Ghost Watch (14 page)

Everyone in the chopper was screaming, but I switched off at that point and closed my eyes. Two chopper crashes I’d experienced in Afghanistan had prepared me for what would come next. At least I was strapped in this time. My head was pushed violently from side to side by the forces acting on the aircraft. The airflow shrieked. Correction – that was the girls.

I was suddenly jammed down into my seat. That meant the pilots had lift from the airflow rushing through the spinning main rotor; they still had some control. That was good news. We were slowing, the nose coming up. We were going to be okay.

And then we hit.

My head slammed forward into my chest. The harness compressed my ribcage in an instant and air blasted from my lungs. Through it all I heard crumpling sounds like a car in a compactor. All went quiet as the chopper dipped forward and back, rocking. Then something snapped and the helo plunged forward, nose down. A weight came crashing through the centre of the cabin – a person. Whoever it was smashed through the Perspex windscreen and vanished into the blackness below. The air filled with the smell of garden clippings as all manner of metal debris from the back of the aircraft hurtled past me. And then something—

I REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS FACING downhill. The air in the cabin was filled with the smell of shredded leaves and the sound of warning bells. A headache thumped behind my eyes. I could hear people groaning. And then our world lurched again and dropped several feet with a tortured, gouging, scraping whine of metal under intense strain.

An object slapped me hard in the side of my face. I turned as far as the harness would allow and saw that the branch of a tree had speared through the observation window behind me.

I was coming to the conclusion that the ride hadn’t quite finished when something else broke with a loud crack, and the Puma plunged, smashing through more branches, which obliterated most of what was left of the windshield. The nose of the aircraft hit something solid and immovable at an angle and the instant deceleration snapped my head forward again, the harness winding me a second time. And then, rolling slowly, the aircraft tipped lazily onto its side and came to rest like a large dead animal.

All motion ceased.

After a brief silence, people started groaning again.

I just sat, taking a moment to come to grips with what had happened. But then the smell of hot jet fuel permeated the shock and gave my brain a kick-start.
Get out get out get out
. . . I ripped off the headset and patted myself down, first mentally, then physically. All I found were bruises. Blood dripping on my shoulder caused me to look upward. I jumped up unsteadily. It was Travis, hanging out of the seat by his harness. A deep, ragged slice ran from his shoulder up the side of his head. Jesus . . . his skull was cracked open. I didn’t need to check his pulse, but I did anyway, confirming that I hadn’t needed to check his pulse.

Shaquand, Leila, and Ayesha were behind him, hanging down, also suspended by their harnesses. Ayesha and Leila had their hands over their mouths, screaming as the numbing effects of the wild ride they’d just survived wore off. I counted twelve PAX. The right number. So who’d gone through the windshield? I did a recount. Shit, of all people, it was the loadmaster. Either his harness hadn’t been fastened properly, or it had failed. If anyone was a candidate for a broken harness, I figured it would have been Boink, but the big man was still buckled in, slowly shaking his head from side to side with his eyes closed, no doubt hoping this was all a bad dream.

In the back of the cabin, Cassidy dropped out of his seat onto Rutherford below him.

‘Fuck,’ I heard Rutherford say.

‘Shaquand! Someone help her!’ Leila screamed.

Ayesha was sobbing hysterically. Shaquand, seated beside Leila, wasn’t moving. I stepped over to her, careful not to fall. The tree branch that had gone through the side of the Puma had impaled the woman through the collarbone and continued through the skin of the aircraft. Her eyes were open and placid. I closed them.

Blood had spattered over Leila’s jacket. I checked the singer; she was all in one piece. I hit the harness release and supported her weight, then helped her down and out of the seat and sat her on the floor.

I checked Ayesha next. She was shaking but nothing was punctured or broken. I hit the release and lifted her down, her body racked with sobs.

‘You’re okay,’ I told her. ‘You hear me?’ I rubbed her arms up and down. Her eyes looked into mine, and the sobbing ebbed. ‘You need to focus so that we can get you and Leila out of here. She’s going to depend on you, okay?’

