by Mack Maloney
Again, this was his third time banging in at Obo, and as the first two had been a bitch, he couldn’t help but wonder if this time something really would go wrong. But the good thing about such thoughts, like landing on aircraft carriers or at a shoestring base like this, was that everything was happening so fast that by the time you started worrying about it, it was over.
That’s what happened now as Ryder fell out of the sky and slammed onto the broken runway, snagging the arrestor cable on the first try. The god-awful sound echoed again, and he was yanked to a stop from 120 mph—all in two seconds. Like having sex in a car wreck was how someone had once described tail-hook landings. For Ryder, this one featured only the car wreck.
But he was down and he was stopped and that’s all that mattered. The Ghosts came out of the support buildings and pushed his plane off to the side as they had just done with Curry’s.
But Ryder and Curry wouldn’t be staying long this time, only until the last of the bombs were put on their planes and the last of their allotted fuel put into their tanks. Then they would be heading back to Khrash—there would be no attacking-at-dawn shit for them.
Everyone around Ryder was moving fast. People were running everywhere. They’d all been briefed on the plan, the ominous-sounding final option. Three dozen people invading a whole city, with very little help? Would it work? Could it work? No one knew. And again, at the moment, no one really cared. They were going to do it, win or lose, for Li.
Ryder rolled up to the second support building. Curry’s plane was already inside. Ryder jumped from his ’Cat and immediately began helping the Marine mechanics load more bombs onto Curry’s dilapidated F-14, this while Curry himself was up in the cockpit hot-wiring his auxiliary oxygen system, which had taken a largecaliber round square on during their surprise attack on Khrash.
The miracle was that either F-14 was flying at all. Again, the Tomcat was the Navy’s premier fighter-interceptor. Its job was to protect America’s supercarriers from incoming aerial threats, be they enemy airplanes or missiles. But the team had done a field modification that even the Navy was somewhat reluctant to do. Starting around the time of the first Gulf War, the Navy began flying F-14s in the expanded role of dropping bombs as well as carrying out fleet defense. Some results were mixed, but when it happened, the F-14 Tomcat went from being a purely defensive aircraft to one adapted for offense as well. The Tomcats became Bombcats.
The two Iranian shit boxes carried rudimentary equipment that would allow them to perform this offensive capability. But it was only the minimum setup: just two hard points on each plane on which to attach five-hundred-pound bombs. The Ghosts had stolen two dozen of the mud movers from the Iranians and wanted to drop them all, and not just two at a time. So prior to the Khrash raid, Ryder, Curry, and a gaggle of the Marine mechanics had jimmy-rigged a system that allowed the F-14s to carry up to 12 of the five-hundred-pounders each, hot-wiring a number of temporary hard points that could each drop bombs separately. All these wires and the Rube Goldberg devices that controlled them took time and attention during the bombing run, hard to do especially while getting shot at and trying to zero in on the target. But Ryder and Curry’s raid on the dirty little city had gone surprisingly well and everything had worked. So now they were back to get bombed up and go again.
They were just hoisting the last two bombs onto Curry’s jet when the chief of the Marine mechanics called Ryder out from under the F-14. He had some bad news. He and his men had looked over both fighter jets, and both were now unflyable.
“It’s not the combat but the landings and the take-offs,” the chief mechanic told him. He explained that their most recent departure, with both jets insanely overloaded with bombs, had literally twisted the fuselages on both planes out of whack, the torque had been that severe. Rivets had popped near the tail section on both planes, their fuel tanks had sprung leaks, and some secondary interior wing systems were now all jammed up. As for the landings, the runway at Obo was not really “soft” asphalt or the relatively flexible surface of a Navy aircraft carrier. It was solid rock, with no give when many tons of airplane slammed into it, going 120 mph. The jets’ landing gear were the victims here, the chief mechanic said. On both planes, there were cracks from the wheel wells right up the hydraulic extension and into the retracting gears. Any shock-absorbing properties contained in the undercarriage were now nonexistent.
In the chief mehanic’s opinion, the two Bombcats might be able to weather one more takeoff. But neither the gear nor the twisted fuselage would survive another arrestor hook landing.
Ryder heard him out but then just smiled. The guy was being sincere as hell, but he was missing part of the picture here.
“Don’t worry about it, Chief,” Ryder finally told him. “Once we take off from here this time, we won’t be coming back . . . .”
That the big Psyclops aircraft fit inside the third support building at Obo was just one more minor miracle of the operation.
Actually, the wingtips scraped the sides of the building’s door going in, but a couple scratches on the paint job were the only result. This was where the big plane was hidden after its earsplitting low-level flight over Khrash. This was where it was now, as night was falling again.
J. C. Dow, Clancy, and the rest of the crew were huddled within the interior of the airplane, waiting, just like everyone else. They were more than 24 hours overdue returning to their home base at Abok, in eastern Afghanistan, and they were sure, officially at least, their airplane was considered “lost” by this time. Search planes had no doubt been dispatched to look for them—or their wreckage. But as their flight plan when they “disappeared” was more than 200 miles northwest of Obo, those search planes wouldn’t start looking for them so far off-course down here in the Qimruz, for at least another 48 hours. Whatever was going to happen with Khrash would have transpired by then—and they were going to be in the thick of it, by their own choice. So if the United States had already contacted their families to report them as missing, then maybe it was just a case of bad news being premature.
