CHAPTER 10
The C-130 Hercules sitting on the tarmac outside the cargo terminal in Ancona looked like an Angus bull.
Beefy, powerful, belly close to the ground.
The loading ramp at the rear of the four-engine turboprop transport plane was down, and Brenna watched through the glass as a forklift with a pallet of UN ration boxes headed toward it.
“Well, hello there, Brenna.” A blond Canadian Forces sergeant with the thick neck and muscled shoulders of a life-long hockey player stepped up to the counter where she and Grace waited to check in.
“Lorrie,” she said.
He flashed his capped front teeth.
Brenna slid her UNPROFOR-issued press card and passport across the countertop. Grace followed suit.
“It’s been a while, eh?” Lorrie said, taking Grace’s paperwork while continuing his conversation with Brenna. “Not the usual in-and-out visit to Italy. Some of the lads were betting you’d decided not to come back—given in to the lure of hot showers.”
“And not being shot at,” she said. “Almost as good as hot showers.”
Lorrie stamped Brenna’s papers and slid them back to her.
“Is Sami around?” Brenna tucked the documents into the right side pocket of her cargo pants.
He nodded out the window toward the Hercules. “Loading those last two wooden crates.”
She followed his gaze. “Thanks.” She turned, picked up her bags, and left Grace to finish checking in.
Lorrie called after her, stopping her at the door. “We’ll radio the Colonel and let him know you’re on your way.”
Brenna pushed the glass door open, and headed across the tarmac. She needed a minute before Grace caught up.
The forklift bee-beeped as it backed down the ramp. The operator glanced up, saw her, and stopped.
“It’s all there?” she asked, holding out her hand in what appeared to be a handshake.
The operator, a swarthy man with two fingers missing from his right hand, smoothly took the roll of bills she handed him, and backed away, turning the vehicle in a semi-circle before putting it into forward gear.
The interior of the Herc was cavernous. With a wingspan in excess of 132 feet, the transport could take off and land on unprepared runways, lift 45,000 pounds, and be configured to move vehicles, cargo, or troops as needed.
Up to 74 stretchers, stacked five-high, could be rigged for medEvac, though at present, only five were installed.
She walked forward to the starboard side to the red web-type seating, and dropped her bag.
“Brenna!”
One of the plane’s two pilots, a thin woman with blazing red hair and fair skin, stood on the port side access stairs up to the flight deck.
“Sarah.”
Women weren’t allowed to fly in war zones, but technically the siege in Kav?ak was merely civil unrest, not a war.
And the mission was humanitarian, not military.
So the fact that they would soon be flying over the most dangerous airspace in the world—airlift planes had been hit by ground fire on more than 200 different occasions, and more than once shot down—was also a technicality.
Sarah looked over Brenna’s shoulder.
Grace joined them.
“Welcome aboard.” She extended a hand. “I’m Captain Flynn.”
Grace shook it warmly. “Grace Alcott.”
“How’s the ground?” Brenna asked. The Kav?ak airport was ringed by anti-aircraft artillery, and paper-based accords for the safe passage of the airlift were often ignored by troops on the ground.
Sarah and her co-pilot would stay as high-altitude as possible until the last possible moment, land at a breathtakingly steep angle, keep the engines running while the transport was unloaded and reloaded, then fly out again. Turnaround time would be ten minutes.
Sarah was no featherweight. Brenna was glad to be flying with her.
“Hot,” Sarah said, responding to Brenna’s question about ground conditions. Her co-pilot squeezed behind her, waving amiably as he took the metal stairs upward.
“Well,” Sarah glanced at her watch. “Let’s go cheat death.”
She disappeared to the flight deck. Shortly afterward, the flight engineer, loadmaster, and navigator came on board and prepared for departure.
The loadmaster, a slender, dark-skinned man of Pakistani descent, checked the pallets were properly strapped to the deck, and handed out foam ear plugs to his passengers.
The ramp rose on smooth hydraulics and locked into place. One by one, each of the four engines kicked on. The noise level rose to a deafening roar. The plane lumbered slowly toward the runway, the pallet tie-down straps vibrating as the aircraft picked up speed.
Brenna had ridden in C-130s many times, but it always amazed her that the gargantuan aircraft could actually lift off the ground.
Once they were aloft and leveled off, she tipped her head back and closed her eyes.
She felt queasy, light-headed, infected by dread.
