by Dale Brown
At some point, he dreamed that the door reopened. The man who had brought them the food reappeared, taking the trays. Then the gorillas appeared and pulled both Gunny and Howland roughly to their feet, pushing them back into the hallway. Gunny seemed to fly to a narrow flight of stairs, descending down another passage covered on all four sides with a thick brown coir carpet.
At the end of the hall, Gunny saw that Howland was with him. They stepped into an eight-by-eight room with smooth whitewashed plaster walls and a thick tan wool carpet. The room had been turned into a television studio—two chairs were set up beneath a lighting bar. Two cameras with camera operators stood opposite them. Monitors were positioned so anyone sitting in the chairs could watch themselves. The six soldiers who had been escorting them filed in behind.
“You will sit in the chairs and respond when questioned,” said a voice from above. “Your trial will begin shortly.”
“Am I dreaming?” Gunny asked Howland.
“No. They’re going to televise this,” said the pilot. “This is happening.”
“Shit,” said Melfi, shaking his head, trying to get his wits back. He was truly awake; all of this was real. “And I always wondered what it would be like to be on TV. Shit.”
Libya
24 October, 0920
IT TOOK NEARLY FOUR HOURS TO COVER THE ROUGHLY two thousand miles from their base in Ethiopia to southern Libya, not counting the aerial refuel shortly after takeoff. Jennifer Gleason and Jeff spent the entire time running through a set of changes for the Flighthawk programming that would keep the UM/Fs separated from their mother ship during fail-safe mode. Jennifer’s fingers dashed over the small keyboard at her station, stopping only so she could wade deeper into the notes she’d made on her yellow pads. Jeff helped read back some of the commands and numbers. Most of it was in machine-code assembler level; he didn’t have a clue what he was reading.
Jennifer also had an idea about adding to the compression routines in the command system, in essence widening the communications bandwidth and lengthening the distance they could operate from the mother ship. At one point she started to explain it, but Jeff just waved her off.
“Tell me what to do,” he said. “I don’t have to understand it. There’s no time.”
She gave him a tap on the shoulder and went back to work. They completed the work with fifteen minutes to spare before the drop point.
Jeff climbed aboard the Hawks, running through the preflight checks. He was so tired now that fatigue felt like a piece of clothing around his upper body, heavy and warm.
“Drop point at zero-two,” said Breanna over the Mega-fortress’s interphone circuit.
“We’re here already?” answered Jeff, honestly surprised.
“Looks like it.”
They ran through the flight and weather data, following their launch protocol precisely. With everything dash-one, Cheshire put the plane into a zero-alpha maneuver, nosing in as she accelerated. The Flighthawks dropped off the wings on cue and Zen began working them onto their flight paths, roaring downward across the still-peaceful Libyan countryside. The sun glinted in his view screen as the planes picked up speed. They were at eighteen and twenty-two thousand feet respectively, well separated in the cloudless sky.
“SEAL commander on the circuit,” advised Cheshire. “Along with Cascade.”
“Hawks are green,” said Zen.
“So’s Big Bear,” said the SEAL commander, using the SEAL team’s call sign.
“Acknowledged.” Jeff thought the voice sounded vaguely familiar, but it belonged to Cascade, a crewman aboard the JSTARS electronic command plane in the southern Mediterranean. Cascade was communicating with Raven and the SEALs through a secure satellite system, linking the feeds from the Flighthawks to the Navy commandos. “Silent corn until zero-two.”
The line snapped clear. The gear seemed to have a way of scrubbing sound right out of the wires, as if the airwaves were erased.
Jeff clicked the button to get back to his intercom circuit.
“Twenty minutes,” he told the crew. “Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.”
“As long as they’re not your sneakers,” answered Breanna.
Jeff laughed. She used to say that all the time.
* * *
THE OSPREY’S TILT WINGS BEGAN PITCHING UPWARD AS the craft banked toward the mountain pass. Danny could feel the heat of the desert through the skin of the plane as he waited for it to land. The plan had called for them to land on a small plateau on the other side of the hill, but the pilot had seen someone there as they approached.
