Ninety feet below in a guard station at the foot of the long exit stairway, a guard unit of seven men and three women responsible for the security of the exit end of ABC’s tunnel complex were bored silly. Completely cut off from the action above them and long used to the numbing sameness of production line noises in the three tunnels, there was nothing new to do or discuss, other than the American attack, about which they had been given no news whatsoever. The only thing that mitigated the sheer bone-crushing monotony of guard duty in the three connected tunnels was the substantial tunnelnaya premiya— tunnel bonus. But even the bonus could not keep the guard detail on their feet during the eight-hour shift. And, despite the strict rules against it, a game of Texas Hold ’Em Poker would usually be in progress, as it was now, with the latest production line inspector wandering over now and then between checking the counterfeit American, Korean, and Chinese manufacturers’ serial numbers on the completed Igla and Vanguard MANPADs and the new hypersonic weapons and ammunition being made as a result of ABC’s victory at DARPA ALPHA.
“Did you hear that scraping noise?” one of the card-playing four asked.
“Don’t worry, Andreyovich,” said the number checker, Vladimir. “The exit door must be under a ton of snow. If it is anything, it’s probably one of those stupid deer rooting around for grass. Anyway, in this weather all kinds of crap’s blowing around the lake and the marshes. Plus, last reports from H-block say we can just keep working, no problem. The Americans are getting the shit kicked out of them.”
Andreyovich nodded. “Maybe, but someone had better check. Let’s not risk the bonus. Vladimir, you come up with me.” Andreyovich looked at his cards, the worst hand he’d had in months. “I’m out,” he said, grabbing his AK-47. “Need to stretch my legs anyway.”
“Good man!” said the numbers inspector, a big, bald, jovial man from one of the hamlets near the railhead that were now all but ghost towns, ABC having combed them for maintenance support workers.
Both guards heard several hollow-sounding bumps as Choir tossed two tear gas canisters and yellow SOS smoke grenades onto the grates of the two air-intake shafts. The yellow smoke laced with tear gas descended quickly, spreading throughout the three parallel tunnels, their connecting passages, and the entrance and exit vestibules at either end of the tunnels. The moment the terrorist guards and weapons assemblers at the exit end of the three tunnels saw the thickening malevolent-looking yellow gas pouring down the ninety-foot-long, cement-lined exit shaft, the alarm horn sounded, its deep, strangled “Arggh! Arggh!” drowning out the usual cacophony of the assembly line. The horn’s unrelenting blasts, accompanied by the scream of “Gaz!” filling the subterranean world, turned panic to frenzy, sending the disorganized horde of three hundred terrorist workers rushing away from the exit toward the massive security doors at the tunnels’ entrance, roars of rage erupting from the frantic mob when they found the inner security door locked. The terror of 243 men and 57 women clamoring, screaming for the door to be opened, fed on itself. The duty officer, who only hours before had thought himself incapable of pushing the button that would explode the RDX unless he was blackmailed, now discovered that his fear of the mob made it easier to contemplate putting his fellow terrorists out of their misery.
Up on the surface, the moment the general, Aussie, Sal, Lee, and Choir saw the yellowish green smoke rising up from the out vents, Freeman and his team ran down the stairs of the long, narrow exit tunnel, then split up at the bottom, Freeman taking the first tunnel, Aussie and Sal the second, Johnny Lee and Choir the third, running along a grated metal floor. They could hear the nightmarish cries coming from the mob of trapped terrorists beyond, hammering and yelling hysterically for the entrance doors to be opened, no doubt terrified the tunnel complex was being attacked with chlorine gas or, as their great-great-grandfathers had called it, mustard gas, which the Americans, like the Russians, still had in ample supply. Further exciting the terrorists’ fear was their conviction, shared by the duty officer, who, sitting safely two floors up in one of the H-block’s administrative offices, had caught a glimpse of the intruders, that the tunnel complex would soon be swarming with Americans. And when the duty officer heard Abramov’s insistence that the RDX be blown, any hesitation that he might have had disappeared in the belief that he would be acting humanely, putting such tortured souls out of their misery. After all, as Abramov sharply instructed him, “You wouldn’t treat an animal like that.”
The duty officer pressed the button. The resulting subterranean roar reverberated through the tunnels, the concussion wave almost knocking Freeman’s team off their feet, and, in the middle tunnel, forcing Aussie and Sal to grab one of the MANPAD lathes to steady themselves.
It was testimony to Abramov’s expertise that he had calculated the amount of RDX so precisely that while the two halves of the massive door were bent and rendered useless by the blast, the door had not collapsed, acting, as Abramov had wanted it to, as a barrier between him and the enemy.
Safe above in the H-block, Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin were cold as steel. They had no intention of waiting for what was being reported by the entrance guard detail as poison gas to leak up into the H-block. Thoroughly professional now, with no time to spare in a blame game — at least not yet — about the colossal error Abramov had made, enabling Dedushka—Grandpa — Freeman to heap humiliation upon them via the Pete Rose feint, Abramov declared, “Dead men can’t make sales,” adding, “Poison gas won’t hurt the production line. We can always get more men. I suggest, gentlemen, we take our bonuses and vacate.”
Without waiting for the other two’s acquiescence, Abramov quickly took his cell phone out of its holster and punched in three digits, briskly instructing his quartermaster, “Transport helo for three, plus luggage. Fully armed Sharks to escort us — and yourself — on the pad behind ABC. Fuel for Vladivostok. Now!”
“Yes, General. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Five!” Abramov shouted into the phone. “Five and you get double your bonus. In gold!”
“Yes, General.”
Beria and Cherkashin now moved quickly to the safe and withdrew their keys to their respective gold bullion boxes and attaché cases, as well as the access codes to their Swiss bank accounts.
“Got your keys?” Beria asked Abramov.
Abramov, checking the slide on his Makarov 9 mm pistol, retorted, “Are you serious? We’ll be back in production next week. C’mon, let’s get to the pad.” They could already hear the heavily armed Black Shark escort helos hovering overhead and the rotors of a big, bugeyed Hind transport chopper descending to the H-block’s emergency pad, located only yards from the edge of the enormous T-90 camouflage net.
Beyond the mass of red-hot twisted and steaming metal that had been the inner door between the entrance vestibule and the tunnels, there was a phalanx of upraised Russian hands dimly visible in the emergency lanterns’ light; were they surrendering? Many of the terrorists were crumpling to the floor in the eerie yellow-green fog, the choking impact of the tear gas in the confined space taking a rapid toll, Chester’s marines above keeping up a steady rain of tear gas canisters and smoke grenades. From inside their gas masks, Freeman, Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee found that despite the state-of-the-art charcoal-and chemical-pad filters, the air was becoming throat-raspingly hot and thin. None of Freeman’s team saw the flash but all heard the bursts of AK-47 fire. In the choking gas, the shooters’ aim was way off, but they could have hit any one of the team.
“Fire!” yelled Freeman, and the team opened up, taking what shelter they could behind the assembly line machinery nearest them. In addition to firing their weapons, Freeman’s team tossed twelve HE and eight flash-bang grenades, the wild terrorist AK-47 fire, presumably coming from the guard detail, absorbed by the boxes of guidance vanes for Igla and Vanguard MANPADs that lined the walls of the tunnels, the flash-bangs taking out most of the remaining emergency lanterns, what little light remained casting huge, macabre shadows on the tunnel walls. Amid the acrid-smelling smoke and tear gas, some of the terrorists managed to stand, screaming for mercy. Freeman’s stentorian nasal voice boomed through his mask: “The Cole, the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, Flight 93!” his AK-74 chopping them down, the barrel of his Kalashnikov so hot he wondered whether it would tolerate another mag just yet. Giving it time to cool, he whipped out his H K sidearm and, with Aussie, Sal, Lee, and Choir doing likewise, continued putting the wounded out of their misery.
Aussie, his hand wet with flesh and bone, continued his gruesome, but as he saw it, necessary task if America and her allies were to be safer from these heartless murderers who sold their wares to the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah. He could make out a clutch of swarthy Middle Eastern faces screaming at him, not begging for mercy but hurling their hatred at him, the Arab face nearest him so contorted for a moment he looked as frightening as Aussie must in his gas mask, Aussie yelling at him, “You look like one of those bastards in Bali!” as the next burst punched the Arab back, his body crumpling beneath the waning light, Aussie seeing the name “RAMON” stenciled on the man’s blood-soaked battle tunic. Immediately Aussie remembered the attack on DARPA ALPHA, one of the victims having written “RAM” and “SCARUND” on a piece of paper before he died. Now, looking down at the dead terrorist, he saw the raised, angry red scar under the man’s chin.
“All right,” Freeman yelled out, his voice muffled by the gas mask’s filters but sounding just as resolute as it had at the beginning of the subterranean raid. “Hurry up with the C-4, guys, and let’s get back topside!”
The five men, the general in the first tunnel, Aussie and Sal in the second, and Johnny and Choir in the third quickly placed the fist-sized lumps of C-4, connecting them with det cord, at strategic points along the production line of each tunnel. The det cords from the three tunnels were wrapped into one, then run topside by the team and connected to the remote initiator that, once the team was safe topside, would be activated, beginning the firing sequence that would move through the det cord to the globs of C-4, the cord’s explosive detonation wave traveling at more than seven thousand yards a second, thus in effect exploding all the globs of C-4 simultaneously.
Freeman told each of the other four men to take a MANPAD and portable power pack with him from the assembly line. There was a chance, he knew, that if the weather cleared, the Russians might just risk some of their hitherto revetment-hidden attack helos to harass the marines’ evacuation, if for no other reason than sheer spite. Against this, however, there was the equally good chance that without “product” to sell after the tunnels blew up, what pilot would bother to risk his life for revenge sans bonus?
