The first slide on the screen looked like someone had splattered pink paint on a pale blue wall.
"This is the Dahlak Archipelago," Harris intoned. "Bunch of islands east of Eritrea in the Red Sea. Intel had it that the Al-Qinamah heavy weapons are being transshipped through here. They get shipped out of Iran or North Korea or wherever, come into the Red Sea, and get landed here. Then they shuffle 'em onto small boats and bring 'em ashore on the mainland."
"Lot of islands there," Hal said. "I lost track counting at two dozen."
"They tell us that there's a hundred twenty-four of 'em," Harris said. "Trouble is, we don't know where the hell they're bringing the stuff in."
"And so you send a recon flight out there to find out," Troy suggested.
"Clever boy, Loensch." Jenna laughed sarcastically.
"Obviously it's better that nobody with radar sees you coming," Harris said, ignoring her taunting banter. "You'll fly low, so you'll need to carry extra fuel. Fly east, cross over the coast and turn south across the Red Sea at two hundred feet or less. You'll be sucking whitecaps as you go."
"Why not head due east? It's a lot shorter," Hal suggested, pointing at the screen. Harris had a map of the entire region up now. The route that Harris had described took a roundabout track to the target.
"Because," Harris said in an exasperated tone. "The shortest distance between two places takes you right over the Eritrean population centers… practically over their capital… I do not think you clowns want to be tangling with the Eritrean Air Force again….. Am I right?"
"Right," Hal agreed. "I guess we don't want any more international incidents."
"Guess not," Jenna agreed, glancing at Troy with a wry grin.
It was the kind of glance that instinctively elicits a wink when you see it, but remembering what he'd seen in the hallway before the briefing, Troy simply stared back, his expression unchanged, then glanced back at the screen.
The flight out of Sudanese airspace was uneventful, but the wavetop run over the Red Sea was challenging. The guidebooks all tell you that the daytime weather over this placid lake between two deserts is clear and sunny ninety-nine percent of the time, but pilots know that the same unsettled air at low altitude that kicks up killer sandstorms over land can also kick up killer turbulence over the water. At two hundred feet, it was a white-knuckle ride as they dodged both downdrafts and the masts of supertankers bound for the Suez Canal.
At last the khaki-colored lumps of the Dahlak islands loomed ahead.
"Dropping tanks," Hal said.
"Tanks," Troy confirmed, feeling the F-16 bob upward as his auxiliary fuel tanks tumbled into the Red Sea. Without them, the aircraft would be lighter and somewhat easier to manage, but each plane was still encumbered with more than the usual payload of recon gear.
"Falcon Three, breaking right," Troy said. Each member of the team had a particular flight path and a particular set of islands to survey.
"Falcon Two, left," Jenna confirmed.
"Falcon One, cameras on," added Hal.
"Cameras on," Troy and Jenna said, almost in unison.
The recon payload that each F-16 carried included not just camera pods, but their AN/APY-77 and AN/ ASD-83 pods, as well as AN/AKR-13 telemetry receivers and other equipment. Because each member of Falcon Force was surveying a separate path, there were no HARMs today. They each carried recon gear.
Troy glimpsed a few small boats — they came and went in a split second — and wondered if any of them were carrying weapons or contraband.
As usual, everything on the ground flashed by too quickly for any of the pilots to make out anything useful.
It was up to the interpreters who plowed through the data the pilots were collecting.
"Dammit," the other pilots heard Jenna say.
"Falcon Two, whazzup?" Hal asked, more than a trace of concern in his voice.
"Damned AKR-13 went FUBAR on me just as I came over Dhuladhiya," Jenna said.
The island of Dhuladhiya was one of the key islands on her recon track, and a screwed-up telemetry receiver meant incomplete coverage.
"Falcon Three breaking left," Troy said. "I'm only about ten clicks off. I can be there in half a minute." "What about your track?" Jenna asked.
"I can bounce over and bounce back," Troy said. "Thanks," Jenna said.
"General Harris thanks you," Hal added.
Troy banked hard, heading north toward Dhuladhiya.
This will make them feel special, he thought to himself, to get buzzed by two American jets from two directions in one day.
The large island lay like all the others, flat and dust-colored, a few boats clustered around an inlet on one side.
By the time Troy had zigged back to the recon track assigned to him, Falcon One and Falcon Two were far ahead, no longer visible to him, exiting Dahlak airspace and turning for home.
"Falcon Three, we're gonna orbit at the egress point and wait for you to catch up," Troy heard Hal say.
"Roger that, Falcon One," Troy replied. "Thanks. I appreciate the company."
After all the months of internal antagonism, it was beginning to seem as though the three pilots of Falcon Force had finally reached the point where they could function as a team.
Chapter 11
"Why the hell can't we?" General Raymond Harris demanded. "Why the hell not?"
"Because it's Eritrea, that's why," the man in the suit said angrily.
Harris had been sparring with the man from the State Department — an under-undersecretary of some sort — practically since the conference began.
"I don't know why I bothered to come down here from Atbara, if I'm just going to be told what my guys can't do."
There were a dozen people in the room, including the JTF commander and his staff, as well as the CIA reconnaissance interpreters who had sifted through all the data that Falcon Force had collected over the Dahlak Archipelago.
Essentially, Falcon Force had found what it had been sent to find — a good overview of the what and how of arms trafficking through the islands. The purpose of the meeting was for JTF Sudan to figure out what to do about it. Harris was present because attacking the traffickers with JTF assets would fall to his 334th Air Expeditionary Wing. The man from the State Department was there — pretty much as Harris had pegged it — to tell the JTF what it could not do.
"General, let me put it as clearly as I can," he said in a patronizing tone. "This, these islands, are part of Eritrea. The UN mandate says we are not to bomb Eritrea, which is technically neutral in this conflict. May I remind you that we had to do big-time, very big-time, damage control a few weeks back when your joyriding jet jockeys shot down a third of the Eritrean Air Force."
"Technically neutral, my ass," Harris replied. "Begging your pardon for my choice of words, I take exception to the undersecretary's characterization of a country where Al-Qinamah has command posts, a country through which Al-Qinamah is hauling weapons and ammo that are being used to target American troops."
"That's why I used the word technically," the man said, loosening his tie.
"And one more thing," Harris said, having sensed that the man was momentarily on the defensive. "My aircrews were not on a joyride, they were not out there looking to attack somebody. They were shot at first….."
"Enough," interrupted the JTF Sudan commander, the three-star who was Harris's boss. "Both of you have made it abundantly clear where you stand on this thing. Now, let's figure out what we can do, and decide what we will do to stop this crap from getting from those islands onto the mainland."
"If I might interject," one of the CIA analysts interjected.