Stephen Coonts: Combat

“Okay, lady. I’m bought and paid for.”

We made our plans over dinner. She drank one glass of wine, and I had a beer, then we both switched to mineral water. I told her I wanted my own pistol and rifles, a request she didn’t blink at. She agreed to fly into Dover Air Force Base on one of the regularly scheduled cargo runs, then take my duffel bag containing the weapons back to Germany with her.

“What if someone wants to run the bag through a metal detector, or German customs wants to inspect it?”

“My risk.”

“I guess there are a few advantages to being a well-scrubbed, cleancut American girl.”

“You can get away with a lot if you shave your legs.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

That was ten days ago. Now we were on our way. Tomorrow we were going to case the old fort and come up with a plan for doing in the assembled bad guys.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of the Humvee sipping coffee and listening to the drone of the turboprops carrying us across the Mediterranean, I got the old combat feeling again.

Yeah, this was really it.

Only this time I was going to get paid for it.

I finished the coffee, went back to the cockpit, and offered Julie a cup. She was intent on the computer screens.

“Problems?” I asked.

“I’m picking up early warning radar, but I think I’m too low for the Libyans to see me. There’s a fighter aloft too. I doubt if he can pick us out of ground return.”

All that was outside my field of expertise. On this portion of the trip, I was merely a passenger.

I saw the land appear on the radar presentation, watched it march down the scope toward us, as if we were stationary and the world was turning under us. It was a nice illusion. As we crossed the beach, I checked my watch. We were only a minute off our planned arrival time, which seemed to me to be a tribute to Julie’s piloting skills.

The ride got bumpy over the desert. Even at night the thermals kept the air boiling. Julie Giraud took the plane off autopilot, hand-flew it. Trusting the autopilot in rough air so close to the ground was foolhardy.

I got out the chart, used a little red spotlight mounted on the ceiling of the cockpit to study the lines and notes as we bounced along in turbulence.

We had an hour and twenty minutes to go. Fuel to get out of the desert would have been a problem, so we had brought five hundred gallons in a portable tank in the cargo compartment. Tomorrow night we would use a hand pump to transfer that fuel into the plane’s tanks, enough to get us out of Africa when the time came.

I sat back and watched her fly, trying not to think about the tasks and dangers ahead. At some point it doesn’t pay to worry about hazards you can’t do anything about. When you’ve taken all the precautions you can, then it’s time to think about something else.

The landing site we had picked was seven miles from the Camel, at the base of what appeared on the chart to be a cliff. The elevation lines seemed to indicate a cliff of sixty or seventy feet in height.

“How do you know that is a cliff?” I had asked Julie when she first showed the chart to me. In reply she pulled out two satellite photos. They had obviously been taken at different times of day, perhaps in different seasons or years, but they were obviously of the same piece of terrain. I compared them to the chart.

There was a cliff all right, and apparently room to tuck the Osprey in against it, pretty much out of sight.

“You want me to try to guess where you got these satellite photos?”

“My friend in the CIA.”

“And nobody is going to ask her any questions?”

“Nope. She’s cool and she’s clean.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“She doesn’t have access to this stuff. She’s stealing it. They’ll only talk to people with access.”

“Must be a bunch of stupes in the IG’s office there, huh.”

She wouldn’t say any more.

We destroyed the photos, of course, before we left the apartment she had rented for me. Still, the thought of Julie’s classmate in the CIA who could sell us down the river to save her own hide gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as we motored through the darkness over the desert.

Julie had our destination dialed into the navigation computer, so the magic box was depicting our track and time to go. I sat there watching the miles and minutes tick down.

With five miles to go, Julie began slowing the Osprey. And she flipped on the landing lights. Beams of light seared the darkness and revealed the yellow rock and sand and dirt of the deep desert.

She began tilting the engines toward the vertical, which slowed us further and allowed the giant rotors to begin carrying a portion of our weight.

When the last mile ticked off the computer and we crossed the cliff line, the Osprey was down to fifty knots. Julie brought the V-22 into a hover and used the landing lights to explore our hiding place. Some small boulders, not too many, and the terrain under the cliff was relatively flat.

After a careful circuit and inspection, Julie set the Osprey down, shut down the engines.

The silence was startling as we took off our helmets.

Now she shut down the aircraft battery and all the cockpit lights went off.

“We’re here,” she said with a sigh of relief.

“You really intend to go through with this, don’t you?”

“Don’t tell me you still have doubts, Charlie Dean.”

“Okay. I won’t.”

She snapped on a flashlight and led the way back through the cargo bay. She opened the rear door and we stepped out onto the godforsaken soil of the Sahara. We used a flashlight to inspect our position.

“I could get it a little closer to the cliff, but I doubt if it’s worth the effort.”

“Let’s get to work,” I said. I was tired of sitting.

First she went back to the cockpit and tilted the engines down to the cruise position. The plane would be easier to camouflage with the engines down. We would rotate the engines back to the vertical position when the time came to leave.

Next we unloaded the Humvee and trailer, then the cargo we had tied down in piles on the floor of the plane. I carried the water jugs out myself, taking care to place them where they wouldn’t fall over.

The last thing we removed from the plane was the camouflage netting. We unrolled it, then began draping it over the airplane. We both had to get up on top of the plane to get the net over the tail and engine nacelles. Obviously we couldn’t cover the blade of each rotor that stuck straight up, so we cut holes in the net for them.

It took us almost two hours of intense effort to get the net completely rigged. We treated ourselves to a drink of water.

“We sure can’t get out of here in a hurry,” I remarked.

“I swore on the altar of God I would kill the men who killed my parents. We aren’t going anywhere until we do it.”

“Yeah.”

I finished my drink, then unhooked the trailer from the Humvee and dug out my night-vision goggles. I uncased my Model 70 and chambered a round, put on the safety, then got into the driver’s seat and laid it across my lap.

“We can’t plant explosives until tomorrow night,” she said.

“I know that. But I want a look at that place now. You coming?”

She got her night-vision goggles and climbed into the passenger seat. I took the time to fire up the GPS and key in our destination, then started the Humvee and plugged in my night-vision goggles. It was like someone turned on the light. I could see the cliff and the plane and the stones as if the sun were shining on an overcast day.

I put the Humvee in gear and rolled.

The Camel sat on a granite ridge that humped up out of the desert floor. On the eastern side of the ridge, in the low place scooped out by the wind, there was an oasis, a small pond of muddy water, a few palm trees, and a cluster of mud huts. According to Julie’s CIA sister, a few dozen nomads lived here seasonally. Standing on the hood of the Humvee, which was parked on a gentle rise a mile east of the oasis, I could just see the tops of the palms and a few of the huts. No heat source flared up when I switched to infrared.