by Mel Odom
“All right,” Delroy said. “Does the captain have a time frame in mind?”
“Captain Falkirk said to leave it up to you. But he also said that something like this, it’s better to deal with it sooner than later.”
Delroy nodded.
“The captain said to take your time,” Tom went on. “He knows you and the chief were close.” The midshipman hesitated. “I suggested that the captain get someone else.”
“No.” The reply was out of Delroy’s mouth before he knew it, and the answer was also sharper than he’d intended. There’s no one else I would assign this to.
Tom took a step back.
“Easy,” Delroy said. He rubbed the back of his neck with a big hand, hoping in vain to ease some of the tension there. “Nobody’s going to do that eulogy but me. Tell the captain to give me a call at his convenience later. We’ll iron out the details then.”
Before Tom could reply, a warning Klaxon screamed. The banshee wail filled the room, echoing in the larger medical department on the other side of the open door.
It was, Delroy thought, loud enough to wake the dead. But it didn’t this time. The flesh that had once been Dwight Mellencamp lay unmoving in the body bag.
Tom turned and charged out the door.
Delroy followed at the younger man’s heels as they pounded through the medical department and ran out into the hall. A stream of men and women hurried through the halls and climbed the stairs leading up to the flight deck. They strapped on protective gear—vests and helmets—as they quickly filed upward.
“What’s going on?” a sailor asked a Marine.
“Dunno,” the Marine corpsman said. “Our general orders are to assemble on the flight deck and stand ready to deploy.”
“Deploy?” The sailor caught the stair railing and yanked himself around. “Deploy where?”
“The border,” the Marine replied. “That’s where the heat is. Don’t you keep up with current events?” The Marine shook his head.
“Man, that’s crazy.”
Pausing, Delroy let the last of the crewmen and Marines climb the stairs. He fell in behind them, sprinting up through the 02 level. In seconds, he was on the flight deck, coming up inside the island that housed the bridge.
Delroy surveyed the activity that swept the landing helicopter dockship. Movement filled the LHD as deck crews dressed in colorcoded jerseys—primarily red for fuel and ordnance and yellow for spotters—ran to their assigned posts. Marines erupted from flight deck ramp tunnel, moving at a dead run with their gear tied securely around them and their assault rifles held at port arms before them. In the old days, military Jeeps had been able to drive up those ramps, but the Humvees they used now were too wide. The next generation of landing helicopter dockships had already worked appropriate changes into the redesigns.
Fighter jets, AV-8B Harriers, rolled off the flight deck, dropping out over the dark sea then rising like kites caught by the wind. Wasp had nine takeoff and landing positions on the deck for helicopters, six to port and three to starboard. The port and stern elevators brought up CH-46E and CH-53E helicopters and the Harriers two at a time.
The CH-46Es, designated Sea Knights, had the distinctive twin prop design. The CH-53E Sea Stallions had the more traditional appearance of a main rotor backed by a tail rotor and were currently ranked as the fastest helos the Marines handled. As soon as the helos were in place and had been boarded by Marine troops, they leapt into the sky.
No voices could be heard over the din that filled Wasp’s flight deck. Jet turbines on the Harriers screamed, competing with the whirling rotors on the cargo helicopters used as troop transports. Navy crew outfitted the aircraft as they rolled on deck from the elevators.
Delroy kept moving toward the island, which was what most of the crew called the bridge structure on the ship’s starboard side. As chaplain for the ship, Delroy had to remain available to help out where he could. He raced up the stairs and through the coded doors leading to Primary Flight. Pri-Fly was Wasp’s nerve center for air operations.
Commander Kelly Tomlinson stood watch this morning. Designated the air boss, he’d served in the same capacity for a handful of years. He was tall and muscular with a shock of blond hair and a surfer’s tan. He also held the current record for bench presses down in the ship’s fitness center and had been a fierce surfing competitor in Hawaii before giving up that dream and stepping into the military life.
The commander glanced at Delroy then resumed watching the deck activity through the heavy-duty glass. “Good to have you, Chaplain.”
“Thank you, sir.” Delroy moved to his usual place back of the shipboard computers. He stood with Lieutenant Gabriel Morales, who was in charge of the Landing Signals Officers. They’d shared stories in the galley about small towns and family.
Morales’s LSOs remained grouped and ready to assist with aircraft landing. Each man and woman was clothed in deck gear, including helmets and goggles. The lieutenant was lanky but muscular. He had grown up on a working cattle ranch in west Texas and sported a mustache that pushed the envelope on navy regs.
“What’s up, Gabe?” Delroy asked.
“The Syrians just launched a full-blown attack across the border,”
Gabe said in a low voice. “They took out the communications towers with SCUDs and FROG-7s. From what I understand, the U.N. peacekeeping forces and the 75th Rangers are taking a beating.”
Delroy glanced at the state-of-the-art weather forecasting equipment that was the heart of the Pri-Fly area. Weather affected every operation. A small television monitor mounted next to the computer screens showed a battle in progress. The tagline read TURKISHSYRIAN BORDER.
“What triggered the attack?” Delroy asked.
