by Jack Du Brul
“And they checked them all?”
Ira simply nodded. “If something looked promising, they cranked the resolution and fed the image to the computers for further enhancement. We found a lot of military camps that the Pentagon hadn’t known about and” — he flipped to the second-to-last picture — “one lost valley.”
Mercer studied the image. The satellite camera was looking straight down at two barren mountain ridges. They were so close together, the valley between them was little more than a jagged line. To the north, where the mountains ended in a high plateau, a dense layer of clouds obscured what little of the valley could be discerned. A river cut across the mouth of the valley as it wended around the twin mountain ranges.
“Are you sure?” Mercer did little to hide his disappointment. He’d expected to see the monastery Tisa had described and the village where she’d grown up.
With a dramatic flourish Ira flipped the picture over to reveal the last in the series. “This what you’re looking for?”
Mercer couldn’t believe the clarity. It was as though the picture had been taken from a couple hundred feet, not hundreds of miles in space. He could see individual tiles in the monastery’s multitiered roof and make out sheep being herded along a nearby path. He could even see there was a rip on the left sleeve of the shepherd’s cloak. The compound was enormous, a square parcel fenced by a stone wall with the lamasery at its center. The building itself was easily the size of four city blocks.
Ira retrieved another stack of pictures from his case. “These are everything we got. I guarantee these are the only shots ever taken of that place.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because we didn’t have them in our archive and no one else in the world has the technology to produce them. Besides, if the Chinese knew the valley existed, don’t you think they would have razed it by now?”
“How far into China is it?” Mercer was too rapt to look up from the photos as he asked. It was almost as if he was searching for Tisa’s upturned face, knowing that at that precise moment her picture was being taken, one that Mercer would shortly see.
“A hundred sixteen miles as the crow flies,” Ira answered. “But we’re talking about an area where you can’t get a crow to fly. The average elevation between there and Nepal is over ten thousand feet and the mountains themselves are impassable. A team sent in on foot would take weeks to reach Rinpoche-La.”
That got Mercer’s attention. “We don’t have weeks, Ira.”
“I know. I saw the latest from La Palma. The team there reports that the tremors are increasing in severity and duration. They also tell me that the westward side of the volcano is beginning to show displacement. I think that means the mountain’s starting to bulge.”
“That’s what it means, all right. The pressure in the magma chamber has reached a point where it can distort the outside of the volcano. If it keeps up, La Palma could explode like Mount St. Helens.”
“Those are the same words they used. What they won’t do is make predictions about when it’ll blow.”
“Like I explained to the president, they can’t do that. In a normal circumstance, they couldn’t even say that it will erupt. When most volcanoes rumble to life they stay active for a few months or even years and go dormant again without any kind of eruption. We’re only certain about La Palma because of Tisa and only she knows exactly when. Have you thought about how to get her out?”
“We can’t get her out, at least not in time.”
“What do you mean can’t?” Mercer stabbed a finger at one of the pictures. “She’s right here.”
The admiral held up a hand. “I said we can’t get her out. I didn’t say we can’t get you in.”
Mercer stared blankly. Ira climbed from his seat and peered out the bar’s plate-glass window. He gave it a rap with his knuckle and returned to the booth. A moment later a black man with a shaved head and massive shoulders pushed through the door. He was dressed all in black and sported dark glasses. One cheek bulged with a wad of tobacco.
He scanned the room from behind his shades, projecting menace that would have withered a normal bar crowd. Harry and Tiny merely gave him a passing glance and returned to their conversation. His gaze settled on Mercer.
“I hear you want to join the Monkey Bombers,” he said in a rich baritone.
Mercer blanched. He’d recognized Captain Booker Sykes the moment he made his entrance but hadn’t put the Delta Force commando together with Ira’s boast about getting him to Rinpoche-La. Once Mercer understood the nature of the weapons Sykes worked with, he’d agreed that the nickname, monkey bombs, was much more apt than the military designation, MMU-22. Manned Munition Utility 22.
