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