Mack Maloney - Chopper Ops

How strange a thought was that ?

Smitz staggered back for a moment, catching himself just as he was about to fall over. It was starting to sink in now. All those long days. All the stress. All the training. All the bullshit. And for what? To come after the wrong airplane? To be fooled by a dupe set up to foil them? And to get nine countrymen they were supposed to rescue killed in the process?

No wonder the Marines were crying.

Smitz felt a lump growing in his throat as well. His eyes were glued on the nine corpses as a very distinct fear gurgled up from his stomach. How could he ever sleep again after this? And what dreams would come to him if he did?

He finally sucked it up and cleared his throat to speak.

“Have… have you checked this place for booby traps?” he asked Chou.

The stoic Marine officer just nodded once. “It’s clean as far as we can tell. Plus, I dispatched three antiambush teams to watch the outside. But I believe we are the only fools at this place. Live fools, that is.”

Smitz then told the others about the decoy airplane. No one was surprised to hear it. It had been just too easy from the beginning, they were mumbling now. Getting into Iraq undetected. Finding this place on the first try. Happening upon it while the AC-130 was supposedly on the ground. Things just didn’t go that smoothly in combat. Usually, if there was any luck floating around, it was bad luck.

And now the unit had a ton of it.

“Yeah,” Smitz heard Norton whisper to no one in particular. “Someone definitely knew we were coming….”

Smitz and Norton stayed with the video man.

They wanted to make sure every inch of the prison was caught on tape. Delaney stayed with the doctor. He supervised getting the dead airmen loaded into body bags. As the grim process began, the vibes inside the prison building began to change. Shock and sadness were turning into anger and fury. Team 66 had been in tight spots before, but never had they been compromised. And never had they had such a failure. But to be fooled so completely—the whole unit had to share the blame. What really twisted the gut was that the culprits had gotten away unscathed. That was why there were no enemy bodies anywhere. There had been no enemy. The Marines and the Hinds had done all the shooting. Whoever was responsible for the grand deception had left the hidden base before chopper unit arrived.

That was probably the worst of it. It was obvious the nine Americans had been dead for only a short while. After enduring ten long years of captivity, they had been killed when help was just minutes away.

Tragic heroes in all senses of the term.

Or so it seemed…

They loaded the nine bodies onto Truck One. Then Team 66 dynamited the prison building, the dupe C-130, and anything else they could find of value. Norton and Delaney climbed back into their choppers and were soon airborne. The Marine choppers took off and met Ricco and Gillis at 1500 feet. Per the alternate plan, each aircraft quickly took on fuel, then turned as one for the long ride back to the Bat Cave.

For the entire flight, in Norton’s eyes, everything had turned a shade of red.

Maybe the oddest thing that happened to Norton that day occurred shortly after they returned to the Bat Cave.

Landing went as smoothly as could be expected. His Hind was the last to be pushed into the cavern before the fake vegetation was put back in place, sealing them in once again. All the important gear was promptly stowed away and the Marine pickets were quickly dispatched outside.

To say the mood inside the cave was somber wasn’t close to capturing the right word. Everyone in the unit was walking around red-faced, with fists clenched, agitated. Restless. Angry. They had failed, miserably, and now living with that truth had begun.

Returning to the cavern itself was a source of contention, though not verbally. Shortly after leaving the hidden air base, Smitz told them they were now operating under orders contained in something called Contingency #2. Which said, if the first attempt at the raid proved unsuccessful, they were to return to the ingress site and evaluate the situation before pulling out completely.

Had it been put to a vote, it would have been unanimous that the unit just go home. But Smitz was following orders—and the orders said return to the Bat Cave, even if it meant using up the fuel they would need to get out of hostile territory. So that was what they did.

But even this prospect wasn’t foremost on Norton’s mind at the moment. Once his Hind had been stored away properly, he grabbed a blanket and simply lay down on the cavern’s floor underneath the helicopter— and instantly fell asleep.

And for the first time in years, he actually dreamed.

In his dream, he traveled to a small American Midwest town. A place where the fifties never ended. Here, at a grocery store, he met the wife of the gunship’s copilot, Mrs. Pete Jones. She was cuter than her photo and hadn’t aged a day since it had been taken. Norton had sought her out to ask her a question: How had her husband and the three other remaining crewmen of the ArcLight aircraft avoided getting shot in the back of the head? Mrs. Jones replied that Norton must have been mistaken. Her husband had died ten years before, during the Gulf War, and she barely thought about him anymore. So Norton took her back to her house and slept with her. But when he opened his eyes the next morning, he could not wake Mrs. Jones. She was dead herself, a bullet in the back of her skull. She had lain like that all night, bleeding slowly on the bed right next to Norton.

That was when someone began shaking him.

Norton opened his eyes for real and saw one of the SEAL doctors looking down at him.

He was saying: “You want to see this or not?”

Norton stumbled to his feet. He wasn’t quite awake yet. The lights in the cave seemed to be flickering. Everyone he saw seemed pale and drawn, moving like shadows away from him. A rotten smell drifted into his nostrils. He stared at his watch. It read 2350 hours. Could that be right? Had he really slept more than twelve hours?

He shuffled to the rear of the cave, trying to keep up with the SEAL doctor who had roused him. The unpleasant smell grew more intense the deeper he walked into the cavern. Finally he reached an area where the SEAL doctors had one of the nine dead Americans up on a makeshift operating table. They had opened up the man’s body like a side of beef and were performing an on-the-spot autopsy. Delaney, Smitz, and Chou were standing nearby, hands to their noses, eyes watering.

Norton nearly threw up.

“You woke me… for this ?’ he barked at the SEALs.

“You’re the senior military officer here,” one replied. “There’s something here you might want to know.”

Norton had never seen a person gutted before, and it was not a pretty sight. The man was torn open from his groin up to the bottom of his rib cage. His stomach and large intestines had been removed and their contents placed inside plastic bags tied with string to the thighs just below his genitalia.

“This man was shot with an M-16,” the doctor was saying, pointing to the man’s slightly shattered skull. “The same type of weapon we were all carrying. Same ammo. Same bore. Same everything. All nine were killed that way.”

Norton felt his stomach do a back flip.

“Now I’m not an expert at this,” the SEAL continued. “But I believe I can tell you some of what this guy ate in the last eight hours or so.”

Norton finally turned away. “I don’t need to know that.”

“Yes, you do,” Smitz interjected.

The doctor had already started poking through the bag containing the contents of the dead man’s stomach, trying to separate the bits of uneaten food from one another.