Dragon Sim-13 (26 page)

Hossey asked the next question that had to be asked from the point of view of mission success. "What about wreckage? Do you think it will be identifiable?"

Hawkins was exasperated. Didn't these idiots understand what he was telling them? 'The damn helicopter blew up, sir. There probably aren't enough pieces left to figure out what the hell type of aircraft it was, never mind identify its source."

Hossey hung his head. Trapp spoke for the first time. "What are you going to do about the wreckage, sir?"

Hossey looked up. "What do you mean, what am I going to do?"

"You're not going to check on it? There still could be somebody alive back there."

Hossey rubbed his head as he considered the problem. "Now that we have a good fix on location, I'll have the SFOB run satellite imagery on the next pass over, which will probably be in a couple of hours. There's not much else we can do right now." He turned to Hooker. "Finish the debrief while I contact the SFOB and give them the grids for the crash site."

Fort Meade, Maryland Friday, 9 June, 0600 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 1:00 a.m. Local

Meng sat at the master console. Tunnel 3 was quiet. The SFOB staff was down to only a watch officer. All that was left for the USSOCOM people to do was the debrief the next day. Meng had sent Wilson home with instructions to handle that tomorrow. He looked as a new message from the real FOB appeared on his screen. He transcribed the location of the crash and sent a request next door to the NSA for the imagery to be forwarded to the FOB. There was no sense in alarming the FOB commander, Meng reasoned, by not answering this request.

FOB, Osan Air Force Base, Korea Friday, 9 June, 0717 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 4:17 p.m. Local

Hossey looked over the faxed imagery with Trapp. The resolution and quality were unbelievable. Even so, the remains of the helicopter were hard to distinguish. The only reason they knew it was the location where the helicopter had gone down was because of the burn marks. There was no large piece of wreckage, just a few burned fragments barely visible through the trees. If that had happened before landing, then no one could have survived, Hossey knew.

He looked up and addressed Trapp. "Tell me again what you told me after the debriefing."

Trapp had pulled the colonel aside, fifteen minutes ago, at the conclusion of the debriefing, and he had clearly been agitated. "Sir, we're kissing those guys off too easy. That pilot was under goggles and all he saw was the initial explosion. I watched something go down in flames into the trees, but I don't think it was big enough to be the whole bird. Maybe something blew off it and the rest of the bird came down intact."

Now, Trapp looked at the colonel. "I'm sorry, sir. After seeing this I guess I was wrong."

Hossey rubbed the stubble of growth that had grown on his chin over the past thirty-six hours. "I'm not sure, Jim. I'm just not sure. What about the radio, either SATCOM or 70? Did the guys on the other bird have that?"

Not totally trusting the SATCOM, the detachment had made a private agreement with Hossey. Unknown to the SFOB, Team 3 had carried an extra radio, the Special Forces standard high-frequency PRC70, on the mission.

They had carried it in fear that the SATCOM might be cut off for whatever reason, most particularly if they weren't exfiltrated on time. If the SATCOM channel was shut down, Hossey was supposed to have the DET-K commo people set up a high-frequency base station and monitor an emergency guard net.

The team was to use the PRC70 only in emergencies, and only after they weren't receiving any more messages on the SATCOM, or if the messages received on the SATCOM lacked Hossey's authenticator. The 70 had been the team's ace in the hole against a loss of the primary means of communication.

The plan had been Riley's idea and Hossey had agreed with the team sergeant's reasoning. It was always good to have an alternate means of communications. Now Hossey wanted to know what had happened to that radio.

Trapp looked embarrassed. "We torched it, sir. We burned everything at the pickup zone before getting on the helicopters. You know we were briefed to get rid of everything to reduce the weight. Riley and Mitchell had figured that if we made it on the helicopters we wouldn't need that stuff anymore."

Hossey shook his head. That had been a mistake. He looked at the pictures again. "I guess it doesn't matter now anyway."

Everything here was shutting down. The Blackhawk crew would spend the night, then fly back to Misawa to link up with their support element there. O'Shaugnesy would remain in the hospital another week before being transferred back to the States for further care. Hossey ordered the remaining members of Team 3 to go up to Yongsan and stay on post for the next few days. He had already fed them the oplan cover story.

