The Chinook would broadcast a signal when it was ten seconds from the LZ. Anything before that was trouble. Smith made sure his radio was set, then quickly checked his GPS page, double-checking to make sure his navigational gear was functioning properly. The INS would conjure a diamond in his HUD to show the target area when he rolled in; he wanted to make sure it would be accurate if he had to roll in with the dumb bombs in a hurry.
His heart beat like a snare drum. He was swimming in sweat. He jerked his head back and forth, practically screwing it out of its socket, checking for other fighters, for missiles that had somehow managed to defy or trick his gear.
Wasn’t going to happen. But knowing that didn’t relax him, and certainly didn’t stop the sweat or the drumbeat.
He’d felt this way in the Gulf, though not on his first mission. His first mission—the first three or four, really—had been tremendous blurs. He was so consumed with the minutiae, the tankings, the radio calls, simply checking six, that he hadn’t had a chance to get nervous.
Mack had also lost about ten pounds in three days, so obviously he’d been sweating a little.
His first kill came on the first patrol he flew, a fluke.
Not a fluke. A product of a zillion hours of training. It was a push-button, beyond-visual-range kill with a Sparrow radar missile. He’d ID’d, locked, and launched in the space of maybe three seconds.
Skill. That was definitely how he nailed splash two—though the F-15’s tape had screwed up, depriving him of credit.
He wasn’t getting a shoot-down tonight. The Somalians didn’t have an air force and the nearest Iranians were well over two hundred miles away. And besides, he was driving an F-16 configured for ground-pounding.
“Bad Boys to Poison Leader, we are one-zero, repeat, one-zero. All calm.”
Before Smith could acknowledge, his RWR began bleating and an icon appeared in the middle of his receiver scope. An instant later, his wing mate yelled a warning over the short-range radio circuit.
“SA-2 battery up! And two more. Shit. There’s four batteries there, not two. Sixes! SA-6’s! Shit-fuck! Where did those bastards come from?”
GUNNY HAD RUN TWENTY FEET FROM THE REAR DOOR of the Chinook when the flare ignited overhead. He began cursing, immediately understanding what had happened.
“Team One, Team One!” he shouted, pushing his old legs hard as he ran forward. “Listen up! The defenses are on the south end of the field. They moved everything beyond the ditches. Come on, come on—everybody move it! Let’s go!”
As he ran forward, Melfi caught sight of the first muzzle flash from the enemy lines: a streak of red that flared oblong in the black smear. The ground shook, but the explosion was at least a half mile away from the LZ. The Somalians had zeroed their weapons in on the highway, obviously expecting the attack would be there. They had fired the flare as well.
“They don’t know where we are!” shouted Gunny to his men. “Come on, come on, they can’t see us. Let’s go. We got about ten seconds to get across their ditch. Mine team! Mines! Come the fuck on! Blow the field so we can advance. Come on!”
The different elements of his assault team began fanning out, remembering the instructions for this contingency. They were sluggish, weighed down by their equipment and hampered by the dark.
Or maybe it just seemed to Gunny like they were moving in slow motion. The two buildings where they’d expected resistance lay twenty feet ahead, across a large ditch lined with antitank obstacles. The buildings were quiet.
Which didn’t mean they were empty, of course.
The missile launchers had apparently been moved closer to the water, nearly four hundred yards further south of the spot briefed. Small-arms fire was coming from that direction. The finicky light from the Somalian flare showed pointed shadows around the slight rise there, but they were too far away to see anything, let alone attack it.
There was a thud, then a series of thuds.
Nothing.
No mines.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” shouted Gunny. “They moved everything to Purple site.”
“Incoming!” yelled someone ahead. “Tank!”
Gunny threw himself to the ground. A large-caliber shell, possibly from an M47, splashed through the trees at the right. The sergeant pushed himself back to his knees, and for the first time realized all hell was breaking loose at the north end of the site, where Captain Gordon and his team had gone.
“Get the SPG on that tank,” yelled Gunny. “Corn! Corn!” he added, calling for the radio specialist. “Where the hell are the F-16’s?”
As if to answer, a tongue of fire lit from behind the Somalian lines and two huge fists leaped from the earth.
“TWO LAUNCHES, ELEVEN O’CLOCK!” SHOUTED SMITH AS he saw the missiles flare off their launchers. His RWR skipped out warning bleats as he jinked hard and kicked out tinsel, metal chaff designed to fool the radar of the acquiring missile.
In some respects, the Somalians had done them a favor by turning on their radars and firing the missiles. Powering up his HARM missiles, the pilot of Poison Two calmly dotted the offending radar van on his threat scope and released the antiradar missiles. With the targeting information downloaded into their miniature onboard computers, the radiation-seeking missiles were in can’t-miss mode—even if the radars were to turn themselves off, the missiles would fly directly to the target points and obliterate the gear.
But that didn’t account for the surface-to-air missiles that had been fired, or pure bad luck. The SA-2’s were equipped with terminal guidance devices that allowed them to home in on an enemy even if their ground units were wiped out. Worse, as far as Knife was concerned, were the SA-6’s—nasty medium-range missiles that weren’t supposed to be here, but were now sending his warning gear into a high-pitched shriek.
And the SA-3. Not to mention triple-A, which erupted with a red cloud to the northeast.
Knife’s head swirled in a tempest of colors and sweat. The warning receiver was still bleating. He pulled the Fighting Falcon over, yanking the F-16 nearly backward in the air, altitude dropping abruptly as he fired off more chaff.
Pulling back on the sidestick at fifteen thousand feet, he found the target area in his windshield. Someone had even fired a flare to show him where everything was.
Thoughtful.
Knife forgot about the SAMs and the antiair and the RWR as he saw the muzzle flash of an ancient M47 tank foam red about three o’clock in his screen. The tank was his primary target if the ground team ran into trouble.
Which obviously it had.
“Poison One, targeting tank,” he said. His pipper slid over the dark shadow of the turret before he realized he hadn’t had any communication from the ground team at all since the helo had called with their time-to-landing.
It was too late to worry about that now. Red fingers jabbed out toward his eyes; he ignored the flak and pushed the trigger on his stick, pickling two five-hundred-pound bombs into the tank. As he started to pull out he saw another ground missile launch; he nudged his stick to the right and called the launch, at the same time riding forward to dump iron on the launcher. If Poison Two acknowledged, its broadcast was lost in the blur of gravity and the roar of his F-16A’s GE F-110 turbofan as he pickled, then jerked hard to get away from the new missiles.
THEY HAD JUST TARGETED THE TANK WHEN A LOUD whistle sounded above them. Before Gunny could shield his eyes, the night flashed white. The tank erupted in a two-fisted swirl of fire, dirt, and metal sailing in every direction.
“About fucking time,” growled Melfi, picking himself up. “Forward, forward! Tank’s history. Go, girls!”
One of his men began screaming on his right. Gunny ran up and found Lance Corporal Gaston curled over a large splash of tangled uniform, half his side blown open by bomb fragments. The medic reached him in the next second; Gunny saw him wince and realized Gaston wasn’t going to make it. He straightened, saw that half the kid’s arm was lying on the ground.