Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“You can afford to,” retorted Crowley, “you’re retired.” He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. Tibbet was watching the general and he saw Freeman’s face redden in controlled anger.

“Retired or not,” retorted Freeman, “I have the little matter of my reputation at stake. You gentlemen know how it goes. In our business you’re as good as your last op. Like a damn movie star: one big flop and you’re in the doghouse. Priest Lake’s my doghouse, and I want out. Badly. But I’m not going into this just because I want to save my ass or get my picture on the cover of Time . I’m doing this for those poor bastards, law-abiding Americans, who were just sitting there working one moment and were blown to smithereens the next by those scumbags.”

Tibbet had no difficulty in imagining fire coming from the general’s nostrils. “Anyway,” the general continued, “if our helos don’t take at least one round from Russian ground defenses, I’ll eat my hat. And if they do, that’ll justify release of the Harriers.”

Crowley hoped the Russians wouldn’t violate the twenty-four-hour agreement with Washington, but if they did, the fighter-bombers would certainly come in handy.

“Admiral?” It was his duty officer. A few minutes later Crowley informed Freeman, “My D.O. tells me there’s been a leak. We’re being inundated with e-mail requests about Bird Rescue. Some correspondents, including a gal from Newsweek , are saying the name the Pentagon gave to this mission is a cynical ploy to win over the environmentalist lobby in support of yet another unilateral U.S. invasion. Would you comment?”

“Invasion!” Freeman said angrily. “This is an operation to chase down a bunch of goddamn murderers. You can tell them from me that—”

“Wait a second, General,” said Crowley, who instructed one of his computer operators to take down Freeman’s comment verbatim.

“Tell them,” said Freeman, “that the list of endangered species on Lake Khanka is as long as your goddamned arm. The one to give to the media is the Grus japonensus . Half those liberal bastards might even be able to spell it. It’s a very rare, endangered species of red-crowned crane, and there’s a critter called the sheathfish endemic to the region.” Freeman turned to Colonel Tibbet. “I like giving the bastards that one, Jack. Just watch and wait for one of the TV anchors to keep a straight face with ‘sheath.’”

“Ah,” Crowley told the computer operator, “I suggest you clean that up a little before you send it. Okay with you, Douglas?”

Colonel Tibbet grinned, welcoming a flash of levity to the occasion, and Freeman readily agreed. There was no point in deliberately riling them up. It reminded him of Marte Price and his deal with her to give her first crack at an exclusive in return for her having come clean about the government’s initial and futile attempt to keep the attack on DARPA ALPHA under wraps.

They could all hear the mounting thunder on the roof, and the appearance of Tibbet’s S-2, the marines’ intel chief, confirmed the MEU was ready to “rock’n’roll.”

“Look,” Freeman told Tibbet and Crowley. “If we can knock these bastards out at Khanka, it won’t be just them and the terrorists’ stockpile we’ll be taking out, gentlemen. It’ll be a lesson to any other ragtag damn terrorists that no matter what it takes, when you kill Americans, we’ll come after you — in your own damn country, if need be. So that Captain Crowley here might even release his Harriers.”

“I’ll put the Harriers on standby,” said Crowley. “That’s as far as I’ll go for now.”

Freeman shook his hand.

“Maybe,” cut in Tibbet, trying to help his old naval colleague Crowley stand his ground against Douglas Freeman’s well-intentioned but relentless charge, “you tried to reach Washington to get ‘weapons-free’ for the Harriers, but your encrypting program temporarily crashed?”

Freeman winked at Tibbet. “I like it!”

Crowley kept a straight face. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

John Cuso, the executive officer who had been seconded from McCain to Yorktown to assist Crowley, had seen his share of helo assaults launched from the ship, but it was always a new and exciting experience for him. From Vultures’ Row, high in the control island, Cuso looked down at the frantic, yet endlessly rehearsed, preparations for combat. He could see the fifteen Super Stallions and Tibbet and Freeman crouching low as each was hurried aboard his respective chopper, a lead Super Stallion for Freeman, his six-man SpecOp team, mortar squad, and other marines aboard, a command Huey for Tibbet. Cuso wondered how many would return. What had Hitler said? Making war was like grabbing a gun and walking into a pitch-black room — anything could happen.

