“How we looking, troops?” she asked.

“Village two miles off that main road,” said Chris.

“Otherwise uninhabited for miles. You sure this is the place?”

“These are the coordinates the F-15s gave us.”

“Maybe try farther north. Raven’s coming up from the south.”

“Mack’s going to take that.”

“East, then,” suggested Chris.

“We’ll give the track one more run, then we’ll try that.”

“Iraqi command radio,” said Habib.

He paused a second, then punched up a location two miles to the south of them. The coordinates flashed on a grid map in Breanna’s left multiuse display area.

“What are they saying?” she asked.

“Coordinating some sort of attack.”

“Mention our helicopter?”

“Negative. I’m having a little trouble picking it up and translating on the fly.”

“You have anything, Torbin?”

RAZOR’S EDGE

379

“No, ma’am.”

“All right, let’s go see if we can put some pictures with Habib’s words,” said Breanna, changing course.

On the ground in Iraq

2006

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, DANNY PUSHED AGAINST THE

metal and got nowhere. He clawed and he fought. He rolled to his stomach and then around to his back, but the Hind had twisted itself into a cocoon around him. He could hear voices nearby and felt, or thought he felt, the others moving, but it was impossible to see anything. He tried pushing his arms under himself and crawling forward; when that didn’t work, he began to shimmy sideways and got a foot or so before getting stuck again. Finally, he pushed his arms under his stomach and levered the front part of his body up with his elbows. His helmet pushed against something hard. He pushed back, slipped, tried again, felt something give way. Danny pushed again. Pain flashed through his injured knee and shin; he felt himself being pulled forward into fresh air.

“Jeez, Cap, we thought you got crushed,” said Powder.

The Whiplash trooper helped Danny upright. Liu ran over, tugging at Danny’s helmet to take it off as the captain began walking. They reached a large rock a few feet away; Danny patted it as he sat, resting and catching his breath. There were two or three inches of snow on the ground, a small, unmelted patch. Danny reached over and took a handful, smearing it on his face.

“Bitch of a landing,” said Powder. “Missile blew through the engine, just about, and threw us down like a frog getting its brains bashed in on a rock. Good thing Egg didn’t know how to fly too high, huh?”

380

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

“Egg’s legs are broken,” said Liu. “The Marine corporal’s got internal bleeding and isn’t conscious. Bison has a busted arm, maybe some other problems. Otherwise we’re cool. Helicopter isn’t going anywhere, though.”

“All right.” Danny, still dazed, looked over at his injured men, huddled near a cluster of rocks about ten feet away from the helicopter, which lay smashed against the hillside a few yards beyond them. It looked as if a large hand had grabbed its fuselage and crumpled the sides.

Danny couldn’t imagine how he’d made it out—or how no one had been killed.

Bison glanced over, then held up the Marine’s M-16 to show he was all right.

Danny realized that his leg didn’t hurt that bad anymore. In fact, it felt almost as good as new.

He decided he must be in shock.

“All right,” he said. “Survival radios—what’s working?”

“We’ve broadcast on everything we got,” said Powder,

“including an old Prick-90 Pretty Boy had stuffed in his ruck. Nothin’ comin’ back at us.”

“The spins—five minutes after the hour,” said Danny, referring to the broadcasts for searching aircraft.

“Gotcha, Cap.”

“Sooner if you hear anything. But remember, those batteries may have to last awhile.” Danny shifted his weight, again balancing against the rock. “All right. What do we have in the way of a perimeter here?”

Powder laid it out for him. The hill they were on backed a sheer drop of about two hundred feet; below that was another deep gully. Pretty Boy and Gunny were checking the base of the hill below them; they would report back in ten minutes.

“Gunny’s idea,” added Powder. “For a Marine, he ain’t too dumb. We gave him Egg’s helmet, but damned if he couldn’t fit his head into it.”

RAZOR’S EDGE

381

“Shoulda given him yours,” said Nurse.

Danny reset his own helmet and tried tapping into the Dreamland circuit but got nothing. It was impossible to tell whether it had been damaged in the crash or if he was just in a bad position to get the satellite.

The cold bit at his face as he pushed his way up the slope, trying to get a sense of where they’d crashed. A shallow ridge across the way blocked his view south, and he couldn’t lean far enough away from the rocks to see much east or west.

Liu and Powder, meanwhile, worked to extricate the stolen equipment from the belly of the helicopter. They began making a pile a few yards below the wreckage.

“Fuckin’ commie metal ain’t worth shit,” said Powder as he bent the Hind’s sides back to get more gear. “Where’s their quality control? Look at this—fuckin’ paper.”

“Rig some explosives to blow the gear,” Danny told them. “My gun anywhere in there?”

As he tried to duck down to see, he heard the rumble of an aircraft running through the mountains nearby.

Aboard Raven , over Iran 2010

FENTRESS SAW THE HELICOPTERS AS HE TURNED WEST-ward. They looked like cockroaches scurrying across a dirty kitchen floor.

He could feel the adrenaline shoot into his stomach. He wanted to nail those suckers badly—too badly, way too badly. If he stayed this excited, he was going to fuck it up.

“Bandits in sight,” he said over the interphone. He tried to think of how Zen would say it, the offhand tone he’d use.

No, he wasn’t Major Jeff Stockard, war hero, fighter 382

DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND

jock. There was no sense even trying. He had to be himself—a little too shy, a little too ready to salute. Hesitant at first, but once he was into it, damn good.

Damn good.

“Four Iraqi helicopters on two-eight-zero heading, edge of our box, right at the edge there, moving fifty knots,” he told Alou. “I’m positioning to engage.” He cleared his throat, pushed upright in his seat.

The computer gave a warning—five seconds to disconnect.

“Raven, please hang with me,” he said.

“Raven. Go for it, Hawk leader. I’m alerting the rest of the troops.”

Aboard Wild Bronco

2018

MACK CHOPPED HIS POWER AS CLOSE TO STALL SPEED AS

he could; gliders went faster than the plane was flying.

They flew higher too—he was less than two hundred feet over the rocks and scrubby bushes that passed for vegetation. The OV-10 Bronco had been designed for taking a close look at the ground; it was arguably one of the best forward air control aircraft ever designed. Still, picking things out from the air was a difficult art. Not for nothing were Bronco crewmen in Vietnam considered among the bravest guys in the service.

And just maybe the craziest.

Maybe he was looking in the wrong place. Mack held his course about a mile farther, then spun back. He began tacking west, checking the INS against the paper map he had spread over his right knee. He’d used a grease pencil to plot his search area; he double-checked it now against the coordinates he’d written on the canopy glass. From RAZOR’S EDGE

383

what he figured, he was maybe two miles north of the spot where the Eagle pilots had nailed the Hind. He plowed through the imaginary X, banked, and brought his speed up to 160 knots, close to what he figured the helicopter would be traveling.