Eagle Station Part 11

"Oh s.h.i.+t," Kelly said. "Can you tell how bad?"

"Forward two, forward One, steady, hold," Bernick commanded s.h.i.+lleto.

"No, I can't. He's not moving. One of the survivors has crawled to him. I think he's checking him out."

The helicopter was facing west to Place the hoist and penetrator on the South side Of the ridge. Neither pilot could see the approachirig rain to their rear. s.h.i.+lleto fought the controls of the big s.h.i.+p as the advance gusts from the storm buffeted the s.h.i.+p back and forth, trying to weathervane the tail first one way then the Other. ,See anything? Are we being shot at?"

Bakke answered from the ramp gun. "Can't see any fire from here, but I tell You that storm is going to eat us in about five minutes."

"Roger, understand," Kelly said. "Get on the left gun and tell me what You see from there."

"Pilot, they're shooting plenty down there," Bernick said. "I see dust puffs and chips coming Off the wall just over their heads."

The left gun opened up with a throaty roar as the Gatling style minigun spewed out thirty-three rounds of high-speed 7.62mm (.30 caliber) slugs per second, "Yeah, they're shooting," Bakke he said on the intercom. "I can see the smoke and muzzle flashes. I'm returning fire.

"Sandy, we got a problem," Kelly transmitted on the UHF. "They're shooting back."

"I Got a tally, Jolly," Sandy Lead said in a deep, measured voice. As the rescue attempt progressed, his voice had deepened and his cadence had slowed. This was his forty-second rescue sortie. "I'm in east to west, just south of you, with CBU. Two, Set UP for the same pa.s.s. Make it fast- That rain is as good as here."

Four slugs tore through the left side of the helicopter cabin "G.o.dd.a.m.nit, we just took rounds,"

He swung the barrel back and let loose a stream of bullets in the direction from which he thought the burst had come, Slant range between the guns on the ground and the guns in the air was 800 feet. The wind was gusting from the east up to thirty-five knots.

Fourteen PL soldiers on the ground who had advanced into the napalmed area closest to the ledge were shooting AK-47 a.s.sault rifles at the hovering helicopter. They were not aiming high enough to counter bullet drop, nor were they compensating sufficiently for the wind. Three other PL soldiers were wrestling with a large 12.7 (.51 cal) gun that had been blown down the hill by one of the bombs' Two PLs carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and r two helpers, were fighting their way up the hill, past their dead and wounded comrades. Between the four of them, they had forty-four rounds of the high-explosive grenades. They had made their plans. When they were within twenty meters of the cliff, they would blast the wall with grenades that would shower metal fragments on the men lying on the ledge below.

Bakke saw the advancing AK-47 gunners and triggered over 100 rounds their way in a three-second burst. One bullet took a man in the stomach, sitting him down as if slugged with a baseball bat. He went down still firing and involuntarily raised the muzzle of his gun. Two rounds tore through the side of the helicopter. One smoked up into the roof and scattered pieces of lead as it splintered on a crosspiece. The other hit Bakke.

He went down hard, his left leg blown backwards with the sledgehammer blow as the bullet entered his left thigh and severed an artery. Bernick saw him go down.

"Bakke's. .h.i.t," he shouted. "We're taking fire back here."

"Hold on," Kelly yelled back. "How bad is he hit? What's happening to Dominguez? Are they on the hoist yet? Can we start up? There ain't no second chance."

"Sir, too many questions. You gotta come back here. Things are turning to s.h.i.+t and I need help." Bernick's voice was hurried and high-pitched, "Go ahead," s.h.i.+lleto said to Kelly and nodded his head toward the aft cabin.

"Be right there," Kelly told Bernick. He unstrapped, pulled out his intercom plug, and prepared to climb from his seat when he looked over at s.h.i.+lleto. The colonel was soaking wet. Sweat was dripping from under his helmet into his eyes. Kelly pulled a sweat rag from a leg pocket and wiped his brow the best he could. "Thanks," Sbilleto mouthed. His lips looked thin and blue.

