by Dale Brown
“It’s the next-generation ECMs,” said Rap, throwing a glare at Freah. “I doubt they’ll have time to remove it all. Just as there wasn’t time to remove the air-to-ground missiles we were carrying. Officially, we’re only here as transports.”
Briggs shook his head slowly, but he had the start of a grin on his face.
“Of course, local conditions prevail. Assuming we do get airborne,” Broanna added, “I’m going to need as much target data as possible. The computer’s persnickety and my copilot’s a real whiner. Personally, I’d trade them both for a good weapons officer, or even a halfway decent radar navigator.”
Dreamland
22 October, 1200 local
“COLONEL, I THOUGHT WE HAD A DATE!”
Dog jerked his head up from his desk. Jennifer Gleason was standing in the doorway.
“I had to run by myself,” said the scientist, striding into his office. She plopped herself down in a chair.
“I’m sorry, Doc,” said Dog. “I got tied up.”
“So I heard.” Jennifer glanced back at the office door. Dog looked in time to see Sergeant Gibbs closing it. He’ll get his, Dog thought.
“Want to do lunch?” asked the scientist.
“I can’t. I’m sorry,” said Bastian. “I’ve been handling the fallout, from, uh, some recommendations I had to make.”
“You mean killing JSF, right?” She flicked her hair back impishly.
“That’s supposed to be classified.”
“Come on, Colonel. You can’t fart on this base without everyone catching a whiff. Not that colonels fart.”
For some reason, the word “fart” and her beautiful mouth didn’t seem to go together.
“I actually didn’t come here to ask you to lunch,” said the scientist quickly. She leaned forward, somehow metamorphosing from a beautiful if slightly insolent young woman to a senior scientist. “I came to make a recommendation regarding the Flighthawk program. I feel the mission to Somalia should go forward.”
“It’s not a mission,” said Dog, angered that the flight was being openly discussed.
“I understand, Colonel. I also feel that I should be along in case something goes wrong.”
“Doc—”
“First of all, call me Jennifer. Or Jen.” She favored him with the briefest of brief smiles. “Second of all, there is no one in the world who knows that computer system better than I do. That’s not a brag, that’s a fact. If you’re sending those planes halfway around the world, I should be there with them.”
“I don’t know that there’s enough room for you,” said Dog.
“I checked with Major Cheshire. She says there is.”
“Major Cheshire only reluctantly approved carrying the Flighthawks,” said Bastian, who’d spoken with Cheshire only a short while before.
“She was worried about not having enough support. I’m the support.”
Dog shook his head. It was one thing to send the Mega-fortresses; while they were definitely still in the experimental stage, an early version had already seen some action. Justifying the Flighthawks was much more difficult, especially since they’d lack the veneer of a “transport” mission. And sending a civilian into a war zone was potentially a hanging offense. Her loss would be a serious embarrassment, and not just to him.
“I’m afraid it’s not possible,” he told her.
“If you lose the U/MFs,” she told him, “they’ll hang you out to dry.”
“If I lose you, they’ll grind me up into little pieces.”
“You’re not going to lose me. Between me and Parsons—”
“Parsons? Sergeant Parsons?”
“He’s waiting in the outer office to talk to you. We drew straws to see who would go first,” she added.
“No way.”
“Colonel, if I were a man, you’d let me go. You need support personnel for the UM/Fs. Shit, the only other person who’s qualified to fix that fucking computer and the com system is Rubeo. You want to send him?”
“You talk like a sailor, you know that?” Dog said. Jennifer shrugged. “My bag is packed.”
If she were a man—hell, that was impossible to even imagine.
They did need a support staff. But a girl?
She wasn’t a girl, damn it.
“I want to talk to Cheshire before I make a decision,” said Bastian finally.
“Good,” said Jennifer, jumping up. “Should I send her in right now, along with Major Stockard, or do you want us to keep going the way we planned?”
Shaking his head, Bastian went to the office door and looked out into the reception area. Cheshire and Parsons were there, along with three other Flighthawk specialists.
