Girl Rides the Wind (18 page)

“I like your fatalism.”

Just then, she noticed Kiku standing a few yards off to the right, apparently chatting up the flight engineer.
Is her English good enough for that sort of conversation?
“I’ll be right back,” she muttered, and slid off the tail ramp onto the deck.

“Michi-san,” Kiku said in Japanese, when she saw Emily approaching. “Is this your helicopter?”

“What are you doing up here, Kiku-san? It’s much too dangerous at night.” Emily waved a yellow- jerseyed deck officer over – “Please escort Lieutenant Otani off the flight deck.”

“I just wanted to see what you do.”

“This really isn’t the time. Maybe tomorrow, when things quiet down, I can give you a tour.” She nodded to the deck officer, and once they were out of earshot, she pulled the flight engineer to one side. “What did Lieutenant Otani want?”

“Nothing really. Just asking about what it’s like to fly in one of these, you know, in combat.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That it gets pretty hairy sometimes. I don’t know if she could understand anything I said.”

“We got the call,” Martinovich yelled, moving faster than she’d ever seen him, spilling coffee with each jiggly step, a corpsman trailing behind him carrying a medical pack over one shoulder. “Everybody strap in, spin it up. There are casualties, and we may have only a narrow window in the weather.”

“Are we waiting for the other birds?” the flight engineer asked.

“No. They can form up in flight. We can’t afford the delay.”

“Do we have numbers yet?” Emily asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence that gripped the cabin for the first half of the trip.

“Comms are sketchy,” the flight engineer called out. “We’ve lost the signal, or they’ve gone quiet.”

“What’s our heading, Cap?”

“Unless we hear different, we’re good to go for LZ Delta.”

“That’s nowhere near the drop-zone,” Emily said.

“I am aware.”

“I don’t see how Oleschenko’s men could have found their way over the western ridgeline.”

“Fog of war, Nugget,” Martinovich grunted, in his best ‘grizzled veteran’ voice. “Anything can happen in battle.”

The moon had already set, which made visual cues difficult to pick out against a horizon curtained by clouds, and the GPS hadn’t been charted for every island this far south, though Emily had noted the coordinates for the drop earlier.

“There,” Martinovich said, pointing off to the left. “A fire on the slope. They must have blown an ammo dump.”

“Let’s hope.” Emily pointed out the silhouette of the two ridgelines, and beaches at the southern tip glimmered slightly in the starlight.

“There’s no time for the LCAC.” Martinovich’s eye flashed with the reflection of a lightning strike to the south, and he called out to the flight engineer. “Tell the
BHR
to send the rest of the Phrogs for an air-evac. Either that or they’ll have to shelter in place.”

“It looks like we have a one-hour window, at best.”

“We might stretch it to two, if the
BHR
heads north, and we chase them faster than the storm chases us.”

“All nine Phrogs are underway,” the flight engineer reported.

“Bring us around from the southeast, so we can take a northwest vector, low and fast. I want the 50-cal on the treeline during approach, and the storm at our backs when we raise the tailgate.”

“Get ready for some chop,” Emily called back to the crew, as she brought the Phrog around and dropped to two hundred feet. The right face of the central peak glowed in the distance from a blaze on its eastern flank, the western edge of the island remaining completely dark. “It looks quiet on Kano’s end, but that fire is exactly where I’d expect Ongpin and Perry to be. Any news on Landing Zone Alpha?”

“Nothing,” Martinovich said. “We stay on course for LZ Delta.”

As they approached from the south, Emily dropped to one hundred feet and took an angle to give the gunners a view of the scene. Tiny flashes, pinpricks of light, flickered in the tropical underbrush just inside the treeline.

“What the hell was that?” came the cry from the door gunner.

“Are we hit?” Hanseal yelled from the tail.

“No noise on the fuselage,” the flight engineer called out. “Probably still out of range.”

“Your call, Cap,” Emily said. “Do we pull out?”

“No time to abort,” he said. “Bring us back to two hundred feet and slow the approach.” Just then, a sudden gust running in advance of the stormfront pushed the Phrog hard right. “Turn into it, Nugget.”

