The Silent Sea Read online

  What the pilot heard was the voice of a man from his own city of Buenos Aires. “I . . .”

  “Don’t think,” Juan said. “Just fly. Take us south.”

  He spent a microsecond considering his options. The hard eyes on him said there was only one. “Sí, sí. I’ll fly.”

  His hands moved to the controls. Cabrillo looked up the hill once again. Trucks were racing down the log-hauling road, kicking up dust that mixed with the smoke already fouling the air. It wasn’t even going to be close. The chopper would be a mile away by the time the Ninth Brigade soldiers were in range.

  Jerry Pulaski shouted Juan’s name.

  And saved his life.

  The pilot of the second chopper had to have heard Major Espinoza’s radio call. He stood just outside the Eurocopter with a raised pistol. He had seen the gun Juan had trained on the pilot and calculated that he was the greatest risk. When he heard Jerry yell, the Argentine shifted his aim and fired twice. From that instant, events happened in such rapid succession that it was impossible to know their order.

  As a fine red mist enveloped the cargo area, Juan twisted and dropped the second pilot with a double tap to the chest that hit in such a tight group the penetrations overlapped. The man dropped where he stood, no dramatic flourish, no Hollywood contortions. One second he thought he was about to become a hero, and the next he was on the ground like discarded laundry.

  Mike Trono fired across the cockpit when the pilot reached for his door, then took up the controls himself. He twisted the throttle, and the helo lifted from the ground. As it began to rotate around on its axes, he put in the opposite rudder, and the craft stabilized.

  Juan turned, jamming his pistol against the pilot’s head hard enough to break skin. Blood ran from his ear. “Fly this chopper or when we hit a thousand feet you’ll fly out of it.”

  Mike’s bullet had passed so close to the pilot’s eyes that they stung from the heat and GSR, but he blinked through the pain and started flying the Eurocopter. With Trono covering him again, Juan turned his attention to Jerry Pulaski and Mark Murphy on the rear bench seat. Mark was bent over Jerry, who was slouched back with an arm clamped across his belly. Making sure the pilot wouldn’t hear, Cabrillo asked, “How bad?”

  The big man was going into shock. His face had lost all color, and he was shaking as though with fever.

  “Gut-shot,” Mark replied. “Both rounds. At such close range, I expect damage beyond the intestines. Kidney. Liver maybe.”

  Juan went numb. Such wounds were treatable at a level-one trauma center, but the nearest one of those was perhaps a thousand miles away. Out here, in the jungle, the chances of Pulaski surviving were zero. Cabrillo was looking at a dead man. And the pained eyes holding his knew it. “Stay with us, Ski,” Juan said, the words as empty as the hollow in his chest.

  “I ain’t going anywhere,” Jerry replied, taking rapid sips of air between each syllable, lying.

  DOWN ON THE GROUND, Major Espinoza realized his quarry was getting away in the helicopter he gave them permission to take. He ordered the logger who was driving their pickup to stop. Espinoza threw open his door and jumped to the ground. He only carried a pistol, an ivory-handled Colt .45, but he had it out and trained on the fleeing helicopter as soon as his boots hit the dirt. He had no hope of hitting the chopper, but he cycled through the pistol’s seven-round magazine as fast as he could pull the trigger, rage as much as gunpowder sending the bullets flying.

  The men in the bed followed suit, filling the sky with autofire from their machine pistols. What they lacked in range they made up for in sheer weight of shot. In seconds, nearly two hundred bullets went chasing after the helicopter, and the men managed to reload and unleash another volley even as the first rounds began to swarm around the chopper like maddened wasps.

  “INCOMING,” MIKE SHOUTED from the copilot’s seat as he saw the constellation of muzzle flashes through the drifting smoke.

  The pilot instinctively juked the nimble chopper, but with so many bullets in the air, and so many of them spreading far from their intended target, it was impossible to evade them all. Nine-millimeters peppered the Eurocopter, tearing sizzling holes through its thin aluminum skin. Most passed harmlessly through, but there was the ominous clang of rounds striking the engine housings and doing who knows what to the delicate turbines. The chopper suddenly veered hard over. Juan lost his footing and, had he not grabbed for the door stanchion, would have fallen out of the aircraft.