Sykes grinned at Mercer’s pallor and slid into the booth next to Ira.
“I’ve had the best minds in the Pentagon on this operation and there’s no other way,” Lasko explained. “Obviously just asking the Chinese for permission is out. We can’t slip a team over the border because of the timing involved and the probability of them being picked up. We can forget an insertion via a regular parachute jump. The Chinese have unbroken radar coverage throughout the region. Even flying nap of the earth, a transport plane wouldn’t make it twenty miles into China before they scramble MiGs for an intercept. It’s the MMUs or nothing.”
Mercer kept his eyes on Sykes. “Do they really work?”
“For the past twenty drops the sensors in the pods indicate the passenger would have survived.”
“Sensors? You mean you haven’t made a manned jump yet?”
Sykes looked hesitant. “Well, the first forty or so drops weren’t survivable. Hell, the first couple were so bad we had to dig what was left of the pods out of the desert floor. The techs needed some time to work out the kinks. They think they have it now.”
“Jesus.” Mercer shook his head. “Well, I was the damned fool to insist on coming along. What about extraction after we reach Rinpoche-La?”
“That’s the other wrinkle,” Ira informed him. “As soon as you establish contact with Miss Nguyen you’ll have a secure satellite phone to relay any information she has about La Palma. Once we have that, the urgency is gone and you can take all the time you need to hike out to the Nepalese border.”
“A hundred sixteen miles?”
“More like two fifty,” Sykes corrected. “There’s a whole lot of mountains we have to walk around.”
“Better and better.” The thought of being reunited with Tisa kept the misery from Mercer’s voice, but not the sarcasm. “How does it play now?”
“Tomorrow morning an air force transport will take you to Area 51 for two days of orientation with Sykes and his team. From there you’ll be flown to a staging point on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. That’s where you load up the MMUs for the flight into Tibet.”
“How long’s the flight?”
“We’re estimating six hours but it could be longer,” Sykes replied. “It all depends on how far we have to detour around the heaviest of the Chinese radar coverage.”
“And no in-flight movie, I suppose.”
The commando laughed. “At least the MMUs have been modified to include a relief tube.”
There wasn’t any need for Mercer to think about the dangers. He would go no matter what scheme the Pentagon savants had concocted to get him to Tisa. “Hey, Harry,” he called across the quiet bar. “You have to modify your rescue story. I’m not charging the damsel’s castle on a horse. I’m dropping on it from out of a dragon’s stomach.”
Harry didn’t miss a beat. “Just as long as you make the moat of the situation.”
DIEGO GARCIA, INDIAN OCEAN
A thousand miles south of the Indian subcontinent, the islands of the Chagos Archipelago were like a handful of emeralds tossed on the blue waves. Dense tropical jungle, sugar sand beaches and azure reefs gave the islands their beauty. The extraction of copra oil from coconuts once gave them a thriving economy. All that changed in the 1970s when the British e
stablished a military base on one of the islands, a seventeen-square-mile atoll called Diego Garcia. At the time, it was a Cold War outpost for monitoring Soviet ships plying the Indian Ocean.
Over the next twenty years the island was gradually expanded. At the same time, it was handed over to the United States. Today, only a handful of the three thousand military and civilian support staff on the atoll are British citizens.
Diego Garcia gained a measure of fame as a staging area during Operation Desert Storm for B-52 bombers pounding Iraqi positions in Kuwait. Upgrades to the facility allowed it to base B-1s and B-2s during the Afghanistan campaign and again in 2003 for the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Strapped in the observer’s seat behind the pilot of the C-17 Globemaster cargo jet, Mercer had a clear view as the giant aircraft descended from out of the clouds after twenty hours of flight. The atoll was shaped like a squashed circle, an open ring of coral and sand that bulged on one side. It was there that an air base had been hacked from the jungle. As the plane dropped farther, he could see the long runway paralleling the beach and acres upon acres of parking ramps. He counted two dozen aircraft before giving up. Behind the landing strip was a village of prefabricated buildings constructed for those posted at this isolated location. Farther on was Camp Justice, a facility built in the wake of the September 11 attacks that housed military personnel involved in the global war on terror. Beyond the island nothing but ocean stretched to the horizon.
