Dale Brown - Dreamland

Thanks, babe, he thought as Cheshire jerked the Megafortress onto the new course.

Over the Mediterranean

24 October, 1050 local

Jed sat back at the JSTARS console while Ms. O’Day left her desk in the White House Situation Room to take another call. The attack on Tripoli, planned by Madcap Magician and carried out mostly by the Navy, was still proceeding. But already Saudi and Syrian governments had taken to the back channels to assure Washington that they had no interest in the Greater Islamic League.

It helped that they trusted neither the Iranians nor the Libyans. It also helped that America was demonstrating how easy it was to obliterate nearly a billion dollars’ worth of military equipment.

Now if they could only complete the rescue.

“Jed, are you still there?” asked Ms. O’Day, coming back on the line.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, sitting back at the console. The major was waving at him – he was needed on the other lines, where he was helping the SWAT team and Raven in contact with each other.

“Do they have our men?”

“Not yet,” he told her.

“When?”

“Maybe soon,” he said. The major was waving violently. “Ms. O’Day, I’m sorry, I have to go,” he said, cutting her off by switching the simple twist knob that controlled the circuit input on the panel in front of him.

Felt weird. He’d never cut off his boss before.

What if the President had been listening in?

“Cascade, this is Big Bear. Can you get Raven to give us a feed on the base area?”

“Uh, I’m not sure,” he said. He looked around for the major, but he’d gone off to help someone else. “Hang on.”

The screen before him was a live situation map. It showed Raven heading south, away from Tripoli.

Shit. Why the hell were they doing that? And where the hell were their prisoners?

Obviously not in the bunker, if Big Bear was looking for a feed.

“Bear, I’m going to have to get back to you,” said Jed, twisting into the Megafortress’s frequency.

Libya

24 October, 0955 local

Even with the Steiner glasses, they were much too far from the action to see anything, not even smoke on the horizon, though all of the Whiplash members fixed their eyes in the direction of the coast. The Osprey pilot had moved the rotorcraft to the foot of the hill and was monitoring the raid via the SATCOM circuit back to the JSTARS command plane. He’d alerted Danny when the raid started; laconic to a fault, he remained silent as the attack continued.

The desert before them gave a little hint of the battle raging seventy miles away. The sand seemed permanent, uncaring; the only sign of mankind was a highway about twelve miles to the northeast, as barren and destitute a stretch as Danny could imagine.

“Captain Freah, Raven is hailing you,” said the Osprey pilot over the com set.

“Patch me through.” Freah stood and looked directly down over the side of the cliff, as if that would somehow help the pilot turn and switch and allow the connection.

“Raven proceed.”

“Danny, this is Breanna Stockard. Are you on the line?”

“Affirmative,” said Freah. He could feel his heart pounding now in every part of his body, worried that the Megafortress had been hit.

“Stand by for Major Stockard,” Bree told him.

“Captain, we have an encrypted microwave signal being beamed to a satellite from a grid in B-2, we think about eight miles easy of you. What do we have there big enough to house a transmitter?”

“Stand by.”

Freah dropped to his knees, carefully pulling the maps and satellite images from his rucksack. There were only two candidates. One was a small military post, the other an abandoned railroad depot with some old warehouses and support buildings. The sites were separated by about a mile and a half. He gave the positions.

“What do you think of checking them out?” Zen asked.

“We’re en route,” said Danny, not even waiting for the explanation as he signaled his men to reboard the Osprey.

The broadcast had ended a few minutes ago, before they were able to pinpoint it; both sites were close enough to have been the source. Zen worked Hawk Two ahead toward the coordinates of the military base that Freah had supplied. It seemed logical to start there.

The threat screen was blank. Gray asphalt rose beyond the desert sand, bounded by trenches and a ramshackle fence. Two long, dull yellow buildings stood at the far right; a pair of ancient antiair guns were behind sandbags in the middle of the installation. Behind one of the buildings was an earth station, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence.

“Losing command link!” warned the computer.

“Jen, I thought you said we increased our control distance.” Zen throttled back. The signal-indicator bar slowly began to climb. “I’m having trouble at seven miles now.”

“I’m not sure what the problem is,” she yelled, working over the control. “We should be fat.”

“Yeah, Raven, can you bring our distance parameter on the U/MFs to within five miles?”

“Affirmative,” said Cheshire. “We’re dropping to ten thousand feet, staying on your programmed flight path. Cascade is trying to hail us. What should I tell them?”

“The truth – we’re on a wild-goose chase.”

Jeff started Hawk Two on a slow orbit around the base perimeter. Hawk One, meanwhile, was approaching the abandoned railroad warehouse. He toggled the view, saw nothing, went back to Two.

This sure did look like a wild-goose chase. Dust blew across the military base. Place looked like it hadn’t been occupied since World War Two. He scanned for a radar dish, saw nothing.

Hawk Two’s indicated airspeed dropped past two hundred knots, still falling. Zen walked over the gun emplacements. Damn things looked like they were rusted. Good trick in the desert.

Probably left by the Germans. Rommel had been out here, right?

He told the computer to take Hawk Two back to trail, and flipped back into Hawk One just as it closed to within two miles of the old railroad depot. He slipped down the throttle. Raven was five miles away, closing fast.

The terminal building’s roof was missing, but the warehouses looked intact as he approached. One of the smaller houses was just a collection of debris. There were two fairly large ones, maybe a hundred feet long apiece, at the edge of the track area. Between them there was a smaller, gray building, low-slung in the desert. It seemed to have collapsed or been swallowed by the terrain.

But was that a microwave dish next to it?

Zen pushed the throttle to close in. As he did, the roof of the nearest warehouse began to disintegrate. The thing seemed to be alive.

The radar-warning indicator flashed red. In the next instant, the sky perforated with explosions. Zen had walked into a minefield. A bank of antiaircraft artillery weapons had been hidden beneath the carefully camouflaged fake roofs of the warehouses.

“Whiplash, Target Two is hot. Hotter than hell! yelled Jeff, goosing the throttle.

They rode toward the volcano, watching the massed fury of two dozen antiaircraft erupting upward. Raven jammed the radars, but the gunners flailed anyway. Danny, hunched over the pilots on the Osprey flight deck, saw the small Flighthawk ducking and weaving in the sky ahead, spinning back and forth like a peregrine falcon eyeing a kill. Major Stockard was trying to keep the gunners’ attention focused on the miniature plane, not the rapidly approaching assault team.

“Ten seconds,” said the Osprey pilot. “Target building is dead ahead. I see a stairway down. Shit! I’ll get you as close as I can.”

“Okay! Okay!” Danny shouted. He spun back to his men, trying to hold down the bile and adrenaline. “We got stairs down to a bunker, I’m guessing.”