Fitzhugh’s senses were transmitting bits of information faster than his brain could sort them out.
Soldiers running.
People throwing themselves to the ground.
Five or six almost simultaneous explosions, rocks and dirt splattering with terrible velocity. The solitary figure of the deacon, marching down the middle of the runway, the crucifix held high.
Douglas yelled, “What the fuck is he doing?”
The man walked on, toward the dissipating smoke of the last mortar bursts, raising the bright cross higher, like an exorcist doing battle with demonic forces. Two soldiers tackled the lunatic and were dragging him away when thick vaporous arms enveloped all three and flung them through the air. Fitzhugh, pinned to his seat by shock as much as by the safety harness, stared at the broken bodies, one lying across another, a third sprawled several yards away. Diana! Where was Diana? Snapping out of his stunned state, he unbuckled the harness, rose from the seat, and fell back. It was only then that he realized that the plane was rolling.
“What’re you doing? Diana’s out there!”
Douglas seemed not to hear his cry, a deaf machine in control of another machine, canted forward in his seat, his eyes nailed to the runway ahead, one hand frozen to the yoke, the other ramming the throttles forward. The plane swerved in the still-slick surface mud, and Fitzhugh saw the ground falling away.
“You can’t do this! Can’t leave her—can’t leave everybody—”
Douglas said nothing. He cranked a wheel in the pedestal, pulled a lever, and looked at the instruments or out the windshield with fierce concentration. He turned westward, leveled off at a thousand feet above the mission, then banked sharply and passed over the airfield, half obscured by torn veils of smoke and reddish dust. The Gulfstream flew on over the plain to the east and banked again. Douglas broke his silence.
“You didn’t hear the gear retract, did you? I’m saving the airplane. Soon as the shelling lifts, I’ll land and pick everybody up. Your job will be to get their asses on board in one hell of a hurry. Nobody’s going to be left behind.”
Fitzhugh wanted to rush to Diana’s side and at the same time dreaded returning to the ground. The explosions, those compact maelstroms with their awful noise, a noise of things going out, of things rent and crushed, had unnerved him. Douglas circled the airfield again.
“Holy shit! There they are! There!” He pointed at a cone-shaped hill barely more than a mile away. “There! Dead ahead!”
Douglas changed the radio frequency and contacted Michael by his call sign, Archangel. There was no answer. He called again, and Michael’s voice came through the static of his field radio.
“Archangel, I’ve got the mortars spotted! At the base of a hill southeast of the strip! Do you see it? Looks like a pyramid! Do you see it?”
“No! Give me an azimuth, give me the range!”
“Roger. Fitz, I’m gonna need you. Keep your eyes on this”—he motioned at the compass on the overhead panel—“and give me the bearing when I ask for it.”
Turning again, they skimmed the ridgetop and sliced across the runway, the Gulfstream’s nose aimed straight at the hill.
“Okay, now.”
Fitzhugh squinted at the instrument, a strange dry taste in his mouth, as if he’d been sucking on the tip of a lead pencil, a quivering in his legs. He couldn’t think.
“Give me the fucking bearing, goddamn it!”
The hill loomed larger in the windshield, a tall mound of jumbled rocks and grass the color of a lion’s mane.
“One-fifty . . . one-fifty-five. Yes, one-fifty-five.”
Douglas’s glance flicked to the compass the moment before he hauled back on the yoke to clear the hill’s peak. Something metallic glinted through sun-scorched trees fringing a wadi a few hundred feet below.
“Archangel, Archangel. Bearing one-five-five, range three thousand meters. Did you read that?”
Static.
“Archangel, do you read me? Bearing one-five-five, range three-zero-zero.”
Michael answered and repeated the information.
“Fire a marking round, tell me when you’ve shot, and I’ll try to adjust from up here,” Douglas said, then made another turn, an airborne hairpin that brought a tug of G-forces.
“What’s happening? What’s going on?”
“We’re in it, my man, that’s what. We are in the goddamned war!”
Two minutes later, as they orbited the plain, they heard Michael report, “Shot out!”
They circled for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty . . .
Michael called, “Did you spot the round?”
“Negative. Give us one more.”
A pause, then: “Shot out!”
Fitzhugh’s heart leaped when he saw a geyser of dense white smoke somewhere between the hill and the airstrip.
“Archangel, you’re way short!” Douglas said. “You’re