Blackout

CHAPTER 22

The presence of another helicopter at the crash site was an unwelcome surprise to Arlin Schoen as they approached from the south and circled at a discreet distance. He shook his head in disgust and sighed, his eyes scanning the eastern horizon as he wondered how many more helicopters would be coming now that the crash was officially discovered and broad daylight filled the landscape.

“What do you want to do?” the pilot asked, gesturing at the occupied clearing.

“Stay at least a mile distant and bring us to the western side. We can’t go look around the wreckage for footprints, but if they’re on the run, they’ll be running west.”

“And if we find them? What then — shoot them one by one from the air?”

Schoen nodded. “If we can find them.”

“And if not?”

“Then we get the hell back to Da Nang and try to get out of here.” He leaned forward. “How much fuel does this thing have?”

“About three more hours, depending on how much you make me hover.”

“Arlin,” one of the men in the back said, grabbing his shoulder. “If we don’t get back there and get our plane, they’ll nail it down, either with red tape or something worse. And if they do that, we won’t get out. Please! Let’s abort this and go. I think we’ve lost them anyway.”

Schoen shook his head no. “It’s not over. It’s not compromised unless that reporter surfaces.”

“Dammit, who are you, Captain Ahab? We’ve lost this round. They wouldn’t crash where they were supposed to, and now we’re flying around a friggin’ jungle acting like Vietcong looking for downed GIs. Let’s just get the hell out of here!”

“I said no.”

“Why, man?”

“Because what that damned reporter has is worth the risk.”

Dark clouds looming ahead, heralded by the boom of distant thunder, increased the anxiety of the six survivors as they stumbled and pushed their way through the increasingly dense jungle vegetation. The sound of monkeys chattering away and racing around blended with the eternal buzz of flies and other flying insects. The humidity made even the diminishing cool of the morning seem oppressive.

Robert MacCabe looked back over his shoulder for the hundredth time, making sure everyone kept up with the frantic pace he’d set. His head was still spinning with the horror of seeing one of his Hong Kong attackers at the crash site. And he felt the crushing guilt that flowed from his panicked determination to get out of Hong Kong without thinking about the risks to others. That selfishness, he’d decided, was the primary reason over 200 innocent people were now dead. And then there was Susan Tash.

There had been no time to question the copilot on what might have exploded just outside the cockpit of the Meridian jumbo, but the face of Walter Carnegie kept haunting his thoughts, along with the increasingly logical conclusion that somehow they were victims of the same terrorists who’d destroyed the SeaAir MD-11.

Robert thought about Kat Bronsky and how incredibly lucky she’d been to get pulled off.

Unless…

He rejected the thought as fast as it had formed. The possibility that Bronsky was somehow involved was just too bizarre. He had searched her out. She’d already had a reservation. Yet her removal was strange. But then, she was FBI, so maybe it wasn’t so strange.

He wondered whether Kat knew of their crash yet, what she was thinking, and what she would do when she found out. How would it feel, Robert thought, to know that the flight you got off of by chance had gone down?

He heard someone stumble behind him and looked back to see Britta helping Dan to right himself. Robert stopped for a second to search the green tangle ahead for the best path and decided to go slightly left. The sound of water somewhere ahead had wafted in and out of his ears for the past few minutes. Where there were rivers, there were often settlements, and the Vietnamese people would be no threat. If he could just get them to a village and alert the authorities, they would be safe. But if their pursuers spotted them first, he had no doubt they’d all be killed.

The horrific reality of the carnage behind them was never more than a thought away. Robert tried to block the images. He took a deep breath of the jungle air, laden with moisture and the fragrance of flowers, then pushed off again, ignoring the insect bites that were itching and stinging their way into his consciousness. It was his responsibility to keep these people safe. That would be only a small act of atonement for the events his presence had set in motion.

Robert pushed through several large fronds, ignoring the possibility of snakes and dangerous insects as the sound of water grew louder. Dallas Nielson appeared beside him, matching his pace. His attention snapped back to his present surroundings.

“Robert MacCabe, let me ask you a question.”

“Go ahead,” he replied, trying unsuccessfully to read her expression as he stepped over a log and pointed it out to her. “But we need to keep our voices low.”

Dallas hopped over the log and continued. “You told us back there those goons tried to kidnap you, probably kill you, because they thought you knew something that would connect that crash near Cuba to a terrorist group, right?”

“Essentially,” Robert replied, holding a huge frond aside for her to pass.

“Thanks. And you had to figure that they might be the same terrorist group, right? I mean, since you weren’t working on any other secret spy stuff, the connection’s pretty obvious, right?”

Dallas pushed through a dense overhead of branches.

“Something like that,” Robert said, following her.

“Right. So when you headed for the airport, would you tell me why a big, world-class, Pulitzer reporter like you didn’t say to himself, ‘Gee, if people who zapped a big airliner out of the sky are trying to kill me and still have the capability to do so, d’you think maybe they would shoot down another airliner to shut me up?’”

Robert grimaced as Dallas pushed several ferns aside to let him through, then moved ahead to watch his expression.

“I mean, Robert! Come on! Shouldn’t you have said, maybe I’m endangering everyone by getting on this airplane? I mean, Robert, DUH!”

He nodded. “I know.”

“Well, I’m pretty ticked that you nearly got me killed, and oh, by the way, we’re missing about two hundred and fifty others.”

Robert let out an agonized breath and closed his eyes, his chin down, his lips tightly together. He looked up at last, eye to eye with her. “Dallas… I’m sorry. I would never have stepped on that flight if I’d thought for a moment that an entire airplane could be targeted just to get me.”

