Jonah came forward to help the Tracker, then tightened the straps until the American thought his chest was being crushed. But the speed in the dive would be up to 150 mph, and nothing must shift by even an inch. Then the switch from the onboard oxygen to personal canister.
At this moment, the Tracker heard a new noise. Over the roar of engines, the aircraft’s speaker system was booming out music, fortissimo. The Tracker realized what David had given to Jonah to be passed to the flight deck. It was a CD. The cavernous hull of the C-130 was being drowned in the pounding clamor of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The start of his personal chant was the signal: three minutes to P-hour.
The seven men were standing along the starboard side of the fuselage when the dull clunk of a breaking seal meant the ramp was coming down. Jonah and his two assistant PDs had attached their tether lines to ensure they could not slide out.
As the sinking ramp revealed a barn-door-sized opening to the sky, an icy blast of wind roared in, accompanied by the stench of aviation fuel and burning oil.
The Tracker, standing second in line behind Barry, the giant, looked past the lead jumper toward the void. Nothing out there, just swirling darkness, freezing cold, pounding noise, and inside the fuselage the raging brass of the Valkyries on their insane ride to Valhalla.
There was one last check. The Tracker saw Jonah’s mouth open but heard not a word. Down the line, Curly, the last out, checked Tim, the trooper, in front of him to ensure his chute and oxygen had no tangles. Then he shouted, “Seven OK.”
Jonah must have heard it because he nodded at Tim, who then did the same for Pete, the medic, in front of him. The mutual checking rippled down the line. The Tracker felt the clap on his shoulder and did the same for Barry in front of him.
Jonah was standing in front of the giant, facing him. He nodded as the Tracker made the last check and stepped aside. There was nothing left to do. After all the pushing and shoving and grunting, the seven free fallers could only hurl themselves into the night five miles above the Somali desert.
Barry took one step forward, lowered his torso into a dive and was gone. The reason for the line being tightly bunched was that wide separation in the air could be disastrous. A three-second gap in the blackness, and two fallers could be so far apart they would never see or find each other. As briefed, the Tracker went out within a second of Barry’s heels disappearing.
The sensations were immediate. In half a second, the noise was gone; the roar of the C-130’s four Allisons, the Wagner—all gone, to be replaced by the silence of the night, broken only by a gentle and rising wind hiss as his falling body accelerated past 100 mph.
He felt the slipstream of the departing Hercules try to flip him over, ankles above head, then onto his back, and fought against it. Though there was no moon, the desert stars, hard and bright, cold and constant, unmarred by any pollution for two thousand miles, gave a low illumination to the sky.
Looking down, he saw a dark shape far below. He knew that close behind his shoulder would be the para captain, David, with the other four strung out upward to the sky.
David appeared beside him, arms by his sides, adopting the arrow position to increase speed and close up on Barry. The Tracker did the same. Slowly the big black form ahead came closer. Barry was in the starfish shape, gloved fists clenched ahead of him, arms and legs half spread, to slow the fall to 120 mph. When they came level with him, the Tracker and the captain did the same.
They fell in a rough echelon formation, joined one by one by the other four. He saw the captain check his wrist altimeter, adjusted for the ambient air pressure above the desert.
Although he could not see it, the altimeter said the troop was passing through 15,000 feet. They would open chutes at 5,000. As the lead jumper, it was Barry’s job to ease ahead and, using experience and the dim light of the stars, try to pick a landing zone as smooth and rock-free as possible. The Tracker’s concern was to stay with the para captain and do whatever he did.
Even from 25,000 feet, the free fall only lasted ninety seconds. Barry was by now slightly below the other six, scanning the ground rushing toward him. The others gently moved into staggered line formation, never losing eye contact with each other.
The Tracker reached for the pocket in his chute pack to make sure he had contact with the chute release mechanism. Pathfinders do not use the D ring rip to open the chute. They can opt for aneroid pressure-triggered release, but things mechanical can and do go wrong. Coming down at 120 mph is no time to discover the gizmo has not worked. David and the rest preferred manual release.
