Black Friday by William W. Johnstone Read Free Book Online

aircraft began to spin crazily.
    Jamie fought the controls as they tried to tear themselves out of her hands, using all the skill and strength she had developed during thousands of hours in the air. In the other seat, the co-pilot shouted readings from the instruments.
    The sandy, rocky ground was coming up fast.
    The chopper was still level, though, which was good. If Jamie could stop the spin and get just a little forward momentum, she could set them down without a catastrophic crash. She hoped. There would at least be a chance . . .
    Of course, even if they got on the ground, Taliban fighters would probably be waiting for them.
    She lowered her chin to key the mike strapped to her throat and called in the Mayday, giving headquarters their position. A few fighter planes might be able to keep the enemy off of them long enough for another chopper to get here for an evac.
    If they didn’t . . .
    Well, those soldiers back there had signed up to fight. Looked like they might get their chance a little sooner than they’d expected.
    The spinning slowed. Servomotors whined as they responded to Jamie’s skillful touch. She coaxed a little more stability out of the controls.
    The chopper lurched forward, clearing a pile of jagged rocks by no more than twenty feet. A gentle, sandy slope loomed ahead of the aircraft. Jamie thought she might be able to set it down without too much damage . . .
    Then it tilted with no warning and rammed starboard side first into the ground.
    * * *
    She came up gasping for air, as if she were fighting against a literal tide that threatened to drown her.
    â€œWhoa, honey, take it easy,” her husband Tom told her. “You just dozed off.” He frowned. “Were you dreaming that you were back there again?”
    She sat up in bed. The light on Tom’s side was still on. He’d been reading a paperback Western that he must have set aside when she startled awake. It was sitting facedown on the covers, open to a page about halfway through the book.
    Jamie glanced at the clock. 10:50, it read. She had gone to sleep almost immediately when her head hit the pillow at 10:30, exhausted after a long day of kids and Thanksgiving festivities.
    That meant she had been asleep for twenty minutes. How in the hell could she have had such a detailed dream—or nightmare, to give it its rightful name—in only twenty minutes? In real life the incident hadn’t taken as long as that. Among the ones who had been killed was Master Sergeant Benjamin Farley. He had saved Jamie’s life at least twice, then lost his defending the makeshift stronghold from the enemy. In addition to Jamie, only four soldiers had lived through that fight.
    Various medals had been passed out, some of them posthumously. Jamie had gone home and taken the medical discharge they offered her. She had been on her third tour when she was wounded, so nobody pressed her to stay in.
    Besides, she had a husband and four kids between the ages of eight and seventeen, and she had been away from them long enough already. Somebody else could handle the fighting from here on out.
    That didn’t mean it was easy to leave the past behind, though. A couple of times a month, on average, she had these painfully vivid dreams where she relived that day in the desert. Those rocks were on the other side of the world from her suburban Springfield home, but to her they might as well have been just down the street.
    She pushed the covers back on her side of the bed and said, “I’m taking something.”
    â€œAre you sure that’s a good idea?” Tom asked.
    She swung her legs off the bed and was struck by the asymmetry of them. The right one ended just below the knee. She had assumed she would be used to that by now, but sometimes she wondered if she ever would be.
    The doctors had done a top-notch job all the way around, from the amputation to the rehab to the prosthesis to the therapy that taught her how to get