  Jerry lost his stoic battle with pain when the helo’s vibration shifted his center of gravity, doubling him over his bleeding belly and causing the bullet fragments to tear through yet more tissue. His scream lanced into Juan as if he’d been pierced by a dagger.

  Cabrillo regained his footing, looking into the cockpit. Mike had firm control of the helicopter, his eyes scanning instruments and sky. The Argentine pilot was slumped in his seat. Juan swung around the back of the chair so he could better assess the man’s wounds. There was a fresh bullet hole in the Plexiglas side window close to the one Trono had fired a moment earlier, but this one had the elongated look of a round flying upward. It had hit the pilot in the side of his head at such an angle that while gouging through skin and perhaps cracking bone, it hadn’t penetrated the skull.

  Like all head wounds, it bled copiously. Juan grabbed a balled-up rag from the floor between the seats, pressed it to the wound, and held it while his other hand reached back. Mark Murphy knew what the Chairman wanted and handed over a roll of surgical tape. Like wrapping a mummy, Juan wound four loops of tape around the pilot’s head to staunch the flow of crimson blood.

  “Mike, you okay?” Juan asked in English. The need for subterfuge was over. The pilot would be unconscious for hours.

  “Yeah, but we’ve got problems.”

  Cabrillo glanced back to where Mark tended to Jerry Pulaski. “Don’t I know it.”

  “We’re losing fuel, and either this model doesn’t have self-sealing tanks or they’ve failed. Add to that the rising engine temperature, and I think we might also have a broken oil line.”

  Juan turned aft and leaned out the window, holding his body rigid against the tremendous wind pounding his head and upper body. The sound was a roar in his ears as if he were at the bottom of a waterfall. Trailing the copter, like proverbial bread crumbs, was a greasy feather of smoke. He could see it stretching back from the rear rotor boom to the point in the sky where a round had severed the oil line.

  The Argentines would be coming hard, and the smoke would last for twenty or thirty minutes because there was so little wind and the air was already so heavily laden with ash and soot.

  “Yeah, she’s smoking pretty badly,” he reported when he swung back toward the cockpit. After closing the door, they only had to shout to one another to be heard rather than screaming as they had been.

  “How’s Jerry?” Mike asked. The two were not only combat partners but best friends.

  Juan’s silence was Trono’s answer. Cabrillo finally asked, “Can we make Paraguay?”

  “Not a chance. This bird had only half a tank when we started, and we’ve already lost nearly half that. If the engines hold together, the best we can hope for is maybe fifty miles. What do you want me to do?”

  Thoughts poured like an avalanche through Juan’s mind. This is what he did best. He considered options, calculated odds, and made a decision all in the time it takes a normal person to digest the question. The factors hanging over his call weighed heavily. There was the success of the mission, his duty to Mike and Mark, the odds Jerry would be alive when they landed, and what they would do if he was. Ultimately, it came down to saving Jerry’s life.

  “We go back. The Argies must have medical facilities at their base, and the other chopper will have the range to reach it.”

  “Like hell,” Pulaski said, finding the strength in his anger to speak. “You’re not going down because I wasn’t fast enough on the draw, damn it.”

  Juan gave Pulaski his f
ull attention. “Jerr, it’s the only way.”

  “Mike, get this tub to the RHIB,” Jerry shouted past Cabrillo. “Chairman, please. I know I’m dying. I can feel it getting closer and closer. Don’t throw your lives away on a dead man. I’m not asking, Juan. I’m begging. I don’t want to go knowing you guys went with me.”

  Pulaski held out a hand, which Juan took. The congealed blood on his palm cemented their skin together. Jerry continued. “It ain’t noble, staying with me. It’s suicide. Argies are gonna shoot you for spies after torturing you.” He coughed wetly and spat a little blood onto the deck. “I got an ex who hates me and a kid who don’t know me. You’re my family. I don’t want you to die for me. I want you to live for me instead. You understand?”

  “I understand you copied that sentiment from Braveheart,” Juan said. His lips smiled. His eyes couldn’t.

  “I’m serious, Juan.”

