“Tonight’s targets are the power plants in California,” Sebastian said. “We’ll start with the regular ones. I just want a large rolling blackout. Think of all the coal and natural gas that will be saved.”
Sienna sat at the console as ordered and began to work. She’d long contemplated hiding a message in the code she was supposed to send. Someone smart enough on the other side might find it, even if it slipped under the noses of Sebastian and Calista. But the only message of any value would be to tell the world where she was and that was something she didn’t know.
Considering the climate, the strange birdcalls she heard at night, and some odd trees she’d seen in the distance, she figured they were somewhere in Africa. But that didn’t exactly narrow it down.
She settled in and did as she was told. For now, that was all she could do.
At that very moment, five hundred miles north of Madagascar, the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship sometimes referred to as a helicopter carrier, was steaming at flank speed to the south. She was rigged for battle, blacked out and operating under strict radio silence. But while she could not transmit, she was capable of receiving messages.
Late on the second watch, a member of the communications crew overheard several puzzling messages and reported them to the officer in charge.
The officer looked at the messages and then at the radioman. “What’s the problem, Charlie?”
“It’s these intercepts, sir. Someone is using our call sign. They’re transmitting and receiving uncoded messages and giving out our old location.”
The communications supervisor studied the transmission sheet. “Yep,” he said. “Looks that way.”
Without another word, he handed the sheet back to the radioman and turned his attention to other matters. The radioman stared at him dumbfounded.
“You have a post to man, sailor.”
“Yes, sir,” the radioman said, turning and heading back to his console. Something was obviously going on, but having seen the look on his superior’s face, Charlie knew better than to ask.
Meanwhile, down on the hangar deck of the ship, a swarm of mechanics and technicians worked on a group of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, making sure all five were in perfect shape for the mission.
In a nearby ready room, forty-six Marines, comprising two Force Recon platoons, were getting briefed on the island compound they were about to attack.
“We go in under cover of darkness,” Lieutenant Brooks told the men. “Secure the perimeter and then search the grounds and buildings with the following objectives. First, to rescue Ms. Westgate and her children. Second, to rescue any other civilians found on the site. Third, to capture the individuals responsible. Fourth, to gather any intelligence regarding their activities or associates.”
“Are we going in as friendlies?” someone asked.
“Negative,” Brooks replied. “We have not been invited and we will not be overstaying our welcome. From wheels down to departure, we have no more than forty minutes. So don’t get lost in the hedges.”
A wave of laughter went around the room.
“How many defenders are we likely to encounter?”
“Based on the two bunkhouses and the size of the main structure, it could be anywhere from thirty to fifty. But not all of those will be armed combatants. Honestly, it should be a walk in the park. Just be ready in case it isn’t.”
Thirty minutes later, the Force Recon Marines were up on the flight deck and boarding the Black Hawks. A long, grueling stretch awaited them, four hours of flight time that included refueling the helicopters from a tanker aircraft approximately one hundred miles from the target.
Assuming they went in and got out in forty minutes, the total trip would be eight hours. At least the journey home would be shorter as the ship would be nearly two hundred miles closer by the time they reached it.
With the pilots going through their preflight checks and the Marines boarding the helicopters and stowing their weapons, the company commander made his way over. He spoke briefly with Lt. Brooks.
“We have the green light to launch, but you won’t get attack authorization until we have confirmation that Ms. Westgate and her children are on-site.”
“Understood,” Brooks said. “Any idea how or when we’re going to get that?”
The commander checked his watch. “A two-man team will be making a LAPES insertion several miles from the compound. They should be on the ground anytime now. They’ll have a ways to go before they’re on-site, but I would expect a go or no-go decision shortly after you refuel.”
Brooks nodded. “LAPES insertion? Who’d they sucker into pulling that duty?”
“A couple of guys from NUMA.”
Brooks stared at the commander blankly for a moment. “NUMA? Aren’t they a bunch of marine biologists or something?”
“They’re something, all right,” the commander said with a strange look on his face. “Anyway, I’m told these guys are good.”
“Right, sir,” Brooks said with disdain in his voice. “I’ll expect our cover to be blown and to be looking for more hostages or dead bodies when we land.”
The commander didn’t respond, but he shared the assessment. “Crack open the operations file once you get airborne. There are photos of the NUMA personnel inside. Make sure you’re familiar. Don’t want to shoot them if they happen to survive. Good luck.”
Brooks offered a salute, received one back from the commander, and then climbed aboard the lead Black Hawk.
As the rotors above him began to turn, he wondered what kind of oceanographer or marine biologist would be up for such a stunt or how such a person would even have the skills to perform what they were being asked to do. With a shrug of his shoulders, Brooks decided they had to be half crazy, whoever they were. At least they had guts, he’d give them that.
Had they overheard Lt. Brooks’s candid assessment of their mental health, Kurt and Joe might have agreed with him. Considering the odds alone, they were at least “half crazy.”
Fortunately, the military had brought along a few items that would even the odds a bit.
Kurt and Joe were changing into combat gear that was far more exotic than anything Kurt had ever heard of. The clothing looked more like a two-piece wet suit than standard fatigues. It fit snugly and had some compression to it, bulging only where armored Kevlar pads covered the chest, thighs, and forearms.
