Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

There was no way the gunner had a target. No way he could see what he was shooting. When the adrenaline is in you, when you’re scared, you squeeze the trigger. That simple.

Chaos.

In the cockpit, the radar alert had changed again, this time to a loud and steady shriek. I knew the missile had locked on to us and was vectoring toward the exhaust pipes of the craft’s overhead engines. There was now no escape.

We went into a steep dive, then the cabin began to rotate wildly beneath the rotor. It was a sickening replay of my previous crash landing in a helicopter. Now the nightmare was repeating itself. Could this really be happening?

I held tight to the handle of the briefcase, trying to stabilize myself, knowing that I was about to die, the realization of it roaring in my ears, feeling it as a weight on my chest.

“Hail Mary, full of grace! Hail Mary, full of grace!”

Across from me, one of the commandos was saying his catechism by rote, and I could see Lieutenant Martinez, wide-eyed, gripping his rifle for support, the centrifugal force tremendous. He held my eyes briefly: Bad, very bad.

Which is when my seat belt broke. I was ripped free, weightless, and clawed the air wildly as the velocity of my own body carried me backward, somersaulting, out the open cargo door.

Then I was tumbling in darkness… then in space, falling, falling, beneath an explosion so close that I could feel the heat, could feel the shock wave like an expanding bubble, my body tensing for impact when I would soon hit the earth.

Impaled on a tree.

That image was in my mind…

Then I did hit, crashed into a blackness, cement-hard, that crushed the wind out of me and nearly knocked me unconscious.

I came up splashing, spitting, completely disoriented until I realized what had happened: water. I was in water. I was swimming.

To my left and ahead of me, I watched the old Huey, already aflame, auger itself into the jungle. It disappeared momentarily behind a silhouette of trees, then exploded, creating a bright halo of flame.

It took me several long, bewildered seconds before I realized what had happened. When my seat belt broke, I’d been dumped out the chopper’s cargo door. I’d fallen a hundred feet or so and landed in the river we’d been following.

The river seemed to be one of those deep and narrow, slow-moving rivers. The moon had drifted toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see that the watercourse was fifty or sixty yards wide and was bordered by a high, abrupt canyon of forest.

Deep jungle has a density that muffles sound and magnifies odor. This was deep jungle, a biosphere of vine, limb, earth. It was cellar-cool, and the river created a narrow corridor of light through the mountainous tree canopy.

Drifting there, I heard a second loud explosion, then a series of smaller explosions: ordnance going off.

The silence that followed the explosions seemed a reflective pause.

It did not last long. Soon the night was filled with sound, wild with peeping, croaking frogs, humming insects, and the howling of monkeys from distant trees. The jungle’s reply to an unusual intrusion.

I straightened my glasses, glad for the fishing line I’d used to tie them in place. Then I began to swim toward the bank where the chopper had crashed. As I did, my brain sent out the careful little search requests: Did I feel pain? Were all my body parts in place? Had I suffered some terrible injury that I was still too stunned to realize?

My left shoulder hurt like hell. I’d probably banged it on something when my seat belt broke. And my right ear was adding a tinny, roaring effect to any noise it processed.

I’d probably broken an eardrum when I hit the water.

Not the first eardrum I’ve broken.

Other that those few aches and pains, though, I felt pretty good.

As I moved toward the bank, I congratulated myself-I’d been damn lucky to survive.

The sense of good luck didn’t last. I remembered that a day from now, I had to be in the village of Remanso with a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, or they’d kill Amelia, and the others, too-if Janet, Michael, and Grace really were still alive.

I had no idea where I was or how far I had to go to get help.

I began to swim faster.

The briefcase had been catapulted out the door with me. I found it drifting high and dry, only a few dozen yards downstream.

I used it as a float, pushing it ahead of me toward shore.

The riverbank was steep, a congestion of roots and overhanging limbs. At one place, I grabbed a low branch and tried to pull myself out. As I did, I felt what seemed to be a heavy sprinkling of sand on my face… but then the sand began to burn like tiny hot coals.

Fire ants. I was covered with them.

I dropped back into the water and submerged until they were gone.

Finally, I found an opening, and crawled out. The first thing I did was take the satellite phone from my pocket and try it-maybe Harrington had equipped me with some new generation of indestructible communications system.

But no. It didn’t work.

I tried taking out the battery and drying it. No luck.

Tossing the phone into the river seemed to underline how completely cut off I now was from what I considered the civilized world. I watched water-rings created by the phone expanding in darkness, then I walked toward the orange glow that I knew was the burning helicopter.

As I did, the sky above me disappeared. No more moonlight, no more stars. I was in a cavern of trees, the ceiling a hundred feet overhead. The canopy was so tangled that light could not penetrate, so nothing grew below. The ground was springy with rot, and slippery, too.

Yet I could still see. It was as if the jungle generated a very low-voltage luminescence. The blanket of forest overhead was black, but the trunks of individual trees were gray or pewter.

It allowed me to walk fairly quickly.

Within a few minutes, I was close enough to the crash site to hear the roar of burning aviation fuel and the crackle of burning wood.

But then I heard something else, and stopped, frozen where I stood.

I heard voices speaking a loud, drunken Spanish.

Of course. The guerrilla troops or drug runners, whoever had shot us down, would be converging on the crash site, too.

How was I going to get around them?

There were six of them: five men and a young Indio girl. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.

The men were older, in their twenties, a couple probably in their late thirties to forties. They wore mismatched military fatigues and carried both M-16s and old Soviet-designed AK- 47 assault rifles.

The girl’s skin was earthen, and she had thick black hair tied in a ponytail that hung to the middle of her back. She had a rough blanket folded over one shoulder and wore a copper-colored traditional blouse I’d seen before in South America, a garment known as a huipil. Her skirt was short, sarong-like, blue, and showed her thick legs. She was barefooted and wore bracelets on her wrists and around both ankles. On her ankles were also black decorative tattoos.

One thing I didn’t doubt: The girl wasn’t with these men by choice. She had a subdued look of fear and emotional resignation. It is an expression I had seen before on the faces of captives and new prisoners.

It would not be pleasant to be in the control of men such as this, especially for a girl her age.

I moved quietly from tree to tree, ducked low and kept in the shadows. When I was close enough to hear the soldiers clearly, I knelt and opened the briefcase. I was wearing my SIG Sauer on my hip, belted into a holster I’d borrowed from Ron Iossi. I was surprised that the force of my fall hadn’t ripped it free, but the holster snap had held.