“Eddie, what’s our ETA to Elmendorf AFB?”
“I don’t know, I filed a flight plan to Fairbanks. What’s at Elly?”
“A couple of helicopter gunships and some gung-ho soldiers.” Mercer grinned at Rice. “There’s no way I’m going to get shot at again.”
“Amen to that, brother.” Rice smiled back, his teeth looking iridescent in the glow of the cockpit. “I’d say about another hour and ten minutes in these conditions.”
“As soon as you can, get me in radio contact with them. They’re expecting my call.” Mercer then switched to a more relaxed tone. “So, how does your wife like living up here?”
“She doesn’t,” Rice said ruefully. “She and I split up while I was still in the hospital. It seems I wasn’t the only one receiving injections from my doctor at Pearl.”
“Man, I’m sorry.”
“Ah, shit. Life goes on, don’t it? Besides, a black man up here? I get more ass than I can handle.” Eddie’s grin was back, though there was a hint of sad bitterness in his voice.
An hour later, Anchorage was a bright blur on the ground beneath the JetRanger. The waters of Cook Inlet were an inky black stain. The storm that had pounded Valdez during the afternoon had moved northward and now pummeled Alaska’s Queen City. Rain lashed the helicopter, striking the windshield so hard that it sounded like stones thrown against the Plexiglas. The wipers turned the torrent into arcing streaks across their field of vision. Wind rocked the craft, sluing it dangerously despite Eddie’s best efforts. He made no apology for his flying. His face was tight with concentration, his hands and feet dancing over the controls. A pilot of lesser skill wouldn’t have dared flying tonight.
“Alyeska Flight One-eleven, we have you on radar twelve miles out, flying three-oh-five degrees.”
“Roger that, Elmendorf,” Eddie confirmed. “ETA in five minutes. Approach three-ten, squawk zero-two-two-zero. Confirmed.”
“Confirmed One-eleven.”
“You know what you’re doing?” Mercer teased Rice.
“No clue.”
Four minutes and forty seconds later, Eddie settled the Bell chopper onto the tarmac near a huge corrugated steel hangar. Two Huey UH-1 troop transport helicopters were next to the spot where ATC had sent the Alyeska helicopter, and even in the murky light spilling from the hangars, they looked deadly. The side doors were open, revealing gimbal mounted M-60 heavy machine guns. Even before the JetRanger’s blades stopped turning, technicians were swarming around the craft, oblivious to the icy rain buffeting the airfield. A fuel truck drew alongside and two men prepared to attach the thick hose to the chopper.
Mercer ducked from the JetRanger, dashing for the protective cover of the hangar, his boots kicking up violent waves in the puddles on the asphalt. A cold chill lapped under the raised collar of his leather coat, and his hands felt frozen by the time he entered the glowing hangar.
The huge building’s heating eased the chill on Mercer’s exposed skin, but his insides were still cold with fear and apprehension. Two delta-shaped F-15 Strike Eagles dominated the space, their twin tails rising up almost twenty feet from the polished concrete floor. Behind them, at the back of the hangar, a cluster of men waited quietly, their faces blackened with camouflage grease, their M-16A1 assault rifles held competently in demigloved hands. They paid little attention to Mercer as he approached, satisfying themselves with a dismissive glance before turning back to the perpetual task of checking and rechecking equipment. Mercer kept walking toward them, and finally a single man detached himself from the collective.
He was short and heavily built, with bristle-cut hair and a face that needed a razor. His brows were heavy tangles of wiry hair that met above his hooked nose. His eyes were dark and wrinkled at their corners, but Mercer saw that they were level and quick. His mouth, incongruously, was full-lipped and sensitive.
“Colonel Knoff?”
“You must be Mercer.” Knoff’s handshake was like having a hand caught in some sort of farm machine, a relentless grinding pressure. Mercer briefly considered matching Knoff’s handshake but realized this wasn’t some sort of macho test, just Knoff’s natural grip. “I gotta say, you’ve caught us a little off guard here. An hour ago, I was watching porno movies with a few of the guys, and next thing I know, I’m on the phone with General Samuel Kelly, the Air Force’s Chief of Staff. I can’t even guess who you are to pull that kind of string.”
Mercer immediately liked Knoff’s attitude. He didn’t have a career soldier’s disdain for anyone not in uniform. It was clear that he hadn’t forgotten that it was civilians he was trained to serve. “Ask any politician and he’ll tell you I’m the most powerful person in the country.” Mercer smiled. “An American tax-payer.”
“You mind telling me what this is all about?”
Mercer could understand Colonel Knoff’s question and the concern he felt for his men that made him ask it, but none of them had the time to stand around and discuss it. He had to get them moving.
“Colonel, if I’ve managed to convince your superiors about this mission’s importance, put your trust in their judgment and just go along with it. This may be a waste of your time, but if it’s not, if I’m right, we’re going to face a seriously hot LZ. I can’t give you any of the overall picture, but I need to know if you have any tactical questions about tonight’s op. If you don’t ask now, some of your boys may not be coming back.”
“Mr. Mercer, I wouldn’t worry about us.” The ramrod in Knoff’s back got about two degrees straighter, if such a thing was possible. “General Kelly briefed us on what to expect. What bothers me is the presence of you and your slick in our convoy. My pilots don’t know your man, and the last thing we need is a civilian helicopter flying in the same area where we’re making a hot drop.”
Mercer had expected such a concern, and his reply was the reassurance that Knoff wanted. “I flew with this pilot during last year’s flap in Hawaii. Plus, he’s ex-navy and a Gulf War veteran. I plan to keep us a couple miles back from your landings and monitor from the radio. You guys are the ones who make the big bucks for getting shot at, not us. Have your lead pilot give instructions to my man, and he’ll follow them to the letter.”
“What about you, what’s your experience?” Knoff asked.
“Were you in Iraq?” Knoff nodded. “I’d already been in and out before the Abrams tanks broke through the berms. I was a specialist for Delta Force’s Operation Prospector, to make sure none of you boys faced nukes on the battlefield. I’ve probably seen more firefights than all of your troops combined, and we can sit here all night and compare scars, but I don’t have the time. Anything else?”
Knoff was slightly taken aback by Mercer’s response. The Special Forces community, though rife with interservice rivalries, was close-knit, and stories of black operations circled freely in watered-down versions to avoid compromising ongoing missions. It was obvious in his reaction that Knoff had heard of Operation Prospector and knew that a civilian had turned a debacle into a success while saving most of the team sent to protect him. “No, sir. That should do it. I’ve got the coordinates for the pump stations and the quick sketch map faxed to us by a guy named Lindstrom. I figured we’d hit both simultaneously.”
“Negative,” Mercer replied evenly. “If we split your forces, we’ll be outgunned and probably outmanned. By the time we get up there, I’ll have the intel on which station was taken.”
“All right.” Knoff didn’t have any more questions.
“Then let’s go,” Mercer said with more bravado than he felt.
Ivan Kerikov settled into a chair behind the pump control console, a Heckler and Koch MP-5 resting across his knees. The corpses of the few Alyeska employees who’d remained at the station had already been dumped outside. He removed his heavy overcoat and was thinking about taking off the bulky black sweater he wore beneath it. In the late 1970s, he’d been attached to a KGB commando team as an intelligence officer. As a training mission, they’d once had to retake a “terrorist-occupied” natural gas pumping station deep in the heart of Siberia. He’d never forgotten the loneliness of the station far out in the tundra or how drab and utilitarian and unbearably cold the facility had been. Expecting much the same in Alaska, he’d dressed several layers too thick for the assault on Pump Station Number 5.