by Tom Clancy
Then he saw their winged shadows fall over him in the remaining daylight and, raising his Steyr bullpup, waved for his men to scatter.
Graham was about to deploy his landing wheels when he heard the first bursts of submachine-gun fire rattling against the cockpit floor.
Not this time, you fuckers, he thought.
He dipped the Osprey's nose slightly and turned toward Winter.
"Release a couple of Sunbursts ..."
Which were folding-fin, high-velocity rocket projectiles fitted with combination phosphorous/smoke warheads in launch tube pods below the Osprey's wings. Their purpose was to blind and confuse, although the rockets could have been capable of massive destruction had their warheads contained explosive charges.
"... then let's hit 'em with the Peacemakers ..."
These being elastomer-cased 40mm bullets containing a liquid core of dimethyl sulfide, a powerful sedative that is instantly absorbed through the skin and mucous membranes. Fired at a rate of 650 rounds per minute from a specially chambered nose-mounted turret gun devised by Sword's less-than-lethal-ordnance technicians, these rounds would disable first through kinetic energy, and second, by rupturing on impact to release their DMSO fill. Again, the nose gun might have easily been converted to take deadly 30mm full-metal-jacket ammunition--but a mandate was a mandate, and the Brazilians had been unyielding in the restrictions imposed upon UpLink's offensive aircraft capabilities.
"... got it?" Graham finished.
"Got it," Winter said.
And reached for his weapons console.
Crouched over a sealed crate in the cargo bay of the DC-3, Manuel worked sweatily at its lid with a crowbar he'd snatched from a tool compartment behind the pilot's cabin. His face dripped with moisture, and he could feel the downwash of the Osprey's rotors through the bay door behind him, blasting sand and pebbles against the back of his head.
One comer of the lid came loose and Manuel shuffled quickly around on his knees to pry at another. He had managed to dash up the freight ramp and shelter himself in the plane as the first rockets from above had discharged their blinding flashes; an instant later the Osprey's machine gun had opened fire. Peering outside, he'd seen his men stagger and fall across the smoke-covered airstrip, but then had noticed they were falling bloodlessly. It had made him remember the robot at the ISS facility, the one he'd taken out with the FAMAS gun. Remember its dizzying lights, and the sound emissions that had sickened him to the stomach. The robot and its armaments had been meant not to kill, but rather to cripple, a weakness that had given Manuel a chance to reduce it to scrap metal. A weakness shared by the strange attack birds besieging the airfield ... or at least by the men in control of them.
Now, as then, Manuel would exploit it.
The second comer of the lid separated, the nails that anchored it to the crate bending as they were torn free. Breathless, panting, the wound on his arm reopened from his exertions and staining his bandages with fresh blots of crimson, Manual flung the crowbar carelessly aside, slipped the fingers of both hands under lid, and then hefted it up with a grunt of exertion.
The lid came off with a splintering crack of wood.
Manuel hurriedly reached inside the crate, his hands ripping layers of fibrous packing material out by the wad until, at last, they found the Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher.
The pilot of Batter Two had remained in a circular hover-and-support pattern above the field as Batter One had alighted, lowering its aft cargo ramp to discharge its strike team.
With only a dozen or so hostiles in the runway area, most of them incapacitated by the Sunbursts and Peace-maker rounds, there was little for the team to do but cleanup work. Minutes after Batter One landed, Graham radioed up word that the field was fairly well secured.
"Thanks for the assist, Batter Two," he said. "Good luck in the valley below."
"Roger, on our way," the pilot of the airborne Osprey said, and veered off toward the ledge where it would drop its rappellers.
That was when Manuel stepped out onto the loading ramp of the DC-3 transport, the man-portable SAM launcher on his shoulder.
Manuel had little to decide in choosing his target: The Osprey on the ground had already discharged its men, and the one still in the sky was full of them.
His eye to the sight of the lightweight fiberglass launcher, his hand on its grip-stock, he angled it toward the flying aircraft and activated its argon-cooled IR seeker unit with the touch of a switch. A shaved second later he heard the beep tone indicating a lock-on, and pulled the Stinger's trigger.
