They charged toward the wood, racing over the flat sloping ground. Out in front they could see the leading helicopter making a wide turn right over the trees, and then banking hard in a tight starboard turn, coming back in, behind them now.
The Puma swooped low, and now it was on them, raking the ground with its mounted machine gun, the bullets spitting into the soft ground, making lines in the grass. The second burst seemed only yards away as the SEALs pounded over the ground, and suddenly there was a terrible cry from Lt. Commander Dallas MacPherson. The most dreaded cry in the Navy SEALs' vocabulary. The leader's hit.
Dallas ran back, and he could see Rick, facedown, blood pouring down his camouflage trousers. He couldn't tell if the boss had been hit in the stomach or the leg, but there was a lot of blood.
He looked up to see where the helicopter was, couldn't find it, and yelled to Mike Hook to get to the wood and send the SOS message, and to open up the TACBE. He told Don Smith,
Out on the horizon they could see the Argentinian helicopters, flying together now, making a long circle. They were plainly on their way back. And Dallas banged a new ammunition belt into the machine gun, cranked open the tripod, then swung around, lying in the grass, adjusting the sights for the approach of the choppers. Dallas was trained, and he was ready to face the enemy.
Doug Jarvis tried to lift Rick to check the injury but could not do so. And within one minute the Arg helicopters were on them again, streaking in low over the grass, both firing now, and Douglas Jarvis flung himself over Rick Hunter to take the impact of the bullets himself.
Dallas hammered back at the Args with the machine gun, aiming every one of the two hundred 7.62mm bullets in the belt straight at the nearest cockpit. And as they overflew the embattled SEALs in the grass, Dallas rolled right around, swiveling the gun with him. Somehow he kept on firing, scarcely realizing he had already smashed the entire windshield of the lead helicopter with the sustained fire from the SEALs' most trusted weapon.
The pilot, unsighted, too low, plummeted into the ground in a fireball, and Dallas leaped to his feet, only now seeing the blood streaming out of Douglas Jarvis's jacket as he crouched over their Team Leader.
Dallas roared in fury. And a thousand memories stood before him, memories of how he and the CO had fought together before. And he stood upright, trembling with rage, shaking his right fist, tears streaming down his face as he screamed without reason at the retreating helicopter,
Unhappily, that was precisely what they were doing, and the surviving Argentinian helicopter, with its deadly machine gun, swung around for yet another attack. Worse yet, there was a new helicopter lifting up over the mountaintop, and briefly it joined the first one, and they flew together some five miles east of the SEALs.
Captain Jarvis was hit, but not badly, high up on his right arm, which was pouring blood but had only been lacerated by the shell. He climbed to his feet and temporarily left the CO on the ground. They were totally exposed, effectively facing two incoming helicopter gunships. But for the moment the Argentinians seemed to be taking their time, hovering out above the snowy foothills. But then they made up their minds and started in again toward the stricken Rick Hunter and his men.
Rick had just opened his eyes when Dallas spotted another aircraft, plainly a fighter-bomber, in the sky, bearing down at high speed from the western range out by Mount Olivia. 'Jesus,' he said, 'now we're in real trouble. They got half the fucking Air Force here.'
And this one was not hesitating. It was traveling like a bat out of hell, racing low along the foothills of the mountains.
But neither Dallas nor Doug Jarvis knew this aircraft was not on a bombing mission. Its attack was more precise than that, and Lt. Commander Alan Ross, from Springfield, Massachusetts, had his finger right next to the missile button. The SEALs, peeping up through the grass, gazed in astonishment as the Hornet 18F came racing in at five hundred knots and fired its first AIM-9 missile.
They saw the bright, unmistakable winged dart shape glinting in the morning light, fizzing in at just below supersonic speed, low over the mountain, and then slamming into the newly arrived helicopter, blowing it in half. Two sudden fireballs roared toward the ground.
And they stood up, Douglas helping Rick to a sitting position, to watch the split-second bright fire in the sky that signaled the second missile was on its way, lasering over the foothills, a fiery trail behind it.
They couldn't see Lt. Commander Ross's fist clench in triumph as he banked the U.S. Navy strike fighter hard to the southeast, but they saw the missile streaking over the grassland, swerving at the last second, and then smashing into the first helicopter with such thumping force it spun the aircraft right over before detonating like a thunderbolt, high over those lonely pastures.
And now they could see Brian Harrison charging out from the wood to help. And, half running, half walking, and laughing, they manhandled Rick Hunter into the safety of the trees. In the distance they could see the Hornet way over the wood, slowed down, somewhere out over the Beagle Channel.
But that was not their immediate concern. What mattered now was the amount of blood their leader was losing, and the obvious pain he was in. With the three Argentinian helicopters all destroyed, and the cover of the trees, they probably had a half hour to get organized.
They wrapped two field dressings on Douglas Jarvis's arm, which in the end might need stitches. But Doug himself took charge of Rick Hunter, resting him down on a sleeping bag, with another one covering him, trying to stop the violent trembling that had set in.
He and Brian cut away the trousers to try and see the extent of the wound, and to Doug's great relief there was no further injury. The Commander had been hit in his right thigh, not in his stomach. The bullet was probably still in there, but the wound was toward the outside, and it had missed the main artery — the one that always kills matadors when the horn of the bull rips it open.
Nevertheless, the leg was bleeding heavily, and Douglas stripped off his jacket, pullover, and shirt, ripping up the shirt to make a tourniquet, which he bound around the Commander's upper leg. He then injected morphine into Rick's arm, and dressed the gaping wound as well as he could with a combination of field dressings and the rest of his shirt.
It looked as if the blood might have stopped, but it may have still been bleeding inside. Doug knew they had to get help, fast; and he told Mike to record a new satellite message, giving the precise GPS at the point where they would reach the wide Beagle Channel. Staring at their chart, using his small ruler, Doug called it…
Dallas MacPherson also knew they would either be there at that time or they would no longer be alive. It just depended on whether the Argentinians realized there had been a minor battle out here in these desolate lands, and that the foreign assault group they were seeking was still on the loose, heading for the channel.
In the considered view of Dallas, there was a very good chance the Argentinians might not realize what was happening, because there had not been a fourth helicopter, and the destruction of the three searching choppers had been so sudden they almost certainly had made no report back to base. At least not one that stated categorically they were being wiped out by a mad groundhog with a machine gun, and a fighter plane they wrongly assumed was Argentinian.
Nonetheless, he thought they had a couple of hours maximum to get the two wounded men to the meeting point. Because one of them was seriously hurt, and they had nearly four miles to walk, and they did not have a stretcher. Dallas assumed a loose command, ordered Mike Hook to fire off the satellite message immediately, and went to help Bob Bland cut or break two fairly straight beech branches, which took ten minutes.
While this was happening, Don Smith made a mug of coffee, principally to give to the Commander, and then
