As he rolled aboard, the chopper thundered forward and converted to upward lift. Here and there, bursts of wind and rain gusted and pushed harshly against the aircraft. A sudden bank to the west and he knew they over were over the ocean itself.. then running downwind .. probably not much more than 100 feet off the surface. They'd soon push for as much elevation as they could muster, then cut across the island if the fading storm allowed. Or they'd round the bottom and skirl back up to Vancouver, no doubt in the heaviest of rain. It was always so when such big weather rolled in off the Pacific.
He looked around him .. and nodded lightly at the smiling crew chief that watched him orient and collect thoughts and memories of many many chopper dustoff's. The chief lightly touched his helmet mike and gave the universal OK ? symbol. Hunter nodded again and heard the chief break through the headset.
"Got one Hunter Walker back here, a bit, a lot.. bigger than I'd thought Winston .. seems kinda harmless though, actually .. looks downright almost friendly to me.."
"You're sure about that Chief .. its the Hunterman back there? Say back, confirm.. Base Ops is all over this pickup and delivery."
"Sure as bears live in the woods .. helped wrassle him aboard myself and he said some kinda heavy duty Navajo mumbo jumbo .. and now he's here lookin at me like I'm some kinda freakin god or something. Maybe even thinking I'm good to eat. Not sure Winnie.. looks awful scary dangerous in a nice n friendly way .."
'Well ... send him up here.. maybe handcuff him or something first, but straighten him out in your own special way.. and get him shipshape. We're going to stay low, scoot south a bit real fast, look for cleaner, lighter air then take a heading due east."
"Uh, roger that, skipper .. not sure about shipshape. Looks pretty damn straight back here.. real shipshape and buttoned down."
"Well send him on up when he has his shit in one bag, so we can all meet the Hunter .... got sit-rep for him!"
Hunter cuffed the chief lightly on the shoulder with a smile from dark eyes, and turning real low, suddenly stepped through the short passageway to the cockpit.. lightly tapping the pilot's shoulder.
"Hey !! What..! Uh oh.. hi there, well, ah.. Hunter, Sir. You're headed into another real clusterfuck ... a dirty, tangled scene, that's what I hear."
'Some are dude .. Winnie Winston. and I'm not sir to you any more, sir. I'm civilian.. just Hunter Walker of the Fast Horse clan.. New Mexico territory, and a real pleasure to ride with you.' A large hand was extended forward and the pilot turned quickly.
'I'm sorry, Winston Fullbright the 3rd.. and over there, 1st officer Mary Blackcrow. This night flying just takes the manners right out of us and my apologies. Caught your orders about an hour ago.. special RCMP request via Coast Guard and bumped up to RCAF.. us....and here we all are."
A vicious downdraft put all aboard into a weightless state but the scout seemed not to notice and neither did the aircrew. He was pushed hard into the co-pilot as the chopper finally bit air and leapt wickedly to starboard
"Appreciated much Winston the 3rd, RCAF... officer Blackcrow, RCAF, nice to meet you.. and any sitrep you could tell me ..?"
The pilot left control of the buffeting aircraft to his female co-pilot without concern and looked to the legendary man leaning in between them..
"A week's head start you're up against, and this lunatic was spotted again. At a service center west of the Alberta border. He's heavily armed, highly capable.. trained by the very best... has a young female hostage.. or so a note he left behind would indicate and he sounds really messed up."
"Well .. seems I need to catch his sign, meet up with him, collect his hostage and the proper authorities can speak to him afterwards if he wants. Not so complicated, though I have to do this fastest."
The chief broke in from the cabin .. 'I heard its an east mountain man you're after, just a kid.. won't leave much trail, if any. Sounds like he's snapped, took the girl in Seattle and seems he's a wicked mean handful.. a Scout shooter they say. Was overseas, did Afghan tours, was in Iraq too. Don't sound like a man that's made for much talking afterwards. Hillbilly folk you know... but no offense meant.'
Hunter thought on this and suggested that every person had their footprint and way of being .. but that sometimes they had to be met and talked with about their actions. If they were truly against the path of the elders, there was need for them to be offered help from the tribe. Was this not so ? He asked.