His heart stroked once, twice in his chest.
The missile shot toward the departing Osprey with a whoosh of propellant gas.
The pilot and co-pilot of Batter Two did not see the plume of the heat-seeking missile as it streaked toward their fuselage, but the sensor pods on its nose and tail did, and instantly informed them of the threat via readouts on their dashboard and HUDs. At their low-level height above the plateau, the missile would only take a matter of three or four seconds to close, too quickly for an evasive maneuver, or for the limitations of human reaction time to allow either crew member to engage the Osprey's IR countermeasures set.
Which was why its GAPSFREE avionics were failsafed to do so automatically.
Two independent defenses awakened at once: a thermal chaff/decoy dispenser on either wing that ejected bundles of aluminum strips and incendiary flares into the air, scattering infrared bogies to confound the missile's nose-cone guidance system, and an infrared pulse lamp that accomplished much the same thing with tiny gusts of energy emitted at right angles to the fuselage.
The Stinger missile tracked yards wide of its mark to finally detonate against a blank wall of sandstone in its declining arc, harming nothing but the weeds and brambles clinging to its face.
Though Ralph Peterson had been with Sword for almost three years without ever having needed to use a weapon off the target range, his first shots fired in action would be lethal ones.
The night the ISS Compound was raided, he'd been on his day shift rotation, off duty, picking up a pretty girl in a Cuiaba barroom. He'd never thought he could possibly regret getting invited back to her apartment, but that turned out to be the case just the next day, when he reported to base and heard about the raid--and about the men who had died defending the facility in his absence.
He was not going to let anyone else be murdered without doing whatever he could to prevent it.
Peterson caught sight of the guy with the Stinger an instant after the SAM was triggered and twisted his VVRS barrel control to its man-killer setting, taking no chances. Then he called out for him to disarm, noticing an assault rifle over his shoulder in addition to the missile launcher in his grasp.
The guy half-obeyed his warning and did indeed drop the Stinger--but only to free his hands for bringing up the rifle.
As Manuel raised and angled the Steyr in Peterson's direction, his movement a near-blur, Peterson hit him with two short bursts, aiming directly at his heart.
Blood sprayed from the center of Manuel's chest, then ejaculated from his mouth in a red gush.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
A lo hecho, pecho.
After dropping four hundred feet from the table of the plateau in its VTOL attitude, Batter Two perched on a weathered spur of cliff above the ravine, its LZ chosen after careful examination of relief maps prepared from Hawkeye-I's stereoscopic terrain images. From here its twenty-five-man strike team would rappel another hundred feet down to the floor of the trench, then wind their way between its sheer sandstone walls to the hostile camp.
The Osprey's cargo ramp opened and the rappellers, led by Dan Carlysle, debarked in hurried single file, night-vision goggles lowered over their eyes, rubber-soled boots crunching on the rocky earth.
There were five ropes, five climbers to each. Removing blade-type titanium pitons from their web rigs, the men drove them into the projecting rock with mountaineer hammers,
slipped their ropes into the piton rings, fastened them with square knots, and tossed the ropes over the side of the cliff, glancing downward as they uncoiled to make sure they were long enough to reach bottom.
Gloved hands gripped the ropes. One, two, three, four, five hard tugs tested that the pitons were securely anchored. Five nods confirmed that they were.
Straddling their ropes as they faced the anchor points, the lead men wound the ropes into harnesses around their bodies--once around the hip, then diagonally across the chest and back over the opposite shoulder. This done, they began their rapid descent along the cliff wall.
They moved in a kind of springing hopskip, bodies leaned out and away from the slope, backs straight, legs spread wide, treaded boot bottoms scuffing along the furrowed rock face. Their braking hands were down, their opposite hands raised to guide them along the rope-lengths.
The satellite maps had indicated firm, hard slope along most of the decline--favorable conditions--and that was essentially what they encountered. The last ten yards were more difficult to traverse, a scree of pebbles and stones that crumbled out from underfoot in gravelly spills.
