Baku, Krebs had found it necessary to put down in the hills so that he could try to carry out whatever immediate repairs were possible. With Meredith trying clumsily to help and the others standing guard with their popguns in the darkness, they had struggled to slap enough mechanical Band-aids on the ship to get her back into the air before dawn brought about their inevitable discovery by the enemy. With the first light sweeping over the barren hills, Krebs had miraculously managed to get the M-100 airborne again. It sounded like a sick old used car. But it flew. And they climbed up above the snow line into high Armenia.
Meredith stared obstinately forward, across the gray and white landscape, as though he could will the ailing machine to continue over these last critical miles. The broken earth beneath them was terra incognita. The situation in Armenia was so chaotic, with so many factions and occupation forces engaged in butchering each other, that a landing would bring completely unpredictable consequences. If the Islamic Union occupation forces got to them first, they would be shot out of hand. If the wrong partisans got them, their fate might be considerably worse.
'Major,' Krebs cried in exasperation. 'Look at the goddamned controls. We're fucked. I've got to land this baby.
Meredith refused to look at the control panel. He stared at the line of white mountains that meant freedom. And life. They had to make it now. For Taylor. So that it would not end as a bad joke after all.
'How far is it?' Meredith asked.
In response, the engines began to choke.
'So much for the decision-making process,' Krebs said.
'
The engines were finished. Krebs struggled with the manual controls, trying to bully the autorotation system to perform at the top of his voice. But the threats didn't help. They were too low for the autorotation to fully activate, and before Meredith could call any further warnings or instructions to the men in the rear compartment, the M-100 began to slice its way through a stand of evergreen trees in a shallow valley.
The machine crashed through the forest, splintering tall conifers. The armored sides and underbelly screamed as the M-100 scraped through the boughs. The ship bucked badly, tilting over on its side. Meredith could hear the sound of man-made materials wrenching apart in the last instant before the fuselage slammed into the ground, and he thought of Taylor. His wife, his parents — they all deserved him now. Only Taylor remained. With his ruined face and haunted eyes. Taylor wanted him to live.
What was left of the ship ploughed into a snow field amid the trees and came to rest on its side.
To his astonishment, Meredith found that he was still alive. The slash wound on his neck had torn open again from the strain, and his spine and joints felt as though he had made a very bad parachute landing. But his seat harness still held him in place And he was unmistakably, incredibly, deliciously alive.
'Sonofabitch,' Krebs said with spectacular emphasis. 'That's it. I've had it. I'm going to retire.'
'You all right, Chief?' Meredith asked. He could hear his own voice shaking.
'Sonofabitch,' the warrant officer repeated. His voice, too, had begun to tremble.
Meredith moved to try the intercom. But the mike had been torn from his headset in the crash. In any case, all of the electronic systems appeared to be utterly inert.
He tested his limbs, then carefully undid his safety harness, lowering himself until his feet caught the edge of the copilot's seat. The M-l00 had settled almost perfectly at ninety degrees, its right wing and rotor torn away. Awkward and stiff, Meredith clambered back through the passageway that led to the ops compartment, crawling in a sideward world, under the surreal glow of the emergency lights.
Parker and Ryder were both bloody and unconscious. The ops-and-intel NCO was awake but dazed, the lower half of his face covered in blood. At the sight of Meredith, the NCO's eyes gave a flicker of recognition, but he immediately sank back into himself.
Parker was in the worst shape. The seats in the ops cell had safety belts, but the overall ergonomics were not nearly as developed as the cockpit seats. Parker's chair had ripped free of its pedestal, throwing him forward- His arm was badly twisted and there was blood seeping through his uniform sleeve where an unnatural jut against the doth announced a compound fracture. His face was misshapen on one side, and it appeared as though both the jaw and cheekbone might have been broken Parker snored blood out of his nose and mouth.
Ryder came to. The young warrant officer was bruised and stiff, but far luckier than the others. Hardly a minute after waking, he was moving tentatively about the cabin, trying to assist Meredith.
'What happened?' Ryder asked.
'We crashed.'
Ryder thought for a moment. It was evident that his head was not yet completely dear 'We in Turkey?'
'No. Somewhere in Armenia. Indian country.'
'Oh.' The younger man thought for a moment. 'So what do we do now?'
Parker groaned. Meredith had repositioned him for maximum comfort. But he had not yet managed to scavenge material for a splint, Shock, too, might be a problem.
Parker groaned again. It was the noise of a man waking after an ungodly drunk.
'First.' Meredith said, 'we zero out all of the electronics, Then we collect whatever we can carry and use. Then we rig the grenades in here and in the cockpit. Then we start walking.'
Krebs slipped into the compartment from the canted passageway. His face looked deadly serious.
'Major,' he said, 'we got company.'
Working frantically, the men wiped out the codes on the electronics that had not been destroyed in the crash Krebs rigged a splint for Parker's arm with the same casual dexterity he displayed working on an engine or a control panel. Parker had an ever greater perception of the pain he was undergoing, and he bobbed just above and below the surface of consciousness Working together. Meredith, Krebs, Ryder, and the NCO, who had largely regained his senses, carefully lowered Parker out into the snow. Parker came up from his dreams just long enough to say:
'You can leave me, guys. Don't let me hold you up. You can leave me.'
And he swooned back into his pain.
Their visitors could not see them at the rear of the M-100. Only the machine's snout and cockpit protruded from the treeline, and the dense evergreens offered good concealment with their impenetrable blankets of snow. But every man waited for the sound of movement in the deep snow. Or of gunfire.
Krebs had spotted the first intruders through the windscreen: men in ragtag winter clothing, but heavily armed. In the moments before he crawled back to inform Meredith, the old warrant had watched the entire visible rim of the little valley fill with armed men.
It was very cold outside of the shelter of the M-100.
'They make any gestures?' Meredith asked. 'Did it seem like they were looking for trouble?'
Krebs threw him a bitter laugh. 'I'm not sure we're in a position to be much trouble to
Meredith nodded. 'I'm going to blow the cockpit and the ops cabin.'
Krebs shook his head, as if in sorrow.
'Won't they, like, think it's a hostile act or something?' Ryder asked.
Meredith answered him as honestly as he could. 'Probably. But we don't have any choice. This baby's loaded with top secret gear.' He shivered with the sharp mountain cold. 'All I can do at this point is toss in a couple of grenades. Before these characters, whoever they are, start closing in. It may not do a hell of a lot of good. But we've got to do everything we can to make it hard for the enemy's technical intelligence boys.'
Krebs raised his head sharply.
Meredith followed the turn of the old warrant's attention.
'You hear something, Flapper?'
'I don't know,' Krebs whispered.
Parker moaned.
'What the hell,' Meredith said. And he pulled himself back up into the belly of the M-100. 'Get your asses over behind those fallen trees,' he ordered. And his boots disappeared.
He had to stand on a monitor worth several million dollars to reach the compartment where the extra
