The machine gun stopped firing with a jerk and a metallic snap. They’d run through the clip.
Salt’s brain was still processing the sound as his instincts took over, propelling him to his feet with a leap. He took a step, brought the rifle to his side, took another step and fired point-blank, the first burst catching the actual gunner, the second catching the man to his right, the third the man on the left.
Except that it didn’t. He’d run through the clip, leaving the third man unharmed.
Salt cursed his stupidity, cursed his shit luck, cursed the world. He ejected the cartridge and reached for another. But as his fingers fumbled the Iraqi drew a pistol, and before Salt could reload there was a tremendous boom in his ears, the sound of a massive bullet hitting home.
Hitting the Iraqi, not him. Captain Wong had run up behind Salt and now stood over him, a Desert Eagle smoking in his hand.
“Shit,” said Salt. “Shit.”
Wong said nothing, turning quickly and running to grab the Saddam impersonator from the ground a few feet away; it wasn’t clear if Wong had left him there or if the man had been trying to escape by crawling away. He dragged him over to the machine-gun position. He scanned the ground, then knelt next to it. By the time Salt got there he had disabled the weapon.
“They were out of ammunition,” the captain told him. “Sergeant Davis is this way.”
“Hey, uh, Captain — thanks. You saved my butt.”
Wong gave him a quizzical look, as if he didn’t understand or his hearing had once more gone on the fritz. But maybe that was just his way of saying “you’re welcome” — the Air Force captain was an odd duck.
“Sergeant Davis is this way,” said Wong, pushing the prisoner ahead.
They found Davis huddled over his leg, half-conscious. He’d been hit by three bullets, one of which had shattered his bone. Wong quickly bandaged the leg and gave Davis a hit from the morphine syringe. The D boy had been fortunate — the wounds had come from the submachine-gun, not the Dushka. The big machine-gun would have taken his limb right off.
“At least he got the bastard,” said Salt, who could see the body on the ground behind the nearby truck.
“Actually, I eliminated the soldier wielding the sub-machine gun,” said Wong.
“You know, Captain, you talk kind of funny.”
Again, Wong gave him a goggle-eyed stare. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
Salt started to laugh.
“I will never understand why everyone in the Gulf has such a bizarre sense of humor,” Wong told Salt. Then he turned to the Iraqi and asked him to carry Davis.
To Salt’s surprise, the Iraqi was actually able to get him over his shoulder.
They ran back across to the road to the spot where Davis had left the com gear. Wong immediately went to work on it, fingers flying over the controls like a mad typist finishing up the last bit of paperwork before a long weekend. Salt scanned northwards. The tank had been taken out by one of the planes. There were two vehicles to the east right at the foot of the hill, guarding the highway. They were maybe a half-mile from them. Salt couldn’t remember now whether they were there when all of this started — it seemed like eons ago.
“Strawman was an impostor,” Wong told Wolf when he succeeding in contacting the ABCCC craft. “We are proceeding to rendezvous site.”
The controller apparently said something the captain didn’t like; he frowned and said only, “understood,” before ending the transmission.
“Take the Satcom and go to the pickup site,” Wong told Salt. “The STAR pod will have been dropped by now.”
“You think Davis will make it?”
“If he’s placed in the harness,” Wong said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“My medical knowledge is limited,” said the captain. “Obviously he cannot survive here and must be evacuated.”
“Where are you going?”
“I am going to complete my assignment,” Wong told him. “If I am not there for the pickup, leave without me.”
“What? When?”
“The plane is on its way. You will recognize the spot from the photos we reviewed after takeoff; set up near the highest elevation and present yourself southwards. Quickly; you have no more than twenty minutes. Apparently the Iraqis are scrambling every force at their disposal into this area.”
“Shit. What about him?” Salt gestured to the Iraqi.
“He won’t give you trouble. Place him in the second set of harnesses. The Hercules will make two passes.”
“You trust me not to kill him?”
“Of course, Sergeant. You have your orders.”
“Yeah.” Salt frowned, then looked over at the Iraqi, who was bending forward under Davis’s weight. The man seemed to have lost the glaze in his eyes; maybe Wong had sobered him up. “You understand what I say, fuckhead?”
“He doesn’t speak English,” Wong said. “Simply point.”
Wong picked up Davis’s SAW and several cases of ammunition.
“Hey, Captain. Thanks,” Salt told him.
This time, Wong nodded and actually seemed to smile.
“All right you, move out,” Salt told the Iraqi, gesturing. “Go.”
Davis groaned as they started. Salt figured that was a good sign, and ignored the fresh explosions and gunfire in the distance.
CHAPTER 56
In 1943, a U.S. Army paratrooper stood under a set of extremely high poles as a Stinson light observation aircraft trundled overhead. The Stinson dipped slightly, then held steady; a hook off its fuselage caught the wire at the top of the poll and the paratrooper shot nearly straight up into the air. Attached to a modified parachute harness, the paratrooper was pulled along behind the plane at roughly a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour before being cranked inside the craft. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but when the paratrooper finally clawed his way in, he became the first American successfully scooped from the earth by an airplane.
Not counting the sheep that had been strangled in the earlier experiments.
After the war, Robert Fulton improved the ground-hook system considerably, stepping up from sheep to pigs for his trials. On August 12, 1958, Marine Staff Sergeant Levi Woods attached himself to a thin harness tethered to a helium balloon and waited as a Navy P2V Neptune approached on wavering wings. The plane snagged a line held by the balloon and the sergeant was airborne. The tug that propelled him upwards supposedly felt lighter than the pull of a parachute opening, though it should be noted that on being winched into the P2V the pigs tended to attack the crew.
Streamlining behind the patrol craft, Woods extended his arms and legs, literally flying as he was pulled toward the plane. When he reached the hold, he had successfully demonstrated the Fulton surface-to-air recovery (STAR) system, and proven once and for all that Marines are crazier than most normal human beings.
The Air Force adopted the STAR system for Spec Ops during Vietnam. Air Force personnel being somewhat less crazy than Marines, the system was not actually used in combat during the war. But it continued to be a favorite of Spec Op troops, or more accurately their commanders, who frowned on risking small and slow helicopters in hostile situations when much larger craft like lumbering transports could be sent instead.
By the time Saddam decided to push into Kuwait, improvements in the C-130 meant that a covert team could be picked up by an aircraft nearly impossible to track. Compared to earlier versions as well as other transports and helicopters, the MC-130 variants were sneaky fast, avoided snoopy radars, and could make quick and effective forays into enemy territory without needing a sixty-plane escort. In theory, the STAR system gave the U.S. an almost invincible covert retrieval capability.