Still, they made it down fast and without injuries.
Again they gripped their ropes, this time looking upward. Again they gave five tugs to test the fastness of the ropes--and to indicate they had successfully reached bottom to those above.
Seconds later, the next group of five began their descent.
They found the base camp completely deserted. There were empty tents, some left standing, some partially folded. There was a single dusty, abandoned jeep with a flat tire. There were mounds of burned and buried rubbish, odd, scattered personal articles and pieces of equipment--entrenching tools, butane cookstoves, spools of rope, a metal bucket, first-aid kits, a disposable razor, four D-cell batteries, a pair of sunglasses missing one lens, an overturned wooden table, a commercially available Hammond map of the area with no penned-in notes or highlighted route markings.
The departed occupants of the camp had made a more or less clean sweep of it, leaving behind not a single weapon or round of ammunition, not a single clue to where they had gone.
Carlysle spat on the ground, then switched on his radio headset to contact Batter Two's pilot.
"Roger, team leader, how's it going?" the pilot responded.
"We've missed the party," Carlysle said in disgust. "That's how."
Megan helped Thibodeau settle comfortably back against his pillow, lifted his campaign hat off his head, and laid it on the table beside the bed. He looked weary and haggard, and the ward nurse had reported that his temperature was slightly elevated--nothing of serious concern, she'd assured Megan, but an indication that it was time for him to get some rest. Though she'd left a plastic cup of painkillers on his tray, he had refused to take them, having insisted on staying awake and alert until word arrived from the strike teams.
Now that it had, Megan poured some water into his glass and handed him the pills.
"Bottoms up," she said.
He grumbled something under his breath, tossed the pills into his mouth, and washed them down with a single gulp.
Taking the glass from him, Megan pressed the button to recline his backrest, pulled the sheets up over his chest, and bent to kiss him on the cheek.
"Night, Rol," she said. "I'll see you in the morning."
He looked soberly up at her.
"Them prisoners won't talk," he said. "You know that."
She nodded. "I doubt they will."
"An' le chaut sauvage ... he wasn't there. Must've been on the plane got away."
Megan nodded again.
"Another thing bothers me's that we still don't know why they went to the trouble they did breakin' into this compound in the first place, use all a' that fancy equipment just to try and blow a low-security warehouse got nothin' besides spare parts in it," he said. "Can't make any sense of it, you know?"
She patted his arm.
"Sleep," she said. "It's been a long day, and there's nothing more we can do right now."
Dimming the light, she lifted her purse off her chair, and strode toward the door.
"Meg?" he called weakly from behind her.
She turned toward him, her hand on the knob.
"Somethin' goes down in Kazakhstan, you think this Ricci gonna be up to takin' care of it?"
She stood there for a long moment, then merely sighed.
"Tomorrow's another day, Rollie," she said.
Then she stepped out into the hall, softly closing the door behind her.
TWENTY-ONE
KAZAKHSTAN
APRIL 26, 2001
PERHAPS BECAUSE OF THE DARK CLOAK OF SECRECY under which Russia's spacecraft testing has long been conducted in southern Kazakhstan, the region has since the early 1950's been the scene of hundreds of unexplained UFO sightings by local peasants. Sugar-beet farmers, grain growers, goatherders, cattlemen, sinewy Mongol horse traders ... many have had stories of strange airborne vehicles glimpsed above the brown, moraine-covered steppes, some accounts accurate, others embellished over the course of time and countless retellings, a considerable number complete fabrications contrived to amuse friends and kinsmen and add a little brightness to the drowsy tedium of life in their remote, mountainous comer of the world.
The dark, disc-shaped object that went skimming over the promontories near the Baikonur Cosmodrome around sundown on April 26--a singularly overcast evening in what had been an even more extraordinary spell of damp, cloudy weather--would be spotted by the entire al-Bijan clan, from great-grandparents on down to its children, all sixty-seven of them gathered outside an ancestral home still occupied by family members to feast on grilled horseflesh, drink potent alcoholic beverages (at least in the case of the adults), dance to chords strummed on the three-stringed komuz, and generally celebrate the wedding of one of its daughters to the son of a well-respected and, by Kazakh standards, well-heeled livestock breeder.