“We call it the dirt aircraft carrier,” the pilot called over the intercom, her voice filled with a Texas drawl. “Folks based here call it Gilligan’s Isle with guns.”
“Ever been here before?” Mercer asked Sykes, seated next to him in the second observer’s seat.
“Couple of times. Damn! That was a secret. Remind me I have to kill you later.”
The pilot eased back on the quad throttle controls and activated the thrust vectoring system that allowed the two-hundred-eighty-ton aircraft to land in less than three thousand feet no matter how large the load she carried. The air was thick and humid and the four engines labored.
Thundering over the runway threshold, the Globemaster floated on ground effects for a few hundred feet before settling on its multiple landing trucks. Without concern for passenger safety beyond getting them to their destination alive, the air force major slammed home the thrust reversers and Mercer pitched against his harness.
Almost immediately the plane slowed to taxi speed and swung off the 11,800-foot runway.
Now that they were on the ground, Mercer saw that the planes he’d noticed during their descent were B-52s, the venerable strategic bomber whose crews were generally younger than the aircraft they flew. At the end of the parking ramp were four futuristic buildings that looked like flattened domes. These round structures measured two hundred fifty feet wide and were almost six stories tall. The C-17 taxied to a spot in front of the last building and the pilot cut the engines. After being assailed by the whine of the turbojets for so long, the silence was disconcerting.
Mercer peered through the windscreen. The building was a hangar with open clamshell doors. Tropical light flooded the interior and yet the aircraft in the center of the cavernous space seemed to absorb it all. Although he’d seen the same plane the day before at Area 51, seeing it deployed and knowing what they would be attempting soon sent the first pangs of fear into his gut. Mercer’s fists clenched and he had to consciously work to get them to relax. Sykes noticed but said nothing.
Officially designated Spirit, the bat-winged B-2 had been dubbed the stealth bomber by the media. The aircraft in the hangar was part of the 509th Bomb Wing out of Whiteman AFB, Missouri. She was number 82-1065, a last-generation block 30 with every conceivable upgrade the builders at Northrop and the air force could devise. With an unlimited range due to her in-flight refueling capability, the stealth was the ultimate weapon of the U.S. doctrine of force projection. It could carry a variety of payloads in her rotary launchers, everything from thirty-six cluster bombs with their hundreds of individual bomblets to eight five-thousand-pound GBU-37 “bunker busters” to sixteen B83 multimegaton thermonuclear bombs capable of leveling entire cities.
For the past several months this particular B-2 had been stationed at Area 51, the linchpin to the development of the MMU-22 — what Sykes’s troops affectionately called the monkey bomb.
The concept for this secret weapon came from the military’s perceived need to covertly insert a commando team inside an area protected by heavy air defenses. Up until the development of the MMU-22 the only options were for troops to land beyond the radar umbrella and slog in on foot or risk a HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) parachute jump off the back ramp of a C-130. However, the Hercules cargo plane was as stealthy as a zeppelin and not much faster. Something better was needed, a covert way to get Special Operations soldiers to where they needed to be.
In the late 1990s, a British defense contractor was working on the development of pods that could be mounted under the wings of the Harrier jump jet. These man-sized capsules were designed for the rapid evacuation of wounded soldiers from deep behind enemy lines. Someone at the Pentagon expanded on the idea and wondered if it was possible to infiltrate troops the same way, but using a stealth platform such as the B-2 or F-117 Nighthawk fighter/bomber. From that abstraction grew the MMU-22.
The pods were slightly larger than telephone booths, doped in radar-absorbing composite material and formed in angular shapes to deflect incoming radar. Using the same global positioning satellite system that gave American bombs such precision, an onboard computer steered the MMU-22 as it fell. At a predetermined height, usually the minimum safe distance above the ground, the parachute would be deployed. Booker Sykes claimed accuracy of within twenty feet even in a crosswind of up to thirty knots.
