, or whoever might follow them toward the Vampire’s crash site, would …
A flashlight beam swept across her. They were coming! They were a couple dozen yards away, but they were getting closer by the second. She heard voices, angry men’s voices. They were tracking her.
There was nowhere else to go but down the embankment. Annie turned Dev’s body so his head was facing downhill. He moved much easier now, so she pulled faster. The flashlight beam swung in her direction again, much closer now. She crashed against a tree, swore gently, maneuvered Dev’s body around the tree, and continued to pull.
Excited, frantic voices now. Annie guessed they had found the parachute. It was only a matter of time now…
Unexpectedly, Annie reached the bottom of the embankment, fell, and landed hard on the frozen dirt road. She twisted an ankle trying to land on her feet and couldn’t help but cry out in pain. The flashlights again swung right in her direction.
They had them now…
Borispol Air Base, Kiev, Republic of Ukraine
The landing was anything but pretty — in fact, it was more of a controlled crash than anything else. With most of his hydraulic system gone, Major John Weston had no control of most of the flight surface, engine nacelle control, or landing gear systems. He was able to use the emergency blow-down system and got one good main landing gear and the nose gear out of the sponsons. But it didn’t matter — since he had no control of the engine rotating system, he couldn’t switch to helicopter mode. They were going to hit hard no matter how good the Trash Man was.
Borispol Air Base was a large combined Ukrainian air force and army aviation base. Weston got a general layout of the base from his flight information publications. The northeast side of the base housed the army aviation eskadriyls, with Mil-8 and Mil-6 heavy transport helicopter squadrons and one Mil-24 attack helicopter squadron; the south side had a mixture of fixed-wing air defense, attack, bomber, and transport planes. Weston used the large runway to get oriented, then slowly, carefully, diverted over to the taxiway opposite the blast deflectors beside the mass helicopter parking ramp. If he lost any pieces of his Pave Hammer aircraft, at least they probably wouldn’t hit any Ukrainian aircraft, and he wouldn’t close the runway by crash-landing on the main runway.
“Hang on!” Weston shouted behind him over the roar of the windblast and engine noises. “Prepare for a hard landing!” Normally he would’ve said, “Prepare for a copilot landing,” but he didn’t think the shades of his dead copilot would appreciate the humor. As he touched down, traveling at least thirty knots beyond normal approach speed to maintain controllability, the first to arrive were the tips of his rotors, chewing huge double gouges into the taxiway. As soon as the rotors stopped, all lift ceased, and the MV-22 slammed into the pavement. The landing gear collapsed instantly, and the Pave Hammer aircraft began a long, ugly belly-slide, stopping four hundred feet later in the dirt between the taxiway and runway.
Weston had all of the major systems shut off several seconds before they landed. Ignoring the emergency escape system in the cockpit, he leapt out of his seat, stepping carefully over the body of his copilot in the aisle, and went to assist his surviving crew members in the evacuation. But Wohl, Briggs, Fratierie, and the surviving PJs had quickly evacuated Linda Mae Maslyukov out of the already-extended aft cargo ramp the moment the aircraft stopped, and had moved her several hundred feet upwind from the crash-landing site.
The aircraft was not on fire, just smoke belching from each seized engine, so Weston accepted the grisly but important task of carrying his copilot’s body out of the aircraft. He half dragged, half carried him as far upwind as he could, then laid him on the grass as carefully as possible. Exhausted, shaking from the buckets of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream, very glad to be alive, Weston collapsed on the grass upwind of the aircraft. His job was over for now. All he needed was a beer and his wife and kids by his side.
Ukrainian soldiers and airmen were running over to them, jabbering excitedly. Several of them spoke English, and they hurried to help the PJs attend to Siren. They started an intravenous drip to try to rehydrate and nourish her, and a Ukrainian medic began dressing her wounds. Ukrainian firefighters knocked down the smoldering engine fires quickly. Weston was introduced first to the security forces first sergeant, and then to a progressive string of higher-ranking officers, until the base commander himself finally appeared.
Hal Briggs and Chris Wohl, looking like some sort of sci-fi Starship Troopers, walked up to them. Since they had just landed on a Commonwealth air base and might still be pursued by the Russian Air Force, both of them were on guard: Briggs had his helmet on, scanning the sky and the base for any sign of a threat; Wohl had his huge electromagnetic antitank rail gun out and ready. “Guys, this is the base commander, Brigadier-General Mykhaylo Sakhan, commander of the Second Aviation Division here at Borispol.” Briggs saluted; Wohl stood silently, his rail gun at port arms.
“And who are you, sir?” Sakhan asked, after he returned his salute, staring in amazement at both their strange outfits and their weapons.
“Our code name is Tin Man, sir,” Briggs replied in his electronically synthesized voice. “We are American military personnel. That’s all I am authorized to reveal to you.”
“Neechohol” Sakhan said. “We were warned by your American state department that you would be arriving, although they said nothing about arriving spacemen.”
“We need one of your helicopters to return to Russia, sir,” Briggs said simply.
“What happened?” Weston asked.
“Our guardian angel took a hit. Terminator is down. We’re going in after them.”
“Damn. I wish I had my ride.” And he meant it — all thoughts of relaxing with his family and a cold one were gone. Dewey and Deverill had risked their lives to save his. “You guys get out of here. We’ll be okay.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot help you,” Sakhan said. I have not received authorization from my superiors to assist you in violating Russian territory. I understand lives are at stake, but your government has not made the reason for all this activity clear to us. Perhaps you can explain who you are and what you were doing in Russia, and I can pass this information along to my superiors.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not possible, sir,” Briggs said. “But I assure you, my government will take full responsibility for our actions and reimburse you in full.”
“Would you sell me your strange outfit, or allow me to rent it for a while, or accept my assurance that whatever I might do with it would not be your responsibility?” Sakhan asked with a smile.