“Son of a bitch!” said young Kegg, as Freeman and the other four gas-masked MANPAD-carrying warriors emerged from the exit. “What the fuck went on down there? Sounded like a — a war!”
“It was,” said Aussie. “For the fucking terrorists.” He whipped off his gas mask with his left hand and took in a deep draft of cold, rainy air. “Those pricks won’t be making any more of these.” He raised the Igla with his right hand. “These five are the only ones left.”
“You know how to fire one, Aussie?” joshed Kegg.
“Surely you jest, boy.” Aussie lifted the forty-pound missile in its launcher-sheath to his right shoulder, the rocket’s aerodynamic spike in front of the heat-seeking infrared and its flare decoy analyzer piercing the air. Aussie looked about. “Where’d the opposition go?”
“The navy infantry,” replied a sodden but smiling Lieutenant Chester. “Soon as the word got out that the tunnels were under attack, that Freeman suckered Abramov, I guess they thought, ‘What’s the point?’ Anyway, they’ve pulled back for now.”
“You ready with that remote, Choir?” called out Freeman.
“Ready, sir.”
“Good.” The general told Kegg and the marine’s two fire team buddies to go back with Melissa Thomas. “These vents are going to start really smoking in the blink of an eye. C’mon, people, move!”
They moved, and waited for Choir to activate the inititiator. The det cord — in effect a long, explosive-filled flexi-tube from a spool — had a burn rate so fast that once the initiator kicked off the firing sequence, the major explosions of the C-4 would occur in a fraction of a second.
But they didn’t.
“Aw—” came Aussie’s bitter disappointment. “Fuck a duck!”
It seemed interminable. Then they heard, saw, high up through the rain, five helos — a big transporter and four Black Shark gunships rising and turning above the minefield.
“Take those bastards out!” yelled Freeman. “I’ll take the big guy in the middle. Let’s see how they like their own medicine.” Freeman hadn’t even had time to take his gas mask off. The Igla on his shoulder, he placed his left foot forward, the ground power supply kit giving full surge power to the missile in four seconds. Gripping the launcher by its flanged neck, he gained visual contact, squeezed the trigger, and heard the gentle whirring of the missile’s automatic target lock and launch circuits, the primary booster igniting the missile, passing through the tube, disabling the first safety twenty feet from the general, the sustainer motor firing, blowing hot air and reed debris into his gas mask, the missile now streaking at over a thousand miles per hour in the two seconds since leaving the tube. Second safety was now gone and, unless the missile’s twenty-five-pound blast and fragmentation warhead hit something within fifteen seconds, it would self-destruct.
The subsequent “whooshing” sounds were the other four fire-and-forget Iglas taking off from the shoulder launchers on Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee. Johnny slipped on a patch of mud as he fired, the Igla going near vertical.
No one said anything, watching the five missiles, fierce orange streaks with the bluish sulfur exhausts visible.
“Terrorists are popping flares!” called Sal.
“Look at ’em panic!” said Aussie, watching the helos jinking hard left, right, right — trying to outmaneuver the closing Iglas, flares popping everywhere like hundreds of little meteorites burning up in the gray, rainy sky, but the Igla-E2, devoid of a friend-or-foe tone because terrorists didn’t need any such discriminating equipment, proved a formidable weapon. With infrared decoy override, the E2 ignored the tortuous, frantic maneuvers of the helos two miles up. There were one, two, three, then a fourth explosion as the “traveling fuel tanks,” as Aussie called the Russian choppers, blew up, sending down heavy golden showers of burning debris that, upon impact, detonated dozens of small anti-personnel and big anti-tank mines, cratering the snow-and rain-covered ground.
A lone Shark helo, the only survivor of the four attack choppers, obviously deciding not to risk any more MANPAD attacks, turned west, climbed higher and fled into the mountain fastness of China across the border. Freeman and Salvini thought they saw a chute blossom, but in the rain it was difficult to be sure whether it was that or a piece of fabric from the transporter caught in the air currents as the fuselage plunged earthward.
There was something wrong, however, as Freeman, taking off his gas mask, realized that there should have been explosions not above him but ninety feet below in the tunnels.
“Did you press that remote?” the general asked Choir.
“Yes, sir. I’ve checked the box and it’s middle tunnel’s det cord that’s screwing things up. There must be a break. Nothing’s wrong up at this end. Something must have fallen on it.”
“Or cut through it!” said Aussie. “One of those bastards—” His voice was suddenly drowned out by the combined roar of a Super Stallion and a Cobra gunship riding shotgun, both helos dropping decoy flares. Despite the noise, the booming voice of the Stallion’s crew chief managed to cut through it and the fury of the rotor wash. “Evac immediately. Mission is over.”
Every one of Freeman’s team and the marines around him wanted to leave, but no one thought that they should. They’d cleaned out the rats in the nest below, but not the nest, as Freeman told the Stallion’s crew chief through cupped hands that reeked of cordite and tear gas from the tunnels.
“Doesn’t matter,” the crew chief hollered back. “We got orders from Yorktown. C’mon, General, I haven’t got all fucking day.” The Cobra gunship was rising and falling in the side draft of the Stallion’s enormous rotors. “C’mon, mission’s over. That’s an order from Colonel Tibbet. You’ve run out of time.”
The general was cupping his right ear. “Can’t hear you.”
“General!” the crew chief bellowed again. “We have to get you guys out of here now. Colonel Tibbet’s order!”
“I outrank him,” said Freeman, “but, dammit, all right,” he continued, and ordered everyone aboard. “Go! Go!”
No matter what their personal feelings, they were professional soldiers, Freeman’s team and the marines, and knew orders were orders.
As the crew chief helped lift Gomez to put him in a litter, the others scrambled aboard the overcrowded helo through a jumble of other bodies and weapons. The Stallion’s anxious copilot glanced back, saw no one on the ground, but spotted an armored vehicle spitting fire and bristling with MANPADs racing toward them from about a mile away on the edge of the frozen marshland that ran back to the lake. Because he too was looking in the distance at the armored vehicle even as he kept hauling the others into the helo, the crew chief noticed something in the rain-washed landscape previously hidden by the snow: a vast carpet of dead birds — thousands of them.
It wasn’t until six minutes after they’d scrambled aboard the already dangerously overloaded helo, which, like all the other Stallions, was trying to get as many of their fellow Americans out before the twenty-four-hour deadline, that someone noticed that neither Freeman nor the marine, Melissa Thomas, was aboard the Stallion. But the pilot and the copilot had their orders. On the other hand, marines didn’t leave their dead, wounded, or living behind.
“Those cocksuckers!” Kegg shouted. “Get a load of this shit!” He was watching the crew chief’s TV feed on the twelve-inch bulkhead inset screen. CNN was running an Al Jazeera tape, which the Arab station said had just been taken in overflight by a lone Shark helo and which showed patches of yellowish smoke rising in Lake Khanka near Siberia. Al Jazeera claimed the smoke was poison gas used by Americans against a defenseless refugee camp. Then there was a CNN clip, Marte Price thrusting her mike into the face of a nearly hysterical coed. “I–I—never thought I’d live to see the day my country would use such a — such a horrible, awful thing. It’s, like, you know, totally irresponsible.”
“Oh,” mimicked a marine who was also watching the feed. “Like you’re totally insane, you silly bitch. We colored the friggin’ tear gas with a yellow smoke grenade, you stupid whore. That’s all we did.”
“Yeah,” put in Kegg. “But it sure frightened the shit out of ’em.” His laugh was contagious, the marines’ pent-up emotions suddenly finding a release. But Aussie, Choir, Sal, and Johnny Lee weren’t laughing. They were petitioning the pilot to go back and pick up Melissa Thomas and Freeman.
“Can’t do it,” said the pilot, quite properly. To go back with a MANPAD vehicle on the loose and risk losing every man he’d picked up would have been the height of irresponsibility.
“Where the fuck did he go?” Aussie asked Sal angrily.
“And the woman,” said Choir. “It was so disorderly. We should’ve—”
“Never mind what we should have done,” cut in Aussie. What are we gonna do now?”
“Tell Yorktown,” put in the crew chief, “to get a STAR bird over here fast.”
“It’d be their only chance,” agreed Choir. “By the time they drop them a kit we can have a Herk on its way out of Japan and here in—” Choir did the math in his head. “—four hundred and fifty miles — two hours, tops.”
“Two hours,” said Aussie.
“I know,” said Choir, “but it’s a STAR or nothing. We can say the Herk’s coming in to pick up our wounded. Tibbet’s boys say we’re missing a few.”
“We’ll go plain language, if you like,” said the pilot. “Tell everyone to head for the lake.”
“Bit bloody vague,” snorted Aussie. “Lake’s four thousand square miles. Bigger ’n Rhode Island.”
“We’ve got a couple of dusters, Hueys,” the pilot told him. “They’re packed under nets near the ice as backup evac for any lost marines.”
“Then shit,” said Aussie, “send one of the Hueys in to pick up the general and Thomas.”
“Negative,” said the pilot. “A lot of guys have been given the location of those two Hueys, but those birds come out exposing themselves looking for our general and his girlfriend—”
“Hey!” Aussie was on the stairs up to the cockpit, but Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee managed to save the pilot from Aussie snapping his neck.
“Fer cryin’ out loud, Aussie!” Salvini shouted above the deafening rotor slap and engines.
“He’s right, Aussie!” shouted Choir. “Calm down, boyo. Those Hueys can’t risk having any MANPADs fired at them or risk anything else those terrorist pricks have left. If the general and Thomas stay where they are, they’ve got a chance with a STAR.”