Inside the pod, a Special Forces soldier was provided with enough room to stretch out, storage for combat harnesses, packs, equipment and the weapons necessary for their mission. While confining, the monkey bombs were lined with high-tech memory foam that made them relatively comfortable, provided the person inside didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. As Sykes had mentioned, there was a relief tube for a soldier to empty his bladder as well as a closed-circuit television attached to a camera at the bottom of the pod to give a view of the landing site during the descent.
Sykes loosened his safety straps and leaned over to Mercer. “Little more intimidating now that we’re here, huh?”
The B-2 resembled a black manta ray, its partially buried engine nacelles being the gills to feed the four General Electric F-118 turbofans, the bulbous cockpit the creature’s eyes. Even resting at its hard stand, the aircraft radiated menace. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Ten minutes later they were sweating on the tarmac. A steady breeze carried the iodine taste of the sea but provided no relief from the humidity. The ramp at the back of the C-17 was down and the aircraft’s loadmaster was coordinating a fleet of forklifts to remove the MMUs from the plane’s hold. Despite the tight security at Area 51 and here at Diego Garcia, the pods were crated in containers labeled MACHINE PARTS and wouldn’t be unpacked until they were in the hangar and the doors closed. There were eight MMUs in total, seven for Sykes and his Delta Force team and one for Mercer.
The six men, hand selected by Sykes, were perhaps the best-trained soldiers the United States had ever produced. They all came from the army and had excelled from their first days of basic training and in their extensive training since. Specialists in all forms of combat, they’d also learned to operate with initiative and flexibility. They were tighter knit than brothers, hard men who had trained through the human instinct of self-preservation to put their lives in the hands of the others. In Kosovo and Afghanistan and Iraq and a dozen other hot spots around the globe their bonds had been tempered by combat.
Because the occupant of the monkey bomb was virtually powerless once the weapon was loaded into the B-2, Mercer’s two days of orientation in Nevada was more for the Delta
operators to assess him for themselves. New members seconded to the team, soldiers who’d already proved they belonged through years in the military, still needed months of initiation and indoctrination before they were accepted.
It wasn’t enough for the men that Sykes had said Mercer was all right. He had to prove it himself. In the thirty hours he’d spent with just the men, not Sykes, he was forced on two five-mile runs, endured numerous timed sprints through an impromptu obstacle course, expended about a thousand rounds of ammunition on a firing range and went on three static line parachute jumps (the jump master had explained why he wanted to see three jumps by telling Mercer anyone can fall from an airplane once, only a few will try it a second time and only damned fools go back for thirds and those were the kind he wanted).
In the end, the team’s senior noncom, Angel Lopez, a streetwise Honduran immigrant who went by the nickname Grumpy, had pronounced Mercer just marginally more fit than a week-old corpse. In keeping with the sequence of names the men chose for each other — Sykes being Doc, the son of a preacher who struck out consistently with women getting called Bashful, the team’s jokester going by Dopey, and so on — Mercer was given the ignominious name of Snow White.
Mercer and Sykes strolled past the hangar. In the background they could hear Grumpy snarling at the men. “H’okay people, we got twenty hours until we launch and twenty-four hours of work. I want a full weapons check, equipment breakdown and ammo load distribution in twenty mikes.”
At the edge of the aircraft ramp, beach sand blew across the asphalt in airy streaks. The wind had kicked up, a steady beat that flattened their clothes. Sykes hunkered down to a squatting position and took up a stick to draw random shapes in the dirt.
“What’s on your mind?” Mercer asked after a moment.
Sykes kept his eyes on his drawings as he spoke, his voice solemn. “We haven’t had a chance to talk since Dreamland. I just want you to know that Grumpy says you did okay back there. That’s a hell of a compliment coming from him.”
