The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

Then Kowalski went on: "What happened was a week, maybe ten days before we went over the berm, the old man, Colonel Stevens? He was then a light colonel"-Prentiss nodded-"Stevens called me in and said I wasn't going to believe what he was going to tell me."

"Which was?" Prentiss said.

"That I was about to have a new copilot. That said new copilot had a little over three hundred hours' total time, forty of which were in the Apache, and had been in the Army since last June, when he'd graduated from West Point. And the explanation for this insanity was that this kid's father had won the Medal of Honor, and they thought it would make a nice story for the newspapers that the son of a Medal of Honor guy had been involved in the first action…etcetera. Get the point?"

"Now, Tom, isn't that very much what Randy said?" Beth asked in an artificially sweet tone.

"I'm not finished," Kowalski said. "Tom said I was to tell you what happened."

"Oh, please do," Beth said.

"Well, I shortly afterward met Second Lieutenant Charley Castillo," Kowalski continued. "And he was your typical bushy-tailed West Point second john. He was going to win the war all by himself. But I also picked up that he was so dumb that he had no idea what they were doing to him.

"And I sort of liked him, right off. He was like a puppy, wagging his tail and trying to please. So because of that, and because I was deeply interested in preserving my own skin, I spent a lot of time in the next week or whatever it was, giving him a cram course in the Kowalski Method of Apache Flying. He wasn't a bad pilot; he just didn't have the Apache time, the experience.

"And then we went over the berm and-what did Castillo say?-'There we were flying over the Iraqi desert at oh dark hundred with people shooting at us.' "What we were doing was taking out Iraqi air defense radar. If the radar didn't work, they not only couldn't shoot at the Air Force but they wouldn't even know where it was.

"I was flying, and Charley was shooting. He was good at that, and like he said, he wasn't the world's best Apache pilot.

"And then some raghead got lucky. I don't think they were shooting at us; what I think happened was they were shooting in the air and we ran into it. Anyway, I think it was probably an explosive-headed 30mm that hit us. It came through my windshield, and all of a sudden I was blind…

"And I figured, 'Oh, fuck'"-he glanced at Beth Wilson-"sorry. I figured, 'We're going in. The kid'll be so shook up he'll freeze and never even think of grabbing the controls'-did I mention, we lost intercom?-'and we're going to fly into the sandpile about as fast as an Apache will fly.' "And then, all of a sudden, I sense that he is flying the sonofabitch, that what he's trying to do is gain a little altitude so that he can set it down someplace where the ragheads aren't.

"And then I sense-like I said, I can't see a goddamned thing-that he's flying the bird. That he's trying to go home."

"When he really should have been trying to land?" Beth asked.

"Yeah, when he really should have been trying to land," Kowalski said. "When most pilots would have tried to land."

"Then why didn't he?" Beth asked.

"Because when he had to wipe my blood from his helmet visor, he figured-damned rightly-that if he set it down, even if there no were ragheads waiting to shoot us-which there were-it would be a long time before anybody found us, and I would die.

"From the way the bird was shaking, from the noise it was making, I thought that we were going to die anyway; the bird was either going to come apart or blow up."

"So he should have landed, then?" Beth asked.

"Either I'm not making myself clear, young lady, or you don't want to hear what I'm saying," Kowalski said, not pleasantly. "If Charley had set it down, he would have lived, and maybe I wouldn't have. He knew that all those long miles back to across the berm. And he had enough time in rotary-wing aircraft to think what I was thinking-Any second now, this sonofabitch is going to come apart, and we'll both die. Knowing that, he kept flying. In case there is any question in your mind, I am the founding member of the Charley Castillo Fan Club."

"That's a very interesting story," Beth said.

"Well, you asked for it," Kowalski said. "I don't know where you got your story, but you got it wrong."

"What happened then, Pete?" Prentiss asked.

"Well, when I got out of the hospital-I wasn't hurt as bad as it looked; there's a lot of blood in the head, and I lost a lot, and that's what blinded me-I went looking for him. But he was already gone. I asked around and found out that when the public relations guys learned that Colonel Stevens had put Charley in for the impact award of the DFC-which he damned sure deserved, that and the Purple Heart, because he'd taken some shrapnel in his hands-they'd arranged to have him flown to Riyadh, so that General Schwarzkopf could personally pin the awards on him. A picture of that would really have gotten in all the newspapers.

"But at Riyadh, one of the brass-I heard it was General Naylor, who was Schwartzkopf's operations officer; he just got put in for a third star, they're giving him V Corps, I saw that in The Army Times-"

"I know who he is," Prentiss said.

Kowalski nodded. "Anyway, someone took a close look at this second lieutenant fresh from West Point flying an Apache and decided something wasn't kosher. What I heard first was that Charley had been reassigned to fly Hueys for some civil affairs outfit to get him out of the line of fire, so to speak-"

"I don't understand 'what you heard first,'" Beth interrupted.

"-then I heard," Kowalski went on, ignoring her while looking at Prentiss, "what Charley was really doing was flying Scotty McNab around the desert in a Huey. The story I got was that was the only place Naylor thought he could stash him safe from the public relations guys, who couldn't wait to either put Charley back in an Apache or send him on a speechmaking tour."

"You said something before, Pete, about what Castillo is 'really doing here'?" Prentiss asked.