“Where’s Stockard?”
“Making sure the Flighthawks are prepped,” said Cheshire.
“Everyone in here,” he told the conspirators.
In the end, Dog had no choice but to agree that if it made sense to send the Flighthawks, it was logical to send a support team as well. Parsons could probably build the damn things from balsa wood and speaker wire. Gleason made the most sense as a technical expert, since she knew both the software and the hardware used by the Flight-hawks’ control system. No way he was sending Rubeo—it would undoubtedly be too tempting for him to be left behind.
Sending a high-tech team halfway around the world with untested weapons was exactly what he had called for
in the white paper he’d written so many years ago. So why did his stomach feel so queasy?
“You’re good with this, Major?” he asked Cheshire. “If the Flighthawks are going, and I think they should, we have to support them.”
He nodded. “This is my responsibility,” he told her. “I’m ordering you to do this.”
Her face flushed, probably because she knew that the Band-Aid he’d just applied to her culpability wouldn’t cover much of anything if things went wrong.
“I have some phone calls to return,” he said. “I’ll try to be there for your takeoff.”
“Fourteen hundred hours sharp,” said Parsons as they exited.
“That soon?”
“We’ll kick some butt for you, sir,” said the sergeant.
Bastian returned the wily old crew dog’s grin, then pulled over his mountain of pink phone-message sheets. Every member of the JSF Mafia wanted to take a shot at chewing off his ear today; might as well let them have a go.
“Lieutenant General Magnus, please,” he said, connecting with the first person on his list. “This is Colonel Bastian.”
“Oh,” said the voice on the other end of the line.
Dog was more than familiar with the tone. It meant, “Oh, so this is the idiot my boss has been screaming about all day.”
As he waited for the connection to go through, Dog fingered the official Whiplash implementation order, which had come through earlier in the day.
YOU ARE HEREBY ORDERED TO IMPLEMENT WHIPLASH AND SUPPORT SAME WITH ALL APPROPRIATE VIGOR.
“Appropriate vigor” could mean Megafortresses. It could mean Flighthawks.
Not if people like General Magnus didn’t want it to. Magnus was close to the Air Force Secretary; word was he was being groomed to be Chief of Staff. Dog knew him largely by reputation. An able officer, Magnus was a good man, unless you disagreed with him.
Then he was the devil’s own bastard.
“Bastian, what the hell are you doing out there in Dreamland? You sleeping?”
“No, sir, General,” said Dog.
“I understand you’ve been there for two weeks.”
“It’s about that.”
“You took your goddamned time.”
Well, thought Dog, at least he has a sense of humor. “Well, I do my best, General, as pitiful as it may be.”
“I don’t think it’s pitiful at all, Colonel. I think it’s goddamn time somebody had the balls to say what a piece of shit this JSF crate is.”
Dog looked at the phone, waiting for the punch line. “You still there, Bastian?”
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“Yes, sir,” said the colonel.
“Good. We’re going to take a hell of a lot of shit on this, I guarantee. But I’m behind you. You bet your ass. I read the whole damn report. Ms. O’Day made sure I got a copy. And a friend of hers. Brad Elliott. I didn’t think you and Brad were pals.”
“We’re not.”
“Oh? He talks about you like you’re his son. Says you’re right on the mark.”
“Well, uh, I’m flattered. To be candid, General, I thought you were a supporter of the JSF.”
“What? Did you read that in the Washington Post?”
“No, sir.”
“I expect you’re taking a lot of shit,” said Magnus.
“That’s an understatement,” said Dog, not entirely convinced that Magnus was on the level.
“Well, hold tight. And keep your nose clean. Some of these pricks will use anything they can against you. The Congressmen are the worst.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dog. “Thank you, sir.” But his line had already gone dead.
Somalia
23 October, 0100 local
MACK WOKE TO FIND THE IMAM STARING AT HIM. Sergeant Melfi and Jackson were gone; perhaps he’d only dreamed they were here with him alive.
