jungle rushed toward him as he rolled upside down. Cody slammed the stick forward in a last attempt to get control and the plane’s nose rose sharply. Its tail raked the treetops and disintegrated, and the black craft was snapped down into the green tapestry below. Cody shoved the stick forward, away from his chest, and braced himself against the instrument panel, his forearms shielding his face. He heard the plane crumpling around him, the metal screaming as the trees tore it apart. Then it all stopped — the noise, the forward thrust — everything seemed suspended in time.
Cody, hanging upside down, looked over his head and stared straight down at the ground, about twenty feet below hint. The plane was a twisted wreck around him. He looked back at Rossiter, his gunner. The kid’s arms hung down toward the ground.
The canopy was half off, dangling from its tracks. Cody slammed the flat of his hand into it and it toppled away into the trees. He smelled smoke.
He started talking to himself, rattling off the drill. ‘Got to get out,’ he said and, loosening his safety belt, tried to hang out of the plane and drop to the tree limbs. The smell of smoke grew stronger, and suddenly he was free of the plane, arcing through the air. He reached out toward a branch, felt it slap his palm and then slip away. It spun him around so his feet were now below him. Just like a bail-out, he thought as he hurtled toward the ground. Knees together and bent, roll when I hit.
But he hit wrong, and as he landed he heard his kneecap pop, felt the pain burn deep in the leg, coursing down to his ankle. He trapped the scream of pain between his teeth. Sweat boiled out of his skin.
He looked up. The river was twenty yards away, shimmering in the early morning sun. He got up and started hobbling frantically toward it He knew there were bandits all around, but maybe he’d get lucky. Then overhead and behind him he heard a sizzling sound and a moment later the dull
Twenty yards to freedom.
‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue one. We have the Black Pony in sight . . .
The Huey was suspended twenty feet above the river. In the belly, Harley Simmons, a young gunner, squinted and peered into the thick foliage, looking for signs of life. The pilot’s voice crackled through the earphones.
‘How about it, Simmons, anything?’
‘I’m looking, Captain, I’m looking. . .
The explosion cut him off. It was almost like slow motion. First the shock wave of the burst rippling through the trees, then the Black Pony disintegrating, then the bright orange fireball boiling up into the sky. Seconds later the ping of bullets sang off the fuselage a few feet from Simmons’s head.
‘We got bandits shooting at us!’ Simmons screamed into his mike.
‘How about our man?’ the pilot relied back.
Then Simmons saw him; he was hobbling from under the awning of fire, heading toward the riverbank. He was almost there-. twenty, thirty feet maybe. But before Simmons could say anything, another round of bullets ripped into the edge of the open hatch, tearing it up. Bits and pieces rattled off Simmons’s helmet. He heard the whine of 9 mm. shells wailing inches from his ear, and fear .charged deeply into him like a bolt of lightning. The plane in the forest exploded again and fire raged through the treetops.
He can’t make it, Simmons said to himself as more gunfire tore at the Huey.
‘I don’t see nothing, Captain,’ he lied. ‘We got bandits chewing us up back here.’
The pilot rolled the belly of the chopper toward the forest and spun around, heading back downriver.
Simmons dropped weakly to his knees. He was shaking all over. Oh God, he thought, what have I done .
But he was too frightened to say it aloud. He heard the pilot’s voice on the intercom: ‘Corkscrew, this is Rescue one . . . We lost him . . .
Cody almost reached the bank when the chatter of an automatic weapon off to his right startled him. He dropped to the ground and crawled to the edge of the water.
The Huey was a hundred feet away, hovering over the river.
Over here, over here! he urged silently. He started to get up, to wave at the chopper. And watched in horror as it peeled away and headed back downstream.
No, he cried to himself, No, no
‘I’m here,’ he screamed desperately.
He stood up, determined to jump into the water and swim to the safety of the other side, at just the moment the sky erupted in fire as the plane disintegrated in flames. The heat roared down over him like a blanket. He covered his face and fell to the ground, huddled against the raging fire in the trees overhead. And as the inferno baked his back and legs he kept crawling toward the river.
Freedom was ten feet away when he gave up.
The commander burst into the radio shack, his face frozen in a scowl.
‘What the hell is it, Wicker?’ he snapped.
‘We just lost a bird, Commander,’ the radio operator answered forlornly.
The commander’s shoulders sagged. He shook his head.
‘Damn!’ he barked. ‘Who was it.’
The radioman hesitated for just a second.
