The solar panel could provide electricity for days.
“So where’d they all come from?”
“Seventy-fifth Rangers. All of them did a tour as instructors at the Sniper School. Two of them could have been Olympians. The Army didn’t want their faces plastered on posters, so they were ordered to take a pass. Burgey could split a dime at a hundred meters. A dime held between your fingers — sideways.”
“Shit.”
“No one’s married. Only two have any living parents. No distractions.”
“Any vices?”
“Yeah.” Furlong laughed at the question. “They all have bikes.”
“Motorcycles?”
“Harleys. Don’t get them started on the difference between a panhandle and a flathead. Frix has a V-Rod. Burgey’s into Sportsters. It’s the one thing that will get ’em spun up.”
Moncrief’s own Harley had been a Super Glide until he put it through a fence on a wet night. He understood the magic of a Harley. After running on special ops in combat for three or four months, peacetime could drive a man crazy. One minute you’re setting an ambush in some mountain valley, ripping apart killers with your M4, and then forty-eight hours later you’re ordering a Big Mac in small-town North Carolina. The transitions were abrupt and highly disjunctive. Adrenaline jolts stateside were always at a premium.
“We are doing a HAHO in from about twenty-five thousand. You’ve done high-altitude jumps before?”
“A few. I went to the MFF School at Bragg and Yuma.”
The free fall school was the only one of its kind in the military.
“Damn, Gunny, you’ve been around.” Furlong stopped for a second. He looked out the portal between his seat and Moncrief. Several seconds passed before he spoke. “My old man was a Marine. He fought in Grenada.”
Moncrief let out a loud laugh, which almost caused him to gag.
“What’s the problem, Gunny?” Furlong wasn’t amused.
“My father was a Ranger. He fought on hill two-oh-five.”
“In the Korean War?”
“Yeah.” Moncrief looked away. “You know the difference between us, Captain? If someone asked me what I was, I would say a Marine. If they asked you, you would say a Ranger. But we’d both die to protect our teams. In that regard, not much difference at all.”
Furlong nodded. It was a concept that most of the three hundred million people that called themselves Americans would not fully understand. Yet it kept the wolf away from the door.
“What about your man? Parker? Why are you here?”
“Parker. He can shoot like Burgey. Language savant. Marathon runner.” Moncrief paused. “Aw, hell. That doesn’t really describe him… who he is.” He paused again. “The reason I’m here is he asked me to help, and…” Moncrief shrugged. “He saved my life.”
“In country?”
Moncrief nodded. “Iraq. Recon went wrong. I took some grenade shrapnel in the gut. Parker taped me up and got me out.”
“Duct tape?”
“Yup. How in the hell did you know? Good old, cheap-ass duct tape.” In all of the years that had passed, Moncrief never got the image out of his head: looking down at the duct tape holding his gut in, blood everywhere.
Just a nick, Parker had said, smiling at him.
Moncrief had seen the smile and for some reason simply stopped worrying.
“Tonight’s jump is gonna be brutal. You know that, right?” Furlong brought Moncrief back to the moment.
“How bad’s bad?”
“We’re dropping in on the east side of the Himalayas. The wind currents will be rough.”
“What altitude we pulling the chutes?”
“Fifteen thousand. The aircraft is going to report an engine failure on number four in about fifteen minutes. He will swing out to the east, wandering over Pakistan, so that he can turn back toward Afghanistan.”
“Then the HAHO?”
Furlong nodded.
A HAHO was high-altitude, high-opening jump. A HAHO’s greatest risk was the jumper being seen. But it also had benefits: The jumper could use the ram air wing of the parachute to act like a glider and carry him quietly for miles. If the winds were played right, the team could jump many miles away from their landing zone. The high opening also allowed the pop-pop sound of the deploying parachute to occur well above and far away from the enemy’s hearing. The drop at night, in cloud cover, gave them the protection of not being seen, but it exposed them to the crosscurrents of high winds for a much longer time.
“It’s our best shot,” said Furlong, “particularly with the FireFly.”
“That’s what you use to get the gear in?”
Marine special ops had used something like a FireFly. A parachute with a box of supplies, radios, some LFP40 sling packs, and most important, extra ammo, would fly by itself, remotely guided in by the lead parachutists. The sling packs were the portable solar panels that would provide them the juice to power their radios. The FireFly lightened the load that the jumpers would have to carry and, ideally, it would land in the right place.
“Yeah. And I’ll lead you in. All you have to do is follow the red bouncing ball.”
By way of explanation, Furlong picked up one of the helmets.
“Heads-up display. Something else from DARPA. A computer integrated with GPS, the winds, everything.”
“How do you make sure the altimeter’s right?”
“We’ll drop a reader that will relay the true barometric readings and its altitude back to my headset.”
“Damn, Skip, you might have a future in this business.”
Furlong smiled. “Skip, eh?”
“In the Marines that’s what we call our captains. It’s a compliment.” Moncrief grinned. “And you can call me Gunny Ndee.”
“Ndee? What’s that, some nom de guerre?”
“Exactly.”
“All right. We go on pure oxygen in fifteen minutes. We’ll breathe it until the jump, when we switch onto our own tanks.”
“Good, got it. I have to go up to the top deck and see if I can make a call or two. I want to check in with Scott about my other man.”
The C-17’s communications deck was outfitted for special operations. A telephone call could be made to anywhere in the world. Moncrief’s first call, to Scott, went unanswered. It rang, and rang, and then switched over to a voice mail with no special message.
Moncrief looked at his own cell phone for the second number.
It only rang once.
“Hello?” Moncrief was making one final call to his source.
“Is that you, Gunny? I thought you’d be calling sooner.” The voice sounded as if he was alone.
“You know why I’m calling?”
“Yes. Is this a secure line?”
Moncrief looked down at the communications-deck airman he was standing over.
“Is this secure?” he whispered to the young airman.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, we’re secure on my end.”
The voice paused.
“Call me back at 023 336 718 3446. Do I need to repeat it?”
“No, got it.” Moncrief wrote the numbers down on the airman’s pad across a form that looked like a communications logbook. He could see the airman’s frown. The kid’s writing was near perfect, with times and dates and numbers in each separate box.
He should be an airman, Moncrief thought, as he looked at the perfect handwriting.
“Don’t worry. This is important. Get me that number on a secure net,” Moncrief barked at the communications airman.
The airman was good at his job. The Globemaster was specially outfitted with a separate communications desk. Through his headset, the gunny heard the phone ring, and again, it only rang once. The voice didn’t waste any time on the small talk.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told, but your man is still alive.”