Clark heard the screams inside and out over the low howl of the miniguns. He could feel the rounds hitting the side of the aircraft, and then saw two men fall just at the tail rotor of the helicopter while others were racing aboard.
"Shit!" He leapt to his feet and ran out the door, joined by Chavez and Vega. Clark lifted one of the fallen soldiers and dragged him toward the ramp. Chavez and Vega got the other. There was dust kicking up at their feet from the fire. Vega fell five feet from the ramp, taking his burden down with him. Clark tossed his soldier into the waiting hands of his team members and turned to assist. First he took the team member. When he turned, Chavez was struggling with Vega. Clark grabbed the man's shoulders and pushed backward, landing on the edge of the ramp. Ding grabbed Oso's feet and swung them around, leaping over them to grab the base of the minigun as the helicopter started lifting off. Fire came straight through the door, but Bean now had a clear field for his weapon and swept it across the area.
It was slow getting off. The helicopter had several tons of new weight, was at over five thousand feet of altitude, and trying to fly with reduced power. Forward, PJ cursed the balky machine. The Pave Low struggled up a few feet, still taking fire.
On the ground around them the attackers were enraged that the men whom they wanted to kill were escaping, and ran for one last attempt to prevent it. They saw the helicopter as a trophy, some horrible apparition that had robbed them of success and their comrades of their lives, and each of them determined that this should not be. Over a hundred rifles were trained on the aircraft as it wavered, halfway between ground and flight.
Ryan felt the passage of several rounds – they were coming right through his door, going he knew not where, aiming for him and his gun. He was past fear. The flashes of rifle fire were places to aim, and that he did. One at a time he selected a target and touched his trigger, shifting rapidly from one to another. Safety, what there was of it, lay in eliminating the danger. There was no place to run, and he knew that the ability to respond was a luxury that everyone aboard the aircraft wanted, but only three of them had. He couldn't let them down. He moved the gun left to right and back again in a series of seconds that stretched out into hours, and he thought that he could hear each individual round the minigun spat out. His head jerked back when something hit his helmet, but he yanked it back and held the trigger down, spraying the area in one continuous blast of fire that changed as he realized that he had to bring his hands up and the muzzles down because the targets were dropping away. For one brief contradictory instant it seemed as if they and not he were getting away. Then it was over. For a moment, his hands wouldn't come off the gun. He tried to take a step back, but his hands wouldn't let go until he willed them to. Then they dropped to his side. Ryan shook his head to clear it. He was deafened by the noise from the minigun, and it took a few seconds before he started hearing the higher-frequency screams of wounded men. He looked around to see that the body of the aircraft was filled with the acidic smoke of the guns, but the rapidly increasing slipstream from forward flight was clearing it out. His eyes were still suffering from the gun flashes, and his legs were wobbly from the sudden fatigue that comes after violent action. He wanted to sit down, to go to sleep, to wake up in another place.
One of the screams was close by. It was Zimmer, only a few feet away, lying on his back and rolling around with his arms across his chest. Ryan went to see what the problem was.
Zimmer had taken three rounds in the chest. He was aspirating blood. It sprayed in a pink cloud from his mouth and nose. One round had shattered his right shoulder, but the serious ones were through the lungs. The man was bleeding to death before his eyes, Ryan knew at once. Was there a medic here? Might he do something?
"This is Ryan," he said over the intercom line. "Sergeant Zimmer is down. He's hit pretty bad."
"Buck!" PJ responded at once. "Buck, are you all right?"
Zimmer tried to answer but couldn't. His intercom line had been shot away. He shouted something Ryan couldn't understand, and Jack turned and screamed as loudly as he could at the rest of them, the others who didn't seem to care or know what the problem here was.
"Medic! Corpsman!" he added, not knowing what it was that Army troops said. Clark heard him and started heading that way.
"Come on, Zimmer, you're going to be all right," Jack told him. He remembered that much from his brief few months in the Marine Corps. Give them a reason to live. "We're going to fix this up and you're going to be all right. Hang in there, Sarge – it hurts, but you're going to be all right."
Clark was there a moment later. He stripped off the flight engineer's flak jacket, oblivious to the screech of pain that it caused from the wrecked shoulder. For Clark, too, it was too much a return to years past and things half-remembered. Somehow he'd forgotten just how scary, how awful this sort of thing was, and while he was recovering his senses more rapidly than most, the horror of having been helpless under fire and helpless with its aftermath had nearly overpowered him. And he was helpless now. He could see that from the placement of the wounds. Clark looked up at Ryan and shook his head.
"My kids!" Zimmer screamed. The sergeant had a reason to live, but the reason wasn't enough.
"Tell me about your kids," Ryan said. "Talk to me about your kids."
"Seven – I got seven kids – I gotta, I can't die! My kids – my kids need me."
"Hang in there, Sarge, we're going to get you out of here. You're going to make it," Ryan told him, tears clouding in his eyes at the shame of lying to a dying man.
"They need me!" His voice was weaker now as the blood was filling his throat and lungs.
Ryan looked up at Clark, hoping that there was something to be said. Some hope. Something. Clark just stared into Jack's face. He looked back down at Zimmer and took his hand, the uninjured one.
"Seven kids?" Jack asked.
"They need me," Zimmer whimpered, knowing now that he wouldn't be there, wouldn't see them grow and marry and have their own children, wouldn't be there to guide them, to protect them. He had failed to do what a father must do.
"I'll tell you something about your kids that you don't know, Zimmer," Ryan said to the dying man.
"Huh? What?" He looked confused, looked to Ryan for the answer to the great question of life. Jack didn't have that one, but told him what he could.
"They're all going to college, man." Ryan squeezed the hand as hard as he could. "You got my word, Zimmer, all your kids'll go to college. I will take care of that for you. Swear to God, man, I'll do it."
The sergeant's face changed a bit at that, but before Ryan could decide what emotion he beheld, the face changed again, and there was no emotion left. Ryan hit the intercom switch. "Zimmer's dead, Colonel."
"Roger." Ryan was offended by the coldness of the acknowledgment. He didn't hear what Johns was thinking: God, oh God, what do I tell Carol and the kids?
Ryan had Zimmer's head cradled on his lap. He disengaged himself slowly, resting the head down on the metal floor of the helicopter. Clark wrapped his burly arms around the younger man.
"I'm going to do it," Jack told him in a choking voice. "That wasn't a fucking lie. I am going to do it!"
"I know. He knew it too. He really did."
"You sure?" The tears had started, and it was hard for Jack to repeat the most important question of his life. "Are you really sure?"
"He knew what you said, Jack, and he believed you. What you did, doc, that was pretty good." Clark embraced Ryan in the way that men do only with their wives, their children, and those with whom they had faced death.
In the right-front seat, Colonel Johns put his grief away into a locked compartment that he would later open and experience to the full. But for now he had a mission to fly. Buck would surely understand that.