“Now we’re talking serious bucks!” Briggs exclaimed happily. “Man, I was hoping we’d get into jobs like this—I was thinking I’d have to go back to Georgia and help my granddad in his kennels and get a real job.”
“I’m not happy about accepting this job,” Patrick admitted. “Some big oil cartel is asking us to put our asses on the firing line to help them keep their profits safe. We don’t know anything about the cartel; and since the assassination of President Salaam, we don’t know which way the Egyptian government is going to go. And I don’t trust any intelligence info we get from private sources. They answer to investors and bosses, not to the grunts.”
Hal fell silent, looking at the ground. Chris Wohl nodded. “All good points, sir,” he said. “Our first priority would be to get our own intel—a few overflights from some NIRTSats should do it.” NIRTSats, or Need It Right This Second Satellites, were small, low-Earth orbit photo and radar reconnaissance satellites designed for a specific mission. They were extremely valuable in passing detailed intelligence information to tactical units; but because they were in very low orbits, their duration was usually only a few days or a couple weeks, and they carried only small positioning thrusters and very little fuel, so their orbits could not be changed or even fine-tuned to any great extent. He looked at Patrick evenly, then added, “If you agree to do it with us.”
“You don’t need my approval, Chris.”
“Pardon me, sir, but I do ... we do,” Wohl said.
“ ’Fraid so, Muck,” Hal said. “The Night Stalkers may be a private nonmilitary unconventional action team, but the bottom line is: We’re a team”
“We don’t do anything unless we all agree to do it,” Paul chimed in. “One person has veto power. One ‘no,’ even one ‘I’m not sure,’ and we scrub the mission.”
“That’s the SOP, sir,” Wohl agreed. “We all do it, or no one does it.”
Patrick hesitated. Something deep within him still maintained that this was wrong. He was trained to fight, trained to use his brains and his training and experience to fight and win battles—but this was not one of the battles he had in mind. He wasn’t defending his home or his country or his family. This mission was to destroy one country’s supposed threat to disrupt commerce in order to help a multinational corporation earn more money. This was a job for a private security company—or a mercenary force.
The obvious question: Was Patrick turning into a mercenary? Was he going to start fighting not for home or country or family, but for money?
Maybe he was, at least for the moment. If his own military didn’t want him, maybe it was time to fight for what he felt was right—and accept a little money to do it.
“I’m in,” Patrick heard himself say. “I’ll get a NIRTSat constellation up right away, and get a few FlightHawks ready for air support.” The FlightHawks were Sky Masters’s unmanned combat aircraft, capable of ground, air, or ship launch, and equipped to carry a wide variety of sensors, cameras, radio gear—or munitions. They were stealthy, accurate, and very effective.
“We’re gone!” Paul McLanahan shouted excitedly, his electronically synthesized voice amplifying his happiness. “Let’s go kick some Libyan rocket-launching ass!”
SAMAH, LIBYA
SEVERAL DAYS LATER
“Nike, say status,” Patrick McLanahan whispered into the secure satellite link. A warning indicator on his electronic visor had just advised him that one of his men had already engaged the enemy. Just a few minutes into what was supposed to be a quick, silent recon, they were made.
“Bad guy came out of nowhere, and this damned suit blasted him before I could stop it,” retired U.S. Marine Corps master sergeant Chris Wohl explained. “I’m secure, and I’m moving in.”
“This is supposed to be a soft probe, Nike, not an assault. We can come back.”
“If they’re alerted, they might move all their assets, and then we’d have to locate them all over again,”
Wohl protested. “I think only one guy saw me, and I don’t think he’s a sentry, so we still might have time. Besides, you made this suit, not me. If you wanted a soft probe, you should’ve showed me how to shut off the auto-bugzapper feature. I’m secure, and I’m moving in.”
