Razor's Edge d-3

by Dale Brown

  Not that anyone aboard was going to object.

  The aircraft started to slow abruptly, a signal that it was getting ready to change from horizontal to vertical flight.

  “Get ready!” yelled Danny.

  Powder and Liu were crouched near the door. They had their smart helmets as well as their vests, M-4s, a medical sack, and grenades. The Marines were standing along the side behind them, one private holding an M-16, the sergeant and the other with Squad Automatic Weapons, light machine guns whose bullets could tear through an engine block at close range.

  “I miss the Pave Low,” said Powder as they began stuttering toward the ground. “Cement mixer smoother than this.”

  “Pave Lows are for wimps,” barked the Marine sergeant. “You need a Marine aircraft.”

  Powder’s curse-laden retort was drowned by a sudden surge from the engines as the Osprey whipped to the side and then shot up. All Danny could see out the window was a sheer cliff.

  “We don’t have contact with the pilot yet, but we’re only two minutes out!” shouted the copilot from the flight deck. “Area is hot!”

  “Just the way I like my pussies,” yapped the gunnery sergeant.

  Chapter 56

  Aboard Quicksilver, over Iraq 1654

  Zen tossed flares and curled the Flighthawk to the right, jinking away from the shoulder-launched SAM.

  The fact that he was actually sitting nearly 25,000 feet higher than the Flighthawk was of little comfort to him; he flew as if he could feel the missile’s breath on his neck.

  More flares, a roll, hit the gas — the U/MF zipped within inches of a cliff wall before dashing into the clear beyond the row of mountains forming the valley.

  “Missile self-detonated,” said Ferris, monitoring the situation from the flight deck. “You’re clear, Hawk leader.”

  “Hawk leader. Thanks, guys.”

  “He’s not on the air,” said Habib.

  “Yeah,” said Ferris. “We’re still clear on Guard.”

  “Maybe it was a decoy,” suggested Bree. “Trying to ambush.”

  “Maybe.” Zen pushed back in his seat, scanning his instruments as he got his bearings. Fuel was starting to get a bit low. He had only two flares left. Full load of combat mix in the cannon, at least.

  “The Iraqi’s transmitting again. He’s on the move,”

  said Habib.

  “Helicopter is ninety seconds away,” said Bree.

  “Better hold the helo at sixty seconds, if he can,” said Zen. “I’m going to try following our friend in the vehicle.”

  He circled back toward the north end of the valley, dropping back to three thousand feet. He saw a rift to his right, glanced quickly at the sitrep or bird’s-eye view to make sure it led to the valley, then whipped into it. As he came through he pushed downward but nudged back power.

  “Iraqi is off the air,” said Habib.

  “Another flare,” said O’Brien.

  This time Zen saw it, about a mile on his left, ten yards at most from the dirt road. He still couldn’t see the vehicle.

  “All right — I got something,” he said as he saw movement on the road. “Computer, frame the object moving on the rocks.”

  Before the computer could acknowledge, he saw a brown bar of soap turn off the road.

  “I think I see our guy in the rocks. Nailing this truck first,” said Zen. By the time the words were out of his mouth, he’d already squeezed the trigger to fire.

  Chapter 57

  Aboard Dreamland Osprey, over Iraq 1700

  The nose of the Osprey bucked upward and the whap of the rotors went down an octave as it cleared a rift in the hills. The pilot had just kicked up the throttle, nearly tripling its speed, but to Danny Freah the sudden change in momentum made it feel as if it had slowed down. Powder and Liu clutched their rifles. Danny realized how much he missed the smart helmet — no map, no real-time view of the battlefield. But much more important, he’d jumped aboard with only his personal handguns — a service Beretta in his holster, and a small hideaway Heckler & Koch P7 M13 strapped to his right ankle. That meant no MP-5 with its target scope slaved to his helmet; he didn’t even have his HK Mark 23 SOCOM with its laser pointer and thick silencer.

