Stephen Coonts - Combat

A thorough, careful preflight of the bizjets would turn up the bombs, of course. We needed to panic these people, not give them the time to search the jets or find holes to crawl into.

Panic was Julie’s job.

She had grinned when I told her how she would have to do it.

I used the binoculars to check the progress of the walking men. They were about a mile away now, approaching the mat where the airplanes were parked. The laggards were hurrying to catch up with the leaders. Apparently no one wanted to take the chance that he might be left behind.

Great outfit, that.

The head of the column had just reached the jets when I heard the Osprey. It was behind me, coming down the ridge.

In seconds it shot over the fort, which was to my left, and dived toward the runway.

Julie was a fine pilot, and the Osprey was an extraordinary machine. She kept the engines horizontal and made a high-speed pass over the bizjets, clearing the tail of the middle one by about fifty feet. I watched the whole show through my binoculars.

She gave the terrorists a good look at the U.S. Marine Corps markings on the plane.

The Osprey went out about a mile and began the transition to rotor-borne flight. I watched it slow, watched the engines tilt up, then watched it drop to just a few feet above the desert.

Julie kept the plane moving forward just fast enough to stay out of the tremendous dust cloud that the rotors kicked up, a speed of about twenty knots, I estimated.

She came slowly down the runway. Through the binoculars I saw the muzzle flashes as she squeezed off a burst from the flex Fifty. I knew she planned to shoot at one of the disabled jets, see if she could set it afire. The fuel tanks would still contain fuel vapor and oxygen, so a high-powered bullet in the right place should find something to ignite.

Swinging the binoculars to the planes, I was pleasantly surprised to see one erupt in flame.

Yep.

The Osprey accelerated. Julie rotated the engines down and climbed away.

The terrorists didn’t know how many enemies they faced. Nor how many Ospreys were about. They were lightly armed and not equipped for a desert firefight, so they had limited options. Apparently that was the way they figured it too, because in less than a minute the first jet taxied out. Another came right behind it. The third was a few seconds late, but it taxied onto the runway before the first reached the end and turned around.

The first plane had to wait for the other two. There was just room on the narrow strip for each of them to turn, but there was no pullout, no way for one plane to get out of the way of the other two. The first two had to wait until the last plane to leave the mat turned around in front of them.

Finally all three had turned and were sitting one behind the other, pointing west into the wind. The first plane rolled. Ten seconds later the second followed. The third waited maybe fifteen seconds, then it began rolling.

The first plane broke ground as Julie Giraud came screaming in from the east at a hundred feet above the ground. The Osprey looked to be flying almost flat out, which Julie said was about 270 knots.

She overtook the jets just as the third one broke ground.

She had moved a bit in front of it, still ripping along, when the second and third plane exploded. Looking through the binoculars, it looked as if the nose came off each plane. The damaged fuselages tilted down and smashed into the ground, making surprisingly little dust when they hit.

The first plane, a Lear I think, seemed undamaged.

The bomb must have failed to explode.

The pilot of the bizjet had his wheels retracted now, was accelerating with the nose down. But not fast enough. Julie Giraud was overtaking nicely.

Through the binoculars I saw the telltale wisp of smoke from the nose of the Osprey. She was using the gun.

The Lear continued to accelerate, now began to widen the distance between it and the trailing Osprey.

“It’s going to get away,” I whispered. The words were just out of my mouth when the thing caught fire.

Trailing black smoke, the Lear did a slow roll over onto its back. The nose came down. The roll continued, but before the pilot could level the wings the plane smeared itself across the earth in a gout of fire and smoke.

Julie Giraud landed the Osprey on the runway near the sabotaged planes. When I walked up she was sitting in the shade under the left wing with an M-16 across her lap.

She had undoubtedly searched the area before I arrived, made sure no one had missed the plane rides to hell. Fire had spread to the other sabotaged airplanes, and now all three were burning. Black smoke tailed away on the desert wind.

“So how does it feel?” I asked as I settled onto the ground beside her.

“Damn good, thank you very much.”

The heat was building, a fierce dry heat that sucked the moisture right out of you. I got out my canteen and drained the thing.

“How do you feel?” she asked after a bit, just to be polite.

“Exhausted and dirty.”

“I could use a bath too.”

“The dirty I feel ain’t gonna wash off.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I’m breaking your heart.” I got to my feet. “Let’s get this thing back to the cliff and covered with camouflage netting. Then we can sleep.”

She nodded, got up, led the way into the machine.

We were spreading the net over the top of the plane when we heard a jet.

“Getting company,” I said.

Julie was standing on top of the Osprey. Now she shaded her eyes, looked north, tried to spot the plane that we heard.

She saw it first, another bizjet. That was a relief to me — a fighter might have spotted the Osprey and strafed it.

“Help me get the net off it,” she demanded, and began tossing armloads of net onto the ground.

“Are you tired of living?”

“Anyone coming to visit that crowd of baby-killers is a terrorist himself.”

“So you’re going to kill them?”

“If I can. Now drag that net out of my way!”

I gathered a double armful and picked it up. Julie climbed down, almost dived through the door into the machine. It took me a couple minutes to drag the net clear, and took Julie about that long to get the engines started and the plane ready to fly.

The instant I gave a thumb-up, she applied power and lifted off.

I hid my face so I wouldn’t get dirt in my eyes.

Away she went in a cloud of dirt.

She shot the plane down. The pilot landed, then tried to take off when he saw the Osprey and the burned-out jets. Julie Giraud used the flex Fifty on him and turned the jet into a fireball a hundred yards off the end of the runway.

When she landed I got busy with the net, spreading it out.

“You are the craziest goddamn broad I ever met,” I told her. “You are no better than these terrorists. You’re just like them.”

“Bullshit,” she said contemptuously.

“You don’t know who the hell you just killed. For all you know you may have killed a planeload of oil-company geologists.”

“Whoever it was was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Just like your parents.”

“Somebody has to take on the predators,” she shouted at me. “They feed on us. If we don’t fight back, they’ll eat us all.”

I let her have the last word. I was sick of her and sick of me and wished to Christ I had never left Van Nuys.

I got a little sleep that afternoon in the shade under a wing, but I had too much on my mind to do more than doze. Darkness finally came and we took the net off the plane for the last time. We left the net, the Humvee, the trailer, everything. I put all the stuff we didn’t need over and around the trailer as tightly as I could, then put a chemical fuse in the last of the C-4 in the trailer and set it to blow in six hours.