4
WITH NO ELECTRICITY TO POWER UP THE AUTOMATIC flight control system, the Chinook was barely flyable, but it was flying. Mack started pulling power, and there was no rotor droop. He banked hard right to the southwest and dove down.
Mack had been too preoccupied before this instant to realize what Madden had told him—“There's a guy on the LZ”—and he nearly shouted in the ICS, “What? What did you say?”
“There's a guy on the LZ,” Madden repeated. “One of the team guys is on the LZ.”
“You better be right,” Mack told him.
“I saw him go out.”
Mack said, “All right, guys, we're going back.” He reviewed his options. He had none. He could not leave a man behind, he thought. If he did, he couldn't live with himself.
Jeremy Curran got up on the ICS. “What the hell's going on, sir?” he asked, wondering where they were heading.
Mack told him, “We're going back. There's a guy on the LZ.”
“But the guns don't work.”
“Test-fire 'em.”
Curran and Nutall did, and they did not work.
Mack said, “All right, we're going in anyway. Any complaints?”
“No, sir, let's get him,” came from several points on the ICS.
The bird started to make a sharp teardrop turn in a bank to the right that strained the rivets. Mack gained altitude and leveled off from the first turn, and the cyclic stick in his left hand started pulling away. Then it failed to move. Mack now had a Chinook with no hydraulics, which he compared to driving a car without a key to the ignition.
“I can't move the controls,” he shouted. Everybody knew what that meant. Suddenly, the ICS went quiet.
“Status on the hydraulics?” he asked Madden.
In the back, Madden checked the panel. “Fluid pressure zero, fluid level zero.”
They were flying 2,000 feet over the ground. Mack thought, We're dead. So, this is how it goes?
In the back, Madden stabbed a beer can opener on the end of a string into the top of a quart can of hydraulic fluid that he'd stored just in case in the skeleton of the fuselage, below the maintenance panel. He poured the viscous liquid into an emergency port at his station, and cranked a small handle up and down to feed the fluid into the lines.
Suddenly, the controls sputtered. Mack could move them. He banked to the right, looking through the right side panel window at landmarks below, including the 2-mile-long geological oddity in the middle of the valley that the Americans called “the whale” because of its elongated bulbous shape. He thought, OK, there's the Whale and there's HLZ 15. So the guy who fell out must be over there. He made another turn, completing a circle. They were approaching the peak from the same direction as before. A couple of seconds passed. The controls started pulling again. Mack realized that even if he got the controls back, he could not risk a landing. He had to put the bird down now in a safe place or they would crash. He told the crew, “I can't move controls again. Guys, we're going to abort the rescue.”
As the helicopter was about to skim the ridge and plummet in a controlled crash 2,000 feet to the valley below, Madden looked out, straining his eyes for a sight of the SEAL who'd fallen out. The helo started taking fire again. The enemy was peppering the night sky with tracers. Rounds came in the back of the helo at an upward angle, piercing the ceiling. The helicopter was shaking like it was breaking up. Madden heard the pilot say, “Lost flight control.”
Madden uttered, “Huh?”
Then he saw him. He was running up the saddle in the snow, toward the peak. The muzzle flash on his machine gun was unmistakable. The sight horrified Madden. He was my passenger. He was on my ramp and on my helicopter. And he fell out. A passenger should not fall out of my aircraft. It should never happen. There was nothing I could do. I made the right decisions. It should not have happened.
He envisioned the SEAL watching the helo circle back—the hope at hearing the engines. He had charged up the saddle pushing hard against the knee-deep snow, his lungs burning in the thin cold air, straining to get back on board. In an instant, the helicopter disappeared over the crest, stranding him. The enemy circled him in the dark. He was alone. Madden could feel his despair.