Dragon Sim-13

13

Commander Lemester watched the lone Blackhawk waver above the fantail of his ship and then slam down on it.

Son of a bitch almost crashed into my ship, he thought angrily as he strode forward to confront the pilot. He stopped in amazement as the cargo doors slid open and five dirty men, dressed in black and carrying weapons, hopped off. Four of them reached back in and started pulling out a man wrapped in a poncho. The fifth man ran over to Lemester.

"We need a stretcher up here right now to take this man to your infirmary."

"Who the hell are you?" Lemester shouted over the whine of the helicopter engine shutting down.

"Listen, we've got a wounded American here. Just get the damn stretcher!" the tall, powerful-looking man yelled back.

Lemester had had enough of taking orders on board his own ship. "First, I want to know who you people are."

Trapp glared at the officer standing in front of him in his clean white uniform. He grabbed his M79 grenade launcher from his vest and pointed the gaping 40mm muzzle at the navy man's face. "You've got ten seconds to get me a stretcher and get that man to your infirmary."

Behind Trapp, the four other members of Team 3, standing under the slowing rotor blades, brought their weapons to the ready.

Lemester was a by-the-book man, but he wasn't stupid. His curiosity was rapidly diminishing. These men didn't look like they were bluffing. He ordered the stretcher brought up, then confronted the tall man. "What about the other helicopter? When is it going to be here? My orders are to wait for it, then I can get out of here."

"There isn't going to be another helicopter."

Trapp cornered Hawkins in the small stateroom that Lemester had provided the team. They waited there while O'Shaugnesy was being worked on in the infirmary. Devito was also down in the infirmary to make sure that the wounded man didn't say anything about the mission while the navy doctor was treating him.

"What the hell happened to the other bird, and where are we going now? I thought you were supposed to fly us back to Osan from here."

"We are supposed to fly you there, but neither me nor my copilot are up to it right now. I've got to wait until my nerve comes back. Give us an hour or so, then we'll take off again.

"Also, I figured you'd want to get your man into the infirmary here rather than let him wait another four hours in the air. C.J. — he's the guy who was piloting the other bird — and I, before we left Japan, decided that if we had any wounded, we'd drop them off here. That isn't what our captain told us to do, but screw that jerk. I'm not going to fly wounded men four extra hours when they can get taken care of sooner."

Trapp agreed with Hawkins' logic, and his respect for the pilot rose another notch. That had been some damn fine flying back there. The pilot's reasoning concerning O'Shaugnesy had mirrored his. If Hawkins hadn't shut down once he landed, Trapp had been prepared to do some weapon pointing at him also, so they could offload O'Shaugnesy and get him some proper care as soon as possible.

"Yeah, OK. What about the other bird though? What the hell happened to it? I didn't see any ground fire. How come you didn't hang around longer searching?"

Hawkins sighed. Since the explosion he'd thought about the same thing, replaying the scene in his mind innumerable times. He hadn't seen any fire from the ground either. C.J.'s bird had just exploded. He gave Trapp the only explanation that fit. "Going in we damn near ran into a Soviet patrol boat. As a matter of fact, the other bird did run into it. It looked to me like it hit the ship's mast. Any number of things could have been damaged that would lead to an explosion.

"I figure it was one of two things. They probably had a blade strike, which means that the transmission might have momentarily seized up, causing some damage to the gears. That damage could have become catastrophic and the transmission finally seized up for good, causing the rotor blades to stop immediately. Centrifugal force would have caused the transmission to separate from the aircraft, and the shrapnel would have punctured the external fuel tanks, causing the explosion we saw."

Hawkins considered what he had just proposed and ran the explosion through his mind one more time. Somehow that explanation still didn't feel right. "I'm not sure if that would have caused the type of explosion we saw, though. Another, more likely, possibility is that one of the external fuel tanks or lines might have been damaged in the collision and developed a small leak. The reason it took so long to blow is that the fuel probably got ignited by static electricity."

Trapp didn't believe it. "You're telling me they flew for almost six hours with a fuel leak and it took that long to explode?"

Hawkins tried to explain. "Static electricity builds on a helicopter as it flies. Sometimes it discharges into the atmosphere. Sometimes into the helicopter itself. That may have happened this time. With all the fuel we were carrying, both aircraft were an explosion waiting to happen. I don't think we'll ever know what really occurred.

"I didn't have the fuel to hang around searching. All I could see was a fire under the trees. There wasn't enough left of the other bird to search for. That thing disintegrated in midair. Plus, there was no place to land around the crash site."

Trapp had to accept the inevitable — the explanation didn't really matter. The bottom line was that the other aircraft hadn't made it out. He grabbed Lalli and the two of them went out to the fantail where the helicopter was sitting. While Lalli set up the SATCOM, Trapp wrote out the hardest message he ever had to write.

The brief, coded message had come in from the team two minutes ago. Hossey reread it and felt the chill settle deeper into his gut.

Hossey's trained eye broke out the message from the six-letter groups. MESSAGE: NUMBER 05. Exfil on time, one aircraft lost on way out, repeat, one aircraft lost on way out, vicinity longitude 128 degrees 23 minutes, latitude 42 degrees 30 minutes. All presumed killed. Refueling, depart 0215 Zulu.

One aircraft, Hossey thought. Half the team and two pilots dead. Eight men. Hossey listlessly handed the message to Hooker, then sat down at his desk. He knew he should immediately forward the information to the SFOB, but he needed a few moments to let the reality of the loss sink in. They wouldn't find out who had been killed until the survivors landed here in three and a half hours.

