Razor's Edge Read online

  “Both on temporary assignment with the 10th. Major Stephen Domber.” Ax paused to let Bastian run the name against his mental file of friends and comrades without finding a match. “Wing Commander Colonel Anthony Priestman. They call him—”

  “Hammer,” said Bastian.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ax. “Looks like DIA.” Bastian walked quickly out of the office suite, nodding at the secretaries outside but not pausing to say anything.

  Ax followed him out. Inside the elevator car, the chief held up papers, pointing to where they should be initialed. Bastian gave each only a cursory glance before signing off.

  Dreamland

  1412

  THE SECOND ZEN TOOK A SIP OF THE SODA, HE KNEW IT was a big mistake. The ice cold soda hit the filling in the back of his mouth like a Maverick missile unbuttoning a T-72 main battle tank. Trying to stifle his yelp of pain, he ended up coughing instead, sending a spray of soda over the video display at the console in Dreamland’s secure center. Fortunately, Major Cheshire had just begun her presentation, clicking a large map of northern Iraq onto the screen at the front of the room. She swung the combination remote-control laser pointer around, flashing its arrow at the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.

  “The first aircraft went down in this vicinity,” said Major Cheshire. “The pilot was recovered approximately here. The F-15s were struck while they were following this route. Barrage-launched SAMs, at least some of which were unguided at launch, are thought to have taken them out. The missile bases on the next screen have been struck.” A political map with a half-dozen radar dishes covered by explosions appeared. “You’ll have to forgive the graphics. Our friend Jed at the NSC prepared them for, uh, for some VIPs,” she added tactfully. “I won’t run through the entire radar sets or the missiles, but SA-2s, some Threes, and a Roland launcher were struck this afternoon, their time. Iraq is ten hours ahead,” she added,

  “which makes it an hour after Turkey.”

  “It’s midnight in Baghdad,” said Danny Freah dryly.

  “In more ways than one.”

  Zen had flown over Iraq in the war and knew exactly how dangerous it could be. The fact that there was still some doubt about what had shot down the fighters bothered him, as well as the others, even though that sort of thing sometimes took days to figure out. Obviously the Iraqis had some sort of new strategy or missile, or maybe both. The Flighthawks would be close to immune, but there had been no time to complete the complicated painting of Quicksilver‘s nose necessary to help deflect radar.

  While the plane would still be comparatively stealthy, he knew that Bree would be in that much more danger.

  So would he, of course, flying the U/MFs in their belly.

  But he ordinarily didn’t think of himself as even aboard it—he was in the Flighthawks. Besides, he didn’t worry about himself.

  “There will be an additional round of strikes in the morning. CentCom is ramping up,” said Cheshire. “An operation to recover the two Eagle pilots is ongoing.

  There was no word at last report.”

  “The prospects aren’t very good,” said Danny.

  “This operation may continue for quite a while,” continued Cheshire. “Iraq has ordered UN weapons’ inspectors out of the country, and the President is considering a wide range of options. In the meantime, we’ve been asked to deploy two Elint-capable Megafortresses to provide CentCom with round-the-clock real-time surveillance of the Iraqi radio net, command communications, and other electronic transmission data. Two specialists familiar with Rivet Joint missions have been detailed to join us in-country; we’re hoping to get two more. Jennifer Gleason and Kurt Ming will accompany us to help facilitate their familiarization with the gear, which of course they’re not up to speed on. Let me cut to the chase,” she said, pressing the small clicker in her hand.

  A large map of southeastern Turkey appeared on the screen.

  “To the extent possible, we’d like to preserve operational secrecy regarding our deployment. Additionally, from a strategic intelligence perspective, the Elint-capable model of the Megafortress remains highly classified. As such, we’d like to find another base to operate from besides Incirlik. Danny Freah and I, along with Colonel Shepherd from the Material Transport Command, have come up with a solution involving a small, disused airstrip twenty miles from the Iraqi border.” Cheshire clicked her remote again. An arrow appeared in the right-hand corner of the map—extremely close to a wide line showing the Iraq-Turkey border.

