"Imagine you have only twenty minutes to accomplish your mission but that you know everything there is to know about this technology. Now, where is this weapon most vulnerable? What would you do?"
Salerno thought. His mind ran through the blueprints and electronic schematics. Suddenly, he knew. But if he admitted he had not checked the gas controller, what would this woman do?
Oshima saw the flicker in Salerno's eyes. So he had forgotten something. It was always the same with experts. Long on theory. Short on practicalities.
"Talk to me, Dr. Salerno," she said.
25
"The Air Force is open for business. MOUNTUP!"
Lines of paratroopers waddled toward waiting C130s. Laden with parachute, reserve, rucksack, weapon, ammunition, and specialist equipment — everything from explosives to spare batteries to AT4s — the troopers moved with the grace and dynamism of sumo wrestlers on a chain gang.
The Airborne were renowned for dash and élan, but that was after they hit the ground. Loading up was a tortuous process. Flight time was not much of an improvement.
No aircraft was better loved by the Airborne than the C130, but the hard truth was that by the time sixty-four fully equipped troopers were sandwiched in, even moving a sick bag up and down required collaborative effort. There was no walking up and down the aisles. There was no aisle space left in which to perambulate. Paratroopers sat knee to knee in two double rows facing each other, with all the intervening space jammed with their equipment. If you had an itch, or a weak bladder, you were well advised to attend to your needs beforehand. The only way you could move from one end of the aircraft to the other was by behaving rather like a monkey moving around in a cage, with the web mesh that supported the seating acting as the bars. A monkey in jump boots.
Fitzduane was of the opinion that the powers that be knew what they were doing. The crush was so great that as time wore on jumping out of the aircraft became an increasingly attractive option.
The ramp was half raised but not closed. There were few windows in the rear of the C130, and the air and just the sight of the sky provided a welcome respite.
The four turboprop engines fired up and clouds of red dust obscured the open aperture. The aircraft vibrated. The background noise level rose to something above pleasant but below tolerable. You could talk, but only by banging your coveralls together. The jumpmasters and safeties wore headphones and were plugged in to the flight intercom system.
Fitzduane had been custom-fitted between Lieutenant Colonel Zachariah Carlson and Lonsdale. Across from him sat Brock. Scout Platoon occupied the adjoining space. The unit looked quite menacing enough to carry out the mission on their own.
Carlson leaned toward Fitzduane. "We were just like this, waiting for takeoff before the Haiti mission," he said, "when there was a banging on the door and we found one of the sergeant majors outside. He'd been on leave, but just couldn’t bear to miss the action. He drove right to Green Ramp in civilian clothes. No weapon, no helmet, no parachute even."
Fitzduane wasn't paying full attention. If his eyes did not deceive him, a head had appeared above the top of the half-open ramp.
He blinked. The head had vanished. He was imagining things. The aircraft started to taxi.
He focused on Carlson. "What did you do with the guy?" he said. "Throw him out to test the wind?"
Carlson smiled. "Hell no. We kitted him out with bits and pieces. Anyone with that kind of Airborne spirit deserves to jump."
Fitzduane blinked again. This time there was no mistake. The head had reappeared above the ramp, and as he watched, the figure slid down into the aircraft in a cloud of red North Carolina dust. The C130 was picking up speed.
Sixty-four helmeted green and black faces stared at the intruder. He was wearing a suit and tie that, once given a good vacuuming, would have passed muster on the Hill when Congress was in session.
"Glad you know the form," said Fitzduane to Carlson.
"What the fuck!" said Brock.
"WHERE DO I SIT?" shouted Cochrane.
Fitzduane grinned evilly.
"Friend of yours?" said Carlson.
Fitzduane shook his head. "Pass the word to that yo-yo that it's going to be a long fucking flight."
Cochrane caught his eye and waved. "Hi, Hugo!" he shouted.
Sixty-four helmeted green and black faces stared at Fitzduane.
"What the fuck!" said Brock.
