The island was shaped like an upside-down L, with the observation post near the tip of the leg. The head of the letter had a rocky beach that could serve as a set-down point for the helos and Osprey once the atoll was secure.
“Hawk Leader to Whiplash One,” said Fentress over the common frequency. “Captain Freah, I’m ready when you are.”
“Roger that,” said Danny. He glanced at his watch, then back at the sitrep map in his smart helmet, which showed they were about twelve miles from the atoll. Fentress would start his pass when they hit five miles. “We’re just over three minutes from Alpha. We’ll keep you posted.”
“Hawk Leader.”
Fentress wasn’t Jeff Stockard and would never be, but he was definitely capable; Danny had no doubt he’d do this job well.
So if Danny left, would somebody else walk right in and pick up the slack?
Yeah.
“Team Two checking in,” said Powder, in charge of the second squad. “Hey, Cap, can we go for a swim when this is over?”
“Only if there’s a school of sharks nearby,” said Liu.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” said Powder.
“Hey, Cap, you ever have grilled shark?” asked Bison. “Serious food. You get a little lemon, maybe some herbs. Very nice.”
“I thought you only ate burgers and pizza,” said Danny.
“Burgers, pizza, and shark.”
They were eight miles from the atoll.
“All right. Sixty seconds, Hawk Leader,” said Danny.
“Copy that.”
Danny turned to look at his pilot, an Army officer who’d come over to Dreamland specifically for the Quick Bird program. Before that he’d flown with the special operations aviation group that worked with Special Forces, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). The captains gave each other a thumbs-up; Danny sat back, clicked his viewer into the Flighthawk feed, and curled his thumbs around his restraints.
“Alpha,” he told Fentress.
“Alpha acknowledged,” said Flighhawk pilot. And the show began. “Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends….”
All Danny saw at first was a blur of blue and white whipping across the screen. The blur settled into a hatched pattern of waves as the Flighthawk leveled off, then slowed. A brown bar appeared in the distance, growing into a cat stretched across a purple rug, morphing into the side of a mountain at the top of a black-blue desert. Light glinted like crystal arrows from the blue background. Then, the image seemed to snap, and now everything was in perfect focus. A small dock sat before him, a rubber speedboat tethered to one end; above it sat a green-yellow cottage, a shack really, made of palms — no panels designed to look like palms in the distance. Fishing poles, oddly oversized, sat in the water near the dock. There was a rock at the water’s edge.
No, not a rock. A housing for a radar.
“Infrared feed,” Danny told Fentress. The pilot must have anticipated him, for as the words left his mouth, the image flashed into a gray greenness, murky monotone as if the robot aircraft feeding if had dipped into the bottom of an algae-choked pond. It took nearly three seconds for the computer to artificially adjust its sensitivity, forming the blurs into an image. If froze frame, backed out twice — all obviously at Fentress’s command — then analyzed the picture, supplying white triangles that showed a total of five people on the islands: two near the docks, one in the hut, and two about twenty yards further north, possibly observing the water.
“We’re dancing,” said Danny. He fed the analyzed picture to the rest of his team, briefly summarizing the situation. The Osprey was tasked with neutralizing any resistance from the two men on the northern side of the atoll.
“Everyone hold your fire unless we’re fired on,” he reminded them. “You know the drill. Two — if they move toward the boat, sink it.”
“Aw, Cap,” said Powder. “Can’t we take it out for a spin first?”
“Hawk Leader to Whiplash One. You need another run?”
“Negative, Hawk Leader. Hold your orbit as planned. We’re going in.”
“Godspeed.”
The Quick Bird pilot threw everything he had into the helo’s turbine engines, flooing the gates with the remains of a thousand long-gone dinosaurs. The tail whipped around and the helicopter tilted hard, pulling two or three Gs as it swooped into an arc. Once pointed at his target, the pilot began to back off the throttle, and somehow managed to come at the island like a ballerina sliding across the stage.
The effect on his passengers, however, was more like what might be felt in the cab of a locomotive throwing on the brakes and reversing steam at a hundred miles an hour. Danny felt his boron vest pushing hard against his collarbone as the restraints took hold.
If felt damn good.
“We’re hot!” said the pilots as something red erupted on the left side of the island.
“Missiles in the air!” said Danny. He could see small pops of red near the dock. “Guns — fuckers! Let ’em have it!”
The mini-gun at the side of the Quick Birds’s cabin spit bullets toward the cottage. A burst from the ground, and the helo pirouetted to the side, flares popping as it whipped into a quick series of zigs and zags to avoid a shoulder-launched SAM. The missile sniffed one of the flares and shot through it, igniting above and behind the helicopter. The small scout shot downward in a rush; Danny threw his arm out in front of him as they hurtled toward the cottage area. The pilot slid the aircraft twenty feet from the ground, hurtling almost sideways over the rooftops. As they passed the cottages, Bison, sitting behind Danny, pointed his MP-5 out the open doorway and burned a magazine at one of the men on the ground. Flames burst from the cottage. Danny caught a glimpse of the man dropping his rifle and falling backward as the chopper spun away.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” screamed Danny, undoing his restraint to go down the rope.
Stoner grabbed the rope after Sergeant Liu disappeared. Even though he wore thick gloves, the friction burned his hands. He had taken the team’s smart helmet and carbon-boron best, but because the Whiplash issue seemed a bit bulky, had opted to use his own gloves. Obviously, a mistake, but it was too late to bitch about it now. He felt the dock under his boots and let go, collapsing into a well-balanced crouch.
Ten times hotter than he imagined, everything was exploding. In the back of his mind, he heard his boss’s boss, the Director of Operations himself, bawling him out for going ahead with only six guys in broad daylight.
Yet the atoll’s defenders throwing up all this lead and blowing up so much equipment — for surely that was what they were doing — argued that hitting them as soon as they could had been the right thing to do.
Should have hit it last night then.
Liu was at the head of the dock, onshore already. The boat was on Stoner’s right. He pulled his knife and went to it, slashed the two lines, then kicked it away. Something pushed him down onto the bobbing boards — it was the helicopter rocking back after firing a salvo of rockets. Thick cordite and smoke, and something like diesel fuel, choked his nose. A fireball erupted; the water churned with a stream of steady explosions. Now all he smelled was burning metal.
These bastards had SAMs and all sorts of weapons.
“Hey, forward, damn it!” yelled someone.
It was Powder, waving through the smoke on the beach. Stoner pushed himself to his knees, stumbling toward the land.
By the time Danny made it to the ground, the gunfire had already stopped. The defenders’ stores of ammunition and weapons continued to explode, and the cottage burned bright orange, flames towering well overhead.