Prologue #2
The valley opened like a curtain, revealing frozen rice paddies laid out in neat rectangles lined by low berms. Jackie trimmed the throttle, letting the L-5 move into a steady glide.
She couldn’t shake the grimness of the sergeant’s warning from her thoughts.
She had to keep his words close in her head, guiding her every action.
Tracks where there shouldn’t be tracks.
Locals clearing out.
The men can feel it.
She could feel it, too.
She scanned the valley floor with broad sweeps first, then narrow focus. No smoke. No figures. No glint of metal. But her gut insisted something was wrong.
The paddies were too still. Too empty. She’d only been in Korea a short time, but already she’d seen farmers tending to broken dikes or checking ice thickness.
Today, there was nothing. Not a soul. Not a dog. Not a cart. Just the faint grid of frozen mud and the thin footpaths threading between them.
She banked slightly to the left, giving herself a better angle of the far side of the valley. The sun hit the snow at a slant, throwing long shadows from the tree line.
Then, a dark shape appeared, tucked against one of the berms—too straight to be natural, too sharp-edged to be a rock. A broken fence post?
She leaned forward, squinting through the cockpit’s windshield. The shape evolved into something longer, lower. Several parallel lines. Like the barrels of rifles laid flat in the snow.
Her pulse kicked. She dipped a wing, just enough to circle without losing altitude. The shapes didn’t move, but the shadows around them did—subtle, like figures crouched low, waiting.
Her training had taught her not to assume, but her gut told her the sergeant had been right.
Heart thudding, she made another slow pass. A flicker of movement snared her attention—something small, quick, near the tree line. A flash of pale fabric? A person ducking? Or just a branch shifting in the wind?
She couldn’t tell for sure.
But she knew one thing. If Charlie Company’s FO team was somewhere in this valley, they needed to know what she was seeing. Even if she wasn’t completely convinced.
The relay from Base Operations would take too long. Talking to the FO team directly was fastest. More important. She reached for the Army radio handset, her fingers stiff with cold and nerves.
“Courier Two to Charlie Company FO Team,” she said, voice steady. “I think I’ve got something. Eastern valley, north end of the paddies. Footprints and depressions near the tree line. Stationary. No sign of reinforcements. Can you copy?”
It only took a moment.
“Copy that. Adjusting course.” The soldier’s voice curled around her. Low, calm, trusting.
She circled once more. If there was an enemy patrol down there, they hadn’t moved. Everything looked quiet. Too quiet, maybe, but she couldn’t second-guess what she couldn’t see.
She circled again, triple-checking to be positive. No one, nothing, had moved in ten minutes. She marked the position on her map and relayed it.
“Charlie Team, proceed east. Path is clear.”
His voice came through again—unmistakably strong under pressure. “Copy that. Moving.”
She pulled back the L-5’s yoke to climb out of the valley. Until movement flickered within the trees. The sun glinted off metal. Lots of metal, and her stomach dropped.
“Charlie Team, hold position!” she shouted into the mic. “Repeat, hold! Enemy movement—”
Static buried her voice. Desperate to warn them, she swerved lower. The tree line erupted, not with a small patrol, but with an entire platoon rising from camouflage. A dozen soldiers poured down the slope, rifles raised, moving with terrifying precision.
“Charlie Team, retreat! Retreat!” she shouted.
He didn’t answer, but she saw them—a squad of three men scrambling for cover. One of them, tall and broad-shouldered, still held the radio. He turned and yelled orders, pushing his men toward a rock outcrop.
A mortar screamed through the air and hit the ground, blasting the men forward, filling the valley with a spray of snow and smoke. The tall soldier staggered to his feet, no longer holding the radio, powerless against the enemy troops surging around them. Blood streamed down his right cheek.
One of the Korean soldiers closed the distance separating them and forced him down, driving his body into the snow, wrenching his arms behind him.
Another Korean lowered a knee to his back and groped around the collar of his coat.
A quick jerk, and a tiny image of metal flew sideways, landing in snow.
Both soldiers jerked the American back to his feet again.
The other two men of Charlie Team were already down—one limp, one struggling weakly as he was forced to his knees. The dark shapes closed around them, swallowing them whole.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
“No, no, no!” she screamed.
She dived lower to draw fire from the enemy, to distract them, to do something. Rifles lifted toward her, tearing the air with their bullets.
One ripped through her wing, another hit the cowling, and the L-5 lurched violently.
She fought the controls, hoping, praying the engine wouldn’t die.
Until it did. Her plane dropped fast, clipped a tree, and slammed into the frozen, snowy ground, throwing her hard against the door.
Pain exploded through her left shoulder.
How long she’d blacked out, she couldn’t know.
Even after coming to, the crash kept her dazed, floundering to recover, and she clawed herself back with a moan.
Fingers fumbling, she unclipped her belt and twisted in her seat, desperate to find any sign of the Charlie Team.
Of the tall, broad-shouldered soldier, especially.
They were gone. The enemy, too. All of them, disappeared into the shadows of the rocks and tree line, swallowed up by the eastern valley.
Jackie groped for the radio and called Base Ops, reporting the crash and the capture of Charlie Team.
She choked out the coordinates and ended the transmission with nothing left to do but wait for the H-5 helicopter to arrive.
On a half sob, she pushed open the door and tumbled out of the L-5. She ran, stumbling and awkward in the snow, in desperate search for bodies or blood. Any sign of life of the three Americans she had tried to help.
She found none.
But something small glinted in the snow, so small she nearly missed it.
A ball chain with two dog tags, tangled together.
Her throat closed, her eyes welled, and she knelt, fingers trembling, and reverently lifted the dog tags from the snow. She pulled the end of her white scarf from inside her leather jacket, and gently, as if the metal were priceless gold, she wiped away the snow.
Archer, Beckett J.
More information was there… service number, blood type, religion... but her eyes blurred from the tears streaming down her cheeks.
All that mattered was his name.
Beckett Archer.
The enemy had humiliated him.
They knew that without his tags, he was nobody.
Without his tags, he was already half-dead.
Jackie forced herself to breathe. She would never forget Beckett Archer. He would always be somebody.
Not just the man and his team, the three men she had failed.
She pulled her scarf from around her neck and draped the strip of silk across her palm. After laying his dog tags on top, she rolled them over and over into a thick wad, protecting them. Saving them. Afterward, she tucked the precious bundle inside her blouse, next to her heart.
The steady whump-whump-whump of the helicopter blades drawing closer into the valley lifted her to her feet. Filled her with relief. And hope.
Somehow, eventually, Beckett Archer and his men would be found, rescued by the country they served.
She could only pray that they were still alive when they did.