The Psyclops crew was now part of the team. Just like other disparate groups the Ghosts had met along the way, they had joined up. It was just as soon as they’d landed at Obo after their in-flight kidnapping that the Psyclops crew found out the mysterious special ops team had been their abductors. They knew well the achievements of the Ghosts—as all Americans did by now. At Hormuz and Singapore and within the United States itself, the Ghosts had been carrying on their own war against Al Qaeda while the majority of the U.S. military was up to other things.
For this reason, and after having the situation explained to them about Khrash, the Patch, and the girl named Li Cho, to a man the Psyclops crew agreed to stay on and help the Ghosts see it through. They’d been briefed about the final option and were getting ready for the adventure of their lives.
One of the most unusual cargoes the Psyclops plane carried was a large box filled with American flags. Made of a tough fiberglass substance that actually looked and felt like cloth, each flag was five feet by three feet and could be folded up and stored away in no space at all. The plane carried the flags as another part of its psychological operations. Whenever they made a propaganda leaflet drop on a targeted village, something that took place a couple times a month, they would drop a smaller box containing some of the American flags as well, hoping those same people would display them as part of the ongoing hearts and minds program. But now, as part of the final option plan, they had been asked to give all the flags to the team’s shock troops, several hundred in all, for use somewhere down the line.
One of Dow’s guys had just returned to the plane from delivering the flags when the White Screen blinked on again. This time was just as much a surprise as the first. The light filled the cabin, and when the screen cleared of static they saw it was Murphy again. He wanted to have a private meeting with the EC-130’s crew, out of sight and earshot of the other team members.
The crew gather
ed around the screen now. They felt like they’d known Murphy all their lives, a common reaction by those who’d met him. He said he had something to ask them and it was a bit complicated.
“That igloo thing you have attached to the bottom of your plane,” Murphy said, “can it do what I think it can do?”
The question caught the Psyclops crew off-guard. In their initial mission for the Ghosts the Psyclops had served as a very loud, very intimidating photo plane. They had performed what was asked with perfection, but in reality taking pictures was one of the most pedestrian things their big plane could do. Breaking into radio broadcasts, commandeering TV stations, speaking through amplifiers that intentionally made them sound like the Almighty, these things the civilian crew could do with ease.
But now Murphy was asking about the Snowball. That was something different entirely. That was ultra –top secret.
In times like this, only Dow could speak for the crew.
“I know better than to give you the standard denial about it,” he told Murphy evenly. “But you, above all, have to be sensitive to something like this. That thing is so top-secret, we’re not sure the President even knows it exists. At least that’s what we’ve been told.
“We are here with you today because we believe in what you guys are trying to do. But who knows what will happen tomorrow—if any of us is still around? You know how the military is. Things can flip in the blink of an eye. I’d hate to be the reason that we all get court-martialed and thrown in Leavenworth for life at hard labor, just because I started blabbing about the Snowball.”
Murphy understood and told them so. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to give up secrets that might come back to haunt you,” he said. “And I don’t want you guys to put yourselves or any of us in jail. I just want to make sure we can make use of all our options in what’s coming up, should things start to go that way.”
There was a long silence. Dow didn’t know what to say. They’d all taken a security oath not to talk about the Snowball and what it could do—but just by being here, in the Obo, with the Ghosts, it seemed like national security laws didn’t matter that much anymore.
No one was talking, so Murphy asked the question again.
And finally, after an approving glance around to his crew, Dow nodded yes. “Let me put it this way: Just by asking the question as to what it can do, you’ve probably guessed right.”
But he quickly added this caveat: “And I want to say that we appreciate what you guys are trying to do out here, and we’re proud that you’ve let us help. But I have to tell you that as far as employing the Snowball, I can only do it as a very last resort . . . .”
They saw Murphy smile slightly.
Then he saluted them and said: “Thanks, men. That’s all I have to know.”
30 minutes later
Ryder was back in the cockpit again. His plane was moving very slowly, heading toward the runway one last time. He could almost imagine the tips of the variable-wing fighter scraping the ground, so many bombs were hanging underneath him.
The small strike force was laid out before him, lined up on the short taxiway leading to Obo’s bumpy airstrip. Again because of the lack of communications between them—the jets’ radios simply didn’t work—they were going through a series of hand signals to get everyone on the same page for takeoff.
They weren’t all going, though. Two of the Marine mechanics would be staying behind at Obo. One aspect of the operation included a possibility that one of the Blackhawks might come back to take on the very last of the fuel and any ammunition that might remain. Leaving someone at Obo was insurance that if the copter needed two more warm bodies aboard, they’d be available. But if the two Marines, volunteers both, were unable to get on the copter at that time or if the copter never came back, they were to make their way to friendly lines in eastern Afghanistan, with help from the Zabul. If they made it to Kabul, then at least someone would be able to tell the world someday what had happened here.
