Had he not been so shaken by the avalanche, focused on the mission ahead, and still suffering a few minor scrapes and bruises by the bombardment himself, Huerta might have stopped to wonder about the equipment he’d just seen. And if he had, he might have remembered that the Inuits who had made the journey over the seas with him had been carrying outdated Navy equipment, not modern combat gear. And that would have struck him as strange.
“Easy, easy,” Gator cautioned.
“I’m okay,” Bird Dog snapped. And he would be, in just a few minutes, if he could get his goddamned hands to quit shaking, his gut to stop twisting into a knot.
Intellectually, he knew it was just the aftereffects of the adrenaline bleeding out of his system, but the feeling frightened him nonetheless. And made him angry — how he’d managed to navigate the aircraft through the near-impossible bombardment mission, only to fall apart during level flight.
Not that tanking was that easy a task. Aside from a night landing on a carrier, it was one of the most dangerous and difficult evolutions a carrier pilot underwent. Approaching another aircraft from behind, slowly adjusting the airspeed until the two were perfectly matched, and then plugging the refueling probe of a Tomcat into the small, three-foot basket trailing out the end of a KA-6 tanker called for steady hands and a cool head. He couldn’t afford to be distracted, not now, not this close to another aircraft. Too many collisions took place just at this point.
“Hold it!” Gator said sharply. “Bird Dog, back off and take a look again. You’re all over the sky, man.”
Bird Dog swore softly. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he insisted.
“You’re not.” Gator’s voice was firm. “Just ease off — let’s try this again.” Gator’s calm, professional tones couldn’t mask the real note of concern in his voice. “You’re a little heavy — all that ice hasn’t melted yet, and it’s affecting your flight characteristics, but it’s real doable — just take it slow, let me kick the heaters up another notch.”
Bird Dog concentrated on the dancing basket in front of him. It was, he realized, not the basket that was moving but his dancing Tomcat. He tried to quiet the tremor in his hands, the jerk in his right foot.
“Think of something calm,” Gator’s voice soothed. “Man, you just blew the hell out of a lot of bad guys back there. Think about that.”
Bird Dog concentrated, focusing on the moments immediately after he’d dropped the weapons. It had been a clear, cool feeling, one buoyed up with exhilaration and joy far beyond anything he’d experienced in the air before. Even shooting down his first MiG hadn’t come close to knowing he’d just done a hell of a job under impossible circumstances. He focused, letting the feeling come back, letting the raw sensation of power replace the tentativeness in his hands and legs.
After a few moments, he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said, his voice now calm and strong. “I’ve got it.”
After what he’d been through, plugging this little basket would be a piece of cake. He grinned, relishing the challenge, and slid the Tomcat smoothly forward. The refueling probe rammed home, jarring the aircraft slightly.
“Good job,” Gator said softly. Not for the first time, he marveled at his pilot’s ability to focus, to compartmentalize and stay right in the moment. Whether Bird Dog knew it or not, Gator decided, he was one hell of a pilot.
Not that Gator was going to tell him that. The RIO glanced down at his gauges and saw a solid lock and fuel flowing into the aircraft. “How much you going to take on?” he asked Bird Dog.
“Six thousand pounds,” the pilot said, his hands and feet moving quickly to make the minor adjustments in airspeed and altitude to keep the aircraft firmly mated. “That gives us enough fuel for a couple of passes. If we need them.”
And they would not, Gator decided, relaxing. The mood that Bird Dog was in, he might not even need the arresting wire to get on board.
“How about a lift?” the helicopter pilot shouted over the noise. Rogov smiled, held out his hand, and tried to look as friendly and undangerous as he could.
“Thank you,” he said, hoping the slight accent in his voice would be interpreted as native islander. Evidently it was, since the pilot returned his smile and gestured to one of the canvas-strapped seats lining the interior of the helicopter. “We’ve got a corpsman and doctor on board,” the pilot added.
“One is badly hurt,” Huerta said, pointing at Morning Eagle, pale and motionless on the stretcher. “The rest are just banged up and bruised.”
“Eskimos, huh?” The pilot studied his new passengers, then shrugged and turned back to the controls. “We’ll be there in five mikes.”
Huerta sat poised in the hatch to the aircraft, watching the others file aboard. Oddly enough, Morning Eagle was among the last in line, still carried by the same two Inuit. He saw Morning Eagle start to move, then one of the stretcher-bearers shifted, blocking his line of sight. When he next got a good look at him, Morning Eagle was no longer moving.
“Come on, come on,” Huerta shouted, gesturing at the men. “We’ve got most of them, but who knows how many else there are?”
The men started to move more rapidly and quickly took seats along the sides. Moving fast, Huerta noted, for men that had looked so stunned half an hour earlier. He shrugged. The human body was more resilient than anyone gave it credit for, particularly when the mind knew what the body didn’t. He’d seen the men drive themselves long past the point of exhaustion, held upright and moving only by the sheer force of will. Any man could do it — SEAL training taught them how.
“That’s the last of them,” Huerta shouted to the pilot. He moved toward the last seat in the aircraft. As he was midway down the fuselage, the waiting men suddenly moved. Three men stood up, grabbed him, and threw him to the deck, pinning him down. He started to struggle, then something hard hit him on the right side of his head. He lay motionless, unconscious, on the deck.
Two more of the supposed native forces moved forward, gently easing their pistols up against the necks of the pilot and copilot. Rogov approached them and stood midway between the two seats. “Now, the carrier,” he ordered, in a voice that left no doubt as to what the consequence of disobedience would be. “Do not touch that,” he said sharply as the copilot’s hand reached out for the IFF transponder. “I know you have special codes that will tell the ship that you are under force. Do not attempt to use them. If necessary, my men can fly this craft themselves.”
The pilot and copilot exchanged an angry, helpless look, then the pilot nodded. “Do what the man says, Brian,” he said levelly. The copilot nodded and returned to reading the preflight checklist in a slightly shaky voice.
Too bad there’s no checklist for hijacking, the pilot thought grimly, as he made the routine responses to the checklist items. And there was no way to let Jefferson know what was happening, not without risking the lives of the remaining friendlies on board. If there were any others, he added to himself, wondering if he and the copilot were the only Americans still left on board the helicopter.
“Helo inbound,” the TFCC TAO reported.
Tombstone acknowledged the report with a curt nod. He studied the friendly aircraft symbol that had just popped up on the display. “Ask them how many souls on board,” he said. “And ask CDC if they’re going to get that Tomcat on board before the helo makes its approach. I don’t want a cluster fuck over this, people.”
“Tomcat Two-oh-one on final now,” the TAO responded instantly. “The tanker is going to wait until after the helo is on board, then we’ll clear the decks for her. I think there’re some casualties on the helo, so we’ll want to get them in as soon as we can, but there’s a good window of time for Bird Dog to take one pass.”
“That’s all it usually takes him,” Tombstone said.
“Tomcat Two-oh-one.”
