by Dale Brown
Northern Somalia
23 October, 0445
THE BUS STOPPED NEAR THE GATE, ALLOWING THE flatbed with the plane to get by. As the Imam walked up the steps, something exploded about a mile away.
“We are under attack,” the Iranian said calmly. “You will follow me off the bus.”
“No, we won’t,” said Mack. This was a gift—now it made sense to stall.
“You will follow me off the bus.” A trio of fresh explosions rocked the vehicle even as he spoke, though they did not affect his manner.
“Maybe we better,” said Howland. “We’re going to get blown up here.”
As if to underline his words, the top of the bus was perforated by machine-gun fire. Outside, men were yelling and screaming. Smith heard the sound of tank and truck motors roaring nearby. The whomp of descending helos—or maybe Ospreys—filled the air.
“You will follow me now,” said the Iranian, disappearing out the front. The two Somalians trained their weapons on the Americans.
“What do you think?” Gunny asked.
Bullets sprayed nearby, sending dirt and rocks against the side of the bus.
“I say let’s move,” said Howland. “And at least get ourselves out in the open where we can make a run for it.”
“Yeah,” said Mack finally.
They didn’t move fast enough for the Somalians—one of them raised his rifle and sent a quick burst through the roof of the bus. The four Americans flinched, but kept moving, walking deliberately to the front and then down the steps. Somalian soldiers crouched nearby; one or two men ran and others yelled, though they seemed confused, perhaps panicked. It was unclear where the attack was coming from or even what was attacking them. A large jet zoomed overhead, its hull dark against the moon. One of the soldiers stood and emptied his AK-47 at it.
Idiots might just as well shoot at the stars, Mack thought.
The Imam had begun walking toward the back of the terminal building a few feet away. One of the guards went to Mack and prodded him to follow, pushing with the barrel end of his rifle. As Mack began to walk, there was a fresh burst of gunfire behind him. A machine gun began firing nearby, shaking the ground and air with a jackhammer thud.
Mack felt something sharp flick him in the face. He thought it was a bug at first; reaching up, he found his face wet with blood. A bullet had chipped a piece of cement up and nicked him below the cheekbone.
The guards pushed the Americans toward a knot of soldiers at the side of the terminal building, urging them to run and occasionally firing into the air. It wasn’t clear whether they were shooting at the plane or planes attacking, or just trying to scare them; neither made much sense.
Mack was only vaguely aware of the others following behind him. Despite his chains and his resolve to go slow and look for a chance to escape, he was trotting, moving quicker than he wanted.
The Imam was waiting at the back corner of the building.
“Into the plane,” the Iranian commanded. A few yards away, three soldiers pulled a black tarp off a small, high-winged aircraft in the field behind the building. The twin-engined, boom-tailed craft was an ancient Antonov An-14 “Clod”—a Soviet-era transport used mostly as a civilian plane thirty years ago. As the cover was removed, a man ran to the rear of the fuselage, yanking open a set of clamshell doors and ducking inside. The small plane rocked with his footsteps as he leapt into the cockpit; the engines started almost instantly, revving with a high-pitched grumble.
“Quickly,” said Imam.
“No,” said Mack.
“You will come now,” said the Iranian. He raised his hand, revealing a pistol. Before any of the Americans could react, he fired point-blank into Jackson’s forehead. The Marine’s head snapped back and then seemed to disintegrate; his body fell almost straight down beneath it.
“The sergeant will be next,” the Imam added, quickly pushing his gun into Gunny’s face. One of the guards had already grabbed the Marine from behind.
“Into the plane, Major, or your sergeant will die,” said the Imam. “You and the captain will be dragged aboard anyway. I will not kill you, even though that is plainly what you desire.”
Meekly, Mack bowed his head and started for the plane.
Northern Somalia
23 October, 0455
DANNY FELL HEADFIRST OVER THE SEAT, BARELY hanging on to his submachine gun. A hurricane seemed to descend around him; his nostrils burned with the smell of plastic and metal burning.
