The night mission proceeded on schedule. Their fearless leader Rempt had been true to his word, after a fashion. He had succeeded in quelling the fires of discontent in the encampment, but the uneasy truce between tribesmen and US specwar personnel had been bought rather than negotiated.
Rempt had dug into his Company imprest fund and paid off the tribal khadkhuda in fifty dollar gold pieces. He had also promised a new consignment of better weapons at the next air drop. But first came the mission.
As with the last mission into the heights of the Elburz range, the mixed force was deployed along the rocky ledges and jagged outcroppings of the Bottleneck, awaiting the next clandestine resupply run out of Kharkov. Only this time there were a few wrinkles that had not been in evidence during the previous mission.
One of these wrinkles was not even present in the operational area at all. On the contrary, it was parked in low earth orbit some hundred miles above the action. It was a satellite that bore the code name Cerberus, and it differed from most other satellites in that it was mostly a huge rectangle, about the size of a trailer, filled with wet-cell electrical storage batteries.
Another wrinkle on the night's operation was a tubular weapon that was mounted on a tripod. The tube did not fire a projectile of any kind, however. Instead, a series of cables ran from the rear of the tube to a regulated power source and an electronic device housed in a MIL-SPEC-hardened carrying case. Rempt had set up the rig himself, calibrating the weapon by means of a head-mounted display that was plugged into the central processing unit.
The rest was standard operating procedure. The team got into position well in advance of the expected arrival of the airborne shuttle run and settled down to wait in the darkness and biting cold of the arid, windswept heights.
Time ticked by, and then the first satellite warnings of the approach of the Antonov came over the downlink and the ghost images of overhead thermal surveillance appeared on the tactical computer screens of the ambush force.
Breaux crouched in the darkness of the windswept heights, overlooking the rift valley below him, waiting for the plane to come gliding in. As was the case previously, Detachment Omega was strung out around the north face of the cliffs above the yawning ravine, ready to intervene with rocket and small arms fire if the situation demanded aggressive response.
Rempt stared transfixed at the screen of the battlefield computer station, his fingers poised above the keyboard.
Soon the distant drone of the Antonov heavy-lifter's huge, shoulder-mounted jet engines was heard in the distance. The sound grew louder as the plane approached. The sound became a deafening roar as the winged metallic leviathan appeared, incredibly low over the top of the bluffs, and glided across the chasm that opened beyond, beginning its overflight of the rift valley.
Rempt paid the plane no attention. His eyes followed the computer's tracking window that showed the satellite view of the oncoming aircraft. Above the window, digital readouts showed the Antonov's altitude, course heading, velocity and other statistics. The most important of these numbers to Rempt, however, was the readout whose flashing numerics had begun steadily rolling down toward the zero mark.
Rempt might just as well have kept his eyes on the plane, because the entire procedure was automated and out of his control. When the flashing numerals counted down to zero, an attack sequence was automatically initiated.
High overhead in low earth orbit, the hundreds of power cells that had been charging with current now released the charge into a step-up transformer that increased the voltage by a factor of twenty.
The thousand kilovolts of electromagnetic energy generated by Cerberus began streaming from the projector dish pointing earthward. The EMP projector was in tickle mode, however. The electromagnetic pulse could be unleashed on ground or airborne targets in a variety of modes, some more severe than others. In tickle mode, the main beam was broken up into a series of smaller, less powerful pulses. The intended effect was to compromise, but not permanently damage, the electronic and electrical systems of the target.
The pulses of electromagnetic energy played across the airframe of the Antonov as it entered the airspace above the arid gorge. The precise point along the trajectory of the aircraft at which the pulses would begin to strike had been calculated by earth- and space-based computers so that the Antonov's autopilot, manual control systems, radio and backup systems would fail, yet leave the pilot with enough room to land the plane on the floor of the ravine.
Now, as the scenario played itself out, these calculations made thousands of miles away by shirt-sleeved intelligence staff wired on coffee jags and hunched over computer terminals studying animated simulations of the operation, these calculations in the service of ends that only a handful of individuals with high security clearances knew in full, these calculations were about to become reality.
The Antonov's onboard systems began to fail as the invisible shock waves penetrated its hull, entered the wiring and overloaded integrated circuitry. Inside the cockpit, the navigational screens and gauges began erratically flashing. Emergency backup systems fared no better. The pilot had no choice — or rather, he was only left with one.
"We are experiencing massive systems failure," he reported over the secure radio, breaking silence in the emergency. "Backup systems are going too. We must land immediately."
In the cockpit of the lead Mi-24 Hind gun ship that had followed the transport plane a half mile behind, the pilot only caught a fraction of the garbled message. But it, and the view through his forward looking infrared head-up display, that showed the huge plane dropping altitude as it struggled to keep its nose up, was enough. The Antonov would need to make an emergency landing. That or crash.
"Damn the luck," Captain Josip Panshin, the pilot, said to his copilot, seated back of him in the elevated weapons system officer's cockpit. "Of all the god-forsaken places to have to land a plane, it's here."
"What do we do about this?" Vanya Petrovsky in helo two put in over the radio net. "This isn't supposed to be happening?"
"We land and call Kharkov for further instructions, that's what we do, Vanya. Don't ask stupid questions. We don't even know if they'll make it down safely at this point. Nothing we can do now except wait and see."
The two Hinds hovered and danced in the black air as their crews watched the spectacle unfolding below them. The Hinds were unaffected by Cerberus, because the space-based EMP projector was capable of focusing on extremely narrow beam widths and precisely tracking its targets. The OPPLAN crafted by nameless operatives in windowless rooms in secret offices on the Washington Beltway did not call for the helos to be disabled.
Another part of the OPPLAN had been crafted specifically for the Hinds, however. That part would be activated soon. In the meantime, the OPPLAN called for the big cargo plane to land safely. Every precaution had been taken to insure that the Russian flight deck crew had enough clearance to accomplish this feat.
Without knowing it, the Antonov's crew carried out its part of the plan almost flawlessly, the pilot putting down the flaps on the still-functional hydraulic controls to yank up the plane's nose and bring it to an emergency landing mere feet from the sheer wall of the cliff face at the opposite end of the gorge.
Once the Antonov was down, the second phase commenced. Small metallic circles positioned along the straps of Rempt's HUD fit close to the temples and crown of the skull, and a projecting flap fit close against the center of his forehead.