* * * * *
With some difficulty and the cooperation of his entire row, who all leaned to give him space, Fitzduane wrapped a two-inch-wide strip of white tape around Cochrane's left arm.
The chief of staff had been scavenging and negotiating for some considerable time and now looked more like a paratrooper. He had a helmet and uniform and his face was green. Even the shoes had gone, though the boots were zip-up flight issue.
His roster of equipment was nearly complete — but not quite.
"What's the tape for?" said Cochrane.
"Identifies you as belonging to the First Brigade," said Fitzduane, "and may stop you getting shot. Maybe I should take it back."
Cochrane ignored the comment. "What do I need to know? Keep it very simple. Brief me like you were using big print — and I was a politician. No big words."
"When we hit the ground, we're going after Oshima," said Fitzduane.
"How do you know where she'll be?" said Cochrane.
"There's a command bunker under Madoa airfield," said Fitzduane. "Rheiman was persuaded to draw a map. In the event of an attack, that's apparently where she'll be."
"If she isn't?" said Cochrane.
"I'll be profoundly irritated," said Fitzduane.
"Anything else?" said Cochrane.
"Roll when you hit the ground," said Fitzduane. "But first, remember to borrow a parachute."
Cochrane sat very still. "Aaaah!" he said slowly. "And I was doing so well."
Brock's eyes rolled upward. He shook his head. "What the fuck!" he said.
"You forget to tell him the challenge and the countersign," said Carlson.
Fitzduane nodded. "Happiness," he said, "is the challenge."
"What's the countersign," said Cochrane.
"Dead woodpecker," said Brock. He pumped his arm.
"HOOAH, SIR!" said Scout Platoon in unison.
Cochrane leaned toward Fitzduane. "Are they always like this?" he said.
"Pretty much," said Fitzduane.
The two jumpmasters, one for each door, faced down their respective double rows of troopers. Their legs were spread, the knees slightly bent, and their arms were ready at their sides as if to draw.
The posture was straight out of Dodge City. Straight gunslinger. And just as compelling.
The tension ratcheted up. The eyes of every trooper were focused on their respective jumpmasters. Fitzduane could feel the adrenaline start to pump. Hands flashed up palms outward, opening and closing twice.
"TWENTY MINUTES!" roared the jumpmasters, voices and hand movements in perfect harmony.
"TWENTY MINUTES!" responded the combined voices of sixty-four paratroopers.
* * * * *
"They've secured Arkono, sir," said Colonel Dave Palmer, the divisional executive officer. "No opposition. The strip was abandoned. The Kiowas are being landed as we speak."
General Mike Gannon nodded. He was a great believer in the 82nd's Kiowa Warrior helicopters, but they had neither the range nor the air-to-air refueling capability to make the journey on their own. That meant flying them in C130s and landing them close enough to the target area to be unloaded and on station when the division went in.
The nearest airstrip of adequate size was Arkono — the same strip that Fitzduane's group had used for their escape. There had been a decided possibility that Arkono would be occupied this time, but a pathfinder team had shown it still to be deserted.
The terrorist were consolidating their manpower. The Devil's Footprint complex was going to be a hard nut to crack. Gannon had no doub
t but that the 82nd would triumph, but the question of casualties was foremost in his mind.
An airborne assault accelerated the entire combat cycle. You could win your objective faster, but the price could be terrible. In the past, parachute assaults had cost as high as fifty percent casualties.
The figure should be nothing like that this time, if Carlson and his team had planned everything correctly.
But the wild card was the supergun.
* * * * *
The faintest hint of a smile on his lips, Lieutenant Colonel Zachariah Carlson sat with his eyes closed as if meditating.
Slap a saffron robe on him and give him a begging bowl, and he would do well as a Buddhist monk, Fitzduane reflected. He already damn near had the shaven head.
An aura of calm exuded from the paratrooper. Internally he was probably using "What the fuck am I doing here?" as a mantra, but externally he looked as if he had just had sex — and it had been good — and Nirvana was just coming up over the horizon.