“It’ll bring us over the trees.”

More pinpricks populated the treeline, and now it sounded like hail on the fuselage.

“Can I return fire?” the door gunner asked.

“Yes, goddamnit,” Martinovich yelled. “Light ’em up, and get us the hell out of here, Tenno. We’ll regroup one click out. Notify Phrog 7 and Phrog 8 that we have a hot LZ.”

Emily banked hard left to head back out to sea, and more hail peppered the underside, where the armor was thicker. A second later, a loud roar followed by an explosion rocked the entire fuselage, which groaned like it might split in two, and the bird began to rotate clockwise, drifting back toward the treeline.

“Anyone hit back there?” Emily called out. No response came back over the comm, and no voices could be heard over the engines, which now seemed much louder.

“I got this,” Martinovich said, taking the stick and the collective control. “Get back there and see if anyone’s still alive.”

Emily extricated herself from the right-hand seat and pulled herself aft just as the Phrog tilted hard right and more hail thudded against the cockpit. The rear compartment was fully engulfed in flames, with a gaping hole on the port side. An RPG must have punched through the starboard side and blown out the other side, taking the flight engineer with it.

Emily sprayed the area down with a fire extinguisher, and looked for casualties. The door gunner lay face down against the far side, tangled in some webbing. She tried to roll him onto his back, but his shoulder came away in her hands, blood gushing everywhere. She pressed her hands to his neck to stanch the bleeding, but there was no coherent hole to try to cover. One more glance into his eyes and she saw that he was already gone, and the flow of blood died down soon after.

A few feet away, the corpsman still sat in his seat, strapped to the portside, seemingly frozen in fear, and she could hardly blame him. The fuselage just exploded all around him, of course he’d go into shock. A closer look at his face and the holes in his chest revealed that he was past caring or fearing. She pulled his medical pack from under the seat and heaved it forward in case they needed it later.

The back of the fuselage seemed relatively intact, and the tail ramp was partially open, just wide enough for Hanseal to rake the treeline with his M-240, shrieking obscene taunts the whole time. One more lurch, and he lost his footing and slipped out the opening, held in now only by the harness. He clutched at the gun, swinging it around into the cabin, and Emily dove for cover, afraid he might accidentally spray the cabin with bullets. She crawled the remaining few feet until she could pull him back in by the harness-strap. But before she could get him all the way onto the ramp, gunfire from the ground ripped through his midsection, practically cutting him in half. By the time she got him back into the cabin, he was dead.
A harness is a harness
.

“They’re all dead,” she cried into her headset, as she ran for the cockpit. “We have to put this thing on the ground.”

“I know,” Martinovich shouted through the cockpit door, no longer relying on the comm system. “But we’ve got no hydraulics. It’s like wrestling an elephant. I’m gonna take her up, and maybe auto-rotate down on the far side of the ridge.”

The fuselage lurched to the right again and machine-gun fire raked the cabin, poking holes on both sides as Emily dove for cover – as if there were any to be had – just outside the cockpit.

“That wasn’t small-arms fire,” she yelled. “They must have something big down there, like a 50-cal.” No voice responded, and once she’d forced her way into the cockpit, she saw why. The last burst had shattered the windshield and ripped through Martinovich, leaving him bleeding profusely from the chest and neck, and gurgling blood through his teeth. Emily yanked up on the collective and armed the throttle control to spin up the engines, if they had anything left to give her, then aimed for the trees. They weren’t going to clear the ridgeline. Now they just needed to find a friendly tree and survive the crash – then she might be able to do something for him.

One more glance at Martinovich and she saw that he was gone, his chest still, no longer gurgling, and when his head lolled forward, a huge hole in the back of his neck came into view. Out the side window, she saw the characteristic flash and smoke plume of an RPG heading her way. With one hand, she tore the shotgun out of the duct tape holding it behind her seat and ran as fast as she could through the pitching fuselage, diving past the tail gun and out into the cool, dark sky.