Kelly went into the cabin and plugged into an intercom line.

He bent over Bakke's body, which lay in a widening puddle of blood. He knelt down, turned Bakke faceup, and saw bright red blood pumping rhythmically from under the left leg of his flight suit. Bakke's eyes were partially open and dazed.

His moan was lost in the roar of the engines and the rotor blast. Kelly pulled his K-Bar knife from its scabbard and cut open the cloth around the wound, then tore the material down to Bakke's knee. The wound was half-dollar size and jagged.

Kelly stood and opened the latches on a first aid box strapped to the side of the helicopter. Moving quickly, he ripped open two compress packages and took out the tourniquet kit. He scrambled backto-backe, pressed the compresses to the wound, fastened the tourniquet over the compresses, and tugged it tight.

He twitched but did not look up as an AK-47 slug impacted the ceiling above his head. He pulled Bakke back to a litter, took off his helmet, and strapped him in. Bakke's eyes focused on him and he attempted a smile. Kelly squeezed his hand and moved over to the left gun.

He pointed the barrel down and fired three two-second bursts into the general target area to let them know the gun was still active. Then he ran to the open ramp, trailing his black intercom cord like an umbilical to the s.h.i.+p, and fired a quick burst with the ramp gun. After that, he ran to the open door by Bernick. He waited until the flight mech gave more maneuver instructions to s.h.i.+lleto. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hold the hover in the path of the approaching storm.

"How is it down there?" he asked on the intercom when Bernick was finished. He had to hold the doorframe to keep his balance as the helicopter dipped and swayed in the gusts.

"We got about three minutes, then we gotta GO," Bernick panted. Kelly braced himself in the doorway and looked down.

Below, Wolf Lochert groaned not with pain but with the mental energy required to perform the tasks he had to perform or die. Everything seemed too large and unwieldy and the air was filled with blasting sounds and was thick and stinging from the downrush of rotor wash and the rainstorm was going to blow them off the ]edge and he had to get everyone attached to that thing and get out of there and he didn't know if he could do it at all.

He stopped moving and lay flat on his back. Looking up, he saw a man waving frantically from the helicopter door 100 feet above. He blinked and wondered what was happening. Four bullets tore into the stone over his head, showering his face with stinging fragments. The shock caused a wave of clarity to wash over his mind.

"Think, s.h.i.+thead," he yelled to himself. "Think." Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be ... the radio. That PJ talked into the radio.

He had one of his own, he knew he did. He reached down with slow deliberate hands and pulled his spare RT-10 from his right cargo pocket and extended the antenna.

"Jolly Green, this is Wolf," he said into the dime-sized microphone embedded in the radio face. When he put the radio to his ear to listen for a reply, he realized the noise from the hovering helicopter was too loud to hear anything.

He saw the man in the open door point to his helmet and give him a thumbs-up. The man also pointed to his wrist and held up two fingers. A spate of rain drummed on Wolf's face and he suddenly knew what he had to do. There was no time to check either of the other two men for wounds, They might even be dead, he thought, but he would get them out of there.

"Okay," he said into the radio. "Okay, now. Here's what we do. Can't stand up, heavy fire from below. Leave the plumb bob flat on the ground. I'll get all three of us strapped on and give you a signal.

Then it's up to you. Give me two thumbs-up if you understand."

. Kelly leaned out and gave Wolf two exaggerated thumbs-up signals.

"Get the penetrator to lay flat," he said to Bernick.

Bernick toggled out several feet of line. The helicopter drifted.

"Forward one, steady, steady. Hold," Bernick said on the intercom to s.h.i.+lleto. When he was finished, the penetrator lay next to Dominguez's body.

Kelly wanted to watch but knew he had to get on the guns.

