Dale Brown - Dreamland

“Bomb bay is open,” the computer reported to Breanna. The open bay made them visible to radar, though their low altitude made it extremely unlikely they would be spotted.

“Launch at will,” Breanna told Chris.

The computer made the process almost idiot-proof, but Chris worked through the procedure carefully, making sure they were at the preprogrammed launch points and altitudes before pushing each of the large missiles off. The twenty-foot-long flying bombs lit their engines as they slipped below the Megafortress, popping up briefly before descending even lower, guided by radar altimeters and sophisticated on-board maps.

“No turning back now,” said Chris as he closed the bomb bay door.

“We can always turn back,” said Bree. “Let’s hope we don’t have to.”

Danny felt the rest of his assault team starting to tense as the Osprey passed over the border into Somalia. Talk had gotten sparse and sparse since takeoff; no one had spoken now for at least five minutes.

No matter how much you trained for combat, or thought about it, or dreamed about it, you were never ready for it when it arrived. You punched the buttons like you were trained to, reacted the way you’d taught your body to react. But that didn’t mean you were really, truly ready. There was no way to erase the millisecond of fear, the quick surge of adrenaline that leaped at you the instant you came under fire.

These guys knew it. they’d been there before.

“Vector One has peeled off. We’re ten minutes from our target,” said the pilot.

Some of the others tried peering out the windows, cranking their heads toward the front. The cruise missiles would be finding their targets any second now; in theory they’d see the flashes.

Danny steadied his eyes on his MP-5, double-checking it to make sure it was ready. He had two clips ready in each vest pocket, along with a grenade, the pin taped so it couldn’t accidentally get snagged.

Good to go.

Chris had his face practically pasted to the screen, which was projecting an infrared image of the Somalian base, now just over twelve miles away.

“Nothing,” he said. “I see the SA-6’s, that’s all. But we’re still a good way off.”

“No Zeus?”

“No antiair guns at all. No other defenses.”

“AGMs to target, ten seconds,” said Bree. “Nine, eight, seven –”

“Wow, I see it!” shouted Chris, and in the next second the horizon lit with a yellow-red explosion. “Got him!”

The second cruise missile splashed five seconds later. Both completely obliterated their targets.

Breanna tenses, waiting for the RWR to warn her that the Somalians had belatedly turned on their antiaircraft radars.

Nada.

She activated the nightscope viewer panel. The view was limited to twelve degrees and Breanna never felt particularly comfortable with it, preferring the radar and IR scans. But the synthetic view didn’t mind the humid conditions caused by the recent rain, couldn’t be jammed, and was easy to sort when things got hot – pun intended.

“We’re going to be overhead in about sixty seconds,” she told Chris. “What do you think?”

“I don’t have a target,” he said. “Looks like the place is deserted. Shit, there are no secondaries. I think those SAMs were decoys.”

“Or we missed.”

“No.” Chris played with the resolutions on the screen. “I saw them. they’re gone. No related vehicles. I’m thinking decoys, Bree. Or they left. Place is deserted.”

“Vector Leader, this is Fort Two,” said Breanna, alerting the assault team. “SAMs have been splashed. No live defenses. Copy?”

“Roger, copy,” returned the ground mission commander from the Osprey. “We’ll proceed as planned.”

“Fort Two,” said Bree. She turned to her copilot. “Chris pull out the satellite maps. Give me a heading of that east-west road.”

“I can see it on the screen,” he told her. “What are you thinking?”

“Let’s see where it goes,” said Bree. She selected the FLIR imaging for her MUD, then banked the Megafortress to follow along the roadway. It rose through the hills toward northern Ethiopia, with a new leg skirting Hargyesa, a relative megalopolis. The road seemed deserted – or at least there were no warm engines or bodies on it, according to the FLIR.

“They could be anywhere, Bree,” said Chris. “We don’t want to get out too far from Vector, in case they run into problems.”

“I’m not intending on getting too far away, Chris,” she told him. “Relax.”

“I’m relaxed,” he said defensively. He checked his screen. “They’re thirty seconds away.”

Breanna swung out of the south leg of her orbit, heading back toward the center of the target area. She selected the starscope input for her screen, and saw two dark shadows leap into the green, wings tilting upward as they swept into a landing.

“Dead as a doornail,” said Chris, who was using the infrared to monitor the scene. “Nothing moving. Nothing hot.”

“You’re ready with the JSOWs just in case?”

“Now who’s getting tense?” asked Chris.

“Let’s open the bay doors just to be sure.”

“Roger that,” he snapped. She could quite tell if he was being sarcastic.

They’d planned to rappel, so hitting the ground behind the swirling motors was a bit of a letdown, but Danny could live with it. he and the rest of the Whiplash team spread out quickly, moving to cover the first team’s assault of the main building.

It wasn’t must of an assault. The Delta troopers had lowered themselves from their Osprey to the roof of the main building, working down to the main floor in about a fifth of the time a training exercise would have taken – less actually, since any training exercise would have used another Spec Ops team as enemies.

“We’re clear, Captain,” said the Delta commander over the com set. The lightweight Dreamland gear made him sound as if he were standing at Danny’s side. “We have blood on the floor in the basement, and some flight gear.”

“Shit. We’re too late.”

“All right. We’ll search and secure,” said the commander.

Danny cursed, then replayed the information to his men.

As soon as the ground team confirmed that the school was deserted, Breanna pointed Fort Two toward A-1, the airstrip close to the Gulf of Aden.

“I don’t know, Bree,” said Chris. “They could be anywhere. I’m thinking Mogadishu.”

“Mogadishu’s five hundred miles southeast of here.”

“My point exactly.”

Breanna didn’t think they would be lucky enough to find them on the ground. But she did want to see if her theory was at least possible. A-1 was a little more than seventy-five miles away, straight line back toward the northwest. While they didn’t have particularly fat fuel reserves, she figured they could get close enough to get a look at the airstrip before turning back to shepherd the Ospreys home.

“We’ll be within FLIR range in five minutes,” she told her copilot.

“Four and a half. I’ve already computed it,” he told her. “Man, I could go for a cigarette right about now.”

“I thought you gave up smoking.”

“Stuff like this tickles my throat,” he said. “Shit, we got something in the air.”

Chris seemed to be operating on a sixth sense, picking up something before the high-powered detectors had sniffed out the radar. But he was right – a Jay Bird radar had flicked on ahead. The computer poked a green puff in the radar-warning screen. It was below them, which seemed impossible since they were at only a thousand feet.

“The source is far off,” said Chris, hunkering over the screen and working the computer to refine the read. “This is on the ground, Bree. Shit, this has to be a MiG-21. Off, it’s off.”