Deep Black

22

The Hind whipped downward, the momentum snaring Dean’s body in the seat restraints like a flailing shark caught in a tuna net. The helo pitched right and he flew in the opposite direction, his arms smacking the side panel so hard they went numb. The Hind leveled off, spun, then zipped through a figure eight before plummeting another thousand feet in the space of a breath. Dean remembered the warnings they gave in commercial airlines about crashes and somewhat confusedly fought to tuck his head down, though the restraints kept him upright.

Somewhere around twenty feet off the ground, the helicopter stopped its tumultuous descent. Its path, however, ran toward a rise, and just as Dean thought the worst was over, the undercarriage smacked against some trees. The top branches hit the nose so hard Dean thought they’d been whacked by a cannon. In the next moment, he felt himself thrown back in the seat, the pilot yanking on his yoke to get over the rise, then flailing left.

“We’re clear,” said Fashona, even though they continued dodging left and right across the rough terrain. “They may have seen us, but they never fired at us.”

“So what happened to the MiG?” asked Karr. His voice sounded as nonchalant as ever.

“Uh, looks like, uh, they’re tracking another aircraft, I think. Escorting.”

“Escorting what?”

“An IL-62, passenger plane. Um, you know the identifier section on the—”

“You sure they’re escorting it?”

As Fashona began to respond, there was a warning beep in the pilot’s cockpit.

“Missiles in the air!” Fashona jerked the chopper hard left.

“They’re firing at the passenger plane,” said Karr calmly.

The team leader’s assessment proved correct. Fashona reported that their radar — a vast improvement over the unit the Poles had removed before selling the aircraft — showed the Ilyushin plane descending rapidly about fifteen miles away. The MiG, meanwhile, had curled off to the south and hit its afterburners.

“Damn,” said Fashona. “He’s going in.”

They were too far away to see the crash. Fashona said the pilot thought he had regained control of the plane, but then it disappeared from the screen. “Down,” he concluded. “Not sure how he went in — possibly there are survivors.”

“Maybe,” said Karr. “I don’t know that anyone’s going to get there, though.”

“Well, we can.”

“Negative,” said Karr. “Get back on our course.”

“Wait a second,” said Dean. “You’re not going to let those people die out there, are you?”

“How do you know there are any survivors?” Karr asked.

“Fashona just said so. Let’s check it out,” said Dean.

“Listen, baby-sitter, no offense, but this is my gig, right?” For the first time since they’d met, Karr’s voice seemed actually a little strained — not quite angry, but at least mildly displeased.

“We can’t let those people die.”

“Maybe he’s got a point,” said the pilot. “There’ll be nobody around to help them.”

“Guys, look, whatever happened to those people, our mission’s more important.”

“We have burnt metal in the cargo hold. What’s so important about that?” asked Dean.

Karr didn’t answer.

“How long would it take us to get there?” Dean asked.

“Eh, four or five minutes,” said Fashona. “A little more.”

“I say we go. It makes sense to check this out anyway, right? From a mission point of view — see if the shootdown is similar to ours.”

“We’ve lost contact with the Art Room,” said Lia, speaking on the circuit for the first time. “The Russians are running some of their jammers, and the satellite’s position changed. We’re at the far end of the range.”

“I say we go for it,” said Dean.

“We’re supposed to go back to Surgut,” said Lia. “And that’s quite a haul.”

“Princess, don’t you know it’s fashionable to be late?” said Karr, back to his buoyant self. “Fashona, get us out there now. But that MiG comes back, anything comes back or around, bug out. Got me?”

“Loud and clear, boss.”

Dean’s night glasses worked fairly well even through the thick helicopter glass, and he could see the crash site when they were still two or three miles away. Unlike the other plane, this one seemed relatively intact.

The chopper dipped downward, its nose pointing like a dagger at the destroyed Ilyushin. The left wing had separated and lay in several pieces. One of the engines had fallen off on the right side and most of the tail and rudder assembly seemed to have simply disappeared. But the main fuselage seemed unscathed, at least from the distance.

“Nearest road is about a half-mile, call it southwest of the wreck,” he told the others.

“I’m going to circle once, then swing down near the cockpit area,” Fashona said.

“No, land on the road,” said Karr. “We’ll hike in. We don’t want any marks from the helicopter, and if it’s wet we get stuck.”

Dean found that he could get a more focused view through the night glasses by holding the frame with his hands. The terrain seemed like black-and-gray soup, with odd pieces of vegetables sticking up here and there. The road ran ruler-straight into the horizon in both directions.

“Going down,” warned the pilot, tipping the nose forward and descending quickly.

Dean braced himself, but the landing still rattled everything from his shinbones to his teeth. By the time he had stopped shaking and unhooked himself from the cockpit, Karr and Lia had trotted in different directions down the road about a quarter-mile. Unsure what they were up to, Dean started for the plane. As he did, the helicopter’s blades whipped up behind him. The wash as it took off bent him forward and nearly knocked him down.