He ran back to the ramp gun and fired a burst, then to the left window gun and began searching for targets. He saw three AK-47s to their shoulders men by a splintered tree, holding and firing so rapidly the smoke from the gun muzzles made a white swirling ribbon. He swung the barrel toward them and had them in his sights. He depressed the trigger even before he saw the bullets impact in the charred gra.s.s and walked them to the three men. One fell down and the other two ducked behind a fallen tree. He saw two others kneel down with some kind of a long shoulder weapon. An M, he guessed.

"Paul, tell the Sandys we need more bombs and CBUs. The PL are all over the place," Kelly cried over the intercom. From the aft cabin, Kelly could talk on the intercom but not on the radio. s.h.i.+lleto relayed the request on the UHF radio.

"Jolly, you're too close for me to drop bombs," Sandy Lead said. "You'd get hit by fragments. We'll try CBU and strafe.

But that storm is here. We'll maybe get two pa.s.ses max.

Lead's in."

Summoning all his will, Wolf crawled to the penetrator. It lay like a three-p.r.o.nged anchor on its side. He shoved and pushed Dominguez, then Tewa, over the extended seat petals and fumbled the safety belts about them. Both of the inert bodies were awkwardly draped over the penetrator. Wolf pulled himself in position and gave the thumbs-up to Bernick in the door.

Bernick eased the handle back. "Hook's coming up," he said to s.h.i.+lleto on the intercom. "The civilian is giving the signal.

The PJ is not moving. Back one, back one. Steady. That's it. Hold."

Bernick delicately moved the hoist handle. As the line tightened and took up the slack, the penetrator began to straighten from its tilted position on the ground. Bernick took up more slack and the two bodies flopped back and slid off the seats. To raise the hook further would cause the two men to fall completely off and out of the safety harnesses.

"Oh s.h.i.+t," he said on the intercom. "Pilot, we got a big problem. The civilian can't get Dominguez and the other guy strapped onto the seats."

Joe Kelly heard Bernick and came over to stand next to him in the door.

He looked down and saw the biggest of the three men struggling without success to get the other two secure in their seats. Their bodies kept slipping out of his hands like grain sacks half-filled with buckshot. He saw the first wisp of rain sweep under the helicopter and felt the cool breeze behind it.

The helicopter buffeted and rocked abruptly.

"That's it," s.h.i.+lleto said on the intercom. "I've got to lift.

What's their progress? We got to go. Flight mech, as soon as you hoist them clear of the ridge I'm moving this thing. I'll take them out still suspended. Then we'll bring them up as we go. Are we clear?"

Kelly could see they were not clear. He looked up at the lever on the hoist that would cut the cable and free the helicopter from its burden, allowing it to speed away. The cable cutter was there to free the rescue helicopter from a snagged cable. Such a disaster had happened.

In his mind's eye he could see the long wire falling down on top of the men below, and the anguished look on the survivors' faces. He had sworn this would never happen to him, to leave a survivor behind. He licked his lips and shuddered. Kelly's hands began shaking as he knew what he should do.

When Kelly had first arrived in SEA and performed a few missions, he had thought that something like this might occur someday, and now here it was. He had never told anyone what he had in mind because he was afraid that if the occasion demanded, he wouldn't be up to it. He had secured a device called a descender from a Special Forces friend and carried it in his flight bag. The man had given him a few rudimentary instructions on how to operate it and wasn't at all sure it would work on a metal cable. ARRS was working on a strap affair called the sky-genie, but it wasn't in the field yet.

"Hold steady," Kelly cried into the intercom and ran forward to the c.o.c.kpit to get the descender from his flight bag.

"What are you doing?" s.h.i.+lleto asked when he saw Kelly pull out a metal mechanism that looked like a cross between a visegrip pliers and an extra-heavy can opener with an eight-inch metal handle. A D-ring similar to a mountaineer's carabiner was snapped onto the middle of it.

"Okay," Kelly said on the intercom to s.h.i.+lleto and Bernick.

He took a deep breath, not sure he could control his voice. "I'm going down the cable and strap those guys on proper."

"You're crazy," s.h.i.+lleto said. "n.o.body can go down a bare cable. Your hands won't hold."

