* * *
Rat continued to stare through his scope. He listened to Lew and Patricia call for backup and announce the first live shooter. Here we go, Rat said to himself. Kill or be killed. He thought of turning and finding the shooter back near the stands, but those there should be able to handle him. Shooting into the stands or the operations building could be done, but it was risky at this distance, almost two thousand yards. He studied the van and saw the slightest movement, almost a shudder. He squinted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. No doors were moving, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, yet there was that slight move, as if someone heavy had walked from one side of the van to the other. Then he noticed the small patch of gray, barely visible to him, on top of the van. He realized it was changing size.
The roof of the truck began retracting, rolling back toward the cab like the security doors in front of so many shops in Paris. The small motor hummed as the top steadily retracted. After a few seconds the top of the truck was completely gone, and the man inside stared into the bright sky. He could hear the approaching jets. They were coming from behind him, perfectly on schedule. He turned on his missile.
* * *
Lew stared at the two solo jets screaming toward him. They sounded like a giant ripping cardboard. Patricia transmitted on the radio, triggering the microphone with her left hand as she reached around to her right hip for her handgun. “We’ve got a shooter on the roof of the operations center!” Lew transmitted.
Patricia was faster getting out her gun and aimed at the small target fifty yards away, a difficult shot with a handgun. Only the man’s head was visible with a small portion of the launch tube. Patricia wasn’t waiting for anything. She fired at the man, missing him widely with her first shot. She kept firing. The man looked at her as he saw the dust fly from the top of the building where her shots hit. He crouched as low as he could and kept the infrared reticle of his Russian-made SA-7 on the approaching jets.
Patricia was still on the radio as she continued to fire. Lew fired as the spectators around them crushed down and tried to get away from a situation they did not understand. Lew and Patricia fired again and again, missing the shooter. The man was nearly ready to shoot when a bullet from Patricia’s gun clubbed him on the top of his head and drove him down to the top of the building. His missile tube clanged down next to him.
“Warn the Blue Angels!” Lew screamed into the radio. “They have to break off!”
* * *
Ismael illuminated his digital watch again. The time had come. He stood quickly and thrust his shoulder against the lid, which flipped completely over. The lock that deterred anyone from using the dumpster was still there. The rest of the plastic cover had been cut to allow a quick tearing away. He stood to his full height with his shoulders and head outside the dumpster. He squinted and listened for the jets. He blinked to force his eyes to adjust more quickly to the brightness. He raised the Stinger to his shoulder. He placed the site in front of his eye and searched for the Hornets, which should be just off to his right, racing toward the crowd from his right to his left. Ismael aimed carefully, putting the two Hornets in his site, and waited.
* * *
Rat realized the van had a retractable roof. There was only one reason someone would have a retractable roof on a van and park it there today—to shoot down the Blue Angels. Rat wasn’t going to wait. He put his crosshairs on the center of the back of the van and fired.
The enormous bullet tore through the back of the steel door and raced down the centerline of the van. The man inside, sitting comfortably in a plastic chair attached to the floor at the proper angle, was stunned to hear the bang of the bullet tear through the door and slam into the wall of the van three inches to the left of his head.
He never heard the second bullet.
Rat had a clip of .50-caliber bullets in his semiautomatic Barrett sniper gun. Some snipers didn’t think the gun was accurate enough to be a true sniper rifle—and there wasn’t sufficiently high-grade ammunition to get small enough groupings on bench shots with the rifle, but Rat loved it for the mass of the bullet, its range, and the fact that it was semiautomatic. And it was accurate enough. He had never missed a target. His second shot was lower, aimed down toward whatever was supporting whoever was looking out the roof of the van as the two Blue Angel solos flew over. Rat’s second bullet tore a hole in the door and the man sitting behind it instantly. The Russian SA-14 missile clattered to the floor of the van as the man bled onto the floor.
Rat watched the Blues fly over, then saw a hissing trail of angry white smoke come from behind a wall.
“Missile away!” Rat yelled over his radio. He quickly controlled his breathing again, released half his air, and aimed at the wall fifteen hundred yards away where the missile had been launched. He fired quickly. His bullet tore through the wall, sending a cinder chip into the eye of the Sudanese shooter and the bullet into his shoulder. He fell in pain as his missile climbed furiously. “Missile airborne!” Rat yelled again as he picked up what looked like a shotgun with an enormous barrel. He aimed up at the Blue Angels, who were now past him, and fired.
The flare flew out of the barrel toward the two solos. It quickly deployed at one hundred feet and started burning.
* * *
“Flares! Break away!” the Boss yelled over the radio.
The four Blue Angels in the diamond couldn’t see the missile. They pumped flares out the back of their jets in case it was headed for them and broke out of their tight formation to head to the four corners of the compass and the safety of the ground. They accelerated downward, leveling out as low as was safe as they fled the airspace over Le Bourget, except for the Boss, who pulled up and stayed high watching the missile fly toward the two solos. “Oden, it’s at your six! Break right!”
“Break!” Oden said. “Get lower!”
“You got the missile?” Stovic asked, desperately looking himself.