Once a flamethrowing kick-ass Marine, always a kick-ass Marine, Patrick thought as he checked the God’s-eye view display on his helmet-mounted electronic visor. Patrick McLanahan was kneeling in a shallow gully just a few yards inside the perimeter fence surrounding a newly discovered Libyan military base near Samah, about two hundred miles south of Benghazi. The mission was to sneak in from three different points, doing a soft probe on this remote desert base. Initial intelligence reports said Samah was a terrorist training camp, but a few unconfirmed reports received from the private intelligence sources said Samah was a rocket base set up recently to secretly attack targets in Egypt, Chad, Europe, or in the Mediterranean Sea, possibly with medium-range Russian-or Chinese-made rockets with chemical or biological warheads.
The plan was for all three infiltrators to go in simultaneously, take infrared or night-vision digital images with their equipment, uplink it all to reconnaissance satellites back to their headquarters, and get out without anyone knowing they were there. If the Libyans discovered they had been infiltrated, they might pack everything up and turn the base into an unassuming training base.
But Chris Wohl was by far the most experienced and well-trained commando among them—and he ran on his own timetable, which was several steps ahead of everyone else, constantly thinking and planning and reacting, leading the way. Patrick should have known that Chris Wohl would want to make first contact.
The God’s-eye overhead images that Patrick was studying were being transmitted via satellite from stealth unmanned combat aircraft called FlightHawks. Two FlightHawks had been launched from a Sky Masters Inc. DC-10 launch aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea while on a normal, routine flight from Bahrain to Madrid. The FlightHawks were autonomous UCAVs, or unmanned combat air vehicles; although a ground controller could fly them, they were designed to fly a preprogrammed flight plan and automatically react to threats or new target instructions. One FlightHawk carried a LADAR, or laser radar, that took images as crystal-clear as a high-resolution digital photograph, then beamed those images down to Wendy on the Catherine as well as the men on the ground in Libya.
The FlightHawk’s ground monitors and controllers were Patrick’s wife and electronics wizard, Wendy Tork McLanahan, as well as Patrick’s longtime partner and friend, engineering expert David Luger, based aboard a converted salvage ship a hundred miles off the Libyan coast in the Mediterranean Sea. The team’s infiltration and exfiltration aircraft, a CV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft, could take off, land, refuel, and be serviced on the cargo ship in hiding. The ship, a Lithuanian-flagged and fully registered and functioning rescue and salvage vessel named S.S. Catherine the Greatf had a contingent of fifty highly trained commandos and enough firepower on board to start a small war.
The commandos on this mission also had another high-tech weapon in their arsenal: their improved “Tin Man” electronic battle armor. Also developed by Sky Masters Inc., the armor used a special electroreactive technology that caused ordinary-looking and -feeling fabric instantly to harden to several times the strength of steel when sharply struck. The suit also contained self-contained breathing apparatus, temperature control, communications, long-range visual and aural detection and tracking sensors, mobility enhancers—compressed-air jump jets in the boots—and self-protection weapons. The self-defense weapon was an electrical discharge device that disabled the enemy with a bolt of high-voltage energy; it operated automatically, tied to the suit’s sensors, and was able to fire instantly in any direction out to thirty feet from electrodes on both shoulders if an enemy was detected.
The newest feature of their battle armor: a microhydraulically controlled fibersteel exoskeleton that gave the wearer the strength and power of a multimillion-dollar robot. The exoskeleton ran alon
g the back, shoulders, arms, legs, and neck, and amplified the wearer’s muscular strength a hundred times; yet the exoskeleton and its control systems weighed only a few pounds and used very little power.
The armor could save its wearers from most small- and medium-sized infantry attacks and even some light armored attacks, but every attack drained precious power from the suit quickly, and they were several hundred miles from help. The Tin Man technology was designed to save its wearer from attack long enough to escape a defensive, patrol, or security engagement, not to press an assault against a superior fighting force. The longer Wohl stayed in the area after the alarm was sounded, the more danger he was in.
Through his electronic visor, Patrick could see that Wohl had stopped just outside an area that had previously been identified in satellite photos as a garbage dump, known by its map coordinate Bravo Two. The area was unguarded and unsecured, and military and civilian personnel passed by it constantly without being stopped or challenged by anyone—there was no reason to suspect it was anything else but a garbage dump. Patrick had dismissed it in their search. “Nike, what are you doing at Bravo Two?”