“Captain! Captain! Captain!”
He couldn’t locate the voice. He tried to stand, felt his throat revolting. He threw himself down to the floor. Instead of landing against the carpet, he kept going, his head and shoulders falling into the open air.
The side of the plane next to him had been blown away. Hanging on by his feet, he flailed back toward the aircraft. Then he saw that the skin of the plane had been twisted into something like a ramp; it would be easier to climb down. As he turned around and began to try to do so, an arm came out of the thick smoke in the plane. He yanked it over him, pulling a man out of the hole, pushing him to climb down. He only realized it was the Iranian pilot as the body slipped and then rolled to the ground.
Another explosion erupted to his left. Danny felt a surge of air against his face, found another body rolling against his. He grabbed it and pushed it toward the tarmac. He rolled down after it, saw it was Talcom.
“Where’s Hernandez? Where the fuck is Hernandez?” he screamed.
Powder, dazed, maybe unconscious, didn’t answer. Danny clambered back up the jagged side of the plane, prodding through the acrid brown stench. He reached the floor of the passenger compartment, got to his feet, and then nearly fell backward as flames erupted in his face. The heat was so intense he could only retreat, tumbling over backward and falling out of the plane headfirst. He managed to grab a piece of metal, slowing himself but ripping his uniform and cutting his arm as he pirouetted around. He fell next to Talcom, who was trying to stand; both men slammed down and flattened the still-dazed Iranian pilot.
It would have been comical had the fuel truck nearby not erupted.
Somehow, Danny managed to pull Talcom and the pilot away. All three collapsed about twenty yards from the jetliner, gasping for breath and feeling the hot flame of the tanker truck.
“Hernandez, we lost Hernandez,” said Freah when Liu grabbed him.
“No, he’s in the Osprey,” said the medic. “Come on. We have to go. Fighters are coming. Let’s go. They blew the hangar.”
Danny shook his head clear, bolting to his feet. He’d lost his MP-5, but he seemed okay; he didn’t think he’d been hurt.
Sunburned maybe. Damn fire was hot.
“My team,” he shouted, twisting back.
“We’re all here!” yelled Liu. “Come on, Captain.”
A massive black cloud hung over the hangar at the other end of the field. The Delta Osprey was taxiing away from it, toward them. An APC was rumbling thirty yards away.
Danny stood motionless as the armored personnel carrier’s turret began to revolve in the direction of the Delta Osprey. Then he started to run toward the APC with all his strength.
“Captain! Captain!” shouted Liu.
As Danny ran, he reached into his pocket for the grenade.
Nothing but MP-5 clips.
Cursing, he kept running. He remembered he’d used the grenade in the airplane, and reached for the other pocket, retrieving a stun grenade. The grenade wasn’t powerful enough to do anything to the exterior of the vehicle; it would have to be thrown inside.
He fumbled with the taped pin as he bolted atop the APC. It was an ancient vehicle, a BTR-60P with an eight-wheeled chassis and a 12.7mm gun mounted in a turret at the front. The gun barrel lurched back, firing toward the Osprey. Danny grappled with the hatch, but there was no way to open it once locked from the inside. He threw himself on top of the gun turret, thinking he might stuff the grenade through the gun opening. But he saw there’d be no c
hance of that as the gun fired again; desperate, he pulled his Beretta out and stuffed the barrel against the small viewing slot at the side of the front of the truck. He fired several times as the APC lurched to the side; Danny fell to the ground. The Osprey was revving its rotors furiously, pulling away. Danny rolled the grenade beneath the APC and ran back for his own craft, expecting at any moment to be shot. The ground rippled near him and he felt himself flying into the air.
Liu and Hernandez caught him just before he hit the ground, stumbling but managing to keep their balance as their Osprey lurched backward toward them. The others grabbed them and Danny felt himself suddenly pulled upward, the rotorcraft taking off with its bay open.
“We’re in! We’re in!” yelped Talcom.