Aussie, cooler now, shook off Sal’s restraining arm. “Have you ever done it?”
“A STAR? No. But—” Sal tried a smile. “—it’s in the manual.” He then resorted to a favorite line of Freeman’s lighter moments, taken from one of his favorite movies, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
“Ja,” repeated Sal, “it’s in zee manual. A German officer can do anything from zee manual.”
“Seriously, though, Aussie,” put in Choir. “They drop instructions with it?”
“I fuckin’ hope so! The marines only use volunteer crew.”
“You think he went back?” said Johnny Lee.
“Of course he went back, Johnny,” said Aussie. “Fucking det cord fucked up so the old man’s gone back down the hole. Alone. Stupid bastard.” It was a term of affection. “Think Thomas is helping him?”
“I dunno,” said Sal. “She could’ve collapsed under the belly of the Stallion. It was a hell of a rush before we left. Not even the Cobra would have seen her.”
Sal was only half right. Melissa Thomas hadn’t collapsed in the evac rush. And the Cobra hadn’t seen her, nor had Freeman. In the maelstrom of swirling reeds and muddy snow that was aerosoled by the downward blast of the Stallion’s rotors, the general, quickly pulling on his gas mask, had slipped back into the tall reeds to retrieve his pack. Melissa Thomas, seeing him, intuitively sensed he wasn’t going to evac, that he was going back down to rectify the broken det cord or remove whatever had either fallen on it or been put there by a terrorist in a last-ditch effort to stop the detonation of the C-4 laid by the team. She owed him her life. From the moment he had astonished his men, dragging her blindfolded onto the ant heap, the adrenaline rush triggered by her body’s reaction to the ant bites’ poison bringing her back to life, she had incurred a debt that any human being would understand. Was she overconfident, she wondered, putting a neophyte’s faith in the corps, in the article of faith that the marines, as always, would be back to get as many people out as possible? Or, given the naked fact that the deadline had now passed, would she merely be listed as MIA, the best she could hope for to be honored in absentia?
What Marine Thomas didn’t know was that what Freeman and his team member Sal had surmised might be a chute was indeed a parachute, Abramov landing sodden and bruised but otherwise unhurt in the reed-dense minefield. Abramov made no attempt to chase his chute or rein it in. Instead, he stood precisely where he had landed, knowing he was in the minefield, and, though his legs were trembling with the effort of sustaining the weight of the bundles of U.S. thousand-dollar bills beneath his tank commander’s uniform and the sheer weight of the twenty small gold bullion bars he wore in a belt, he remained on spot, making one call on his cell to his tank commander, Colonel Nureyev.
“Dancer. Release El-Hage and friend. And tell your men there’s bullion for Freeman’s head.”
“Done, General,” said Colonel Nureyev, who then called whatever ABC staff were still on duty. Most had fled, but a radio operator still on duty had apprised Nureyev of the intercepts that had been made of the American aircraft communication and that Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had left together in the transports, with Abramov, as overall commander, having taken the vital DARPA ALPHA computer disk with him. Having now spoken with Abramov, Nureyev concluded that, of the three, Abramov was the sole survivor of the Igla MANPAD attack. Nureyev then called his own private troop of four T-90s. “I know,” he told them, “that the Americans are pulling out, but this Freeman bastard is still around. American channels were randomly monitored by our scanners during their first wave evac. One intercept was specifically asking, ‘Where’s Freeman?’ So he’s still out there. Strictly speaking, we’re on a cease-fire order, some girlfriend deal between our two so-called presidents, following the deadline. But out here, we rule, and there’s bullion on his head. Who wants in?”
One of the four tank teams opted out — they’d seen enough destruction, five T-90s taken out by marine anti-tank missiles and Hummer-fired TOWs. But the three remaining tank crews opted for the chance of bullion.
“Let’s hope, Captain,” Nureyev told his 2IC, “that El-Hage doesn’t get Freeman before we do.”
“Right,” said the captain. “Do we have a GPS on Freeman?”
“No, but the Iglas that brought down Abramov could have only come from the tunnels, and they haven’t been blown. I don’t think that American shithead has come all this way to kill us only to leave our factory intact. Those SpecOp teams carry around plastique like you and I carry keys. They always have it. I’ll bet ten to one, Captain, that the bastard is still sniffing around the tunnels with his boys.”
“Very well then,” said the captain. “I know where I’ll take my tank.”
“Meanwhile,” said Nureyev, “I’ll take my tanks out to the minefield road and run over some Bettys to get Abramov out. The sight of all that lovely currency going sky-high and getting burned up is enough to make you ill.”
“Yes, so be careful in that minefield,” said the captain.
“Ah,” said Nureyev dismissively, “I can run over those Betty anti-personnel jobs no problem. They won’t even rattle my beast’s treads.”
“Yes,” the Russian tank captain agreed, “but don’t get too close. You don’t want shrapnel from a bouncing Betty to burn those dollar bills.”
“You think I’m stupid?” countered Nureyev. “I’ll get just close enough to extend the main gun to him. He grabs it and I’ll swing the gun around behind us.”
“But—” began the captain, until he sensed the Dancer’s wide grin and understood: A tank with its gun pointing to the rear was giving the sign of surrender. “So you see,” said Nureyev, “any asshole American with an anti-tank weapon won’t fire at me.”
“Be careful the general doesn’t lose his grip on the gun’s barrel.”
“Would you, until you were out of the minefield?”
“No, Comrade,” replied the captain. “I’d hang on like grim death.”
“So would I,” agreed Nureyev with a smile, his mood clearly elevated by the promise of the largest bonus ever paid by ABC — now A.
“All right, let’s go,” ordered Nureyev. “You get to that exit and put a few rounds down that shaft.” The captain paused, and Nureyev could hear him pulling down his ribbed leather helmet. “One thing I don’t get, Comrade. I thought this Freeman and his team were supposed to attack the entrance, not the exit?”
“That’s what we thought, but from what the boys who are still in H-block tell me, Freeman sent a bogus message to an American colonel. Rumor is that there was a signal within the signal that deliberately misled Abramov — something about a baseball player in America who claimed he had never wagered and was thrown out when it was found he lied. So when this Freeman said he was going to attack the H-block and the tunnels’ joint entrance below, our decoders, or Abramov himself, didn’t recognize this thing about the baseball player. It was like a verbal wink, you see, like saying, ‘I’m saying this but I’m going to do the opposite.’”
“Cunning shit,” said the captain. “I’ll take great delight in personally running over him.”
“Watch him. He may still have an Igla.”
The captain buttoned up his tunic and tapped on his throat mike. “Ivan, let’s roll. We have Yankees to kill.” The captain wasn’t worried about Iglas. They would bring down aircraft, no problem, but he’d seen them fired against a T-90’s glacis plate and its top — where armor was thinnest — and the HE charge just hit the tank and made a hell of a bang but no penetration whatsoever. “Ivan?” he asked his driver. “You watch all that TV shit. What’s that English phrase those Yankee game show hosts use?”
Ivan was thinking. “‘Come on down.’”
“Nyet,” said that captain. “That’s not it. You know — the one Bush Junior used against his enemies in his election campaign.”
Ivan didn’t know.
“Ah, I have it,” the captain declared jubilantly. “Bring it on!”
“Don’t freak!” Melissa Thomas told herself. “Don’t freak out.” It was difficult not to when she saw the huge black blob moving through the high reeds, especially when she realized it was a Russian state-of-the-art, infrared-laser-targeting-equipped main battle tank and when she didn’t know whether General Freeman would emerge from the pitch-black square that had been the exit door which she had seen him enter shortly after the last evac chopper had left. Down there now the general would have only his infrared-keyed night vision goggles by which to see, all the lighting, from the snippets she’d heard as the team had come up from the tunnel, taken out in the firefight.
“General,” she said on open channel, “a T-90’s coming out of the minefield.” If he heard her, maybe that would bring him up. “I say again, a T-90 is coming out of the minefield, heading our way.”
Freeman froze in shock. By now he’d descended the ninety-foot-long stairway into the bowels of the tunnel complex. Melissa — where the hell was she? And more to the point, why hadn’t she evaced? He didn’t dare answer immediately. Someone near or amongst the dead bodies of the terrorists must have somehow severed the det cord and might hear him reply. His right hand grasping his 9 mm H K handgun, he was on his knees, using his left hand to feel along the cord of the middle tunnel for a break.
“General! Are you reading me?”
Again he said nothing, and squelched the volume button. Ahead of him, through the infrared lenses, he was concentrating on the long assembly line of the middle tunnel. But it was slow, meticulous work, for no matter that Freeman had his night vision goggles functioning, the line of bodies he saw ahead was still a threat. During the firefight, a terrorist could have faked it, hiding in some nook or antechamber in one of the three tunnels which the team felt confident had been swept clean of the violently coughing terrorists who were trying to flee what they had thought was poison gas. No one else had come out of the exit since the team had gone in to “take out the garbage,” as Aussie had put it. And the explosion-buckled entrance doors at the far end of the tunnel were impassable.
Maybe, Freeman told himself, no one had severed the det cord. Perhaps it could have been cut by something heavy, such as a box of MANPADs falling from one of the stacks along the tunnel walls.
In the dank darkness all about him, fetid with the stench of human waste, he could hear a faint dripping. Then he saw darts of white light crossing his NVGs’ field of vision. Rats. Intuitively he wanted to hurry up, go topside, and try to position himself well enough so that he could trigger his identification friend or foe beacon, realizing there might still be a risk of rogue terrorist elements still prowling around after the marines’ first evac wave. And the general prayed that Melissa Thomas would be all right until the second evac wave. Freeman had been touched that she’d stayed behind, offering him backup. But on an op like this, searching for just one det cord break, one soldier was enough. Besides, though she’d come out of her semicomatose state, she had the awful pain of a broken rib, and he was unsure how steady she was on her feet. The tunnels weren’t the place to find out.