“I want to check this place out,” Wohl replied. “I’m secure.”
“Nike, let’s stick with the recon plan, shall we?”
“I’ll be back on schedule in no time.”
“Stalkers, looks like there’s some activity on this side of the base—your guy might have missed a bed check or something,” ex-Air Force security officer and commando Hal Briggs reported. The commandos on this mission were spread out around the sprawling, isolated desert base in strategic support locations, and moving from one spot to another without attracting any attention took time. “They’re doing a search around the perimeter. Might as well let Nike poke around a bit more—he’s safe there for now.”
“If the alarm’s been sounded, we need to bug out of here,” Patrick said. “Your best exit point now is Alpha One, Nike. Get moving.” To Briggs, he added, “Taurus, can you cover him?”
“Dammit, Castor, we traveled too far to turn around the moment someone has a bad dream,” Wohl radioed. “I’m secure, and I think I found something interesting, so I’m staying put for sixty lousy seconds longer. The FlightHawks will have to RTB in less than fifteen minutes anyway—they might not complete a full reconnoiter, and there won’t be time to recover, refuel, and relaunch them before daybreak. I’m staying. If you don’t like it, come in here and try to drag me back. Nike out."
McLanahan cursed again—it seemed as if he was doing that a lot lately—and wished for one of his long-range bombers loaded with smart bombs to be flying overhead right about now. Twice retired from the United States Air Force—the last time involuntarily—Patrick had been a one-star general, the deputy commander of one of the world’s most secret weapons development and testing facilities, the High Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC), Elliott Air Force Base, Groom Lake, Nevada. The weapons from that facility had many times been used in real-world conflicts, from Russia to China to America and everywhere in between, and Patrick had been a part of the action originating there for over a decade. Patrick had seen and experienced the best—and worst—of both human suffering and technological amazement.
But they would probably not see action within a decade, if ever, because few politicians and bureaucrats—including, in Patrick’s estimation, the current administration of U.S. President Thomas Nathaniel Thom—had the guts to use them. Just one of HAWC’s Megafortress bombers could destroy several dozen armored vehicles and keep an entire battalion of troops at bay, without being detected on radar and without exposing itself to undue risk; if they were given the order, one Megafortress could destroy the entire base without so much as rustling an innocent civilian’s tent flap, if there were any here. They had already proven the value of a small commando team paired up with one stealth bomber in the skies over Russia, right near Moscow itself.
But since then, Thom had all but shut down HAWC and had sent most of America’s fleet of bombers to the Bone- yard, along with about a third of the active-duty military and other deep cuts in tactical weapons and units. McLanahan and the other commandos here at Samah were not here under government sanction. It was dirty, difficult, and dangerous work.
No wonder Patrick found little to smile about these days.
“Don’t give me that ‘Nike out’ crap,” McLanahan radioed back. “This is supposed to be a soft probe, not a search-and-destroy—that’s why we have the FlightHawks overhead. I want you out now.”
“Then I guess I’ll just ignore this SS-12 battery I just found.”
“What?”
“Pretty damned clever, hiding it in a garbage dump,” Wohl said. He moved closer to the area. There was a short ramp on the west end of the pit, ostensibly to make it easier for the dump truck drivers to enter the pit. But on closer inspection, he saw that the garbage was piled not on the ground inside the pit but atop a retractable net. “Normal overhead imagery shows a garbage dump. It’s unguarded like a garbage dump—and the organic waste gives off enough heat to block infrared and radar imagery.” Wohl examined underneath the net with his infrared sensors. “And there it is, boys—the aft end of a MAZ-543 transporter-erector-launcher and an SS-12 Scaleboard rocket, still in its marching sheath. I’ll bet there are at least three more TELs in this pit, and if I check the other garbage pits, I’ll find more. Not to mention the TELs hidden in some of the service buildings.”
“The damned Libyans have SS-12s,” Briggs breathed. “Holy shit.” The SS-12 tactical ballistic missile, NATO code name “Scaleboard,” was the upgraded version of the ubiquitous mobile “Scud” surface-to-surface missile, in service with almost a dozen nations around the world. The SS-12 was larger, had three times the range of a Scud, was more accurate—and it carried a one-point-three-megaton nuclear warhead. As far as anyone knew, this was the first known instance of an SS-12 missile based outside of Russia. “Can you see the warhead, Nike? Is it a nuke?”