No worries. Positive vibrations.
His example seemed to be infectious. Although the tension had definitely increased in the aircraft since the jumpmasters' initial warning call, there were few external signs of fear. Of course, packed that tightly together, you could not really do much to show what was churning away inside.
You couldn't prowl up and down. You couldn't shuffle your feet. You could not even shake with fear without alerting your entire row.
You certainly could not run away. All you could do was sweat, and laden with equipment and packed together as you were, you were doing that anyway.
You were committed.
In minutes you would be doing what you had been trained to do. You would be jumping into a hot zone where several thousand hostiles would be doing their best to kill you.
Unless you killed them first. Which was beginning to seem like an increasingly good idea. In fact, the only option.
Acceptance of that decision had a definite calming effect. Instead of focusing on what might happen, you zeroed in on what had to be done and the tools you had to do the job.
Mission focus. The best antidote to fear. Combat-proven since the first cave dweller had sallied out to kill something large and unfriendly for supper.
Carlson's brain was racing. The assault plan was the product of the entire divisional planning team and had been signed off on by the CG and more than a few layers above his pay grade. Nonetheless the core strategy was his and, rather more than he cared to admit, Fitzduane's.
The airborne had half a century's experience in parachute assaults, so how in hell had he allowed this stranger to so influence their thinking?
Conventional wisdom dictated that they should assault Madoa airfield and the heavily reinforced supergun valley simultaneously. Instead, the entire focus was on the airfield and the supergun was being left to destroy itself — with a little follow-up help from the air force.
But what about the troops dug in around the supergun valley's perimeter? Even if the supergun did blow, what was to stop the perimeter troops from attacking the airborne from the rear as they battled to secure the airfield? There were only eight kilometers to cross, and the terrorists had artillery, mortars, and armor.
Fitzduane had argued that the supergun explosion would be devastating and that any survivors of the perimeter forces could be handled by air or mopped up afterward. The clincher was that friendly forces should be kept out of the area until the supergun was destroyed or they would be duck soup too.
It had seemed to make sense, but now Carlson was wondering. Well-dug-in troops have an incredible ability to survive blast. How violent can one conventional explosion be? Anyway, even if the sabotage works, how do we know that the terrorists will fire the weapon?
I know Oshima, Fitzduane had said with absolute certainty. She won't fire immediately. She will keep her options open for as long as she can — but as soon as she knows the full scale of the assault and realizes that she cannot hold, then she will fire. Sooner rather than later.
And then? Carlson had queried.
If the supergun blows, she will do three things, Fitzduane had said. She will fight a furious delaying action for as long as possible; if she has the expertise she may try to mine or activate any nerve agents stored off the command bunker in some way that will buy her time; and she will try to escape.
How can you be so sure? Carlson had argued.
She learned much of her trade under the terrorist known as the Hangman, Fitzduane had said. Her subsequent record proved that she learned well. As sure as it rains in the West of Ireland — both when you expect it and when you don't — Oshima will have an escape route planned.
The Devil's Footprint complex is hundreds of kilometers from anywhere, Carlson had said. Oshima's command bunker in Madoa is going to have two brigades of the 82nd Airborne Division descend around it and blow it to shit. The airfield itself is surrounded by a belt of mines up to half a kilometer deep. There will be so much aerial reconnaissance an AWACS will have to make sure no one bumps into each other. So how?
That's for her to know and us to find out, Fitzduane had said.
How do we do that? Carlson had asked.
You lie back and soak in a nice deep hot bath with your eyes closed and think a lot, said Fitzduane.
Carlson smiled to himself at the memory, but the anxiety did not go away.
"TEN MINUTES!" shouted the jumpmasters, hands opening and closing twice, energy and urgency radiating from them like some kind of psychic transfusion.
"TEN MINUTES!" roared back the planeload of paratroopers.
