The Descent Part 8

Branch took a minute to get the other gunships positioned at the edges of the gas cloud, and to double-check his armament and snug his oxygen mask hard and tight.

'All right, then,' he said. 'Let's get some answers.'

0425.

He entered from on high with his faithful navigator at his back, meaning to descend at his own pace. To go slowly. To winnow out the perils one by one. With his three gunships poised at the rear like wrathful archangels, Branch meant to own this blighted real estate from the top down.

But the Stanford forensic chemistry specialist was wrong.

Apaches did not breathe this gaseous broth.

He was no more than ten seconds in when the acid haze began sparking furiously. The sparks killed the pilot flame already burning in the turbine, then, sparking more, relit the engine with a small explosion beneath the rotors. The exhaust-gas temperature gauge went into the red. The pilot flame became a two-foot wildfire.

It was Branch's job to be ready for all emergencies. Part of your training as a pilot involved hubris, and part of it involved preparing for your own downfall. This particular mechanical bankruptcy had never happened to him before, but he had reflexes for it anyway.

When the rotors surged, he corrected for it. When the machine started into failure and instruments shorted out, he did not panic. The power cut out on him.

'I've got a hot start,' Branch declared calmly. Fed by an oxygen surge, the bushing above their heads held a fiery bluish globe, like St. Elmo's fire.

'Autorote,' he announced next when the machine - logically - failed altogether.

Autorotation was a state of mechanical paralysis.

'Going down,' he announced. No emotion. No blame. Here was here.

'Are you hit, Major?' Count on Mac. The Avenger.

'Negative,' Branch rea.s.sured. 'No contact. Our turbine's blown.'

Autorotation, Branch could handle. It was one of his oldest instincts, to shove the collective down and find that long, steep, safe glide that imitated flight. Even with the engine dead, the rotor blades would continue spinning with the centrifugal force, allowing for a short, steep forced landing. That was the theory. At a plunging speed of 1,700 feet per minute, it all translated into thirty seconds of alternative.

Branch had practiced autorotations a thousand times, but never in the middle of night, in the middle of a toxic forest. With the power cut, his headlights died. The darkness leaped out at him. He was startled by its quickness. There was no time for his eyes to adjust. No time to flip on the monocle's artificial night vision. d.a.m.n instruments. That was his downfall. Should have been relying on his own eyes. For the first time he felt fear.

'I'm blind,' Branch reported in a monotone.

He fought away the image of trees waiting to gut them. He reached for the faith of his wings. Hold the pitch flat, the rotors will spin.

The dead forest rushed at his imagination like switchblades in an alley. He knew better than to think the trees might cushion them. He wanted to apologize to Ramada, the father who was young enough to be his son. Where have I brought us?

Only now did he admit his loss of control. 'Mayday,' he reported.

They entered the treeline with a metallic shriek, limbs raking the aluminum, breaking the skids, reaching to skin their souls out of the machine.

For a few seconds more their descent was more glide than plummet.

The blades sheared treetops, then the trees sheared his blades.

The forest caught them.

The Apache braked in a mangle.

The noise quit.

Wrapped nose-down against a tree, the machine rocked gently like a cradle in rain. Branch lifted his fists from the controls. He let go. It was done.

Despite himself, he pa.s.sed out.

He woke gagging. His mask was filled with vomit. In darkness and smoke, he clawed at the straps, freed the facepiece, dragged hard at the air.

Instantly he tasted and smelled the poison reach into his lungs and blood. It seared his throat. He felt diseased, anciently diseased, plagued into his very bones. Mask, he thought with alarm.

One arm would not work. It dangled before him. With his good hand he fumbled to find the mask again. He emptied the mess, pressed the rubber to his face.

The oxygen burned cold across the nitrogen wounds in his throat.

'Ram?' he croaked.

No answer.

'Ram?'

He could feel the emptiness behind him.

Strapped facedown, bones broken, wings clipped, Branch did the only other thing he was able to do, the one thing he had come to do. He had entered this dark forest to witness great evil. And so he made himself see. He refused delirium. He looked. He watched. He waited.

The darkness eased.

It was not dawn arriving. Rather, it was his own vision binding with the blackness. Shapes surfaced. A horizon of gray tones.

He noticed now a strange, taut lightning flickering on the far side of his Plexiglas. At first he thought it was the storm igniting thin strands of gas. The hits of light penciled in various objects on the forest floor, less with actual illumination than through brief flashes of silhouette.

Branch struggled to make sense of the clues spread all around him, but apprehended only that he had fallen from the sky.

'Mac,' he called on his radio. He traced the communications cord to his helmet, and it was severed. He was alone.

His instrument panel still showed aspects of vitality. Various green and red lights twinkled, fed by batteries here and there. They signified only that the ship was still dying.

He saw that the crash had cast him among a tangle of fallen trees close to Zulu Four. He peered through Plexiglas sprayed with a fine spiderweb. A gracile crucifix loomed in the near distance. It was a vast, fragile icon, and he wondered - hoped - that some Serb warrior might have erected it as penance for this ma.s.s grave. But then Branch saw that it was one of his broken rotor blades caught at a right angle in a tree.

Bits of wreckage smoldered on the floor of soaked needles and leaves. The soak could be rain. Rather late, it came to him that the soak could also be his own spilled fuel.

What alarmed him was how sluggish his alarm was. From far away, it seemed, he registered that the fuel could ignite and that he should extricate himself and his partner - dead or alive - and get away from his ship. It was imperative, but did not feel so. He wanted to sleep. No.

He hyperventilated with the oxygen. He tried to steel himself to the pain about to come, jock stuff mostly, when the going gets tough...

