Christen
Tuesday, The wrong side of the Iraqi-Syrian Border
The team from the Black Hawk were climbing the hill, looking like pack mules. Christen followed after them as they slid under the helicopter camouflage. Their supplies rolled out of the men’s arms onto the ground, and they plopped their packs down, then themselves. The heat of the sun was deflected by the reflective quality of their tarp that made a tent over the Little Bird’s rotors. It was demonstrably cooler under here. The July heat in Syria was no joke. It felt like it could bore a hole through your hat down into your head and fry the contents of your brain.
Christen looked the men over. One Delta had his arm in a splint and was rigging a triangular bandage to hold it to his chest now that he’d dropped his pack. Christen moved over to give him an assist. Their uniforms had drying blood stains. White bandaging peeked out of the rips in their BDUs, abrasions, cuts, and bruising on their hands and faces, one guy looked like he’d broken his nose. All in all, a damned good outcome.
Prominator was one hell of a pilot. She knew the Night Stalkers would debrief his landing, so they could all learn from this event. Christen was looking forward to that hot wash where they’d dissect the mission. But now? She wanted to hear what the Deltas had to say about their present situation.
One of the operators from the Black Hawk caught her eye. “Where’s Jeopardy, Nitro and Grey?”
The Deltas hadn’t introduced themselves by name. They never did. Sometimes Christen would catch a call name, but, for the most part, they were just “the customer.”
“Someone took off in that direction.” Christen pointed. A Delta she hadn’t met stood next to her. His eyes travelled along her arm and out into the distance as she pointed. “And another took off down by the copse of trees behind the boulder with your PC.” Christen used the term for precious cargo, a non-military person that needed rescue or security while moving from Point A to Point B. “My turn,” she said, turning her attention to the Delta to her right. “Where’s your pilot and co-pilot? Are they okay?”
“They’re banged up like the rest of us. They’re down with the Black Hawk figuring out if they can call for some parts and get it up in the air again. I’m told you’re here instead of in the air because of a fuel problem. You’re completely dry?” he asked.
“No, but I don’t have enough to get to base. Better that we stick together. Consolidate weapons and manpower.”
He nodded.
They didn’t call them the silent professionals for nothing.
Moving over to the open door on her bird, he looked the fuel tank over. “I thought these were supposed to withstand handgun fire.”
“Not withstand. Resist. Up to a fifty-caliber round. Looks to me like the shooter knew that too. See here? He was aiming for a single target on the tank. He hit it repeatedly, weakening the structure until he finally got some rounds through.”
He grimaced. “Good thing it didn’t explode like in the movies.”
“Impossible,” she said. “But you knew that already.”
He winked and stretched out his hand for a shake. “T-Rex.”
“D-day,” she said.
He moved his hand to the fuel container and slid his finger into one of the holes. He ran his hand over the surface, around the sides. “This is it for damage? Maybe we could patch it and haul the fuel from the Black Hawk. Are you running the same kind of fuel through these engines?”
“Same. JP-4. We’d need at least thirty gallons, forty would be better. Safer.”
“Dogs,” a whisper came over the radio.
“Crap,” would be the nicest of the exclamations that was muttered by the men around her.
Christen could hear the ting ting tinging of bells echoing through the craggy hills. It didn’t seem to her like they were coming any closer.
“We’ve got two five-gallon containers we could syphon into,” T-Rex said. “A couple of trips, and we can get you and your co-pilot, Grey and four of my worst wounded out of here. I’ll send Ty with you to be your firepower.” He pointed at another giant of a human-being. It looked like Ty could scoop up an adversary and eat him for breakfast, no weapons necessary.
Christen looked around T-Rex’s broad shoulder at where his team splayed out in the dirt, working with their weapons. “How badly are they injured?” she asked under her breath.
“Walking wounded, they could fight if need be.”
“So that leaves you with—”
“Plenty. We’ll do fine. Let’s figure out—”
“Kid,” a man’s whisper rose from the radio into the air.
Again, with the curses.
“Who is that?”
“Jeopardy.” T-Rex’s shift was microscopic, but his energy brightened, became more intense, focused.
He tapped two men on the shoulder as he walked by. “You’re with me. Ty, you figure out how to keep some fuel in this bird. I don’t care if someone has to ride back to base with their fingers shoved in there like the Little Dutch Boy with his thumb in the dyke. A fat wad of chewing gum if it comes down to it,” he said over his shoulder.
T-Rex and his two men took off down the hill.
Christen looked around. She felt like she should be doing something, but the something she should be doing didn’t occur to her. She’d already done everything she could to set up her helicopter for the refueling bladders she expected the rescue crew to bring in from base. She checked her watch. It was thirteen hundred hours. She didn’t expect help before twenty-two hundred hours when it would be dark enough to hide the Black Hawks in the night sky. The next nine hours stretched in front of her felt like an eternity. Could they stay hidden until help arrived?