Shit. She couldn’t believe she was doing this again.
She shouldn’t have come back so soon. Push it away, she warned herself, trying to take a cleansing breath.
What should have been a long, slow invitation of air into her lungs turned into a shuddering rasp.
She expected to feel uneasy, but this was a dissonant tension, like a violin string tightened past harmony to imminent rupture.
This was the worst part, the transition between safety and danger. This was when the insanity of the journey was most evident, like submitting to surgery when nothing was wrong. She wanted to run screaming from the plane, say it was a mistake, and get back to real life.
But that was the curse.
She seemed to be at odds with ordinary life in some fundamental way that precluded connection to it.
She didn’t know what to do with it, or how to hold onto it.
So she kept finding herself on some wretched airplane, doing this all over again.
She frowned, inadvertently giving the struggle behind her eyelids an outward expression.
Pull it together, Rease. This was what she did. It might be madness, but she was good at it. And the fear wasn’t new. She was always scared. It was the uncertainty she hated, the not-knowing what was ahead. Once she hit the ground, she would cope. She always had.
No, she corrected herself. Not always.
A cold sweat bathed her.
The last time she was in Kav?ak, she’d disconnected.
Looked away and missed her photo. She never missed her shot.
And it hadn’t even been that unusual a situation.
A soldier cracking a civilian in the face with the butt of his rifle.
Scarcely worth a picture. But she had flinched, jammed her eyes shut and spun away, covering her exposed ear so she wouldn’t hear the impact.
And then she’d stood there, numb, paralyzed, unable to flee.
The soldier grabbed her and shoved her backwards onto a heap of rubble, bruising her thigh and shoulder.
Looking down at her with eyes as black as a winter’s night, he slowly pressed the tip of the bayonet into her neck.
She was so terrified, she peed her pants.
He laughed and let her go, her humiliation a longer-lasting punishment than death.
She shuddered, her stomach churning. It was a random event. A blip. She could still hold it together.
Right?
A wave of nausea swept through her.
She tossed her seat harness aside and lurched forward, heedless that she’d pushed the strap onto Grace.
She bolted past the pallets to the tiny curtained area that passed for a lavatory.
Inside, she sagged, shaking, over the toilet—a seat bolted to a crude metal canister.
The worst already happened, she kept telling herself.
She lost Ari. Life couldn’t hurt her further.
Get a hold of yourself. You’ll do this job and get out. Three more days, that’s all. It won’t happen again.
Would it?
A clock was ticking somewhere, winding down. The Balkans were going to kill her. That was a given. More journalists had been killed in Kav?ak so far than in all fourteen years of the Vietnam War. She’d risked death for a long time.
The real question was—why did it suddenly disturb her?
Grace looked at the curtained area. Fifteen minutes had passed since Brenna fled there, looking like she was going to toss her cookies.
If Grace had been traveling with anyone else, she would have checked on them by now.
But Brenna wasn’t anyone. If she called at that curtain, Brenna might as easily bite her head off as thank her.
Grace was acting like a chickenshit, afraid of a little snarling.
Alcotts didn’t run from fang-baring. She didn’t stop being who she was because of how Brenna behaved.
It was a matter of basic decency. She unclicked the seat harness and went over.
“Brenna?” She wasn’t sure she could hear her over the roar of the engines. “Are you all right?”
A moment later, the curtain slid open. Brenna appeared, chalky white, with a haze of sweat on her forehead. “I’m fine,” she mouthed, and stepped past her.
Watching her weave back toward her seat, Grace decided she wasn’t. She went forward, found the loadmaster and shouted over the engine, pointing to the case of bottled water beside him.
Brenna sat with her elbows on her knees, head between her hands, fingers laced through her hair, staring at her boots. She was unnaturally still, breathing as if she were afraid of breaking.
Grace crouched in front of her. “Here.” She cracked open the bottle cap. “Water.”
Brenna lifted her head and gazed at the bottle as if it were a thousand miles away.
Grace took her right hand, guided it around the bottle, and helped her lift it to her lips. She was trembling and clammy, but drank eagerly.
“Are you ill?”
She shook her head.
“Airsick?”
“Lay off,” she snapped. “I’m all right. I’ll be fine on the ground.”
Fine on the ground?
Grace left the water in her hand, took her seat, and sat back, stunned.
It was fear.
Brenna Rease was sick with fear.