  There was something to be said for the good old-fashioned feel of the Beretta in his palm. He took it from his holster as the MV-22 skittered forward, and peered through the window on his right at a narrow furrow of gray and black smoke.

  “Flighthawk!” Liu yelled to him over the whine of the GE turboshafts.

  Danny saw it too — a small white wedge twisted through the air about fifty yards away, red bursting from its chin as if it were on fire. It figured that Zen and the others would be in the middle of this.

  Standard combat air rescue doctrine called for rescue aircraft to remain at forward bases until definitive contact was made with a downed airman. Occasionally, those procedures were relaxed to deal with difficult situations — on several attempted rescues during the Gulf War helicopters had actually waited inside Iraq during searches. But they were really freelancing here — according to what the copilot said, Quicksilver had heard the pilot but not seen him. They were listening to Iraqi units search, and had been fired upon.

  Definitely could be a trap.

  “Downed airman is near the road, near a truck they’re smoking!” yelled the copilot. “We got a spot to land right next to it. We’re going for it.”

  “They talk to him?” shouted Danny.

  “Negative, sir. They’re sure, though. Hang on!”

  “Okay, ladies!” yelled the Marine sergeant, moving toward the door. In the next moment, the Osprey pitched sharply, pirouetting around and descending in nearly the same motion, dropping so quickly that for a half second Danny thought they’d been hit. Then there was a loud clunk and he knew they’d been hit. But they were on the ground, it was time to go, go — he fought back a sliver of bile and lurched toward the door behind his men as the door kicked down.

  The Osprey settled harshly onto the uneven surface of the scratch road. Danny was the fifth man out. An acrid smell stung his nose; the Flighthawk had smoked a pickup truck, which was burning nearby.

  “Yo, Marines — my guys on point! Whiplash on fucking point!” yelled Danny. It wasn’t a pride thing — it made much more sense to have the people with the body armor in the lead. The Marines finally caught on, or maybe they just grew winded as Liu and Powder motored past.

  So where the hell was their guy?

  The Flighthawk whipped overhead and wheeled to the right, then shot straight upward about three hundred yards away. But it wasn’t until the plane rolled and dove back down that Danny realized Zen was trying to put them on the downed pilot.

  “There! There!” he shouted, pointing. “Powder, your right. Right! Right!”

  No way the pilot didn’t hear the Osprey. So why wasn’t he jumping up to greet them?

  They had to clamber over a twenty-foot-wide rock slide before finally reaching their man. As he cleared the rocks, Danny saw the pilot sprawled on the ground, his radio lying smashed on the rocks. Powder was just getting to him; Liu was a few yards behind Danny.

  Powder threw back his helmet and put his head down in front of the pilot’s face. Danny noticed a black stain on the pilot’s right pant leg; congealed blood.

  “Breathing. Shit, I thought he’d fucking bought it,”

  said Powder. “Hit by something.”

  Liu threw his medical kit in front of him as he slid close. He glanced quickly over the pilot’s body, then reached into his pack for the quick-inflate stretcher. He pulled a wire loop and held onto the side as compressed air exploded into the honeycombed tubes. Liu took a pair of titanium telescoping rods from the underside of his go-bag, then propped the stretcher on rocks next to the stricken man.

  As they moved him to the stretcher, a second radio fell from his hand. His face had been bruised badly during the ejection, and his right hand burned; besides the leg there were no other outw
ard signs of injury. Liu had his enhanced stethoscope out, getting vitals. The stethoscope had a display screen that could be used to show pulse rate and breathing patterns; intended for battle situations where it might be difficult to hear, the display also helped convey important information quickly to a full team. The downed airman’s heart beat fifty-six times a minute; his breathing code was yellow — halfway between shallow and normal.

  “Leg’s busted,” said Nurse. “Compound fracture.” He checked for a concussion by looking for pupil reaction, then listened to make sure the pilot’s lungs were clear.

  “Cut by something, but if it was a bullet, it just grazed him. Looks like that’s the worst of it. Not too much blood lost. Cold, maybe hypothermia. He’ll make it.”

