“Tomcat is standing by at your six,” McCulloch radioed. “I have your aft IR beacon in sight.”
Flynn checked one of the little mirrors the ground crew had attached just forward of the doors. There, back behind them near the north edge of the runway, he could see the Predator UAV. The praying mantis shape of the drone now looked pregnant. A streamlined cargo container had been slung below its long, thin fuselage. Fully loaded now, the Predator needed at least five thousand feet of runway to get into the air, a far cry from the few hundred feet required by the BushCat. Dust kicked up by the drone’s rear-mounted propeller eddied away downwind, appearing as a bright white plume in his night vision goggles.
“Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat,” Van Horn said calmly. “Departing runway one-six.”
She revved up again and started her takeoff roll. The little plane gathered speed fast and lifted off smoothly, climbing fast into the night sky. At five hundred feet, she pushed the flaps control handle back up and leveled off. They flew on low over Zaranj, continuing south by southeast at eighty-two knots to maintain the deception that they were headed for Pakistan.
Flynn checked the mirror again. The Predator was still on their tail, trailing them by several hundred yards. He turned back around in time to see the last clusters of mud-brick houses on the southern fringe of Zaranj sliding past beneath their wings. Ahead, beyond the BushCat’s whirring propeller, a desolate landscape stretched in all directions — an empty, lifeless country marked only by the snakelike ripples of bone-dry watercourses and low mounds of heaped earth and rock.
Twenty minutes later, Van Horn tweaked her centerline control stick to the right and forward a little, initiating a gentle, descending turn to the southwest. “Tomcat,” she radioed. “Starting my run for the border.”
“Copy that, Tiger Cat,” the drone’s remote pilot acknowledged. “Following you around.” A sensitive receiver aboard the Predator had picked up the BushCat’s short-range radio transmission and relayed it back to Zaranj via satellite link.
Concentrating hard, Van Horn leveled off again — this time at just a hundred feet. They were low enough now to make out individual boulders, lone dwarf trees, and clumps of withered thornbushes through the windshield. She continued making small adjustments to their altitude, climbing a few dozen feet to clear low rises and then descending back down into the shallow valleys beyond. “Next stop, Indian country,” she said conversationally. She shot Flynn a quick, slashing grin. “Having fun yet, Nick?”
“Oh, more than I can say, ma’am,” he drawled, working hard to sound unfazed. “But I’d sure appreciate it if you kept your eyes on the road.” He’d never much liked flying so close to the ground. And right now, he couldn’t help visualizing the little aircraft’s fixed landing gear smacking into a big rock or snagging in the branches of a tree — sending them cartwheeling to destruction. Then he shook his head at his own foolishness. All things considered, it was probably a bit late to start regretting his career choices.
Van Horn’s smile grew a little bigger. “Relax, cowboy. This is still the easy part of the trip. It only really gets hard when we hit the mountains.”
Flynn winced. “You know,” he said tightly. “Hit isn’t exactly the word I’d have chosen right there.”
She laughed. “I was speaking figuratively, not literally.” She shrugged. “Besides, if you’d been a professional aviator when you were in the Air Force, instead of an intelligence puke, you’d know that we call the process of interacting with the ground in an uncontrolled manner a crash.”
Realizing he was in an unwinnable fight, Flynn held up his hands in surrender.
Little more than a shadow gliding through darkness, the BushCat flew on just above the desert floor, arrowing southwest toward the border with Iran. The Predator tagged along behind it. They were still more than three hundred nautical miles and almost four hours flying time from their destination.
Fifteen
The BushCat swooped low over a jagged, sawtooth saddle between two higher peaks and plunged down the other side. Hit by a powerful updraft boiling up those steep slopes, its fabric-covered wings flexed and rippled. “Hold together, baby,” Laura Van Horn said quietly, almost as a prayer. She throttled back slightly and raised the nose a couple of degrees to shed some velocity. Though solidly built for a light aircraft, the BushCat’s rated VNE, the speed it was never supposed to exceed, was only 108 knots. Going any faster risked having the plane’s aluminum frame fold up under the stress — instantly turning what had been a flyable machine into a tangled mess of torn fabric and crumpled metal spinning uncontrollably down out of the sky.
Nick Flynn gripped the strut over his head as she banked hard away from another soaring spire of rock. The lightweight aluminum bar was one of the structural members that formed the basic shell of their BushCat’s tiny cabin. Otherwise, the only thing between him and a couple of thousand feet of empty space was a thin layer of zippered Dacron-Trilam cloth.
Mountains rose on all sides, some more than ten thousand feet high. Their towering black masses blotted out whole swathes of stars in the night sky. Formed tens of millions of years ago by volcanic eruption and upthrust, the Jebel Barez ran like a spine of hardened lava through the central Iranian highlands — separating their more fertile plains from the vast, waterless deserts in the east.
Trying to navigate safely through this maze of razor-edged heights, sheer cliffs, and narrow, boulder-strewn clefts would have been tough enough in an aircraft equipped with terrain-following radar and sophisticated navigation systems tied into a full-spectrum heads-up display. It was an order of magnitude more difficult in a tiny plane fitted with only the bare minimum of electronics to save weight and electrical power. A GPS-linked digital map open on the BushCat’s sole multifunction display provided some idea of where they were… but for the most part, their survival depended on Van Horn’s skill as a pilot, her situational awareness, and her uncanny ability to anticipate danger and react in time.
Insane as this harrowing nighttime flight through mountains seemed, Flynn knew it was their only real chance to slip through Iran’s air defenses unnoticed. There were relatively few air surveillance radars and surface-to-air missile batteries sited to cover the sparsely populated eastern third of the country. That was not the case farther to the west and along the coast of the Persian Gulf, where a thickening web of interlocking radars, missile units, antiaircraft guns, and interceptor bases lay in wait for any intruder.
He swallowed hard as Van Horn pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing steeply to clear another ridge. Their airspeed bled off fast, dropping below fifty knots. Just before the BushCat stalled out, she lowered its nose again and dove — rolling to follow the trace of a slender gap between two much higher summits.
“You still with me, Tomcat?” she radioed.
“Roger that, Tiger Cat,” the Predator’s remote pilot replied tersely. “Still hanging on your six.”
Flynn could hear the tension in Sara McCulloch’s voice. Because her flight control inputs had to be relayed through a satellite link, there was always a tiny delay before the Predator responded to her commands. It wasn’t much, usually considerably less than a second. But even flying at only eighty knots, the UAV would travel more than a hundred feet in that short interval. And in this rugged country that was often the difference between survival and slamming head-on into a wall of rock. Trying to thread a remote-piloted drone through the middle of these mountains on its own would have been completely impossible. Only by closely following the IR beacon fixed to the BushCat’s tail could McCulloch maneuver her ungainly Predator away from obstacles in time… and then often only by the narrowest of margins.