"With this, I can do it." Kelly shook the device at s.h.i.+lleto, then ran back to the door. "Give me a pair of gloves," he ordered Bernick, who tossed him a heavy pair of linesman's gloves. "When I get down there I'm going to get those guys in place, then give you the pumping signal to start up. Don't worry about me. I'll still be attached with this thing. Just tell the Colonel we're clear and he'll lift up and get out of here. You can start the hoist up when you want, but get him moving us out of here immediately. I'll use my radio only if I have to."

He threw a glance over his shoulder out the left window.

"Colonel, tell those Sandys to dump everything they've got in one pa.s.s.

The storm is here and they won't be able to work anymore." He looked back at the taut cable. "Right two feet," he told s.h.i.+lleto, who complied while telling the Sandys what was happening and what he wanted them to do with their remaining ordnance. Kelly unplugged the intercom cord from his helmet. He felt suddenly alone and cut off. He bent and snugged up his parachute harness straps. The first rain swirled through the cabin.

When the cable was slack, Kelly motioned for Bernick to pull it toward him. Bernick leaned out the door, snagged the cable, and pulled it inside. Kelly fitted the descender to the wire, closed the gripping jaws, then snapped the carabiner onto the front of his parachute harness, wis.h.i.+ng he had just the harness and not the extra bulk of a parachute he could not possibly use.

This was the moment he had thought about: a terrifying descent using a method with which he had no experience and which had never been tried by anyone in the rescue business. He stood in the door and tried not to look down. He didn't know if the Pathet Lao were still shooting or not, he only knew he had to go down the cable. He stepped out of the door into the buffeting rotor wash, which spun him around so he was looking straight at Bernick. The two men locked eyes. The last thing Kelly saw was Dan Bernick giving him a thumbs-up as he toggled the switch lowering him from view. He wrapped his legs around the cable.

The descender was stiff and slightly rusty. Kelly had difficulty opening and closing its jaws. He jerked and dropped in fits and starts as he manipulated the handle to open and close the jaws. Once he fell nearly ten feet in a free fall until he jerked to a stop that took his breath away. He resisted an almost overpowering urge just to hang there and signal Bernick to lift away. He continued and was halfway down before he mastered the descent rate. The noise and buffeting was as he remembered in training, when he had played victim to see what a pickup was like from the survivor's point of view. He was thankful the cable was anch.o.r.ed to the penetrator on the ground, otherwise he would probably be spinning in addition to the buffeting.

Then he felt pain in his legs and thought he had been hit. He looked down and saw that the inside of his flight suit pant legs were shredded and covered with dots of blood as they flapped like so many ragged pennants. He focused in on the cable and realized it was covered with thousands of wire hairs from broken strands that were raking his legs like tiny steel claws. He unwrapped his legs and let them hang free.

Behind, he heard the roar of the quad 20mm cannons as a Sandy made a firing pa.s.s.

Kelly heard a sharp explosion below and looked down to see a square-foot portion of the rock face crumble away from the cliff and fall to one side of the men on the ledge. He was twenty feet above the men now and almost touching the cliff below the ridgeline. He saw another explosion on the wall and looked down the karst slope to see two men with RPGs standing up and preparing to fire again. They looked like they were aiming directly at him. He felt a spasm in his stomach and a wild urge to stop everything and urinate. He saw one man's weapon fire and was sure he could see the missile in flight as it arced up to the cliff and detonated on the wall thirty feet west of him.

The roar was deafening, and he felt his body lightly peppered with stone and metal fragments. The rotor downwash and the wind from the rainstorm had protected him from more serious impacts.

Kelly's heart leaped again as he saw the second man take aim. He had never felt so exposed and vulnerable in his life.

His bladder threatened to burst. Behind the soldier, he saw the second A-1 pull up from a pa.s.s as the last of its napalm cans splashed along the base of the karst directly toward the RPG gunners and they disappeared in the red inferno. Kelly could feel the heat. Then the first of the rain was on him and the jungle and scrub karst were totally concealed, so that the A-Is could make no more pa.s.ses, but the enemy could still see the cliff.