***
Christen lay on her stomach peering through her binoculars under a slim space that separated their camouflaging invisibility fabric from the ground. A little girl tipped her head to the side and blinked. Her little brown toes were dusted with grey dirt. The sandals she wore were too big for her feet. Her eyes were dark and filled with curiosity. “Curiosity killed the cat,” tumbled over itself in Christen’s brain as she wished the girl would get the wayward goat and go away. The girl tipped her head back, her mouth wide. Christen anticipated a scream. But the child’s head dunked forward in a powerful arc as she sneezed violently then wiped her nose on the sleeve of her cotton dress with faded roses dancing around the hem. She adjusted the red bandana, that was folded into a triangle and tied around her cascade of tangled black curls, as she focused once again on the expanse in front of her.
Christen held her breath as she watched the child try to interpret what she was seeing. Christen’s mind went back to one of her first interviews when she was applying to the Night Stalkers.
“You’re on a mission of vital importance.” The colonel had said. “A child stumbles upon your position. What do you do? Do you kill her? Take her prisoner? Or do you let her go?”
Christen had said, “It depends on the circumstances, sir. All are viable answers just not equally so. During a mission, I expect I will weigh the choices and come to the best conclusion I can, given the circumstances.” What Christen had thought was: I’ll be in the air. It’ll be night. All the kids will be sleeping. This scenario doesn’t pertain to me.
One of the Deltas crouch walked toward her, whispering into his comms. A sniper rifle in his hands. A silencer screwed into place.
If he took that child down, the sound from the suppressed rifle might blow away with the wind. It just as easily might echo off the rocks and throw the rest of the people who were with the herd into a panic. Then the search party. Then the retaliation. This Delta wasn’t on the elite team for nothing. He knew all the ramifications of his actions. And all the rules of engagement. Christen trusted his expertise. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t feeling the adrenaline. And not the happy rush that she loved so much. This was the crappola kind that comes when she was truly at risk of life and limb, or when she watched an innocent get caught up in the event.
They lay there, side by side, watching the child. In this moment, their fates were intertwined, and Christen didn’t even know the guy’s name.
Christen wondered what the helicopter looked like from where the girl stood. Did the breeze ripple the fabric making it look like a portal between the worlds? Did it glisten, somehow, in the intensity of the sunlight, making this space look enchanted? The child looked up at the sky as if she were pondering. She pointed a finger then traced it down to the ground over to the right. That’s where the Black Hawk had dropped. But Christen knew the Black Hawk was too far down the hill for it to be in the child’s view. The girl turned and faced toward Christen again and scratched at her bandana, pointed at the sky and traced her finger down until she was pointing just to the left of where Little Bird rested.
That was strange. Maybe this child saw the helicopters land, and she wondered how they had disappeared. If not, why the pointing?
Maybe their camouflaged helicopter didn’t look like anything at all from where she stood.
Maybe she just happened to stop there.
Just happened to look in their direction.
Just happened to pause.
The child turned and ran away.
Sigh. Maybe not.
The sniper guy was reporting into his radio, so his team was up to speed.
“Move it,” T-Rex growled under his breath. Two of the operators who had been bringing up fuel cans scrambled out under the corner that had been unpegged. They carried an empty five-gallon container with them. T-Rex turned and pointed and emphatic finger at the plastic jug, filled with fuel they’d left behind. “Get that into the funnel. Go.”
One man stood holding the funnel steady, another lifted the forty-pound canister and tilted it slowly.
“Are you ready to go?” This time T-Rex’s finger stabbed the air in front of Christen.
“As soon as we’re fueled,” she said. This canister was the fourth to go in. Twenty gallons was half of what she needed in place. She wasn’t a hundred percent about the holding power of the patch Ty had rigged. Especially as the weight and pressure inside the fuel tank increased.
“Son of a bitch,” Jeopardy was back on his comms. “We’ve been spotted. The girl ran to a man. He pulled her up on his shoulders and now they’re all high-tailing it.”
T-Rex adjusted his radio frequency. “Base this is Alpha Actual…” his voice blurred as he moved from under the hide and down the hill.
Moments later he was back. “You. You. You. And you.” He pointed out certain team members. “Get on board.” He pointed at the Little Bird. His finger seemed to be his mode of cutting down on verbal clutter.
A general “Hell no, we won’t go” was raised, and T-Rex lifted the corner of his lip in a snarl. The men might have been grumbling under their breath, but they moved to their places.
Grey came panting up under the camouflage, his Delta guardian, Nitro, still gripped the collar of the man’s shirt.
T-Rex pointed at Grey then jerked his thumb toward the Little Bird. And the Nitro guy moved his fistful of cloth toward the heli, jostling Grey to his place.