He reared up, shouldering high against the side canopy, and bones grated upon bones. The dislocated knee popped in, then out again. He roared.

Branch sank down into his seat, shocked alive by the crescendo of nerve endings. Everything hurt. He laid his head back, found the mask.

The canopy flapped up, gently.

He drew hard at the oxygen, as if it might make him forget how much more pain was left to come. But the oxygen only made him more lucid. In the back of his mind, the names of broken bones flooded in helpfully. Horribly. Strange, this diagnosis. His wounds were eloquent. Each wanted to announce itself precisely, all at the same time. The pain was thunderous.

He raised a wild stare at the bygone sky. No stars up there. No sky. Clouds upon clouds. A ceiling without end. He felt claustrophobic. Get out.

He took a final lungful, let go of the mask, shed his useless helmet.

With his one good arm, Branch grappled himself free of the c.o.c.kpit. He fell upon the earth. Gravity despised him. He felt crushed smaller and smaller into himself.

Within the pain, a distant ecstasy opened its strange flower. The dislocated knee popped back into place, and the relief was almost s.e.xual. 'G.o.d,' he groaned. 'Thank G.o.d.'

He rested, panting rapidly, cheek upon the mud. He focused on the ecstasy. It was tiny among all the other savage sensations. He imagined a doorway. If only he could enter, all the pain would end.

After a few minutes, Branch felt stronger. The good news was that his limbs were numbing from the gas saturation in his bloodstream. The bad news was the gas. The nitrogen reeked. It tasted like aftermath.

'...Tango One...' he heard.

Branch looked up at the caved-in hull of his Apache. The electronic voice was coming from the backseat. 'Echo... read me...'

He stood away from the earth's flat seduction. It was beyond his comprehension that he could function at all. But he had to tend to Ramada. And they had to know the dangers.

He climbed to a standing position against the chill aluminum body. The ship lay tilted upon one side, more ravaged than he had realized. Hanging on to a handhold, Branch looked into the rear cavity. He braced for the worst.

But the backseat was empty.

Ramada's helmet lay on the seat. The voice came again, tiny, now distinct. 'Echo Tango One...'

Branch lifted the helmet and pulled it onto his own head. He remembered that there was a photograph of the newborn son in its crown.

'This is Echo Tango One,' he said. His voice sounded ridiculous in his own ears, elastic and high, cartoonish.

'Ramada?' It was Mac, angry in his relief. 'Quit s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around and report. Are you guys okay? Over.'

'Branch here,' Elias identified with his absurd voice. He was concussed. The crash had messed up his hearing.

'Major? Is that you?' Mac's voice practically reached for him. 'This is Echo Tango Two. What is your condition, please? Over.'

'Ramada is missing,' Branch said. 'The ship is totaled.'

Mac took a half-minute to absorb the information. He came back on, all business. 'We've got a fix on you on the thermal scan, Major. Right beside your bird. Just hold your position. We're coming in to provide a.s.sistance. Over.'

'No,' Branch quacked with his bird voice. 'Negative. Do you read me?'

Mac and the other gunships did not respond.

'Do not, repeat, do not attempt approach. Your engines will not breathe this air.'

They accepted his explanation reluctantly. 'Ah, roger that,' Schulbe said.

Mac came on. 'Major. What is your condition, please?'

'My condition?' Beyond suffering and loss, he didn't know. Human? 'Never mind.'

'Major.' Mac paused awkwardly. 'What's with the voice, Major?'

They could hear it, too?

Christie Chambers, MD, was listening back at Base. 'It's the nitrogen,' she diagnosed. Of course, thought Branch. 'Is there any way you can get back on oxygen, Elias? You must.'

Feebly, Branch rummaged for Ramada's oxygen mask, but it must have been torn away in the crash. 'Up front,' he said dully.

'Go up there,' Chambers told him.

'Can't,' said Branch. It meant moving again. Worse, it meant giving up Ramada's helmet and losing his contact with the outside world. No, he would take the radio link over oxygen. Communication was information. Information was duty. Duty was salvation.

'Are you injured?'

He looked down at his limbs. Strange darts of electric color were scribbling along his thighs, and he realized that the beams of light were lasers. His gunships were painting the region, defining targets for their weapons systems.

'Must find Ramada,' he said. 'Can't you see him on your scan?'

Mac was fixed on him. 'Are you mobile, sir?'

What were they saying? Branch leaned against the ship, exhausted.

'Are you able to walk, Major? Can you evacuate yourself from the region?'

Branch judged himself. He judged the night. 'Negative.'

'Rest, Major. Stay put. A bio-chem team is on its way from Molly. We will insert them by cable. Help is on the way, sir.'

'But Ramada...'

'Not your concern, Major. We'll find him. Maybe you should just sit down.'

How could a man just disappear? Even dead, his body would go on emitting a heat signature for hours more. Branch raised his eyes and tried to find Ramada wedged in the trees. Maybe he'd been thrown into the funeral waters.

Now another voice entered. 'Echo Tango One, this is Base.' It was Master Sergeant Jefferson; Branch wanted to lay his head against that resonant bosom.

'You are not alone,' Jefferson said. 'Please be advised, Major. The KH-12 is showing unidentified movement to your north-northwest.'

North-northwest? His instruments were dead. He had no compa.s.s, even. But Branch did not complain. 'It's Ramada,' he predicted confidently. Who else could it be out there? His navigator was alive after all.

'Major,' cautioned Jefferson, 'the image carries no combat tag. This is not confirmed friendly. Repeat, we have no idea who is approaching you.'