Carlson's mind snapped clear of doubt and uncertainty. Repining was useless.
It was going to happen.
* * * * *
"Shit!" said Cochrane. "I nearly forgot."
Fitzduane was thinking about the ground disturbance the infra red satellite photographs had shown up. On the face of it an extensive tunnel network had been constructed under the airfield by the relatively fast technique of evacuating the earth, constructing a deep trench, roofing it over, and then covering it in.
But Oshima must have known that surveillance would show up the disturbed ground, and it was not like her to limit her work to something so obvious.
So what else had she done? What had she constructed that would not show? How many of the tunnels she had constructed were decoys? Had she constructed other tunnels by purely underground digging that would not show up on film? The giveaway would be the extracted earth, but that could be intermingled in the earth extracted from the trenches.
Detectable tunnels near the surface. Hidden tunnels much deeper down. But deep digging would be much harder, and this was a rocky plateau. Where could you dig? How fast could you dig? They had seen an excess of bulldozers and surface-digging equipment, but had they seen any tunneling equipment? What were your options?
What he had really needed were the detailed geological reports. The whole area had originally been surveyed when exploring for oil.
"I've got the reports," said Cochrane. "Maury dug them up."
Fitzduane glared at him. "You’ve spent too long on the Hill, Lee, briefing congressmen just before they vote. It's supposed to be done differently when people are shooting at you."
Cochrane tried to shrug. It wasn't possible.
"What am I supposed to do with them?" snarled Fitzduane. "Read them on the way down?"
"Airborne!" said Brock. "Cool suggestion, sir!"
"FIVE MINUTES!" roared the jumpmasters. Five fingers came up.
"FIVE MINUTES!" came the response.
"GET READY!"
"GET READY!"
"OUTBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"
"OUTBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"
"INBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"
"INBOARD PERSONNEL, STAND UP!"
"HOOK UP!"
"HOOK UP!"
"CHECK STATIC LINE!"
"CHECK STATIC LINE!"
"CHECK EQUIPMENT!"
"CHECK E
QUIPMENT!"
"I can't get to them anyway," said Cochrane. "They're in the small of my back under all this gear. God, I feel like an Egyptian mummy."
"You should live so long, sir," said Brock.
The side doors were slid open. The sound of the engines suddenly increased and was combined with the rush of air and the noise of the slipstream.
'THREE MINUTES!" shouted the jumpmasters.
"THREE MINUTES!" blasted back the paratroopers.
"STAND BY!"
"STAND BY!"
A row of holes appeared toward the tail of the aircraft.
Seconds later there was a flash of tracer and the helmet of one of the air force loadmasters seemed to explode.
Blood showered from his neck over a nearby safety officer as he collapsed. The aircraft bucked and rolled as antiaircraft fire exploded nearby.
"Guess we'd better get down there," said Brock quietly, "and refocus the fucks."
The jumping light was red. As they watched, it turned green.
"GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!"
Two open doors. A paratrooper in just under a second jumped out of each door, the rhythm alternating.
The last two to jump were the jumpmasters.
In thirty-six seconds, the sixty-four troopers were gone and the C130 was headed to Arkono to refuel and wait to extract the dead and wounded.
The surviving air force loadmaster secured the doors, then slumped on a bench in shock. He had seen quite enough through the open doors to make him glad he had joined the air force rather than the infantry. The 82nd were jumping into a maelstrom.
* * * * *
The command bunker was made up of a linked series of insulated steel spheres supported by hydraulic shock absorbers similar to the kind used by high-rise buildings in Japan to make them earthquake resistant. Above the bunker there were layers of armor plate, reinforced concrete, packed earth, and yet more concrete to a height of fifty feet.
For all practical purposes, they were invulnerable to conventional bombing. There were rumors of rocket-assisted penetrator bombs in development, but as far as anyone seemed to know they were just rumors. Certainly, they were immune to virtually all existing bombs in general use.
Fitzduane 03 - Devil's Footprint, The Page 42