Silently he asked God to protect the young woman who had stayed behind. He had prayed a lot over the past twenty-four hours — never more for absolution as they’d gunned down the terrorists after only one, at the most, three, had fired at the team — and wildly at that.
Suddenly a body moved, then another. Freeman swung his sidearm in their direction and stayed his trigger finger. It had been rigor mortis setting in, an arm jerk of one of the dead terrorists enough to produce movement but no threat. Lord, he was tired. Now he could hear moaning, but was sure, from his long experience of combat, that it was no more than the sounds of bowel, stomach, and throats changing volume after death, bad air expelled. Get a grip on yourself, he silently ordered himself. General Freeman! You’re tired. Keep alert but don’t overreact.
He moved forward again slowly, his left hand cautiously sliding along the det cord.
When Melissa Thomas saw the T-90 slowing about five hundred yards beyond the perimeter of the minefield, she had hoped it would stop coming eastward, and turn about westward, and go away. The rain was still heavy and she knew that, despite her thermal clothing, she’d soon be in the early stages of hypothermia unless she started to move. Her body, despite one morphine jab, was throbbing with the sharp, needle-stabbing pain of hundreds of ant bites and her broken rib. She saw the tank’s cupola open, sighting it through her M40A1’s scope, resting the rifle on the gnarled tree branch at the edge of a clump of reed grass just beyond the wood. She could see a man’s head or, more accurately, a man’s bearded face, enclosed in the peculiarly antiquated thick, ribbed-leather helmet favored by both modern Russian and old Soviet bloc tank commanders and crews. The bearded face looked about quickly then disappeared. Now Marine Thomas was cursing herself in terms that would have shocked a longshoreman. Why hadn’t she got away a quick “slap” shot? Because, she told herself, truthfully, you weren’t ready, you silly bitch. You were so full of “poor me” and your ant-bitten, cold ass that you weren’t on the ball. But at least the tank was now moving southward, reminding her, in the neurotic manner of its sudden and abrupt change of course, of some mad bird dog, fast right, then left, fast right again, as it passed through the shoulder-high reeds, at times only its turret visible.
In the central tunnel, still moving slowly, one of a soldier’s most difficult disciplines, feeling his way along the det cord to find the break, the general’s breathing echoed inside his gas mask, and he could detect faint whiffs of tear gas. Probably the filter needed to be changed or, more likely, his head strap had slipped, his neck aching from the unusual strain of having to simultaneously stay alert for danger in the tunnel and outside. If the fingers of his hand missed even one millimeter-wide break he would have to repeat the whole process. Unable to contain the itch in his throat from the whiff of tear gas, he coughed.
“You okay, General?”
Melissa’s voice so startled him he lost his place on the det cord, quickly raising his handgun for a double-handed shot before he realized it was Thomas’s voice in his earpiece.
“Yes,” he said. “Having a great time!” It was the most sarcastic voice she’d heard since her DI’s, immediately followed by a more compassionate question from him, “How you doing?”
“I’m holding,” she said. “Tank’s sniffing around. Think it’s looking for us.”
By “us,” she meant not only her and the general but those other marines still dug in throughout the area of reeds and swamp-bordered woods, but “us” gave Freeman the impression that the tank was specifically looking for him and Thomas. A main battle tank with a 125 mm main gun and machine guns tended to make things very personal.
Freeman’s left hand resumed its feel of the detonation cord. Suddenly his NVG’s view was of a white jumble of bodies that looked like a long pile of clothes waiting to be ironed, the heat given off by the bodies sufficiently warm to register as “thermals” on his NVGs.
General Abramov reached up like a man doing his morning calisthenics and took a firm hold, wrapping both arms around the muzzle of Nureyev’s T-90’s main gun. Once before, Abramov had told Nureyev, this shit Freeman had caused trouble as leader of the U.S.-led “peace intervention” in Sirbir. Well, now he was going to pay for it. All legends die, whether those who embrace the legend wish to concede the point or not. After having carefully followed the GPS route and running over five anti-personnel mines so they could get safely to him, the tank now backed out of the minefield, Nureyev having reversed the gun.
When Marine Thomas saw this second tank, with Abramov hanging from its main gun, moving slowly away east of the mad bird dog tank that was busily sniffing in the reeds beyond the minefield, she estimated the distance between it and her to be about a mile, though in the downpour that obscured lenses and made a constant hiss in the reeds it was difficult to gauge, even using the scope’s range finder. But she knew she had to move, the cold in her bones now making her feel, she imagined, like her great-grandfather who suffered 24/7 from the curse of fibromyalgia, from the despair of which nothing short of narcotic painkillers and the Good Book could help him. Every bone in her body was heavy with the ague, every muscle taut with strain, only one more disposable “jab” of morphine left. She forced herself to think of the second evac wave, which would surely be back within the hour. Please, God.
As dusk settled on this strangely beautiful but, for Melissa, godforsaken, reed-world west of the huge lake, she remembered the SpecWar guy Aussie Lewis telling her it was nearly four times bigger than Oahu, and she remembered stepping off the plane there and how warm it was, before the marines began their long haul to Japan. She was starting to drift; for a blessed moment her pain-racked brain was able to conjure up the fragrant kiss of the trade winds, the sound of crashing, lacy surf, and the sun of those blessed, healing isles.
Her brief reverie was broken by the bass bellow of the first T-90 bursting out of the reeds no less than a quarter of a mile away, heading straight for her or, she guessed, the tunnel exit, and now she understood why the mad bird dog tank wasn’t so mad and indecisive as it had seemed. While the other T-90 Melissa had seen had stopped in the minefield, only its cupola visible, its more agile comrade had no doubt been sent to scour east and west of the minefield exit to make sure there were no more tank-destroying Predator, Javelin, or TOW units whose marines might be tempted to fire, and to hell with the presidents’ timeline for evac that had passed already. No doubt about it now. This mad bird dog tank was racing, doing at least forty miles per hour, running parallel to the minefield, charging through the reeds like a bull elephant in a surge of uncontrollable sexual “must,” leaving a thick shower of tangled vegetation, reeds, birds’ nests, dead birds, Euriale leaves, and splintered ice in its wake, simultaneously firing its coaxial and 7.62 mm machine guns like some thundering giant savagely obliterating any impediments before it, its exhaust pipes all the while vomiting filthy brown clouds over the hitherto pristine, clean greens of reeds and lotus.
When this monster came to a halt, it did so so abruptly that a wave of broken ice, reeds, and feathers surged forward from its wake along the midline of the tank just as the turret slewed to bring the main gun in line with the tunnel’s exit which, for Melissa, was two hundred yards away at two o’clock but only fifty yards dead ahead for the tank.
Melissa heard the telltale rotor slap of Cobra gunships. Then, a few seconds later, the much bigger air-pummeling noise of Super Stallions and other helos she couldn’t identify. Her heart pounding, she was elated, confused. Yorktown’s angels couldn’t possibly have returned so soon. Or could they? It must, she reasoned, be the pain of the multiple insect bites that was momentarily stupefying her brain until, her mind in excited overdrive, she realized the obvious truth, that Yorktown had managed to scramble an ad hoc second wave of helos from all around the fleet. Any helo that could carry drop tanks of extra fuel to cover the distance to Lake Khanka had no doubt been pressed into service, once SATPIX or HUMINT indicated to McCain’s Blue Tile boys that there was still terrorist tank movement after the cease-fire deadline, and such terrorist movement posed an undeniably clear and present danger to whatever elements of Yorktown’s MEU remained to be evacuated.
Melissa saw the T-90 belch recoil like a drunken garbage truck, the boom of its big 125 mm gun frightening her more than anything since the “water facility” at Parris Island. The crash of the high explosive round echoing back from the base of the exit stairway ninety feet below the surface was gut-punching and deafening. The blast wave hurled cement forward into the tunnels as well as spewing dirty clouds up the exit, hitting the T-90, the din momentarily drowning what had been the soft drumming of the rain.
While Melissa Thomas had started with fright, Freeman was knocked flat, as if some huge, invisible fist had slammed him down, winding him so severely that in order to breathe he rolled onto his back, tore off his gas mask, and gulped for air in the dust-thick darkness, his right — pistol — hand flung out in a desperate effort to take in as much air as possible. As well as much-needed oxygen, he also inhaled more residual tear gas. Still on his back, he put the mask back on and saw a white rain coming down onto his NVGs, sodden peat as well as red-hot pieces of floor grating falling indiscriminately about him, a brick striking his helmet, another hitting the chest area of his Kevlar vest, and yet another fragment striking his face, or rather the eyepiece of his gas mask, with such force that it spiderwebbed the hardened glass of the right lens, ramming the whole mask so hard against his face that the general felt as if he’d been in a barroom brawl. He could taste blood, and it was a moment or two before he recovered his senses, realizing that what had saved him from a worse fate was that as he’d rolled over the det cord, most of his head had been covered, not only by the gas mask and helmet but by the overhang afforded by the edge of the long, metallic MANPAD assembly table.
Now he could smell smoke.
