Ralph Peters Read Free Page B

abandoned the town, after setting it ablaze. Quickly, the paratroopers secured a sizable airhead. And the next wave of transports began to land. The South Africans made no move to interfere. They could not even be located. It appeared that they had backed down, evacuating the province.
    The forward deployment of U.S. forces continued, having become little more than a strenuous logistics exercise. On the scene in Shaba, at corps headquarters in Kinshasa, and in Washington there was jubilation. It was decided that U.S. forces would remain on the scene just long enough to tidy things up and to make our unequivocable support of the present Zairean government clear to all interested parties.
     
    Taylor cried out in pain as he regained consciousness. There was a hammering at the back of his skull that made it painful to breathe, painful to move, painful to keep still. His eyes felt as though he had been punched with pepper-coated fists, and his head felt too large for the flight helmet clamped around it. Then he realized that his back ached deeply, as well, commanding him not to move.
    But he did move. Jumping madly at the thought that the aircraft must be on fire. He tore at the safety harness, screaming, hurling himself out of the cockpit in a panic, a frightened child. His pant leg caught on the frame, and he fell facedown, the force of his weight sending a shudder through the remnants of the airframe. He tore wildly at his leg, struggling to free himself, almost dragging the wreck behind him until the fabric of his flight suit gave way, freeing his calf to cut itself against the sharp metal. The world seemed to have no end of pain in store for him, and he curled into himself, whimpering, imagining that he was screaming, still waiting to die.
    There was no fire. The tattered aircraft frame sat erectly in the churned grassland, its Gatling gun loose as a hangnail and its snout nuzzled against a leathery dwarf of a tree. The tail section was missing, and the rotors looked like broken fingers. The multipurpose missiles were gone, perhaps fired off in the last moment, or stripped away as the machine skidded through the undergrowth. Taylor was so amazed that he was alive, unburned, and that his bird, at least, had held together the way it was supposed to, that it took him a long moment to remember the weapons officer.
    None of it had been the way it was supposed to be. You were supposed to outfly and outfight the enemy. You were supposed to fly home in triumph. And if your heroics and sacrifice caused you to crash, the first thing you were to do was to think of your comrade. But Taylor had only been able to think of his own pain, his own fear, overwhelmed by a terror of burning alive.
    The weapons officer sat slumped in his subcompartment. Not moving. As still as the inert fuselage.
    A young warrant officer, hardly out of flight school. When asked why he had taken the most inexperienced man in the troop to be his gunner, Taylor always replied that it was his responsibility to train the man properly. But he also wanted someone who was malleable, who would do as he was told. Not some cranky old bastard who had seen a dozen troop commanders come and go.
    Taylor hardly knew the man. As the troop commander, he always kept a bit of distance from the others, and the leadership technique was compounded by Taylor's essentially private nature. Now, dizzy and sick, with his eyes tricking out of focus, he looked up from the ground at the slumped figure in the aircraft, shocked at the summary of his failures.
    This was not the way it was supposed to be. He had done nothing correctly, failing in everything. His troop lay squandered across the wastes, and the man for whom Taylor bore the most immediate responsibility had lain dead or unconscious or unable to move while his superior, the swaggering cavalry captain, had rescued himself without a thought for any other living thing. It was not the way it was supposed to be.
    At the same time, Taylor