One of the screams was close by. It was Zimmer, only a few feet away, lying on his back and rolling around with his arms across his chest. Ryan went to see what the problem was.
Zimmer had taken three rounds in the chest. He was aspirating blood. It sprayed in a pink cloud from his mouth and nose. One round had shattered his right shoulder, but the serious ones were through the lungs. The man was bleeding to death before his eyes, Ryan knew at once. Was there a medic here? Might he do something?
“This is Ryan,” he said over the intercom line. “Sergeant Zimmer is down. He’s hit pretty bad.”
“Buck!” PJ responded at once. “Buck, are you all right?”
Zimmer tried to answer but couldn’t. His intercom line had been shot away. He shouted something Ryan couldn’t understand, and Jack turned and screamed as loudly as he could at the rest of them, the others who didn’t seem to care or know what the problem here was.
“Medic! Corpsman!” he added, not knowing what it was that Army troops said. Clark heard him and started heading that way.
“Come on, Zimmer, you’re going to be all right,” Jack told him. He remembered that much from his brief few months in the Marine Corps. Give them a reason to live. “We’re going to fix this up and you’re going to be all right. Hang in there, Sarge – it hurts, but you’re going to be all right.”
Clark was there a moment later. He stripped off the flight engineer’s flak jacket, oblivious to the screech of pain that it caused from the wrecked shoulder. For Clark, too, it was too much a return to years past and things half-remembered. Somehow he’d forgotten just how scary, how awful this sort of thing was, and while he was recovering his senses more rapidly than most, the horror of having been helpless under fire and helpless with its aftermath had nearly overpowered him. And he was helpless now. He could see that from the placement of the wounds. Clark looked up at Ryan and shook his head.
“My kids!” Zimmer screamed. The sergeant had a reason to live, but the reason wasn’t enough.
“Tell me about your kids,” Ryan said. “Talk to me about your kids.”
“Seven – I got seven kids – I gotta, I can’t die! My kids – my kids need me.”
“Hang in there, Sarge, we’re going to get you out of here. You’re going to make it,” Ryan told him, tears clouding in his eyes at the shame of lying to a dying man.
“They need me!” His voice was weaker now as the blood was filling his throat and lungs.
Ryan looked up at Clark, hoping that there was something to be said. Some hope. Something. Clark just stared into Jack’s face. He looked back down at Zimmer and took his hand, the uninjured one.
“Seven kids?” Jack asked.
“They need me,” Zimmer whimpered, knowing now that he wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t see them grow and marry and have their own children, wouldn’t be there to guide them, to protect them. He had failed to do what a father must do.
“I’ll tell you something about your kids that you don’t know, Zimmer,” Ryan said to the dying man.
“Huh? What?” He looked confused, looked to Ryan for the answer to the great question of life. Jack didn’t have that one, but told him what he could.
“They’re all going to college, man.” Ryan squeezed the hand as hard as he could. “You got my word, Zimmer, all your kids’ll go to college. I will take care of that for you. Swear to God, man, I’ll do it.”
The sergeant’s face changed a bit at that, but before Ryan could decide what emotion he beheld, the face changed again, and there was no emotion left. Ryan hit the intercom switch. “Zimmer’s dead, Colonel.”
“Roger.” Ryan was offended by the coldness of the acknowledgment. He didn’t hear what Johns was thinking: God, oh God, what do I tell Carol and the kids?
Ryan had Zimmer’s head cradled on his lap. He disengaged himself slowly, resting the head down on the metal floor of the helicopter. Clark wrapped his burly arms around the younger man.
“I’m going to do it,” Jack told him in a choking voice. “That wasn’t a fucking lie. I am going to do it!”
“I know. He knew it too. He really did.”
“You sure?” The tears had started, and it was hard for Jack to repeat the most important question of his life. “Are you really sure?”
“He knew what you said, Jack, and he believed you. What you did, doc, that was pretty good.” Clark embraced Ryan in the way that men do only with their wives, their children, and those with whom they had faced death.
In the right-front seat, Colonel Johns put his grief away into a locked compartment that he would later open and experience to the full. But for now he had a mission to fly. Buck would surely understand that.
Cutter’s jet arrived at Hurlburt Field well after dark. He was met by a car which took him to Wing Operations. He’d arrived entirely without warning, and strode into the Operations office like an evil spirit.
“Who the hell’s in charge here?”
The sergeant at the desk recognized the President’s National Security Adviser immediately from seeing him on television. “Right through that door, sir.”
Cutter found a young captain dozing in his swivel chair. His eyes had cracked open just as the door did, and the twenty-nine-year-old officer jumped to his feet quite unsteadily.
“I want to know where Colonel Johns is,” Vice Admiral Cutter told him quietly.
“Sir, that is information which I am not able to -”
“You know who the hell I am?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you trying to say no to me, Captain?”
“Sir, I have my orders.”
“Captain, I am countermanding all of your orders. Now, you answer my question and you do it right now.” Cutter’s voice was a few decibels higher now.
“Sir, I don’t know where the -”
“Then you find somebody who does, and you get him here.”
The captain was frightened enough that he took the route of least resistance. He called a major, who lived on post and was in the office in under eight minutes.
“What the hell is this?” the major said on the way through the door.
“Major, I am what’s going on here,” Cutter told him. “I want to know where Colonel Johns is. He’s the goddamned CO of this outfit, isn’t he?”
“Yessir!” What the hell is this… ?
“Are you telling me that the people of this unit don’t know where their CO is?” Cutter was sufficiently amazed that his authority hadn’t generated immediate compliance with his orders that he allowed himself to bluster off on a tangent.
“Sir, in Special Operations, we -”
“Is this a fucking Boy Scout camp or a military organization?” the Admiral shouted.
“Sir, this is a military organization,” the major replied. “Colonel Johns is off TDY. I am under orders, sir, not to discuss his mission or his location with anyone without proper authority, and you are not on the list, sir. Those are my orders, Admiral.”
Cutter was amazed and only got angrier. “Do you know what my job is and who I work for?” He hadn’t had a junior officer talk to him like this in over a decade. And he’d broken that one’s career like a matchstick.
“Sir, I have written orders on this matter. The President ain’t on the list either, sir,” the major said from the position of attention. Fucking squid, calling the United States Air Force a Boy Scout camp! Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on – Admiral, sir, his face managed to communicate quite clearly.
Cutter had to soften his voice, had to regain control of his emotions. He could take care of this insolent punk at leisure. But for now he needed that information. He started, therefore, with an apology, man to man, as it were. “Major, you’ll have to excuse me. This is a most important matter, and I can’t explain to you why it is important or the issues involved here. I can say that this is a real life-or-death situation. Your Colonel Johns may be in a place where he needs help. The operation may be coming apart around him, and I really need to know. Your loyalty to your commander is laudable, and your devotion to duty is exemplary, but officers are supposed to exercise judgment. You have to do that now, Major. I am telling you that I need that information – and I need it now.”
Reason succeeded where bluster had failed. “Admiral, the colonel went back down to Panama along with one of our MC-130s. I do not know why, and I don’t know what they’re doing. That is normal in a special-ops wing, sir. Practically everything we do is compartmented, and this one is tighter than most. What I just told you is everything I know, sir.”