Ninety feet above what had been the tunnels’ guard antechamber at the base of the exit steps, the cupola of the T-90 opened, terrifyingly close to Melissa who, no more than thirty feet away, was hunkered down near the fallen twisted branch and sea of reeds and realized that what she was looking at was not a regular T-90 but an upgraded version, reminiscent of the brilliant Israeli Merkava main battle tank with its troop squad section added to the rear of the tank that contained a commander, gunner, loader, and driver. She saw the tank commander appear, babbling excitedly, his torso above the cupola, and she could hear raucous laughter from the tank crew. Before she realized it, her weapon stock was hard into her shoulder, her left eye closed, the right cupped by the M40A1’s scope, only part of the commander’s head filling her water-streaked telescopic sight. She held a half breath to steady — and didn’t fire. The commander was getting out of the tank, followed by another crew member, then another, which told her that something must be wrong with the automatic loader. It was being replaced by a third crew member. But why were the terrorists exiting the tank?
The cupola banged shut, the tank buttoned up. The commander huddled momentarily in the downpour then drew his pistol, turning to one of the other two terrorists, one of whom handed him a flashlight.
Why on earth, wondered Melissa, would they bother venturing down the tunnel after the one HE round? Did they know Freeman was down there? Oh, shit! She’d been talking to him on their throat-mike radios. A scanner could have located them pretty accurately, if not with pinpoint precision. Now she could hear louder, distant sounds of Cobras and other helos of the second evac wave. Even given the normal confusion that characterizes the most elementary ship-shore-ship exercise, surely someone must remember to revisit the exit area? On the other hand, it was quite possible that as yet no one of authority in the fleet had heard about Freeman’s absence, but they knew that there were dozens of marines still spread throughout the marshes, waiting.
And did the terrorists want to kill Freeman so badly that they’d violate the twenty-four-hour deadline? She immediately berated herself for such an asinine question, excusing it as the product of her exhaustion. Here was a man, already a legend amongst men at arms, who had humiliated his opposition from one side of the globe to the other. Even his critics had conceded that he had been the soldier who, more than any other, had faced down the homegrown terrorist camps of white supremacists riding what he referred to, and was nearly fired for saying it, as “the understandable anti-immigrant mood” of the U.S. southwestern border states.
Melissa, fighting the cold in her sodden uniform, began shivering violently, her body assaulted by paroxysms of uncontrollable muscle spasms. All she had to cling to was the image of her DI at the water facility, his peaked hat, trouser crease sharp as a knife, arms akimbo, standing like the one and only God, declaring simply, but with the steel voice of utter conviction, “Cadet Thomas, you will prevail. Water is your friend, not your enemy. The chemical soup of your mother’s womb was the same as the sea. You are in your element, marine. Swim. Swim. Swim for the corps.”
She’d hated him for it, the badgering, but now it was his image, his immaculate sense of order and calm in the face and fear of chaos, that made her fight.
The three Russians walked toward the exit then hesitated, dust and debris still issuing forth too thick to breathe through. The commander returned to the tank, banged on the cupola, and shouted. The cupola opened and a crewman in a leather-ribbed helmet emerged and began passing down three biochem masks. Melissa took a half breath and squeezed the trigger. There was a bullwhiplike crack and the crewman’s head jerked sideways, his body slumping, half in and half out of the cupola. Thomas worked the bolt action on her sniper rifle — up-back-forward-down — so fast she had the tank commander in sight before he could step back off the tank’s front glacis plate, his hands dropping two of the biochem masks as he hit the ground where he died instantly from Melissa’s chest shot. Unable to get back into the tank because of the terrorist slumped in the cupola, the other two men started to run for the tunnel exit. She felled one of them, the other running blindly into the exit’s thick haze. She ignored him, her open sight back on the cupola. Her brain simply bullied her pain and cold aside, adrenaline alone stoking her determination as she smartly assessed the situation. The tank wouldn’t move yet. An open cupola with Cobra gunships around was guaranteed death. All she needed was a hand in her scope. A second would be plenty. Someone was going to have to pull or push the dead man out of the cupola so they could close the thing before a grenade came their way. They had no idea whether Melissa’s fire had come from one marine or more. She could hear panic in the tank, then the turret suddenly slewed, the 7.62 coaxial machine gun opening up, the turret moving through 180 degrees, but Marine Thomas kept her cool. It was something the Marine Corps held in contempt: wild, unfocused fire. At Parris they called it “Hollywood fire”—wasting ammunition. A marine’s shot, on the other hand, was always aimed to kill. The fire from the 7.62 was too high — the bullets zipped overhead. She saw the man’s body that was slumped half in, half out of the cupola suddenly, noisily, fall down back into the tank, then a hand shot up to grab hold of the cupola lid’s inside hand grip and she fired, heard a scream, and fell to the ground as the 7.62 mm rounds began chopping into the wood close right and — damn, she hadn’t warned Freeman. She flicked on her mike. “General, it’s Marine Thomas. There’s a terrorist in the tunnel and—”
“There was,” came the general’s nasal reply. She heard the general laugh. “Damned fool switched on a flashlight. Those stupid leather helmets they wear. ID’d him straightaway.”
Freeman couldn’t hear any more machine gun fire in the background; the only sound now was the muffled rotor slap of the helos’ second-wave evacuation. It was the sound of promise, of getting out, of freedom in its most literal, easy-to-understand manifestation, the freedom of a human being able to go from one place to another at will, not subject to some order from a totalitarian regime where terrorists such as the Taliban ruled.
Forcing himself back to the task at hand, the general felt for the det cord again, resumed his crawl, and, after a few more yards, realized why half of what had earlier been a more or less continuous line of terrorist bodies was now partially obscured: A crate of heavy MANPAD parts had fallen in the melée from the top of a stack of crates that had been piled high in the middle tunnel, the impact of the crate’s sharp edge against the metal grid severing the det cord. He pushed the box of MANPAD parts off the det cord, then, using his knife, he quickly cut the cord and overlapped the two ends by about a foot and attached det cord clips. He then took out his time-delay pencil initiator and crushed the vial, releasing the acid that in five minutes would eat away a thin restraining wire that would in turn release the spring-held firing pin, the pin then striking a percussion cap which would initiate the final sequence in the explosive train.
The general now quickly moved back toward the exit. His NVGs picked up a speckled bloom of light, caused by still-falling dust particles whose radiant heat from the tank round was still enough to faintly illuminate the exit stairs. Suddenly he felt, then heard, the earth trembling above him. It was the forty-seven-ton T-90, crewless except for the driver who was screaming in agony from a bullet-smashed right hand.
With three minutes to go in the tunnel, Freeman easily cleared the body of a terrorist whose flashlight was still on, the general then crashing into a folding card table that against all odds was still standing, albeit with one severed leg. But the general was up and running, with two minutes to go. As he reached the last five stairs to the top of the exit he was aware of a flash of light “blooming out” his NVGs with overload. Though virtually blind for the next few seconds, he felt the wet draft of air on his hands and on the skin between his battle jacket and the bottom of the gas mask. He remembered to turn hard left away from the mined area, running into an uneven patch of tank-mashed reeds, falling, getting up, his feet unable to gain purchase, the ground shifting, then he heard the “whoomp,” the roiling of the explosion knocking him off his feet. As if a ballistic missile had been launched from its silo, a huge V of dirt and debris shot out and up from the exit toward the higher ground, falling near the edge of the wood where he’d last seen Melissa Thomas. But now all was a cloud of dark gray dust over sodden earth, the clouds of burned chemicals and noxious fumes from the incinerated terrorists’ dungeon now spreading out.
Unable to see more than a foot in front of him, all Douglas Freeman could identify with certainty was the eardunning sound of the Cobra gunships’ chain guns, the Cobras’ tracers, if his sense of direction was intact, streaming toward the H-block. It was a maelstrom of fire, being delivered as punishment for the terrorists having violated the twenty-four-hour agreement, a venting of the Americans’ outrage against what the gunships’ pilots had clearly seen themselves and heard from rescued marine stragglers who had alerted the marine forces to the presence and activity of the T-90 tanks.
Freeman flicked on his mike to contact the pilots, but he could tell immediately that that bastard Murphy had struck again. All he could hear was static. And he was worried about Melissa Thomas.
At least the rain was easing, and a fragrant wind was rushing in from the Wanda Shan to replace the harsh, hot air of the detonation, an explosion which Freeman knew had completely destroyed the three tunnels, assembly lines, and the terrorists’ entire stock of shoulder-fired MANPADs, hypersonic small rounds, and torpedo prototypes. Boosting the general’s weary, yet decidedly effusive, mood, was the rapid withdrawal of the T-90 that had fired point-blank into the exit and was now paying for it by being attacked by the Cobras, who had initially come into Khanka as nothing more than escorts for the evac Stallions. The general’s celebratory high was quickly punctured, however, by his growing concern for Melissa Thomas. With the radio out, no flare gun, and the air around him thick with debris, how could he communicate his and her situation to the mission’s air arm? “Wait a minute,” he scolded himself. “Run, you bastard, run out of this crap cloud. No one can see you here. Run!” And he did, until he saw the two dead tank crewmen, whom he immediately checked for flares. Nothing. He ran on until his knees seemed to be on fire and he burst out into relatively clear air and the reeds. The choppers were gone, their gas tanks’ loiter times exhausted.
The general morphed into an angry savage, cursing with such force and volume that he dared any damned Russian terrorists who hadn’t had enough to show themselves and he’d personally shoot them. And when he ran out of ammunition he’d go strangle the bastards with his bare hands. Battle fatigue, he told himself. He saw a white blur coming at him and fired two quick shots. It was a small, man-sized parachute, one of half a dozen dropped either by either the unseen Cobra gunships or the Super Stallions.
“They’re message chutes. I’ve opened one.” He swung around, startled by her voice. Relieved, fatigued, and enormously embarrassed for having been caught firing at a parachute, and a small one at that, Freeman hurried over to the voice and found Melissa Thomas shivering violently, whereas he was perspiring profusely underneath the layers of Kevlar and battle tunic, with heat to spare. He embraced her in a bear hug.