This is what the Tracker was reaching for. It is a parachute-shaped piece of cloth attached to a twine and stored in an easy-access pocket on the top. When thrown into the slipstream, it will pull the entire BT80 out of its pack and deploy it.
Below him, the Tracker saw Barry hit the 5,000-foot mark and the flash of the canopy, gray in the surrounding blackness. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw David toss his release drogue into the air and then disappear upward.
The Tracker did the same and almost instantaneously felt the jerk of the huge chute pulling him backward and upward—or so it seemed. It was, in fact, simply slowing him down. The sensation was of driving a car fast into a wall and the air bag going off. But it lasted just three seconds; then he was floating.
The BT80 is nothing like the domed parachutes of paratroopers jumping on a military exercise. It is a colossal oblong of silk, mattress-shaped, a flying wing that, on a high-altitude opening, can let the trooper glide mile after mile behind the enemy lines unseen by radar or the human eye.
The Pathfinders liked it for that, and another reason. It opens silently as opposed to the whip-crack of others, which can alert a sentry below.
At 800 feet, the para captain released his Bergen, which dropped on its lanyard to hang twelve feet beneath him. The Tracker did the same. A few feet above them, the remaining four followed suit.
The U.S. Marine watched the ground, now clear in the starlight, rushing toward him, heard the plop of the Bergen hitting the sand and performed the final braking maneuver. He reached upward, grabbing the two toggles controlling the canopy, and pulled down. The chute flared and slowed, permitting him to hit the deck at a brisk run. Then the chute lost its shape, folded and flopped to the ground as a tangled mess of silk and nylon cords. He unclipped the chest and leg harnesses, and the remainder of the para pack fell to the sand. It had served its purpose. All around him, six Pathfinders were doing the same.
He checked his watch. Four minutes after two a.m. Good scheduling. But it took time to clear up and form a line of march.
The seven chutes had to be collected, along with the no-further-use helmets and oxygen masks, plus the oxygen canisters. They were all piled together, and three Pathfinders covered them with rocks.
Out of the Bergens came the sidearms and night vision goggles, the NVGs. There was enough starlight for them not to be needed on the march, but they would certainly give an unmatchable edge when attacking the village, turning pitch-black night into green and watery day.
Dai, the Welsh Wizard, was poring over his equipment. Thanks to modern technology, their task was simpler than it would have been before the drone.
Somewhere high above them was a Global Hawk RQ-4, operated by J-SOC out of MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa. It was gazing down at them, and at the village, and could see them both. It could also detect any living creature by body heat, showing up as a pale blob of light on the landscape.
J-SOC headquarters had patched through an image of everything Tampa saw to the communications room at Djibouti, with sound and picture. Dai was setting up and testing his direct radio link with Djibouti, which could tell him exactly where he was, where the village was, the line of march between the two and whether there was any activity in the target area.
After a murmured conversation with Djibouti, Dai reported to the rest. Both controllers could see them as seven pale blobs on the desert. The village was mo
tionless, seemingly fast asleep. There were no human beings outside the cluster of houses, inside which they could not be detected. But all the village’s wealth, a flock of goats, four donkeys and two camels, was in a corral or tethered out in the open and showed up clearly.
There were a few smaller blobs that moved about—the pye-dogs. The distance was 4.8 kilometers and the optimum line of march on a compass heading of 020 true.
The para captain had his own Silva compass and his own SOPHIE thermal imaging system. Despite the assurances of Tampa, he switched it on and ran its beam in a circle around them. They froze when a small blob showed up on top of a ridge along the edge of the sandy basin Barry had chosen as a good place to land.
Too small for a human but big enough for a watching head. Then it gave a low whine and disappeared. A desert jackal. At 02.22, they set off in Indian file to the north.