“Negative!”
Their flares dropped beautifully, following the computer-programmed timing for the release to achieve maximum deception as they broke in opposite directions, forcing the missile to follow one or the other. But they were too low for their flares to operate effectively. They bounced on the concrete below them and hissed and burned hot on the ground like nuclear fireflies. The missile was already ahead of Rat’s flair. It flew over the Blue Angels’ flares toward the four hot exhausts in front of it.
Oden and Stovic were turning as hard as they could in opposite directions to get their exhausts away from the missile. They each had one wing straight up in the air and the other straight down toward the ground. They grunted against the Gs as they gained a better angle on the pursuing missile. The missile chose Oden’s jet and turned right to follow the moving heat source.
* * *
Ismael watched the missile chase the two fighters and their furious turning to avoid it. Number six was turning hard and in seconds would be pointed directly at him. The Stinger was the only shoulder-fired weapon in the world that could shoot down a jet from head on. The seeker-head was that good. The hungry missile rested on his shoulder, waiting for the American jet to finish its turn and head directly for him.
* * *
The first Stinger followed Oden. It drank in the heat of the exhaust, recognizing the range of the infrared spectrum that represented an engine. The closer it got, the more sure the missile was it had the right target. The oscillations of its flight path lessened and it focused on the center of the heat source. The missile flew right up the tailpipe and exploded in the back of Oden’s jet. The hydraulic flight control lines for the tail were severed and the horizontal stabilizer went hard down, forcing the nose of the jet down toward the ground. Oden jerked the stick back, fighting the sudden loss of control, but felt no response. He pulled his ejection handle the instant before the Hornet hit the ground, burst into flames, and skidded toward the hangar filled with sales booths for aircraft engines.
Stovic saw the flash of the miss
ile impact in Oden’s jet and relaxed his pull. He was heading down the runway away from the center point. He flew as low as he could safely fly. The small wings under the engine nacelles of his Hornet were no more than five feet off the ground. He tried to get even lower, hugging the ground for cover and making the lines of sight impossible for other shooters.
* * *
Ismael looked up to see one of their SA-7s chase a flare instead of a high-flying Hornet. He then watched Stovic turn #6 directly toward him. He watched flares drop out of the Hornet and pop against the runway as they lay there burning, completely ineffective, and behind the Hornet where they wouldn’t do any good even if they were floating carelessly through the air.
He looked on in alarm as he realized Stovic was flying directly at him so low that his airplane would hit the dumpster if he continued at the same altitude. He raised his Stinger to fire.
* * *
Stovic looked for obstacles at the end of the runway. He still had two thousand feet before he reached the end. He had bled off a good deal of airspeed with his hard turn and had stayed out of afterburner. But now he needed speed to escape. He slammed the throttles outward and forward to pump raw gas into the exhaust of the two powerful engines, the afterburners, and felt them kick the airplane forward, accelerating even faster.
He looked through the windscreen and saw the Dumpster directly in front of him, past the end of the runway at the end of the line of booths. A man was standing in it, a missile launcher on his shoulder aimed directly at Stovic. If he continued on, he would fly directly into the missile, but if he pulled up it would make the shot even easier. He moved the stick slightly until his screaming Hornet was headed directly at the man aiming at him. He knew without a doubt who was standing in the Dumpster.
* * *
Ismael watched in alarm as he realized Stovic had seen him. He now had to shoot at the jet coming directly at him, a small target with a lot of speed. He didn’t know if the Stinger missile was up to it. He couldn’t wait until the jet was past him, when he might have a clear shot at the exhaust. He knew what Stovic was doing. It was like an air show, like his first maneuver where he would fly low along the runway, then pull up hard and streak into the sky. Stovic was going to pull up and put his exhaust, or his tailpipes, right into the Dumpster. He was going to fry Ismael like a sausage on a spit.
Ismael closed his left eye and concentrated on the site picture of his weapon with his other eye. The missile growled hungrily. He curled his finger around the trigger.
* * *
Rat saw him. He sighted down the barrel, put his scope on the target, and saw a man standing in a Dumpster about to fire at Stovic. He didn’t have time to linger on the target, to check the wind, to confirm the distance, to ensure his bullet would hit in a four-inch circle. He simply had to fire and guess at the details.
The next .50-caliber bullet had already been chambered automatically by the Barrett and was ready. Rat put the crosshairs on the man’s chest and fired.
The supersonic bullet raced to Ismael before the Algerian could even tell himself to pull the trigger. He knew he had a few seconds to perfect his shot at the Blue Angel, but he hadn’t accounted for Rat seeing him from two thousand yards away with a cannon for a rifle.
The bullet nicked the top of the Dumpster just enough to disfigure the bullet before it hit Ismael. It was tumbling, trying to go end over end, but before it had a chance, it entered Ismael’s chest, opening a hole through him and driving him back into the wall of the Dumpster. The Stinger fell from his hand as he crumpled inside the waste container.
