Read Run for Free Online Page A

through an otherwise dark head of hair.
    Skunk Man , he thought.
    The memories he had suppressed hit him with the force of an anvil dropped from the Empire State Building, cracking the sidewalks of his mind.  He staggered, almost falling from the chopper before one of the other Berets caught him.  John’s mouth opened and shut, but no sound came out.  Words floated back to him.
    Daddy’s got a booger.
    Skunk Man.
    John stared at the man, who stared back, and for a moment John remembered what had happened.  He remembered his father being killed.  He remembered why he himself hadn’t died. 
    He remembered his father standing and walking after having his head blown off.
    Then he blinked and the memories were gone again, fled behind whatever wall had protected his sanity for these years.  John looked at the serviceman in the other chopper.  At the stranger.  At the Skunk Man.  John did not remember anything after seeing the Skunk Man on his sidewalk on the morning his father died, but that memory was now as clear and clean as a pristine photograph in an album.  John remembered the Skunk Man.
    The man looked the same.  Not close, but exactly the same.  Twenty years hadn’t aged the man, nor had his expression changed.  There was nothing to show that he had passed through twenty years and more.  He might have stepped right out of John’s memory as a perfect reproduction of himself, and John wondered just what the hell was happening to him.
    John would have dived right out of the chopper then, leaping for the other helicopter’s strut - a suicidal move - had not one of the Pave Low navigators clacked a carabiner to his belt, securing him to the deck.  The navigator reached out to slide shut the side door.
    "No!" screamed John.
    He pushed the man aside, his total attention still focused on the man.  On Skunk Man, who had been on his street when his father died.  Who had been there and looked exactly the same.
    Then the Black Hawk exploded.
    John saw the white contrail of a hand-held rocket - probably black market Russian hardware - an instant before it hit.  The small missile streaked through the open side hatch of the Black Hawk, and then there was a tiny snatch of fire, almost pitiful really, followed by a great gout of yellow and red flame.  The incendiary tongue licked forth, singeing John’s hair, as the Black Hawk exploded from the inside out, the machine dying along with its crew in an instant.  Blackened machinery and the charcoal corpses of the vehicle’s occupants fell the short distance to the ground, exploding outward in a wash of shrapnel that sent the Iraqis scurrying for cover.
    "No!" John screamed again.  He wasn’t sure if he screamed for the loss of the chopper and its firepower, his friends who had been in it, the men piloting the saving machine...
    Or for the loss of the man.
    Skunk Man.
    The Pave Low pilot pulled back on the yoke, and the chopper jerked high into the sky as though yanked by a great hand.  Bullet fire continued to snap below them, the sounds growing thinner as the chopper ascended, until finally they were gone, lost in the endless desert where half of John’s friends would remain forever, molded and joined to the helicopter that had come to save them.
    The trip back to base camp was uneventful.  The Pave Low kept below radar level, easily following the contours of the earth.  The land rolled below them like a sandy sea dotted with bits of scrub that had somehow divined the secret of eking a life out of the death of the desert.  John glanced at the pilot from time to time, noting how seamlessly the man moved with the machine, how melded they were, as if there was no chopper and no man, but only a weird hybrid of both.  Then his eyes closed, and fear and terror fell away from him like a rush of water from a waterfall, leaving him dry and suddenly sleepy. 
    When the return trip ended, he asked the Pave Low pilot and a few others on base about the Black Hawk crew,