“Stand by, Taurus. I’ll check.”
“Nike, clear out of there,” McLanahan repeated. “We’ll have the FlightHawks take them out.” The first FlightHawk UCAV carried only the laser radar array, but the second FlightHawk was armed with four antitank BLU-108 SFW sensor-fuzed weapon bomblets and four antipersonnel Gator cluster bomb munitions. They were devastating weapons: A single SFW could destroy as many as three dozen main battle tanks, and a single Gator could kill, injure, or deny enemy access across an area twice the size of a football field. “Base, you copy? Stand by to arm up the ’Hawks.”
“We have a good location on Nike,” Wendy McLanahan radioed from the Catherine out in the Med. The Tin Man battle armor contained a transponder to allow Wendy on board the command ship to track and monitor all the commandos. “Ready to come in hot.”
“Negative, Base, negative,” Wohl interjected. “The junk they got these things buried under will keep the SFW from detecting them, or they might lock onto some other hot object; and the junk might block the bomblets’ blast effects. We’re going to have to expose them enough so the SFWs and Gators can do their job, or destroy them one by one by hand. I’m moving in.”
No use in trying to hold him back, Patrick thought, he’s on the warpath. It’s not every day that you’re sent in just to take a few pictures and end up coming across a bunch of nuclear-tipped missiles. Wohl must be salivating in his battle armor. “Roger, Nike. Stalkers, let’s move in together. One coordinated attack. Stand by.”
But Chris Wohl wasn’t going to “stand by”—he was already on the move.
He hurriedly checked for a sentry. There were sentry shacks on all four sides of the garbage pit, but through his infrared sensors he could see that all were deserted. He descended down the incline toward the rear of the rocket.. .
. .. and the second he reached the floor of the pit and touched the net covering the rocket, four huge ballpark lights illuminated the entire garbage pit, and a siren sounded. There were no sentries because the entire garb
age pit was alarmed. Time had run out.
From his observation point, Patrick saw the lights come on. “Oh, shit,” Patrick murmured. “Taurus, move in, check the garbage pit at Alpha Two,” he radioed. “I’ll check Golf Six. Pollux, create a diversion around Tango Five. Base, order the FlightHawks in to attack.”
“Roger that, Castor,” Patrick’s younger brother, Paul, responded. One of the original members of the Night Stalkers and the acknowledged expert in the use of the Tin Man battle armor, he was the fourth man on this spy team, taking the east side of the Libyan base.
“Copy, Castor,” Wendy replied. “They’re coming in hot, two minutes out, SFWs and Gators. Light up the targets as much as you can.”
Meanwhile, Wohl dashed to the body of the SS-12 rocket, grabbed a cable running down the side, and pulled. The SS-12 missile was encased in a plastic transport sheath that protected it during transit but popped off easily during launch; it was simple to peel it off now. It was a real SS-12 rocket—no decoys here. He dashed forward, unzipping the sheath as he ran, then climbed up onto the cab until he reached the warhead. It looked real enough too, although he had never seen a live nuclear warhead before. “Castor, I just cracked open the warhead. Take a look and tell me what it is.”
Patrick commanded his electronic helmet visor to lock in on Chris Wohl’s visor image, transmitted from his suit’s electronics suite via satellite. He recognized it instantly: “It’s the real thing, folks—a Russian NMT-17 Mod One warhead, one-megaton-plus yield.”
Wohl turned at a sudden sound behind him and saw soldiers rushing to the edge of the garbage pit, gesturing inside. The best proof he had a live warhead here wasn’t McLanahan’s assessment—it was the fact that none of the Libyans surrounding him dared raise a rifle muzzle in his direction or even come any closer to him. They were afraid of creating a nuclear yield if they hit the missile with a bullet. Wohl knew it took a lot more than one bullet to set one of these things off—but then again, maybe they knew something he didn’t. “How do I disable it, Castor?”
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