In this instance, their subsequent accounts of its appearance did not require any exaggeration.
Ricci sat alone in the silence of the trailer that served as his personal quarters outside the Cosmodrome, looking over some maps of the area, liking his situation, and particularly his Russian hosts, less and less with every minute that passed. Expecting them to keep a promise of cooperation was like thinking you could hire some degenerate pedophile as a camp counselor and accept his absolute guarantee that he'd keep his hands to himself. Their original agreement to put the launch center's security under Ricci's full direction had, in the last twenty-four hours, been qualified and ultimately redefined so that he was now in charge only of perimeter defense, with the VKS space cops, or whatever they were called, assuming control of the facility's interior grounds protection, even prohibiting access of Sword personnel to some of its buildings. And there already had been clashes of authority at the outer checkpoints that were supposed to be his team's areas of patrol.
The duplicity had been pure borscht, reminding him of what had happened in Yugoslavia after the bombing war back in the '90s, when Moscow had no sooner cut a deal with NATO not to enter Kosovo than it had ordered a military occupation force into one of Pristina's key strategic airports. Back then, they'd had a President who'd looked and acted like a huge leech pickled in vodka to blame for the supposed confusion ... but what sort of excuses were they making now?
Ricci shook his head gravely. He knew Roger Gordian had been in repeated contact with Yuri Petrov, trying to persuade him to stick to his original commitments. But Ricci's own last conversation with Gordian had taken place twelve hours ago, at which point he'd been told to sit tight and await further news. Gordian hadn't sounded optimistic, though, and there had been nothing from him since--a clear indication that Petrov had fallen victim to the hereditary Russian breast-beating reflex and would keep thumping away until he keeled over backward. In other words, negotiations were stalled indefinitely and Ricci's curtailed functions would continue to be the status quo unti
l after the ISS launch was history.
Assuming it occurred without disaster striking first.
Ricci studied his map, feeling stretched thin in every sense. His exhaustion and jet lag, the haste with which he'd needed to organize his guard force, the ongoing logistical problems of building it up to a reasonable level of adequacy, Petrov's frequent curve balls and increasing restrictions upon his authority ... the whole kit and kaboodle was grating on him. Nor had there been a bit of encouragement in anything he'd heard about the strike on the terrorist camp in the Chapadas. Whoever had been occupying that base had flown the coop aboard the Lockheed, which had itself vanished without a trace. And if they were as good and well-equipped as his information led him to believe, Ricci figured they'd have a network of safe, tucked-away airfields where they could make layover and refueling stops en route to their ultimate destination.
And where do you think that's going to be? he thought. Come on, take a guess.
Ricci studied the map, thinking they were out there someplace close by, knowing it with a strange and implacable certainty he could not have explained to any other human being ... with the possible exception of Pete Nimec. Sometimes when he was with the BPD and had worked a criminal investigation to where a bust was imminent, he'd been able to feel the accelerating energies of the thing with his nerve endings, the way he supposed animals in a forest could sense a coming storm.
They were out there, out there someplace--but where? Even the weather was working to his disadvantage. As long as the low-pressure front remained in a holding pattern over southern Kazakhstan, the Hawkeye-II satellite would be wearing what amounted to a blindfold of clouds, severely reducing its capabilities. To offset this handicap, Gordian and Nimec had shipped Ricci another of their little toys, a SkyManta unmanned air recon vehicle that looked for all the world like a flying saucer in some 1950's-era drive-in masterpiece. Earth versus the Aliens from Zanthor. He'd seen other drones in his military days, including the Predator, which had been in its experimental stages at the time, and was eventually given over to the exclusive use of the Air Force's 11th Reconnaissance Squadron ... the Predator, and another UAV called the Hunter, both of which had outwardly resembled conventional airplanes.
