“For the past twenty drops the sensors in the pods indicate the passenger would have survived.”
“Sensors? You mean you haven’t made a manned jump yet?”
Sykes looked hesitant. “Well, the first forty or so drops weren’t survivable. Hell, the first couple were so bad we had to dig what was left of the pods out of the desert floor. The techs needed some time to work out the kinks. They think they have it now.”
“Jesus.” Mercer shook his head. “Well, I was the damned fool to insist on coming along. What about extraction after we reach Rinpoche-La?”
“That’s the other wrinkle,” Ira informed him. “As soon as you establish contact with Miss Nguyen you’ll have a secure satellite phone to relay any information she has about La Palma. Once we have that, the urgency is gone and you can take all the time you need to hike out to the Nepalese border.”
“A hundred sixteen miles?”
“More like two fifty,” Sykes corrected. “There’s a whole lot of mountains we have to walk around.”
“Better and better.” The thought of being reunited with Tisa kept the misery from Mercer’s voice, but not the sarcasm. “How does it play now?”
“Tomorrow morning an air force transport will take you to Area 51 for two days of orientation with Sykes and his team. From there you’ll be flown to a staging point on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. That’s where you load up the MMUs for the flight into Tibet.”
“How long’s the flight?”
“We’re estimating six hours but it could be longer,” Sykes replied. “It all depends on how far we have to detour around the heaviest of the Chinese radar coverage.”
“And no in-flight movie, I suppose.”
The commando laughed. “At least the MMUs have been modified to include a relief tube.”
There wasn’t any need for Mercer to think about the dangers. He would go no matter what scheme the Pentagon savants had concocted to get him to Tisa. “Hey, Harry,” he called across the quiet bar. “You have to modify your rescue story. I’m not charging the damsel’s castle on a horse. I’m dropping on it from out of a dragon’s stomach.”
Harry didn’t miss a beat. “Just as long as you make the moat of the situation.”
DIEGO GARCIA, INDIAN OCEAN
A thousand miles south of the Indian subcontinent, the islands of the Chagos Archipelago were like a handful of emeralds tossed on the blue waves. Dense tropical jungle, sugar sand beaches and azure reefs gave the islands their beauty. The extraction of copra oil from coconuts once gave them a thriving economy. All that changed in the 1970s when the British established a military base on one of the islands, a seventeen-square-mile atoll called Diego Garcia. At the time, it was a Cold War outpost for monitoring Soviet ships plying the Indian Ocean.
Over the next twenty years the island was gradually expanded. At the same time, it was handed over to the United States. Today, only a handful of the three thousand military and civilian support staff on the atoll are British citizens.
Diego Garcia gained a measure of fame as a staging area during Operation Desert Storm for B-52 bombers pounding Iraqi positions in Kuwait. Upgrades to the facility allowed it to base B-1s and B-2s during the Afghanistan campaign and again in 2003 for the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Strapped in the observer’s seat behind the pilot of the C-17 Globemaster cargo jet, Mercer had a clear view as the giant aircraft descended from out of the clouds after twenty hours of flight. The atoll was shaped like a squashed circle, an open ring of coral and sand that bulged on one side. It was there that an air base had been hacked from the jungle. As the plane dropped farther, he could see the long runway paralleling the beach and acres upon acres of parking ramps. He counted two dozen aircraft before giving up. Behind the landing strip was a village of prefabricated buildings constructed for those posted at this isolated location. Farther on was Camp Justice, a facility built in the wake of the September 11 attacks that housed military personnel involved in the global war on terror. Beyond the island nothing but ocean stretched to the horizon.
“We call it the dirt aircraft carrier,” the pilot called over the intercom, her voice filled with a Texas drawl. “Folks based here call it Gilligan’s Isle with guns.”
“Ever been here before?” Mercer asked Sykes, seated next to him in the second observer’s seat.
“Couple of times. Damn! That was a secret. Remind me I have to kill you later.”
The pilot eased back on the quad throttle controls and activated the thrust vectoring system that allowed the two-hundred-eighty-ton aircraft to land in less than three thousand feet no matter how large the load she carried. The air was thick and humid and the four engines labored.
Thundering over the runway threshold, the Globemaster floated on ground effects for a few hundred feet before settling on its multiple landing trucks. Without concern for passenger safety beyond getting them to their destination alive, the air force major slammed home the thrust reversers and Mercer pitched against his harness.
Almost immediately the plane slowed to taxi speed and swung off the 11,800-foot runway.
Now that they were on the ground, Mercer saw that the planes he’d noticed during their descent were B-52s, the venerable strategic bomber whose crews were generally younger than the aircraft they flew. At the end of the parking ramp were four futuristic buildings that looked like flattened domes. These round structures measured two hundred fifty feet wide and were almost six stories tall. The C-17 taxied to a spot in front of the last building and the pilot cut the engines. After being assailed by the whine of the turbojets for so long, the silence was disconcerting.
Mercer peered through the windscreen. The building was a hangar with open clamshell doors. Tropical light flooded the interior and yet the aircraft in the center of the cavernous space seemed to absorb it all. Although he’d seen the same plane the day before at Area 51, seeing it deployed and knowing what they would be attempting soon sent the first pangs of fear into his gut. Mercer’s fists clenched and he had to consciously work to get them to relax. Sykes noticed but said nothing.
Officially designated Spirit, the bat-winged B-2 had been dubbed the stealth bomber by the media. The aircraft in the hangar was part of the 509th Bomb Wing out of Whiteman AFB, Missouri. She was number 82-1065, a last-generation block 30 with every conceivable upgrade the builders at Northrop and the air force could devise. With an unlimited range due to her in-flight refueling capability, the stealth was the ultimate weapon of the U.S. doctrine of force projection. It could carry a variety of payloads in her rotary launchers, everything from thirty-six cluster bombs with their hundreds of individual bomblets to eight five-thousand-pound GBU-37 “bunker busters” to sixteen B83 multimegaton thermonuclear bombs capable of leveling entire cities.
For the past several months this particular B-2 had been stationed at Area 51, the linchpin to the development of the MMU-22 — what Sykes’s troops affectionately called the monkey bomb.
The concept for this secret weapon came from the military’s perceived need to covertly insert a commando team inside an area protected by heavy air defenses. Up until the development of the MMU-22 the only options were for troops to land beyond the radar umbrella and slog in on foot or risk a HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) parachute jump off the back ramp of a C-130. However, the Hercules cargo plane was as stealthy as a zeppelin and not much faster. Something better was needed, a covert way to get Special Operations soldiers to where they needed to be.
In the late 1990s, a British defense contractor was working on the development of pods that could be mounted under the wings of the Harrier jump jet. These man-sized capsules were designed for the rapid evacuation of wounded soldiers from deep behind enemy lines. Someone at the Pentagon expanded on the idea and wondered if it was possible to infiltrate troops the same way, but using a stealth platform such as the B-2 or F-117 Nighthawk fighter/bomber. From that abstraction grew the MMU-22.