The Hunters (5 page)

I
n the DC-3 cockpit, Parson and Chartier strapped into their seats, and Geedi sat behind them in the jump seat. Gold stood in the flight deck doorway. Her duffel bag lay in the cargo compartment, secured by a cargo strap. If the test run works, Parson had told everyone, we'll just start the other engine, finish the checklist, and get out of here. The fuel truck pulled away; Geedi had topped off the tanks and double-checked the sumps for water contamination. So far, the fuel checked good.

Parson donned his headset, reached up and turned on the battery master switches and the avionics master. The interphone came alive, and static fried in his headset.

“All right,” he said, “here goes nothing. Let's see if she'll crank.”

“Ouais,”
Chartier said. He'd used that expression often enough for Parson to realize it meant “yeah.”

Chartier turned on the right fuel boost pump. By 1930s standards, the electric boost pump was a modern convenience. In the DC-3's original configuration, Chartier would have had to operate a wobble pump by hand. All surviving DC-3s had received modifications over the years, with new avionics, GPS screens, even weather radar. Now no two looked alike.

When the fuel pressure on the right side showed ten PSI, Chartier pressed the right starter switch. The prop began turning, and he counted as the blades passed the twelve-o'clock position.

“Un, deux, trois, quatre,”
Chartier muttered to himself.

When he'd counted ten blades, he moved the right mixture control to
AUTO RICH
, and he placed the right engine's magneto switch to
BOTH
.

The Pratt & Whitney coughed, sputtered, belched blue smoke, and fired up.

“Très bien,”
Chartier said. “Geedi, you really know your airplane.”

“Cool,” Parson said. He glanced back at Gold and said, “Looks like you're going to Djibouti. And you say I never take you anywhere.”

“That's the last thing I'd say about you,” Gold said.

Chartier let the engine idle as the oil pressure needle came alive. When the oil temperature rose, he bumped up the throttle to one thousand RPM and began the checklist for the left engine.

The left engine started normally, and Parson steered the airplane to the end of the taxiway. Geedi scanned the instruments and looked outside at the right engine. Gold strapped into a seat at the front of the cargo compartment, wearing a spare headset with an interphone cord running from the cockpit. Parson ran up the engines and tested the propeller controls. Checked the magnetos and scanned the gauges one more time. Shoved the prop levers full forward and said to Chartier, “Let's tell 'em we're ready to go.”

Chartier pressed his transmit switch and said, “Baidoa Tower, World Relief Eight-Two Alpha ready for departure.”

“Eight-Two Alpha,” came the answer, “you are cleared for takeoff, Runway Two-Two.”

“Cleared for takeoff,” Chartier responded.

Parson advanced the throttles and taxied onto the runway. Chartier locked the tailwheel and began to make snorting noises.

“Oh, I ain't believing this,” Parson said. He glanced back at Geedi in the jump seat. “He's calling me a stick hog. Can you believe this froggy bastard is calling me a stick hog?”

Geedi chuckled. Chartier snorted again.

“Okay, you truffle-eating son of a bitch,” Parson said. “Your takeoff.”

Chartier grinned, and he placed one hand on the throttles and the other on the right yoke. He eased the power up to forty-eight inches of manifold pressure on both engines, and the aircraft began to accelerate. As the weight of the airplane transferred from the wheels to the wings, the tail came off the ground. A few seconds later, the DC-3 lifted into the air.

Parson eyed the instruments, with special attention to the right side's engine gauges. Everything looked normal, and he brought up the landing gear on Chartier's call. The DC-3 climbed above arid terrain on a northerly heading that would take it over Ethiopia's Ogaden Desert before reaching Djibouti. When the radio traffic quieted, Gold spoke up on the interphone from her seat in the cargo compartment.

“Michael,” she said, “I didn't know you were a stick hog.”

“Me neither,” Geedi said.

“Oh, hell,” Parson said. “Now I got a mutiny by the whole crew.”

Chartier laughed as he tweaked the throttles to adjust climb power. He leveled off at seventy-five hundred feet, a low cruising altitude by modern standards. In the unpressurized aircraft, Parson swallowed to equalize the pressure in his sinuses, and he felt his ears pop.

“Mind if I come up to the flight deck?” Gold asked.

