Everything rattled as we bounced across the pasture trying not to think about the increasingly obvious fact.
"This is my fault," Jasmine said, her voice low and burdened with second thoughts. "We should have visited all those little airfields after dark. The choppers have to go somewhere to refuel."
"Just keep praying," I said as we bounced across the field.
"Worse comes to worst, we'll locate one tonight and if we don't have time, we'll try again tomorrow night," Tyrone said.
"Might have to," I said. "But it also gives our buddies with the Blackhawks more time to find us."
Worse looked as if it were coming to worst, then we rounded a peninsula of trees and spotted the dragonfly silhouette of the old M*A*S*H chopper resting on a trailer. A blue tarp covered the bubble nose. The newer helicopter was nowhere to be seen.
"Oh, boy," Rex said, his voice flat and dull. "Oh freaking boy."
Anita pulled up to the old helicopter and stopped. Even after she put the Suburban in park we all sat there silently absorbing the unspoken reality facing us.
"Shake it off, guys," Jasmine said. "It could be a lot worse." Then she got out and walked around the helicopter climbed up on the trailer and shined her flashlight into some sort of inspection port on what looked like the tail-rotor gearbox. Next, she rapped on the near-side saddle fuel tank and checked out the pesticide hopper fastened behind the cockpit.
Then she unsnapped the bungee cords holding the tarp and let it drift to the ground.
Feeling proud and proprietary, I couldn't take my eyes off Jasmine, climbing into the cockpit, sitting in the pilot's seat, and looking slowly around her then down at the instrument panel. My respect for her grew as I saw the subtle displays of her knowledge and competence as she inspected the craft. After a while she smiled, looked over at us, and offered a satisfied nod. Then she climbed down and made her way back to the Suburban.
"Well, the good news is that this is a G model of the Bell 47, which means the Franklin internal combustion engine is at least two hundred horsepower rather than one seventy-eight, which we see a lot," she said.
"Oh, Lord, bless you for twenty-two horsepower," Rex said sarcastically.
"Rex!" Anita barked at him.
"Okay, all right," Rex mumbled softly.
"The aircraft's still here," Jasmine continued, "because the trailer tire on the other side is flat."
"So why didn't they fly it out like the other one?" Rex asked.
"On something as old and slow as this one, you want to save your engine and airframe hours for something that makes you money," she said.
"So… I guess this is the ultimate good-news, bad-news thing," Rex said. "The good news is we have a helicopter; the bad news is we have a helicopter."
Laughter cut through some of the tension.
"This one's okay?" I asked Jasmine.
"Well, it just has to be, doesn't it?"
"Enough gas?"
She nodded.
"How about the stuttering from the engine?"
"Sounded like a fouled plug," Jasmine said. "I'll check once we excavate Rex's tools."
The moon had started to dip below the trees as we piled out of the Suburban, pulled on dark coveralls and boots.
"One more thing," Jasmine said. "The 47 is a lot slower than the Jet Ranger. We can cruise around seventy-five knots… eighty-two or eighty-three miles per hour. It'll add another ten or fifteen minutes to the flight time."
Time had become our enemy and this latest news urged us on faster. We used the bolt cutters to get rid of all the chains and padlocks, then rolled the light helicopter off the trailer with surprisingly little effort.
Rex and I unloaded the Suburban and tried to figure out what we could strap to the skids, under the fuselage, and to the forward portion of the tail frame. We soon realized we'd need to leave a lot of the gear behind.
While Rex and I struggled to sort out the gear, Tyrone and Jasmine unbolted the pesticide hoppers and removed the spray boom. With help from Anita, they hot-wired the simple ignition circuit, then patched the SuperNova spotlights' coiled power wires directly into the helicopter's twelve-volt electrical system.
Rex and I rigged a makeshift net from half-inch climbing rope and strung it from the front to the rear of the skids on both sides in roughly the same places the old M*A*S*H choppers carried the wounded.
The makeshift net also offered Rex and me a safer platform from which to ride the skids, necessary because the cockpit held only two people.
"Careful of the right side where the rear skid frame meets the tail," Jasmine warned us. "The exhaust pipes get really, really hot."
The moon sank from sight as our watches raced toward 4:00 a.m. Dawn would follow soon. We'd be toast if we hadn't finished before it was light. Then, shortly before 4:15 a.m., we rolled out the floppy strip of metal-grid reinforcing wire used for light-duty concrete pavement like sidewalks and driveways. It was a good twenty feet long and eight feet wide. We stiffened it lengthwise with three lengths of half-inch steel rebar cable tied to the grid. Then we connected two "vees" of rope to each side of the metal grid and a single piece of rope from the apex of the vees.
Rex and I climbed into our safety harnesses, checked our packs, and put them on. We put on our red helmets, as did Tyrone, who was our loadmaster and might have to climb out on the skids to hand us equipment depending on what transpired. He had put on his safety harness and helmet earlier.
I had the dead blond woman's H amp;K automatic in a thigh holster and spare magazines in the cargo pockets of my coveralls. Rex had a worn, nickel-plated. 38 °Colt automatic pistol with white grips my mother had left him in her will. Jasmine and Tyrone had the matching. 357 Ruger revolvers. They also had the M21 between them, but I doubted it would come in handy. If we got into a firefight, we were doomed.
As Jasmine fired up the helicopter's engine, Anita gave Rex a kiss and a hug, then drove away.
Rex and I slipped on our goggles and stood next to the metal grid as Jasmine lifted the helicopter about five feet off the ground. Her hover was unsteady at first, then grew more and more solid.
Using the walkie-talkies, Rex and I had her hover over the wire grid as we attached the ropes to the skids of the chopper. Then Rex made his way over to the left side of the craft. I climbed aboard my side and snapped my safety harnesses to the tail frame and radioed for Jasmine to lift off. I held on tight as she lifted slowly up into the dark sky.
"Hold a minute," Rex's voice played in my radio earpiece. An instant later, brilliant light shot from his side. The SuperNova light on my side was snapped to one of the grid ropes with a carabiner. In the illumination of Rex's light, I spotted the metal grid spinning about, trying to keep time with the rotor downwash.
We landed for an instant to fix stabilizing lines from two of the metal grid's corners.
It was 4:30 A.M. when we took off again. I lay almost prone on top of the gear, head forward, legs splayed for bracing.
I pulled the night-vision spotting scope from my overalls and trained it ahead to keep an eye out for power lines. It made me wonder what other unseen terrors waited in the dark.
CHAPTER 80
David Brown leaned against the windowsill of the commandeered office on the fifth floor of the federal office building in Jackson, Mississippi, and looked down at the nearly deserted stretch of Capitol Street. A newly lit Marlboro hung from the corner of his mouth. "Where the hell are you, you thieving pig-frigger?"
Brown drew on the Marlboro and let the smoke drift out his nostrils. A knock sounded on the door behind him, then he heard it open.