Gabe shrugged. His dark brown eyes flashed as he watched the aircraft lifting off Wasp’s flight deck. “Who knows? It was waiting to happen, Del. Only a matter of time. The intel I was looking at, man, you just knew the Syrians were gonna jump some time.”
“What are we doing?”
“Air and troop support. Those gunships are herding jump troops. We’re also providing medical corpsmen to handle on-site wounded. Once a triage is established, the wounded that can travel will be sent back here. From what we’ve heard so far, there are a lot of casualties. Gonna be a lot more.”
Glancing at his watch, Delroy did the math. With the border two hundred miles away, give or take a handful, the trip in-country would take time. “The border is an hour and a half away.”
“An hour and twenty minutes,” Gabe corrected.
As Delroy watched the television screen, coverage shifted to Glitter City. Several of the specials about the ongoing conflict had been shot there and in the field featuring military men involved in the border patrol, and almost everybody in the ship had watched them when they aired. Over the last few tense months, Delroy—as well as the rest of the world addicted to news services—had watched the dead city rise from the dust and become a thriving if threadbare metropolis of journalists and local residents trying to make a living from the meager opportunity the media invasion had brought them. One of the newsmagazines was planning to do a special on the impact the journalists’ presence had on the area.
The camera panned down the single road that cut through Glitter City. People were panicked, some of them abandoning vehicles while others loaded gear and passengers aboard, evidently thinking they were going to flee before the missiles reached them.
In the next instant, absolute carnage tore through Glitter City. SCUDs landed in the small town, and the resulting explosions collapsed a building.
Dwight’s voice came to Delroy in that moment. “We’re living in the end times now, Del. God is going to deliver his people from the war and strife that’s going to consume this world. We’re going to live to see the Rapture.”
Dwight had been wrong, of course. He hadn’t lived to see it. But as Delroy Harte watched the stark images relayed on the television monitor, the chaplain found the idea of the R
apture being close at hand much easier to believe.
But then, Delroy denied that, refused to believe it. This was just a military engagement, not the end times. Perhaps a war would even come of it. Men would die and he would pray for them because that was what he had signed on to do.
5
Turkey
30 Klicks South of Sanliurfa
Local Time 0657 Hours
A SCUD-B surface-to-surface missile’s rockets burned for eighty seconds, more or less. While in the air that eighty seconds, the SCUD-B traveled one hundred and seventy-five miles.
The distance to Glitter City from Aleppo, Syria, was less than eighty miles, less than half the distance the SCUD-Bs were capable of. When he’d gotten the call from Captain Remington, Goose had been three minutes away from the tent city that housed support personnel as well as media. Even picking up the pace in the RSOVs to the point of risking life and limb, the Rangers arrived two minutes and forty-eight seconds after the first wave of SCUDs blasted into the landscape.
Goose sat buckled into the passenger seat and peered at the huge dust cloud that had been raised around the area from the impact and detonation of the SCUDs. Bobby Tanaka whipped the vehicle hard to the left just as Goose yelled, “Something’s in the road!”
The yellow dust cloud had concealed the long steel body of an unexploded SCUD missile. Goose knew from hard experience that SCUDs didn’t always detonate. The failure rate for the Russiandesigned weapons was something U.S. military forces would never have allowed. But the thirty-foot-plus missiles remained in the Syrian army’s arsenal. And they had done their share of damage today.
The RSOV skidded wildly in the loose sand. The rear quarter panel came around and smacked the SCUD. When he heard an ear-splitting blast at almost the same time, Goose figured that he and his unit had just been blown to smithereens.
Instead, the RSOV skidded in the opposite direction from the impact as Tanaka overcorrected. The SCUD in the roadway remained a dud. It would have to be removed by bomb disposal teams later.
Glancing over his shoulder, Goose watched the second Ranger vehicle avoid the SCUD by several feet. Then realization kicked in that if the detonation he’d heard hadn’t occurred at their twenty it had to have happened elsewhere. He glanced forward again and saw a new cloud of dust curling up a hundred feet and more from the desert.
Clods of hard earth and debris tumbled back down from the sky.
They drummed against the RSOV with the force of sledgehammers. The cacophony rolled over Goose, deafening him.
Holding his left forearm over his face, Goose took as much cover as he could from his helmet and Kevlar vest. Rocks and clods pinged off armor as well as flesh, leaving welts, scrapes, and bruises. Goggles protected his eyes from the grit that swirled in the air, but the yellow dust matted and stuck to the kerchief he’d pulled up over his nose and mouth. Perspiration and saliva had made the kerchief wet enough to turn the dust to mud.
The fallout from the SCUD detonation continued for a few seconds, then immediately started again as at least two more missiles struck the high ridges of broken earth that surrounded Glitter City. Ages ago, when the town had been little more than a trading post for travelers, small stone buildings had been constructed against the sides of the bowl that contained the meeting place. The surrounding hills forming the natural bowl had always protected the village and the traders from the wind and the sandstorms that sometimes rose up. The town had provided a place of relative peace, a little shade, and a natural spring that was work to get to but had provided the townsfolk with their share of cool water.