“Not at all,” Parson said. “The view's a lot better up here.”

A few seconds later Gold appeared in the flight deck entrance. Her untied blond hair spilled over her scarf. She put her hand on Parson's shoulder and stood over the cockpit in a way that made him think of a guardian angel—if guardian angels wore David Clark headsets and Ray-Bans.

Maybe Gold possessed no powers of divine intervention, but with her, Parson had survived many dangers. As his interpreter during his time as an adviser to the Afghan air force, she'd helped him take down a tyrant who forced kids to become child soldiers. On another mission, she'd given him the encouragement and strength he needed to land a crippled C-5 Galaxy, despite serious injuries and one hell of a lot of pain. Her knowledge of languages and cultures awed him, as did her compassion for people in need.

The aircraft droned over dirt roads, sparse trees, and villages made of cardboard and scrap sheet metal. The six-hundred-mile flight would take about three hours.

“Looks pretty bleak down there,” Chartier said.

“You got that right,” Parson said.

Parson recalled a story he'd heard about a well-intentioned but clueless pilot back during the 1990s relief effort in Somalia. In a crowd of Somalis outside the Mogadishu airport, the dumbass held up a carton of canned beef stew.

One carton.

The crowd surged at him, knocked him down, and broke open the carton. Cans of beef stew rolled across the ground. Fights broke out over each can. Somalis suffered split lips, broken noses. The pilot got trampled but somehow escaped serious injury. A UN official with a British accent yanked him to his feet and said, “You bloody idiot. Don't you ever, ever fucking do that again.”

Overwhelmed and shocked, the young pilot stammered, “I paid for that myself. I just wanted to give somebody something that tasted better than all these emergency rations.”

Reared in American suburbia, the guy could not comprehend need on a Somali scale. To him, hunger meant the way you felt after missing one meal. He had no concept of true hunger, the desperation that stripped away everything but the basest animal survival instinct. The knowledge that you must eat something, anything,
now
, because in a day or two your body will pass a point of no return, too weak to digest food.

As Parson considered that incident, somewhere in the back of his mind a warning light came on. A vague note of caution. Something he saw in the corner of his eye kicked in his combat instincts. He looked down and to the left.

A white smoke trail lifted from the ground. Corkscrewed for an instant. Traced a path straight toward the DC-3.

“My airplane,” Parson called. “Missile, ten o'clock.”

Parson grabbed the yoke with his left hand. With his right, he snatched both throttles back to idle to cut his heat signature. Rolled hard and kicked full left rudder. Stood the DC-3 on its wingtip. The horizon tilted to nearly vertical.

Gold lost her balance and tumbled against the folding seats on the side of the cargo compartment. Parson kept his eyes on the white smoke burning right at him.

With no countermeasures or missile warning system, nothing protected the old airplane except eyeballs and reflexes. G-forces pressed Parson into his seat as he held the steep turn. His arms grew heavy, and he even felt his cheeks sag.

In a military aircraft, his crew would have punched flares as defensive countermeasures; a sky suddenly full of hot things might confuse a heat-seeking missile. Over Iraq and Afghanistan, Parson had seen heat-seekers chase flares in crazy directions, much to the relief of aviators. He had also seen countermeasures fail.

But right now Parson had no options except maneuvering: The missile's seeker head expected to intercept the airplane at point X. Parson hoped to put the plane anywhere but there. The missile scorched closer, seemed headed right between his eyes. Parson held the turn.

The threat reduced life and death to geometry. Rate of turn. Radius of a circle. Vector of a missile. Angle of intercept.

The warhead shot across the nose of the airplane like a smoking dagger. So close that Parson saw the flame of burning rocket fuel.

“You made it,” Chartier called.

Parson rolled out of the turn. Pushed the nose over and dived toward the ground. The noise of the rushing slipstream rose as speed increased. He glanced at the unwinding altimeter and kept his airspeed just shy of the two-hundred-and-twenty-mile-an-hour redline.

“They might have another missile, Frenchie,” Parson said. “Let's get low and fast.”

“Absolument.”

Fast
was a relative term in a DC-3. Parson knew he could not climb out of missile range quickly enough. He could only dive, fly as low as he dared, and hope his angular velocity across the ground would make him a difficult target. Wouldn't hurt to blend the heat of his engines with that of the warm land, either.