Ayesha nodded.

I crouched in front of Leila.

‘You all right?’ I asked.

She gazed at me unresponsive, in shock.

LeDuc and Fournier fell out of the cockpit behind me. I turned briefly and saw LeDuc’s face smeared with blood from injuries to his nose and mouth. The aircrew was damn lucky to be alive as the Puma’s nose was flatter than a wristwatch, squashed from its impact with the ground.

‘Get them out – hurry,’ LeDuc gasped, breathless, coming up on all fours.

The smell of jet fuel was heavy in the air, overpowering. I scoped the situation. Getting out was easier said than done. At first glance, the Puma appeared to be a sealed coffn.

‘
Le panneau,
’ said LeDuc. ‘The hatch.’ He pointed at what was now the ceiling.

I left Leila with Ayesha, climbed up the floor, now a wall, then reached across and threw back the hatch’s locking mechanism. Swinging out, I kicked the handle, hoping the door would slide open, but the rails it was mounted on were bent out of alignment. The hatch was jammed shut.

‘Cassidy,’ I called out. He stood, shaky on his feet.

I made a gesture that could loosely be interpreted as get your shit together. He nodded, gave Rutherford a hand out of his seat, then checked West and Ryder before coming forward to see how Twenny Fo, Boink, and Peanut were doing.

The rapper and Boink were moving their heads and arms slowly, their movements oddly disconnected from the situation, as if they were in zero gravity. Peanut appeared to be unconscious. West gave him a shake and he opened his eyes.

‘C’mon,’ I yelled at my team. ‘Move it!’

The only exit possible was through the cockpit’s smashed front windshield.

‘There!’ I pointed forward.

Rutherford scrambled past me, climbed into the cockpit over the center floor console and kicked out the remaining Perspex.

‘Duke, you get the principals clear once they’re outside,’ I said, sending him through.

There was a lot of hot metal in those turbines. We didn’t have a lot of time before this crate blew.

Cassidy lifted Leila in his arms and passed her through the limited space into Rutherford’s waiting hands. Next was Ayesha. Twenny Fo pushed Peanut ahead and then jumped out after him. Boink climbed through the space on his hands and knees, but his gut became wedged between the pilot and co-pilot’s chairs. Cassidy and I put a shoulder to each butt cheek and shunted him free.

‘LeDuc, got a medical kit on board?’ I asked the Frenchman.

‘Down the back. I get it. You go. It is my ship. Henri and I are last off.’

Fournier agreed, grim-faced.

This was one argument I was happy to lose. I tapped Cassidy on the shoulder.

‘Go!’

The big sergeant didn’t need to be told twice. I had a last look at Shaquand and Travis. There was nothing we could do for them. I snatched off the colonel’s dog tags and leaped after Cassidy. Stumbling over the windshield frame, I came down heavily onto the ground, which was covered by torn tree branches and shredded leaf litter. Lying beside me was the loadmaster who’d shot out of the Puma to his death. I got to my feet and looked down at him. The man’s body was crumpled, his legs and arms splayed out at impossible angles. His eyes were open, and he’d bitten off the end of his tongue. I pulled his tags and stuffed them into my pocket.

Whump
. Heat warmed the side of my face. A fire had burst into life on the far side of the chopper. Flames illuminated the metal around the main rotor housing. Hot kerosene fumes fooded my nostrils. The flames built quickly, searching for more fuel. Pretty soon they were going to find it.

‘LeDuc,’ I yelled into the chopper. ‘Get out!’

I saw two desperate shadows tangling together as they scrambled into the cockpit. LeDuc shouted something at Fournier.

A small explosion shuddered the Puma’s airframe and a cover blew off part of the fuselage. It spun through the air and smacked with a crumpling sound into a tree. A hand reached out of the cockpit. I grabbed hold of it and pulled, and Fournier tumbled clear, rolling some way down the hill.

The flames were rising ten feet into the air on the far side of the fuselage. The heat was now searing my skin. The tanks were going to blow any second.

