“Losing command link!” warned the computer.
“Jen, I thought you said we increased our control distance.” Zen throttled back. The signal-indicator bar slowly began to climb. “I’m having trouble at seven miles now.”
“I’m not sure what the problem is,” she yelled, working over the control. “We should be fat.”
“Yeah, Raven, can you bring our distance parameter on the U/MFs to within five miles?”
“Affirmative,” said Cheshire. “We’re dropping to ten thousand feet, staying on your programmed flight path. Cascade is trying to hail us. What should I tell them?”
“The truth – we’re on a wild-goose chase.”
Jeff started Hawk Two on a slow orbit around the base perimeter. Hawk One, meanwhile, was approaching the abandoned railroad warehouse. He toggled the view, saw nothing, went back to Two.
This sure did look like a wild-goose chase. Dust blew across the military base. Place looked like it hadn’t been occupied since World War Two. He scanned for a radar dish, saw nothing.
Hawk Two’s indicated airspeed dropped past two hundred knots, still falling. Zen walked over the gun emplacements. Damn things looked like they were rusted. Good trick in the desert.
Probably left by the Germans. Rommel had been out here, right?
He told the computer to take Hawk Two back to trail, and flipped back into Hawk One just as it closed to within two miles of the old railroad depot. He slipped down the throttle. Raven was five miles away, closing fast.
The terminal building’s roof was missing, but the warehouses looked intact as he approached. One of the smaller houses was just a collection of debris. There were two fairly large ones, maybe a hundred feet long apiece, at the edge of the track area. Between them there was a smaller, gray building, low-slung in the desert. It seemed to have collapsed or been swallowed by the terrain.
But was that a microwave dish next to it?
Zen pushed the throttle to close in. As he did, the roof of the nearest warehouse began to disintegrate. The thing seemed to be alive.
The radar-warning indicator flashed red. In the next instant, the sky perforated with explosions. Zen had walked into a minefield. A bank of antiaircraft artillery weapons had been hidden beneath the carefully camouflaged fake roofs of the warehouses.
“Whiplash, Target Two is hot. Hotter than hell! yelled Jeff, goosing the throttle.
They rode toward the volcano, watching the massed fury of two dozen antiaircraft erupting upward. Raven jammed the radars, but the gunners flailed anyway. Danny, hunched over the pilots on the Osprey flight deck, saw the small Flighthawk ducking and weaving in the sky ahead, spinning back and forth like a peregrine falcon eyeing a kill. Major Stockard was trying to keep the gunners’ attention focused on the miniature plane, not the rapidly approaching assault team.
“Ten seconds,” said the Osprey pilot. “Target building is dead ahead. I see a stairway down. Shit! I’ll get you as close as I can.”
“Okay! Okay!” Danny shouted. He spun back to his men, trying to hold down the bile and adrenaline. “We got stairs down to a bunker, I’m guessing.”
“Vehicles coming up out of a ramp near the warehouses!” yelled the copilot.
“Get us down! Get us down!” Danny insisted. He was wearing the com device, but he yelled anyway. The Osprey pitched and weaved, swirling in the air. A second volcano opened up just to their right, bullets hissing like team. The rear door began opening even though the Osprey was still ten feet off the ground. Power leaped out.
“TV time!” yelled Danny, jumping out with Liu.
“Take him out! Take him out! There’s a machine gun on the steps! Shit! Duck! Duck!” Powder screamed.
Gunny heard the rumble of the antiaircraft batteries above. The entire complex shuddered.
“About fucking time,” he said to the pilot on the metal chair next to him. “Hey, you got any more questions before we go?” he called to the disembodied voice that had been questioning them from unseen speakers.
In the next second, the complex went dark. One of the camera technicians screamed.
“Hit the deck!” shouted Gunny. He reached to pull Howland down, got nothing but air. He found the captain on the ground.
“What now?” said Howland.
“Find a Sommie and get his gun,” said the Marine, crawling toward the door.
Raven took out the first battery with a pair of JSOWs, even though they were nearly on top of it. Zen barely managed to get Hawk One away from the second bank of ZSUs as the roof of the warehouse opened and the flak dealers began peppering the air.
“Wing damage, Hawk Two,” warned the computer.
Zen could feel it. Hawk Two began to wobble, threatening to yaw out of control.
Time to eject.
Shit, he yelled at himself. I’m half a mile away.
The computer helped stabilize the plane, but the damage was severe, and went well beyond the wing. Zen opened the warning/status screen; he had multiple hits, pending systems failures in the control and engine sections. Power was dropping rapidly.
Destroy the Flighthawk?
Better to land if he could. Whiplash could take it with them, lashing it beneath the Osprey.
He cold always hit the self-destruct switch later.
Jeff did a quick check on Hawk One, just to make sure the computer had it under control; then he jumped back into Hawk Two. She was jerking up and down, wrestling with the air instead of gliding through it. he fought the wings level and aimed toward a nice flat piece of sand a quarter mile ahead. As gently as he could, he put her down on her belly, skidding and then spinning to a stop.
“We have the location marked,” Jennifer said.
“Yeah,” said Jeff.
He put himself into Hawk One, pulling the plane over him as the new image kicked into the top of his screen.
“JSTARS is sending reinforcements,” said Cheshire.
“You have to keep me close,” he told her, pushing the Flighthawk lower and back toward the flak.
Danny turned as a grenade whizzed from Liu’s launcher. There was a low, dull explosion and everything started moving in slow motion. He ran toward the building, ignoring the canvas-backed truck that had come out from the other side. There was a stairwell down; he grabbed the red metal pipe blocking off the side and swung himself down into the hole.
Powder had beaten him there. He was standing in front of the doorway inside a small alcove. He waved his right hand at Freah to stay back, then gripped his SAW at the handle. The door swung out toward them.
A set of metal steps led downward. Freah, leaping ahead of Talcom, took two at a time. A metal door at the bottom gave way as soon as he butted it with his machine gun; he stopped stooped and rolled in a concussion grenade.
If they’d had a chance to plan this, to work the whole thing out, they’d probably by going in with masks, smoking the bastards out.
But hell, if they’d a chance to plan the damn thing out, they wouldn’t be the ones doing the attack.
“I got ya, I got ya,” said Powder, taking a covering position as Danny plunged into the dark hall.
Nothing. No fire. nothing. He ran for all he was worth.
“Door!” he heard himself yell. Powder was on top of him, throwing him down and in the same instant punching the door with the machine gun, ducking, rolling.
Two men fell out behind the doorway.
Light up ahead.
“We’re taking fire up here,” said Liu over the com set.
“Hold your positions.”
“We are. Delta’s en route.”
“Room’s empty,” yelled Powder. Danny started moving down the hall. The boron-carbide vest gave him a dangerous sense of invulnerability – a foolish sense, since he knew that while the vest could stop point-blank machine gun fire, it covered less than fifty percent of his body.