R
ain pelted
the side of Emily’s face, as if to remind her that she would surely die hitting the ground curled up in a fetal tuck.
Spread your legs and arms, try to grab on to something
. Large, leathery leaves and extravagant fern-like structures slapped at her face and chest. A heavier branch stabbed at one leg and she struggled to keep a grip on the Remington 870, all the while feeling warm, moist air cling to her eyes and throat.

“This is more like a rainforest.” A throng of thoughts crowded in on her, tugging at her optic nerve. “What was Kiku doing by my bird?” On the periphery of her attention, Phrog 6 tore through nearby treetops, groaning and roaring like a gored dragon, belching flames from its belly. “The fuel tanks haven’t blown yet.”

A branch struck both knees and spun her face forward, slowing her vertical progress but scrambling her effort at controlling how she’d contact the ground. “I hope Perry’s safe… and Tarot and Racket… and Durant.” At thirty feet up, something – old growth bamboo perhaps – caught one foot and bent with her momentum, as if it would sling her back whence she came, before releasing her onto another fall of palm fronds, not strong enough to carry that much weight, but less bruising.

“This is how it begins… but there must be another target, another crisis.” The Phrog finally came to rest some hundred yards away, out of sight but for the glow, and the stink of jet fuel still floating on the heavy, humid air. Scattered gunfire came from that direction – another firefight, or maybe the flames had ignited Hanseal’s ammo-drum? “The last chrysanthemum may fall, that’s what the Crown Princess tried to tell us.”

A few more layers of foliage and branches reached for her… or she grasped at them… until she landed on top of a shrub thick enough to catch her. Voices rang out from behind, converging on her position. Had they seen her fall, or were they rushing to search the wreckage? Lying there, slightly dazed, on top of a crushed fern, a heavy twig stabbing into the flesh of one forearm, numb but for the warm blood oozing over her hand, Emily drew her knees to her chest, seeking the comfort of the first position her body had ever known. A few scattered raindrops found her through the foliage and focused her mind.
Get up. Run
.

Heavy footsteps crashed through the underbrush a few yards away, and the voices became clearer, though she couldn’t understand them. They were speaking Cantonese, she recognized that much, and two phrases stuck in her ear:
gwei-po
and
yatboon-mui
. She didn’t know exactly what they meant, though she could guess – they were searching for the ghost girl, the Japanese girl.
They were searching for her
.

No terrorists had fired on them. These were Diao’s men, and they didn’t sound friendly.
Maybe this is how it ends, in a paroxysm of violence directed against a familiar enemy, another Predator.
But why bother? Why not let them take her life, much good it had done her so far? The prospect was soothing – to let herself be destroyed in some bloody self-sacrifice – until a most uncanny intruder crept into her consciousness, the dread voice of the heavens, crying out a thunderous reminder of an ancient duty:
The true master takes life when she must, and gives life when she can.
How she’d longed to hear the voice she knew as “Granny,” the Shinto Goddess of the Sun,
Amaterasu-omikami
, a voice that had gone quiet these past few years… and yet this was not exactly her voice. Deeper, darker, more threatening and yet also somehow comforting, Emily tilted her face to the forest canopy above that blocked her view of the sky, and would have shrieked out a joyous tearful reply, but for another sound.

As two squads charged past, not more than fifteen or twenty feet away, the crackle of exploding ammunition from the Phrog caught her attention and grew in intensity.
The fuel tanks have to explode soon
. She turned her head away to shield her eyes from the flash, and when she felt the heat of the blast, she picked herself up, running diagonally behind the Chinese troops –
Diao’s men?
– and made for the ridgeline she’d spied during her fall, counting on their temporary blindness to cover her escape.

Get to the top, survey the scene, see what other confusion might cover her movements, that was her plan. Close, humid air, trapped by the trees, made breathing a chore, and only some of the storm’s initial force would likely make it through. At least Emily wouldn’t be the only one to suffer. Halfway up the slope, trying for stealth, but crashing through underbrush where she had to, her foot caught on something soft and pitched her forward. Her hands found a face, still warm, and a broad chest, damp and sticky, but it was too dark to make out the features, at least until another explosion rocked the Phrog’s carcass and lit up the slope for an instant.

