She nodded.
'Who has the key? The charge nurse?'
'Nope,' Anita said. 'It's with a captain from something called the Technical Escort Unit, bivouacked in the room next to Talmadge.' Anita leaned over and pointed to the room east of Talmadge's.
'Now for the hard part,' Anita said as she drove the Suburban back to Woodrow Wilson Avenue and headed for Hawkins Field, our unanimous first choice for stealing a helicopter. As expected, the airfield offered a wide choice of Bell JetRangers, the aircraft Jasmine had flown in Los Angeles for television news crews. But Hawkins crawled with security and too many people.
'Okay, plan B,' Jasmine said, little knowing we would eventually run through plans C through BB as the pressure of unrelieved frustration built toward dark. For more than five hours, we crisscrossed Hinds, Madison, Rankin, and parts of Yazoo County, north past Canton and way over toward Flora and Pocahontas, south down to Byram, and finally southeast of Brandon. We found the better the airport, like Campbell Field in Madison, the more helicopters were there and the better the security.
Using an aviation map and data earlier downloaded off AirNav. com, Jasmine directed Anita to smaller and smaller fields, private airports with names like Supplejack, Root Hog, and Petrified Forest.
'Getting warm,' Jasmine would say every time we'd close in on a smaller airstrip because we'd find crop dusters there, but so far no helicopters, just fixed-wing Dromader MI8s, Cessna Ag Huskies, and the occasional Ag Cat and an Ayres Thrush.
'There should be more helicopters,' Jasmine said now as Anita shifted the Suburban into four-wheel drive and charted a slippery course down a narrow, tree-lined lane paved with mud from summer rains. 'Mama and I won a couple of dozen lawsuits for families and school districts when fixed-wing aircraft oversprayed pesticides and seriously exposed children. And we have more and more organic farmers who will sue at the slightest hint of pesticide on their fields. Helicopters are more expensive for aerial application, but the mere threat of legal action has offered a real financial incentive to use choppers instead.'
As we mulled this over, the trees gave way suddenly to a pasture.
'Eureka!' Jasmine said.
Anita eased off the accelerator
'Don't slow too much,' I said. 'We don't want to stick in anybody's memory.'
'Okay, over there, at the far edge,' Jasmine pointed. 'That's a Bell B3. It'll do perfectly. I can hot-wire it in a second.' She turned toward Tyrone. 'Got the waypoint?'
'Yes, ma'am. Yes indeedy!'
As we approached the trees at the pasture's far edge, a deep banging, popping racket thundered down on us from above. Instants later an old bubble-nosed helicopter with an Erector-set tail burst low over the trees and made its way toward the pasture. It looked like one of the dragonfly rescue copters from an old M*A*S*H episode, but instead of a litter for wounded soldiers, this one had a long pipelike array extending left and right below the cockpit. Jasmine turned and craned her head up to follow it. The engine missed an ignition stroke and left a stutter as the sound faded.
'What a relic,' I said as we entered the trees again.
'Not really.' Jasmine shook her head. 'More like a classic. That's a Bell model 47,' she said. The engine stuttered again. 'Needs a tune-up.'
'Belongs in a museum,' Tyrone said.
Jasmine laughed. 'A lot of flight schools still use them. I learned rotary wing in one.' She read the surprise on my face. 'A lot of small operators who have to transition from fixed to rotary wing still use the 47 because they're cheap. Bell 47 clubs all over the world buy these, restore them, have races, and fawn over them like vintage Corvettes. The 47's a damn good bucket of bolts if you take care of it.'
'And if you don't?'
Jasmine shrugged. 'They crash a lot.'*****
Jack Kilgore had finished off the sixteen-ounce tub of bad convenience-store coffee when his encrypted phone rang. He grimaced at the last swallow of thin acidic crap and said a small prayer of thanks he'd been able to drink it in a safe, warm, dry place free of incoming rounds.
'Kilgore.'
'Barner here, sir. We have a lead on our targets.'
'Excellent. Tell me about it.'
CHAPTER 79
The helicopters were gone.
Everything depended on stealing a chopper. Everything.
But when we returned to the GPS waypoint for the helicopters shortly before 3:00
A.M., both helicopters were gone. Anita stopped the Suburban and we all strained our eyes for a glimpse of a helicopter in the empty cow pasture intermittently lit as clouds hurried across the face of the setting moon.
We sat in stunned silence-Rex, Tyrone, Anita, Jasmine, and I- sandwiched in among the gear jamming the big Chevy truck's capacious interior and overflowed to the roof rack. 'This is not a good thing,' I said finally.
Jasmine leaned toward Anita. 'Can you follow those tracks?' Jasmine pointed to a set of muddy tire ruts leading into the pasture. 'Maybe they're around a bend of trees or something.' 'Sure,' Anita said. 'We're already in four-wheel drive.'
Everything rattled as we bounced across the pasture trying not to think about the increasingly obvious fact.
'This is my fault,' Jasmine said, her voice low and burdened with second thoughts. 'We should have visited all those little airfields after dark. The choppers have to go somewhere to refuel.'
'Just keep praying,' I said as we bounced across the field.
'Worse comes to worst, we'll locate one tonight and if we don't have time, we'll try again tomorrow night,' Tyrone said.
'Might have to,' I said. 'But it also gives our buddies with the Blackhawks more time to find us.'
Worse looked as if it were coming to worst, then we rounded a peninsula of trees and spotted the dragonfly silhouette of the old M*A*S*H chopper resting on a trailer. A blue tarp covered the bubble nose. The newer helicopter was nowhere to be seen.
'Oh, boy,' Rex said, his voice flat and dull. 'Oh freaking boy.'
Anita pulled up to the old helicopter and stopped. Even after she put the Suburban in park we all sat there silently absorbing the unspoken reality facing us.
'Shake it off, guys,' Jasmine said. 'It could be a lot worse.' Then she got out and walked around the helicopter climbed up on the trailer and shined her flashlight into some sort of inspection port on what looked like the tail-rotor gearbox. Next, she rapped on the near-side saddle fuel tank and checked out the pesticide hopper fastened behind the cockpit.
Then she unsnapped the bungee cords holding the tarp and let it drift to the ground.
Feeling proud and proprietary, I couldn't take my eyes off Jasmine, climbing into the cockpit, sitting in the pilot's seat, and looking slowly around her then down at the instrument panel. My respect for her grew as I saw the subtle displays of her knowledge and competence as she inspected the craft. After a while she smiled, looked over at us, and offered a satisfied nod. Then she climbed down and made her way back to the Suburban.
'Well, the good news is that this is a G model of the Bell 47, which means the Franklin internal combustion engine is at least two hundred horsepower rather than one seventy-eight, which we see a lot,' she said.
'Oh, Lord, bless you for twenty-two horsepower,' Rex said sarcastically.
'Rex!' Anita barked at him.
'Okay, all right,' Rex mumbled softly.
'The aircraft's still here,' Jasmine continued, 'because the trailer tire on the other side is flat.'
'So why didn't they fly it out like the other one?' Rex asked.
'On something as old and slow as this one, you want to save your engine and airframe hours for something
