Of course, Weston would never ask his family the question about whether or not he should go. His wife was especially accustomed to the bliss of ignorance that surrounded her husband’s job. The ISA deployed year-round to every corner of the globe. The wives and families never knew any details. The cell’s rotation came up, they were gone, and sometime later — days, weeks, months later — they would return. The families watched the news and speculated about whether their husbands or wives were involved in that particular crisis, but they never knew for sure. The only indications that they might have been involved in something horrible were the faraway stares and wandering attention at the dinner table.
Sometimes, they didn’t come back. Instead of reunions with loved ones, there were condolences, tears, and a flag folded up into a triangle. If they were lucky, they got the body back. Even then, no explanations. Never any explanations.
Quite unabashedly, Weston believed one other thing: the ISA picked the right guy for the job. John Weston, an ROTC cadet and high school chess champion from Springfield, Illinois, was pretty much a book-loving stay-at-home-with-the-kids ex-farm boy nerd most of the time, but he did have one quality absolutely no one disputed: he could make an MV-22 Pave Hammer transport plane dance.
Right now, however, he wasn’t sure if all the dancing in the world could get them out of this mess. “How’s it look, Flex?” Weston asked.
“Like shit, boss,” Master Sergeant Ed “Flex” Fratierie, the senior loadmaster, responded. The big amateur bodybuilder and Air Force special ops veteran was standing in the port-side doorway of the MV-22, strapped to the interior of the fuselage with a safety harness and wearing night-vision goggles. “I don’t see Tin Man. But I do see more heavy military vehicles coming down the road. ETA about five minutes.”
“Tin Man, Hammer, we’ve got company,” Weston radioed. “Four minutes out. Better hustle.”
“Exfils inbound from the southeast and east, crew,” Fratierie radioed on the secure intercom channel, watching Briggs and Wohl through his NVGs. “Identity confirmed.”
“Security out!” Weston ordered. Fratierie directed his three commandos to deploy around the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor as guards during the evacuation. “Get ready to—”
“Heavy weapons fire west!” one loadmaster shouted. “Coming from one of the inbound vehicles. Range four klicks!”
“Aces will be coming in hot in twenty seconds,” Deverill reported. “Can you catch him, Tin Man?”
“Roger,” Chris Wohl responded. “I need a range and bearing to the inbound, sir.”
Hal Briggs stopped, then turned to the west and scanned the area with his helmet-mounted sensors. He pointed away down the highway. “Three point five K meters, Stan,” he radioed. “Fast-moving, big — might be a wheeled APC.”
“Finally got it right, sir,” Wohl said. He raised a large weapon that resembled a cross between an M60 machine gun and a ray gun, sighted through a large electronic multispectral scope, aimed, and fired toward the highway. A hypervelocity projectile about the size of a cigar, but traveling five times faster than a bullet, hissed out of the weapon’s muzzle with a sound resembling a loud buzzing cough. There was no recoil — the same electromagnetic impulses that sent the projectile on its way also dampened out the tremendous recoil.
Exactly three thousand and seventeen yards away, the depleted uranium hypervelocity railgun projectile shot through a half-inch of steel plating on a Russian BTR-27 wheeled armored command post vehicle racing down the highway, proceeded unimpeded through the six-hundred-horsepower diesel engine, through the fuel tank, out the back end, and into the engine compartment of a police car traveling fifty yards behind the BTR, before it finally stopped. The BTR’s engine exploded, then the diesel fuel exploded. The police car was knocked sideways into the ditch as if it were a toy.
Wohl continued to scan the area with his electronic scope. “I’ve got infantry moving in,” he reported. “Three klicks out. They might be setting up a mortar or getting ready to shoot in grenades. We better move.”
“Pop smoke, pop smoke!” Weston ordered. Soon, thick clouds of gray infrared-blocking smoke wafted across the windscreen, covering every direction except the one in which they intended to take off. Hopefully the smoke would make it a bit more difficult for the mortar crews to range in on them. Union, Weston breathed, c’mon, hurry!
“More mortar fire! Incoming!” That time, Weston felt the explosion rattle his plane’s fuselage, clumps of dirt, snow, and tarmac pinging off his props and fuselage. Despite the clouds of smoke swirling around the plane, the rounds were being quickly, expertly walked in. Another one or two rounds, and they’d have their range. Weston could almost feel the bad guys loading that deadly round into the tube, letting it slide down, hearing its ballistic charges light off with a loud KA-BLAM! The MV-22 rocked on its wheels, and two engines coughed and rattled as the overpressure from a large explosion forced air backward through the turbine engines.
But as he watched, one by one, Fratierie saw the oncoming Russian military vehicles blasted apart by some unseen force. The last to die caused a tremendous explosion as its magazine of antivehicle mortars was hit and detonated. But the nonmilitary vehicles — a police car and a second ambulance — were untouched.
“What was that?” Weston shouted on the secure intercom. “Sing out!”
“Looks like our guardian angel took care of our newcomers,” one of his loadmasters responded. “Lots of secondaries. Road’s clear right now except for a police cruiser and an ambulance.”
Good shooting by someone out there, Weston thought. The driving rain and winds were dissipating the cover smoke quickly-there was no more time to waste. “How long until our exfils get on board?”
“All exfils under the tail. Wounded coming aboard.”
“Roger.” Weston revved the throttle, starting to feed in takeoff torque. “Security, pull in. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
The loadmasters acting as security forces started pulling back toward the plane — when suddenly they stopped, then dove for the ground. Weston couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the engines until the last moment. It was the scream of an inbound mortar round. And as he looked on helplessly, one of his loadmasters disappeared in a blinding flash of light and an earsplitting explosion, just thirty yards from the plane.
“Jesus! “ the copilot shouted. “Candy got hit! Triggerman, Flex, check east, see if you can help Candy!”
“Negative,” Weston interjected, his words acidity in his throat. It was the hardest decision he had ever had to make, but one he made without any hesitation. “Candy took a direct hit. Get in the plane. Let’s go.”
“Cap, we can’t leave our men behind—”
“We don’t have any choice,” Weston said. “Security, pull in, now. Flex, where did that mortar come from?”