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  “Snake Eater,” says a familiar voice to her right rear. She turns and sees Sam standing behind her, removing his sunglasses. Wrinkled and red-eyed, he points at the American climbing on Colbert’s Hawk. “See the watch? Them Snake Eaters always wear them gold Rolexes.”

  “Sam, you’re supposed to be in quarters. Take off.”

  “Hoo-ah,” Sam says, raises a finger to the brim of his cap, and decorates the runway with a stream of Copenhagen. Then, after he has a brief word with Marge, he ambles away. Jesse watches him depart, studying the swing to his still broad shoulders and narrow cowboy hips.

  Get serious, Jess.

  All business, she climbs in the cramped cockpit and puts on her helmet. Pilots adhere to ritual, and the last item on Jesse’s checklist is to inspect the duct tape that holds the male hula doll on the dashboard in place. Sam again. When the guys in the battalion started sticking hula girls on their dashboards, Sam located the hula boys on eBay and gave one to each of the women pilots. When the chopper vibrates, the boy toy wiggles his plastic butt.

  Onward. Jesse pulls on her fire-resistant Nomex flight gloves and checks the comms again: VHF, UHF, an electronic digital pad fastened to her knee, Blue Force tracker, MERC, the texting chat room if needed. She confers with Laura, who marks the flight route to the rally point in yellow magic marker on her map. Flying the aircraft is a full-time job, so she hands off navigation and comms to Laura.

  Before Laura puts on her helmet, she grins and holds up a tin of Skoal. Jesse makes a face and shakes her head. Their personal joke. She tried the stuff once on a night mission when she was at the ragged end of her endurance. Once was enough.

  Ignition. The composite titanium and fiberglass four-bladed rotor slaps the desert air. In a bloom of sweet-scented fuel, they rush through the remaining preflight checks. “I got it,” Jesse says, taking the controls. Wheels up at 0700 hrs.

  With twenty-two hundred pounds of fuel on board, Jesse eases up on the collective with her left hand, jockeys the cyclic with her right, and lightly toes the pedals. Her slope-nosed, six-ton, six million dollar ride heaves up from the strip like a muscle-bound predatory bus. As the base runway falls away, the familiar, flat checkerboard of tan on green on brown stretches out in a grid of farm fields and canals from horizon to horizon.

  As the two Hawks motor over the base perimeter, they run their “Wall Check” to make sure weapons, lights, and aircraft survivability equipment are in working order. Two Apache gunships are already aloft and will trail them at altitude.

  “Red Side coming up. Keep your eyes open,” Jesse tells the crew on the internal comms, just like she always does.

  “Crossing wires,” Toby calls out.

  “Roger.”

  ***

  Fifty air miles north of Balad, they circle at the rally point, and the horizon stretches out in flat monotonous shades of tan hardpan, muddy canals, field green, and little turd-colored clumps of mud-brick houses. Out the right window, the Tigris River winds in the distance like an algae boa constricter.

  Colbert checks in, “It’s confirmed. We’re going to Ramil. We’ll approach it from the south up the big canal. It’s perfect for us.”

  Jesse keys her mic and points Tumbleweed Six north along the Tigris until Colbert signals the turn. A few minutes later, Marge calls out on the internal comms, “Tracers at seven o’clock, 300 yards.”

  “Diagonal or straight up?” Jesse asks, feeling a slight adrenaline surge.

  “No sweat. Straight up.”

  “You copy, Tumbleweed Five?” Jesse calls Colbert.

  “Roger. Some farmer pissed off we’re over his field.” The Apaches, nonchalant killers, merely key their mics in acknowledgement.

  Jesse concentrates on flying. Tracers straight up are the farmer’s equivalent of flipping the bird. Diagonal tracers could mean aimed fire. Aimed fire could be a lure to get the Hawks to swing down and investigate. Some hajji with half a brain could be waiting to launch an RPG or the much more accurate SA16, a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile.

  That could mean Red Screen of Death time.

  Stateside, once a year she travels to Camp Ripley in Minnesota to check on their flight simulator. You screw up on the SIM, and the windshield video pops bright red. You get the Red Screen of Death, it means you crashed.

  Jess watches hula boy shake his tush on the dashboard. She hasn’t crashed yet, SIM or real world. She’s a natural pilot and, if pressed, will tell you that flying the huge Hawk is a delicate, sensory ballet played out with subtle pressure in her fingers and toes. Terry once likened her to a war witch flying a mean steel broom across the face of the full moon. The collective and the cyclic controls are her magic wands.

