Black Wolf

1

Mark Stoner ran for the Aerospatiale helicopter, trailing the rest of the commando team as it headed for the last of the four helos.

We made it, he thought. We’re OK. We’re good.

Good, good, good.

The CIA officer jumped into the helicopter just as it started to lift off the ground. He lost his balance, spinning toward the floor as the helo shuddered against a sudden buffet of wind. One of the Romanian commandos he was with grabbed him, easing his fall.

Stoner looked back toward the door just in time to see the chopper clear a row of trees by bare inches, the angled tops of the evergreens like sharp black spikes in the night. As the helicopter banked around the woods to set a course westward, a large slash appeared in the sky, a sword that seemed to swing up from the ground

But this was an optical illusion. The black shape was the spire of the church they had struck, the haven for rebel guerrillas who had nearly succeeded in destroying Romania’s gas pipeline network. Aided by Russia, the rebels had come perilously close to plunging Western Europe into a very cold winter. That wasn’t going to happen now.

But Stoner hadn’t come just to prevent that. The CIA agent had been after evidence proving Russia had helped the guerrillas as part of a bid to raise its prices for natural gas, and to keep Eastern Europe under its thumb. Stoner had grabbed a computer and disks from the church basement that proved just that. The colonel who had led the men was already transmitting some of the files back to his headquarters via a data link Stoner provided, courtesy of the Dreamland Whiplash deployment team.

No matter what happened now, the operation had been a success. A big success — one more win in a résumé filled with wins.

But to Mark Stoner, the mission was a loss — a deep pit of blackness that drilled into his chest. To get the information for the raid, he had tracked down one of the guerrillas’ key leaders, a woman named Sorina Viorica. He’d gone behind the lines, met her, and helped her escape when other rebels turned against her.

Along the way, he fell in love with her.

It didn’t change their arrangement: she gave him the information he needed for the raid, he helped her escape Romania.

Yet it changed it profoundly. He could count on one hand the times he’d been in love, and not use half the fingers.

“Great mission!” shouted Colonel Brasov, the Romanian commander.

“Yeah,” said Stoner.

Brasov began thanking him for saving his men from an ambush.

“You are hero for us,” the colonel told him in his unsteady English. “Real hero.”

He added something in Romanian. His men nodded, adding their own words of praise.

Stoner shrugged them off. What was a hero?

The soldiers looked at him as if he was superhuman, as if he was part of a different race. But he wasn’t. He was just like them — he was flesh and blood, creaky bones and cramped muscles. There were moments when he hesitated, seconds ticking away under fire, times when he felt fear.

Fear in his gut. Paralysis that filled him like a damp wind collecting over a bog.

People didn’t understand how much it really took. The bosses back home didn’t know the price of each mission, of each instance where someone looking from the distance could say, “Good job. Good mission. Way to go.”

Another star in the folder, eh, Mark?

He died a little bit every moment on those missions. He felt dead now — heart pumping, lungs filling, but just as certainly dead inside.

Stoner’s sat phone began to ring. He pulled it out but had trouble hearing.

“Stoner, this is Dog.”

It was Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian, the leader of Dreamland himself, miles away, over the border, circling in an EB–52 Megafortress to provide radar coverage.

“This is Stoner!” Stoner yelled into the sat phone, trying to make himself heard over the helo’s turbines.

“Stoner, tell your pilot and Colonel Brasov there are four MiGs headed in your direction,” said Colonel Bastian. “They’re about ten minutes away from the helicopters.”

“Four what?”

“Four MiGs. Russian fighters. Get the hell out of there. Get over the border.”

“We’re working on it, Colonel.”

Stoner turned to Colonel Brasov and tugged on his arm.

“There are fighter jets headed in our direction,” he said. “They’re about ten minutes away.”

Brasov’s face blanched — he’d said on takeoff that it would take the helicopters roughly thirty minutes to reach the border — then went forward to the cockpit to tell the pilots.

