“Come on, baby, come on, give me some power,” she pleaded as the old Huey strained under the punishment. She leveled off, still only twenty feet above the ground, with the bulk of Storm King Mountain less than 400 meters away. Trace pulled back on the cyclic, slowing her forward progress, and put everything into the cyclic, gaining altitude as quickly as possible.
She cleared the foothills of Storm King with barely five feet between the skids and the highest tree tops and was off to the west, disappearing from the sight of the two officers below.
“What do we do, sir?” Captain Isaac asked, holding his empty .45 in his hand.
“The. bitch has got to land somewhere,” Quincy said, “and when she does, she’s ours. Let’s go alert all the local airfields and the State Police.”
Trace’s options were rapidly dwindling. The thickly overcast sky was pressing down on her, forcing her to stay below 1,500 feet altitude.
With the mountainous terrain that surrounded West Point, there were only a couple of directions she could fly. Out the right window, the tree covered slopes of Crows Nest and Storm King Mountains loomed, stopping her from going north. To her rear, the low valley of the Hudson beckoned, but Trace instinctively didn’t want to go the easy way — that’s where they would look first.
South, Bear Mountain blocked the way.
In her haste to simply get away from Target Hill Field, she’d headed west and passed over Washington Gate less than a minute ago — the rear entrance to the Academy from Route 293. For the present she was following the road, fifty feet above the black ribbon. She tried to remember as best she could the surrounding terrain. Following the road was the safest route for the moment. She knew the New York State Thruway was about a dozen miles to the west and she estimated she might be able to follow that to the north and land at Stewart Airfield, a former military airbase, that had been turned over to civilian authority several years previously.
Trace figured she had a good chance of landing there and getting away in another rental before the alert went out.
At the West Point MP station. Sergeant Taylor received a call from the superintendent’s office less than two minutes after getting the radio call from two of his MPS about shots fired near the cemetery and Target Hill Field. He wasn’t surprised when the superintendent’s aide told him to ignore all reports and that nothing had happened.
Taylor instructed his MPS to stay away from whatever was going on and to forget about it. Then he picked up the phone and called the same number he had called earlier after realizing he was dealing with the supe’s office.
He started speaking as soon as the other end was picked up.
“Harry, it’s Sergeant Taylor. Something’s happening.”
Long Pond flashed by on the left, then the flashing yellow light indicating the turnoff for Camp Buckner. Trace’ banked right, overflying the long barracks that made up the summer training encampment. Popolopen Lake appeared and Trace flittered across the surface, continuing on a southwesterly direction. She knew the Bull Hill fire tower was somewhere off to her right, but the cloud cover was so low, the tops of the hills were completely covered.
Doubt began to creep into Trace’s mind. Did 293 intersect the Thruway or did it loop back to Route 6 and Bear Mountain? She had driven out this way numerous times as a cadet but that was over a dozen years ago.
Of one thing she was certain: the Thruway was to the west, and it was her best and only shot through the mountains and to Stewart Airfield.
She remembered seeing the four-lane highway from her plebe field training at Lake Frederick which she knew was very close, somewhere off to the right. With her hands full of cyclic and collective, there was no way she could check to see if there were any charts in the helmet bag next to the seat. A helicopter needs two hands to fly; let go of the controls even for the briefest of seconds and the aircraft will immediately attempt to invert and destroy itself.
A gap appeared in the solid line of green to Trace’s right as the terrain descended below the clouds, an opening heading due west. Trace made her decision and turned, heading directly into the opening. A pond appeared: Lake Frederick?
Trace wondered. She was caught between the gray clouds less than a hundred feet above and the black water thirty feet under her skids. The far side of the pond was a solid wall of trees. She was forced to turn left again, south 9 west, following the pond’s surface.
The pond gave way to swamp and Trace slowed to an airspeed of less than thirty knots. She was looking out to the right when something appeared in the corner of her eyes. As she spun her head about she screamed a curse and pulled in on the collective as she slammed the cyclic over.
High-tension wires were directly ahead, looming down out of the clouds and attached to a tower to her far left.
For a brief second Trace thought she’d make it as they flashed beneath the cockpit. The toe of the right skid didn’t clear. It hooked on the topmost wire. The helicopter tilted and the blades flashed through the steel wires, destroying the wires and themselves in a split second. The helicopter went from an aerodynamic object to a rock.
Trace’s hands were still struggling with the dead controls when the cockpit slammed into the rock wall face, then tumbled to the ground below, coming to a rest in a pile of broken tree limbs, crumpled metal, and shattered Plexiglas.
CHAPTER 18
From the hillside Boomer could clearly see the Arizona Memorial and the entire harbor spread out below him. He was above the Pacific Palisades in the jungle that clung to the side of the mountains. Skibicki had driven them there in the dark, going up an old trail until it gave out in a small clearing, hidden by the overhanging trees.
Boomer glanced over. Vasquez was in the back seat, sleeping. Skibicki had strung a hammock between two trees and was quietly snoring.
Boomer looked along the southern coast of Oahu in the quiet splendor of the rising sun. He wondered if any place could be further from the cold gray walls of West Point in December than Hawaii? Boomer couldn’t imagine the Academy on the slopes of Diamond Head. Such martial learnings seemed so far removed from the tropical paradise around him.
But he only had to look down at the harbor and the constantly lit white building above the rusting hulk of the Arizona to know that war had come here too.
Boomer twisted the focus on the binoculars. There was a launch heading out to the Memorial. He scanned it.
Everyone on board was Navy except for one man in a suit.
As he checked the man out, a sound to the side drew his attention.
It was Skibicki stirring. The sergeant major swung his feet to the ground, still supported by the hammock.
“How’s the head?”
Boomer reached up and felt the bandage the sergeant major had applied in the dark.
“I’ve got a little bit of a headache, but other than that, it’s all right.”