Each of the fifteen Super Stallions in Yorktown ’s thirty-two-helo force would be carrying fifty fully loaded marines, which meant putting 750 marines in the target zone in the first assault wave — providing there was no interference en route. Each of the big Stallions had three.50-caliber machine guns, one located in the forward starboard crew door and two on pivot mounts for open-ramp firing, all three weapons fed by linked-belt.50-caliber ammunition. As the air armada rose above a blue, choppy sea, two-thirds of the total marine MEU combat force was en route toward the rugged coast of Russia’s far east, which was already in sight as a dark squiggle on the horizon.

Aboard his Huey, Colonel Tibbet was double-checking the landing area selected from the SATPIX where two Super Stallions were to deposit their sling-carried fifteen-thousand-pound bladders of aviation fuel for both helos and Harriers, should it become necessary to call for the Harriers to provide close air support and enough loiter time over the target. During the vital refueling, squads of marines would rush to form a defensive perimeter screen, though it was not anticipated that much ground fire at all would be encountered, given the absence of troops on SIGINT and SATPIX intel.

Though clouds appeared to be thickening and were clustering ominously along the coast, forming a line of ragged gray ahead of them, the rising of the thirty-two-aircraft armada made an impressive sight. An able force, if ever he’d seen one, thought Tibbet, whose high morale had been duly noted by Peter Norton who, in an attempt to contain his rising fear before the mission, had closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the happiest, most relaxing times of his youth — picnicking and swimming in the James River to beat the awful, humid heat of August.

As the low-flying MEU approached the coast, a Russian fisherman-cum-coastwatcher, Alexander Rostovich, whose great grandfather had been killed as an adviser to Ho Chi Minh’s legions against the Americans in Vietnam, was awakened to the choppers’ sound. Grabbing his binoculars, he glimpsed a white U.S. star with a white bar either side of it on one of the incoming helos of the U.S. air armada. Racing into his fishing hut, where he kept an old but reliable 8 mm Mauser that was always loaded for the sharks that bothered his nets when he was fishing off Timpevay Bay or for bears that could wipe out a year’s carefully tended vegetable patch in a few seconds, Rostovich raised the weapon and let fly a round at the armada, pulled back the bolt, swearing as he did so, rammed another round home, and fired again. By sheer dumb luck, this round hit the cockpit of a Stallion, spiderwebbing the copilot’s window screen and narrowly missing his head.

“Ground fire!” the copilot reported. “Three o’clock, from that hut down by that garden. Anyone see it? Along the cliff edge.”

“I’ve got it, Stallion. He’s mine,” came a voice, the violation of radio silence no serious thing, given the number of helos that were airborne and clearly visible to isolated settlements along the coast. In addition, the ABC, thanks to CNN, Al Jazeera, and all the others, clearly knew that the strike was imminent. One of the SuperCobras, feared by and known to Saddam’s soldiers as the “Skinny Birds,” peeled off into a steep, 180 m.p.h. dive, the helo firing its three-barrel rotary chin-mounted chain gun, the one-in-five red tracers dancing crazily about the hut. The hut collapsed, as did Rostovich. There was no fire or explosion, nothing more than a cloud of dust rising above the imploded hut, the coastwatcher lying spread-eagled in a garden of collapsed trellises. Little chance he was still alive. In any event, the target had been “neutralized.” Even so, Jack Tibbet did a one-eighty and called for the six Harriers. There was no way he could know how much ground fire was about to open up, and, with Crowley’s blessing, decided that he’d rather be called overcautious than unnecessarily risk his marines on the coast before they reached the target.