Nerve Center (25 page)

“So do I.”

Aboard SAR Helicopter Charlie 7
Over Sierra Nevada Mountains
19 February, 1715

SERGEANT PERSE “POWDER” TALCOM LEANED AGAINST the door window of the Pave Low as the big helicopter struggled against the wind. The cloud hanging on the mountainside seemed like a massive bear, trying to protect her young.

“Fierce fuckin’ rain,” he groused to Sergeant Lee “Nurse” Liu, who was standing behind him. “I can’t fuckin’ see fuckin’ shit.”

“Sleet,” corrected Liu. “Some of it’s even snow.”

“Whatever.”

“Use Captain Freah’s visor.”

“Helmet’s too damn heavy.”

“Then I will.”

Powder gave his companion a scowl, then braced himself to fit the smart helmet and its high-tech visor over his head. Freah’s suggestion that they take the new device had seemed like a great idea—until Powder put it on in the transport out to Nellis. The helmet had been formed for the captain’s head. It scraped the hell out of Powder’s ears going on, but floated around freely like a bucket atop a water pump once on.

No wonder officers thought differently than normal human beings; their heads were shaped weird.

Normally, a Pave Low would ride with two officers—pilot and copilot—along with a pair of flight engineers and two crew members manning the guns. This craft, Charlie 7, had been flying nearly nonstop since before the crash, and was now on its third crew. Besides the pilots and the Dreamland volunteers as SAR personnel, it carried only one flight engineer, a staff sergeant named Brautman who had drunk at least four liter bottles of Coke since the Dreamland volunteers had come aboard forty-five minutes ago. He definitely had a caffeine buzz—his chin bobbed up and down constantly and his arms buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. Brautman kept getting up and down, pacing back and forth between the rear of the flight deck and the rest of the cabin, so jittery Powder felt like laying him out with a shot to the jaw.

“There, right there,” said Liu, pointing to the ravine.

Powder flicked the visor into infrared mode. A brownish blob appeared at the lower left of the screen; the weather cut down greatly on the available detail, but there was definitely something warm down there.

“Get us the fuck down there,” Powder yelled to Brautman, who relayed the request to the pilot without the expletive.

“Too windy,” was the reply.

“Fuck that.” Sergeant Talcom took off the helmet, and then nearly lost it as turbulence rocked the helo. Liu grabbed the helmet and Powder tottered forward, grabbing at the bulkhead like a drunken sailor.

“You gotta get us fuckin’ down!” he yelled at the two men on the flight deck.

As a general rule, Air Force SAR helicopter pilots, and Pave Low jocks in particular, had boulder-sized balls. With the possible exception of their mamas, they weren’t scared of anything. This particular pilot had flown deep into Iraq during the Gulf War, and had a scar on his leg to prove he had done so under fire. But he shook his head.

“The storm is too much, night’s coming on, and that’s not a man down there,” he told Powder.

“How the fuck do you know?” demanded the sergeant.

“Because we’ve been looking at that spot for five minutes on the infrared.” answered the copilot, pointing to the Pave Low’s screen. A strong gust of wind caught the helicopter, and he snapped his head back to the front as the pilot steadied the craft. “The scope is clear,” he added. “No one’s there.”

“He’s on ours!” answered Powder. He jerked his thumb back toward Liu. “Or something is! I’m fuckin’ tellin’ yaour gear spotted something.”

“Look, Sergeant, you do your job, we’ll do ours,” said the copilot. “And watch your language when you’re talking to an officer.”

“Hey, fuck that,” grumbled Powder.

Liu squeezed next to him, the helmet on his head. The Whiplash crew members’ discrete-burst com sets didn’t interface with the Pave Low’s interphone, so he hadn’t heard the discussion.

“I see something,” he shouted to the others over the whine of the engines.

“We know,” said Powder.

“Not a person,” answered the copilot.

“I know,” said Liu. “But I have a theory.”

“What?” said Brautman.

“If that object below is the ejection seat, which I believe it must be, then perhaps the pilot came out nearby.”

No shit, thought Powder.

“In this storm, he would seek shelter,” continued Liu. “There are caves on the south side of the ravine.”

“We can look.” said the copilot, all of a sudden Mr. Compromise. He said something into his mouthpiece and the pilot began nodding his head.

“You’re a fuckin’ diplomat, you know that, Nurse?” Powder told Liu.