Since the arrival of the American troops and the international media, Turkish traders had opened up a market again. They offered local cuisine and trinkets for souvenirs, bartering those things for American and European products such as cigarettes, Coke and Pepsi, and even military MREs. Most American fighting men only accepted the meals-ready-to-eat when nothing else was available, but Turkish traders found a ready market waiting to sample the meals.
Several buildings had existed on those hillsides, some of them decades old. Most of them were in some state of disrepair. After the media had encamped there, local construction teams had been hired to provide more adequate shelter. With things heating up on the border, most of the reporters wanted to stay on-site rather than make the trip between Diyarbakir and Sanliurfa, the closest metropolitan cities.
The repaired buildings had filled with the international reporters, enterprising Turkish merchants, and support personnel subsidized by the spending habits of the Turkish and American troops. When members of the U.N. relief crews and peacekeeping efforts had arrived, the overflow had been set up in tents. The tents ranged from cutting-edge technology to sheets of canvas put up with sticks. All of them offered shade from the unforgiving sun.
No one knew who had hung the sobriquet Glitter City on the place. But everyone knew the reference was to the Hollywood-style atmosphere of the place. Some news agencies had rolled out what were, in effect, microproduction companies that shot day-by-day footage of the military buildup on both sides of the border, managed day trips to local religious sites such as the Ulu Cami—the Grand Mosque of the Suljuk Turks—the brick beehive cities of Harran, and the Pool of Abraham, and interviewed anyone and everyone willing to talk to them.
During conversations with other Rangers who had visited Glitter City, Goose had learned that several newscasts now featured segments spotlighting the potential for disaster between Turkey and Syria. Several investigations had been made into the roots of the PKK and their effect on Turkey’s relations with its neighbors.
Other writers prepared books and took photographs, laying out chapters that were edited and readied for printing as soon as they were e-mailed to New York publishing houses. There were even a few releases being done about Turkey, the Turkish-Syrian conflict, terrorists, and historical events and places, pieces that would be aired on the Travel Channel, The History Channel, and on the Discovery Channel, then released straight to video.
War—or at least the threat of impending war—had become big business in media, politics, and economics. Politicians used those threats to shepherd legislation through Congress and to fund budget increases for military spending. The military needed the money—U.S. troops were deployed at every hot spot imaginable, going after everything from terrorists to the bankers who financed them to drug dealers to the country’s traditional enemies.
Not every politician was pushing for more and bigger weapons and more and bigger armies. Goose had heard of a United Nations representative from Romania named Nicolae Carpathia. Surprisingly, Carpathia was pushing for disarmament in his own country. At the time he’d heard that, Goose had never thought it would happen. Romania was part of Eastern Europe, left orphaned by the failed Soviet Communist government, and host to a series of bloodthirsty dictators who had only been driven from office by equally bloodthirsty military uprisings. Most military analysts had figured that the country would be awash in political unrest and military action for decades to come. Instead, Carpathia had begun to quiet Romania down, almost as if by magic.
“Incoming!” Bill yelled from the back of the RSOV.
Instinctively, Goose looked up and saw another SCUD plunge from the air like a blunt spear. Although the missiles lacked a lot in targeting systems, this one streaked almost into the smoke- and dustcovered heart of Glitter City.
The preexisting clouds of smoke and dust prevented Goose from seeing the actual impact. But a heartbeat later, a fairly new blue van erupted into the air, turning and whirling like a child’s toy. Flames wreathed the vehicle and then the gas tank blew, ripping open the vehicle’s side.
The van reached the apex of its arc and had started earthward again, disappearing into the smoke and dust before the sonic boom of the explosion reached Goose’s ears. A moment later, a wave of concussion rattled the RSOV’s windshield.
Merciful God, Goose prayed. Spare the innocent. Because if You don’t, they’re all going
to die here today.
Bobby Tanaka glanced at Goose. Fear lit the young man’s eyes. He put his foot over the brake and slowed.
“Get in there, soldier,” Goose said.
“Gonna be suicide to go in there,” Tanaka said. But he grinned a little as he pressed his foot harder on the accelerator and drove the vehicle over the edge of the bowl. “Ah, well, I always did like a wild ride.” The RSOV juked and shuddered as the tires fought for traction on the hillside. They’d run out of road, roaring out over loose layers of sand and rock.
Goose sat in the shotgun seat with his left foot braced against the dash. He cradled the M-4A1 with both hands and kept the assault rifle canted up at the ready. Closer to ground zero now, he raked his gaze across the field of destruction the SCUDs had left in their wake.
Huge craters had opened up from the bomb blasts, turning the desert floor under the shifting sands into a lunar landscape. Stone buildings lay in tumbled wrecks or nearly covered by a deluge of debris that had slid free of hillsides. Flattened tents and flaming tents littered the area, and none had been spared. The concussions from the SCUDs had ripped the tent pegs from the ground and flung the tents around like used tissues. Cars and trucks and vans sat abandoned, blown over or apart, or wrapped in flames that sent spikes of twisting black smoke up through the dust cover.