Parson pulled up a hundred feet off the deck. At that altitude, two hundred felt like blinding speed. The parched fields, scrub brush, and wasteland melted into swells on an earthen sea.

“Sophia, are you all right?” Parson called on interphone. Hadn't she been right behind him?

No answer. Geedi looked back into the cargo compartment.

“I think she hit her head,” the flight mechanic said. He started to get out of his seat to help Gold get up.

“I'm all right,” Gold said.

A moment later she appeared in the flight deck entrance. With a bloody handkerchief, she dabbed at a cut on her temple. Parson glanced up at her for a second, then returned his eyes to the horizon and his instruments.

“Damn, Sophia,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“No, you did what you had to do.”

“Let's hope we don't have to do it again,” Parson said. “Frenchie, sorry to jerk the plane away from you like that.”

“Do not apologize,
mon colonel
. I think you saved our lives.”

In the jump seat, Geedi placed his hand against the frame of the cockpit entrance to steady himself.

“Nobody ever tried to blow me up before,” Geedi said.

“I think we're all right now,” Parson said. “Frenchie, tell ATC we just got shot at.”

Chartier reported the missile to air traffic control, but the radio call seemed a hollow gesture. What could ATC do? On a military mission, the report would go to an AWACS bird, which would immediately relay the information to a Quick Reaction Force. The QRF, likely in the form of Apache attack helicopters, would go hunting with missiles of their own.
Give your soul to Allah, 'cause your ass is mine.

Not today, though. Parson felt impotent in this defenseless old crate.

Once he felt he'd put more than enough distance between the airplane and whoever fired the missile, he climbed back up to seventy-five hundred feet. They flew on in silence except for radio calls. Parson had seen that reaction before; people in an airplane got quiet after a close brush with death.

He let Chartier take control of the airplane again. With his hands now off the yoke, Parson noticed his palms were sweating. A shoulder-fired missile had come up at him in Afghanistan the first time he ever flew with Gold. That time, the missile connected. He forced himself to keep his mind on the DC-3's flight.

Eventually, ATC cleared World Relief Eight-Two Alpha for descent to Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport. Djibouti, a tiny republic with a capital city of the same name, stood in the Horn of Africa where the Red Sea met the Gulf of Aden. Parson had flown to Djibouti many times in C-130s and C-5s. The U.S. military's Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa maintained a base there, sharing a runway with the civilian airport. The base, dubbed Camp Lemonnier by the French who built it, had once hosted Marine Corps helicopters, Air Force C-130s and Pave Hawk choppers, Navy P-3 Orions, and from time to time, various special ops forces such as SEALs and Green Berets. But now, the American presence was dwindling because of budget cuts and the demands of other hotspots.

When approach control handed the DC-3 over to Djibouti Tower, the routine of procedure began to settle Parson's nerves.

“World Relief Eight-Two Alpha,” the tower said. “Descend and maintain three thousand feet. Expect visual approach to Runway Two-Seven.”

“Eight-Two Alpha down to three thousand,” Parson responded, “looking for the visual to Two-Seven.”

Chartier pulled back the throttles to begin the descent. Gold buckled into a seat in the cargo compartment. Parson checked to make sure the tailwheel was locked, flipped on the landing lights, and completed the rest of the approach checklist. The sapphire waters of the Gulf of Tadjoura glittered in the distance, and the glitter spread into the larger Gulf of Aden at the southern end of the Red Sea. The city of Djibouti lay on the southern coast of the Gulf of Tadjoura. A couple miles offshore, a warship cut a wake across the water's surface. As an Air Force guy, Parson didn't know a cruiser from a destroyer. However, the vessel's guns and multiple antennas, as well as the shape of its superstructure, made clear its military purpose.

“Looks like somebody's on pirate patrol,” Parson said.

“Ça, c'est sûr,”
Chartier said.

The DC-3 glided over the coastline and banked onto final approach. The turn put the aircraft over the sea and on a westerly heading, with the Somali border and coastline to Parson's left. In that direction, just off the beach, a civilian freighter lay aground, rusting in shallow water. The wreck listed at some forty-five degrees, corroded chains dangling from the deck.