There was a quietness aboard the craft .. It was a strange concept to get a hold of.. then the intercom chattered with a new voice... "Bear Country One... Alpha Wave base ops here, you read?" A quick exchange about the onboard passenger followed, then updated orders, and a new flight path was noted onto the pilot's kneeboard quickly .
"There's all sorts of legends about you Hunter .. care to tell us of one? You were Special Forces right ? Seems we have a ways to run you tonight."
"Oh .. I've had a few situations turn out all right .. got the scent.. worked with it.. and things worked out just fine."
The chief's voice cut through again.. gently chiding that surely there was more to it than that.. and Hunter's response was that sometimes there had been tough or puzzling tracks, even unpleasant, that was true. But the chief held that a tough response was what it took some times, to set things straight .. or right.
Hunter thought on the idea for a moment.. then agreed it was true. It was so. The chief ventured that an old story surrounding Hunter, held that he'd iced two gunmen in a Victoria bank, barehanded. Hunter pointed out that they had guns held on hostages and had killed two already.. so his meeting with them had been very short and without much useful conversation. Unfortunately the kidnappers did not survive the meeting, though all the remaining hostages had.
After some silence, the co-pilot asked after his family and was rewarded with a complete and detailed answer.. and a request for a sense of her clan and Blackcrow family. Huron from Ontario he heard, with extreme interest. They were certainly a highly renowned and mystically strong woodland tribe that had many many legends surrounding them. Ate the hearts of vanquished enemies, if he was not mistaken.
The chief was not to be denied and disrupted Hunter's revervie on the eating of body parts in warpoint however.. he probed more bluntly about just how Hunter had managed to somehow surprise or take down the armed kidnappers in the bank.
"They were careless and had wrong ideas in their heads .. It was about money taken by violence and they weren't ready for reality. So I had to speak for reality .. They went down together.. surprised and dead.
"Were you going in there with the idea it would go bad Hunter?"
"No" ... he said in a quiet tone... "they were just too far gone.. not connected to the path at all and they shot at me wildly when I spoke to them. Then I had to move against them and they fell hard while I moved among them. I cleared folks from the bank to the street, as they were in shock and then I came back to see to them, but they were gone. The two of them.. my place is with the living... not the dead... and so I let them be."
The aircrew fell silent, though all the while executing flight operations with sure and confident direction. They wondered at the unspoken idea though, that this man could find and take down armed hard cases without a weapon. And there was a balance, and a kind of sadness in how he spoke of the situations.. and the crew felt the man was in a mood to talk, but he seemed more interested in all of their experiences and light banter.. and ... he seemed to have an innate sense of each and every mountain pass they slipped through on their way eastward.
The big man touched their shoulders lightly and slipped back toward the light glow of the chief's tiny workstation.
'You got backchannel poop for me Chief? About this hillbilly Scout kid? What's the scuttlebutt or whatever you flyboys call it. I know you're tapped into it all.. you're a chief sergeant and have the look about you."
'You got a mighty remarkable and sharp nose for things Hunter Walker.. and maybe you can make some sense of what I hear through the backdoor. There's some sort of Master Gunny up country Afghanistan, told another Gunny a kid in his company had been reported missing in the high country during a solo op. The rest of the chatter I hear is muddled, that the Gunny's not happy at all, pissed even. The MP's interviewed him real hard about the MIA and there's SF colonels on the ground now. Impression I get is.. and it's a faint one.. the kid aint missing, he took off and disappeared, seems he has a talent for making hiself invisible along with his gunwork and maybe he headed home or somewhere's where he had kin.'
'Chief.. you're just a breath of fine mountain air. You got all this intel from your homie sarges.. lay it on me and now you're sitting there holding out. I know there's far more you're holding from me. And.. now you know, that I know this!'
'Well sure, there's more Hunter.. always is in the military. But like I say.. things get garbled, passin from one mouth to another. I'm just a gunny was passed some of the story, don't want to muddle it further, Hunter. Just seems there was a call for some help or mebbe more of a back channel alert and you know what I mean. So all the Gunny's are spooked, an in country Top is even more spooked, or better said riled up, a serious gun that's tied into this clusterfuck has gone down the mountain AWOL, MIA, whatever.. and your name was mentioned it seems from what I've heard."
