He chambered another round and scanned left and right for the real Nathan McBride.
Assuming McBride had fired the handgun at arm’s length, he searched both sides of the fallen trunk but saw nothing until a very slow movement caught his eye on the left edge of his scope, farther and higher than he had imagined McBride could be.
He centered the crosshairs on the movement and felt a chill rake his body.
Impossible!
Well-concealed near the top of an enormous root ball, Nathan McBride was lined up on him.
Perfectly.
The movement he’d seen was McBride’s left hand, waving good-bye.
In slow motion, he saw McBride’s rifle wink.
Half a second after the muzzle flash burned his retina, he sensed an impact on his forehead.
Nathan’s rifle bucked against his shoulder, but he hadn’t anticipated the level of agony it would cause. His vision grayed, then quit altogether. Blind and helpless, sudden dizziness and nausea hammered him. He remembered this sickening feeling well, recalled it with hideous clarity from his days spent in a Nicaraguan cage. He was seconds from passing out. How high was he perched in this root ball? Five or six feet? High enough to snap his neck on impact. As gravity pulled him headfirst toward the ground, his right leg slipped and hung up in the interior root tangle.
He felt and heard his shinbones snap.
Tib-fib. One-two. Oh man, that’s a bad deal.
I’m so sorry, Harv. Sorry I let you down.…
Just before his head struck the earth, Nathan Daniel McBride closed his eyes, and for the second time in his life, waited for the mercy of death to take him.
Chapter 30
“ETA one minute,” General Mansfield said.
Flanked by two Black Hawks, Harvey flew Nathan’s Bell 407 toward the canyon. Sitting next to him, Mansfield was coordinating the approach as the V-shaped formation of helicopters screamed over the town of Dupuyer. Harvey glanced at his watch, early by nearly twenty minutes. Nathan would just have to deal with it. No way in hell Harvey was waiting the entire two hours.
“We don’t know what to expect up there,” Harvey said. “We could take ground fire from Bridgestone. He could do some real damage with a sniper rifle.”
“That’s true, but if your partner is still alive, Bridgestone won’t fire his weapon and give away his location. We don’t have a lot of options at this point. I’m not willing to put men on the ground until we know what’s going on.”
“Agreed,” Harvey said. “We’ll be lucky to see anything at all. If they’re engaged in a sniper fight, we won’t see either of them.”
“We should make a pass down the length of the canyon. Either McBride will signal us, or Bridgestone will shoot us. I hate to say this, but if Bridgestone managed to kill McBride, he might be long gone and it might be difficult to find your partner down there.”
Harvey didn’t want to think about that possibility. “Let’s have your two birds fly the southern and northern rims of the canyon while we fly down the middle.”
“Good plan.” Mansfield passed the orders along.
The three helicopters cleared the canyon’s rim and flew directly over the original landing zone where Nathan had set down. The Black Hawk on Harvey’s right peeled off to fly the north rim of the canyon. The Black Hawk on the port side made a similar maneuver toward the south rim. Harvey slowed the Bell and expertly followed the canyon’s streambed at thirty knots.
When he rounded the last horseshoe bend and had the rock spire in sight, the radio crackled to life. “Civilian Delta, Rescue Alpha has a man down on the south rim. He looks dead.”
Before Mansfield could respond, Harvey pulled the transmit trigger. “Rescue Alpha, what is the downed man wearing?” Harvey looked up to his right where the Black Hawk was orbiting in a tight circle above a bowl-shaped sandy formation on the rim.
“Can’t say for sure, but it looks like digital desert.”
Harvey felt relief wash over him. “Do you see anyone else? Our man is wearing woodland MARPAT under a ghillie suit.”
“Negative, the casualty isn’t wearing a ghillie suit.”
“I’m going up there,” Harvey said. He applied collective and climbed to the rim of the canyon. Fifty yards south of Leonard’s body, he saw a sandy patch of clear ground surrounded by waist-high brush. He taxied over, made a landing, and throttled the RPM down. “I’ll be right back. You’ve got her?”
“I’ve got her,” Mansfield confirmed.
Harvey climbed out and sprinted across the rocky terrain, weaving his way through the brush and larger rocks littering the landscape. Overhead, the loud roar of the orbiting helicopter drowned out the Bell’s engine noise.
Leonard Bridgestone lay facedown at the edge of the canyon’s rim. The back of his head was gone. From the look of things, his rifle had been shouldered when Nate nailed him. Harvey stepped behind Bridgestone and lined up on his position. Bone, scalp, and brain matter had been sprayed across the sand, and from the fan-shaped pattern, Harvey could approximate where the shot had come from. He sighted down Leonard’s body and made a mental note of a huge downed oak near the streambed. Twenty seconds later, Harvey was strapped in and lifting off. When he descended into the canyon, there wasn’t a good place to set her down except the wet sand of the streambed. In the center of the wash, nearly a foot of water still flowed.
“General, can one of your pilots test this LZ before I set her down? I don’t have enough experience to try it.”
“No problem.” Mansfield called Rescue Bravo down to their location and ordered it to check the stability of the sand near the bank of the stream.
Harvey taxied Nathan’s Bell away from the LZ so the Black Hawk could take his place. Thirty seconds later, the Air Force helicopter was hovering over the moist sand. Its pilot carefully settled onto the wet surface, gradually putting more and more weight onto its skids until it was fully down. The skids sunk only a few inches into the wet sand before stopping.
The pilot radioed the results before lifting off again. “You’re good to go, Civilian Delta. Shouldn’t be a problem lifting off again.”
Mansfield cut in. “Rescue Bravo, set down and prepare for a medevac.”
“Copy.”
Harvey hovered over, set the ship down, and started the shutdown procedure. Since General Mansfield was coming with him, he didn’t want to risk the helicopter vibrating itself down into the moist sand by leaving its engine idling. It took an endless two-and-a-half minutes before the engine was cool enough to cut its fuel for shut down.
“Nice landing,” Mansfield said. “Not bad for someone without a rating. Let’s go find your friend.”
With General Mansfield following, Harvey thrashed his way through the brush at the creek’s northern bank and approached the fallen oak, but Nathan wasn’t here. Panicked, he looked around. Nothing. But this had to be the place. Then he saw something, something out of place. Nathan’s Predator knife, sticking straight up with its blade driven into a large branch attached to the fallen tree trunk. Harvey approached the knife and saw Nathan’s Sig Sauer handgun tied to the top of the same branch. He frowned. A fishing line was attached to the trigger and looped around the butt of the knife. On the ground next to the branch lay Nathan’s ghillie suit with a crude wooden cross inside. A broken pair of field glasses was attached to the crosspiece. A second fishing line, also attached to the crosspiece, was cleverly looped through a V-shaped area of one of the fallen oak’s branches. Harvey now knew that Nathan had set up a dummy decoy, and from the look of the shattered binoculars, Leonard had taken the bait.
From over Harvey’s shoulder, General Mansfield looked at the setup and whispered, “I’ll be damned.”