  Powder jumped up and trotted a few feet away, scooping something up from the rocks. “Pencil flares. Musta meant to shoot ’em, then the bad guys came.”

  “Grab the radio and let’s get,” Danny told him.

  Nurse secured the pilot with a series of balloon restraints, as much for cushioning as a precaution against back and spinal injuries. Danny took the back end of the stretcher and together they began making their way to the Osprey.

  The Marine sergeant met them about halfway.

  “Let’s go, ladies!” he shouted. “Uh, you too, Captain.

  Something big’s kicking up some dirt up the road. Your pilot’s starting to get some twists in his underwear.”

  Chapter 58

  Aboard Quicksilver, over Iraq 1655

  Zen pitched the Flighthawk back south when he noticed the three vehicles leaving the village on the dirt road. He was moving too fast to target them.

  “Vehicles on the highway, coming out of the village,”

  Zen told Breanna. “Alert the Osprey. I’m rolling on them.”

  “You sure they’re not civilians?” asked Breanna.

  “What do you want me to do, ask for license and registration?”

  “I don’t want you to splash civilians,” said Breanna.

  “Hawk leader,” he said.

  Zen didn’t want to kill civilians either, but he wasn’t about to take any chances with his people on the ground.

  The rules of engagement allowed him to attack anything that appeared to be a threat. He tucked Hawk One into a shallow dive, angling toward the lead truck. When it came up fat in the crosshairs, he fired.

  One of the most difficult things to get used to about flying the robot plane in combat was the fact that the cannon provided no feedback, no shake, no sound. The pipper changed color to indicate the target was centered, and blackened into a small star when the gun was fired — that was it. He couldn’t feel the momentum-stealing vibration or the quick shudder as the gun’s barrels spun out their lead. But at least he could see the results of his handiwork: the lead vehicle, a four-door pickup truck with three or four men in the back, imploded as the bullets split it neatly in two. He nudged his nose upward and found the second truck, this one a more traditional military troop carrier; a long burst caught the back end but failed to stop it. Zen broke right, regrouping; as he circled west he saw the Osprey on the ground two or three miles away.

  It had been hit. Black smoke curled from one of the engines. Zen tore his eyes away, looked for a target.

  The third vehicle, another pickup, left the roadway, spitting along the riverbank. Zen swooped in on it from behind, lighting his cannon as the letters on the rear gate of the pickup came into focus. His first shell got the circle on the second O in Toyota; his next two nailed something in the rear bed. After that he couldn’t tell what he hit — the truck disappeared into a steaming cloud of black, red, and white. Zen flew through the smoke — he was now down to fifty feet — and had to shove himself hard left to avoid running into the Osprey, which despite the damage was lifting off, albeit slowly. As he came back toward the road, he realized the second truck he’d hit had stopped to let out its passengers. They were spreading out in the sand, taking up firing positions. He double-clutched, then put his nose on the clump closest to the MV-22 and pulled the trigger. His bullets exploded in a thick line across the dirt; he let off the last of his flares as he came over them, hoping to deke any shoulder-launched SAMs.

  “Osprey is away,” Breanna was saying. “Osprey is away.”

  “Hawk leader acknowledges. Osprey is away. They okay?”

  “Pressman says he lost an engine but he’ll get back before Boston wins the Series.”

  “Yeah, well, that could be a century from now at least.”

  Zen continued to climb, flying east of the mountains, well out of range of anything on the ground, before easing back on the throttle and looking for Quicksilver.

  “Fuel on ten minute reserve,” warned the computer.

  “Hawk leader to Quicksilver,” said Zen. “Bree, I need to tank.”

  * * *

  While Zen brought the Flighthawk up to twenty thousand feet for refueling, Breanna polled her crew, making sure they were prepared to resume the search for the SA-2 radar. O’Brien and Habib seemed to be champing at the bit, riding the high from having located the pilot and helping rescue him. Chris Ferris was his usual cautious self, advising her on fuel reserves and shortened flight times, but nonetheless insisting they should carry on with the mission.