Bison stood near the open doorway, firing his SAW. The APC continued to fire at them.
“Shit,” said Freah.
“They got away,” said Liu. “They got off okay. Vector One.”
“Good.”
“We got the Iranian, he’s alive,” added the medic. “We’re all here. Scratch the airliner. Hangar’s gone. F-117’s toast.”
“Pilots?”
Liu shook his head.
“Pair of MiGs gunning for us,” said Reagan, who was back near the cockpit. “We’re not home free yet.”
Danny pulled himself to his haunches, then lifted himself to the canvas rack that served as a seat in the battle-rigged MHV-22.
“What’d you do, Captain, try and blow up an APC with a smoke grenade?” asked Bison, turning around now that he’d gone through his clip. The rear doorway began to close behind him.
“I think it was a concussion grenade,” said Freah. “Oh, that’s different,” said Bison.
“Probably gave them a good headache,” said Danny. And he began to laugh.
So did the others. They must have laughed for a good ten minutes.
When the pilot called back that they had eluded the MiGs, the laughs just got louder.
Northern Somalia
23 October, 0505
“LEAD MIG HAS US SPIKED.”
“Yeah,” said Bree. She held her course steady. They had to suck the MiGs away from the Ospreys before the enemy fights saw the defenseless aircraft.
“They’re buying it. Both of them coming for us.” Breanna glanced at the radar screen. The MiGs were about twenty miles out to sea, closing fast. The Ospreys were just getting off the ground.
“Be ready with the Stinger air mines,” Bree said.
“Max range of the Stingers is three miles,” warned Chris. The Stinger air mines were the Megafortress’s last remaining defensive weapons. In place of the standard B-52’s tail guns, the Megafortress had a cannon that fired small explosive rockets. The cannon was steered by an aft-scanning radar and the missiles fired in an attacking fighter’s flight path. At a proper range determined by the fire-control computer, the rockets detonated, creating a cloud of shrapnel in the enemy fighter’s face several dozen meters wide.
The problem was, the air mines were short-range weapons. An enemy fighter had to close within knife-fighting range before they were effective. The Megafortress’s stealth characteristics usually forced an enemy fighter to forgo radar-guided missiles and use short-range heat-seeking missiles or cannons, and that was when the air mines worked the best. Bree and Chris would have to survive a long-range attack before they’d be close enough to use the weapons.
As long as the Ospreys got away, she thought, her fingers cramping tight on the flight controls.
“We’re in range,” said Chris. “They haven’t locked us, though. Shit. The Ospreys will be on their scopes any second. They’re going to think we’re a blip or a ghost and go for the Ospreys.”
Breanna cursed. If only she still had two AMRAAMs in the weapons bay.
“Switch on the targeting radar,” she said. “Lock them.”
“Rap?”
“Do it!”
“Okay, okay.” Chris worked the controls quickly, not quite realizing what Bree was up to. “They have us. They’re locked. Shit, the MiGs are launching!”
“Kill the radar. Batten down the hatches,” she said. Breanna splashed out chaff and pushed the plane over. The air was filled with electronic fuzz as the Megafortress shot downward, Breanna yanking and banking for dear life. The MiGs and their missiles flashed somewhere overhead as the Megafortress continued her evasive maneuvers, turning back in the opposite direction, then pulling five or six g’s through a fresh set of zags. If a standard B-52 could have somehow found the momentum to make the maneuvers, its wings would have sheared off at the roots.
“We’re clean. MiGs have turned. They bought it—they thought we were targeting them. Good call, Bree. Shit, I should have thought of that.”
“Take out the runway—now,” she ordered.
“Bay,” warned Chris, dialing up the final air-to-surface missile. While not optimized for runway-crashing, the large hunk of explosive molded into the front of the missile would create a rather large and hopefully unavoidable hole in the middle of the Somalian field.
“Airliner is smashed. Another plane down there, off to the side,” warned Chris.
“The runway. Now,” demanded Breanna. The computer warned that one of the MiG radars had again targeted them, measuring their distance for a fresh attack.
