Without remorse - Tom Clancy [271]
'I got the strobe!' the copilot said.
'Coming in hot.' The pilot was driving his Sikorsky as hard as the engines would allow. Two hundred yards short of the clearing he pulled back sharply on the cyclic, and the forfy-five-degree nose-up attitude stopped forward motion quickly - perfectly in fact, as he leveled out within feet of the blinking infrared strobe light. The rescue helicopter came to a steady hover two feet over the deck, buffeted by the winds. The Navy commander was fighting all manner of forces to hold his aircraft steady, and was slow to respond to something his eyes had told him. He had seen the rotor wash knock his intended survivor down, but -
'Did I see two people out there?' he asked over the intercom.
'Co go go!' another voice said over the IC circuit. 'Pax aboard now, go!'
'Getting the hell outa Dodge City, now!' The pilot pulled collective for altitude, kicked rudder pedal, and dropped his nose, heading back to the river as the helicopter accelerated. Wasn't there just supposed to be one person? He set it aside. He had to fly now, and it was thirty twisty miles to the water and safety.
'Who the fuck is this?' Irvin asked.
'Hitchhiker,' Kelly answered over the din of the engines. He shook his head. Explanations would be lengthy and would have to wait. Irvin understood, offering him a canteen. Kelly drained it. That's when the shaking started. In front of the helicopter crew and five Marines, Kelly shivered like a man in the Arctic, huddling and clutching himself, holding his weapon close until Irvin took it away and cleared it. It had been fired, the master gunnery sergeant saw. Later he'd find out why and at what. The door gunners scanned the river valley while their aircraft screamed out, barely a hundred feet over the meandering surface. The ride proved uneventful, far different from what they had expected, as was the case with this whole night. What had gone wrong? they all wanted to know. The answer was in the man they'd just picked up. But who the hell was the other one, and wasn't that a Russian uniform? Two Marines sat over him. One of them tied his hands up. A third secured the pack's flap in place with the straps.
'Rescue One, feet-wet. We have snake aboard, over.'
'Rescue One, this is cricket, roger, copy that. Standing by. Out.' Albie looked up. 'Well, that's it.'
Podulski took it the hardest of all. boxwood green had been his idea from the start. Had it been successful, it might have changed everything. It might have opened the door for certain cornet, might have changed the course of the war - and his son's death would not have been for nothing. He looked up at the others. He almost asked if they might still try it again, but he knew better. Washout. It was a bitter concept and an even more bitter reality for one who had served his adopted country for nearly thirty years.
'Tough day?' Frank Allen asked.
Lieutenant Mark Charon was surprisingly chipper for a man who'd been through a fatal shooting and the almost-as-rigorous interrogation that had followed it.
'The damned fool. Didn't have to happen that way,' Charon said. 'I guess he didn't like the idea of life on Falls Road,' the narcotics-division lieutenant added, referring to the Maryland State Penitentiary. Located in downtown Baltimore, the building was so grim that its inmates referred to it as Frankenstein's Castle.
Allen didn't have to tell him much. The procedures for the incident were straightforward. Charon would go on administrative leave for ten working days while the Department made sure that the shooting had not been contrary to official policy guidelines for the use of 'deadly force.' It was essentially a two-week vacation with pay, except that Charon might have to face additional interviews. Not likely in this case, as several police officers had observed the whole thing, one from a mere twenty feet away.
'I've got the case, Mark,' Allen told him. 'I've been over the preliminaries. Looks like you'll come out okay on this. Anything you might have done to spook him?'
Charon shook his head. 'No,