  Maybe. But to Jesse, bottom line, it’s a piece of machinery. Like Dad’s old Ford 9N tractor she climbed on and mastered when she was twelve, standing up because she couldn’t reach the pedals from the seat. It’s all about balancing the competing consequences of centrifugal force with gentle pulses of pressure on the collective, cyclic, and pedals. Minding the instruments. Feeding in and decreasing the pitch and torque and throttle.

  Back in the States, girls she went to school with are lining up at Starbucks ordering their lattes. Jesse’s doing 120 knots fifty feet over the Mesopotamian hardpan by virtue of keeping two spinning discs in perfect sync—one over her head and another on the tail boom. Plus, unlike her suburban sisters, she’s got a tender grasp on the cyclic jammed straight up between her thighs like a bad but potent Freudian Joke.

  You’re a type A power-tripper; you love being strapped inside a war machine. Another Terryism.

  Jesse glances over at Laura, who is coolly helmeted and visored and vested and armored and armed. If Laura bopped into that Starbucks in full battle rattle, those sisters would pee their Victoria’s Secret panties.

  Jesse swings her eyes and scans the desert floor, where the Hawks cast two black racing shadows and reflects that maybe Terry has a point. No denying the power thing.

  Colbert calls, “Echo tango alpha to objective ten zero mikes. Gunners test your guns.”

  Marge and Toby rip a few bursts down into the desert.

  “Okay, Tumbleweed Six, check it on tracker,” Colbert calls again. “We’re coming up on the canal. It has high sides screened by palms. We’ll shoot right up it. You fly lead, hugging the canal, I’ll follow. Should cover the approach.”

  “Tumbleweed Six, roger.”

  A few minutes later, conforming to Colbert’s flight path, flying right on the deck, Jesse spots the broad canal flanked by palms. Colbert drifts to the left, and Jesse takes the lead, drops into the slot, and contours north, date palms zipping past on either side.

  Chapter Ten

  Two raggedy children with dirty faces and eyes dark as the Black Stone of Mecca hunker at the edge of the ruins minding five skinny camels. They stare at one of Ahmed’s crew, a young kid, who is eagerly lining up his RPG rocket launcher at the tool shed. Ahmed breaks off, trots over, and sternly shoos the kids back to the north, beyond the ruins.

  Morgon glances at his watch; it’s thirty-five minutes past Ahmed’s two hours. The cement truck has departed. The Bobcat has finished its job and is parked on a trailer along with the welder’s equipment behind the truck. Except for the kid with the rocket and the truck driver, Ahmed’s men have taken the Suburban and relocated to the bridge. Casually Ahmed raises his AK and fires a burst into Noland’s Land Rover. The windshield shatters. The kid with the rocket laughs. Morgon turns and looks ruefully at the truck full of artillery rounds that is going to be their transportation up to the bridge. But the truck hood is open, and the driver is now arguing with Ahmed. Morgon gathers that the vehicle is flooded.

  Slowly his eyes track the horizon. Outwardly he appears as undisturbed as the flat, empty desert. But he knows the desert’s deceptive and relies on a frail skin of pebbles to hold it in place. Crack that “desert pavement,” and it will gush dust.

  The driver closes the truck hood, gets in, and t
his time the vehicle starts. Ahmed raises his hand, thumbs up to Morgon, then he signals to the kid with the RPG he can go ahead and shoot the shed with his rocket.

  Morgon feels it at first, a vibration thrumming in his chest. Then he hears the unmistakable rotor beat of an approaching helicopter. But muffled. Where? He swings his head. The sky is empty. Then he knows. The canal.

  “Wait, don’t shoot!” he shouts to Ahmed and the kid with the RPG. Too late. The rocket sizzles off, and the shed erupts in a deafening burst of flame, smoke, and dust.

  Jesse is flying ten feet over the water when she sees the arch of the bridge. “Be advised, Tumbleweed Five. We got a high bridge coming up across the canal.”

  Then she hauls in the controls and brings the Hawk up to clear the bridge, and that’s when the internal comms crackle with Toby’s shout: “Explosion, ten o’clock, 400 yards!”

