Driscoll walked to the rear of the cave, playing his flashlight around until he reached the alcove the gomer had seemed so keen to frag. It was about the size of a walk-in closet, he now saw, maybe a little bigger, with a low-hanging ceiling. He crouched down and waddled a few feet into the alcove.
“Whatcha got?” Tait said, coming up behind him.
“Sand table and a wooden ammo crate.”
A flat piece of three-fourths-inch-thick plywood, about two meters square to each side, covered in glued-on sand and papier-mâché mountains and ridges, scatterings of boxlike buildings here and there. It looked like something in one of those old-time World War Two movies, or a grade-school diorama. Pretty good job, too, not something half-assed you sometimes see with these guys. More often than not the gomers here drew a plan in the dirt, said some prayers, then went at it.
The terrain didn’t look familiar to Driscoll. Could be anywhere, but it sure as hell looked rugged enough to be around here, which didn’t narrow down the possibilities much. No landmarks, either. No buildings, no roads. Driscoll lifted the corner of the table. It was damned heavy, maybe eighty pounds, which solved one of Driscoll’s problems: no way they were going to haul that thing down the mountain. It was a goddamned brick hang glider; at this altitude the wind was a bitch, and they’d either lose the thing in a gust or it would start flapping and give them away. And breaking it up might ruin something of value.
“Okay, take some measurements and some samples, then go see if Smith is done taking shots of the gomers’ faces and photograph the hell out of this thing,” Driscoll ordered. “How many SD cards we got?”
“Six. Four gigs each. Plenty.”
“Good. Multiple shots of everything, highest resolution. Get some extra lights on it, too, and drop something beside for scale.”
“Reno’s got a tape measure.”
“Good. Use it. Plenty of angles and close-ups-the more, the better.” That was the beauty of digital cameras-take as many as you want and delete the bad ones. In this case they’d leave the deleting to the intel folks. “And check every inch for markings.”
Never could tell what was important. A lot would depend on the model’s scale, he suspected. If it was to scale they might be able to plug the measurements into a computer, do a little funky algebra or algorithms or whatever they used, and come up with a match somewhere. Who knew, maybe the papier-mâché stuff would turn out to be special or something, made only in some back-alley shop in Kandahar. Stranger shit had happened, and he wasn’t about to give the higher-ups anything to bitch about. They’d be angry enough that their quarry hadn’t been here, but that wasn’t Driscoll’s fault. Pre-mission intelligence, bad or good or otherwise, was beyond a soldier’s control. Still, the old saying in the military, “Shit runs downhill,” was as true as ever, and in this business there was always someone uphill from you, ready to give the shit ball a shove.
“You got it, boss,” Tait said.
“Frag it when you’re done. Might as well finish the job they should have done.”
Tait trotted off.
Driscoll turned his attention to the ammo box, picking it up and carrying it into the entrance tunnel. Inside was a stack of paper about three inches thick-some lined notebook paper covered in Arabic script, some random numbers and doodles-and a large two-sided foldout map. One side was labeled “Sheet Operational Navigation Chart, G-6, Defense Mapping Agency, 1982” and displayed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, while the other, held in place with masking tape, was a map of Peshawar torn from a Baedeker’s travel guide.
4
WELCOME TO AMERICAN AIRSPACE, gentlemen,” the copilot announced.
They were about to overfly Montana, home of elk, big skies, and a whole lot of decommissioned ICBM bases with empty silos.
They’d be burning fuel a lot faster down here, but the computer took notice of all that, and they had a much better reserve than what they’d had westbound over the Atlantic a few hours before-with a lot of usable fields down below to land on. The pilot turned on the heads-up display, which used low-light cameras to turn the darkness into green-and-white mono-color TV. Now it showed mountains to the west of their course track. The aircraft would automatically gain altitude to compensate, programmed as it was to maintain one thousand feet AGL-above ground level-and to do so with gentle angles, to keep his wealthy passengers happy and, he hoped, turn them into repeat customers.
The aircraft eased up to a true altitude of 6,100 feet as they passed over the lizard-back spine of the Grand Teton Range. Somewhere down there was Yellowstone National Park. In daylight he could have seen it, but it was a cloudless and moonless night.
The radar-sending systems showed they were “clear of conflict.” No other aircraft was close to their position or altitude. Mountain Home Air Force Base was a few hundred miles behind them, along with its complement of young piss-and-vinegar fighter pilots.
“Pity we can’t steer the HUD off the nose. Might even see the buffalo on the infrared sensors,” he observed. “They are making a real comeback in the West, I’ve read.”
“Along with the wolves,” the copilot responded. Nature was about balance, or so the Discovery Channel said. Not enough bison, the wolves die. Not enough wolves, the bison overproduce.
Utah’s countryside started off mountainous but gradually settled down to rolling flatness. They again maneuvered east to avoid Salt Lake City, which had an international airport and, probably, a sufficiently powerful radar to get a skin-paint.
This entire exercise would have been impossible thirty years earlier. They would have had to cross the Pinetree Line, one of the predecessors to America’s DEW-Distant Early Warning-Lines, and alert the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain. Well, given the current tensions between the United States and Russia, maybe the DEW and Pinetree would be recommissioned.
The ride was smoother than he’d expected. Riding in daylight, in summer, over the desert, could be bumpy indeed, what with the irregular rising thermal currents. Except for a few automobile headlights, the land below might as well have been the sea, so empty and black it was.
Thirty minutes to go. They were down to 9,000 pounds of fuel. The engines burned it a lot faster down here, just over 5,000 pounds per hour instead of the usual 3,400 or so.
“Wake the passengers up?” the copilot asked.
“Good idea.” The pilot lifted the microphone. “Attention. We expect to land in thirty minutes. Let us know if you have any special needs. Thank you,” he added. Thank you indeed for the money, and the interesting flight profile, he did not add.
The pilot and copilot both wondered who the passengers were but asked no questions. Upholding customer anonymity was part of the job, and though what they were doing was technically illegal, probably, by American law, they weren’t American citizens. They were not carrying guns, drugs, or anything else illegal. In any case, they didn’t know their passenger from Adam, and his face was wrapped in bandages anyway.
“Hundred miles, according to the computer. I hope the runway really is that long.”
“Chart says it is. Two thousand six hundred meters. We’ll know soon enough.”
In fact, the airstrip had been built in 1943, and was scarcely used since, built by an engineer battalion that had been trucked to Nevada and told to build an air base-as practice, really. All the fields looked the same, built from the same manual, like a triangle with one line segment longer than the other two. They were angling for runway two-seven, indicating a due-west approach run into the prevailing winds. It even had runway lights installed, but the cabling had long since degraded, as had the airport’s diesel generator. But as there was little in the way of snow and ice here to damage the concrete runways, they were as good as the day they’d cured out, twelve inches thick of rebarred concrete.