“He was an American,” said Danny. “He was an advisor. Helping them.”
“We are very close to Romania,” said the chief. “But separate countries, no? Like brothers.”
“Like brothers.”
“And brothers with America.”
“I hope so, yes.”
“Allies, dad,” said the boy. “Friends.”
“Allies, brothers — whatever words.”
The chief took out three glasses. He filled two to the brim; the third, for his son, contained just a sip of the liquor.
“Drink!” translated his son as the glasses were handed around. “To your health!”
The chief smiled. The vodka was raw and very strong. Danny couldn’t finish the entire shot in one gulp. This amused the chief, who refilled his glass.
“I was a young officer then,” he told Danny, leading him over to a pair of overstuffed chairs in the living room. His son came, too, standing by his father’s side and translating. “Fresh on the force. The state police. We were arranged differently — my supervisor was from another region. I came to the crash. It was a bog. Two miles from here.”
“I see.”
“A terrible tragedy. Many soldiers.”
“Was the aircraft on fire?” asked Danny.
“On fire? No. By that time, any fire would have been out. This was in the afternoon — it had crashed earlier in the day. The morning.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think there were any survivors.”
“Would you know where they were taken?”
“The bodies? Buried.”
“They didn’t take them back to Romania? A few months later?”
“One was. But the others stayed.”
“Why?” asked Danny.
The chief shook his head. Danny knew from the records MY-PID had found that three Romanian soldiers’ bodies had been repatriated within months of the end of the coup. But a combination of politics, ancestry — at least one of the soldiers’ families had come from this part of Moldova during the 1960s — and the difficulty of working with distant relatives had prevented all from being repatriated. The records were vague, but there were at least two soldiers still buried in Moldova.
“I’d like to visit the crash site as well as the cemetery,” said Danny. “Could you give me directions?”
“I’ll take you myself!” said the chief. He looked over at his wife, who was signaling that dinner was ready. “Here, we will have another vodka before eating.”
It was dark by the time they were finished dinner. The police chief offered to let Danny stay at his house, but it was clear he would be displacing someone, probably the son. Danny begged off, and the chief recommended a small guest house run by a widow on the other side of town. As the town consisted of only six blocks, it was easy to reach, and Danny was sleeping by eight.
He got up before dawn, expecting to run a bit before breakfast. The police chief and his son were already in his squad car outside, waiting.
The chief insisted on running his blue emergency lights as they drove out to the swamp where the helicopter had crashed. It took less than ten minutes, a bumpy ride up and down a medium-sized hill into a narrow valley parted almost exactly in the middle by a meandering creek.
According to the police chief, not much had changed in fifteen years — the trees were bigger and the ground a little drier, but not much. He pointed out the area where the helicopter had lain, at the edge of a pool of water. The general location agreed with what MY-PID had displayed earlier.
“It went straight in, on its belly,” said the son, boiling down the chief’s elaborate description to a few words.
Danny stared at the area. He’d seen a number of helicopter crashes during his stints with Air Force special operations and Dreamland. He saw them all now, flickering through his head like ghosts combining into a single image: a Marine Whiskey Cobra merging with a mangled Blackhawk, half morphed into a Comanche test bed whose rotor was the only surviving part. Beneath them all were the pancaked remains of a flattened Chinook, the wounded passengers still crying for help.
Danny looked at the nearby woods and trees. The helo would have come in low, skimmed down when it was shot — the report said the chopper pilot was trying to attract the interceptors’ attention to help the others get away.
If it lay the way the chief said it did, it must have banked slightly before going in. Maybe that would have lessened the impact, at least for someone on the other side of the fuselage.
Would that make it survivable?
He could stare at the scene all morning and not come to any real conclusions, he thought.
“So where did they take the bodies?” he asked.
The police chief described the process — they’d moved two flatboats in, but the ground proved solid enough to walk on. One body was out of the helicopter, but the others were inside. Three men in the back. And the two pilots.
“Three?” asked Danny, making sure he understood. “Only three people?”
“And the one about there, two meters from the helicopter,” said the chief. “Ejected.”
There had been a full squad of men aboard the helicopter, but Danny didn’t correct the police chief. He said that tents had been set up near the road. They were brought in under the pretense of being an aid station to help the wounded, though it was far too late for that.
“Then what happened?” asked Danny.
“To the cemetery.”
Danny nodded. “Can we go there?”
“Yes,” said the chief somberly. “It is time for you to pay the respects for your friend.”
The cemetery was about three-quarters of a mile away, an old church plot used sporadically as a kind of overflow from the main churchyard in town. The southeastern end was marked by foundation stones overgrown with weeds and moss; according to the police chief, these were the remains of an Orthodox church that had fallen down sometime in the eighteenth century after being replaced by the slightly larger one where the town now sat.
There were three dozen headstones, most pockmarked with centuries of wear. The bodies of the men found in the helicopter were together at the side, three marked by wooden crosses and one by a stone that lay flat against the ground.
“Once they were white,” said the chief, referring to the worn wood. “But given their age, they have done well.”
Standing over the graves, Danny felt the urge to say a prayer. He knelt and bowed his head, wishing the dead men peace.
“I hope you’re here, Mark,” he whispered to himself.
He stopped himself. It felt funny, praying that someone was dead.
17
It was a coincidence that Captain Turk Mako’s last name meant shark. But it was a chance occurrence that he liked to play up in casual conversation.
“The Shark flies the shark — gotta happen,” he’d say when telling people what he did.
Not that he told many people. The aircraft wasn’t actually top secret, but most of what it was used for was.
In a sense, Turk’s name wasn’t actually Mako. It had been shortened and Americanized, kind of, from Makolowejeski by his great-great-grandfather, who’d come from Poland in the 1930s, escaping the war. He’d been dead some years when Turk was born, but he’d left a set of taped recordings about his adventures, a revelation and inspiration to the young man when he discovered them in high school.
Most pilots are at least a little superstitious, even if ultimately they know it’s bunk. Turk, who had a lucky coin he kept in his pocket every flight, viewed the name change as something of a good omen. Great-great had been looking after him even before he was born.