The message in the milk-pail-sized canister attached to the chute was
ENCLOSED INFRARED X FOR SATELLITE OVERFLIGHT STOP MOTHER WILL THEN EXECUTE STAR STOP GOOD LUCK
“I’ve—” She was shivering so badly she could hardly speak. “—spread — the X over there.” Her hand shaking, Melissa was pointing to a flattened area of reeds. Freeman could see her face was tinged with the telltale bluish hue of impending hypothermia.
She pointed to the word STAR. “I — haven’t — a clue what—”
“Don’t talk. You’ll waste energy,” he advised her, while simultaneously trying not to show his alarm at the gross violation of operational procedure exhibited by whomever it was who had sent a message, especially one with such specific instructions. What if the enemy had picked it up? The fact that HQ had taken such a risk, however, told Freeman just how desperate operational HQ must be, the message, indeed the drop itself, stark evidence that time was quickly running out for him and Melissa Thomas. “We’ve got to get you warm,” he told her. “Don’t worry about STAR. It’s an acronym for a recovery system. I’ll tell you more about it if and when they see that X. They may wait till dark in case any of these terrorist bastards are wandering around—” He paused for breath. “—though I expect by now they know their money machine’s kaput, so what’s the point?” He looked around at the wood and marsh. Everything was soaking wet. “We’ve got to get you under cover. We’ll go into the tunnel exit. We can get dry clothes down there. Wrap ourselves in those and snuggle, if you’ve no objection. Warm you up. We’ll hear Mother when she comes.” He meant “if” a rescue plane comes, but Thomas didn’t need discouragement on top of her plummeting body temperature.
Once in the driest, least bloodstained clothes he could bring her, dressing himself only after he’d helped her, they set up an improvised machine gun nest just in from the tunnel’s exit, he dragging in the dead T-90 captain and crewman to use as an ad hoc barricade on which to rest his AK-74 and her sniper rifle, he down to his last clip of thirty rounds. He embraced her with his left arm, leaving his right holding the Kalashnikov, ready to fire. “No time to be shy, Marine,” he told her. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather!” he joked. “Come in close. I’ve got enough hot air to thaw a frozen turkey.” She tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t respond, her teeth literally chattering, but she did feel a suggestion of warmth.
As Freeman held the young woman, like other soldiers who had saved their comrades in the same manner from perishing of cold, he became aware of a smell other than their body odor and the reek of charred equipment and burnt flesh in the tunnels. It was the faint but very definite smell of a woman, and he thought of his first wife, Catherine, and Margaret. It was so distant, as if their love-making had been a dream long ago.
“Don’t you ever tell anyone,” he told Melissa, “that I shot at a damned parachute.” She said nothing, barely hearing him over the soft moan of the China wind whistling about the tunnel exit, the warmth of his closeness seeping into her. No one at Parris would believe it, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone for the sake of both their reputations. She felt the general start. Something had spooked him.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“A vehicle,” he answered. “Maybe a truck.”
“Not the plane?”
“No. If—when—that comes, we’ll know it. They’ll use a four-engined Herk for our pickup.”
Although warming, Melissa still felt desperately cold. It was as if the cogs in a wheel in her brain had slowed with the precipitous drop in her temperature. For a moment she was confused by him mentioning “our pickup.” She thought he’d mentioned a plane, not a pickup truck.
It was a pickup truck the general had heard, and it was being driven by a sallow-skinned man in the navy blue padded uniform of Chinese and Russian workers and peasants along the border between the two countries, the map line separating the two running across the top quarter of the lake, about forty miles north of the tunnel exit.
Next to the man in the small Jinlin pickup, whose motor sounded like nothing much more than a two-stroke lawn mower, sat a blue-eyed boy of about twelve, his skin so fair that he was often thought by the others in Wadi El-Hage’s cell to be a European. On missions, he and El-Hage never spoke Arabic, only English, the world’s language of business, El-Hage pronouncing it in a halting, schoolboylike fashion, the blue-eyed boy with the fluency and colloquialisms of an educated American schoolboy, a youngster who, at Hamas’s expense, had spent five of his years in a tightly controlled madrassa in the U.S. There the boy had grown up in a North American cultural sea, his task, as he was reminded daily, to immerse himself, to learn as much as he could about the infidel nation.
“You must be happy,” said El-Hage, “to be so soon in Paradise.”
“Yes,” said the boy. “I am ready.”
“Think of Azzah,” El-Hage told him, recalling the woman he’d used to help indoctrinate the blue-eyed boy. “She taught you the pleasure a woman can give a young man. In Paradise there will be seventy-two virgins like her, yes, all waiting to pleasure you. Most men much older than to you—”
“Older than you,” said the boy dispassionately. “Not older to you.” El-Hage always made such elementary grammatical mistakes.
“What? Oh yes. I am sorry, Jamal. Older than you. Well, you see, not even those older than you obtain such pleasuring.” El-Hage saw yet another parachute canister, this one poking out from a clump of bushes that were barely visible amid the encroaching reeds. He and the boy had seen several of the milk-pail-sized canisters which, attached to small parachutes, had floated down from the infidels’ giant helicopters before they all left, the pilots and crew unable to see any more survivors in the thick smoke that had spewed out from the tunnel explosion and soon filled the evening sky. El-Hage had already stopped several times on the narrow, raised roadway through the low-lying marshes, and had waded in knee-high water to retrieve one of the canisters and thrown it into the back of the Jinlin, though even the boy could not tell El-Hage what to make of “STAR” in the canister’s written directions. But whatever it was, the phrase “pickup,” he told El-Hage, meant just that, and indicated that this infidel general and some soldier called Thomas were still missing. If they saw an infidel cross spread out, no doubt a signal for the infidel’s rescue, it would also locate Freeman for El-Hage and the boy.
“There it is!” said the boy, sitting abruptly forward, pointing to a spot almost a quarter of a mile to his left. The light was fading, and while neither he nor El-Hage could see a parachute, the white cross could be seen atop a reed island.
“Yes, yes, now remember—” El-Hage, though he had switched to English, was speaking more quickly than he normally did when giving his Hamas cell its instructions. “—you are looking for help for your poor father, a pond fisherman who is ill, and—”
“I know,” said the boy sharply, also in English. “I know. Our engine has broken down. Could he please help us?”
“Yes, and I will stand by the engine’s hood and look into the engine and I will appear—” El-Hage now allowed himself a small laugh. “I will — I will appear how? The word you taught me.”
“Mystified,” the boy told him.
“Yes, very mystified.”
The boy laughed, and El-Hage saw the imperturbable courage, the cool determination in the boy’s eyes. This time the boy, unlike other martyrs of Islam, would not be wearing a bomb belt. The Americans, the British, and other degenerates had grown wise to the dynamite-belted bombers since the infidels’ occupation of Iraq. “Do not speak English very well,” advised El-Hage for the umpteenth time. “Otherwise they will—”
“Too well,” the boy corrected him. “I know, I must sound like a peasant. I am begging the American for help.” He adopted a forlorn look, his pleading, snuffling manner in keeping with the rumpled Russian garb, selected and dirtied for the mission by El-Hage himself. “‘Please, you help my father. His car. No go. It no good. You help, please.’”
“Good,” said El-Hage. “But remember, if they ask how it is you know a little English?”
“At school. Yes,” said the boy in the exasperated tone of a much older, more mature boy who had learned not only of the pleasures of the beautiful Azzah, but English as well.
“Who’s that?” Melissa asked Freeman. The voice coming down the exit shaft from above was that of a child. It wasn’t loud, but its “Hello!” was persistent, and Melissa whispered to the general that it sounded as if whoever it was must be very near the spot where they put the cross. Melissa felt resentful, then ashamed. The marine in her wanted to help anyone in trouble, especially a child, but the woman in her wanted more warmth and the safe, protected feeling she had while being held by the general, telling her she was alive, coming back from the brink of hypothermia to the present, the insect bites that had saved her now starting to itch so badly that all she wanted to do was rip off the clothes and scratch till there was no tomorrow.
“Quiet, dammit!” said Freeman, his ill temper surprising him almost as much as it did Melissa, but he had a soldier’s sixth sense of danger. For an instant much of his earlier life, the times of maximum danger, flashed through his mind with a vividness he’d not experienced before but which other soldiers had spoken to him about moments before their death. For all his self-confidence, Douglas Freeman was not a man who had lived with the belief that things always work out for the best. For him, that was demonstrably false in the utterance of one word: Holocaust. And he knew someday would be his day to die. The best anyone could do was try to avoid it, but if you couldn’t, then for him there was only one way to deal with it: bravely.
Extracting himself from the layers of now-warm clothing, and picking up his weapon, trigger finger on the guard, he walked up through the malodorous tunnel, up into the pale square of evening. He heard two things: A boy’s voice calling, “Help, please?” and Melissa Thomas coming out behind him.
When Freeman saw the Jinlin with its hood up, apparently conked out, about a hundred yards away, he was surprised to see a peasant in the ubiquitous quilted blue jacket, pants, and thick fur cap — either Chinese or Russian, it was difficult to tell — staring into the motor as if he didn’t know what to make of it all. Only now did Freeman notice the boy, probably Russian, Freeman thought, off to his left. The boy, who must have walked around the large, marshy depression nearby, was now waving at the general and asking, “Please, you help my father. He sick and truck no go. It no good. You help, please. My English not good but you, you understand?”
“I understand,” said Freeman, trying to quickly assay the situation. “But you just stay where you are for a jiff.”
“Jiff?” asked the blue-eyed boy. “What does this ‘jiff’ mean?”
“It means stay still.”