  For Cabrillo, time stopped for a few moments. The steady beat of the rotor and the whine of the turbine faded to silence. He’d known death and loss. His wife had been killed by a drunk driver—herself. He’d lost agents and contacts during his time at the CIA, and the Corporation had been visited by the Grim Reaper as well, but he’d never asked another man to die so that he could live.

  He reached into his pack and handed the portable GPS to Mike. “The RHIB’s at waypoint Delta.”

  “There’s no place to land,” Mike said. “You remember how thick that jungle was. And there’s no way I can ditch this thing in the river without killing us all.”

  “Don’t worry about an LZ,” Mark Murphy shouted forward. “I got that covered.”

  Cabrillo knew to trust the eccentric Mr. Murphy.

  “Swing us around and punch in waypoint Delta.”

  “Not Delta,” Murph said. “Echo.”

  “Echo?” Juan questioned.

  “Trust me.”

  The Eurocopter’s navigational computer was self-explanatory, so Mike punched in the coordinates from the handheld GPS, then swung the chopper around to a southeasterly bearing. So far, his flying had been smooth and controlled, just as he’d been taught. Gomez Adams would be proud.

  “Looks like we have enough fuel. Barely,” he said.

  “Chairman,” Mark shouted. “Starboard side. Maybe three klicks back.”

  “What?”

  “I saw the flash of sun off the other chopper’s windshield.”

  Juan looked out the side window. He didn’t see anything but he didn’t doubt Mark’s eyesight. The Argentines were coming a lot faster than he’d thought. Then he should have realized it. With their helo burning oil, they didn’t have the speed to match the other bird. And the Argentine Major would tear the guts out of his aircraft in order to get his prey.

  “Mike,” he shouted. “Give us everything she’s got. Company’s coming.”

  The turbines kicked up a notch but didn’t sound healthy. Metal was grinding someplace in the engine compartment, and it was only a matter of time before they shut down.

  Juan looked around the cabin for additional weapons. The door-mounted .30 caliber was a better option than their H&K machine pistols, but only if the other helo came up on the port side where the gun was mounted. He found a medical kit under the bench seat and a red plastic box containing a large-bore flare pistol and four stubby projectiles. Juan knew the script for this mission didn’t include a billion-to-one shot with a flare, so he left it on the bench.

  “Mark, jury-rig a harness for me,” he ordered as he set to work unbolting the old Browning machine gun from its webbing gimbal.

  The gun was a thirty-pound, four-foot-long antique with a single pistol grip at the end of its boxy receiver. A belt of fifty brass cartridges dangled from the breach and made an almost musical chime when they clinked together. He was familiar enough with the weapon and knew it had a reputation for reliability as well as a recoil that could shatter teeth.

  Juan stripped off his shirt. He wrapped the garment around the Browning’s twenty-four-inch barrel and tied it off with the rest of the surgical tape.

  Murph, meanwhile, shucked out of his combat harness and reconfigured the nylon webbing into a long loop that he clipped to a D ring just forward of the starboard door. He clipped the other end to the back of Cabrillo’s combat harness. He used the strap of his backpack to make a second loop that would go around the Chairman’s ankles. He would hold the other end to prevent Juan from falling into the Eurocopter’s slipstream.

  “I see them in my mirror,” Mike announced from the cockpit. “If you’re going to do something, do it quick.”

  “How much farther?” Juan asked.

  “Eight miles to Echo. And just so you know, I don’t see anything below us but jungle.”

  “I said, trust me,” Mark fired back hotly.

  Juan looked at Pulaski. Had he not been shot, he knew his men would be bantering, not sniping at one another. Jerry’s head lolled and, had Mark not strapped him in, he would have tumbled to the floor.

  “They’re opening their side door,” Trono said. “Okay, I see a guy. He’s got a Browning like ours. He’s fired! He’s fired!”

  Accustomed to strafing unarmed civilians fleeing from their villages, the gunner had fired far too soon. Three numbers then came into play. Mike saw the muzzle flashes reaching him at the speed of light, about three hundred million meters per second. The stream of bullets was approaching from a kilometer away at eight hundred and fifty meters per second. The nerve impulse, from brain to wrist, traveled at only a hundred meters per second. But it only had a meter to go. One-hundredth of a second after the first round was fired, Trono cut the power to dump altitude. Gravity had more than a second to pull the helicopter earthward. The string of white phosphorus tracers arrowed well over the spinning disk of the chopper’s main rotor.

