John Schettler - Fallen Angels - 9 Days Falling, Volume II

She smiled. “No, it isn’t that,” she said skirting the edge of the hidden truth again. “It’s not the government. Neither Whitehall nor Ten Downing Street has anything to do with it.”

“What then? Will you at least give me that much before I give the order. Can we hit this operation? Yes we can, but we’ll likely lose good men if we do this, not to mention the X-3s. Tell me why Fairchild Inc. needs to get in on this bar fight, Elena? You tell me that and I’ll move heaven and earth for you. You know I will, but I’ve been mucking about in the dark all these years, carrying on behind these Captain’s stripes. Ours is not to reason why…You know the drill. I’d give you the world if I could hold it in my arms, but you’re a damn hard woman to love…”

My god, he thought. I’ve said it.

And she heard it at once, heard what she had been longing to tell him for years. She did something that surprised him now, though it seemed a natural thing to do in the situation, reaching up and touching the side of his face, her hand soft on his cheek, a longing in her eyes, and the beginning of tears. “Gordon MacRae,” she started.

Words came to him, in the old tongue he still loved and knew so well: “ Tá sé níos fearr chun iarracht a dhéanamh ná mar a súil,” he said. “It’s better to try than to hope.” Then he did something that surprised himself even more, and he leaned down and kissed her…

CaptainMacRae got his answer, though he sat for a good long hour trying to understand what it meant. Lieutenant Ryan with the X-3 Helo contingent got his orders soon after. He was out on the tarmac at Buzachi airfield north of Fort Shevchenko, watching as the air crews finished up the refueling operation and were rolling the tanker truck away. It wasn’t much of an airfield, just a single hanger and fuel station and a simple asphalt runway. A thin, dull brown road led west toward the Caspian coast and the oil worker’s settlement. His three sleek X-3s sat like birds of prey on the landing strip, the only aircraft there that day, and though he knew he had one of his men over in the number three bird watching radar returns, he still found himself looking north with apprehension.

The Russians, he thought…They let loose on the company and put Princess Irene on the bottom of the sea. I hope to God we gave them a bloody nose for that one. Word is they have a reinforced rifle division up on the Kazakh border ready to roll on a moment’s notice. If they do move, that will mean they’ll have air cover up as well, and they know exactly where every airfield in the region is now. The longer he sat there on the tarmac the more vulnerable he felt, and he was itching to get his men aboard the X-3s and heading home—until the call came in from Captain MacRae on Argos Fire.

“Well now,” he said, his Irish blood riled. “A bar fight, Tommy.” His co-pilot Tom Wicks was checking one of the twin turbo-prop engines on the nearest X-3. “Looks like somebody got her skirts ruffled over that incident in the Black Sea.”

“What skirts?” said Wicks. “She’s got a pair of legs on her, no question about that, but her ladyship never gives us a look at them. Always prancing about in those pants suits and all.”

“You have it in for the CEO, Tommy?”

“Me? I’ll have it in anywhere I get a welcome,” he smiled. “What’s this all about, Lieutenant?”

“I can’t say as I know,” said Ryan. “Just like us Irish. We never know what we want, but we’re prepared to fight to the death until we get it.”

“Is Fairchild Irish? I thought she was proper British.”

“That she is, but there’s a wee bit of good Irish honey in her blood, and those lips have kissed the blarney stone, eh? Why else would she plant the company flag on the Isle of Man, right smack in the Irish Sea?”

“Missing Bradytown, are you?”

“Aye, we’re a long way from home out here, Tommy. Now we get this new mission and something tells me a good many of us may not ever get home again.”

Wicks thought that one over, his eyes drifting to one of the rifle squads resting in the open hanger across the way. “What is it we’re supposed to do, exactly?”

“There’s a Russian base on the other side of that big lake out there.”

“Lake? You mean the Caspian Sea?”

“Right-O. Well, we’re paying them a visit, if you know what I mean. Mack Morgan thinks they’re ready to run some kind of Spetsnaz operation from an anchorage just off shore. They want us to crash the party.”

“Lord almighty! What are we up against?”

“Not much off shore. Just a big floating power plant, but the Russians seem to be using it as a staging base for some pending operation. They want us to shoot the damn thing up before they get it underway.”

“Where is the place?”

“About 15 klicks off the coast near that naval base at Kaspiysk. I make it about 350 kilometers from here.”

“That sounds like a run and gun mission, Lieutenant. We taking the Argonauts?”

“Well we’ve got to get them home some way, right? But you’re right, we won’t much need them on a mission like this. My plan is to get them down to Baku—that’s a 500 kilometer run, so we’ll need to refuel there again at the BP facility. Then we run up the coast, go in fast and low, paint the target, and let the missiles do the rest. We can pick the Argonauts up on the way back.”

“If we make it back,” said Wicks with a shrug. “We’re packing Hydra-70s in the rocket pods. Their effective range is 8,000 meters, and they’re unguided, so we’ll have to be pretty damn close. You think the Russians might know we’re coming? They’ll sure as hell have radar and SAM batteries at that naval base. We’ve got a fairly small radar cross section, but they’ll see us in time.”

“Aye, and they won’t be happy when they do. Things are getting pretty dicey now. Russians beefed up the 414th Naval Infantry at Kaspiysk. There’s a motorized column from their 58th Army heading for Makhachkala. Could be trouble, and Morgan thinks they mean to make a move on Baku, and grab the Kashagan superfields up here while they’re at it.”

“What’s this world coming to, Lieutenant?”

“No good,” said Ryan. “Well, the birds are all fueled and ready to go. Let’s get the Argonauts loaded and get on with it.”

“What about those Chevron people?”

“What, Flack and the rest? They come too, at least as far as, Baku. The birds will be heavy but we’ll lift them easily enough. That will take more fuel, which is why we top off at Baku again after we get back. It’ll be another thousand kilometer run back to Argos in the Black Sea. So take a good look at the Caspian while we’re here, Tommy. And I hope to God we never see the damn place again.”

Ryan turned to the open hanger and gave a loud whistle, waving at the men there. The Argonauts had done what they came for. It was no problem scaring off the local militias near the oil fields. One look at these dangerous looking men in jet black military garb was enough to convince them that their little oil war would best be conducted some other day. They melted away, and Lieutenant Ryan was able to pull out good number of Chevron workers and get them safely back to Buzachi. They were shutting down. The place was just too dangerous now to contemplate any further operations. There had already been a brief air duel between Russian fighter patrols and the Kazakh air force, and it was looking like the conflict would get rolling on the ground any moment.

They’re just waiting on fuel and equipment, he knew. Once they do move, however, they’ll come hard and fast, and that Kazakh Ready Brigade will have its hands full. Who knows, perhaps this Spetsnaz outfit off the Caspian coast is figuring to be part of that attack. Mack Morgan says they’re moving in a big fat helicopter as part of the force. So I guess we’ll see what kind of sting my X-3s have after all.