Stovic raced toward the Dumpster in full afterburner. He waited for the missile to come up after him, but the man had disappeared. Stovic continued ahead, unsure of what had happened, expecting the man to stand back up. He flew as close to it as he could, then pulled up hard as he reached it, throwing his afterburning exhaust directly into the steel container as if it were a runway light at El Centro. He shot breath out of his lungs and grabbed another mouthful to hold as he automatically flexed every muscle in his upper body to trap blood to stay conscious. The ground disappeared and all he could see was sky.
* * *
Salam was in a black Mercedes van parked along the curb in the road outside the fence. He had wanted to be there when Ismael fired his Stinger into the mouth of the arrogant American. He didn’t know what had happened. Ismael was in place, then suddenly he dropped like a stone. Sniper, Salam realized grimly. Someone centrally placed. He hadn’t expected that. He envisioned Special Forces with their machine pistols racing to get Ismael after the fact. Ismael’s Stinger never fired.
Salam checked his own Stinger, readied himself, and slid the side door of the van open. He stepped outside and looked up. Before anyone had a chance to see him, he raised his missile toward Stovic’s jet and fired. He tossed the Stinger launcher on the ground and jumped back into the Mercedes.
Stovic held the stick back. He strained as he climbed and hit the button on his stick to deploy his last flares. They dropped out the back, but the missile had chosen its target. It hit his Hornet in the belly between the two engines. The warhead on the Stinger penetrated the thin skin of the jet and pierced the fuel tank between the engines. It exploded, sending hot steel fragments through both engines, which were spinning furiously, and into the fuel tank rich with fumes.
The engines began to come apart, and a flame shot up out of the back of the stricken Hornet.
“You’re hit!” the Boss called from above. “Eject! Eject!”
Stovic looked at his instruments. The caution and warning panel was lit up like a scoreboard. He knew he wasn’t going to make it. He still had three hundred fifty knots on the airplane and control. He continued up, trading his airspeed for more altitude. He decided to continue over on his back into a half Cuban Eight and try to land the Hornet on the runway heading the other direction. He pulled gently, just enough to keep going, and found himself on his back directly over the end of the runway at Le Bourget almost out of airspeed with a raging fire in the middle of the Hornet right behind his ejection seat. His engines were both full of steel fragments and were steadily coming apart, generating very little thrust. He knew he should shut off the engines and deploy the fire retardant through the fire handles. But he needed the hydraulic power and electrical power the engines gave him to keep flying.
He had no idea what had happened. The man with the missile had been shot. Rat probably got him. So where did the missile come from that got him? He was furious, but he had to focus on his airplane to have any hope of getting it on the ground. He wanted to roll level and head down to land at the other end of the runway, throw down his tailhook, and grab the arresting wire. He looked up at the ground through his canopy and saw a figure behind him dropping a launching tube and climbing into a van.
Over my dead body, Stovic thought. He checked his altitude, saw that he had enough, and pulled hard. The nose of the Hornet sliced through the horizon and headed down toward the ground. He saw the runway pass through his windscreen, and he completed a small loop with his nose pointing down at the field. He shut down one of his engines and pressed the fire extinguisher button for that engine.
“Animal, eject! Eject!” Boss yelled.
Stovic pulled the nose through until he was pointed directly at Salam. He could see that the man was looking over his shoulder at the shrieking, burning Hornet that was headed straight for him. He seemed to realize his predicament. He threw the van door open again and came out firing an AK-47 at the jet.
To Stovic it looked like a fast series of lights without any noise or effect. He knew every flash represented a bullet leaving the weapon aimed at him, but it didn’t register. He didn’t care. He was at five hundred feet. He looked at his airspeed and compared it to his altitude. He was approaching the edge of the envelope—the last chance he would have to successfully eject and live to tell about it. If he waited, the airplane’s descent rate would trump the rocket motor in the ejection seat, and his ej
ection would end with him smacking into the ground without a parachute. Stovic saw more flashes from the barrel of the assault rifle and suddenly wished the 20-millimeter Gatling gun in the nose of the Hornet were loaded. But he had no weapons other than himself.
He flew down the path of the bullets and trimmed the Hornet’s controls quickly so it would continue straight into the man firing at him. He waited until he was one hundred feet off the ground and reached between his legs. He grabbed the loop attached to the ejection seat and leaned back to make sure his spine was straight. He put his left hand on the wrist of his right hand and pulled with all the strength he had.
The canopy was instantly blown off, his seat motor fired, and he was blasted up the rail by the rocket motor on his ejection seat. He flew into the sky as the shiny blue Hornet with two dead engines and a raging fire in its back slammed into the ground ten feet from Salam. It exploded in a concussive conflagration. The metal and fire tore through Salam instantly, completely destroying him.
But Stovic had waited too long. His descent rate was too high. The barometer in the seat knew it was too low and pushed him out of the seat by inflating a bladder behind his back. The passing airstream jerked the parachute out of its pack, and the ballistic spreader fired sending the canopy into its instantaneous imitation of an airborne jellyfish racing for the surface.
The canopy caught the air once, and Stovic hit the ground right in the middle of the burning Hornet he had just abandoned. He reached for the Koch fittings of his parachute to get away from it and run out of the fire.
The Shadows of Power Page 36
