Tanner gave Phillips another hand signal.
Phillips nodded slowly and raised his pistol.
Taking in a long breath and holding it, Tanner rolled away from his tree, aimed at the sailor on the left, and fired.
'Jenkins, turn around!' screamed Mitchell. 'We're going back for Ramirez.'
Even as Jenkins rolled the wheel, throwing all of them to the rail, Beasley and Smith shifted their fire to the smoking chopper, whose pilot was still trying to regain control.
Suddenly, a new trail of smoke unfurled from the chopper's tail rotor, and a fire appeared there as Beasley and Smith whooped and reloaded.
'Get him!' cried Mitchell as they came back toward Ramirez.
Jenkins released the wheel, turning it over to Mitchell, then dove into the water as Mitchell killed the throttle.
Meanwhile, the now-burning chopper began spinning and wobbling away from the boat, and Hume cursed that he didn't have a rocket to finish her off. But it didn't matter. The chopper rolled hard onto its side, the main rotor now perpendicular to the water as Mitchell brought the fishing boat around once more, trying to slow up near Jenkins and Ramirez.
The chopper's rotors began slicing into the water, and it suddenly turned once more as it made impact, the rotors snapping like twigs, the cabin slapping hard, waves of white water cascading up around the craft.
'Got that one, sir!' shouted Smith.
At the same time, the remaining chopper and its single gunner came back around for another pass, and that pilot had all the time in the world to get his gunner on target. Now their searchlight swept up, across Mitchell's wake, and found the two men in the water.
'Jenkins, come on!' cried Mitchell.
THIRTY-FOUR
The moment the second sailor collapsed with a bullet lodged in his head, SEAL Chief Tanner and his partner wove back through the woods, heading west to circle around and come in from behind the remaining men.
Tanner and Phillips now held their pistols in one hand, their SOG SEAL knives in the other, the seven-inch blades powder-coated to conceal glare.
They darted to the edge of a slight clearing and crouched in the brush.
Just ahead, one sailor shouted to another, giving up his position — his last mistake.
With their predator's instincts finely tuned on the forest ahead, Tanner and Phillips moved in for the kill.
Diaz sat cross-legged on the deck and propped one elbow on the gunwale, sighting the oncoming chopper pilot. He roared down at a forty-five-degree angle, lining up on their stern and interrogating them with his searchlight.
Mitchell hollered as the rotor wash finally hit the boat, whipping up a mist that, in the next few seconds, would ruin Diaz's shot.
The chopper's gunner opened fire, and it was Brown who, despite his head injury, held a steady bead on the bird with his light machine gun. He quickly adjusted fire, and the gunner slumped after firing a salvo that stitched across the deck, missing Diaz by an arm's length.
Brown glanced back at her. 'You're clear, Alicia! Take him out!'
It was the least she could do for the man she had almost killed.
Diaz froze and tuned out every noise, jostle, and vibration of the boat. She ignored the cuts, stiff joints, and bruises, and even the searchlight's pulsating glare.
Carlos and Tomas were strangely silent, as though she'd finally convinced them that she was their equal. Oh, that was hardly the case, but maybe they, too, were wondering in rigid silence if she could really pull this off.
Her crosshairs lined up, and just like that, she took a shot, squeezing off a second before thinking about it.
Both rounds punched through the canopy and struck the pilot in the chest and shoulder, respectively, blood darkening the side window as the man fell back, then slumped forward.
To her left, Beasley and Mitchell hauled a bleeding Ramirez back into the boat, and Jenkins climbed aboard himself while the chopper continued to descend.
'Oh my God,' Diaz whispered, lowering her rifle as the enemy bird pitched even more, engine and slicing rotors blaring, speed increasing.
The deafening noise stole everyone's attention, Diaz knew, and it was Mitchell who vocalized their thoughts: 'It's going to hit! Everybody out of the boat!'
Tanner had holstered his pistol when he'd realized he'd had the perfect kill. He called, 'Over here,' in Mandarin and got the sailor to turn around and come toward him. As the young man passed the tree behind which Tanner huddled, Tanner came around, covered the kid's mouth with one hand while punching his blade into the man's aorta.
The sailor would not die instantly, Tanner knew, so he'd kept his hand over the guy's mouth and withdrew the blade. He drove the sailor forward and came down with a second strike to the spinal cord.
That finished him.
Tanner carefully lowered the body to the ground and stood upright to catch his breath and wipe off the blade on his thigh.
Phillips, who'd slipped off to their right to take out the dead man's partner, called to say his guy was down, but his transmission broke off at the sound of gunfire.
'Phillips?'
He didn't answer. A hollow pang seized Tanner's gut. He cursed and bolted toward his partner's position.
They had just finished hauling Ramirez into the boat when Mitchell grabbed him and threw himself and the assistant team leader back over the side.
He wrapped an arm under Ramirez's chin and swam as hard as he could until the horrible sound of the chopper's rotors slashing through the fishing boat made him cry, 'Joey, hold your breath!'
Mitchell dragged them underwater as a fireball swept over the water and lit up the waves with a surreal, flickering light, as though he were staring at a fireplace through warped glass.
For a moment, time slowed, and nearly all of Mitchell's senses shut down, but then the muffled cries of his Ghosts and the reverberating chomp, chomp of the rotors as they snapped off wrenched him back to reality and drove him to paddle deeper.
His thoughts reached out to the others, to what would happen to them now as his legs burned with exertion and his wounded arm twinged.