Jim Trapp had volunteered to accompany Hossey on his next task. They would drive up to ChunChon the next morning to inform Mitchell's wife of his death. None of the other people lost had been married, as far as Hossey knew. Hooker had reported that Chong had had a local girl in Seoul with whom he'd been close, and volunteered to break the news to her the next day.

Hossey wrote out his last message to the SFOB, then transmitted it. Immediately afterward, the commo equipment was broken down and they started loading up for the ride back up to Seoul and home.

"They die away and are reborn; recurrent,

as are the passing seasons."

Sun Tzu: The Art of War

Western Slope, Changbai Mountains, China Thursday, 8 June, 2155 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 5:55 a.m. Local

The explosion of the number 4 external fuel tank blew the flaming pod away from the helicopter and sprayed the entire top right side of the aircraft with pieces of metal. The shrapnel tore through the turbine engines, simultaneously causing both engines to fail.

C.J. felt a total loss of power as he was trying to regain control of the wildly careening helicopter. He had three seconds from the initial explosion before the Blackhawk hit the trees, and he utilized that scant time as best he could. Automatically he brought the cyclic all the way up to its stops while pushing the cyclic forward to level the aircraft. With the loss of hydraulics, the stick responded sluggishly. The Blackhawk hit the trees nose down and rolled to the left. Bones cracked in C.J.'s right hand as he made a final desperate effort to keep the aircraft from flipping over before impact.

The aircraft tore through the thick tree cover and came to a halt on the ground. The combination of the original forward speed of ninety knots and the sudden drop in altitude produced a collision that crumpled the left front of the helicopter. Shattered glass, twisted metal, and foliage filled the cockpit.

On impact all the occupants of the cargo bay were thrown forward in a pile. Buried under the bodies of the rest of the team, Riley lay still until the helicopter came to a rest. He could feel the others stirring as they tried to get up. He heard someone in the front screaming in pain, but his first priority was to get himself untangled, then get a door opened and his people out before the helicopter exploded. Riley could smell jet fuel leaking. As soon as that fuel touched part of the hot engine, the helicopter would burst into flames.

In the confused darkness, it was Comsky who got the right cargo door open. Using all the strength in his short, powerful body, he wrenched the door off its rollers and shoved it aside. Then he proceeded to get people out by the expedient method of picking them up and throwing them through the open door. Olinski, Hoffman, and Chong were propelled out the door. He looked next at Riley, who signaled that he was all right.

Riley turned to help Mitchell, who was trying to tear through the wreckage and free the copilot. The pilot, in the right front seat, was trying to unbuckle his copilot but was able to use only one arm. The copilot was in bad shape. The whole left front of the helicopter was pressed against his seat. Blood was splattered about—a darker color than the flat gray of the interior paint.

As he leaned over the copilot's seat and tried to unfasten his seat belt, Riley saw something that turned his stomach. The front instrument console had been twisted back by the impact and had torn into the copilot's legs. Jagged metal had cut his thighs to the bone, pinning him to his armored seat. Riley could see the white bone against the console's edge.

Riley slid back and grabbed Mitchell by the shoulders. He pointed at the copilot's legs and then at the flowing fuel. He shouted at both Mitchell and the pilot. "Get out! He's a goner. We can't get him out in time before it blows. GO! GO!"

Riley shoved Mitchell toward the open cargo door, where Comsky waited patiently. With one large paw, Comsky grabbed Mitchell and hauled the team leader out. Riley saw that Hoffman had climbed back into the helicopter during all this and was hammering away at something in the rear of the cargo compartment.

"Get out!" Riley yelled at Hoffman. He didn't know what Hoffman was doing, but he didn't have time to find out. Fuel finally reached the hot engine exhausts and burst into flames. Instantly, the entire left side of the helicopter became an inferno. Riley clambered away from the flames as the copilot screamed in agony. The pilot paused in his door on the way out. Looking back at Riley, he pointed with his right hand. Riley quickly understood and nodded. The pilot rolled free out of the right front door.

Riley held himself steady in the right cargo door, ignoring the flames licking at his feet. He drew his 9mm pistol, aimed quickly, and fired twice. Then he jumped out, closely followed by Hoffman, who was cradling something in his arms.