“What the hell?” he said over his com system.

“Just a precaution,” explained Karr. “He’ll watch from the distance. We’re putting little mines along the road in case we need to keep anyone back,” he added.

Dean took one of his ear buds out, expecting he might hear someone crying or screaming in pain. But the night was quiet, except for the Hind in the distance. He smelled jet fuel and burnt metal.

The cockpit glass had been shattered on the pilot’s side. Dean kicked something as he walked and turned back, bracing himself to see a body. But it was just a log petrified into stone.

“Here,” said Lia, who was on the left side of the plane. “Radar missile again. Hit very close to the wing root.”

“Hey, there’s something alive in there,” said Dean. He saw something, or rather someone, moving in the cockpit. He started to run, but as he reached the nose of the plane something grabbed him from the side and threw him down. Dean rolled to his feet with his left arm forward and his right cocked back.

“Easy,” said Karr. “It’s just me.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“We can’t touch anything.”

“We have to get those people out before there’s a fire or something.”

“Relax. If it hasn’t caught on fire yet, it’s not going to catch on fire now. Just slow down. We can’t compromise the mission.”

“We have to save these people.”

“Slow down,” said Karr. “We’re not in Vietnam.”

The remark struck Dean as smart-ass bullshit. And what the hell was the sense of coming here if they were going to let the survivors burn to a crisp?

“Couple of bodies in the field here,” said Lia over the circuit. “I can see inside. Two or three people moving.”

“Let’s get them out,” said Dean. “There’s jet fuel all over the ground.”

“Wait,” snapped Karr. He put his hand to his ear. “Back to the road. Lia, grab the mines. Go south to the second pickup point.”

“We have to save those people,” said Dean.

“Someone else already plans to,” said Karr. “Fashona says there’s a helicopter on a direct vector five minutes from here. If you want to help, slip these on the bodies out near that wing. Put this glove on first.”

He pulled a thin latex glove from his pocket and held it out, then retrieved a small test tube. The glass seemed empty; it was only by staring at it very closely that Dean discerned four or five tiny specks at the bottom. They looked like ticks.

“Flies,” said Karr. “They’re just tracking devices. One on each body if you can. No fingerprints, no sweat, no spit, if you can help it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You wanted me to help them, right?”

Karr disappeared around the other side of the airplane. Dean made his way around to the wing area but had trouble finding the bodies. Finally, he saw one — a woman facedown in the muck, her long hair splayed to the side. He bent toward her, then slipped down to one knee. As he unscrewed the top of the test tube, his hands started to shake and he had to stop for a moment. He’d touched corpses before — more than his share — but the woman’s body unnerved him somehow. He shook his head, silently scolding himself, then tipped the tube gently to work one of the flies into his palm. Two or three tumbled out, bouncing across his palm onto her body.

There was a screech of pain.

Dean jerked back, completely overcome by shock and fear. It took him at least ten seconds to realize that the cries he heard were coming from someone else.

Someone nearby. He scanned the area quickly, saw a piece of white near the plane but not attached to it. As he stepped toward it he realized the white belonged to the body of a man — or rather, the top half of a body of a man. The legs were missing.

As Dean looked away, he glimpsed a shadow writhing on the other side of him. He couldn’t help but think he was going to see the dead man’s legs, but he went to it anyway.

Legs, yes, but tiny. And attached to a body, a kid, a small child no more than five years old. And alive.

Dean bent to the kid, turned him over. There was a thread of blood across his forehead, but his eyes were wide open. They closed, then opened again. The child screamed. Dean saw a pair of thick blankets nearby. He pulled them over, arranging them to make the kid comfortable. The boy seemed to realize that the stranger wasn’t going to hurt him and stopped screaming, though his expression remained somewhere between suspicion and complete bewilderment. He looked almost comfortable — Dean saw no obvious broken bones or other injuries — but he’d need an expert to check the boy over.

“Dean. Time to go,” said Karr in his ear bud.

“I got a kid here.”

“They’ll save him. Go.”

“I’m taking him with us.”

“Don’t do it.”

“How do you know they’ll find him?”

“Look, we got to go,” said Karr. “You hear the helicopter. I promise, if they don’t take him, we’ll come back. But not now. Most of these people are dead, or will be soon.”

“We can save this kid,” said Dean.

“You sure about that? You have a trauma center handy? One that won’t ask questions?”

Something inside Dean resisted the logic of the argument. Nonetheless, he tilted his hand, tilted the small test tube, showering the flies over the child’s body. Then, with the helicopter rotors pounding the ground and a searchlight playing over the broken, discarded wing, he began trotting south, following Karr’s outline against the open terrain.