Third Degree

fourth-quarter huddle. “We’re not waiting three minutes! We’re going in one minute. Copy?”

Danny wasn’t sure he had heard right until Ray Breen said, “I got you now. We’re ready.”

“Black Six,” Ellis said, “if Shields gets within thirty feet of that panic room, we’re going in. Keep me posted.”

Christ, Danny thought. Shields could be in there thinking about giving up, and he’ll still be thinking about it when Ray Breen blows his head off. Sheriff Ellis’s strategy was sound; giving an unbalanced man a real deadline could easily push him into executing his hostages. But Danny couldn’t shake the feeling that they hadn’t done all they could to talk Shields out of the house. Or was that simply his guilt talking? Was there any hope that Shields would surrender? The doctor believed he’d just defended himself against an intruder trying to murder him. He was deep into a siege mentality. He was also terminally ill. Did it even matter to Warren when or where he died?

“Take us up another hundred feet,” Sheriff Ellis ordered.

Danny started ascending. Where’s Laurel now? he wondered. What will she do when they blow the doors? Drop to the floor or stand there like a doe in the headlights while bullets spray through the house? Is there any chance she’ll try to protect her husband? Danny didn’t think so, but even the slightest prospect of this terrified him, because he was certain that Ray meant to kill Shields no matter what.

“Thirty-five seconds,” Ellis said, his eyes on his wristwatch. “Stay ready, Ray. Everybody key off your watches. Thirty seconds…”

A silver sheet of rain hit the windshield, and Danny fell through a black hole, straight into Afghanistan. Forty- two marines were trapped on a mountaintop in the worst storm the company’s Tajik adviser could remember. Taliban guerrillas commanded by mujahideen who’d fought the Russians twenty years earlier were scaling the rock walls like ants to finish off the Americans. It was only a sideshow to the battle raging at Tora Bora, but to the marines marooned on the mountain, it was the end of the world. An army Black Hawk had already been shot down as it hovered to fire a Hell-fire missile into a cave mouth. An Air Force A-10 had held off the guerrillas for a while, but now even the Warthog had been grounded. When night fell, there would be no stopping the Taliban. They were already too close to the marines for artillery to knock them off the mountain, and the Spectre gunships in the theater were committed to Tora Bora. At any moment, Danny expected the marines to call in artillery on their own position, as Joe Adams had famously done on Hill 385 in Korea. Anything was better than being captured by Afghan tribesmen.

Then a Delta Force officer volunteered to drop onto the mountain and set up a protective perimeter, if a helicopter pilot would try to airlift the trapped marines to safety. To do so would mean almost certain death. Danny didn’t want to die. He had no illusions about war. He was forty-three years old, and he hadn’t reached that age by volunteering for suicide missions. Yet he’d felt a voice rising up his throat, trying to volunteer him. Why? Was he trying to live up to the legacy of his father, the red-faced crop duster who’d fought in the Big One? He certainly had no faith in his immortality under fire. But at bottom, he realized, it was simpler than all that. If someone didn’t take a bird up there, those marines would die. Forty-two husbands, fathers, and sons. Fate had placed their lives in Danny’s hands. Of the two other pilots there that day, one had a son he’d never seen, and the other always had his eye on the main chance, which meant flying milk runs for rock stars, not dying in Afghanistan. So without thinking very much, Danny had raised his hand and said, “I’ll go.” The most meaningful reward he ever got in the military was the look in the Delta operator’s eyes after he volunteered. The look said, You are a crazy fuck, and you’re probably going to die, but, brother, you are One of Us.

Danny landed on the mountaintop three times before they got him. He wrung performance out of that chopper that the engineers who’d designed it would never have believed. His Pave Low took more AK rounds than by any physical law it should have survived, and the blasting sand and water stripped off half the paint and all the decals by the end of the second run. But eventually the ship gave up the ghost. It took an RPG round to kill it. Danny’s door-gunner screamed a warning, and Danny jinked at the last second, but the hissing rocket clipped his tail rotor and the controls went gooey on him. He didn’t even remember the crash, only an absolute certainty that the end had come, and that it had come in a chopper, as he had always known it would. He thought of his father as he fell, with his beloved Pave Low windmilling in the air like Pete Townshend’s guitar arm. There was a bright flash in his head, then the face of a girl he’d loved in high school, and then…nothing.