“Major, very good,” said the Iranian. “Come now. We must meet our fate.”
The Imam straightened, then gestured at him to rise. Though still groggy, Smith felt almost powerless to resist. “What’s going on?” Mack asked.
“You are going to stand trial,” said the Imam. “Justice will be swift.”
He turned and walked back to the steps. Someone behind Mack pushed him; he stumbled over his chains, but managed to keep his balance.
Goddamn. Mack Smith. The hottest stick on the patch. Damn Iranians were going to make him the star of “don’t let this happen to you” lectures for the next hundred years.
The man behind him pushed again. Knife’s anger leaped inside him; he spun and grabbed the startled soldier by the throat, pushing him to the floor with surprising ease. He smashed the bastard’s head against the concrete. The chain of his handcuffs clanked against the man’s chest as he grabbed the guard’s ears, pulling them upward to smash him again, then again, feeling the thud of the floor reverberating across the Somalian’s skull.
He knew he was being foolish. The best thing to do was go along, resist, yes, but not so overtly, not so crazily. Doing this was like committing suicide, or worse.
And yet he couldn’t stop himself. Blood spread out behind the man’s face as Mack pounded again and again, screaming, shrieking his anger.
Then a sharp light erupted from behind his ears. Then his head seemed to collapse. He blanked out.
“YOU SCREWED UP THEIR PLANS, MAJOR,” GUNNY WAS saying. “You really threw them for a loop. I don’t know what you did, but it messed them up. Kept us here for hours. And they didn’t want that, I can tell you.”
Mack waited for the hunched shadow to come into focus. They were moving, in a train—no, a bus, an old school bus with half of its seats removed. Gunny, the Marine Corps sergeant, was kneeling next to him in the back aisle. There were stretchers on the wall of the bus next to him, empty.
“What do you think, Sarge?” said another Marine. Jackson. He was leaning over a seat a few feet away. “I don’t know. I’d say he took a slam to the noggin.
You with us, Major?”
“Yeah,” groaned Knife.
“You have blood on your flight suit,” said Gunny. “Don’t look like yours.”
“No?”
Mack struggled to sit up. He was still chained at the hands and the feet. “I hit somebody,” he told them.
“No shit?” said Gunny. “Way to go, Major. Dumb, but way to go.”
“Yeah, it was dumb,” agreed Mack.
“You messed them up,” added the sergeant. “Put them on notice that we’re no pushovers.”
The bus lurched off the side of the road, coming to a stop.
“City,” said Jackson, looking out the window. “By their standards anyway.”
“Where are we?” Mack asked.
“Damned if I know,” said Gunny. He went to the window and looked outside. “Pretty damn dark.”
“Think it’s Mogadishu, Sarge?” asked Jackson. A few years before, several U.S. soldiers had died there in an ill-fated relief operation.
“Nah. Wrong direction. We’re still way north. We’ve been heading west.” Gunny returned, hovering over Mack. “Damned if I know where the hell we’re going. Can you get up, Major?”
“Maybe,” he said. He let Melfi pull him up; he sat on the floor, waiting for the blood to stop rushing to his head. “Did he die?” Mack asked.
“Did who die?” Gunny asked.
“The guy I hit.”
“Don’t know,” said the sergeant. “The raghead guy’s still alive, if that’s who you’re talking about.”
“I didn’t hit him,” said Mack. “I hit one of the guards. A Somalian.”
The door to the bus opened up front. Two Somalian soldiers came up the steps, followed by an American in a flight suit—Captain Stephen Howland, one of the F-117 pilots. The Imam was behind him. The soldiers stepped aside and let the pilot pass. He walked toward them slowly, eyes fixed on the floor. He didn’t seem to be injured, beyond some bruises to his eyes.
“I see Major Smith has recovered,” said the Imam mildly. “There will be no more episodes, Major. They make our task that much more difficult. Our hosts get bothered.”
“You could just let us go,” said Gunny. “Then we’ll go easy on you.”