Talcom gripped his SAW so tightly Danny thought he was going to snap his fingers through it. He reached over to the sergeant and gently put his hand on the machine gun.
“Nice and easy,” he told Powder.
Sand and pebbles began whipping against the body of the Osprey. Talcom and some of the others winced, obviously thinking it was rifle fire.
“Nice and easy,” Danny repeated to his men as the rear door began to open.
BREANNA KEPT ONE EYE ON HER INSTRUMENT PANEL and the other on her commander. Cheshire was definitely tired, but she was on top of her game. She’d held Raven steady through the Flighthawk release, performing the launch maneuvers flawlessly and without help from either Rap or the Megafortress’s autopilot. She continued to work carefully, reviewing nav data and making a minute adjustment to her course.
The radar-warning receivers in Raven had several times the range and about ten times the selectivity of Fort Two’s. They were now within a hundred miles of two large ground-intercept radars just south of Tripoli; the threat screen painted their rays bright green ahead. Toggling the screen showed that Raven could get within twenty miles and still look like a misplaced seagull to the ground radar; after that, the computer painted a “path of least observance” that would take the EB-52 to within about five miles before it was likely to be detected.
The real value of the fancy gear would come when the assault started. Raven would put its custom-made gallium arsenic chips to work jamming the sensors, adding its fuzz to the electronic noise from a pair of Navy EA-6 Prowlers. Every radar and most of the TVs in North Africa would be toast.
“Hawks are zero-five from commitment. We’re green all around,” said Jeff.
Breanna, who always had a hard time thinking of herself as a copilot, began to click her mike button to respond, then let go as Cheshire acknowledged. The major gave her a smile, then turned back ahead, studying the clear sky.
Jennifer Gleason said something to Jeff about one of the computer readings. Breanna felt the muscles in her back tense at the girlish lilt in the scientist’s voice. If she ever washed out as a scientist, Gleason would have no trouble finding a job doing telephone sex.
“We’re picking up some interesting transmissions,” said the weapons officer. “Have something in grid B-2 just beyond the mountains.”
“Radar?” asked Cheshire.
“No. Some sort of microwave, but I can’t quite pin down the source from this distance. It’s encrypted. Lot of data, like it’s a video feed. It’s coming from the middle of nowhere. You want me to record it?”
“Negative,” said the pilot. “Don’t waste your time.”
“I’m also getting audio for a video feed that’s being beamed out of Tripoli,” he added. “I think it’s our trial.”
God, thought Bree. Poor Mack. His parents would hear him, probably see him, on CNN. The tape would be shown over and over and over.
“Yeah, shit. I have a sound track. Getting a location. I can pinpoint it. Hang on.”
The sophisticated tracking gear in Raven allowed him to plot a radar source within .0003 meters—roughly a tenth of an inch—once he locked and tracked it. The process took anywhere from forty-five seconds to five minutes.
“You want to hear this? Damn, it is the trial. It’s in English.”
“No,” snapped Breanna.
“Neither do I,” said Cheshire. “Run through the emergency
tanker locations and frequencies for me.”
It took Bree a second to realize Cheshire was talking to her. She turned her eyes to the right instrument panel, where the fuel burn as well as the reserves were projected. Personally serviced by Greasy Hands before takeoff, the ancient TF33-P-3’s were humming better than the day they left the shop in early 1962.
“We’re running a few hundred pounds ahead,” she told Cheshire. “So I don’t think we need to—”
The major turned her head toward her without saying anything.
“I’m sorry,” said Breanna, reaching for the data on the tankers.
DANNY HIT THE GROUND A FEW FEET BEHIND TALCOM, not sure whether his sergeant had seen something or was just being cautious. They were still a good twenty feet from the plateau, approaching from the blind side.
“Team, hold,” he said, speaking softly but distinctly so the communicator pinned to his collar could pick up his command. Bison was about five yards behind him. Liu and Pretty Boy were working their way around the other side.
