“Goose! Goose!”
Bill Townsend’s voice rolled out of the smoke and dust to Goose’s right.
“It’s Dockery, Goose,” Bill said. Under the dust and blood, his face was ashen. “He’s hit.”
Goose followed Bill as the thunder of the arriving CH-46Es filled the air overhead again. The pilots juked their helos around, bringing them down in a compact spread. Then the dust and smoke cleared in front of Goose. Seeing Dockery nearly took Goose’s breath away.
Corporal Steve Dockery had eight years in as a Ranger and had seen some of the worst that the terrorist campaigns had to offer. He was a good man, a good soldier.
Now Dockery sat on his knees in a mockery of obeisance. A two-inch-wide, six-foot-long shard of the downed helicopter’s shattered rotors impaled him, sticking through his back and nailing him to the ground in a crouching position. His assault rifle lay beside him. Blood colored the kerchief over his lower face. His hands gripped the piece of steel that jutted from his chest and into the earth between his knees. Crimson ran down his arms, darkening the sleeves of his BDUs.
The man tried to speak. His mouth came open, but only blood poured out.
Goose didn’t know why the soldier wasn’t already dead, but over the years he had seen men cling tenaciously to life because they were afraid there wasn’t anything afterward. His eyes made contact with Dockery’s.
Dockery’s mouth moved again, pleading.
Bill knelt beside the wounded man and took one of Dockery’s hands in his. “We’re gonna be okay, buddy,” Bill said, his voice unnaturally calm. “We’re gonna be okay. Just look up in the sky. Look at those helos coming in to us. We got help now. We’ll get you out of here.”
Goose shouldered his rifle and dropped to one knee. He opened his medkit and took out an ampoule. Ripping the plastic away with his teeth, he stabbed the needle into a vein in Dockery’s arm and hit the plunger. He hoped the anesthetic was enough to knock the man out, but at the same time he felt bad that Dockery might not even be conscious the last few minutes of his life.
Bill took out gauze and tried to stem the flow of blood around the wounds in the Ranger’s back and chest. “Sarge. Goose. I need help. Please.”
“Excaliber, this is Phoenix,” Goose called, holding a bloody and shaking hand to his mouthpiece. “Are you prepared to take on wounded?”
“Affirmative, Phoenix. Excaliber is ready, willing, and able to transport wounded back to Wasp. The cap’n has the ship’s hospital standing by if we can’t make use of local resources in Sanliurfa.”
Not feeling in the least relieved, knowing that a great number of good men were going to be dead very soon and some were already dead, Goose looked back at Dockery. The Ranger’s eyes had glazed, but his breath still pulled at the kerchief covering his mouth. He was conscious, but barely so.
Goose took some of the gauze Bill handed him. He took a deep breath and tried to steady his hands as he worked to staunch the bleeding. The shadows of the descending helicopters filtered through the swirling smoke and dust haze to cover them.
“The shrapnel missed his heart and both lungs,” Bill said. “At least, I think it missed both—”
When his friend’s words cut off abruptly, Goose looked up from Dockery’s back. Bill wasn’t on the other side of the wounded man. All that remained was a set of crumpled of BDUs, the LCE, the assault rifle, and gear.
Alarm jarred through Goose. He’d only taken his eyes off Bill for an instant. There was no way Bill had time to get out of his clothes and then—then—then what? Take off across Turkey?
The superstitious paranoia that Goose had grown up with as a child, part of that feeling stemming from stories of the Old Testament and part of it from all the tall tales of ghosts and monsters that lived in the Okefenokee Swamp around Waycross, Georgia, raised goose bumps across the back of his neck. He fisted the pistol grip of the M-4A1 and glanced around.
“Bill?”
“He … vanished,” Dockery croaked.
Goose glanced at the wounded man, noting the pinprick-sized pupils, symptoms of the drugs in his system.
“’S’truth, Sargh. Saw ‘im … disappear.”
A dozen questions filled Goose’s mind. Before he had a chance to ask any of them, metal screamed overhead. He glanced up, spotting the black silhouettes of the helicopters through the dusk and smoke haze framed against the sun and the blue sky. Tears ran down his cheeks, brought on by the stabbing brightness of the sun.
But then he saw at least half of the CH-46Es slide out of control across the sky. They collided with other helicopters, shredding rotors and sending deadly shrapnel through each other and the vulnerable troops inside.
Then the troop transport ships rained from the sky like dying flies, breaking open and scattering troops and gear across the hardpan. In a handful of seconds, the relief effort sent by USS Wasp had become a broken necklace of casualties spread across the battlefield.
United States of America
Fort Benning, Georgia
Local Time 1:20 A.M.
Megan threw her upper body out across the roof’s edge. She’d moved before she’d thought about the action, and she knew that was the only thing that had saved Gerry Fletcher. She had never moved so quickly in her life. By some miracle, she managed to grab the boy’s left wrist and stop his plummet down the side of the building to the hard ground four stories below.
Men cursed in the parking lot below, in stunned amazement as well as fear. Megan recognized those emotions because she felt them within herself as well. She couldn’t believe she’d caught the falling boy.
At the same time, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep Gerry from falling. She didn’t have the mass or the strength. Her arm felt torn from the socket.
The spotlights from the vehicles trained