He was ten feet above the survivors when he heard the popping of small-arms fire and looked down the karst and, Oh Jesus, there were three soldiers shooting and preparing to throw grenades. He released the jaws in a spasm and fell heavily to the ledge below, next to the men and the penetrator.

Stunned for a second, he lay still as he caught his breath.

With disgust he realized his bladder had let go. He jerked as an object arced through the air from below, struck the cliff face, then bounced back over the ledge and exploded. Kelly unsnapped his carabiner from the descender. Immediately, a second object, a grenade, hit the cliff face and fell to the ]edge.

Kelly's whole body reacted in a blaze of motion as he rose to his knees and scrambled after the grenade and brushed it over the cliff edge, then fell flat before it exploded. As he fell, he saw several soldiers below aiming AK-47s and firing and preparing more grenades. He ducked back and pulled a 9mm Browning automatic from his shoulder holster and without looking held it over the cliff edge and pulled the trigger in rapid succession until the magazine was empty and the slide c.o.c.ked back.

Another grenade arced over the edge and bounced off the cliff wall but fell beyond the ledge and exploded just under the lip with a huge roar.

Kelly knew it was just a matter of time until they lobbed several grenades that would come to rest on the ledge.

Kelly fumbled a new magazine into his Browning and was surprised the weapon was wet. He looked around and saw the rain was on him, then heard an increase in noise and looked up and saw the helicopter had descended to hover just above the ridgeline barely thirty feet over his head, and Bernick was tossing objects out the side door. They fell one after the other to land below the ledge. When loud booms began a regular cadence, it registered with Kelly that Bernick was dropping Dominguez's Mason jar bombs on the enemy soldiers.

He didn't dare look, for exposing himself to the fire and the fragments, but there were no more grenades arcing up from below. He felt an insane desire to giggle. Then he did giggle as he realized the rain would soak his flight suit and hide the fact that he had peed in his pants.

He crawled over to the thickset American in a shredded white s.h.i.+rt who lay next to the penetrator. The other two, Dominguez and the Asian, were sprawled over the device.

"Can you move?" Kelly yelled to the man.

"Not well. Leg won't work," the man answered. "Gimme that CAR-15," he demanded, pointing at the weapon slung over Dominguez's back.

"No time, no time," Kelly said as he unstrapped them all and rose to his knees and righted the penetrator with one hand while motioning Bernick to take up the slack with the hoist. When it was two feet above the ground, he prepared to strap in the two unconscious men. A dozen bullets spanged the rock over his head and he dropped down.

"GIVE ME THE GUN," Wolf Lochert bellowed.

Lying flat, Kelly pulled it from Dominguez and slid it to him.

Lochert rolled to the edge and pointed the barrel down.

"When I fire, you stand up and hook up," he yelled, and started pulling the trigger in short bursts.

Kelly scrambled to his feet and wrestled, first the small Asian, then Dominguez, into the saddles and strapped them securely in place. Then he flopped down. "Now you," he yelled at the other man.

Wolf Lochert back-crawled to the penetrator and rose on his good leg.

"Need help," he said. He nestled up between the two bodies, but couldn't brace himself well enough to hook his strap.

Kelly boosted him the rest of the way and helped him secure his belt.

The penetrator, free of the ground, swayed ponderously in the wind.

Kelly looked up at Bernick and gave him the "hoist-up" sign. Bernick frantically waved "no" and pointed to his own chest.

"Oh s.h.i.+t," Kelly yelled out loud as he realized he had not hooked himself up and lunged for the cable but couldn't reach high enough to snap the carabiner on the descender. Without a second thought he stepped up onto the big man's left leg and snapped the ring in place.

Immediately, the penetrator started up, and Kelly heard the blades change pitch and tone as the HH-53 surged to take up the strain and began to move.