“Thought I saw something,” whispered Talcom.
Danny had contemplated sending the Osprey around from the front to draw the attention of any Libyans while they came around from the flanks. He’d rejected the idea, however—if the aircraft was shot down they were in serious trouble.
“I’m coming to you,” he told Talcom, raising his body. He took a crouching step toward the sergeant’s chocolate-chip fatigues, then another, then trotted ahead and slid in.
“I can get over them,” said Talcom, pointing upward. A jagged rock face rose above nearly fifty feet. There looked to be few if any handholds.
“Hell of a climb,” said Freah.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” said the sergeant. “We’ll trade weapons. You just cover my ass if they come for me.”
Danny eyed the rock wall doubtfully, but then gave Talcom the MP-5, which was shorter and much lighter than the SAW. He helped him snug it against his back.
“Wish I brought my climbing shoes,” said the sergeant, starting upward.
“Powder’s going to try to get some height on them,” Freah told the others. “Liu, you and Floyd hold on until Powder’s up. Nurse, you on the circuit?”
No answer. The Dreamland-engineered radio system had a good range, but perhaps they were asking it to do too much with the jagged terrain.
“Hernandez, you read me?”
“Loud and clear, Cap.”
“You see Liu?”
“I can see them, but I can’t hear them,” Hernandez hissed into the miniature microphone. “Nothing, Captain,” he said finally.
“Can you get close enough to tell them to hold on until Powder’s in position?”
“Gotcha, Cap.”
Danny glanced at the firing mechanism of the gun, as if reorienting himself to the machine gun. Powder had already climbed nearly halfway up the rock. Slowly, Freah began to crawl to his right, coming around the face where he could have an angle at anyone trying to attack his man.
The communicator suddenly cracked with an ungodly noise. A submachine gun began firing from the other side of the hill and something exploded upward. Danny pitched up the barrel of his gun, and had already begun firing at the dark shadow above before he realized what was going on.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” he said.
The crackle over the radio was laughter.
“Buzzards,” Powder was saying. “There’s a fucking nest of vultures on the ledge. Liu toasted three of them, but another got away.”
“I thought he had a marksman badge,” somebody said with a laugh as Danny’s heartbeat returned to normal.
ZEN WAS IN HAWK ONE’S COCKPIT NOW, BARELY twenty feet over the tallest building in downtown Tripoli. He flung himself back toward the outskirts of the capital, feeding live video back to the JSTARS and from there to the SEALS, already en route from the Mediterranean. The route had been carefully chosen, with intricate zigs and zags to avoid defenses; whoever had laid it out had done a damn good job, because he didn’t notice anything deadlier than a water pistol. Nudging his sticks left, Zen put himself on a direct line to the bunker, now less than three miles away.
As critical as the video was for the SEAL team following him in, a good hunk of Jeff’s attention was pasted on the threat indicator in the bottom left visor screen. He was whizzing through green and yellow fingers, ducking an array of radars as he came in. The jammers weren’t set to go on until the SEALs were almost overhead.
A large ring of concrete appeared on his left. A lollipop of a road led to it, lined with tanks and missile launchers.
“SA-6 radar active, attempting to lock,” warned the computer. “Scanning.”
Thirteen seconds to his turn point. He had to crisscross the top of the bunker, catching two air-exchange units with the camera. Then he’d jump to Hawk Two, concentrating on antiair guns at the west end of the complex.
The computer continued to count down the programmed course for him. He took the turn, pushing the throttle for the last ounce of thrust.
Everything was a gray blur, even the bunker facility. He clocked past, noted a set of missiles that hadn’t appeared on the satellite.
“Computer, Hawk Two optical feed in visor,” he said, pushing the computer disengage switch at the stick base as he did. “Computer, take Hawk One on programmed course.”
The images instantly switched, and he saw the world again, as if he’d jumped back in time, not location. A large 57mm gun loomed straight ahead, turning. A row of antiaircraft weapons were arrayed at ten o’clock in the view screen, looking like sewer pipes in a supply yard.