Only later did he learn that his crew were killed on impact. Danny was ejected, seat and all, through a hole the mountain ripped in the cockpit during the ship’s final spin. A piece of shrapnel tore through his left leg, and some Afghans fired a burst of AK rounds at him, connecting once in the same leg. And then a miracle occurred. Inspired by Danny’s desperate barnstorming, the pilot of one of the AC-130 gunships over Tora Bora threw away his regulation book, diverted to the besieged mountain, and rained hell and death down on the Afghans for ninety minutes straight. The Delta Force operators tied Danny to a stretcher they found in the wreckage of his chopper and carried him down the mountain, fighting a rearguard action all the way. The last six marines came with them. A hundred meters from the bottom, elements of the First Marine Division rushed up like a camouflaged tide and swept them back down to safety.

They gave Danny and his dead crew a Mackay Trophy for that action, but the ceremony was hollow for him. He never again saw any of the marines he’d saved that day. He did receive a couple of letters, one from a wife in Kansas, thanking him for saving her husband. The jarhead had added a postscript himself at the bottom: Semper fi, buddy. You’re always welcome here. They put in a snapshot of their kid, too, a freckled girl standing in short rows of corn. Danny had only read the letter once, but he kept it in his top dresser drawer, to remind him that sometimes you just had to say “Fuck it” and do the right thing, no matter what it cost. If you did, you never knew what someone else might do to help you. Or what good might come of it.

“Ten seconds!” Sheriff Ellis cried, his voice pitched high from the stress. “Take us down, Danny!”

Danny loved Laurel; he hadn’t the slightest doubt about that. And he hated his wife, for using his son as a hostage. He had an obligation to Michael that nothing could remove, but didn’t he also have an obligation to Laurel? What if she was carrying his child? God forgive him, a healthy child who could speak and listen? Laurel had given him everything she had to offer and asked nothing in return. She’d simply trusted that he’d do the right thing by her. And that he had not done-

“Five seconds,” said Sheriff Ellis. “This is Black Leader, we’re going to hover low and hit the spotlight. Everybody-”

Danny twisted back the throttle and slammed down the collective, and the helicopter dropped like King Kong off the Empire State Building.

“Shiiiiiiiitttt!” Ellis screamed, his face bone white with terror. “What’s happening?”

“We lost the engine!” Danny shouted, intentionally throwing the ship out of trim. “Brace yourself!”

Anything less than a crash might have left Ellis capable of issuing orders on the way down, so Danny had pulled an emergency autorotation, virtually killing the engine and causing a controlled crash in which only the energy stored in the still-whirling rotor blades could spare them from death. Red emergency lights lit up the instrument panel, and the whoop-whoop of the low rpm warning filled the cabin. He waited until the last possible instant to flare, then yanked up on the collective, certain that the primal terror scrambling the sheriff’s brain would prevent him from giving the go order. The Bell bounced hard on the front lawn, its rotor tips spinning bare inches from the brick front of the house.

“What just happened?” Ray Breen shouted. “Are you guys okay?”

“Holy Christ!” yelled Ellis, clutching his chest in terror.

Danny unhooked his harness and scrambled out of the chopper onto wet grass. When the sheriff saw this, he assumed the ship was about to explode and tried to do the same, but Danny leaned back inside and yelled, “Give me ten minutes! Ten minutes alone with him! Stay on those mikes!”

Comprehension dawned in Ellis’s eyes, followed by a blaze of anger, but Danny broke away and sprinted around the chopper to the front door of the house. He slammed into it with all his weight and started banging on it like a fugitive at a church door.

“Open up! It’s Danny! Warren, it’s me! It’s Danny!”

Over his shoulder he saw two alien figures in black body armor break cover and charge him. They’d closed to