The Afghan

“I have lost both engines,” said the major. “Stand by to eject.” The Wizzo looked one last time at his instruments. Altitude: 24,000. Diving; dive steepening. Outside, the sun still shone, but the cloud bank was seething toward them. He glanced round over his shoulder. The Eagle was a torch, flaming from end to end. He heard the same calm voice up front: “Eject, eject.” Both men reached down for the handle beside their seats and pulled. That was all they needed to do. Modern ejection seats are so automated that even if the airman is unconscious, they will do everything for him. Neither Larry Duval nor Nicky Johns actually saw their airplane die. With seconds to spare, their bodies were hurled upward through the shattering canopy and into the freezing stratosphere. The seat restrained their legs and arms so they would not flail and snap off. The seat protected their faces from the blast that could push their cheekbones through their skulls. Both falling ejection seats stabilized with tiny drogues and plunged toward the ground. In a second, they were lost in the cloud bank. Even when they were able to see through their visors, the two aircrew could only watch the wet, gray clouds rushing past them.

The seats sensed when they were near enough to the ground to release their charges. The restraining straps just flicked open, and the men, now separated by a mile from each other, fell out of their seats, which dropped into the landscape below.

The men’s parachutes were also automatic. They, too, deployed, first with a small drogue to steady the falling men in the air, then with the main canopy. Each man felt the heaving jerk as a terminal velocity of 120 miles per hour slowed to around fourteen.

They began to feel the intense cold through their light nylon flight suits and G suits. They seemed to be in a weird, wet, gray limbo between heaven and hell until they crashed into the topmost branches of pine and spruce. In the half darkness beneath the cloud bank, the major landed in a type of clearing, his fall cushioned by springy conifer branches lying flat on the ground. After several seconds dazed and winded, he released the main chute buckle at his midriff and stood up. Then he began to broadcast so the rescuers could get a fix on him.

Nicky Johns had also come down in trees, but not in a clearing; right in the thick of them. As he hit the branches, he was drenched in the snow that fell off them. He waited for the “hit,” the ground, but it never came. Above him, in the freezing gloom, he could see that his parachute was caught in the trees. Below, he could make out the ground. Snow and pine needles, he thought, about fifteen feet down. He took a deep breath, hit the release buckle and fell. With luck, he would have landed and stood up. In fact, he felt his left leg snap neatly at the shin as it slid between two stout branches under the snow. That told him that cold and shock would start to eat into his reserve without mercy. He, too, unhooked his transmitter and began to broadcast.

The Eagle had attempted to fly for a few seconds after its crew had ejected it. It turned its nose up, wallowed, tilted over, resumed its dive and, as it entered the cloud bank, simply blew up. The flames had reached the fuel tanks. As the Eagle disintegrated, both its engines tore themselves from their housing and fell away. Twenty thousand feet below, each engine-five tons of blazing metal roaring down at five hundred miles per hour-hit the Cascades. One engine destroyed twenty trees. The other did more.

The CIA special ops officer who commanded the garrison at the Cabin took over two minutes to regain consciousness and pull himself off the floor of the chow room where he had been eating lunch. He was dazed and felt sick. He leaned against the wall of the log cabin amid the swirling dust and called out some names. He was answered with groans. Twenty minutes later, he had made his inventory. The two men playing pool in the game room were dead. Three others were injured. The lucky ones had been those outside on a hiking break. They had been a hundred yards away when the meteorite, as they thought, hit the Cabin. When they had confirmed that, of twelve CIA staffers, two were dead, three needed emergency hospitalization, the two hikers were fine and the other five badly shaken, they checked on the prisoner.

They would later be accused of being slow on the uptake, but the inquiry found in the end that they were justified in looking out for themselves first. A glance through the spy hole into the Afghan’s room revealed there was too much light in there. When they burst in, the door from the living area to the walled exercise court was open. The room itself, being of reinforced concrete, had survived intact.

The wall of the compound was not so lucky. Concrete or not, the falling Fioo jet engine had taken a five-foot chunk out of the wall before ricocheting into the garrison quarters. And the Afghan was gone.

CHAPTER 15

AS THE GREAT AMERICAN sea trap closed around the Philippines, Borneo and eastern Indonesia, all the way across the Pacific to the U.S. coast, the Countess of Richmond slipped out of the Flores Sea, through the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok and into the Indian Ocean. Then she turned due west for Africa.

The distress call from the dying Eagle had been heard by at least three listeners. McChord AFB, of course, had it all on tape, because they had actually been talking to the crew. The Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, north of McChord, also kept a listening watch on cha

The days of pilots bobbing helplessly in a dinghy or lying in a forest waiting to be found are long gone. Modern aircrew have a life jacket with a state-of-the-art beacon, small but powerful, and a transmitter that permits voice communication.

The beacons were picked up at once, and the three listening posts had the men located within a few yards. Major Duval was down in the heart of the state park, and Captain Johns had fallen in a logging forest. Both were still closed for access due to the winter.

The cloud cover right on top of the trees would prevent extraction by helicopter, the fastest and the favored way. The cloud bank would force an old-fashioned rescue. Off-road vehicles or half-track vehicles would take the rescue parties in as near as possible; from there to the downed airman, it would be muscle and sweat all the way.

The enemy now was hypothermia, and in the case of Johns, with his broken leg, trauma. The sheriff of Whatcom County radioed to say he had deputies ready to move, and they would rendezvous in the small town of Glacier on the edge of the forest within thirty minutes. They were nearest to the Wizzo, Nicky Johns, with his broken leg. A number of the loggers lived around Glacier, and knew every logging road through the forest. The sheriff was given Johns’s exact position within a few yards and set off.

To keep up the injured man’s morale, McChord patched the sheriff right through to the communicator on the Wizzo’s life jacket so that the sheriff could encourage the airman as they came nearer and nearer. The Washington State Parks service opted for Major Duval. They had experience to spare; every year, they had to pull out the occasional camper who slipped and fell. They knew every road through the park, and, where the roads ran out, every trail. They went in with snowmobiles and quad bikes. Since their man was not injured, a full stretcher would not be necessary. But as the minutes ticked by, the body temperature of the airmen started slowly to drop, and faster with Johns, who could not move.