It was now nearly 0700 hours. The sun was almost up, it was even getting hot. The Hook was more than ninety minutes overdue. Norton was still scanning the highway. The Iraqis appeared to be getting a bit restless.
“If that’s what those two did, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand their temptation,” he told Delaney finally. “A few hundred miles in any direction and they’re out of this bad dream for good.”
Delaney just shook his head. “Think they’d have the balls to do it, Jazz? To just to leave us here?” he wondered.
Norton lowered his electronic spyglasses.
“Match it up with what Angel told us,” he said, his voice a whisper. “No one who cares knows where we are. If it all ends here for us, who will really give a fuck? In fact, it would be a big help for the people who put us in this wringer in the first place.”
Delaney gritted his teeth as he mulled over Norton’s grim words.
“I’ll haunt those bastards if they turned tail,” Delaney said finally. “Their families won’t know a minute of peace. I’ll be throwing pots around their kitchen; bleeding through their walls. I’ll scare the shit out of their kids on a daily basis. I’ll be one bad-ass ghost.”
“Well, if they did run away, it would actually be better for us than if they showed up now,” Norton said. “That looks like half the Iraqi Army out there.”
No sooner were those words out of Norton’s mouth when Chou ran up to their position, landing in a skid on his chest, knees, and stomach. He was out of breath, covered with dust, his face uncharacteristically dirty.
“My guys just spotted something on the big scope,” he gasped. “Sixty degrees east, twenty south… below two hundred feet.”
Norton put his glasses up and zeroed in on Chou’s coordinates. And that was when he saw it. A pinprick of light coming out of the early dawn clouds, heading straight for them.
“Damn… is it really… ?” Norton breathed.
It was the Hook. Even head-on, the huge chopper’s profile was unmistakable. But even from this distance it was obvious the chopper was in bad shape. It was trailing heavy smoke and barely flying no more than two hundred feet off the ground.
Even worse, it was heading right for the mountain in full view of the Iraqis on the highway.
Delaney grabbed the glasses and spotted the chopper as well.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Now those guys decide to be heroes?”
“Well, that’s the end of this ballgame,” Chou said. “You might as well get a neon sign and point it at us.”
He looked around. “Anyone have any bright ideas?” he asked.
No one said a word. There was nothing they could do.
“We’ve got to let them land,” Norton said finally. “If they don’t crash first.”
“Yeah, but if they set down here, we’ll have a thousand Gomers on top of us before we know it,” Delaney replied.
Chou lowered his glasses, turned, and yelled an order to his men. It sounded ominous, like “last-ditch defense posture,” or words to that effect. The Marines immediately snapped to. They jumped from their various hiding spots and clustered together, visors down, weapons ready, in a forward trench they’d dug previously along the edge of the cliff. They looked like doughboys awaiting an attack across the fields of the Somme.
“Man, this is getting a bit too dramatic for me,” Delaney whispered, checking his own M-16.
“Take notes then,” Norton told him. “It will make good copy for your memoirs.”
It took about another minute, but the Hook finally went right over the stalled Iraqi column, leaving behind a trail of sparks and very heavy smoke. It did a bone-charring turn to the right and fluttered its way towards the cliff.
While the others watched the stricken chopper, Norton kept his scope on the Iraqis on the highway. Those soldiers he could see looked absolutely baffled. To their eyes, they were looking at one of their own choppers in trouble. But how long would that incorrect assumption last?
When Norton looked up again, the Hook was only a hundred feet out from the cliff’s edge. It was obvious the refueler only had a few more seconds of flying left in it.
So in it came. One engine on fire, the other backfiring like a bad ’55 Chevy. It went into a brief hover just above the far lip of the cliff. There was so much smoke pouring out of the chopper, it created a huge black smoke screen that was blowing down with great force on all those waiting below.
“NBW masks!” Chou yelled, and quickly his men were pulling down their gas masks. But Norton and Delaney had no such protection. They were soon engulfed by the maelstrom of exhaust and smoke.
“Jeesuz!” Delaney yelled. “They’re still trying to kill us, those bastards!”
The Hook came crashing down a second later, not a hundred feet from the trench line. The entire mountain shook from the impact. Everyone hit the deck. The noise was unbearable. Screeching, grinding, the scream of metal twisting as the huge rotor buried itself deep into the hard rock of the cliff. This was all mixed with a bizarre sound similar to that of many huge waves hitting a beach in rapid succession. It was the gas inside the Hook’s fuel bags, dangerously sloshing about. Now the cliff was suddenly thick with gas fumes as well as smoke and exhaust.
“Jeesuz!” Chou cried out. “They actually got the fuel?”
“Those guys are nuts flying that thing back here!” Delaney added to the din. “One spark and this whole fucking mountain will go up!”
The next thing he knew, Norton was on his feet, running towards the wreck. Air techs were scrambling out of the cave, many with fire extinguishers in hand. They quickly began hosing down the burning aircraft. But there was no sign of movement in the cockpit.
In seconds Norton was boosting himself up onto the twisted wing of the Hook, Delaney close behind. The lower side access door was crumpled. There would be no way of getting in from there. Smoke was pouring from the main cargo bay door. That way was blocked too. Norton only had one other choice. He climbed up to the top of the fuselage and crawled over to the cockpit window itself. He peered inside. He could see Ricco and Gillis, slumped over, still strapped in their seats. They looked dead. The fumes were nearly overwhelming.
Now Delaney was at his side, and together they began pounding on the cockpit glass with their rifle butts. But the strong panes would not budge. No surprise. They were bullet-proof just like the glass on the Hinds.
“What should we do?” Delaney was yelling over at Norton. “We can’t shoot it out!”
Suddenly, a fire ax appeared between them. It hit one window with such force, the glass exploded into thousands of pieces. They looked down and saw Smitz standing on the twisted nose below. There was a fire in his eye they’d never seen before.
“C’mon!” he was yelling. “Get them out of there!”
Norton reached through the busted window and grabbed Ricco by the scruff of his neck. The window frame was just large enough to squeeze the injured pilot out, but it was like pulling deadweight. It took all of his strength, but somehow Norton managed to extract him.
Then Smitz hit the next window over with the ax; it too burst in a cloud of tiny pieces. Delaney reached in this hole and pulled Gillis’s long lanky frame out. All around them, the air techs were dousing them and the chopper with mountains of foam. The heavy smoke was everywhere—which was a good thing. The haze was so thick it prevented the Iraqis on the highway from seeing the rescue efforts.
Yet no sooner had they lowered both pilots to the ground when Chou ran up. He was coughing from the fumes and smoke; so much, he couldn’t talk. So he just pointed to the highway. Norton took one look and immediately felt his heart sink to his boots. A half-dozen trucks had split away from the Iraqi column and were racing for the cliff at full speed.