There were thirty soldiers in the rear of the helicopter, along with two of the prisoners, a dozen boxes from the church, and the two footlockers. There were also several bodies stacked at the back. The Aerospatiale was designed to hold about twenty-five men, counting the crew; the extra weight slowed it down dramatically.

Brasov returned, a frown on his face.

“We will stay very low to the ground,” he said, shouting in Stoner’s ear. “They may not see us on their radar. But it will be tight.”

The helicopter suddenly veered hard to the left. Stoner had trouble staying on his feet. The chopper ran a tight zigzag across the fields, the pilot trying to get as close as possible to the trees and buildings so the Aerospatiale would blend into their radar returns and be lost to the MiGs. It was a time-honored solution to the problem of escaping more powerful aircraft.

The problem was, the aircraft they were trying to dodge had look-down radar specifically designed to counter that tactic. And the French-made helicopter wasn’t the most maneuverable chopper in the air.

Stoner realized they were going to be caught. They had to do something desperate — sacrifice themselves maybe, to save the others.

“We’re not going to make it,” he told Brasov finally. “We can’t outrun them.”

The colonel nodded grimly.

“A mother bird when its nest is being attacked pretends to be wounded, drawing the predators away,” Stoner continued. “You could do the same — have one of the helicopters peel off, get the MiGs interested, then land. Everyone runs for it — the MiGs come down and investigate. The other choppers get away. We make our way home by foot.”

Instead of answering, Brasov went forward to the cockpit. Stoner glanced around the cabin. The troops were quiet now, aware they were being pursued.

“You are full of good ideas, Mr. Stoner,” said Brasov, returning. Then he added, “The Russian aircraft are almost on us.”

“How far is the border?”

The colonel just shook his head.

“I would not ask my men to make a sacrifice I was unwilling to make myself,” he said.

“Neither would I,” said Stoner. He glanced around the cabin as Brasov spoke to the pilots. It was one thing to risk his own death, another to risk those of the men around him. He’d just saved a bunch of them. Undoubtedly they were thinking about their families, about getting home, and now he was dooming them.

Colonel Bastian was under orders not to interfere. Bastian wasn’t exactly known for following orders, but in this case he might not have any choice. He was too far away to intercept the MiGs.

Still, Stoner found himself wishing he would.

The helicopter popped up suddenly. Stoner fell back against the bulkhead, then slipped and fell on the deck. Two of the Romanian commandos helped him to his feet.

One of them said something in Romanian. Stoner thought he was telling him not to lose hope. He nodded.

Never lose hope. There’s always something.

Something.

He grabbed the spar as the helicopter whirled hard into the turn. The pilot had spotted a small clearing on the hillside ahead. He launched flares in hopes of decoying the Russian missiles, then pushed the nose of the helicopter down, aiming for the hill.

The helicopter blades, buffeted by the force of the turn, made a loud whomp-whomp-whomp sound, as if they were going to tear themselves off.

Everyone inside the helicopter was silent, knowing what was going on outside but not really knowing, ready but not ready.

“When we get out, run!” Brasov yelled. “Run from the helicopter. As soon as you can, make your best way over the border. It is seven miles southwest. Seven miles! A few hours’ walk.”

The men closest to him nodded, grim-faced.

The helicopter pitched hard to the left.

“You are a brave man, braver than I gave you credit for when we met,” Colonel Brasov told Stoner as the force of the turn threw the two men together.

“You, too,” said Stoner.

“Until we meet again.”

Brasov held out his hand.

As Stoner reached for it he thought of Sorina Viorica, the way she’d looked on the street in Bucharest. He thought of the mission he’d had in China a year before, where he came close to being killed. He thought of Breanna Stockard, who’d parachuted with him into the water. They spent the night together in the rain, without any hope of rescue. Now he saw her smiling face in the aircraft just after they were picked up.

He thought of his first day at the Agency, his graduation from high school, a morning in the very distant past, being driven by his mom to church with the rain pouring and the car warm and safe.

There was a flash above him, and a loud clap like thunder.

And then there was nothing, no memory, no thought, no pain or regret.