As for everyone else, they were anxious to go. Before they’d all climbed into their respective aircraft—the shock troops into the helicopters, the Psyclops guys into their weird aircraft, Curry and Ryder into the Bombcats—Ryder had gathered the team around him. Did everybody understand the part they had to play in the upcoming operation? he asked them first. Did everyone know the final option plan by heart? The reply came back unanimous: Yes, everyone did.
His second question was a little more difficult. Did anyone want to jump ship right now, with absolutely no shame attached?
Again, the response was unanimous: No one wanted to back out. They were all going. Together.
This was what Ryder was thinking about now, sitting in his cockpit, doing a final check of the few working instruments he had left. The team was standing firm, new guys and old, committed to what lay ahead. But why was he here? The team was out here to kill mooks and to avenge the loss of one of the team. But what was his motive? His real motive? It was a strange question, especially since he was the CO of the mission, yet he’d been asking it of himself since leaving the Ocean Voyager. These and other thoughts, haunting him for days, were coming from so deep down in his soul that he couldn’t understand them, at least, not at first.
He started fiddling with his wedding ring as the rest of the team finished moving into position. He hadn’t taken the ring off since the day his wife died. He’d vowed then that he’d never take it off again. But looking at it now unleashed a flood of emotion. Again, what was he really doing here? Whose ghost was he chasing? By avenging Li’s death, was he forgetting about his wife? How could that be? How could he ever forget her?
It was all very confusing, and unsettling, and very unlike him. It was changing him, just like taking over the team had changed him, but this change he didn’t like. He felt like a hypocrite, but he didn’t know why.
These thoughts were broken by the sound of someone banging on his canopy. He looked left to see one of the young Marine mechanics had pushed a ladder against the F-14 and climbed up beside him. He had the yellow cell phone with him, the only secure communication line the team had with the outside world. Ryder had carried it on his person every moment since Murphy gave it to him. But shortly before the team got ready to depart this time, it was decided that it would be best to leave the cell phone at Obo. After all, Murphy had told them it was the most secure line in the world. Putting it on one of the aircraft risked it being compromised should that plane get shot down. And no one wanted that. So, it was being left with the two mechanics who were staying behind. This kid banging on Ryder’s canopy was one of them.
But why was he bringing the phone to him? Ryder had just had a last conversation with Murphy before he climbed back into the plane. That conversation had been brief: Murphy just wanting to know if they had crossed every T and dotted every I for what lay ahead and Ryder telling him they had. They wished each other good luck and thanked each other for all they had accomplished and that was it.
So what was this about?
Ryder lifted his canopy and the kid handed the phone to him. It was indeed Murphy.
“I didn’t know whether to make this call or not,” Murphy told Ryder. His voice sounded very somber and far away. “But I thought I owed it to you at least.”
Ryder really didn’t know what he was talking about.
“It just arrived,” Murphy told him. “Li’s execution video. We just dragged it down from the Al-Qazzaza tele-link.”
Ryder felt his chest cave in. His ears began burning. His eyes filled up. He’d been waiting for this inevitable piece of bad news ever since they’d left the Ocean Voyager. He’d been steeling himself, expecting the crushing blow he knew it would bring. Now that it was here, it was almost too much for him to take.
“I just thought you’d want to know,” Murphy went on. “The thing was time-stamped. It was filmed four days ago. So, at least she went quick.”
Ryder choked up. Li had been dead for only four days? It seemed like four years.
“Bates has the footage now, down in the White Rooms,” Murphy concluded. “He volunteered to watch it. God knows I could never do so. But he’ll study it, see if we can come up with something that might help us, in the future. If there is a future. But again, I just thought you should know.”
Ryder thanked him, hung up, and gave the phone back to the mechanic, who promptly disappeared.
He breathed deep from his oxygen mask. And that’s when he finally had his answer. He would have liked to think that they would still be doing this if it had been himself or Fox or Ozzi or Curry or any of the team members, right down to one of the Ocean Voyager’s sailors or the Marine mechanics who had been kidnapped by The Patch and executed. That they would come here and kill those who had killed them.
But this was different, because it was her. Li . . .
This beautiful girl . . . now gone.
He took another deep breath, and got back into himself again.
Between his legs was the bag of money Murphy had given him back on the ship. He’d kept it with him this entire time as well. Now, he threw the bag back into the unoccupied space behind his seat. Then he revved up his engines and started moving again.
Once last look around told him they were all as ready as they were ever going to be. Ryder would be the first to take off. The others would follow. He was about to hit his throttle and pop his brakes when he caught himself looking down at his wedding ring again. He closed his eyes and it was Li’s face he saw, waving to him as she left aboard the CIA helicopter, the last time they would ever see each other.
He opened his eyes again, and wiped them. He thought a moment . . . then slowly, with shaking fingers, he removed the wedding ring and put it in his pocket.
Then he popped his throttles and took off, climbing steeply and quickly becoming lost in the stars.
