“Blue rain … blue rain…” came the other pilot’s voice through the radio.
It meant that the zone into which they were flying was hot, inhospitable. It could be anything—mortar fire, a missile, an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), a gunfight of some kind.
Jolene said on comm, “Raptor eight-nine veering east. ETA to Green Zone, four minutes.”
She moved the cyclic; the helicopter responded instantly to her touch, dropping its nose, picking up speed, hurtling forward.
Ra-ta-ta-tat. Bullets hit the helicopter in a spray. The sound was so loud that even wearing a helmet and earbuds, Jolene flinched.
“We’re taking fire,” Tami said sharply.
“Hang on,” Jolene said, banking a hard left turn.
She heard the tink-tink-tink of machine gun fire hitting her aircraft. One first, then a splatter of hits, close together, sounding like a hard rain on tin. Smoke filled the helicopter.
“There,” Tami said. “Three o’clock.”
A group of insurgents was on a rooftop below, firing. A machine gun set on a tripod spit yellow fire.
Jolene banked left again. As she made the turn, the helicopter to her right exploded. Bits of burning metal hit the side of Jolene’s aircraft. Heat billowed inside, and the aftermath rocked them from side to side.
“Knife oh-four, do you copy?” Tami said into the radio. “This is Raptor eight-nine.”
The helicopter next to them spiraled to the ground. On impact, a cloud of black smoke billowed up. For a split second, Jolene couldn’t look away.
Tami radioed the crash coordinates into the base. “Knife oh-four, do you copy?”
Jolene made a series of fast turns, evading, varying her airspeed, changing her altitude. Up, down, side to side.
When they were out of range, she turned to look in the back bay. “Is everyone okay?” she said to her crew, hearing back from all of them.
Jolene followed the other Black Hawk into Washington Heliport, landing behind it. She was shaking as she unhooked her MCU vest and seat belt.
She climbed out of the seat and stepped down onto the tarmac. The sky was gunmetal gray, but even in the gloom she could see the thick black smoke still rising up from the crash site. She closed her eyes and said a prayer for the fallen airmen, even though in her heart she knew that no one had survived that explosion. Seconds later, the roar of jet engines filled the night sky; bombs exploded in bursts of red fire. As soon as possible, she knew that a medevac helicopter would go to the site and try to locate survivors and victims.
She couldn’t help thinking that if you were alive and hurt in enemy territory with your bird on fire, it would be the longest wait of your life.
Could she have done something differently? Would a different choice on her part have changed the outcome? They flew in formation to protect one another, but Jolene hadn’t protected her partner aircraft; soon, somewhere across the world, a casualty assistance team would gather to give a family the worst possible news.
Tami and Jamie came up to stand beside her. They stood in front of their helicopter, which was scarred with bullet holes.
No one spoke. Each of them knew that one bullet in the right place, one RPG hit, and they could have been the aircraft on fire in the desert.
“Who’s hungry?” Jamie said, taking off his helmet.
“I’m always hungry,” Smitty said, coming up beside them, coughing. He gave everyone his trademark grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Tonight, for the first time, Smitty looked old. “I sure could use me a Mountain Dew.”
Jamie, as always, kept up a steady stream of conversation as they walked through the Green Zone. Everything he said was funny, and each of them wanted something to smile about. They ate made-to-order stir-fry and homemade milkshakes while the maintenance crew patched up their helicopter. All the while, they talked about anything except what was on their minds.
By midnight, they were back in the air, flying over Baghdad again. They skirted the most dangerous parts of the city. Now and then gunfire rang out—coming from opportunistic insurgents who could hear the helicopter and shot skyward, hoping to hit what they couldn’t see. They landed back at Balad without incident.
Jolene shut down the engine. The rotors slowed by degrees, the thwop-thwop-thwop more drawn out in every rotation.
Jolene finally relaxed in her seat. Through her night-vision goggles, the world looked distorted. Here on the black tarmac, she saw ghostly green images moving in front of her.
Absurdly, she thought of souls, walking away from their bodies; that reminded her of the crew they’d lost.
“My son has chicken pox,” Jamie said from behind her. “Did I tell you that?”
It was what she needed: a reminder of home. “Kids get over that fast. He won’t even remember it in a year. Betsy wanted strawberry Popsicles for every meal.”
“Will he remember that I wasn’t there?”
Jolene had no easy answer for that.
She unhooked the goggles from her helmet and unstrapped from the seat. When she stepped onto the tarmac, a wave of exhaustion overtook her, and it was not an ordinary tiredness; this was bone deep, a kind of standing death.
She wanted to know she’d done everything possible tonight, that she was not in any way at fault, but there was no one to tell her that, no one she could believe, anyway. The thought isolated her, reminded her of how alone she was over here. She wished she could call Michael, tell him about her day and let his voice soothe her ragged nerves. So many soldiers over here had that, a marital lifeline. Like Tami and Carl.
