It sort of made sense to Kipper if he thought about it in the same way as cleaning his basement. The units were like his push broom, shoving dirty water, or in this case the enemy's fighters, toward the drain. They would sweep the pirates and their jihadi allies toward the heaviest concentration of his forces, the Seventh Cavalry Regiment.
"Okay. Keep pushing, Tommy," Kipper said. "Keep pushing. And my apologies for losing my temper. I shouldn't have."
"That's perfectly understandable, sir," Franks said, before signing off.
Kipper wondered whether he could take another couple of Advils for his head. He was already feeling nauseous from them. At least another dozen officers from all the branches of the military were standing behind him, all waiting for a moment of his attention. He decided to skip the painkillers, instead seeking out his aide, Colonel Ralls, who was standing behind Jed.
"Mike, can you get me somebody from the air force to talk me through their plans for this bombing run? How much longer do we have before they're ready to go?"
Ralls consulted with a USAF general who was standing nearby clutching a manila folder full of documents.
"Mister President," the air force man answered. "General Wisnewski, sir. The units you're asking about will be over the city in twelve hours on present projections."
Kipper nodded, quietly admonishing himself. They'd already told him that not half an hour ago. He was having serious trouble holding it all in his head.
Something else was bugging him. Something he had forgotten…
"Jed," he asked when the memory came to him. "Agent Monroe. She does understand that she's working to this timetable, doesn't she?"
"Yes, Mister President. She knows she is on the clock. If she is still in the AOR when times runs out, there's very little we can do for her."
Jed paused, favoring him with a worried look.
"It's why she was reluctant to commit to rendition, sir. She simply does not have time."
"No," Kip sighed. "I guess she doesn't."
45
New York The loadmaster leaned over and checked Caitlin's rig, pronouncing himself happy with a brusque nod. The roar of the MC-130H in flight, the military free-fall helmet she wore, and the oxygen masks they both needed at thirty thousand feet in an unpressurized cabin rendered any kind of verbal communication impossible. She ran through a final check of her loadout and tried to center her thoughts. She had not expected the call from James Kipper, and it had thrown her completely, especially the last-minute attempt to redefine her mission. What the fuck did he think he was doing? There was no way she had the resources to grab al Banna and throw him over her shoulder. Especially not with the countdown she was now working to. The more she thought about it, the more pissed off she became. She made a conscious effort to let go of her frustration and annoyance, to focus instead on what lay immediately ahead of her: a high-altitude high-opening parachute drop into the middle of a city being fought over by multiple factions, warlords, nut jobs, and the remnants of what had been the most powerful military force in the world.
She had settled on a relatively light weapons and ammo package. A sawed-off Mossberg 500 shotgun. An M4 carbine. The Kimber CQB pistol she had picked up at the London Cage. And two Gerber fighting knives, one at her hip and one tucked into a scabbard on her reinforced jump boots. The rest of her equipment she wore or carried in some of the many pouches sewn into her black, insulated jumpsuit and combat assault vest. A GPS unit with locator beacon and IFF transponder, a small but rugged PDA, altimeter, goggles, gloves, spare oxygen tanks, a full-face mask, and the FF2, a pressure-activated device that would pop her chute if she happened to pass out from hypoxia on the drop.
The engines whined in protest as the pilot brought them around on the correct heading for an HAHO insertion over the city. She could not see New York yet. She could see nothing in the darkness outside the cabin windows, which were streaked with freezing rain. The plane banked as the pilot made one final adjustment, and then she was just able to make out some of the city skyline far below and to the south, silhouetted by angry flashes of light.
At two minutes out the jumpmaster lowered the rear ramp and raised his arm, telling Caitlin it was time to stand up. He extended the same arm with the palm up at shoulder height before bending it to touch his helmet. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly and powerfully as she pushed up out of her seat and moved to the rear of the MC-130. Her equipment was secured and the ram-air steerable chute hugged her like a child. Even with every inch of her body covered, she could feel the drop in temperature as the damp, subzero air swirled in.
As she stood in the dim red light looking out into the darkness, Caitlin imagined that her own child was out there, sleeping safely in Bret's arms. Red lamps clunked over to pale green, and the jumpmaster gave her a pat on the shoulder. She stepped on the ramp, flexing her knees slightly against the buffeting of the plane. She didn't look back or wave. She strode forward and stepped into the infinite dark.
The drone of aircraft engines, muted by her helmet, fell away completely as she dropped toward the earth. The weather was poor-foul, really-and she had only intermittent visibility before she popped the chute after a few seconds of free fall. It deployed with a fierce tug, and she allowed herself a minute's glide through the inky gloom before checking her altitude and position via the GPS unit.
She was thirty miles north of the insertion point, the Great Lawn of Central Park in the middle of Manhattan. The PDA attached to her right forearm fed a continous stream of updated weather data, helping Caitlin adjust her glide path toward the landing spot. For the first few minutes she descended through a black void, enveloped in clouds and rain. Droplets beaded her goggles and the readout of her instruments, necessitating a continual juggle between steering the chute, checking her position, and cleaning off the small green-lit screens.
At twenty-one thousand feet, however, she emerged from the cloud cover to find herself where she should have been, gliding south-southeast over the lower reaches of the Hudson, with the New Jersey Palisades passing by far beneath her boots. The U.S. Air Force was maintaining a clear corridor for her to drop through, but she saw that far away in the gloom the skies over southern Manhattan were alive with military aircraft. The great battle caused a curious inversion in the scene, with a terrible storm appearing to rage on the ground within the canyons of the city, lighting the gray featureless clouds that formed a ceiling over the tempest. Caitlin noted with professional detachment that very little antiaircraft fire chased the fighters through the bleak diorama, but she knew it would be different for helicopters dawdling close to any of the enemy hidden high above street level on the upper floors of office buildings or apartment houses. A lot of choppers had been raked out of the sky by low-tech countermeasures such as RPGs. That wasn't the reason she was parachuting rather than riding in, but she was still grateful not to have to contend with that sort of bullshit.
Another check revealed that she had drifted off course by a mile, pushed off her line of approach by a freshening westerly. The slightest gap between the glove on her left hand and the cuff of her jumpsuit let in a knifing wind to cold burn her skin and remind her of just how hostile was the environment through which she was passing. As Caitlin steered herself back on course, a small rain squall blew through, making the correction that much more difficult. She fought the chute, the elements, and her momentum as she angled across the dark void of the river just north of the George Washington Bridge. Here and there below her, she could make out single points and occasional small clusters of light, far distant from the fighting in the city. Were they small pirate bands, perhaps? Or possibly even the camps of Baumer's people? The latest intel digests she had read on the flight from Berlin to upstate New York to change planes had spoken of small camps of civilians, previously thought to be wildcat settlements, now possibly tied in with Baumer's crazed colonization scheme.