Comsky, Chong, and Mitchell were dragging Olinski away from the burning helicopter as Riley and Hoffman caught up with them. The pilot was fleeing off to their left. They were thirty meters away when the helicopter exploded.

The impact threw them all to the ground, and Mitchell screamed in agony. Riley picked himself up and ran over to his team leader. The captain's entire right side was covered with blood where a fragment of the exploding helicopter had laid it open.

6:45 a.m. Local

An hour later Riley took stock of the situation in the growing daylight. They were still only thirty meters away from where the helicopter had crashed, but there was little to indicate that a helicopter had impacted on that spot. The explosion had scattered pieces in a hundred-meter circle and had scorched the forest.

Comsky finished sewing up the captain as best he could. Earlier, the medic had set Olinski's broken leg and arm. These two men had sustained the only serious injuries from the accident. The other team members were banged up but functional. Somehow, training and instinct had held fast and everyone had their weapons in hand. Those, in combination with the ammunition and grenades on their vests, meant that the beat-up outfit still had some bite left.

Riley walked over to Hoffman, who had been working with the insides of the black box for which he had risked his life. "What do you think? You gonna be able to do anything with that?"

Hoffman squinted up at Riley from behind his slightly bent glasses. "Hmm. I think so. Olinski still had the PRC68 on his vest, so I've cannibalized some stuff off that. There'll be two main problems. The biggest is that we don't have a power source. It takes a lot of juice to transmit high-frequency radio. The battery from the 68 won't even warm the wires of this thing. The second problem is we'll only be able to send, even if it does work. We won't be able to receive. I'll send using two wires as a kind of telegraph key. It's rigged to go now, if we only had a power source. I don't think it will be good for much beyond one shot."

Riley nodded. "That was real good thinking, Dan."

Hoffman was pleased with the compliment and the unexpected use of his first name. Riley really meant it. In the excitement of the crash, Hoffman had had the presence of mind to leap back into the helicopter and tear the aircraft's high-frequency transmitter out of the right rear panel of the cargo compartment. Using the transmitter, in combination with the small FM radio that Olinski had kept, Hoffman had jury-rigged something they could possibly use to send out a message. Where they'd send, and to whom, and on what frequency, Riley wasn't quite sure yet. He'd worry about that when they found a power source.

Riley turned his attention to the wounded. He walked over to the tree stump where Comsky was now setting the broken right arm and hand of the pilot. All the bones in that hand were fractured from the tremendous force C.J. had tried to exert on the cyclic during the crash. The arm had snapped during the helicopter's impact with the ground.

The pilot extended his left hand to Riley. "We haven't had the opportunity. I'm C.J. Mclntire. You all can call me C.J." He looked at the lean sergeant. "I appreciate what you did back in the bird. I'd have done it myself but with this arm I couldn't get at my holster."

Riley accepted the hand and the thanks. Shooting the copilot had been an act of mercy. Burning alive wasn't a fate Riley would wish on anyone. There was no body to recover and bury. The fire and explosion had taken care of that. "I'm Dave Riley. That's Comsky who's doing the honors on you. The man messing with the radio is Dan Hoffman. Tom Chong is up there on that outcropping keeping an eye out for visitors. The man with the splints on his leg and arm next to you is Lech Olinski. And this over here is our team leader, Captain Mitchell." Mitchell painfully raised himself slightly on one arm and nodded.

C.J. returned the nod. "Well, Captain, what now?"

Mitchell gingerly sat up. He was pale from loss of blood. A twelve-inch gash ran from just under his right arm to above his hip. Although not deep, it was painful, and the sutures Comsky had put in threatened to tear open with any movement, starting the bleeding again. 

"I thought you might be able to tell us what we'd do next. Were you able to get anything out over the radio before we crashed?"

"Hell, sir, I had about three seconds before impact, and my time was kind of full, what with keeping us from inverting and landing on the blades. If we'd turned over, none of us would be alive now."

Riley persisted for Mitchell. "What was the backup plan? The other bird saw us go down. What was the plan for a downed aircraft? They going to send another bird in here to the crash site?"

C.J. sighed. "There isn't a plan. There is no backup. We're on our own, unless we can get ahold of somebody. The way that fuel tank exploded, they probably think we're all dead. We should be, too. We're just lucky it blew away and didn't ignite all the rest of the fuel." C.J. shot the problem back to the team leader. "What was your backup plan for this?"

