Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - Red Horseman

by Red Horseman (lit)

  He forced himself to full extension. The rotating feeling slowed. And stopped.

  And he was still chanting. "Go go go..." He stopped and took a deep, ragged breath.

  He stared straight ahead, which must be down. The wind was in his face, trying to pull his arms and legs backward, so straight ahead must be down.

  Thirty years of life, and all of it led up to this. School, work, family, women, good moments and bad, and all of it was mere prelude for this moment, this free fall into a cold, black eternity.

  Jack Yocke began to laugh. He laughed until he choked, then decided he might be getting hysterical, and stopped himself.

  How long has it been?

  Does it matter?

  And the answer came back. No.

  He fell on toward the waiting earth.

  Jake knew he was through the cloud layer when lights suddenly appeared in the velvet blackness below. There was Samarra, and the base almost directly under him. He twisted his head so he could see Baghdad. The navy and air force were doing their job, he noted. In the blackness he saw the wink and twinkle of explosions, here and there jeweled strings of tracers streaking through the darkness at odd angles.

  No sounds, just muzzle blasts and flashes of warheads and those twinkling strings of tracers.

  He tried to steer toward the center of the air base below, that black spot where the runways must intersect.

  Now the two-miles-per-minute rate of fall was quite discernible. The lights below were coming up at sickening speed. Even though he had spent years flying tactical aircraft at night, the visual impact of his rate of descent was disconcerting. Would the parachute open?

  This question must run through the mind of every free fall parachutist.

  Jake Grafton had a pragmatic faith in military equipment-through the years he had occasionally witnessed the spectacular, usually fatal, outcome when vital equipment failed.

  He pulled his left wrist in and examined the luminous hands of the wrist altimeter. Three thousand feet still to fall!

  How many seconds?

  The math was too much. He waited, noting the absence of muzzle flashes.

  Maybe they had achieved surprise!

  Toad's eyes were slits, staring at the lights rushing up at him. He reached forand grasped the manual ripcord. And waited.

  The runways were plainly visible, and the hangar.

  There was a plane!

  How high was he? Still a couple The opening of the chute almost tore his boots off.

  Toad took off the oxygen mask and threw it away, then began checking his equipment. He still had it. All right! He got the submachine gun unslung and checked the magazine.

  Still no muzzle flashes on the airfield directly below.

  Please God, let them be asleep!

  Jack Yocke was chanting again, some mindless sound he repeated over and over as he fell toward the lights on the earth below.

  The air was warmer here. In one corner of his mind he took note of that fact, but the flashing, twinkling lights embedded in the velvet, Stygian blackness claimed the rest of his attention. The lights were coming closer, growing larger. He could even hear muffled explosions. They were having a war down there, and he was falling into it at two miles per minute.

  He caught himself fumbling for the ripcord. No.

  No! No!

  The lights were rushing toward him now, faster and faster and fast-a tremendous jolt jerked his head up and tore at his crotch.

  He yelled. Into the oxygen mask.

  And he was hanging by the harness, the fierce wind now a zephyour. He tore at the oxygen mask and succeeded in freeing one side of it.

  He was drifting. Where? What was that lighted complex there?

  The city! God, he was coming down into the city of Sa marra, not the airfield, which was over there to the right.

  Buildings below, streets.

  He pulled on the left side of the parachute risers and felt himself slowly turn in the air. Now he was going toward a street. Good! He looked up, trying to see the parachute.

  He could just make out its vague, winglike shape.

  Where are those cords that you use to steer it? He fumbled, tryin now to find them. Oh well, he was coming down into that street Something tore at his feet and he tumbled forward all in a heap, the wind knocked out of him.

  He rolled over on his back, gasping.

  Alive! Thank God!

  Something tugged at his shoulders. The chute was on the ground, tugging in the gentle breeze.

  Clumsily he got to his feet and fumbled in the darkness for the Koch fittings that held the parachute on. He got them released. The chute began to move away.

  He let it go as he stood there staring all about him at the buildings, the windows, the empty street lit by the occasional streetlight. No one about. No Iraqis, which was wonderful, but no SEAL'S either.

  In the pregnant gloom of an Arab street his euphoria gave way to fear.

  He scuttled to the doorway of a building and stood sheltered there, looking and listening as the sounds of battle echoed off the buildings.

  The swelling, fading, then swelling sound of jet engines set his teeth on edge. His hands were shaking, he realized, and he was biting his lip.

  Which way was the airfield?

  He had no idea. It had been on his right as he descended but he had hit the street and tumbled and lost all sense of direction, so now he gazed upward at the three- and fourstory buildings, trying to decide in which direction the airfield lay as the fear congealed into a lump of ice in his chest.