There was little privacy over here, and since Tami and Jolene routinely stood in the phone lines together, they heard each other’s conversations. She heard Tami whispering, I love you so much, baby, just hearing your voice makes me strong again.
She remembered when she and Michael had been like that, each a half of the whole. Tami came up beside her, bumped her hip to hip. “You okay?”
“No. You?”
“No. Let’s call home. I need to hear my husband’s voice,” Tami said.
They walked across the base to the phones. Amazingly, the line was short. There were only two soldiers in front of them.
Jolene let Tami go first, heard her friend say, “Carl? Baby? I miss you so much…”
Jolene tried not to listen. The truth was she needed Michael right now, needed him to say he loved her and that he was waiting for her, that she wasn’t as alone over here as she felt, that she still had a life at home.
When it was finally Jolene’s turn, she dialed home, hoping someone was there. Back there, it was two fifteen on a Saturday afternoon.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Michael.”
She closed her eyes, imagining his smile. She wanted to tell him more, share her feelings, but how could she? He would never understand. He wasn’t like Carl; he wasn’t proud of what she did over here. He didn’t understand how deeply she cared about the other soldiers with whom she served. At that, she felt even more separate, more distant.
A world away, she heard the creaking of his chair as he sat down, and that simple, ordinary sound reminded her acutely of the people she’d left behind and how they’d gone on with their lives, making memories that didn’t include her.
“How are you, Jo?”
She felt her mouth tremble. His tone of voice was so tender; she had to remind herself that he didn’t really want to know. When had he ever wanted to hear about her service? She couldn’t tell him that her friends had been killed tonight, that maybe it was even her fault, a little. He’d just tell her it was a ridiculous war and the soldiers had died for nothing. She straightened, cleared her throat. “How are my girls? Is Lulu excited about her birthday?”
“They miss you. Betsy heard about a helicopter pilot who’d been shot down. She was pretty upset.”
“Tell her I’m a long way from the front line.”
“But are you?”
She thought about tonight and winced. “Of course. I’m safe.” That was what he wanted to hear. “Can I talk to the girls?”
“Mom took them to a movie.”
“Oh.”
“They’ll be so disappointed. They miss you so much, Jo. Lulu keeps asking if you’re going to be home for her party.”
They miss you. “I better go.”
“Don’t. I want to say—”
It was always about what he wanted. The thought exhausted her. She’d been a fool to need him. “I have to go, Michael. There’s a line behind me.”
“Take care of yourself,” he said after a pause.
“I’m trying.” Her voice cracked. She hung up the phone and turned back around.
Tami had heard every word. “How about a hot shower?” her friend said, putting an arm around her.
Jolene nodded. They walked to their trailer, grabbed their dopp kits, and headed for the showers. Jolene kept meaning to say something to Tami, make some idle chitchat to gloss over the emotions that lay beneath, but she couldn’t.
Even at this late hour, the base was a busy place. Thirty thousand men and women lived here. That didn’t even include the contract people who came and went.
Jolene wore her flip-flops into the shower and turned on the water.
Cold.
Trying not to think about the shower—and the hot water—she had at home, she washed quickly, scrubbing the sweat and sand from her skin. After she dried off, she redressed in her dusty, dirty ACUs.
“Cold wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Tami said, smiling tiredly.
“Yeah.”
They walked out of the shower trailer and headed back to D-Pod.
Jamie and Smitty were waiting for them, sitting on a pair of overturned crates outside the door of their trailer, which was across from Tami and Jolene’s. Beside Smitty was a small blue and white cooler full of pops. “Wanna drink?” he said. Jolene could see how hard he was trying to smile. He might be a great gunner and a courageous soldier, but he was still just a twenty-year-old kid, and tonight had shaken him. He probably wouldn’t sleep well; none of them would.
Tami and Jolene sat down beside them—Tami on the steps in front of the door, Jolene on the crate beside Smitty. Behind them, the metal still radiated some of the day’s heat, even though it was cold out here now. On either side of the door, sandbags were piled high—rows and rows of them provided some protection from the near-constant mortar fire. Across from her, not more than eight feet away, was the door to their trailer.
“Bill Diehler was on Knife oh-four,” Tami said solemnly.
Jolene pictured Bill: a big florid-faced “old school” Guard pilot out of Fort Worth. Just last week he’d shown her a picture of the daughter who was waiting for him to walk her down the aisle.
She closed her eyes and immediately wished she hadn’t; she saw the last few seconds again—the roof sniper, the shooting. She’d banked left, turned sharply away from Knife 04.
“Wally Toddan was the crew chief,” Jamie said. “His wife just found out she’s pregnant. Yesterday, he went to the Haji Mart and bought the kid a football. He hasn’t even mailed it yet.”