From almost a mile away Abramov was watching, his nerves rattled by his near-death experiences in the shot-up transport helo and the minefield. He could barely move, so tightly stuffed was his battle uniform and backpack with three different currencies and a back brace belt he’d personally ordered to be altered so that it would carry a bag of ten big-candy-bar-sized ingots of gold.
“A walking bank,” the crew of Nureyev’s tank had called him as they’d fished him out of the minefield.
“What’s the American doing?” Abramov demanded angrily, standing atop the tank next to its cupola with two other bonus-hungry terrorists. Abramov was using the cupola to brace himself, his legs and arms still spasming in reaction to his having had to stand perfectly still and then bear his own weight and that of the gold while dangling from the huge 125 mm gun.
“General Abramov!” called out the tank’s radio operator. “Our crew in Tank 1 has been badly mauled. Only one survivor. He’s withdrawing to H-block.”
“What for?” Abramov snarled. “There’s nothing left for him there. Doesn’t he know what the Cobras did? They’ve destroyed H-block; it’s burning. Computers and everything. Gone!”
“Sir,” Nureyev cut in, “the American must be telling the boy to take off his jacket. Why is he making the boy—”
“Shut up!” ordered Abramov, the weight of his binoculars straining his wrists. “The boy’s in my employ. His guardian’s a big customer of ours — paid half your wages. This Freeman bastard must be suspicious.”
“Looks like he is telling the kid to turn around,” said Nureyev.
Despite his nervous state, or perhaps because of it, Abramov gave a short, guttural laugh. “He suspects the blue-eyed boy. Thinks he might be wired with explosives.”
“Is he?” Nureyev dared to ask. He, as well as his crew, were exhausted by the ever-present threat of being taken out like the others at the beginning of the U.S. raid. “He hasn’t got a bomb belt on,” said Nureyev, watching through his binoculars and still waiting for Abramov’s confirmation of whether or not the boy was wired. “Maybe a grenade?” proffered Nureyev.
“No,” Abramov said, having to lower his binoculars, hands atremble. “But he’s Freeman’s death warrant.”
Freeman glimpsed movement, side right. It was Melissa Thomas coming closer, still in Russian garb, but wearing her American helmet. Hunched over from the weight of the clothing, she looked like a crone. The boy started with fright when he saw her, the suddenness of her appearance rather than her Russian uniform and American helmet surprising him.
“Now take off your pants,” Freeman told the boy slowly.
“But mister, I wish to tell I am not Russian soldier. I am no soldier. I am only twelve years—”
“Be quiet!” snapped Freeman. “Take them off!”
The boy first took off his boots, then the trousers, revealing khaki cotton long johns.
“I am cold,” he complained.
“So am I,” the legendary general told him. “Everybody’s cold. Now take off your long johns.”
“General!” said Thomas. “I hear aircraft—”
She was right. There were three of them. Two were less loud than the other, which seemed slower and was out of sight above the gray three-thousand-foot-high stratus. Night was almost upon them, and the man, Melissa saw, purportedly this boy’s father, was still visible by the Jinlin but becoming more difficult to see in the fast-descending dusk.
“Joint Strike Fighters,” Freeman answered, without turning toward her, watching the boy taking off his underwear and shivering. Melissa didn’t avert her eyes. She’d been trained not to, not after the number of marines lost in Iraq to innocent-looking children who had wandered up to U.S. soldiers with a smile and a “Hi, Mac!” then blown themselves and the marines to pieces.
The blue-eyed boy had no grenades tucked into the crotch of his long johns. He was shivering violently. The rule was not to let them speak, to “chat you up,” as the Brits called it, chat you up all friendly and innocent and then the grenade.
“All right,” Freeman said. “Put your long johns on and pull your jacket and trousers inside out. Pockets as well. And pat them down so I can see.”
To help the boy understand, Freeman, still holding his AK-74 in his right hand, patted his left leg with his left hand, miming what he wanted the boy to do. The kid seemed smart enough, older than his young, blue-eyed innocence would suggest.
Melissa Thomas saw the first two planes, black specks beneath the gray stratus, the thunder and speed of their passing so fast she had only a few seconds to see they were in fact two American Joint Strike Fighters; the third plane, the one the JSFs were obviously protecting, sounded higher and was still hidden by the clouds of stratus, its drone much heavier and slower than the low-level scream of the two JSFs.
Freeman hadn’t seen the planes, “total focus,” as he used to tell Aussie and Co., being the necessity of the moment. Freeman still felt there was something weird. Yes, they’d seen the road track when they landed, and he himself had told the MEU force on Yorktown they might see the occasional rice farmer who spent the winters huddled in the hamlets around the lake, using bundled dried reeds collected during the summer for fuel, but he was cautious nevertheless.
“All right,” said Freeman, pointing down at the boy’s pile of inside-out clothes. “Put your hands up, like this — spread fingers — and walk back from the clothes.”
“Sir,” said Melissa Thomas, “he’s going to die of chill.”
“He’ll die of dynamite if he’s got a stick or two sown into that quilting,” though the general could see that none of the quilted segments was big enough to conceal a stick of dynamite. But you could kill a man with much less. Melissa Thomas had heard just how meticulous the elite forces, such as the SAS, SEALs, Spetsnaz, and Freeman’s SpecFor were. And she’d heard the story about Aussie and the “woman” with the baby. Freeman was quickly but gingerly feeling the quilted clothing, fur cap, and then the boy’s boots, upending and smacking them. Det cord could by itself cripple and maim.
“Sir,” said Thomas. “There’s a container coming down.”
It wasn’t one of the small ones holding white infrared X cloths but was much larger, about twice the size of a forty-five-gallon drum, under a full-size chute. Freeman figured, correctly, that this was all being coordinated by McCain’s Signals Exploitation Space via satellite. They’d homed in on the points of the X that Melissa Thomas had spread out, and had now given the big plane, which sounded like a Herk, the X’s exact GPS address.
Freeman’s concentration on the boy and the indistinct man down by the Jinlin truck didn’t falter for a second. The general didn’t even look in the direction of the descending chute. But as he began patting down the boy’s quilted trousers he could see the peasant by the truck was standing motionless. Why wouldn’t the father be over here by now to see what’s going on? the general asked himself. His son had been made to strip and still he hadn’t moved? But the general could not feel any explosive or triggering device or any unusual heaviness as he lifted the jacket and pants up to gauge their weight. They felt just about right.
“Okay,” he told the boy, pointing down at the clothes. “Put those back on.”
“Okay?” said the boy.
“Yes, it’s okay.”
“You help my father now?”
“Yes.” Freeman turned to Melissa Thomas, who was watching the big canister float down, keeping the scope eye of her M40A1 on Abramov’s unmoving tank. The tank’s crew was no doubt wondering what to do now that there were two state-of-the-art MANPAD-invulnerable Joint Strike Fighters in the area, with tank-busting rockets and cannon.
“Let’s go help your dad,” said Freeman. “Marine Thomas?”
“Sir?”
“Inside the canister you’ll find two dry, insulated boilersuits, a five-hundred-foot cord of reinforced nylex rope, and a seaman’s kit bag — it’s the rolled-up balloon-dirigible bladder — and a tank of helium with an easy-to-release—”
Suddenly his voice was lost in a thunderous roar as the two JSFs screamed out of the stratus in a tight turn and swept over them, rocking wings to say “hello,” and assuring them that if yonder T-90 tank was to cause any trouble, there would be no more T-90.
The boy was zipping up his jacket as Freeman continued. “There’ll be two body harnesses. Put one on.”
“Should I start filling the balloon?”
“Just enough to get it off the ground,” said Freeman. “No more till I get back. Fully inflated, the dirigible’s like a house-sized Goodyear blimp.” He smiled. “But no gondola.” He turned to the boy. “Okay, Let’s go help your father.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry about making you cold,” Freeman apologized. “You understand? Sometimes bad people use children. Do you understand me?”
“Oh yes,” said the blue-eyed boy. “That’s why I want to tell you that this man we’re walking toward is the regional Hamas leader Wadi El-Hage and they told me all this bullshit about how Americans were evil and sent me to school over there to learn English.” He paused. “And where I found that American kids were great.”
Freeman was stunned by the boy’s mature self-confidence and sudden switch from the halting vocabulary one would expect of a peasant to the kind of A-plus high school student he himself had been. The general almost stopped walking, he was so surprised, but the boy continued walking and talking. “But these Hamas assholes have kept me like a prisoner and told me that if I ever left them, they’d hunt me down and kill me, no matter where I went. My pants and jacket are padded with explosive — with what Hamas call spun Semtex. You know what that is?”
“Semtex, yes, but not spun.”
“The detonator is a fine wire and a tiny watch battery in the jacket in a seam tucked into the collar label. The theory is that I tear it and you and I go to Paradise. I don’t believe any of it.” The boy paused now and looked knowingly at Freeman. “In the Middle East, girls can marry at twelve. I know about women. There’s Paradise here if you’re alive. Hamas is nuts. If I went with you, General, they’d chase me down, but if you take El-Hage and me prisoner, people’ll think we’re both locked up. You can take me back to America where I’ll be safe. I’m young, and you have the world’s best plastic surgeons in your witness protection programs.”
The boy’s unemotional, businesslike tone was alarming, chilling. The child had a cold, calculating heart beyond his years, the inheritance of the terrorist heartlessness.
“Is he armed?” Freeman asked, ready to bring up his AK-47 from its casual barrel-down position by his right side.
“A pistol in his waistband,” the boy told him. “He’s left-handed.”
El-Hage was still standing by the truck, as if frozen in time. Wait a minute, thought Freeman, slowing. What if the kid was lying — a sucker ploy to get him away from the sniper, Thomas, her shooter’s eye resting in the scope’s reticule. A no-miss shot, with El-Hage in her scope.