‘LeDuc!’ I screamed into the chopper.

A white plastic case with a red cross on it flew through the opening, followed by a man. LeDuc. I grabbed him, took hold of his clothing and heaved him down the hill after Fournier. I took a running leap away from the wreckage at the instant the ground beneath my feet shifted. An explosion rent the air and a shockwave followed that lifted and hurled me down the hill into a screen of dense wet bush. Burning fuel fell around us along with chunks of metal. I covered my head beneath my arm and lay where I landed, waiting for the shower of metal and faming jet fuel to bury me. Then my nose picked up something other than kerosene burning. I lifted my head. It was LeDuc. He was only a handful of feet away and his legs were on fire.

LeDuc jack-knifed when he realized that he’d become a Roman candle. He rolled and slapped at the flames while I jumped up and doused them with handfuls of wet leaf litter and earth.

When the flames were extinguished, we both lay there in the bush, exhausted, the fire-retardant flight suit protecting the French pilot’s legs steaming and smoking along with my Nomex gloves. We caught our breath watching the chopper burn twenty meters up the hill, the heat from the inferno only just bearable.

I got to my feet eventually and held out a smoking hand to LeDuc.

‘
Merci, mon ami
,’ he said, hoisting himself up.

I handed him the tags taken from the dead loadmaster. LeDuc accepted them, unzipped a small backpack hanging off one shoulder and dropped them into it.

‘Claude was a good man,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Married to a local woman in Goma. One child.’

The hill we found ourselves on was reasonably steep, about a forty-degree incline. Here and there were outcrops of wet black volcanic rock. The ground was a tangle of tree roots, mud and fint.

I heard a whistle and scoped around for its source. It was Ryder. He waved at us from thirty meters up the hill. I could just make him out through a tossed salad of palm fronds and snaking vines. I could also see Cassidy and West, but not Boink or Leila. Aside from the dense greenery, the fact it was dusk wasn’t helping with the visibility. I looked up and a burnished sky twinkled like pale blue stars through the holes in the tree canopy. Technically, at least, it was still daytime up there. We’d come down on the side of a heavily wooded valley, more rainforest than jungle. Wet black tree trunks patched with lime-green moss mingled with various species of palms, or shrubs with broad, fleshy, boat-shaped leaves. Liana vines, the type Tarzan swung on, hung down everywhere, some with no apparent anchor point overhead. I took another look at the canopy. It was mostly a solid roof, except where a fallen tree had left an opening and the plant life had burst forth on the forest floor below it as if with a steroidal fury, each bush and shrub competing in a life and death struggle with its neighbor to claim the precious extra sunlight.

From the looks of all the broken tree limbs and shredded foliage lying around, the trees, many well over a hundred feet, had cushioned our fall and saved our lives, gloving the Puma like a big green catcher’s mitt.

‘French helicopters never go down, huh?’ I said to LeDuc as I hoisted Fournier to his feet. Both pilots’ faces were black with burned kerosene. Mine was probably the same.

‘I think perhaps we took on dirty fuel,’ he replied and then, with a shrug, added, ‘Nothing we could do.’

‘You could’ve checked it.’

‘We did, of course.’

‘Injured?’ I asked Fournier, who was wincing.

‘
Mon épaule,
’ said the co-pilot. ‘My shoulder.
C’est disloquée
.’

‘Dislocated?’

‘
Oui
,’ said Fournier.

I checked the lieutenant’s arm. It wasn’t broken, but I could feel that the joint had sprung.

‘I can put it back in,’ I told him.

‘Do it,’ said Fournier with a nod, turning away.

I took hold of the forearm and put my thumb on the joint so that I could feel what was happening under the skin. He let out an extended grunt as I rotated his arm back and forth slowly and popped it back in.

‘Rest it,’ I told him. ‘Nothing’s broken. You should be able to use it again in a day or so.’

‘
Merci, monsieur
,’ he said, forcing a smile.

Picking our way up the hill, we came across the plastic medical case. The heat from the fire had distorted it on one side, but its contents were intact.