“Feel like I’m suiting up for some futuristic sport,” Joe said as he pulled the garment tight.
Kurt laughed as he pulled his own suit on and ran his hands over the outer layer. “Odd texture,” he said. “It feels like sandpaper.”
An Air Force staff sergeant named Connors explained the clothing. “These are what we call infiltration suits,” he said. “The guys call them Chameleon Camo, because of the way they work. There are twenty-nine thousand microsensors sewn into the exterior. They detect ambient light in all directions and change the color of the suit to match what is behind and around you. Try them out.”
Kurt found a small switch and clicked it to the on position. Then went over and stood by the wall of the aircraft. The suit changed almost instantly from a dark navy blue to battleship gray. Where his right leg crossed in front of a black seat, the suit turned black. And where a yellow cable crossed behind him, a matching yellow strip crossed from his shoulder.
He wasn’t exactly invisible, but it looked like he’d been painted over to match the wall. Only his face and hands were obvious and they would be covered by gloves and a hood once he was on-site.
“That’s incredible,” Joe muttered.
“If you think they work well inside a brightly lit aircraft,” the sergeant said, “wait till you get on the ground. If you two aren’t careful, you’ll lose track of each other from ten feet away.”
“What about infrared?” Kurt said.
“The suit has a cooling unit,” Connors said. “It will counteract your body heat for about thirty minutes once you switch it on. After that, the e
xterior of the suit will start to warm up and you’ll lose both your thermal protection and your chameleonlike powers. From that point on you’re just wearing expensive body armor. And I mean real expensive. Each of these suits costs more than you guys make in a year.”
Kurt switched his suit off and watched it return to a dark blue color in the time it takes a lightbulb to dim. From there the sergeant led them over to an equipment table that had been folded down from the wall of the cavernous aircraft.
“You’ll breathe through these,” he said, picking up two devices that looked much like divers’ regulators.
“What’s wrong with the air on the ground?” Joe asked.
“We can’t have your breath giving you away.”
Kurt chuckled. “I told you go easy on the onions.”
“What can I say?” Joe replied. “I like a little flavor.”
“It’s not the odor,” Connors explained, “it’s the heat. Breathing out vents a lot of hot air into the world, easy to spot on a thermal scope. No sense covering the rest of you in a cool suit if you’re going to walk around with a plume of ninety-eightpoint-six-degree vapor coming from your nose or mouth.”
He pointed to a lever on the front of the regulators. “Twist this when you’re ready to go dark. From then on the regulator will mix cold air with every outgoing breath, effectively cooling it to the ambient air temperature and neutralizing the danger.”
“How long will it last?”
“As long as your compressed air holds out. Depends on your level of exertion. The tank is small so you’re looking at fifteen, maybe twenty minutes tops. Make sure you’re through the outer layer of security by then.”
Both Kurt and Joe nodded.
Next came the weapons and guidance equipment. First off, the sergeant strapped a gauntlet to Kurt’s arm. It had a curved, low-light screen on it. “Standard GPS, moving map display,” he said. “It will illuminate with less than one candlepower. You’ll be able to read it with your night vision goggles on, but no one else will. Remember, this is military GPS, so it’s good to within three feet.”
From there they moved to a rifle rack.
Connors handed them matching weapons. Once again they were like nothing Kurt had ever fired. Considering how much he knew about guns, that was surprising.
“Are these phasers?” Joe asked. “I’ve always wanted one.”
Connors chuckled. “Electromagnetic railguns,” he said. “Completely silent. Accurate up to a thousand yards. They fire ferrous projectiles—in other words, the bullets are made of iron, not lead, so they’re more lethal in terms of penetrating anything they encounter. Also, since they don’t require gunpowder, your standard-sized magazine carries fifty projectiles. You have a second magazine in your packs.”
Kurt held the weapon up, testing the weight and feel. It had a long barrel and was definitely nose-heavy.
“How does it work?” Joe asked.
“Superconducting magnets along the barrel and a high- potency battery pack. Pull the trigger and they accelerate the projectiles to a thousand feet per second in the blink of an eye.”
Joe nodded approvingly.
“Why are there two triggers?” Kurt asked.
“Since they are already equipped with a substantial power source, someone got the great idea to add a long-range Taser to the bottom rail. The lower trigger fires it. You can hit someone accurately up to fifty feet or simply hold the tip of the barrel against them and give a half pull to zap them manually.”
“So we don’t have to kill everything we see,” Joe mentioned.
The sergeant nodded.
A red light went on at the far end of the aircraft and they could feel the plane begin a rather steep descent.
“We’re approaching the drop zone,” the sergeant said. “Any questions?”
Joe raised a hand. “You said ‘drop zone,’ but we don’t seem to have parachutes.”
“You won’t need them,” Connors said. “You’ll be going out in the Hummer.”
“Does it fly?”
“Nope. But it can be put on a pallet and tossed out the back from an altitude of no more than twenty feet.”
Joe turned to Kurt. “You said we’d be using parachutes.”
