Prince of Peace by James Carroll Page B

rotors kicked up a screen of dirt, and the peasant-riflemen were too agitated to fire accurately.
    At first Maguire thought the helicopter, erratically dropping toward him from the hilltop, had been hit and was about to crash. But then he realized that its jerkiness was evasion, and that it was coming down to snatch Pace and him up.
    Pace was still lost in another time. He had not been hit, though he continued to stand exposed, like a statue. But he was pressing off shot after shot. Maguire took his cue from him. All over the hill the Chinese too were upright, in the open, firing madly in the air, trying to bring down that helicopter. Pace and Maguire picked off one after the other of them. By now more than twenty Reds had been shot and still the brown hill was dotted with them. Maguire's estimate had been off by dozens.
    The helicopter swerved and bounced in midair, as if it were being swung on a cable. A soldier was in the open door braced against the hatch frame, clinging with one hand to the lurching machine and, with the other, firing an automatic pistol down at the Chinese.
    The chopper dropped dangerously and then hovered right above Pace. Pace reacted to it with shock, as if he'd just awakened. The noise and dust were infernal. Only an act of mind made it possible to see the thing as a rescuer, not monster. The skid-railing was just above his head and he could have grabbed it, but at that moment his back snapped in a sharp arc as he took a bullet. His body jerked again as it took another.
    Maguire ran to him.
    Unbelievably, gallantly, the helicopter waited.
    Pace collapsed in Maguire's arms. That was it.
    Maguire looked helplessly up at the man straddling the doorway. Wind tore at him. He was bareheaded and half-bald, naked without his helmet. Perhaps that was why Maguire had not recognized him. He was frantically gesturing with his pistol for Maguire to grab the skid. Only yards separated them.
    Maguire's mind slowed down. Why didn't the man in the chopper jump down and help him save Pace? But that was impossible. Still he stared pleadingly up at him. Don't leave us here! He focused on the soldier's breast insignia off which light glanced. The silver cross. The man who'd been firing from the doorway was Father O'Shea.
    The irony that his violation—his violence—should have so embodied his dedication stunned Michael. This priest would kill for me!
    Michael shook his head and waved them off.
    O'Shea was screaming at him, having dropped the gun and cupped his hands around his mouth, as the helicopter began to ascend. In the noise it was impossible to hear what he was saying, but then O'Shea, priest again, blessed him. Absolution. For an instant Maguire's eyes and the priest's met.
    Michael told me years later that he felt in Father O'Shea's look an absolute affirmation, what he'd come to call, with Rogers, an unconditional positive regard. Michael might have called it by its other name—love—but his history with Father O'Shea was complicated by then. At that moment, though, he experienced the priest's gaze as if it were his dead father's or God's. The transcendence of that sensation, more than the violence around him, made him certain that he was about to die.
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    The helicopter swooped away, leaving behind in the relative silence only the popping of the Chinese guns.
    Even that fell off to nothing as the last echo of the chopper engine faded.
    Maguire listened and listened, but to Pace, not the enemy as it closed on him. He pressed the Italian kid against his own breast, the way he had that baby at the bridge, that rabbit in basic. He listened and listened.
    He could have sworn he heard Pace speak: "You said you wouldn't let them kill me and I believed you."
    But Pace was silence itself.
    When his captors jerked Pace's body out of Maguire's arms, he saw a red mark on Pace's face, the impress of Maguire's own dog tag. He had crushed his buddy's face against it, stamping on the poor bastard's forehead