'Her? Oh, Christ…'
'Quit staring, Mike,' another Marine snapped. 'Lend a hand!'
'Easy there. Get her into the Stokes.'
'For God's sake, take it easy with her,' Willis said. 'Best fuckin' B/N I ever had…'
His legs gave way as he stepped onto the tarmac. He never did remember being helped away from the plane.
Tombstone saw both the parachute and the man and broke into a run, the heavy Colt clutched in his hand. The guy wore a camo uniform but had a high-peaked cap, and he carried an AKM slung over his back, muzzle down. His back was to Tombstone, and he was bending over Tomboy, who was lying on her back, still in her parachute harness with the chute billowing and tugging in the breeze.
The soldier appeared to be alone. His back was to Tombstone, his total attention on the woman at his feet. Stoney raised the pistol but kept on running, trying to center the sights on a target that bobbed with each step he took.
From fifty feet away, Tombstone fired… a clean miss. The soldier turned, gaping at this apparition charging him with a pistol, then reached for his AKM, fumbling with its strap.
Tombstone fired again. Damn! It looked easy on the TV cop shows, but a pistol was a ridiculously inaccurate weapon, especially when fired while running. The Russian raised the AK's muzzle…
Again, Tombstone squeezed the trigger… miss!
Then there was a sharp crack and the Russian staggered forward, still clutching the AKM. Tomboy, still on her back, had her revolver out. She'd shot up into the Russian's back from a range of four feet. The man tried to raise the AK again…
Tombstone stopped, braced his.45 in both hands, and squeezed the trigger three more times in rapid succession. One of the rounds at least hit the Russian in the chest, pitching him backwards, sending the rifle spinning from his hands.
He dropped to his knees at Tomboy's side. 'Tomboy! You okay?'
'Hi… Stoney.' Her face twisted with pain. 'Bad landing.'
Glancing back, he saw her left leg twisted back under her body at an impossible angle. It looked like she'd snapped both her tibia and her fibula just below her knee. There was blood on her leg too, and a gleam of white bone visible through a tear in her flight suit ? a compound fracture, and a nasty one.
Quickly, Tombstone scanned their surroundings. The Russian soldier was dead, and there was no one else in sight. He could just make out the peaked roofs of a small village or settlement some distance to the east. They were sheltered to the north by a low rise, little more than a snow-covered mound on the tundra. Nothing else was visible in any direction but mountains, ground, and sky.
He touched the transmit key on the Search and Rescue radio strapped to his flight suit. 'This is Tomcat Two-double-oh, Tomcat Two-double-oh, broadcasting Mayday, Mayday.' He stopped, listening intently, but heard only the hiss of static, and once a garbled burst of something that might have been a partial transmission leaking across from a neighboring frequency.
Nothing. His transmitter might have been damaged in the landing, or else no one was listening on the frequency at the moment. He set the SAR radio to broadcast an emergency beacon, then turned to Tomboy.
'Let me take a look at that leg,' he told her. First, he pulled a morphine syrette from his first-aid kit, pulled open the tear in her flight suit, squeezed a handful of skin and muscle, and jammed the needle home.
'That ought to make you feel real good,' he told her.
'A real… high.'
With a grease pencil included in the first-aid kit, he marked the letter 'M' on her forehead, and the time. The small ritual was comforting, an acknowledgment that they were going to get out of this.
'You don't really think we're gonna get rescued, do you?' she asked. Her eyes were glassy, the words slurred. He thought she must already be in shock.
''Course we are,' he told her. 'Brace yourself now. This might hurt, morphine or no morphine.'
It did hurt; she fought back a yelp as he straightened her leg.
Tombstone looked around for a splint, but there wasn't a thing to be found but the soldier's AKM. He'd hoped to use the weapon ? an AKM with a thirty-round magazine was better than a pistol any day ? but he also needed a splint, and even with an assault rifle, he wouldn't be able to hold the enemy off for long once they showed up in force. He used his knife to cut generous lengths of nylon cord from the parachute, as well as strips from the canopy that he could use as bandages and padding. He removed the AKM's banana magazine, did his best to straighten out Tomboy's leg, then began tying the rifle above and below the break, keeping her leg rigid from thigh to ankle. He tried just once to set the bone, but he stopped when she screamed. Unable to see what he was doing, and unwilling to damage her leg more than it already was, he settled at last for simply immobilizing it, wrapping it in swaths of parachute nylon.
After a while, Tomboy opened her eyes as he worked. 'Hey, CAG.' Her voice sounded dreamy now, and she smiled. 'Is it true what some of the girls are saying?'
'What's that?'
'That some sailor snuck into our shower and took photographs of us in there.'
'Where the hell did that come from?'
'All the girls are talking about it.'
How did news spread so swiftly through a ship's company? Tombstone had hoped the women would never find out about that episode. Obviously, though, he'd not counted on the incredible speed and power of the shipboard dissemination of rumor.
'It's true.'
'Any in there of me? Heard there was.'
'Yes. One.'
'I must've… looked awful without my makeup.'
'Oh, from what I could see, you looked pretty good.'
'I'll bet. Ha! So much for all those women's issues sensitivity sessions. You're not supposed to notice things like that.'
'So much for privacy aboard ship. Even one as big as the Jeff.' He straightened up. 'How's that feel?'
'It hurts like hell. CAG?'
'Yeah?'
'We're not going to get out of this, are we?'
'Sure we are. We've got our beacon out. They'll hear us.'
'Yeah, but they can hear it too. You'd better take off without me.'
'Nope.'
'The Marine lines can't be more than five or six miles north of here.
Damn it, Captain, why should both of us get caught? Why should you get caught?'
'Why don't you shut up? You women talk too much, you know that?'
'You bastard! Get out of here now, while you can.'
'And how effective a CAG would I be after that, knowing I'd run off and left one of my men, half stoned on morphine and lying out here in the mud?
What are you trying to do, Tomboy, ruin my career?'
She laughed, an involuntary snicker. Then the pain in her leg hit her and she gasped. Biting her lip, she shook her head. 'Tombstone, if you don't-'
'Hush!' Tombstone raised his pistol. He could hear the rumble of an engine, nearby and growing closer. The source was masked by that low mound of earth and snow to the north.
Slowly, Tombstone rose to his feet. 'Something's coming.'
Troops spilled over the crest of the rise, spreading out to either side.
It took Tombstone a shocked half-second to recognize the uniforms, to put up his pistol.
'I'm Sergeant Bradley,' the lead Marine said. 'You Navy guys pick the God-damnedest places for LZs!'
