Stephen Coonts - Combat

When we lifted off, I didn’t even bother to look at the Camel, the old fortress. I never wanted to see any of this again.

She flew west on autopilot, a few hundred feet above the desert floor. There were mountain ranges ahead of us. She used the night-vision goggles to spot them and climbed when the terrain forced her to. I dozed beside her in the copilot’s seat.

Hours later she shook me awake. Out the window ahead I could see the lights of Tangier.

She had the plane on autopilot, flying toward the city. We went aft, put on coveralls, helped each other don backpacks and parachutes, then she waddled forward to check how the plane was flying.

The idea was to fly over the city from east to west, jump over the western edge of the city and let the plane fly on, out to sea. When the fuel in the plane was exhausted it would go into the ocean, probably break up and sink.

Meanwhile we would be on our way via commercial airliner. I had my American passports in my backpack — my real one and Robert Arnold’s — and a plane ticket to South Africa. I hadn’t asked Julie where she was going when we hit the ground because I didn’t want to know. By that point I hoped to God I never set eyes on her again.

She lowered the tailgate, and I walked out on it. She was looking out one of the windows. She held up a hand, signaling me to get ready. I could just glimpse lights.

Now she came over to stand beside me. “Fifteen seconds,” she shouted and looked at her watch. I looked at mine too.

I must have relaxed for just a second, because the next thing I knew she pushed me and I was going out, reaching for her. She was inches beyond my grasp.

Then I was out of the plane and falling through the darkness.

Needless to say, I never saw Julie Giraud again. I landed on a rocky slope, a sheep pasture I think, on the edge of town and gathered up the parachute. She was nowhere in sight.

I took off my helmet, listened for airplane noise … nothing.

Just a distant jet, maybe an airliner leaving the commercial airport.

I buried the chute and helmet and coveralls in a hole I dug with a folding shovel. I tossed the shovel into the hole and filled it with my hands, tromped it down with my new civilian shoes, then set off downhill with a flashlight. Didn’t see a soul.

The next morning I walked into town and got a room at a decent hotel. I had a hot bath and went to bed and slept the clock around, almost twenty-four hours. When I awoke I went to the airport and caught a flight to Capetown.

Capetown is a pretty city in a spectacular setting, on the ocean with Table Mountain behind it. I had plenty of cash and I established an account with a local bank, then had money wired in from Switzerland. There was three million in the Swiss account before my first transfer, so Julie Giraud made good on her promise. As I instinctively knew she would.

I lived in a hotel the first week, then found a little place that a widow rented to me.

I watched the paper pretty close, expecting to see a story about the massacre in the Libyan desert. The Libyans were bound to find the wreckage of those jets sooner or later, and the bodies, and the news would leak out.

But it didn’t.

The newspapers never mentioned it.

Finally I got to walking down to the city library and reading the papers from Europe and the United States.

Nothing. Nada.

Like it never happened.

A month went by, a peaceful, quiet month. No one paid any attention to me, I had a mountain of money in the local bank and in Switzerland, and neither radio, television, nor newspapers ever mentioned all those dead people in the desert.

Finally I called my retired Marine pal Bill Wiley in Van Nuys, the police dispatcher. “Hey, Bill, this is Charlie Dean.”

“Hey Charlie. When you coming home, guy?”

“I don’t know. How’s Candy doing with the stations?”

“They’re making more money than they ever did with you running them. He’s got rid of the facial iron and works twelve hours a day.”

“No shit!”

“So where are you?”

“Let’s skip that for a bit. I want you to do me a favor. Tomorrow at work how about running me on the crime computer, see if I’m wanted for anything.”

He whistled. “What the hell you been up to, Charlie?”

“Will you do that? I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

“Give me your birth date and social security number.”

I gave it to him, then said good-bye.

I was on pins and needles for the next twenty-four hours. When I called again, Bill said, “You ain’t in the big computer, Charlie. What the hell you been up to?”

“I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”

“So when you coming home?”

“One of these days. I’m still vacationing as hard as I can.”

“Kiss her once for me,” Bill Wiley said.

At the Capetown library I got into old copies of the International Herald Tribune, published in Paris. I finally found what I was looking for on microfiche: a complete list of the passengers who died twelve years ago on the Air France flight that blew up over Niger. Colonel Giraud and his wife were not on the list.

Well, the light finally began to dawn.

I got one of the librarians to help me get on the Internet. What I was interested in were lists of U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, say from five to ten years ago.

I read the names until I thought my eyeballs were going to fall out. No Julie Giraud.

I’d been had. Julie was either a CIA or French agent. French, I suspected, and the Americans agreed to let her steal a plane.

As I sat and thought about it, I realized that I didn’t ever meet old Colonel Giraud’s kids. Not to the best of my recollection. Maybe he had a couple of daughters, maybe he didn’t, but damned if I could remember.

What had she said? That the colonel said I was the best Marine in the corps?

Stupid ol’ Charlie Dean. I ate that shit with a spoon. The best Marine in the corps! So I helped her “steal” a plane and kill a bunch of convicted terrorists that Libya would never extradite.

If we were caught I would have sworn under torture, until my very last breath, that no government was involved, that the people planning this escapade were a U.S. Air Force deserter and an ex-Marine she hired.

I loafed around Capetown for a few more days, paid my bills, thanked the widow lady, gave her a cock-and-bull story about my sick kids in America, and took a plane to New York. At JFK I got on another plane to Los Angeles.

When the taxi dropped me at my apartment, I stopped by the super’s office and paid the rent. The battery in my car had enough juice to start the motor on the very first crank.

I almost didn’t recognize Candy. He had even gotten a haircut and wore clean jeans. “Hey, Mr. Dean,” Candy said after we had been chatting a while. “Thanks for giving me another chance. You’ve taught me a lot.”

“We all make mistakes,” I told him. If only he knew how true that was.

STEPHEN COONTS is the author of eight New York Times best-selling novels, the first of which was the classic flying tale Flight of the Intruder, which spent over six months on the New York Times best-seller list. He graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in political science, and immediately was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy, where he began flight training in Pensacola, Florida, training on the A-6 Intruder aircraft. After two combat cruises in Vietnam aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and one tour as assistant catapult and arresting gear officer aboard USS Nimitz, he left active duty in 1977 to pursue a law degree, which he received from the University of Colorado. His novels have been published around the world and have been translated into more than a dozen different languages. He was honored by the U.S. Navy Institute with its Author of the Year award in 1986. His latest novel is Hong Kong. He and his wife, Deborah, reside in Clarksville, Maryland.