The day after: An apocalyptic morning (140 page)

              "Will those maps help us, sir?" Livingston asked.

              Bracken shook his head sadly. "Not if we can't monitor their radios," he said. "Obviously they're not using the Goddam CB bands or we would've picked them up by now. They're probably using a VHF direct band that links to the fuckin helicopter."

              "But we killed one," Stu, who had wandered over after bringing his platoon back from the pursuit, said helpfully. "Maybe two of them. Livingston said that they had a wounded man when they went around the hill. At least we've gotten on the fuckin scoreboard."

              Bracken looked at him with disgust. "The fuckin scoreboard?" he asked viciously. "You wanna hear about the fuckin scoreboard? We had a head count of 276 men this morning. That's one hundred and fucking twenty-four killed or deserted! And in exchange for what? For two of theirs! Maybe you think that's an acceptable ratio but it sounds suspiciously to me like we're losing about seventy-five men for every one that we take of theirs!"

              "They can't keep this up," Stu said, unoffended, at least visibly, by the rebuff. "They just can't. And we're learning. We lose less with each attack. We're almost there, sir. Almost fucking there. And when we get there, we'll make them pay for what they did. We'll kill every man in that town and rape every woman before we kill them too. They're doing this because they know they can't beat us!"

              "They are beating us, Covington," Bracken said. "Can't you fucking see that? They're kicking the shit out of us!"

              "Sir," Stu said, "we have to push on. We have to. At least give it a few more days. Like I said, now that they've taken casualties, they'll be more cautious. Our losses have been bad, that's true, but we're getting the upper hand now. Trust me, the attacks will slack off now."

              "Shit," Bracken mumbled, shaking his head, uncertain what to do. He looked at the faces of the men around him. It was obvious that they didn't want to push on any further.

              "Just a few more days," Stu repeated.

              "All right," Bracken said. "Let's move out. Form up again and we'll get the hell on our way. We need to increase the rate of our zigzagging as we march."

              He didn't hear the groan of the men listening with his ears, but he heard it with his mind.

              An hour went by, and then another, still with no word on what was happening with Hector in the makeshift operating room. Pat and two other members of the El Dorado Hills team sat in the conference room with them, all of them sipping tea, Skip updating them on the status of the war so far, with contributions from everyone but Paula. Paula simply sat, staring at the wall, occasionally crying softly to herself.

              At one point, about twenty minutes into the operation, Sally, the girl who had been ordered to test Hector's blood and find donors, shot by in the hallway with four people, two women and two men in tow. She took them to the room next door and drew a pint of blood from each of them, storing it in empty IV bags before carrying it next door to the operating suite. Everyone took this as a good sign that Hector was at least still hanging in there.

              Finally, when conversation lapsed for a few minutes, Skip said, "I need to go extract Christine and her team from their location. The militia has probably passed them by now."

              Pat simply nodded and Jack, the designated radioman, started to get up.

              "Why don't you stay here, Jase," Skip suggested. "I think Paula should come with me on this flight."

              Jack didn't protest but Paula certainly did. "No," she said firmly. "I'm staying here until I find out how Hector's doing."

              "I'll bring you back with me," Skip promised. "Come on. I think we need to talk."

              It took a few more minutes of convincing and a direct order from Skip, who as military commander of Garden Hill, technically had that right, but finally she agreed. They left the school building and went out to the parking lot, climbing into the front of the helicopter.

              Skip said nothing to her as he went through the start-up procedure and the abbreviated pre-flight check. He lifted off into the rainy sky and then headed northeast, towards the hill where hatchling one had been dropped. It was only after leveling off that he began to speak.

              "You want to quit being a hit team leader," he said, not phrasing it as a question.

              She looked over at him, this man that she loved, that she shared a bed with, amazed at always at the ability he had to read her mind at times. "I made the decision to go ahead with the attack," she said. "I knew that the militia was inside the safety margin, but I went ahead anyway. I fucked up, Skip. I'm not fit to command a team."

              He didn't contradict her, not directly. "You made a decision," he said. "Whether it was a fuck-up or not, who knows? From what I understand, they weren't that far inside the safety margin. I can't say that I would've chosen any differently."

              "Skip," she said, "one of my people is dead! We had to leave Leanette out there to commit suicide in front of those fuckers. And Hector might die as well. I made a decision and now I've lost half of my team! I can't go back out there and do that again. I can't!"

              "You can," he said. "And you have to."

              "I can't!"

              "You and Christine are the most experienced team leaders we have," he said. "Our survival counts on you doing your job. We need you out there, Paula. Don't dwell on what happened today. It's a part of war. Think about the thirty or so missions that you did pull off successfully, where you did get your whole team out in one piece after leaving five or six of those fascist fucks dead in the mud."

              "You don't understand how I feel," she accused. "You can't possibly!"

              "Can't I?" he asked. "Did you think that you were the first person that something like this has happened to? Do you think you're the first person to make a decision in combat that you think cost someone their lives?"

              "What do you mean?" she asked, wiping at a tear.

              He sighed a little. "January 27, 1991," he said. "I was with the 3rd ACR flying out of a forward air base in Saudi Arabia, just a few miles from the Iraqi border. I was the pilot of an Apache and Jim Summers was my gunner. We flew out at 1:00 in the morning on a strike mission to try to take out some Iraqi tanks that were supposed to be holed up in defensive positions just on the other side of the border."