Down the corridor in Tunnel 3, General Olson and his staff were celebrating the successful exfiltration of the Special Forces team and the completion of their exercise. All had gone well in the simulation; the mission had been a success.

In Meng's office, the emotions were much different. Meng looked at the message about the lost aircraft another time. This was real. Eight men were dead because of his manipulations. He wasn't sure what to do. It was only a matter of time before the curtain of his deception was torn asunder. Questions would be asked. Meng thought he could control the FOB relatively well for a while yet. The surviving Blackhawk would drop the rest of the team at Osan and then, after a debrief and some rest, fly back to Misawa and down to Okinawa. Meng wondered how well the cover stories would work that had been concocted in the oplan against the possible loss of a helicopter. Would they work against the people who had written them?

Meng considered the situation. The aviation detachment commander from the 1 st Special Forces Group was supposed to report the aircraft lost at sea during classified training. The FOB commander was supposed to back him up on that. The problem would come when someone at USSOCOM put two and two together and came up with five. Meng ran the scenario through his computer. The answer was that he had anywhere from thirty-six to seventy-two hours, with a statistical mean of forty-eight, before someone started asking questions.

Meng rubbed his eyes wearily. He had that much time before the walls came crumbling down. He prayed the attack had moved the Old Men, even if just a little.

The ship's doctor finished examining and cleaning the wounds. He'd never seen anything like them. The tall, silent man who'd accompanied the patient into the infirmary had been uncommunicative so far.

"What the hell happened to you?" the doctor asked as the patient finally came out of his drug-induced unconsciousness.

Despite being fuzzy headed from the morphine and loss of blood, O'Shaugnesy managed a weak smile. "I tripped over my rucksack."

Devito smiled and turned to the doctor. "He got mauled by a bear. I've got him on morphine, last injection was one hour ago. He's been taking whole blood for the last two hours. We need you to finish rebandaging him and give him some more antibiotics. We're taking off in a little while to take him to Korea and get him into a regular hospital."

The doctor was just finishing those procedures when three other men, dressed in the same black outfits and carrying exotic-looking weapons, came into the infirmary. They looked at the tall man, who shifted his gaze to the doctor. "Well, Doc? What do you think? Can he take another four-hour chopper ride back to a real hospital?"

The doctor considered. The tall man definitely knew something about medicine, the doctor could tell from what had been done so far, and had probably made up his own mind about the answer to that question. He was most likely just asking out of professional courtesy.

"I think getting him to a hospital as soon as possible is the best treatment he can receive right now. I really don't have the facilities here to do much more for him. Whoever's been treating him so far has done a super job. I've done as much as I can do."

"Let's take him on up, guys."

The doctor wondered where these men were going, and where they had come from. But he had a feeling he really didn't want to know.

Trapp supervised as they carefully loaded O'Shaugnesy onto the bird. The cleanly dressed naval officer who had met them when they landed was nowhere to be seen. Trapp expected as much. He climbed on board. The refueled Blackhawk lifted into the sky and turned to the southwest.

Hooker and Hossey watched the Blackhawk touch down and roll toward the hangar. The cover story had already been released by the aviation detachment commander at Misawa Air Force Base in Japan. In fact, the U.S. and Japanese navies and air forces were presently conducting a search for survivors in the location where the helicopter supposedly had been lost.

In the hangar, with the doors shut behind it, the Blackhawk rolled to a halt. The ambulance crew, which Hossey had called, ran forward as the cargo doors opened. They loaded O'Shaugnesy onto a stretcher for his final ride to the hospital.

Hossey ticked off the faces in his mind as he watched the men offload: O'Shaugnesy, Trapp, Devito, Reese, Lalli, and Smith. Both Mitchell and Riley, he thought. Goddamn, not both. Which sparked a new thought in the colonel's mind: I'm going to have to see Mitchell's wife and tell her. He didn't look forward to that.

He looked at the dejected, beaten faces of the six who had made it home. Hossey walked over to Trapp. "What happened, Jim?"

Hooker edged up next to the two of them, forestalling Trapp's reply. "Sir, why don't we wait until we're in the isolation area and get some hot coffee and food."

Hossey nodded. As always the sergeant major made sense. The group walked across the hangar to a van. The team loaded their gear on board, and Hooker drove them and the pilots to the isolation area.

Hooker had dismissed the communications men, and the only ones now in the room were the six team members, the two pilots, and Hooker and Hossey. In the center of the operations center was a large table; on it were the maps Team 3 had used to plan the mission.

After the team members and pilots grabbed a cup of hot coffee, Hossey stood up to begin the debrief. "My first concern is what happened to the other aircraft." He turned to the chief pilot. "Where did they go down, how, and is there any chance of survivors?"

Hawkins leaned over the map and pointed. "They went down somewhere along here."

Hossey winced as he saw that it was over land. Hopefully, there were no identifiable pieces left, which also meant that the team members wouldn't be identifiable. He berated himself sharply in his own mind for such a coldhearted thought.

Hawkins continued. "We were flying up a draw, following it into the Changbai Mountains, where we figured we'd punch over the top, then drop right down and sprint for the sea. C.J. was leading me by about a hundred meters. You've got to remember that we were all under goggles." Hawkins described what had happened and his suspicions as to cause.

When he was done, it was Hooker who repeated the question nearest to Hossey's heart. "Do you think there might be survivors?"

Hawkins' answer was blunt. "No. That thing exploded as far as I could tell. We weren't too high up, probably eighty feet AGL. If it had just been an engine failure, C.J. probably could have autorotated into the trees. But an explosion, with all that fuel we had on board… " Hawkins shook his head. "I did a sweep back across where they should have gone down and all I could see was a fire under the trees."

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."

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.

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.