  Next comes Laura’s controlled yell: “Hard left, RPG twelve o’clock off the nose.” On pure reflex, Jesse yanks in pitch and puts the Hawk on its side in an abrupt left turn, and the world speeds up in a blur of date palms and muddy water. Now she’s flying over deserted ruins as the rocket flashes past the cockpit window in a rush of whitish, blue-gray smoke. Wow, little pucker factor there.First time in daylight. Sonofabitch, that was almost close enough to touch.

  Then it’s Marge’s turn: “Hajji’s in the open.”

  Morgon is momentarily stunned when the Black Hawk jumps over the palm trees four hundred yards away—this black, roaring, sixty-five-foot-long steel flying insect attracted to the exploding shed. He recovers immediately and shouts, “Ahmed, tell your men at the bridge to do nothing, freeze—understand?”

  Ahmed stares at him open-mouthed, his walkie-talkie hanging useless in his hand.

  And then Morgon see’s the rocket contrail race up from the cover of the palms along the waterway. Sees the chopper lurch toward them, taking evasive action. Shit. Some idiot back at the bridge has panicked and fired an RPG. And now the kid with Ahmed has touched off a second one at the chopper that is still rocking on its side in their direction.

  It’s gonna be amateur hour.

  “Holy shit! Another RPG, two o’clock,” Toby yells into the comms.

  Jesse calls her move to the gun bunnies overhead. “I’m breaking hard left. Contact my two o’clock,” she croaks, suddenly dry-mouthed.

  “Get out of there, Jesse,” Colbert says urgently, stepping on her transmission to the Apaches.

  Jesse finds her steady aviator voice that had momentarily got stuck in her throat. “You bet.”

  “Get your ass clear,” Colbert shouts in the radio. “Guns are lining up.”

  “Hold on, it could get hot!” Jesse shouts on the crew intercom as icicles stitch a tight pattern between her shoulder blades and up her neck. Her heart bangs against the ceramic plate over her chest as she hauls in the collective and the two General Electric turbo-shaft engines surge. She’s absolutely programmed to fly the Hawk but, back channel, her senses pound out an inarticulate battle prayer: Our father red screen of death motherfucker!

  Do your job.

  She puts the Hawk on its side, rolls away from the second RPG, and sees a truck down there. “Toby, Marge?”

  “I count three hajjis by that truck,” Marge comes back.

  “One of them has another RPG,” Laura calls out.

  Jesse cranes her neck, catches a glimpse of three men running for cover, and marks the shape of the shoulder-fired missile one of them carries. “Keep them off me so we can get the hell outta here,” she shouts to Marge and Toby.

  “I’m on them,” Marge answers in a tight, focused voice.

  In a heartbeat Morgon adapts and calculates the distance and the angle. The left-side gunner is lining up on him. The only cover is the fragment of brick wall twenty yards distant. His hands move, seeing the solution before his mind catches up. He seizes the RPG-7 from the confused kid, snatches another long-stemmed rocket from the pouch on his back, loads the weapon, and motions to Ahmed and the kid to duck for cover behind the wall.

  A string of machine-gun rounds kicks up sand as they sprint and hunker against the rocks. Morgon rolls, shifting position as the gunner hangs out on his harness and sprays more rounds. Sharp bits of silica pepper his face as he rises behind the wall and swings the launcher toward the truck full of artillery rounds with the tanks of oxygen and acetylene hooked behind. Not more than a hundred yards away. That’s too close. But he has no choice.

  “No, No,” Ahmed yells. Terrified, he points toward the turning helicopter.

  “There’s going to be an explosion,” Morgon yells back. “And one hell of a dust cloud. Should cover us to run for the ruins. Now get down.”

  Then Morgon takes a fatal second to orient because another Black Hawk has cleared the palms. The Hawks aren’t a problem, they’re just transports. He’s tracking two more aircraft that are leveling out in the distance, their snouts heavy with armament. Apaches. A fraction too long, he watches the fleeing Blawk Hawk’s sinister, rotating shadow flit on the hardpan near the truck. Do it. He raises the launcher, leans into the optical sight, steadies the recticle on the truck, and squeezes the trigger. Then he ducks. The ground rocks, his eardrums burst, and fists of sand hammer his mouth and eyes. A millisecond after the shock wave, the world explodes.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Screen of Death is not red.

