Aussie, to the four SEALs’ amazement, had nodded off, his legs sticking out, his feet resting on his combat pack and almost touching one of the bright orange “glo” Air Force HIBUDs—“hi-buoyancy” drums — that had been lashed down below the equipment’s pallet.
“Can see he’s worried,” the loadmaster joshed before he made his way through the narrow space to inform the general that they were fifteen minutes from the carrier battle group McCain off the island of Ullŭng.
“Thanks, Sergeant,” acknowledged Freeman. “Would you ask the driver to put it through on-screen?”
“Yes, sir.”
As the flat screen came alive, they could see the Galaxy’s line of descent toward Ullŭng Island, 170 miles east-southeast of Kosong on the North Korean coast, the Kosong warehouse on the SATPIX — satellite pictures — being ten miles north of the DMZ. Whether or not the team would head the 92 miles in to the South Korean coast then head up along the coast, passing over the DMZ, or head instead directly to Kosong would be something Freeman would decide after — or rather, if—the deplaning of personnel and equipment succeeded, and after he received updated real-time intel. The latter could be provided only by the Signals Exploitation Space, the ultrasecret “blue tile” room with its “Big Blue” screen located deep in the inner sanctums of the McCain, as the carrier steamed at reduced speed off Ullŭng, protected by its battle group’s screen of cruisers, destroyers, and two nuclear attack submarines.
The screen’s data-block read, “TD2”—time to drop zone—“14 minutes.”
“With this headwind that’s hitting us now,” said Salvini, “I’d say it’ll be more like twenty minutes.”
“Want to bet on it?” joshed Freeman.
“Bet?” It was Lewis, suddenly awake and sitting up. “Did I hear bet?”
Freeman smiled knowingly at Brady, who was sitting immediately to the general’s right. “Aussie’d bet on the sun not coming up. Next to watching that so-called football game down under, ‘Australian Rules’—an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one — Aussies are addicted to beer and gambling.”
“Yeah,” Salvini called out above the sustained roar of the Galaxy’s turbofans. “An Aussie gets wounded, they transfuse him with Foster’s Lager.”
“Foster’s, my ass!” Aussie corrected him, sitting up and assuming the air of an outraged connoisseur. “I only drink Castlemaine. That’s Castlemaine Four X to you, Mr. Salvini.” Aussie turned to look along the bench to the tall African-American. “What’s the bet, Shorty?”
“Data-block up there,” explained Brady, indicating the screen, “is telling us it’s fourteen — no, thirteen — minutes to the drop zone. Sal thinks it’ll be longer.”
“Ten minutes,” came the pilot’s warning, the headwind having now dissipated.
“Damn!” said Aussie. “I could have made some money.”
The red light was still on but already the Galaxy’s ramp yawn was under way, the great plane’s huge door lowering like the jaw of some airborne leviathan, the whine and howl of its hydraulic pressure lines mixing with the rush of cold air invading the huge, warm cave of the plane’s interior.
Far below, they could see a vast, cobalt-blue sea, wrinkled and flecked here and there by the short-lived whiteness of breaking waves. The loadmaster and another crew member released the tension lines. The crated equipment, which included the team’s eight individual eighty-pound combat packs, Freeman not needing one insofar as he’d been ordered by the President to stay at mission control, slid noisily but evenly down over the rows of precisely aligned rollers.
The drogue chute pack attached to the palletized load followed it out into the void in a long taper of bundled lines, the sudden unraveling and reefing of the three enormous nylon conical-ribbon drogue chutes, each 83.5 feet in diameter, sounding like a thousand tents struck by a banshee wind. The noise was so alarming that for several moments, before the tripetal blossoming of the drogues’ dazzling white canopies a half mile aft of the plane, Johnny Lee instinctively stepped back — onto Eddie Mervyn’s combat boots. Mervyn’s obscenity was unheard by his diving buddy, given the combined maelstrom of unraveling lines, slipstream, engine noise, and the racket created by the hundreds of well-oiled floor rollers still spinning, despite their load having exited, descending toward the sea. It was a sea that, given the centuries-old conflict between the two countries, was claimed by both Korea, as the East Sea, and by the inheritors of Nippon, as the Sea of Japan, even before Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and its brutal domination of the country until 1945.
“Go!” shouted the Air Force sergeant. The team stepped into space, Freeman and his first four from the ramp’s starboard side, Aussie and the remaining three from the port side, the roaring wind so cold, so fast, it took their breath away, heart rates increasing, the dot of Ullŭng Island coming up at them fast.
Then each man felt the sudden jerk, his body rising as his Mach III Alpha — the high-glide tactical parachute — took over. With the best glide-rate-to-descent ratio of any Special Forces chutes in the world and its eighteen ripple-arc panels and independently flexed left/right control cords, it allowed its jumper unprecedented maneuverability, despite each commando’s heavy combat pack.
The black basalt pinnacles of Ullŭng Island appeared momentarily to be sliding uphill, an optical illusion caused by the nine men’s alpha chutes inclining slightly against the horizontal during a short, sharp buffeting by updrafts. Beyond the island, Freeman and his men now saw the whitish gray slivers of the McCain’s 7th Fleet battle group, the carrier battle group out of COMPAC’s — Commander Pacific’s — base in Yokosuka, Japan. McCain was steaming, as expected, in the middle of her protective screen. Not surprisingly, the two attack subs, presumably fore and aft, were nowhere in sight.
Within McCain’s screen of twelve vessels, which included four destroyers, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, a replenishment vessel, and the two nuclear attack submarines, was the Wasp-class helo carrier transport USS Yorktown, carrying 2,100 Marines of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of Colonel Jack Tibbet. Marines high and low were making bets as to whether the nine parachutists would be able to land on the “boat,” as the big aircraft carrier McCain was known to her six thousand personnel, the other ships’ sole reason for being in the battle group to protect Captain Crowley’s flat-top.
“What d’you think, sir?” Executive Officer John Cuso asked Crowley, who, as captain of the McCain, was also admiral of the fleet.
The diminutive Crowley, who’d stepped down from the bridge and made his way along the walkway known as “Vultures’ Row,” from where he had a high and open-aired view down onto the four and a half acres of flight deck, held Cuso’s question in abeyance. He watched his orange-vested swimmers drop like black stones from McCain’s CM-53E, the Super Sea Stallion’s rotors’ slap clearly audible for a change, now that the carrier’s air arm’s ops had been suspended, its eighty-two aircraft chained down to allow as much space as possible for the helicopter’s “triple P”—pick up personnel and pallet — retrieval crew to operate. This was a rare event in normal times, but less so in the world war against terrorism wherein U.S. supplies and combatants had to have RO/RO — roll-on, roll-off — capability across ever-shifting fronts, some of which existed one day and were gone the next.