  He found that he had the submachine gun in his hands.

  The hard coolness of the plastic and metal should have comforted him somewhat, but if it did he didn't feel the effect.

  As he tried to remember what the map had looked like when he studied it several hours ago surrounded by SEAL'S'-IN his former life, before he leaped through that extraordinary threshold from the airplane into the voidhe drew a total blank. He had absolutely no idea where in the city he was or in which direction the airfield lay.

  He stood paralyzed. He was panting and he was desperately afraid, a freezing, numbing fear that left him unable to think, unable to move.

  The parachute finally brought him out of it. The white silk had draped itself around a car and fluttered ever so gently in the wind. Anyone looking out a window would see it. Anyone who came along, anyone who Jack Yocke stepped from the safety of the doorway and started along the sidewalk. His steps quickened.

  He ran.

  He had gone several blocks and just crossed a fairly wide street at a hell-bent gallop when he heard the truck. The noise of a big engine at full throttle boomed off the buildings and penetrated his fear-soaked brain. He dove into a doorway as a large army truck thundered across the intersection he had just crossed.

  Follow it! Yes. It must be going toward the base.

  He waited until the engine noise died away, then willed his legs to move.

  He was in the middle of the street when a jet streaked overhead just above the housetops-the thunder of its engines arrived all at once and temporarily deafened Yocke.

  The glass in several windows broke and fell to the sidewalk.

  The roar faded almost as fast as it came and left a terrifying silence in its wake.

  Someone was looking out a window. He caught a glimpse of a face. He kept going. His pace was slower now, more sure. He wiped the sweat from his face with his fight hand, then grasped his weapon again.

  He held it in front of him, ready.

  He had walked for five minutes or so when he heard the first rifle shots. Single shots, then the staccato ripping of an automatic weapon.

  The reports seemed loud.

  When Jake Grafton's chute opened, he bounced once in the harness and breathed a tremendous sigh of relief.

  He quickly took off the oxygen mask and grabbed for the steering cords on the parachute risers. He was directly over a big hangar. He didn't have a lot of options, so he steered for t
he dark area behind it.

  He seemed to be covefing ground quickly. Going downwind. There was no help for it.

  The breeze carried him well clear of the hangar.

  He tried to make out the terrain where he would be coming down.

  Vague shapes-was that a truck? Then his feet struck something and he took a vicious rap on the left shin. He smacked into something else, then was on the ground with a thump.

  Opening his eyes, he found he was in a parking lot. He had bounced off two trucks before he got to the ground.

  His shin felt like it was on fire.

  He rolled over and tried to get up. His leg took his weight but the pain brought tears into his eyes. Holy-to He pulled the chute down with the risers. Only then did he unfasten his Koch fittings.

  Aagh, his shin! He sat down heavily and felt his left leg.

  It was swelling rapidly and maybe bleeding, but it didn't seem to be broken.

  He got the goggles off, the helmet off, then donned the infrared night vision goggles. He found the switch and adjusted the sensitivity. After replacing his helmet, he wiggled out of the parachute harness and the unopened backup chute. Now for the silenced submachine gun. He tilted the goggles up and made sure it was loaded, with the safety on.

  Massaging his shin, he sat there trying to recall where the truck parking area was on the field.

  Yes, the hangar he wanted was that big one he had floated over, that one over there.

  Jake Grafton got to his feet and gingerly hobbled to the gate. It wasn't locked. He stood there scanning with the goggles He could see figures moving out beyond the hangars.

  These blobs of red stayed low, moving swiftly and surely, then stopped to reconnoiter. SEAL'S!

  But closer in.

  there! A sentry by a guard shack, looking out into the darkness. Even as he watched, the sentry contorted and collapsed onto the concrete.

  Jake scanned. The shooter who had drilled the sentry with a silenced weapon from almost a hundred feet away began to creep along the side of the hangar toward the door.

  Jake opened the gate and hobbled toward the hangar as fast as he could go.

  The shooter by the hangar wall watched him come.

  When he was five feet away, the man said, "Jesus, CAG, what happened to your leg?" Toad Tarkington!

  "Banged it up. You okay?" "Yeah, I think so. Landed on some concrete. But I don't think this hangar is the one we want.

  Aren't we on the wrong side of the airfield?" "You're assuming this is the right airfield." "Don't tell me." Toad Tarkington pulled a compass from his shirt. He consulted it. "This has got to be the right airfield, but the wrong hangar.

  Ours is over there." He pointed.

  Missiles streaked overhead before they could react.

  They heard the explosions of the warheads detonating, then the roar of jet engines at full military power.