She began moving again, looking back over her shoulder. “You just don’t happen to be my favorite human being right now. Maybe that’s uncharitable of me, but if you get tired of kicking your ass, I’ll be happy to take over.”

Robert started to respond, then stopped suddenly, listening carefully. “I keep hearing a running river somewhere ahead.”

“Is that good?” Dallas asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes ahead as he tried to part a series of large ferns for the two of them, “but we’ve got to keep moving.” Robert stumbled and almost lost his balance, but righted himself and started pushing through another set of ferns.

“STOP!” Dallas barked suddenly.

Robert braked to a halt, realizing his foot was resting on the edge of a hundred-foot dropoff. A river full of shallow rapids ran below, both embankments steep, vine-entangled products of erosion.

“Good Lord!” he said, putting a healthy distance between himself and the ledge.

Dallas whirled around and yelled a warning to the others, who approached the edge carefully. The sound of a vehicle in the distance reached their ears.

“I hear a truck,” Steve Delaney said, pointing over the river.

“Me, too,” Britta chimed in. “Should we hide from it or try to flag it down?”

Dan stood behind Britta, holding her hand tightly and cocking his bandaged head as the sound increased in volume and then receded. “Probably the highway they made out of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail,” he said.

“And conveniently placed on the other side of a river,” Robert added.

“How… ah… far have we come, do you think?” Dan asked, his voice betraying crushing fatigue. His breathing was labored.

“Maybe two miles. Maybe a bit more,” Robert replied.

“So… what’s the plan?” Dan directed the question toward Robert’s voice.

“How about to get away and live happily ever after?” Dallas laughed ruefully, then grew serious again, noting Graham’s numbed look as he stared at the ground, with his hands in his pockets.

Robert cleared his throat. “Look, here’s what I think. We have to keep on moving as fast as we can along this bank of the river until we find civilization, or get out of these mountains.”

The sound of a shortwave radio made them all jump and look around. Steve Delaney was fiddling with something he’d fished out of his backpack.

“What the heck is that, Steve?” Dallas asked.

“Aviation band. It can also send out a distress signal to the rescue satellites. Should I turn it on?”

“Wait!” Robert replied, his hand up. “We’d better think this through. Who could track that?”

Dallas’s eyebrows climbed almost to her hairline. “How about an American-built helicopter full of English-speaking cutthroats looking to nail our”—she hesitated, looking at Steve—“posteriors.”

Dan was shaking his head. “It’s true, Dallas, that… the basic signal could be tracked by any… aviation radio equipped with a direction finder, but… the special search-and-rescue satellite system wouldn’t help whoever was in that helicopter. It’s… designed to look for… for distress signals from downed airplanes… and relay the information to legitimate search forces.”

“So, the bad guys don’t have direction finders?” Dallas asked.

“Unlikely,” Dan replied.

They all exchanged glances, trying to decide. Robert broke the silence. “Let’s wait. Let’s get farther away,” he said. “It’s still midmorning, and it won’t be long before the crash site will be swarming with rescue forces and Vietnamese military. Then it would probably be safe to turn it on. I just wish we could transmit a voice message on that thing.”

“We can,” Steve said, holding up the handheld radio. “It’s a new type. If the satellite can hear the beacon, it can hear what you transmit, and it’s got a GPS in it, so it transmits our exact location digitally.”

“What does all that mean?” Britta asked.

“It means,” Dan began, sighing deeply, “that when we turn it on, we can tell the world where we are. We’d just better be ready for the consequences.”

“Wait!” Dallas held up her hand, her eyes up as she cocked her head to listen.

“What?” Robert said in a low voice.

“I hear a helicopter over there, somewhere,” she said, pointing west.

“And the crash site’s behind us, right?” Britta asked.

Robert nodded. “Probably not the same one,” he said. “He’d be searching along this direct pathway if it was.”

“How much longer?” Britta asked.

“What do you mean?” Robert replied.

“I mean, how much longer do you think it’s going to take to get out of here and get to safety?” Britta’s chin was trembling slightly, her emotions cracking through the calm facade she’d been keeping intact. She tried to smooth her hair with her right hand, embarrassed to be shaking. “I, ah, I’m exhausted, thirsty, hungry, scared to death, dirty as a bum, flea-bitten and scratched to shreds, and I just… I just wanted to know if I should be planning on sleeping in this horrible place, too.”

“Not if we’re lucky,” Dan said softly. The sound of his voice triggered tears Britta instantly regretted.

“Oh, Dan! I didn’t mean to cry.” She swatted at the tears, her mouth opening and closing as she tried for control. “I mean, I know you can’t see them, but what you’re going through — what the doctor’s going through — and here, I’m bitching like a little baby. I’m sorry.”

Dan put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a small squeeze, his voice soft in her ear. “Come on, Britta. You’re not made of steel. It’s okay.”

“We are going to make it, aren’t we?” she said. She looked around at the others. “Dammit, we can’t bring them back, but we can get out of here and make sure the world knows what those bastards did.”

“Where, Arlin?” the pilot asked in a disgusted tone. He’d picked nearly a dozen clearings to land in, and Schoen had rejected every one.

“There!” Arlin Schoen said as he pointed into the distance.

“All I see is jungle,” the pilot replied.

“Follow my finger. It’s a wide clearing by that river, with a highway bridge on the other side. If they come this way, they’ll be funneled right into that location.”

The pilot nodded and began planning his approach. They would land, Arlin had decided, camouflage the helicopter with whatever brush they could find, and wait for MacCabe and whoever was with him to come walking out of the jungle.

“And if you’re wrong?” one of the men had asked.

“Then we crank up and fly this bucket back to Da Nang, collect our aircraft, and get the hell out of here.”

The man shook his head. “Always have an answer, don’t you, Arlin?”