15
They tabbed in a loose line astern, with Curly as the lead scout to give warning of the first sign of opposition. There was none. David the captain was second. He swung his imaging system from side to side, but no other warm-blooded creatures showed themselves.
Dai had his comm set in his rucksack at the top of his Bergen, behind his head, and a plug in one ear to listen to anything from Tampa via Djibouti, which were watching them from the stratosphere. At ten to four, he advanced to David’s side and whispered: “Half a mile, boss.”
They advanced the next eight hundred yards at a crouch, each man bowed by the forty kilos on his back. While they marched, high above them clouds appeared in the sky, lowering the light level.
The captain stopped and made a gentle wave-down motion with one arm. The rest sank toward the sand. David produced a monocular night vision scope and peered ahead. Then he saw it, the first of the squat cuboidal houses of the village. The Silva compass had brought them to the threshold of the target.
He stowed the monocular and pulled on the goggles. The other six followed. For each man, the vision changed from slowly diminishing starlight to a brighter, almost sub-aqua-green tunnel. All the NVG does is to capture every scintilla of ambient light and concentrate it into one forward tunnel. The wearer loses spatial awareness and must turn his head to see anything left or right.
With the target in sight, the men had no need of the Bergens but great need of the ammunition and grenades inside them. They lowered the packs to the ground, slipped out of the shoulder straps and filled every pocket on their jumpsuits with ordnance. Their M4 rifles and sidearms already had full chambers.
David and the Tracker crawled forward together. They were staring at exactly what one of the angled shots from the Global Hawk had freeze-framed for them back at Djibouti. There was an alley that led from the village center to the desert where they crouched. Somewhere up it, on the left side, was the larger house identified as that of the headman, now taken over by the Preacher’s party.
A small pye-dog trotted down the alley, stopped and sniffed. Another joined it. They were both mangy, possibly rabid, accustomed to foraging amid the garbage, eating excrement or, on feast days, the entrails of a slaughtered goat. They sniffed again, suspecting there was something out there but not yet alarmed enough to bark and trigger a multi-dog alarm.
The Tracker took something from a breast pocket and threw it like a baseball pitcher toward the dogs. It landed with a soft phut in the sand. Both dogs jumped, then sniffed again before barking. Raw beefsteak. They approached, sniffed again, and the lead dog swallowed the tidbit in a single gulp. Another followed for his friend. The second treat disappeared.
The Tracker sent a salvo of meat chunks into the mouth of the alley. More dogs appeared, nine in all, saw their leaders gulping down the treats and did the same. There were twenty morsels, more than two each. Every cur got at least one. Then they sniffed around to see if there were more.
The original eaters began to stumble. Then their legs failed and they fell over, lying on their sides, kicking feebly. Finally, they ceased to move. The remaining seven did the same. Within ten minutes of the first throw, they were all unconscious.
David rose to a crouch and gestured forward, rifle at the port, finger on trigger. Five followed him. Barry remained to scan the exteriors of the houses. A donkey brayed from deep inside the hamlet. Nothing moved. The enemies ahead of them either slept or waited in ambush. The Tracker believed it was the former. The men from Marka were also strangers, and the dogs would have barked at them also. He was right.
The attack group entered the alley and approached the house on the left. It was the third up, facing the square. The masked men could make out a door on the alley, thick old timber, brought once from somewhere else, for only scrubby camel thorn bushes grew nearby. The plank door had two ring handles but no lock with keyhole. David tested it with fingertips. It did not budge. Barred from the inside, crude but effective. It would take a battering ram. He beckoned to Tim, the munitions man, pointed at the door and withdrew.
Tim was holding what looked like a small wreath. He applied this to the crack between the left- and right-hand halves of the double door. Had it been metal, magnets or putty would have worked. Being timber, he used thumbtacks. There was no hammering, just pressure from his thumb. When the wreath was fixed, he set the short fuse and waved the others back.
They withdrew fifteen feet and crouched. Because it was a shaped charge, there would be no outward explosive force. The fury of the PETN plastic explosive would all be forward, cutting the wood like a chain saw in a fraction of a second.