Grey had lost his other shoe along the way and his socks hung halfway off his feet like flaccid flippers. Flaccid flippers—that alliteration cartwheeled in Christen’s brain while she tried to figure out if Grey was under arrest or if they thought he might flee. She didn’t remember a PC being manhandled like that before. But, then again, she’d never been in these circumstances before. She was just trying to go with the flow. Be a help, not a hindrance nor a distraction.
Christen had noticed T-Rex’s face had clouded when he came back under the tent, a storm brewing in his thoughts. She could guess why. There would be no air-support. Her commanders were coldly-calculating when it came to mission assignments. They were already two helicopters, four Night Stalkers, and ten Delta Force operators down, along with one (whatever the heck Grey was) PC.
Base had calculated that Grey’s extraction was worth the risk of their teams being deployed into the city for the day-time mission. But now that they had Grey in hand, Christen wondered what Delta orders were in place as far as Grey was concerned. Under such circumstances, would the operators go to extremes to make sure there was zero chance that the PC would ever fall back into the hands of the combatants? It was possible. She couldn’t speak to that. Didn’t want to consider it. It wasn’t her call. The military wasn’t a democracy.
She took a good look at Grey sitting facing out of the helicopter. His body said calm, cool, collected. His eyes said exhausted and hungry. His skin color was a shade that matched his name. He was playing a brave role, but he was scared, or maybe just in shock. Who wouldn’t be? Grey was probably dozing on his cot anticipating who might come knocking on his cell door and what horror awaited him when suddenly a crew of wild men with skeleton face masks showed up outside of his window and pulled him through the broken panes five stories off the ground. That might take a day or two to recover from. And recovery wouldn’t start while they were hunkered under reflective cloth on the wrong side of the enemy line.
Christen reached for her emergency pack, pulled out an MRE and handed it over to Grey. He took it and blinked vacantly at her.
“Eat,” she said.
He sat still as a statue as if the words weren’t gelling in his brain.
A Delta bumped Grey with his elbow and lifted his chin, bringing Grey back from lala land.
Grey’s fingers fumbled to open the box.
Christen moved to inspect the patch that sat like a giant pimple on her fuel tank. It wasn’t confidence building. She sent a wry look toward the men, who carefully filled the tank. She wondered how T-Rex saw this playing out. She wished they’d have a powwow and fill her in on the concerns and precautions. A plan. Yeah, a plan would be good.
The shepherds are running. Christen would pay good money to know for sure the reason why. She checked her watch: only thirteen thirty-five hours – time was at a standstill.
How far would the locals have to run before they got where they were going? Did the shepherds have contact with the city? Would they have heard of the prison exfil and been asked to be on the look-out for anything odd? Surely, whoever had taken down the Black Hawk had seen it going down and knew their general location. Surely, the same people had seen her heli follow them to the ground. Could that, and not the child, be the reason that the shepherds were running? From the shepherds’ vantage point, did they see trouble moving into the area?
Just as the thought formed in her mind, she heard Jeopardy’s voice over the radio. “We’ve got insurgents moving into view. Forty – fifty heads. They’ve got some big ass guns mounted, too. Get that Little Bird the hell out of here.”
All in one fluid motion, the Delta reaction machine mobilized. The man tilted the fuel container up, letting the last drop slide in. He tossed the container to the side as he moved to the tent peg. T-Rex grabbed hold of Christen’s flight suit as he shoved her toward her seat.
“No man left behind,” she yelled.
“Fuck that,” he snarled as he half-lifted half-threw her in place. “We’re the customers. You’re here to provide for our needs. We need you to get our precious cargo and our wounded back to base. As soon as we’ve got you cleared, you take off. The sooner you’re gone, the sooner we can get ourselves squared away. Capisch? Strap in and give me a thumbs up.”
This feels wrong. This is wrong. Christen grabbed a hunk of T-Rex’s uniform in an equal display of power. “The jerry-rigged tank isn’t going to hold. The patch needs to be welded in place to cover a hole that big. Duct tape and epoxy just aren’t going to cut it.”
“Watch your gauge and find another place to set down, lady. Anywhere but here. They’re about to light us up, or didn’t you hear?” He turned his head. “You and you. Get the damned tarp off. Get them cleared for takeoff.” He pointed at Nick who was reaching for a peg. “You, either get in your seat or grab a gun.”
Nick sprinted around to the other side and piled in. Snatching at his harness, he strapped down. “Fucking hell,” he said under his breath, slamming his helmet into place.
The camouflaging fabric cleared, Christen cranked her engines. The blades slow whop, whop, whop gained the speed they’d need for lift off. Several Delta’s lay off in the distance, hips on the ground, shoulders curved above their sniper rifles. The first of their bullets flew. Christen knew each carefully-sighted bang meant a life extinguished. She maneuvered the Little Bird up and away from the noise.