Mitchell shrugged. "We had a lot of contingency plans. Unfortunately, we didn't have one for the helicopter crashing on the way out. Since we didn't know what your flight route was going to be, and didn't even get a chance to talk to you all during isolation, it was kind of hard to plan."

The words sank in to everyone in the clearing.

Riley broke the silence. "We need to think this through. The Chinese definitely have a reaction force moving by this time. Now that it's daylight we can expect to see choppers pretty soon. It might take them awhile to work this far to the southeast, but they will eventually."

He reached into his pants cargo pocket and pulled out his 1:250,000 large-scale map of Manchuria. He unfolded the map and handed it to C.J. "Show me where you think we are."

C.J. studied the map, then pointed. "We're right here. We were flying up this draw."

Riley looked around. The terrain fit in with the location that C.J. had pointed out. "OK, this means we're about three kilometers west of the crest of the Changbai Mountain Range. We've got it downhill all the way, once we make it over the top. That's the good news. The bad news is that once we get over the top we'll still have a hundred and fifty kilometers to the coast."

He checked with Mitchell. "Can you walk?"

"Hell, yeah. It only hurts when I laugh or Comsky touches it. As long as we don't try to move too fast, I think I can make it."

Riley looked at Olinski. "We'll have to carry you, Ski. We need to get out of here. We've already been here too long. Let's sterilize the area. Maybe the Chinese will think everyone died in the crash when they find it, but we can't count on it. Comsky, make a litter for Olinski. You and I will start out carrying it and rotate with Chong and Hoffman. It's 0700 now. I want to put as much mileage between us and this spot as we can before we start spotting Chinese helicopters. Let's go!"

7:35 a.m. Local

Carrying Olinski, they moved very slowly up the mountainside. Comsky had made a stretcher out of two long branches and a poncho he always carried in his vest butt pack.

Chong scouted ahead to make sure the way was clear. Riley didn't like moving in daylight, but he knew they needed to get away from the crash site. He also knew that carrying Olinski at night, over rough terrain, would be a tricky proposition at best.

It took more than four hours, scrambling over the rocks and keeping under the cover of trees as much as possible, to make it to the crest. As they crossed over the top, Riley took a last look back to the west. He still couldn't see any sign of a search in that direction.

He led the team a kilometer down the eastern slope, then stopped under a thick stand of pine for a rest. Moving downhill was a bit easier; it had taken them a little less than an hour to do the last kilometer.

Shenyang Military Region Headquarters, China Friday, 9 June, 0100 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 9:00 a.m. Local

General Yang carefully examined the information available on the Daqing pipeline explosion. The most glaring fact was that General Haotian's duty officer had bungled things, but that would be dealt with later. The more immediate and pressing problem was tracking down the terrorists who had done this.

The evidence was disturbing. The most intriguing piece was Captain Lu's report of hearing helicopters off to the north of the explosion area. If there were helicopters involved, that meant somebody with more resources than a group of dissidents was involved. Yang had initially suspected the students or their supporters had been behind the explosion. The helicopter report changed that suspicion. Now, much as Yang disliked considering it, the most likely culprits were revolting Chinese soldiers. Ever since the killings in Tiananmen Square, the entire country had been in a state of flux. In this region, Yang had had no killings like they had in Beijing. The students had marched in Harbin, but it had been peaceful. Yang had already dispatched three of his divisions to Beijing at the request of the Communist party secretary, Zhao Ziyang, to aid in control there.

Yang was frankly more worried about that situation than this pipeline problem. With the dispatch of those troops, he had extended his hand into the power play going on in Beijing. The whole situation down there was very murky. He didn't need trouble in his own region.

Yang evaluated the likely possibilities and figured that the troops who had done the deed were probably trying to escape. He briefly considered the possibility that foreigners were involved. He doubted it, but had to admit there was a slight chance. Either the Russians, Americans, or Japanese. He very much doubted the Japanese. They used some of the oil from the pipe. He didn't think the Americans had the guts. They were making a lot of noise about the events in Tiananmen Square, but they would never back up their words. But the Russians were another story, Yang knew from past experience along the border. He wouldn't put it past them to have done this.