Dan yelled at his two crewmen to egress. He swiftly shut down the engines, seeing Andy slumped to his left, his helmeted head resting on his chest, the harness still holding him in the seat. He needed to escape with Andy.
Suddenly, the whole night lit up with an RPG being fired. It missed the MH-47 by six feet, but the wall of fire raced toward the opened cockpit. Rocks sailed like missiles through the broken Plexiglas, striking Dan.
One moment, he was conscious. The next, his helmet was struck hard, snapping back his head against the seat, the force of it stunning him into semi-consciousness.
Dan heard the A-team leader screaming at him to egress. Groggy, he barely lifted his eyelids, his NVGs still in place. He saw several members of the team sprinting toward the wounded helicopter. They were screwed. This bird wasn’t going to ever get off the ground again. More noise, screams, and orders, filtered through his semi-conscious state. Trying to unsnap the harness, he found his wounded right arm wouldn’t work. Pain raced up the limb as he fumbled with the clip, trying to get it to release. The smell of fuel was everywhere. The blades were slowing down, the engines off. But he hadn’t been able to reach the fuel bladders to shut off the fuel to the engines. Shit. Kerosene was leaking into the helicopter now, the smell making him nauseated. One bullet…one bullet could blow this thing up, and they’d become an instant fireball.
Dan tried weakly to escape but couldn’t. He felt more than saw two A-team members squeezing into the cockpit area. His brain wouldn’t work. He tried to tell them Andy was wounded, but all that came out was a grunt. The pain was so bad that he felt faint from it. Someone leaned over him, instantly releasing the buckle, the harness opening. Whoever it was, quickly helped him get rid of the nylon straps and he was being hauled out of his seat and into the area behind the cockpit.
Dan heard things. A woman’s voice? He knew that voice! It was Sloan Kennedy. What the hell? And then, someone jerked the cord from his helmet out of the ICS, and he heard nothing more. Bullets were snapping and flying all around them. The helmet protected Dan’s ears up to a point; all sounds were muffled. He couldn’t make out what was being said by the two soldiers who were dragging his sorry ass out of that helo, trying to save his life. And then, Dan lost consciousness because his wounded arm slammed into the opened door, the agony arcing upward, swallowing him whole.
Dan jerked into an upright position on his soaked bed, breathing in ragged, harsh gasps. He pushed his shaking fingers through his short black hair. Moonlight filtered through his second-story apartment. A commercial jet was taking off from the airport nearby, the sound of the engines vibrating through the thin glass of the open window near his bed.
Fuck!
He got up and gripped the dresser nearby, hanging his head. All of the emotions he felt the night of the crash coming back, gutting him once again. He needed a cold beer. Dan glared at the clock on the dresser. It was three a.m. He forced himself out of the tiny bedroom and down the narrow hall to the bathroom. He stunk of fear, sweat still rolling down his chest, the adrenaline making him feel like someone had ripped the skin off his body, leaving him vulnerable to everything about that crash years earlier.
Would the crash ever stop replaying in his dreams? Dan fumbled for the light switch. The bathroom was small, like everything else about this apartment. A cockroach raced up the yellowed wall opposite the plastic-enclosed shower stall. He slammed his palm against it, killing it. The little bastard. The apartment swam with cockroaches. They infested everything, no matter what he did. Never mind the landlord piled garbage outside the building half a story high, and the garbage truck never came around once a week, as it should. He hated Sudan for its lack of basic cleanliness. But it was better than the alternative. People lived in grass huts with dirt floors around them in most places. Here, at the port on the Red Sea, there were stucco homes, but only the rich could afford them. Everywhere else it was squalor, and tents made from pieces of corrugated aluminum. He’d seen this in Afghanistan. Now here.
Dan wanted that beer—he craved it—but he needed a shower first. He felt hot, sweaty, and fevered, turning on the tap for cold water. In October, the heat in Sudan still climbed into the eighties during the day and hovered near seventy-five at night. His air conditioner, if it could be called that, was barely working.
The tap water was tepid but felt damned good as it poured over him. He tipped his head up, eyes closed, his hands on either side of the stall to stop himself from falling because his knees were still shaking. Dan appreciated the water like it was life itself—and in Sudan water was life in this mostly desert country.
He opened his eyes because when they were closed, it dragged him back into the crash—the smells, the sounds, the icy coldness biting into his flight suit covered body. He shook with tension, his breath slowing, but still uneven as he oriented himself to the here and now.
This fucking nightmare always hit at full moon time, at least once, sometimes twice in a seven-day period. Those nights were raw, and he bled from his soul. Hot tears jammed into his eyes, and he pressed his brow against the shower stall, closing them, their salty trails spilling into the corners of his opened mouth. He never cried. Not ever. But every time the nightmare happened, he cried no matter how hard he fought against it.
Because of him, Andy had died in that crash when an AK-47 bullet struck his chest. Both A-team medics tried to save his life as the firefight blazed around them, but it was no use.
Jesus.
He was passed out as two of the Special Forces team members carried him out of that helo. He’d awakened minutes later, one medic working over him, the other, working over Andy. Dan could still hear Andy’s gasps and cries. He would never forget that night or the pleading from Andy. That crash was his fault.
His wife Sable was without husband now and their two little girls, Olivia and Karen, without a father. His two crewmen in the rear had also been injured, but not half as bad as Andy and Dan. Andy died an hour later. The rest of them survived to remember it.
God, if only I’d hammered that bird to the ground. Why didn’t I?
Dan felt destroyed by that one question. If he’d stuck the bird, the Taliban wouldn’t have had the target they acquired. Their bullets would have hit the rear side of the helo. Everyone would have been protected to a degree. Andy would still be alive.
He was such a fuck up.
Sometimes, he wanted to die. These nightmares tore at his shattered soul and made him feel so damned helpless. Hope had left him long ago. He woke up in the morning knowing it was just one more day and he didn’t even feel the energy he needed to live through it. The beer always helped. Two or three cans took that hopelessness away from him, lifted him a little, and then he could focus on something positive, instead. That got him through the day—and that’s all he could handle was one day at a time.