When it came, the Tracker was surprised how low the noise was: a muted crack like a twig snapping. Then the first four were through the door, which swung weakly to the touch, its inner crossbar splintered and broken. Tim and Dai remained outside, covering the square with its three pickup trucks, tethered donkeys and corralled goats.
The para captain was first in, the Tracker at his shoulder. There were three men rising, half asleep, from the floor. The hitherto silent night was ripped by two M4 carbine on automatic mode. All three were from the Marka party. They were the Preacher’s bodyguards. They were dead before they got upright. Yells came from an inner room beyond a farther door.
The captain paused a moment to ensure all three were very dead; Pete and Curly came in from the alley; the Tracker kicked the inner door and went through. He prayed Opal, wherever he was, would have responded to the first fusillade by diving for the floor, preferably under a bed.
There were two men in the room. Unlike their companions in the hall, they had requisitioned two of the family’s beds, rough charpoys with camel’s hair blankets. They were up but sightless in the pitch-blackness. The burly one, the fourth bodyguard, had been perhaps dozing but not fast asleep; clearly he was the night watch, supposed to stay awake. He was up, with a handgun, and he fired.
The bullet went past the Tracker’s head, but what really hurt was the blaze of light from the muzzle, magnified many times by the goggles. It was like a searchlight in the face. He fired blind but on auto, sweeping right to left. His bullet stream took both men, the fourth Pakistani and the one who turned out to be Jamma, the private secretary.
Outside at the entrance to the square, as agreed, Tim and Dai raked the house across the square, the one sheltering the Sacad clansmen from Garacad. The paras fired long streams through each window. There was no glass in them, just nailed-up blankets. They knew their bullets would be above bed height, so they slammed in fresh magazines and waited for the reaction. It was not long.
In the headman’s house there was a low scuffling noise and a hint of movement. The Tracker swung toward it. A third truckle bed, tucked away in the corner. Someone beneath it, a hint of baseball cap.
“Stay there,” he shouted. “Don’t move. Don’t come out.” The scuffling stopped, the cap was withdrawn.
He swung around to the three men behind him.
“Clear in here. Go help with the northern gang.”
Out on the square, six from Garacad, convinced they were betrayed by those
from Marka, came across the square in a charge, Kalashnikovs held low, dodging between the donkeys, which screamed and reared on their halters, and the three parked vehicles.
But they were in darkness. The clouds now covered the stars. Tim and Dai picked out one each and “slotted” them. The muzzle flashes were enough for the other four. They brought up their Russian guns. Tim and Dai went facedown fast. Behind them, Pete, Curly and their captain came into the alley, saw the muzzle flashes from the Kalashnikovs and also went down.
From prone positions, the five paras took out two more of the running men. The fifth, firing on empty when his magazine ran out, paused to slot in a fresh one. He was clearly visible beside the goat pen, and two M4 rounds took his head off.
The last was crouching behind one of the technicals, out of sight. The firing died and stopped. Trying to find a target in the darkness, he popped his head around the front of the engine block. He was unaware his enemies had NVGs; his head was like a green football. Another round blew his brains out.
Then there really was silence. There was no more response from the house with the pirates, but the paras were two short. They needed eight; they had taken down six. They prepared to charge and risk taking casualties, but there was no need. From way behind the village, they heard more shots, three in all, spaced a second apart.
Seeing the village well roused, Barry had abandoned his useless vigil outside the alley and raced around to the back. With his NVGs, he saw three figures running out of the back of the pirate house. Two were in robes, the third, stumbling and pleading, being hustled along with the two Somalis, had a thatch of blond hair.
Barry did not even challenge the runners. He rose from the camel thorn scrub when they were twenty yards away and fired. The one with the Kalashnikov, Duale, of the one eye, went first; the older man, later identified as al-Afrit, the Devil, took two spaced bullets in the chest.