El-Hage suddenly ran to the other side of the truck and snatched up an AK-47. Freeman immediately dropped to the ground, firing as he did so underneath the Jinlin. He heard a cry of pain, the Arab’s legs out from under him, and the man fell, his AK-47 clattering on the Jinlin-flattened reeds. The general unleashed another long burst, and the Hamas leader was grossly spastic in his death throes. He tried to say something to the boy, but only bright arterial blood issued from his mouth, and he was dead.
Freeman heard the rifle’s crack, and wheeled. Thomas, still too weak to shout loudly, had fired a warning shot into the air from her sniper rifle, and was now pointing at the T-90 a half a mile away in the minefield, its gun lowering to slightly below the azimuth, which meant it was about to engage a short-range target. “Run!” Freeman told the boy, who needed no encouragement, having sized up the situation as quickly as the general. They heard the boom of the 125 mm cannon and felt a great rush of air.
“Down!” Freeman yelled as the Jinlin somersaulted ten feet into the air and became a ball of tangled metal and flame crashing to the ground.
Melissa now had the scope on Abramov, his head and that of the other two crewmen by the cupola in her crosshairs. The tank was coming straight for her. Below the Russians were winks of orange light, the T-90’s machine guns sweeping the rain-drenched reeds that Freeman and the boy were racing for.
So enraged was Abramov, kneeling on the tank with one hand on the cupola, that, despite the T-90’s superb suspension, his head kept bobbing around in Melissa’s IR scope. The furious terrorist’s instructions to his driver didn’t allow for any zigzag pattern during the T-90’s charge. He wanted to run Freeman down.
Melissa lowered the M40A1 for a seventy-yard chest shot, and fired. Abramov flew off the tank into its wake, the impact of Thomas’s sniper round against Abramov’s Kevlar vest such that while it didn’t penetrate all the way through, it knocked him ass-over-tit, verkh dnom, as the Russians say, his money-filled backpack leaking a trail of assorted currencies as his body, wrapped in gold, rolled in the tank’s wake.
Though badly wounded and bleeding, Abramov rose in feral rage, screaming at the now-stopped tank, from which Nureyev, his driver, and two other terrorists escaped, risking all to get his money for themselves. The general was waving his 9 mm Makarov menacingly at them as Freeman, emerging from the reeds, fired a long burst. Abramov’s body was sent reeling back, his face a bloody pulp.
The four terrorists, would-be millionaires, held up their hands. One, with a green signal flag, frantically called, “Don’t shoot. No shooting!”
“You’ll take the money and leave?” shouted Freeman, his AK-74 aimed at the four Russians.
“Sure,” said one of them. “No problem.”
Without taking his eyes off the four Russian terrorists, Freeman told the boy to climb quickly up on the T-90 and drop his jacket in, the Russians mesmerized by the brightly colored Euros and thousand-dollar U.S. bills still falling out of Abramov’s torn knapsack and being sucked away by the faint but frigid breeze.
“We get the money now?” asked the man who had been waving the maneuver flag.
“Sure,” said Freeman. “It’s yours.”
The boy had taken off his jacket and, without a glance at Freeman, tore the collar label, dropped the jacket into the hole with his right hand, and slammed the cupola lid down with his left.
There was a noticeably soft “whoomp” in the tank as the boy jumped off, slipped on the wet reeds, and banged his head hard against the tank’s track. The Russian terrorists turned as one, and Freeman cut them down with one long burst, his AK-74’s barrel steaming in the cold. “Grab that backpack,” he told the boy, pointing to Abramov. The boy obeyed quickly, picking up the belt of gold bullion as well. “Here,” said Freeman, stuffing the backpack and gold into a plastic garbage bag he’d taken from his DARPA “goodies” waist pouch. “We’ve got to get a move on. Got a plane to catch.” They were running toward the X. “You okay, son?” Freeman saw fresh blood in the boy’s hair.
The boy didn’t answer, but kept running with Freeman and never looked back at the burning tank and river of spilled fuel that by now was incinerating the dead radio operator who’d remained inside. “Boy” seemed to Freeman a misnomer for someone so mature. But then Hamas had had him. They were a tough outfit, and Douglas Freeman knew it would take some deprogramming at home, a place which at the moment Freeman knew in his gut they had only a fifty-fifty chance of reaching, to straighten the kid out.
The STAR, or Surface-to-Air Recovery technique, was known throughout Special Forces and Special Ops command as a last resort. Indeed, it was the riskiest extraction method ever devised by man.
“You afraid of heights?” Freeman asked the boy as they sprinted to where Marine Thomas, now barely visible in the dusk, had begun preparations as per the instructions in the container as the Herk and its two Joint Strike Fighters loitered overhead.
“Fill it!” Freeman shouted at her. “Time to go. Give the valve its head.”
What a moment before had been the size of a giant jellyfish now quickly expanded into a car-sized and then a small but definite Goodyear blimp-shaped dirigible as the helium silently inflated it, and it rose high into the icy air, unraveling the first one hundred feet of the five-hundred-foot-long specially treated nylon rope that lay coiled at Freeman’s and Melissa Thomas’s feet as they hurriedly donned the multilayered thermal boilersuits complete with hoods, skydiver helmets, and rescue harnesses for each of them.
“You’re going to have to hold on to me tightly, son,” said Freeman. “What’s your name, Blue Eyes?”
“Jamal.”
“All right, Jamal, now the big Hercules — that plane up there — is going to come down pretty low to get us three out of here. First we’ll go up like a—”
“General!” Marine Thomas interjected. “The dirigible’s at full height. We’re the only ones holding it down. The Herk’ll pick it up or—” She had no time to finish; the Hercules, its four turboprop engines roaring, was coming at them at about five hundred feet, a big, metal, horizontal V sticking out from the nose like a forked tongue which, in theory, should snag the nylon rope suspended from above by the blimp. If the V snagged the rope, an automatic clamp would lock the base of the V’s jaw onto the line, the dirigible, still attached to the flex rope, now high above the plane and trailing well behind it. The strain would soon be taken up by the rope, if it worked.
“Ever been on a swing, Jamal?” Freeman shouted against the roar of the Herk as he and Melissa Thomas strapped their harnesses together.
“Yes, I’ve been on lots of swings.”
Freeman took the boy in a bear hug. “Not like this one, kid. You hang on to me no matter what, okay?”
“O—” And they were off, the plane’s V-shaped proboscis having snagged the line, whisking them straight up for 120 feet before the big pendulum swing began, their initial acceleration from the sitting position to more than a hundred feet surprisingly smooth, if very fast, like being whipped up through the air at the end of a five-hundred-foot-long elastic band. The sensation of speed was so frightening and exhilarating that Freeman felt it in his loins as the three of them, in an experience for which not even Top Gun graduates volunteered, went hurtling through frigid air, the lake already far below and behind them, a silver sheen in the moonlight slipping away westward, the black Herk entering cloud. The easy part was over.
Above the Herk, now traveling at 144 miles per hour, the dirigible’s breakaway cords snapped from the sheer stress of the air buffeting its huge volume. Inside the plane, at the Herk’s rear ramp door, one of two volunteer crewmen set about lowering a hook line to catch the lift line, which now arced back from the nose of the Herk, now traveling at 136 miles per hour. Meantime, a second volunteer crewman began working the telescopic arm which would, it was hoped, reach out and grab the lift line so it could be brought closer to the underside of the plane, and Freeman, Jamal, and Melissa winched safely into the plane’s belly.
The boom’s hook missed on the first pass, but snagged the line on the backswing. The winch began its high whine, then suddenly Freeman, Jamal, and Melissa Thomas felt an arm-ripping jolt so severe that Melissa thought their harnesses had split apart, her shout of alarm ripped away by the Hercules’s roaring slipstream. While the jolt, which Freeman thought he’d readied for, failed to loosen his grip on the boy, the general heard something snap, probably, he thought, one of the many wire cables that ran through the aircraft, looming two hundred feet above them, the noise of its big engines reverberating in every bone.
Three minutes and fifty seconds after the enormous jolt, they were being winched into the plane, the night ahead filled with stars. The plane, having climbed and increased speed to 315 miles per hour, was now an hour and half out of Sapporo, Japan. Chipper Armstrong and Rhino Manowski put their escorting Joint Strike Fighters through a synchronized barrel roll for victory as they crossed over Cape Titova and to the southeast saw the metallic glints in the moonlight that were the ships of McCain’s battle group, another two JSFs already aloft to take over escort duty for the Herk. But, apart from the JSF’s barrel rolls, no signal came up to greet the Herk or its passengers who, like those in the carrier battle group, were on strict radio silence, with no running lights showing. The United States was still in a state of war against terror.
One of the two volunteer marine crewmen, coiling the lift rope, greeted the general with a hearty, “Welcome aboard, General!” It was a few seconds before a grateful and exhausted Freeman recognized Peter Norton, his courage reincarnated, his newfound self-respect purchased during the final hours of the evac when he’d repeatedly risked his own life, under fire, to help injured marines aboard.
“Is…” began Melissa, then stopped. “I can’t remember his name.” The noise in the cavernous Herk was giving her a severe headache, and in her utter exhaustion she told the general what marines told one another on a long, fatigue-plagued mission: “I’m dumbed out. Can hardly remember my name.”
Freeman wasn’t listening. He was bending low over Jamal. He was unable to hear the boy’s breathing, which the general knew shouldn’t be surprising given the thundering noise of the big transport. He stared hard at Jamal to see whether his chest was moving, but it was difficult to tell sometimes, particularly with children.
“Jamal?” said Freeman. There was no response. “Jamal?” he said louder, giving the boy a shake.
Nothing.