“Launching. Gone. Good. Buttoning up.”
The radar-warning tone blipped. “Tail radar warning,” said Bree. “Here they come.”
“Air mines ready,” said Chris.
Breanna fired off her last flares and tinsels and inverted the big plane, rolling her down toward the ground like she was an F-16 on a practice range, yipping and yawing to get away from some frisky students.
“Two MiGs within range … Stingers firing!” Chris shouted. The fire-control computer began launching Stinger air mine rockets at their pursuers, one every three seconds, sowing clouds of deadly tungsten chips in the MiGs’ flight path.
One of her “students” launched a heat-seeker toward their tailpipe. The other let go of his last radar missile.
Gravity slapped Breanna hard across the face as she slid the Megafortress a hairbreadth above the waves of the Gulf of Aden. Lights flickered in her eyes, stars or a Christmas light or the sun peeking through the hills. The stall warning yelped, but she was on top of it; one of the engines coughed loudly from a compressor stall, but she compensated beautifully. Chris monitored the computer’s automatic clearing procedure.
Bree recovered, picking the big plane up by its wing roots. She banked south, lost the MiGs on the FLIR as they searched to the north.
The air mines were just as effective against air-to-air missiles as they were against fighters. As the MiGs’ missiles closed in on the Megafortress’s hot exhausts, they were shredded by the air mines’ deadly debris. As the MiG pilots tried to close the distance for one last try at their quarry, they too fell prey to the silent, invisible invaders. Without warning, the tiny tungsten chips splintered turbine compressor blades, cut fuel lines, and shattered windscreens. Crippled and almost out of fuel, both MiGs broke off their attacks and headed for the closest emergency runway.
“That was close,” Breanna admitted.
“I think you went out to ten g’s on that last yank,” said her copilot. “A-1 dead ahead.”
“Yeah.”
“Jeez, I nailed the runway. No way those MiGs are landing there. They’ll end up ditching.”
“I’ll send a sympathy card.”
It seemed like the entire countryside, dirt and all, was on fire.
“Plane!” Chris yelled.
Breanna jerked the Megafortress upward as a dark shadow lumbered across their path. A small two-engined propeller craft pulled up from the grass near the terminal, barely making it into the air ahead of them. It edged toward the hills to the west.
“I got a bad feeling about that,” said Chris.
Breanna looked at him.
“We don’t have enough fuel,” he said. “We may not ev
en make it back as it is.”
They didn’t have any weapons left on board.
“I could clip its wings,” said Breanna, even though she knew that was wildly improbable.
“Go to the radar and track it?” suggested Chris.
“They’ll be lost in the ground clutter,” she said. She banked to the west; even with the FLIR at maximum resolution, the small plane was difficult to make out in the hills.
“Due west. Going to the Sudan,” said Chris. “Or Libya.”
“Alert Madcap Magician,” she said. “Maybe they can scramble something to follow it.”
Breanna leaned back against her ejector seat, the last vestiges of her energy starting to drain out. “All this way, and we missed them.”
“If it was them,” said Chris.
“Aw, come on,” she said, trying to force a smile into her voice. “I trust your woman’s intuition.”
“Plotting new course,” was his only reply.
V
TV time
Ethiopia
23 October, 1540
YOU COULD SMELL A COMBAT BASE. PART OF IT WAS the sweat in the air. Part of it was spent fuel, and the ammo being packed.
Another part was fear.
Zen smelled it as he worked his way down the Mega-fortress’s stair ramp, levering himself sideways down each step, aware that he was being stared at—or actually, that people were pretending not to stare at him. He used his arms and shifted his weight carefully as he lowered his butt; he wanted to come down on his own power, but he also didn’t want to fall on his face.
It had been more than five years now since he’d been on a combat base, not counting his brief rotation in Turkey to enforce the no-fly zone in Iraq. This felt different for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, he’d probably had more sleep on his flight over than his whole time during the Air War.