The wash of the motors drowned out Liu’s reply. The two Whiplash troopers resumed their posts at the windows, trying to scan through the heavy fog and drizzle.

The helicopter lurched sharply left, so quickly Talcom thought they were going in.

“Got something!” yelled the flight engineer.

Powder bent forward to look at the IR screen. A small greenish blob congealed at the bottom of the screen around other greenish blobs in a sea of fuzz.

“Our fuckin’ guy?” he asked Liu, who was scanning with the CIV.

“Something,” replied Nurse. “The rain and sleet hinder the sensors.”

The pilots agreed the only way to find out was to go down there. But between the wind and the ravine, the closest the helicopter could come after three attempts was twenty-five feet.

“Tell the pilot to hold the fuckin’ thing steady and we’ll fuckin’ rappel,” Powder told Brautman.

“That’s a hell of a fall,” said the flight engineer.

“I ain’t plannin’ on fuckin’ fallin,” said Powder. “Come on—it’s gettin’ fuckin’ dark. We gotta kick ass here.”

Brautman consulted with the pilots through his corn gear. “He’s up for it if you’re up for it.”

The helicopter stuttered against a wind shear.

“Fuckin’ damn, let’s kick ass.”

“Hey,” said Brautman, grabbing Talcom’s shoulder. “You sure?”

“Fuck you.”

Brautman laughed and shook his head.

“What?”

“You curse worse than anyone I’ve ever met”

“Fuck off.”

“Ten bucks says you can’t get through the rest of the mission without using the F word.”

Powder snorted. “Sure. Now let’s stop screwin’ around and do it. Liu, give me the damn helmet back and put on your own. Mama always told me never go out in a storm without a hat.”

The Pave Low reared sideways as the door slid open for Powder and Liu. The wash of wind, sleet, hail, and rain against Powder’s body felt like a tsunami, sending him off balance into the bulkhead behind the cockpit. The sergeant smacked the back of his helmet against the metal and rebounded like a cue ball with bottom English.

“Bitchin’ shit-ass weather,” said Powder, grabbing for the side of the door. He was careful not to use “fuck.” Ten bucks was ten bucks.

By the time he was three quarters of the way down the rope line, his thick weatherproof gloves were sopping wet. He managed to toe himself against a ledge six or seven feet over the cave Liu had spotted. The helo had descended a little further, but could hardly be called steady; one of the gyrations whipped him forward, and he just managed to avoid smashing his knee on the rocks. Leaning around the rope, Powder tried to see what the hell was below him—he didn’t want to be climbing through this shit for a lost mountain lion.

He couldn’t see much of anything except some very nasty-looking rocks. And sheets of rain, sleet, and snow.

Slowly, he worked himself down far enough to leave the rope. The helicopter began drifting backward as he went; he twisted and put one arm out to keep himself from smacking against the rock face opposite the cave. Finally, he found a ledge wide enough to stand on.

As soon as he let go of the rope, he slipped and tumbled halfway down a three-foot-wide crevice to his right. His curses became truly poetic, invoking the wrath not merely of God, but of the bastard recruiting sergeant who had steered him toward such a thank-shitting-less life. He continued to curse until he reached the cave, where he found Liu kneeling over a prostrate body.

“Alive. Barely. Hypothermia. Broken leg. Internal injuries,” said Liu over the Whiplash corn set. “It’s the pilot, Dalton.”

“Yeah. Think he’ll survive a shittin’ sling?” asked Powder. “He better. An avalanche may cover the cave opening any minute.”

“You’re pulling my pud, right?”

“Too big to pull, Powder.”

Talcom heard—or thought he heard—the rocks groan above. He popped out his walkie-talkie and told the crew to expedite the stretcher.

The wind died somewhat as they secured Dalton and brought him beneath the helicopter. The sleet compensated by kicking down harder.

Despite the fact that he was clad entirely in waterproof gear, water had seeped into every pore of Powder’s body. Even his liver felt waterlogged. He sloshed against the rocks, trying to keep the stretcher from spinning too much as it cranked upward. It had reached nearly to the doorway when the Pave Low stuttered backward, pushed toward the jagged peaks by an immense gush of wind.

“Hey, you bastard,” Powder shouted. “Crank him in before you go anywhere.”