  More jets. One went over with his cannon spitting bursts Jake Grafton sat on the ground. He pulled his map and a pencil flash from a leg pocket and studied it while the jets worked over the Iraqi armor beyond the field perimeter. Finally he replaced the map and flash in his pocket.

  "Help me up." "How bad's your leg?" "Ain't broke. Come on. Let's go.

  With Toad leading and Jake hobbling along behind, the two of them headed into the darkness of the center of the field toward the distant hangars on the other side.

  They had gone no more than a hundred feet when they heard the small-arms fire. It seemed to be coming from the perimeter.

  "Well, they know we're here," Toad muttered.

  They came to a drainage ditch and were wading through the mud in the bottom when they heard the first chopper.

  It swept across the field only a few feet above the ground without a single light showing. Somewhere off to the left it slowed, almost a hover, then kept going toward the airfield perimeter, Jack Yocke heard the background hum of the chopper engines, and he heard several more of the machines coming across the city. These were the Apaches, he assumed, the gunships that were to act as heavy artillery under the direction of the SEAL'S on the ground.

  But he was on the wrong side of the fight. He was supposed to be inside the airfield perimeter, under cover.

  Goddamnit!

  Nothing in war ever goes the way you planned it.

  Wasn't that what Jake Grafton told him as they waited to board the plane?

  Explosions ahead. Flashes, and after a few seconds, the noise, which swept down the night streets in waves that could almost be felt. And the roar of automatic gunfire.

  Burst after burst.

  A man opened a second-story window and stuck his head out. He saw Yocke and ducked his head back in.

  That lump in the pit of Yocke's stomach turned cold. He was sweating profusely now. Unable to do anything else, he kept going, toward the gunfire.

  He came to a corner and approached it carefully. The firing was loud now, no more than a block away. Close against the side of a building and sheltered in darkness, he waited until a helicopter swept over and eased his head around. And found himself staring straight into the face of a man just a few feet away.

  Yocke swung the weapon and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Mother of God! The safety! He tried to find it.

  There was no time. The Iraqi came for him in a rush.

  Yocke swung the gun barrel, still trying to find the safety, and literally pushed the man away with the barrel. But he kept coming.

  Galvanized, Yocke pushed him again, this time using his left hand.

  He felt the bite of the knife on his arm. It stung.

  The knife gleamed in the man's right hand as he crouched, then flung himself at the reporter.

  Yocke was at least six inches taller than the Iraqi and twenty pounds heavier and his terror gave him tremendous strength, which probably saved his life. Somehow he got hold of the Iraqi's right wrist and began to twist. As the two men fell to the ground the knife came loose.

  Yocke got it.

  And rammed it into the Iraqi's body. Twice, three times, jabbing with all his strength.

  The Iraqi groaned once, almost a scream, then the strength drained from him.

  Yocke stabbed him three or four more times, then rolled away.

  He lay beside the dead man, trying to get his breath.

  Sticky. His hands were sticky and wet.

  His arm was burning.

  Horrified, he looked at the blood. On his hands, his arm, his clothes, the gear he wore. On the Iraqi. Smeared on the sidewalk.

  Jack Yocke managed to get to his feet and stood swaying as the sounds of battle came echoing down the empty street. Amazingly, he discovered he still had the knife in his hand. He opened his fingers.

  The knife made a hollow sound when it bounced on the sidewalk, Sobbing, Yocke examined the submachine gun still slung around his shoulders and found the safety. He flicked it Off.

  The Apache helicopters were pouring fire into an area by the main gate, about two hundred yards away, as Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington lay in the darkness on the edge of the concrete parking mat and studied the hangar looming ahead of them.

  Lights mounted above the center of the main door and by a sentry box at the left corner were still illuminated.

  What the lights revealed were bodies. Jake counted.

  Eight. Even as he watched, one of the men lying near the hangar moved, and drew immediate fire from out of the darkness on Jake's right. With the goggles on, Jake could see the prone figure who had just fired.

  "The SEAL'S are here," Toad whispered.

  "Isn't this Saddam's safety-deposit box, the Treasure Chest?" "I think so." "There's a personnel door over behind that sentry box.

  We might be able to get in there." "Let's check in first. Keep an eye peeled." Jake extracted his radio and fumbled with the switches.

  Then he held it to his ear and keyed the mike.

  "Snake One, this is the Doctor." Snake One was the commanding officer of
the SEAL team, Commander Lester Stick. Slick was a hell of a name for a naval officer but if anyone snickered they did it well away from Lester, who had the body of a professional wrestler and the scarred face of a man who liked to fight and had done far too much of it.