Early Friday night was usually the time he and his father played catch. It was only that Dad had spent hours playing toss with him that he’d been good enough to make the Wickes Hardware Junior Tigers in the first place, even if it was as a benchwarmer. Now, Ryan would have given anything to have Dad see him start his first real game.
But Dad was not home these days.
Just around the time he’d gotten out of school for summer vacation, his mother told him Dad would be away for two weeks. At first Ryan thought no more about it. He knew his father was a big shot with the Air National Guard. He was away for two weeks a lot. But Dad had been away for more than a month now—and Mom told him the night before she wasn’t sure now when he’d be coming home.
Where was he? Mom just didn’t know. She guessed that maybe he was overseas, on a very special mission, picked especially by the President. How cool would that be? Ryan thought. But when he told the neighborhood kids this, they just laughed at him. Air National Guard guys never went on special missions, the kids said. They were just guys who cleaned up after the real soldiers.
And after a while, Ryan started to believe them.
The helicopter first began sputtering somewhere over the Shawar region of Iraq.
Ricco and Gillis groaned at the same time when they first heard the disturbing noise. They were ten minutes away from crossing over the coastline to the Persian Gulf. If trouble was coming, they would much rather be over solid ground—helicopters usually sank quicker than airplanes, and they certainly did not want to go down in the Gulf without the opportunity of sending out a distress call. But their orders said they had to maintain radio silence, no matter what. And this they would do.
The first real indication of trouble came about twenty minutes after taking off from the Bat Cave. The electrical output monitor had started fluctuating. Their control panel lights began blinking, with some losing function for as long as a minute or two. These were worrisome things—but not enough to force them to turn back.
But then, just as the coastline came into view north of Basra, their oil pressure gauge indicated a 20-percent drop. And the sputtering began.
Then they began to smell smoke.
“Damn,” Gillis whispered, strangely. “My kid’s playing Little League today.”
Ricco didn’t even hear him. He was pushing buttons and throwing switches—and making sure the copter’s engines were still working right. They were. But they sounded awful.
“Shit, now what?” Ricco was saying more to himself than anything else. This was a real problem. Up to this point, the big Russian chopper had performed nearly flawlessly. Since that first flight from Seven Ghosts, through all the drilling, through the voyage here and the transit to the cliff cave, to the refueling after the raid, the Hook had not given them one whit of trouble.
But now, on their most important mission, the thing had decided to get cranky.
“We still have adequate pressure and adequate juice,” Gillis reported, doing a quick diagnostic scan of their controls. “I say we continue.”
Ricco just shook his head in disgust. “What other choice do we have? We got to pick up the gas just to get ourselves back to the cave. We ain’t got enough to go back, fix this thing, then come out and meet the tanker again.”
“Unless we just land near someplace friendly,” Gillis said under his breath.
Ricco ignored him because he knew his partner didn’t mean it. At least, he hoped he didn’t.
They flew on, Ricco doing the piloting, Gillis watching the small laptop that was serving as their navigation system. In ten minutes they were over the deep waters of the Gulf and approaching the rendezvous point—five minutes too early.
This was not a good thing.
“Our gas is so low we must have a fuel leak somewhere,” Ricco said, tapping the fuel gauge readout, hoping it would suddenly show more fuel.
Suddenly both of them knew just how valuable they’d been when they were out looking for lost and drained airplanes over the Atlantic. It was not a pleasant feeling to be on the other end.
“Christ,” Ricco said, “We’re at half reserves. If this keeps up, we might not have any choice but to get our feet wet.”
“Not to worry,” Gillis said, his voice suddenly calm. “Our friends are here.”
Ricco looked up and sure enough, he could see the navigation lights of the refueling tanker. It was a Marine C-130, about a mile ahead and maybe a thousand feet above them, breaking out of a huge cumulous cloud. There were red lights all over it. They began blinking. It was a beautiful sight.
But now came the hard part. Ricco and Gillis had hooked up many times with C-130’s during their night drills. But never under real conditions. Essentially, their most important role in the whole mission came down to what they would do in the next five minutes.
They began a series of blinking light signals with the C-130. Altitude, flight speed, and so on were transmitted between the two aircraft. Once all these things were out of the way, the refueling could begin in earnest.
The long snake-like hose began unreeling from the C-130’s left wing. Ricco managed to twist the chopper to line up with the fuel hose.
“OK, I need your eyeballs now, Gilly,” Ricco said. “Guide me in.”
“OK,” Gillis said, eyes glued on the hose as they drew closer to it. “Up a hair. Over… left. Good! Stay. Whoops—go up. A little. Little more. There! That’s it. You’re golden.”
The fuel hose was now right above their heads. Their receptacle was four feet behind their line of sight, but it had a long spout on it and with a jerk of a controls, Ricco slammed the probe into the end of the hose.
“Contact!” Gillis yelled out. The series of green lights popping up on his control window confirmed they were hooked.
Ricco began flipping governor switches now. When they got a clear-flow situation-lamp light, they would know they were ready to take on gas. The light blinked on a second later. Ricco began flashing his nav lights madly. The C-130 pilots flashed theirs in return. A moment later gas began flowing through the C-130’s hose into the Hook’s receptacle, through the temporary piping, and into the fuel bladders in the back of the huge chopper.
That was when the chopper started sputtering again.
“Sheeeet!” Gillis cursed. “This is not good….”
Suddenly the chopper was all over the sky.
“We’re losing power in the left plant!” Gillis yelled to Ricco.
The chopper was now tipping out of balance.
“Damn! The left engine is failing!” Gillis yelled.
Ricco didn’t reply. He was too busy trying to hold the chopper steady and hooked to the fuel hose.
“Can this thing fly on just one engine?” Gillis was asking.
They weren’t sure.
Now another problem. They could both smell the stink of gas. This was enough to make Ricco take his eyes off the hose hookup and look over at Gillis. There was terror on his partner’s face. Fumes were filling the cockpit very rapidly now. But where were they coming from?
“Either one of the fuel bladders is leaking,” Gillis said, answering the question before it was asked, “or we got fuel coming out of the failing left-side engine.”
“You gotta go check!” Ricco yelled back over to him.
Gillis was already unstrapping from his seat. With the slightest electrical spark, they’d both be blown to Kingdom Come—and probably take the C-130 tanker with them.
Gillis had to crawl back into the rear of the huge chopper on his hands and knees, so violently was the big Hook bouncing all over the sky. Using his penlight, he checked the bladders both front and back. They were slowly filling with the gas from the C-130, just as they were supposed to. The fumes were very thick back here, but he could see no leaks in either of the two huge gas bags.