He and Liu stared at the aircraft struggling above them, no more powerful than a grasshopper caught in the fury of the storm. The front of the helicopter pushed upward, then steadied back, leveling off. Brautman appeared in the doorway, fumbling with the mechanism for the stretcher. Dalton disappeared inside the hull.

Then the rear of the MH-53 veered to the left, the front of the big bird tipping against the wind. Powder thought the idiot pilot had forgotten them and was taking off.

In the next moment, the helicopter’s tail smashed against the rocks.

Dreamland Commander’s Office
19 February, 1803

“EXCUSE ME, COLONEL,” SAID SERGEANT GIBBS, opening the door to Dog’s office. “Secretary Keesh is on the line.”

Dog nodded, then turned back to Geraldo, who had only just come in. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me,” he told her. “This isn’t going to be pleasant anyway.”

“I understand, Colonel.” She stood. “I should be back at my lab in any event. You’ll contact me when Kevin is picked up?”

Even though he was a big believer in remaining positive, Dog found it hard not to grimace. If Madrone had managed to parachute—and at the moment there was no reason to think that he had, based on what the copilot had said—he would have spent more than seven hours in mountainous terrain in freezing weather.

“It’s okay, Colonel,” said Geraldo. “I realize the odds. But it’s best to sound positive.”

“I’ll keep you informed,” he told her as she walked out of the room.

Ax held the door for her. The sergeant rarely, if ever, did that for anyone, Dog thought to himself before picking up the phone.

Ax soft on Geraldo?

No way.

“Stand by for Secretary Keesh,” said an aide on the other line. The woman’s voice sounded muffled, as if she were speaking from inside full body armor—undoubtedly standard issue for anyone on Keesh’s staff.

“How the hell did you lose two airplanes?” demanded Keesh as the line clicked.

“Actually, sir, it was one 777 and two Flighthawks. We’ve recovered one of the pilots. Two others are missing, including the ANTARES subject.”

Dog paused for effect, pushing around the papers on his desk. Among them was an old photograph Ax had found while going through some old papers the other day; it showed Dog at an air show standing in front of a P-51 Mustang.

Damn nice airplane. He hadn’t had a chance to fly it, though.

“What is this going to do to the project?” Keesh demanded.

“At the moment, Mr. Secretary, we’re in the process of recovering our people. We haven’t even located the wreckage yet.

“You’re taking your damn time.”

There was no sense arguing with him. Bastian looked up as the door to his office opened again. Danny Freah stood there with one of his most serious expressions.

“With all due respect, sir, I’m advised by my security people that we’re speaking on an open line,” said Bastian.

“That’s not going to get you off the hook, Bastian.”

Dog was tempted—sorely tempted—to ask if Keesh thought he’d arranged the crash solely to make the Secretary look bad. But he merely told Keesh that he would keep him apprised through the proper channels, then hung up the phone.

“You’re not here about that line being open, are you?” Dog said to Danny, who was still standing in the doorway.

“They’ve lost contact with the Pave Low that Powder and Liu were on,” said Freah. “They think they went down. The storm’s pretty bad.”

“Excuse me, Colonel,” said Major Stockard, rolling up behind Danny. “Can I get in on this?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything to get in on, Jeff,” said Bastian.

“Nellis is asking for help in the search,” explained Danny, who obviously had already told Zen what was up.

“Raven and the Flighthawks can help,” said Stockard. “The IR sensors on the U/MFs are more sensitive than the units in the Pave Lows. We can get in through the storm while Raven stays up above.”

“We just lost two Flighthawks,” said Bastian.

“The Flighthawks had nothing to do with that,” said Jeff. He gave his wheels a shove, then pulled his hands close to his body as the chair rolled across the threshold, narrowly clearing the doorjambs. “We can be off the ground inside of thirty minutes. Twenty, easy. Raven’s ready to go. With the weather, the Flighthawks would extend our vision exponentially.”

“I don’t know Jeff. Those are our last two Flighthawks.”

“Why do we have them if we can’t use them?”

“You have to be tired as shit.”

“Screw that.”

Bastian folded his arms. If the Flighthawks ran into trouble in the heavy storm—and the weather report was anything but pleasant—Keesh would be unmerciful. Worse, the Flighthawk program might be set back six months or even longer.

But he had two missing men, plus two Whiplash team members and the crew of a Pave Low down. What was more important?