              "Skip," she said, "I don't see what..."

              "Just listen," he said, taking his eyes off the instruments and the windshield for a moment to look at her.

              She stopped talking and listened.

              "We didn't have GPS in our Apache," he said. "That was back in the days before they had put them in every aircraft. All we were using for navigation was the inertial systems that operated by a computer tracking how far we'd gone from our starting point. These were far from perfect navigation systems and what happened to me and Jim are a big part of the reason that every attack craft did have GPS by the year 1996.

              "It was a windy night, about twenty knots sustained with gusts up to forty at times. That should've clued us in to what was going to happen. It didn't. We flew out to the target area just across the border and started looking for those tanks or for anything else Iraqi that we could blow the shit out of. Visual navigation was pretty much a joke out in that desert, especially at night looking through the FLIR since everything looked the same. A bunch of flat sand, scrub brush, and small hills and that was Iraq and Saudi for you. We couldn't find our targets so we went back and forth along the border, staying just to the north side of it, inside Iraq. We would stop and hover for a long time, panning back and forth, trying to see something, and then we'd do it again a few miles to the side.

              "After about an hour or so of this, just as we were starting to give up hope of finding anything, we spot four tanks moving right to left in the distance, apparently shifting from one place to another. It was hard to identify the type exactly because the wind was kicking up sand and degrading the effectiveness of the FLIR. The image was a little blurry. But we knew they had to be Iraqi armor because they were north of the border, right? I mean, the ground war hadn't started yet and there was no reason that our tanks would've been in Iraq.

              "So Jim locks 'em up on the weapons panel and assigns them target numbers. He arms up the Hellfires and gets ready to fire and we contact our controller to tell him we're about to make an attack. The controller asks if we have positive ID on type and we have to reply that we don't, that the image isn't clear. But we give him our position, which, according to our nav computer, is more than three kilometers inside of Iraq. The controller boots the decision to attack to us, which, as aircraft commander, falls to me, even though Jim is the one that will actually be firing at them. So, confident that I'm looking at enemy tanks, I give him the go ahead to launch."

              Skip sighed again, feeling physical pain at the recall of this memory, which he had fought long and hard to suppress over the years. "The missiles go flying out and blow the first tank all to shit. The second one goes up just as easily. You could actually see the turret go flying into the air from the explosion. The third one takes a hit but is only disabled. The fourth one does the same. Pretty soon, while we're watching these tanks burn, we see the figures of the crews climbing out of the two disabled ones and trying to run off into the desert." Skip shook his head a little. "They didn't have anywhere to hide. I flew in closer and Jim fired up the cannon on the nose of chopper. The sight was hooked into his helmet display so that everywhere he turned his head, the crosshairs for the gun followed. He mowed those men down, one by one, blowing them into little pieces. We yelled and screamed in triumph over the radio that we had just single-handedly taken out four Iraqi tanks and their crews.

              "And then..." a long pause as he wiped a tear running from his own eye, "and then the air controller put out a report that four American tanks had just come under fire from an unknown source. They said the report was several miles south of our reported position but it was far too close to be a coincidence."

              "It was you?" Paula asked, eyes wide.

              "It was us," he confirmed. "We didn't realize it at the time, but every time we had stopped and hovered to check for the Iraqi positions, that wind was blowing us backwards and our nav computer didn't realize it. By the time we encountered the tanks we were back inside Saudi Arabia thinking that we were in Iraq. We massacred four of our own tanks by mistake and killed sixteen American soldiers."

              "Jesus, Skip," Paula said. "But you didn't know..."

              "No," he said, "I didn't know. I made a decision though and I sent sixteen young kids home in coffins with American flags wrapped around them. As soon as I realized what had happened, I almost lost it. I started babbling on the radio, asking permission to land to check for survivors. I was ordered back to base but I could barely fly. The controller had to calm me down and talk me in, that's how bad I was.

              "I was ready to turn my wings in that night, as soon as I landed. I was ready to get my court martial and go to Leavenworth. I thought I deserved it."

              "But you kept flying," Paula said, starting to see the point of his story now.

              "I kept flying. During wartime the inquiries went fast. It took them less than three days to clear us of criminal negligence or any wrongdoing. It was just one of those things, was what we were basically told. As soon as we were cleared, my CO ordered me back into the air on another tank strike mission."

              "And you went?" Paula asked.

              "I didn't want to," he said. "I didn't think I was fit to serve anymore. I was terrified of making the same mistake again, but he insisted and I went up. My hands shook and I nearly threw up as we crossed the border. But I did my job that night and I did it every other night and day until that stupid war was over. I learned from what had happened and I didn't quit because I couldn't quit. I just couldn't."

              "And that's stayed with you ever since?" Paula said.

              He nodded. "It's stayed with me ever since. And what happened to your team today will stay with you forever, don't think that it won't. But you can't quit, babe. We need you out there. We need you. So you have to put it behind you for now."

              The pick-up of Christine's team went off without a hitch. They made radio contact with them and learned that the militia had passed by their position uneventfully more than forty minutes before. Skip landed in the pre-arranged pick-up location and they climbed aboard, their faces solemn, their weapons unfired. Maria in particular was taking it very hard.

              "How did she go?" she asked tearfully as Skip lifted off. Christine had allowed her the use of the headset.

              "She went like a warrior," Paula said, crying again. She told the story of Leanette's last stand with a halting voice.