  Juan nodded to Mark. Murph hauled back on the starboard door until it locked against its roller stops, and then he grabbed the loop of webbing around Cabrillo’s feet.

  The Chairman let his upper body fall out of the helicopter, coming up short when he hit the end of his tether. The tremendous power of the wind nearly pushed him back inside, but he fought it with every muscle in his legs and back.

  Because he was firing aft from the right-side door, he had to shoot offhand, his left gripping the trigger and his right clamped over his taped shirt. There was no help for the spent brass flying into the helo’s cabin.

  His sudden appearance had startled the Argentine pilot, but he was moments late taking evasive action. Juan used those seconds and opened fire. The .30 cal bucked in his arms like a jackhammer, and heat began seeping through the gun’s barrel sleeve and the bundled shirt.

  It was a miracle that the flapping ammo belt didn’t jam as the machine gun chewed up cartridges at four hundred rounds per minute and spat out a metallic plume of empty shells that pattered to the deck like shiny hail.

  The clear Plexiglas windshield of the fast-approaching helicopter turned opaque as round after round punched into it, spiderwebbing the plastic until it was almost a solid sheet of white. The pilot veered sharply away, making the mistake of not passing behind the Corporation’s pilfered chopper and giving Juan more opportunities to fire. He had no idea if the follow-up barrage struck his target, but it certainly caused the other helicopter to fly a miles-long arc away.

  “LZ coordinates coming up,” Mike said. If the prospect of landing the unfamiliar Eurocopter bothered him, it didn’t come through in his voice. “What the . . . ? I’ll be damned. Murph, how did you know?”

  A quarter mile from waypoint Echo—the decaying wreckage of the blimp—was an area large enough to land the helicopter where the jungle vegetation was no more than a few feet high and composed mostly of immature shrubs and ground cover.

  “When the Flying Dutchman crashed,” Mark shouted back, “its rubber gasbag would have landed nearby. As it lay across the jungle canopy, it would have shaded the plants under it until they died. Nothing would grow there until the envelope decomp
osed, forty or fifty years later. Voilà, instant landing zone.”

  “Pretty slick,” the Chairman told Mark with more than a little pride. “Even for you.”

  “Strap in,” Mike warned.

  Hemmed in by thick jungle that rose a hundred or more feet into the air, the clearing was coming up fast. Trono slowed the Eurocopter on his final approach, skewing the aircraft to the left, then too far right, before centering over the nearly open area. He eased off the power, and the chopper slowly lowered itself earthward. When a sudden gust threatened to push the main rotor toward the wall of trees, he chopped the throttle a little too much, and the four-million-dollar aircraft hit with a bone-jarring impact. He immediately killed the engines. The turbines wound down, but the rotor continued to whip the grass into a frenzy and caused the trees to sway as if caught in a gale.

  “Everybody out,” Juan commanded. “That other chopper will be back any second.”

  Mike unbuckled his harness, and Murph went to work on Jerry’s.

  “Forget it. I ain’t going anywhere,” the big Pole muttered. His chin was covered with blood. He held up an object for the others to see. Somehow, he had managed to pull a wad of Semtex plastique explosives and a pencil detonator from the thigh pocket of his combat fatigues. “Give me one last shot.”

  “Ski?” Mike’s eyes were pleading.

  “Not this time, bud. I don’t have it in me.”

  “Damn it, Jerry,” Juan cursed. “I can carry you. The boat’s only a couple miles away.”

  The sound of an approaching helicopter echoed across their little glen.

  “I suck at good-byes,” Pulaski said. “Just go.”

  “I’ll make sure your family’s taken care of.” Juan tried to look his friend in the eye but couldn’t. He shouldered his way into the seventy-pound harness for the power cell and jumped from the chopper. He took a moment to drag the unconscious pilot into the shrubs and found cover a short distance away, his machine pistol raised in the direction of the approaching Argentines.