In the end about twenty men from Blue Platoon came over and gathered around Alex.
“Tell me about this helicopter,” Alex said. “One of you. Slowly. Not all at once. The man who spoke first.”
“Sir,” the boy eventually said in slow country rhythms. “Sir, during the last run of the aerial attack, a helicopter flew low over the trees. We saw it only very late in its approach, because everyone was undercover from the airplanes. Naturally—” he clapped his rifle, a Fabrique Nationale FAL, “I fired on it.”
“What kind of helicopter?”
“UH-1B. The Huey, so famous from Vietnam.”
“You hit it?”
“I–I think so, sir.”
“How many rounds?”
“Sir?”
“How many rounds did you put into it? What kind of sight picture did you have? Were you leading it? Were you in the full or semiautomatic mode? Where were you firing?”
The boy was silent, baffled.
“Please be honest with me,” said Alex. “I mean you no disrespect. You are a brave and dedicated man. But I have to know the answers to these questions as completely as you can tell me.”
“Sir, then the truth is, I fired hurriedly. I had no time to really aim competently. I was firing semiautomatic and perhaps I got off seven or eight rounds.”
“Did you see any damage? I mean, ruptures in the steel, smoke, flames, blown rotors, that sort of thing?”
“Not really, sir. It was so fast.”
“How about any of you others. Who else thinks they scored hits?”
A few hands rose.
“Full-auto or semi?”
The answers were all semi; the stories were all the same: jerked shots fired desperately at a flashing target, no real sight pictures, less than a magazine apiece fired at the machine.
“Yet it crashed?”
“Yessir. It crossed the crest, whirled down the mountain, out of control. We lost sight of it from here. But there was an explosion at the base of the mountain.”
“Did you see it hit?”
“No, sir. It hit behind some trees. Down there you can see how thick the trees are. It hit right there. A few seconds later there was an explosion.”
“Was the explosion exactly at the point of impact?”
“Sir, it’s hard to say. It seemed to be more or less at the point of impact. Perhaps the machine bounced when it hit, then exploded. It’s—”
But Alex was already gone.
“Sergeant,” he shouted, “I want you to put together a team of ten of your very best men. I think something’s up, something I don’t like. I don’t know what. I want you to go down the hill and check out that helicopter wreck.”
1600
“I don’t know,” said Delta Three. “I hate to go in blind. It’s against everything they teach us.” He was looking through binoculars from well back in the room of a house on Main Street, in Burkittsville, at the front of Jack Hummel’s place some two hundred yards down the road.
“We don’t have time for a recon,” said Jim Uckley. “Listen, it’s even possible there’s no one in there except the mother and her two sick little girls.”
“Then what happens,” said Delta Three, “if I get a peripheral cue, turn and fire and blow away a child? It’s no good, Mr. Uckley. I’m not going to risk civilians like that. I couldn’t live with myself if—”
Some Delta! thought Uckley.
“Look, man,” he said, “we don’t have a lot of time. We got to help those guys on the mountain. We’ve got to improvise something.”
“I’m not going in without a floorplan, sure information on how many guys there are and a good idea of where they are in the house and where these children might be. And I’m not going in without multiple simultaneous entries. You’re too fat a target. I don’t mind taking chances. I was hit twice in Vietnam, in fact. But goddammit, I’m not going in and risk kids’ lives.”
Delta Three was a sanctimonious Southerner in his late thirties with the righteous jaw set of a zealot. He was raw-boned and tough, a master sergeant. Uckley hated him. The other three Deltas — he didn’t have time to learn their names so he’d simply christened them Deltas One through Four — seemed like decent kids. But goddamn this adult!
“Officer,” Uckley called to the Burkittsville cop who was with them in the house. “Any chance you could, uh, get us a floorplan or something. So we knew—”
“No,” said the cop. “That house is one hundred years old and they didn’t make floorplans in those days, they just built ’em and built ’em a damn sight better ’n they do now.”
Great. Another zealot who loved to express his opinions. The cop was about fifty-five and plainly pissed off that all this government beef had come gunslinging into his town. But in a phase four emergency, federal officers called the shots, and he’d buy the idea that young Uckley was calling these.
“Neighbors,” said Delta Four. “They’d have been in the house, right? Maybe you could round one up and get some kind of a drawing or diagram. Then we’d at least have some idea.”
The cop chewed this one over. Finally, he allowed that Kathy Reed lived next door.
“Call her,” said Uckley. “Tell her it’s an emergency, ask her to walk down the street to us.”
“That’s good,” said Delta Four. “Maybe we can rock and roll after all.”
In a few minutes, Kathy Reed, her twin boys, Mick and Sam, and a scroungy mutt that turned out to be named Theo showed up. Kathy was in her housedress still and looked as though a few days had passed since she’d last washed her hair.
“Bruce is away,” she began to explain, “I’m sorry about the way I look, but it’s so hard to—”
“Mrs. Reed?” Uckley asked. “I’m James Uckley, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. These men here with me are a special assault team from the Army’s Delta Group.”
He watched her mouth lengthen, then form the perfect rictus of an O. She was a woman who at one time or other might have been attractive but had been ground to a nub by the trenchwork of motherhood. She swallowed, her eyes going big, then said, “Is this about the mountain. There’s something going on on the mountain, right?”
“Yes, this does have to do with the mountain. Now, what I wanted to ask you about was your neighbor, Mrs. Hummel.”
“Beth? Is Beth in trouble?”
“Well, that’s what I want you to tell me. Did you talk to her today?”
“Yes, sir. About an hour ago.”
“And how did she seem?”
“Uh, the same.”
“The same?”
“It was just Beth, that’s all. I was the scared one. Because I thought there was gas or an atom bomb on the mountain. She said she’d drive us out of here if there was an evacuation. Bruce has the car. He travels a lot.”
“Did she invite you in?”
“Uh, no.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Well, we have coffee nearly every morning. Beth’s my best friend. She’s everybody’s best friend. I guess it was.”
“Was she nervous? Unsettled?”
“Come to think of it, yes, I suppose she was.”
“What about her kids?”
“What about them?”
“Did she say anything about them being sick?”
“Sick! What have they got? Sam was with Poo all yesterday. That means Sam will be coming down with it. Did she tell you they were sick?”
“They’re not in school. She called in.”
“That’s peculiar. I know she would have said something about it. But she didn’t mention it.”