Farah’s empty eyes looked back at her, and he wasn’t moving. She wanted to shake the life back into him, until she heard more voices, running towards her position. Had they seen her? Or were they converging on the Phrog? She rolled Farah onto his side and made herself small behind him, peeking out across his ear, shotgun at the ready.

Not thirty feet away, a squad of Chinese soldiers – more of Diao’s men, she recognized some of them from the
wu shu
demonstrations on the Upper-V – had stopped for some reason. Had they heard her? The squad leader shouted a command and sent them running toward the wreckage, then turned to look her way.
Had he seen her?
It was Lt Yan, and his eyes glistened from the distant glow of her Phrog. She had a clear shot and balanced the barrel on Farah’s shoulder, but didn’t fire. At this distance, the impact would lift Yan off his feet, if it didn’t cut him in half, and the sound might not be noticed in the general commotion. He stood still a moment longer, staring directly at her, then touched a finger to his lips and gestured sharply to his left, toward the beach. When she didn’t react, he gestured again before running after his men.

Cautiously, not sure she could trust him, though his signal was unambiguous – and he could just as easily have called his squad back – she pulled herself up into a crouch next to Farah’s head. “I’m sorry to leave you here, Marine. There’s nothing more I can do for you.” She pushed his eyelids down, then scrambled toward the top of the ridge. She’d have to trust Yan, at least as far as heading toward the beach, though she’d get there in her own way.

Running as fast as she could in a low crouch along the ridgeline, the rising wind beginning to howl, she scanned the terrain and saw two more bodies, one a Lance Corporal whose name she couldn’t remember and then someone she knew all too well – Capt Oleschenko. They must have died trying to clear this same ridge, while Farah tried to buy them some time lower down. She’d have to leave them, too, but not before swapping her shotgun for the LCpl’s M4. With the attached grenade launcher, it packed a lot more punch than her shotgun, and the night-vision sight would come in handy.

Fifty yards further on, she found another body, this one still breathing and groaning. Sgt Durant seemed to have rolled down the slope, or perhaps hadn’t yet tried to climb it. When she got to him, he let out a startled yelp.

“Quiet, Sarge.” With one arm on his shoulder to steady him, she placed her hand on his cheek. “It’s only me.”

When he finally managed to focus on her, his face bent under the weight of remorse, he croaked out some sort of greeting. “I’m sorry to let you down, LT.”

“Marines don’t apologize. Aren’t you the one who used to tell me that?”

“Holy shit, it’s really you. I knew the cavalry would come. Cap must have got the radio working. I thought we were goners for sure, the way they had us pinned down here. Farah’s fifty yards or so that way, and the rest of the squad’s on the other side.”

“They’re dead, Sarge… and it’s just me.” These words didn’t register for him, and there didn’t seem to be any pressing reason to make him recognize them at that moment. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I got hit by something big… knocked me on my ass. Plus, I think I must have hit my head on something.”

Emily inspected his head and found a lump and some still-warm blood. “I can’t tell what it was, maybe a round creased your skull just under your helmet. You’ve still got your ear, though…”

“That’s a relief.”

“Or maybe you just hit your head on that stump.” She pulled a splinter out of his hair as she said this. “It looks like you took at least one round in your leg, and your back is soaked with blood.”

“I’m still alive,” he croaked, his breathing growing more difficult as he spoke.

“We can’t stay here. I have to get you to the beach.” She pulled his arm around her shoulder and heaved him up. “Man, you guys are heavy.” Once she got him to the bottom of the slope, she saw the problem: his left leg was not able to take his weight. “Switch sides with me, Sarge. We’ve gotta move faster before Diao’s men come back.”

“Those sons of bitches. There’s no way… Who the hell did they think they were shooting at?”

“Keep it down. We’re almost there, and I don’t know if the beach is empty.”

Standing just inside the last layer of foliage, and having eased Durant down against a bamboo trunk, Emily scanned the beach from one end while the rain pelted her face. A lightning strike somewhere in the distance cracked the sky and lit up the beach, showing most of the Zodiac inflatables bobbing in the surf at the far end, though one had been pushed onto the sand just above the tide-line directly in front of them. To get to it would mean crossing a completely exposed kill-zone if the gun positions that brought down her Phrog were still manned.