'A Top Sergeant, spooked, you say. In country and talking back channel. A missing Scout... MIA even!"
Hunter closed his eyes and sought his vision in the Afghan mountains. Slowly it resolved and he shaped a visual sense of a Gunny Sergeant messaging one of his opposite numbers in a different company or even at Base Ops. It would have to be a crucial leadership or command issue, a failure or other weakness in the company chain of command for such a wild communication and alert to take place. If his name was involved somehow or in any way, it reflected some sort of extreme reaction. It made it personal to him and the messenger had claimed this need.
The missing Scout had been tied into the back channel messaging, clearly. Hunter let a series of images drift past for review.. then sharpened the brief images and ran it again inside his thoughts. The AWOL Scout had made a radical egression, invisibly made it off mountain, jumped trans-ocean to onshore USA, made the west coast, kidnapped a girl, entered Canada.. armed himself, left huge clues.. and was quickly mobile eastward.. all unseen. Then the crafty Canuck Mounties had ID'd him and then sighted him three times within twelve hours. Let himself be seen at a gas station this punk shooter had.. really. That was interesting. Had he walked up to a camera and not noticed it?
He refined and reviewed the play in his head several times. Sign came to him quickly. Or rather, points in space and time where the AWOL young Scout must have had some sort of free pass and assistance.. and left his footprint.
It was actually easy for Hunter to create a visual and highly rich playback in his thoughts. Since he'd been there and done the Afghan on several tours himself.. he simply played a scenario of himself deciding for some strange reason, to have to get to Seattle ASAP. Get off the Afghan mountain immediate, Hard priority, no avoidance, imperative/now just do it level of need. This would be driven by Family, Friend, Corps crisis/emergency level or simply have a similar weight.
A brilliantly smart missile, this Scout sniper had been launched at remote high mountain rebels in Afghanistan and now had somehow howled into the airspace near Banff, Alberta in Canada, five days later. Really ? This kid had just peeled back off the high passes and rolled down to a local airfield, made at least two connected flights, passed US Customs, got feet dry in the U S of A.. crossed it, made Seattle, scooped a hostage and crossed the border. All this while his troop thought he was just hunkered on a shrieking windswept mountainside in hammering rain and sleet with a scary powerful gun and very, very sharp eyes.
It was some sort of passion play he decided thoughtfully. Some sort of convoluted WhiteMan confusion or prejudice that as usual crashed hard and cruelly on certain individuals. Wide collateral damage not a problem and any injuries free of charge. Your typical American ClusterFuck. A Custer's Last Stand.. minus the Redskins.. He refined it all in his thoughts again, searched for the sign. Found it. Studied it. Sign was always found where people passed by, and this shooter either had his passport on his person while on Ops and against regulation, or went back to a firebase for his passport then went AWOL or had a ticket to ride from someone very influential..
Just for fun he created and played the physical checkpoints that came to life in the way it had to have been played out and added his internal impression of John Madden doing the color commentary. See how it was supposed to be a dive play.. but it got all plugged up and he bumped it out laterally, went wide.. see, there, Bam.. he gets a key block, a bit of hold-up and can turn the corner.. turn on the jets.. so now its... can anybody catch him..? He's just so fast and its open field.
His thoughts turned further inwards...
This kid did not cross the Atlantic or enter an American Airport on a commercial flight or line up for USA Customs. No, he went backdoor and military.. and that required orders, implied military execution and efficiency, and a complete bypass of airport civilian processes. This would be Top level Gunny intrigue and machinations. He settled his chin on his chest after a wink to the crew chief.
Hours later, the chopper swept down from the darkness onto a hospital pad in Golden, British Columbia. Hunter thanked the aircrew quickly then rolled out the waist hatch reflecting on their interested and probing conversations. An armed RCMP officer held tightly onto her holster and hat and bent under the howling downblast of the helicopter as it surged off into the night then led him quickly to an unmarked RCMP cruiser.