The Iranian had already started off the bus. The others followed, leaving them to the two Somalian guards and driver at the front.
“They’re taking us to Libya,” said the pilot as the driver started the bus.
“Libya?” asked Johnson.
“Yeah. The Iranians have declared a Muslim coalition against the West,” said Howland. “Libya, Sudan, Iran, now Somalia. Iraq is cheering them on.”
“The usual shitheads,” said Gunny. “They won’t get anywhere.”
“I don’t know,” said Howland. He sat in the seat opposite Johnson. “They’re gloating about Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They think they’re coming in with them. Something about air bases. Probably they didn’t give our planes permission to land.” The pilot shook his head. “There’s a whole lot of shit going down and we’re right in the middle of it.”
“Aw, come on,” said Gunny, trying to cheer him up. “If you’re standing in shit, at least it can’t rain on your head.”
“Unless you slip and fall in it,” said Howland.
“Jeez, Gunny, look at that.” Jackson pointed out the back window. A flatbed truck had pulled up behind them. A huge scrap of black metal was lashed to the rear; Somalians clustered all over the wreckage as well as the roof of the vehicle’s cab.
“My plane,” said Howland. He looked down at Mack. “They must have been waiting for me to open the bay and pickle. I got the warning and started doing evasive maneuvers, but like an idiot I flamed out.”
“You were just unlucky,” said Mack.
“What happened to you?”
“I fucked up,” said Knife.
“Ah, bullshit on that,” said Gunny, his voice almost vicious as he turned from the back window. “Fuckin’ major saved our asses is what he did. That wasn’t no fuck-up. And it wasn’t bad luck.”
“Wasn’t good luck,” said Mack.
“No, sir. No fuckin’ sir,” said the sergeant as the bus lurched forward. “But it sure as shit wasn’t a fuck-up.”
Mack fought off the swelling pain in his head to acknowledge the thank-you with a nod.
Northeastern Ethiopia
23 October, 0300
BREANNA PULLED BACK ON THE CONTROL STICK DESPITE the warning from the computer that they hadn’t yet reached optimum takeoff speed. She pushed down on the throttle bar with her other hand, as if the extra force might somehow squeeze more oomph out of the four power plant
s, which were already at max.
She was also mumbling a Hail Mary. Couldn’t hurt.
Despite the computer’s disapproval, Fort Two caught a stiff wind in her chin and lifted off the mesh runway extension, clearing the trees at the far end of the runway with a good two inches to spare. Breanna gave herself a second to exhale, then began banking to swing onto the course north. They would fly at five hundred feet above ground level all the way to the border. At that point, she would take the plane even lower and goose the engines; they would be on their target in precisely five minutes. Chris would unleash the two cruise missiles on the known SAMs.
What happened next depended on the Somalians and the Iranians who were helping them. According to the satellite photos, a ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun sat at the northwestern corner of the complex. It would be nice to eliminate the gun before the MHV-22 Ospreys arrived with their assault teams. On the other hand, the Zeus had a limited line of sight toward that end of the base, so attacking it wasn’t a priority if other defenses had been installed along the southern edge of the old school grounds.
Unfortunately, there was only one sure way to discover if there were additional defenses there—the Megafortress would have to show itself and see if anyone took a potshot at it. It could then use its JSOWs on them.
The EB-52’s ECMs could automatically ID all known Soviet-era detection and targeting radars, buzzing bands from Jaybird to DesiLu, as Chris liked to joke. At the same time, it could automatically note the source of the radars, supplying the data for the targeting lobe of its multifaceted brain. On the other hand, Fort Two could not preemptively wipe out radars and signal radios like Raven, for example, nor was it equipped to deal with the next-generation gear found in more sophisticated Western systems. They’d have to punt if they came up against any.
“Vector One and Vector Two are airborne,” said Chris. Pushed to top speed, the tilt-wing rotorcraft transports could approach four hundred knots, more than twice as fast as “normal” helicopters. They were coming in right behind the Megafortress.