“What do you think, Sarge? Do we risk the sand, or do I double back and clear any positions behind the tree-line?”

“Are you out of your mind, LT? Do you really mean to take an inflatable out into that storm?”

“What choice do we have? Diao’s people will be back here double-quick once they see I’m not in the wreckage.”

“If you’re right about Diao, then you can’t shoot any of ’em. Won’t that just confirm whatever story they mean to tell about friendly-fire?”

“Shit.”

Durant looked up at her, and when she glanced at him, she noticed a devilish gleam in his eye. “Is that your pig-sticker I see strapped to your back?”

His meaning was clear, and Emily cringed to hear it. He was right, of course. Sword wounds would hardly fit Diao’s scheme, and might even set it back, at least if his men saw them. But the prospect of cutting into men, of hacking and killing them with her hands… again – so much more gruesome than perforating them with steel pellets from a distance – was it really necessary? One look at Durant told her exactly how necessary it was, since Diao would hardly let him live if he found him. This realization did little to alleviate the pain he’d just brought to her mind. She felt the heat in her face as she turned this thought over, and began to resent the bearer of this news

“I read you loud and clear, Sarge.” She leaned over to kiss his forehead, hoping it would calm her own heart, and gestured to the shoreline. “Can you make it that far under your own steam, while I take care of some business?”

“Do what you have to do, LT, while I eat sand and haul my sorry ass to the damn boat.”

It was slow going at first, picking her way through the edge of a tropical rainforest, trying not to disturb the larger fronds that reached across whatever path she chose. Thankfully, the first few gun positions she came across were no longer manned, though they were clear enough even in the dark. Digging themselves in had crushed the foliage, and scorch marks showed where they’d fired the RPGs. A lighter clearing and a beaten path opened up on her left, halfway along the curving beachfront, and she moved more quickly, until she heard voices – the last gun position, four men stationed with an ancient, large-bore machine gun, at least 50 cal, mounted on a tripod.

“I can’t leave that thing here, or they’ll cut us down before we can even clear the breakers.”

The men spoke and laughed, completely unconcerned with stealth – if only she understood Cantonese better, they might give up much of their plan. Diao must have left them to watch for more birds, and it never occurred to any of them that she’d come this way, if she survived the crash. Standing next to a large trunk, no more than ten feet from the nearest man, the hand-held video screen they huddled around bathed them in light and made her nearly invisible. She contemplated them for a long moment. What was so captivating that they’d let their guard down so completely? Was it porn, or a video of loved ones back home? She couldn’t afford to let the difference matter, and her irritation at being denied such moral distinctions made her stomach churn.

No more time to deliberate on how to approach them – she kicked the closest man on the ear and sent him crashing into a tree, his neck bent at an improbable angle. Two others turned in time to see him slide to the ground, inert, and lunged for her, not thinking to reach for their weapons. Sidestepping one and wrenching his arm forcefully enough to drive him to the ground, she pivoted and kicked high to the back of the other man’s neck, sending him face first into the magazine of the machine gun, which tipped over with the impact. When he tried to right himself, maybe even fight back, disoriented and out of balance as he was, she slipped a side-kick under his chin, crushing his windpipe, and he ended up tangled in tripod legs, oozing blood over the barrel of the gun.

The last man had retained the presence of mind to grab his rifle and swing the barrel in her direction. But before he could fire, she drew the
wakizashi
over her shoulder and brought the blade crashing down through his elbow. He fell backwards, eyes fixed in terror, mouthing a silent scream and clutching what remained of his arm, as he kicked at the dirt in a futile effort to crab-walk out of her reach.

Emily pivoted at a sound and slashed across the throat of the man she’d wrenched to the ground. He’d managed to pick himself up and regain his footing just in time to meet his end, which turned out to be exceptionally grisly. Somehow, she’d cut more deeply than she intended, hacking through most of the muscles in his neck, the blade scraping the vertebrae at the top of his spine. She yanked it loose and watched him collapse like an accordion, his head lolling to the side in a fountain of blood.