“No sweat. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” Bird Dog locked the canopy down and turned to taxi.
So, he wasn’t the only one who realized what Shaughnessy was facing, was he? Even her own former peers realized it. Hell, knowing where she came from, maybe that made her a little desperate to succeed. Maybe she tried too hard, felt like she had something to prove.
But she was a hot stick. Did she know that? Did she know how really good she was? Good enough not to have anything to prove to anybody. Not even to me.
Maybe she didn’t know that. He considered the possibility as he kept up his scan of the deck and followed the plane captain’s motions to taxi forward. Shaughnessy fell in behind him and her own plane captain held her back and waited for Bird Dog.
Good thinking. Maybe between the plane captains and her RIO, they could keep her from screwing up.
The shuttle locked on and the Tomcat jolted slightly. He watched the plane captain and the catapult officer, cycled his stick on signal, saluted, and braced for launch. Seconds later, he was airborne.
Once clear of the ship, Bird Dog circled around to the marshal point and waited for Shaughnessy. One way or another, along with killing his share of MiGs, he was going to bring her back alive.
FOURTEEN
Under any other circumstances, Lieutenant Bruno Parto would have considered this a tropical paradise. Towering palms swayed gently in the light breeze, and the foliage was dense with a wide range of exotic flowers. Everywhere he looked it was green, the colors running the gamut from the pale yellow shades to dark, almost black greens. Hibiscus blossomed seemingly at random, deep red and yellow splashes against the green canopy.
This far up the mountain, there were few sounds of civilization. No trucks, no internal combustion engines. No aircraft. Instead, the air teemed with shrieks and raucous cries of birds as they went about their daily tasks.
Yes, paradise. Except for the area immediately in front of him.
Someone had been brutal about clearing the area, as well as quite thorough. A cleared path slashed through the forest, leading down to the main road he’d observed from the air. Up here, the road widened into a clearing forty feet in diameter. Within the cleared area, everything was trampled to the ground. Ugly stumps seeping sap poked up, raw and wounded. The debris was tossed around the edges of the circle, already turning brown and melting down to join the compost on the tropical floor. Parked in the center was the rocket launcher, its rails extending up from the bed, a missile already in place.
Parto ran his hand over the ground, letting the rich loam sift through his fingers. Even the most brutal treatment by men could not permanently stop nature. Already, only a week after the area had been cleared, the jungle was trying to reclaim its own. Small sprouts of green poked up through the debris, and twigs were visible in the center of the tree trunks. Within another week, the ground would not be visible as foliage started to sprout, and in perhaps as little as three months he would never have been able to tell it had been cleared.
But, for now, it was an ugly scar on the land, easily visible from the air, although a bit more difficult to find on the ground. The dense foliage screened it until you were almost on top of it.
It was the smells that first gave away the location even before he had visual contact on it. The scent of people, cooked meat and tobacco, sweat, and the oily, noxious odor of machinery. He motioned to the members of the squad, and they dispersed silently around him. They advanced slowly, each with his own assignment, knowing that time was running short.
The previous three sites had been easily taken down. The SEALs had approached like Ninjas, undetected, and during the night had silently and finally eliminated the soldiers asleep in their trucks. After everyone was dead, Parto himself had run through the simple sequence of input commands on the attached fire control panel, canceling all preprogrammed launch instructions. As a final precautionary measure, they carefully detached the warhead sitting on the bed of the truck and rolled it off onto the ground. It would be impossible to remount on the launcher, and other teams would be along later to dispose of it.
But they had run out of darkness before they had run out of trucks, and the result was that they were making their approach on this one in the afternoon, already worn out after a night of operations.
Parto could smell something cooking, as well as coffee, and he swore silently. He would have preferred to catch them just as they stumbled out of their beds, when they were still caught in the no man’s land between sleep and alertness.
But you played the cards you were dealt, and Parto was not one to demand a recount.
Just as he was about to give the command over his whisper-mike, the technicians scrambled over the missile. They began raising the launch arms, putting it at the angle necessary to launch through a narrow hole in the canopy overhead.
As the launch arms rotated upward, the mounting platform under them complained. A good coat of grease would have prevented the metal-on-metal grinding, but Parto knew how hard it was to maintain equipment in the warm salty air. As the missile launch rails reached the angle of approximately twenty degrees above vertical, something snapped. The entire assembly jolted hard to the left.
“Not yet,” Parto whispered. He waited. There was a sharp crack, and then a seam near the tip of the missile opened. From it gouted a burst of white vapor, a fog that wafted in the gentle breeze toward the depths of the jungle.
The men around the truck panicked. Some grabbed gas masks, others fled wildly into the jungle. With cold dread in his stomach, Parto knew what the warhead was.
“Fall back,” he ordered, moving himself away from the site. “Get as far away from here as fast you can — it’s a chemical warhead, and it’s leaking. Head down slope, into the wind — we’ll form up at Charlie point.”
His men needed no urging. He heard them moving out, sacrificing stealth for speed. If they didn’t escape the deadly cloud heading for them, there would be no second chance of this mission.
Which nerve agent? It didn’t matter. Not if he didn’t get out of range fast enough. He had the standard antidotes in self-injecting vials in his pocket, atropine and a few others, but they weren’t effective against everything. Some nerve agents didn’t even need to be inhaled. The slightest touch of their vapor on skin would be immediately deadly.
Was he clear of it? Did he feel muscle tremors starting now? No — he was imagining things. It was the normal, comfortable feel of adrenaline pumping through his body as he put out maximum physical effort.
He was the second man to arrive at the muster point, but the others weren’t far behind him. There was something peculiarly terrifying about chemical and biological weapons. For all the SEALs’ strength, for all their physical prowess and weapons, they had no sure counter to this enemy. What they could not see, what they could not touch, they could not fight. And that was a very odd sensation for each one of them.
“What now?” one asked. Despite the hard run, Parto was breathing normally.
“The last thing I heard before all hell broke loose was a launch order. They’re planning on letting them rip sometime in the next hour. Every site still around is raising launchers, setting in coordinates, and preparing to fire. If we are going to stop them, we have to do it now.”