“Team One is inbound. Thirty seconds,” reported Cascade.
The guns started to move.
“Jamming now,” said Raven’s operator.
“They’re firing,” reported Jeff.
Two Navy Prowlers as well as Raven clicked on their fuzzbusters. The interference was so severe the UM/F control computer immediately complained, giving him a red light on the radar altimeter and then warning that it was having trouble maintaining the connection with Hawk One.
“Raven, I need us closer to the Flighthawks,” said Jeff, switching back into Hawk One as Two completed the run of the antiair guns. He flew up the coast, the plane responding well to his controls despite the computer’s admonitions that the signal was degrading.
Somewhere offshore in the JSTARS, the operation coordinators were studying Zen’s feed to make sure they had all of the SAM sites properly targeted. They were like defensive coordinators sitting in the press box during a football game, checking to make sure the blitz they’d called would work.
It did. With a vengeance.
Jeff caught the shadows of laser-guided missiles closing in on the SAM sites as he began to turn Hawk One south. The Libyans hadn’t had a chance to launch.
Secondaries.
Turbulence.
A lot of shit down there.
He was between the two planes, spreading out over the coast. Fuel good, heavy air, almost stormy. His controls felt a little sloppy. Maybe it was the computer reacting to the wide spectrum of ECMs.
He could handle it. Zen nudged the stick up. The signal bar on Hawk One flittered into the red area, got strong again.
“Jeff, they’re asking for another pass on the bunker,” said Jennifer. Her voice seemed to descend from the clouds.
Zen told the computer to bring Hawk One closer. Then he pulled Hawk Two back in the other direction, away from Raven under a heavy cloud of black smoke and exploding tracers. Helos were coming in from the northeast; he saw a pair of Sea Cobra attack helos letting loose with rockets on an official building a half mile from the bunker. Jeff hunkered down, pushing his head into the windscreen, backing off the throttle, slowing down for the longest possible look at the bunker.
The east side of the facility was defended only by an armored car. He tilted his wing and banked off, the assault helicopters right behind.
He circled, watching
them land. Raven was almost overhead now, beginning to orbit back. Hawk One flew in its set position behind the left wing. Jeff pushed Two around, came in on the bunker once more as the SEALS blew the cover on the southwest air-exchange portal. They immediately began disappearing down the large vertical shaft.
A second Seahawk came in over the back entrance of the bunker. An armored car moved toward them.
Zen was nearly lined up for a shot with the UM/F’s cannon. He prodded the throttle slide but before he could activate his cannon, one of the Sea Cobras obliterated the vehicle.
“They’re in!” shouted someone over the command circuit.
“How’s the trial going now?” said Breanna sarcastically.
“It’s still going,” said the weapons officer, surprised.
Zen saw the main entrance to the bunker implode as he began a fresh circuit. Three satellite dishes collapsed with the dust as the front half of the football-field-sized upper building collapsed.
Had he said the trial was still going?
He pushed Hawk Two into a rolling dive to reverse course and overfly the bunker again.
“Missiles have launched! Flak batteries are shooting unguided in grid A-1. Evasive maneuvers,” said the weapons officer.
“Losing control connection for Hawk Two!” warned the Flighthawk computer.
“Nancy, we need to double back,” said Zen as he struggled to put Hawk Two’s camera on the bunker complex. He jerked his right hand instead of his left, cursed at the infinitesimal delay.
“We have SA-2’s in the air,” said Cheshire calmly. “Jam them.”
“We are. But we’re not taking any unnecessary risks now that the team is down. Evasive maneuvers.”
Zen felt himself being pushed sideways as the Mega-fortress beamed the SAM site’s pulse-Doppler radar. He lost Hawk Two and had to throw One’s throttle to the firewall to try to keep up with the EB-52. The Libyans had launched no less than twelve of the high-altitude surface-to-air missiles at them. While the Megafortress’s ECMs had no trouble thwarting their radars, there were an awful lot of them in the air; just dodging the debris was a chore.