“LAPES,” Kurt said. “Low altitude parachute extraction system. It’s all right there in the acronym.”
Joe shrugged, secured his weapon, and made his way toward the Humvee. “Why not? I’m open to new things, different experiences, novel ways of risking my neck in the name of science, why not try driving an SUV off an airplane moving at a hundred fifty knots? Somebody’s got to do it.”
Both Kurt and the sergeant laughed.
“Good luck,” Connors said.
Kurt nodded. “You want us to bring you anything back? T-shirt? Postcard? Puka shell necklace?”
The sergeant grinned. “I prefer a shot glass that says ‘We came, we saw, we conquered.’ ”
Kurt returned the smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Thirty minutes later, Kurt and Joe sat belted into a Humvee that was secured to a sturdy wooden pallet and a harness that would deploy two large drogue chutes. Joe was harnessed in at the wheel, though he wouldn’t actually do any driving during the insertion, as the danger of the wheels turning sideways and getting ripped off was far too great. Instead, the Humvee would use the pallet beneath it as a sled while the parachutes trailing out behind them would both slow the vehicle down and keep them from nosing over.
Kurt made one last check of his equipment. Out of an abundance of caution and a certain sense of nostalgia, he had added an additional weapon to his arsenal. Hidden in his pack was the Colt revolver that Mohammed El Din had given him. He doubted he’d need it. But if the recent past had taught them anything, it was that modern technology was vulnerable to tampering or failing at precisely the wrong moment. That being the case, having a backup weapon from a bygone era didn’t sound all that bad. He kept it zipped up in a front pocket that ran diagonally across the vest.
For less logical reasons he’d brought the pictures of Calista’s family and the lifeboat they attempted to escape in. After searching for the truth so painfully himself, some part of him thought she deserved to know hers.
The light on the wall turned yellow and Sergeant Connors pressed a switch that opened the ramp at the tail end of the C-17.
They were descending through two thousand feet into utter darkness. The sea was below them for a moment and then sand as they flew over the beach.
As they flew lower and slower, the howl of the airstream whipping past the open door took on a different tone. With full flaps and its gear down, the C-17 could move incredibly slowly for such a huge machine. But the wake turbulence caused by flying at a high angle of attack in such a “dirty” condition created a buffeting and whining sound that seemed to trail behind the plane as if banshees were chasing it.
On the map, the drop zone was labeled Antsalova Airport. Joe seemed concerned about that. “You think the people at this airport are going to be surprised when we drop out of the sky and drive off without stopping at customs?”
“It’s not much of an airport,” Kurt said, “more of a dirt strip with a grass hut at the far end. We’re only coming here because we need a flat surface to slide on. But there are no planes. No rental-car desks. No white courtesy telephone.”
“No Admirals Club?” Joe said, looking perturbed. Kurt shook his head. “Sorry, buddy.”
Joe sighed. “I really have to talk to my travel agent. This trip is getting worse all the time.”
As Kurt and Joe waited for the light to go green, the pilots up front were easing the huge aircraft down over the trees. A crosswind coming down off the slope of the island was making it difficult and they were actually flying sideways, a tactic pilots call crabbing. The problem was that they couldn’t drop the Humvee in that alignment or it would land sideways and flip, killing the occupants instantly.
The copilot was on the instruments while the pilot flew with
night vision goggles on.
“Ninety feet AGL,” the copilot said.
“Can’t get any lower until the trees clear,” the pilot replied.
“We should be over the site in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
The trees finally dropped away from under them and the pilot saw the dirt strip stretching out before him in a long thin line. He corrected to the left and brought the C-17 almost to the surface, stomping on the rudder to straighten the huge bird out.
The C-17 was now thirty feet off the dirt strip, screaming at full power and headed for the trees five thousand feet ahead.
In a chair behind them the loadmaster hit a switch, changing the jump light in the rear of the aircraft from yellow to green. “Release the payload,” he said into the intercom.
For what seemed like an interminable length of time but was, in fact, only a few seconds, nothing happened except the trees ahead looming larger. Then the pilot felt the plane rise as the five-thousand-pound payload was pulled out the back.
At almost the same instant, Sgt. Connors’s voice came over the intercom. “They’re away. Payload clear. I repeat, payload clear.”
In a synchronized move, the pilot jammed the throttles to full as the copilot retracted the gear to reduce the plane’s drag coefficient.
“Positive rate,” the copilot called out, seeing the altimeter begin to move.
The pilot heard but did not reply. The dirt strip was only a mile long. The trees at the far end were no more than a few hundred yards away. It was a very tight window.
“Climb, baby, climb,” he whispered to the plane.
With its engines screaming and its nose pointed skyward, the gargantuan aircraft clawed for altitude. It crossed the end of the dirt strip and pulled just clear of the trees, close enough that the mechanics who inspected her later would find streaks of green chlorophyll all across the underside of the fuselage.
Clear of the danger, the pilot leveled off, picked up airspeed, and then turned to the southwest. In short order, they were out over the Mozambique Channel. Only now did the pilot consider the fate of the men they’d just dropped, wondering if they would live out the night.