His jaw clenched. If they lost the drone on the way in, this whole operation was a bust — and he and Laura Van Horn would find themselves trapped deep inside Iran, without any real hope of rescue. Right now, they had no room at all for error or accident. His college ROTC instructors would have failed him outright for coming up with a boneheaded scheme like this. And they probably would have been right, he knew. Friction — the combination of random and unforeseen events which could not be predicted — was the only real constant in war.
The BushCat climbed again, cresting over another narrow ridge with less than a hundred feet to spare. Ahead, the ground fell away sharply, spreading out into an open plain. A band of fields and orchards stretched north and south. Flanked by two rivers, the volcanic soil here was immensely fertile. A small sea of yellow lights off to their right marked the location of Jiroft, a city of nearly one hundred thousand people. Other faint specks of light here and there pinpointed several of the tiny farming villages which dotted the broad valley.
Van Horn took them down onto the deck, jogging first right and then back left to keep as much distance as possible between them and any settled places. The Predator tagged along behind. This far inside Iran, the passage of low-flying aircraft wasn’t likely to raise an alarm — but there also wasn’t any point in giving the fates extra opportunities to screw them over.
“That was some seriously badass flying,” Flynn told her quietly.
She nodded tightly. “Just don’t jinx us,” she warned. They still had two more stretches of rough country to pass through, both of them offshoots of the larger Jebel Barez chain. “What’s my current ETA to the landing zone?” she asked.
Flynn studied the terrain map on their multifunction display. He traced their planned flight path. On a straight line course, they were about eighty nautical miles from the LZ he’d picked out using a combination of satellite photos and topographical charts. Of course, there was no way they could fly anything like a direct approach across those mountains and escarpments, not if they wanted to stay low enough to avoid detection by Iranian radars. Dodging and weaving through meandering passes and valleys would add miles and miles to their journey. He did some quick mental math. “Sixty minutes, plus or minus ten either way,” he said.
Van Horn’s mouth turned down a bit. She reached out and touched the display, switching it to show their engine and other status readouts. “Given our current fuel state, that’s really pushing the envelope,” she commented coolly.
“Pushing the envelope so far that we run out of gas and fall out of the sky?” Flynn asked.
She sniffed. “Have a little faith, Nick. We’ll make it.” Then she turned her head and gave him a shit-eating grin. “Even if I have to make you get out and push.”
“You know, remind me to lecture you on basic physics sometime,” he shot back.
“I thought you ducked out on the hard sciences in school?” Van Horn reminded him.
“Sure, but I figured out gravity the one time I jumped off our garage roof to see if I could fly with a couple of cardboard wings strapped to my arms. Busted a leg and dislocated a shoulder finding out that I couldn’t.”
Van Horn looked sympathetic. “Tough break the week before your senior prom, I guess.”
“I was only six,” he said with wounded dignity.
Another wall of steep hills lined the horizon ahead of them. Higher peaks lofted beyond. Thankfully, they weren’t quite as daunting as the main range of the Jebel Barez — rising around two to three thousand feet above the valley floor. Van Horn pulled back on her stick a bit, beginning a shallow climb that would take them over the first rise ahead. She contacted the Predator. “We’re coming up to the next rollercoaster ride, Tomcat. Stick tight and stay sharp.”
“I’ll be on you like glue, Tiger Cat,” McCulloch assured her.
The BushCat zoomed low over a sharp-edged ridgeline devoid of any vegetation. These heights were completely barren, a sea of bare, blackened rock, wind-blasted boulders, and fans of loose gravel scree that would have looked at home on Mars. The little plane banked to avoid a slab-sided knob that spiked several hundred feet higher and then turned back to continue southwest.
“My bird is picking up intermittent radar pulses at our eleven o’clock,” the Predator’s remote pilot suddenly reported. “Signal strength is pretty low, but my computer evaluates the likely source as a Meraj-Four S-band phased array radar.” One of the modifications Quartet Directorate technicians had made to the drone for this operation was to install a radar warning system similar to those suggested for its far more capable successor, the MQ-9 Reaper. Without this capability, their two aircraft would have been forced to fly largely blind through Iran’s air defense network. Plotting a course that would evade fixed radar sites was relatively easy. But many of the advanced radars associated with Iran’s long-range surface-to-air missiles, like the Russian-built S-300s and its own Bavar-373 missiles, were road-mobile — making it very difficult to pin down their operating locations at any particular moment.
Flynn leaned forward and pulled up their map on the multifunction display. He studied the territory shown ahead of them, thinking fast. The Meraj-4 radar system was an expensive piece of hardware. Deploying one anywhere except to watch over high-priority targets like nuclear installations, airfields, and naval bases wouldn’t make much military sense. “My bet is that radar is positioned to cover the approaches to Bandar Abbas,” he told Van Horn.
Her mouth tightened. “Which puts us what? About a hundred and ten nautical miles away?”
“About that,” he agreed. “And getting closer all the time.”
Van Horn nodded. “No point in fooling around, then,” she said. “We need to really get down in the dirt.”
Flynn stared at her. “Our altitude’s only a hundred feet right now. That’s not down in the dirt?”
“Nope.” She pushed the stick forward and the BushCat dove again — dropping until its undercarriage almost seemed to be brushing against the earth. A little cloud of dust and sand kicked up by their propeller and the wind of their passage swirled away behind them. When a massive boulder loomed up through the windshield, she pulled back just far enough to skim a few feet above its cracked and pitted surface before lowering the aircraft’s nose again.
“Holy crap,” Flynn blurted out before he could stop himself. Instinctively, he grabbed again for the cabin strut over his head.
“Now this is flying in the dirt,” Van Horn said with satisfaction.
“No radar pulses detected,” the Predator’s remote pilot reported from her post at the Zaranj airport. “We’re masked by the terrain.”
“See?” She said with a rictus grin. “Piece of cake.”
Flynn kept his mouth shut. The sweat streaking her face told a different story.
Almost an hour later, they emerged from the last band of mountains on their flight path. A large barren plain opened up to the west, bordered on three sides by more rugged hills and ridges. A few scattered lights in the darkness pinpointed small villages, most of them built along a north-south, two-lane highway at the mouth of this basin. A patchwork of small fields and orchards surrounded these little clusters of flat-roofed buildings.