  The black crackling flash rips up through the steel cockpit deck, and the Hawk dies in a wrenching metal roar that drowns out Jesse’s scream, “Tumbleweed Six going down!” Instinctively she jerks the cyclic to avoid the thrust of the blast. Big mistake. Now’s she’s in a bone-breaking struggle with the stick and jumping pedals to correct the violent yaw and right the ship from flipping. Lights flash on the console she’s never seen before. Her helmet’s gone in a violent shrapnel-studded rush, windshield’s gone, Laura’s gone. There’s this sickening smell and then a more sickening vibration. The props are shredding, coming apart. Fighting the controls, she stares at her bare right knee—white of bone, red of blood. Looks up. Altitude? Level bubble?

  No help. Somebody’s guts on the instrument panel.

  She’s not flying the chopper. This little tin soldier strapped in her bursting heart informs her, Captain you better straighten this fucker out and get her down or you’re gonna kill your crew.

  She’s blind in a pitching black maelstrom of dust, smoke, fire, leaking gas, sparks, and sizzling circuitry. Tumbleweed Six now has the aerodynamics of a plummeting safe. Riding it in, she reaches up and yanks the power-control levers. Fuel off. Battery off. Not aware she’s screaming, she wills the Hawk to earth in a six-ton belly flop. A couple Gs of impact purees the marrow in her bones as blazing gravedigger dirt engulfs her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Nothing.

  Everybody’s yelling on the comms in Tumbleweed Five, how it looks like a freakin’ ammo dump cooking off down there as Colbert fights to bring the aircraft in trim after being buffeted by the shock wave. The crew chief and gunner are restraining Joe Davis, who’s out of his seat gesturing furiously for Colbert to take it down. Colbert ignores the rumpus. Nausea rises in his throat as he watches the crippled, whirling shadow of Tumbleweed Six auger in at the edge of the mushrooming explosion, sees a second huge geyser of dust erupt on impact.

  “Slow your roll. Can’t do nothin’ ’til all that shit clears,” he tells everybody in a hoarse, controlled voice. Then he switches to the country-wide Safe Skies net and says, “Tumbleweed Five, grid line 38-Sierra—Lima Charlie—82824-80212. Fallen Angel. I say again, fallen angel.”

  Tumbleweed Six ploughs a trench into the dirt, and the front canopy disintegrates into plastic shrapnel and the rotors chew up the hardpan, beat themselves to splinters, and fling a huge cloud of dirt and sand that swells into the churning debris. Titanium/fiberglass razors the size of cookie sheets zing and slash through the cockpit and smash up the instruments. They ricochet off debris and miss Jesse. They carve Laura Double Bear’s body to pieces.
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  The grinding wreckage convulses and shivers and slaps Jesse in and out of consciousness, and after everything else stops, it’s still shaking inside her head and she has this awful taste in her mouth. Her first impulse from training is to try to get a grip. On what? Shock, pain, death? Okay, you’re still alive. You just can’t move. She’s trapped between the armored back of her seat and the crumpled instrument panel. She’s up to her nose in scorching sand and pebbles and shattered plastic. She can feel her feet and hands struggle to move, so she’s not paralyzed. Apparently the shock-absorber system in the seat actually worked.

  Figuring this out only makes her more acutely aware of the dying electronics crackling all around. Fluids drip, and she realizes in slow horror that she’s smothered in body parts. Before the full effect of that takes hold, a loopy flash of flame sears the dirty sweat on her face, and she thinks, Oh my God, I’m going to burn. Hyperventilation, tachycardia, the end.

  But the flicker of fire fades and she blinks away dirt so she can see a little now through the tangled rubbish of the instrument panel. And what her eyes focus on is this spectral figure that staggers in the dust.

  It’s Marge.

  Chapter Twelve

  Morgon hugs the obstinate chunk of ancient Babylonian wall that saved his life. Then, slowly, he forces himself up on his elbows and knees. He lurches to his feet and, as the lore accumulated through all the bad close times kicks in, he feels himself for wet spots. He’s momentarily disoriented, like in a sandstorm with his vision plugged. After pawing at his eyes, he can barely make out the broken Black Hawk stove in the dirt a dozen yards in front of him, with the stump of one rotor still vibrating and the roof sprung like a crushed steel coffin. Then he sees what he thinks is the kid running away, disappearing in and out of the billowing dust. Thinks to call out for Ahmed. But he isn’t functioning yet, having trouble with his balance. Numb, he staggers toward the wreck.

  Involuntarily he flinches and ducks as a sparkling pinwheel of flame illuminates the gloom. Jesus. Some of the artillery rounds are still going off.