  Zen was all for continuing. He’d fly the Flighthawks down closer to the ground, using the video input to check on any radio sources, and look for buildings big enough to house a laser. Jennifer Gleason, working on her sensor coding in between monitoring the Flighthawk equipment, as usual was almost oblivious to what was going on, agreeing to keep at it with a distracted, “Shit, yeah.”

  The normal procedure for the Flighthawk refuel called for the Megafortress to be turned over to the computer, which would fly it in an utterly predictable fashion for the U/MF. Six months ago the refuel had been considered next to impossible; now it was so routine that Breanna took the opportunity to stretch her legs, leaving Chris at the helm. She curled her body sideways, stepping out gingerly from behind the controls, stretching her stiff ligaments as she slipped back toward the hatchway. A small refrigerator unit sat beneath the station for the observer jumpseat at the rear of the EB-52’s flight deck; Breanna knelt down and opened it. She took the tall, narrow plastic cup filled with mint ice tea from the door and took a steady pull. Refreshed, she turned back toward the front of the plane and watched over Chris’s shoulder as he monitored the refuel.

  Zen had blown off her question about the trucks, but it was a real one. They were here to kill soldiers, not civilians.

  True, you couldn’t ask for IDs in the middle of a fight.

  And their rules of engagement allowed them to target anyone or anything that seemed to be a threat. But if they didn’t draw a distinction, they were no better than Saddam, or terrorists.

  Was that a distinction God drew? Did it matter to Him that only soldiers were in the crosshairs?

  Did it matter to the dead?

  “Refuel complete,” said Chris as she slipped back into her seat. “Computer has course to search grids. I’ve downloaded the course to Zen. He wants to launch the second Flighthawk about five minutes from the grid.”

  “Thanks.”

  Breanna flicked her talk button. “How are you doing down there, Zen?”

  “Fine. Yourself?”

  “I wasn’t trying to be testy about the civilian trucks.”

  “I know that. They were army or militia or whatever.”

  “The Kurds use a lot of pickups.”

  “Yup.”

  “You okay, Jeff? Do we have a problem?”

  Breanna realized her heart had jumped into overdrive, pounding much faster than it had during the action. She was worried about their relationship, not their job. A deadly distraction. She couldn’t work with him again, not in combat.

  “Major Stockard?”

  “Not a problem on my end, Captain,” answered her husband.

  “Thank you much. Computer says we’re on course and ten m
inutes from your drop zone,” she said, trying to make her voice sound light.

  Chapter 59

  Iraq Intercept Missile Station Two 1720

  Musah Tahir sat before the enormous, inoperative screens, waiting. Kakii had called ten minutes ago, but Abass had not; it was possible that the planes had passed him by, but there had been no call from the airport at Baghdad, where the air traffic radar was still in full operation. The Americans might be attacking somewhere north or east of Kirkuk, but if so, it made no sense to turn on his units; they would be out of range.

  Tahir envisioned himself as a spider, standing at the edge of a highly sensitive web, waiting for the moment to strike. He had been entrusted with great responsibility by the leader himself — indeed, by Allah. Turning on the radars, even for a moment, was a matter of great delicacy, since the American planes carried missiles that could home in on them; the decision to initiate the search and launch sequence was dictated by his sense of timing as well as his computer program.

  Now?

  No. He must wait. Perhaps in a few minutes; perhaps not today at all. Allah would tell him when.

  Chapter 60

  Over Iraq

  1720

  Zen took Hawk One to the end of the search grid, pulling up as he neared a cloud of antiaircraft fire from the Zsu-23. A pair of the four-barreled 23mm flak dealers had opened up just as he started his run; optically aimed and effective only to five or six thousand feet, they were more an annoyance than a threat. He came back south, running four miles parallel to Quicksilver. He would turn Hawk One over to the computer while he launched Two.

  “Anything, O’Brien?”

  “Negative,” said the radar detector’s babysitter. “Clean as a whistle.”