  “There’s a village nearby, connected by a donkey road through the hills. It’s called Al Derhagdad. We’ll designate it ‘High Top,’ unless someone comes up with something better.”

  Zen and some of the others snickered when Cheshire said “donkey road,” but she wasn’t making a joke.

  “We’re close to the border, but the terrain is almost impassable except by foot,” said Cheshire.

  “Or donkey,” said Danny—he wasn’t joking either.

  “Security will be provided by a Whiplash team, to be supplemented by a detachment of Marines from the 24th MEU(SOC) available for reinforcement. We’re still hanging on the Marine timetable. They may come with us, they may not; we’re still working that out.”

  “For the uninitiated,” said Bastian, “which included myself until a half hour ago, MEU stands for Marine Expeditionary Unit, and SOC means they’re special operations capable. The 24th has been in the area before; they kicked Saddam out during Operation Provide Comfort.

  They’re our kind of guys,” added the colonel, “even if they are Marines.”

  Everyone laughed except Cheshire, who remained stone-faced as she flipped through a series of satellite photos of the airstrip and surrounding terrain. Zen nudged the keyboard at his console, getting a close-up of the last photo in her sequence.

  “Nancy, is this scale right?” he asked. “Six hundred feet?”

  “The strip is presently six hundred feet,” she said.

  “I can’t even land the Flighthawks there,” said Zen.

  “We’re going to make it longer,” she said. “This area here is flat and wide enough, with the exception of this ridge here. The ridge only stands about eighteen inches high; if we get rid of it, we think we can get it to fifteen hundred. Danny has worked out a plan. Incirlik is our backup, but for security reasons we prefer not to fly the Megafortresses out of there.”

  Zen glanced toward Breanna as Cheshire continued.

  She’d obviously gone over this earlier, but even so, her lips were pressed tightly together.

  “Taking off should be no problem. We can use the Flighthawks and/or the short-field assist packs. Since we’ll have access to the tankers out of Incirlik, we can keep our takeoff weight to a bare minimum fuelwise. And of course we’ll have braking parachutes. They’ll work,” added Cheshire, apparently seeing some skepticism in the pilots’ faces. Though the chutes had been used in B-52s, they were not exactly standard equipment on the Megafortress.

  “So how do we get rid of that ridge?” said Zen, ignoring his receding toothache. “And even if you do that, I see maybe seven hundred feet you can lay mesh over, but what about that hill at the end there?”

  “We have something special planned.” There was a note of triumph in Cheshire’s voice. She pressed her remote and the satellite photo morphed into a live feed from one of the Dreamland weapons development labs. A small, white-haired woman frowned in the middle of the screen.

  “Dr. Klondike.”

  “That would be Mrs. Klondike,” said the weapons scientist testily.

  “Hi, Annie,” said Danny.

  The old woman squinted at a monitor in the lab.

  “Captain.”

  “Dr. Klondike,” said Cheshire, “if you could explain—”

  “That would be Mrs. Klondike.”

  “Mrs. Klondike, if you could explain about the special application JSOW—”

  “Yes. In fact, the configuration of the Joint Standoff Weapons was tried last year and fo
und to be wanting, so we redesigned the delivery vehicle around a standard AGM-86 ALCM frame. But the key was—”

  “What Mrs. Klondike is talking about,” said Major Cheshire, losing her patience, “is a controlled explosion to blast the rock into bits. They create a field of explosive powder by exploding very small weapons, focusing the blast in such a way that they can control the shape of the force. I’m told it’s similar to the principle of an air-fuel bomb.”

  “That is most inaccurate,” said Klondike on the screen.

  “We’ll move a bulldozer in, lay the steel mesh, and land the planes,” continued Cheshire.

  “As Jeff pointed out, most of the runway is already there,” said Danny, looking at Zen. “Annie’s bombs will take care of the rest. She knows her stuff.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  “We’ll run the ‘dozer over it before we pop down the mesh,” said Danny. “Once we’re established, we ought to be able to expand a bit more. Some Pave Lows used the site yesterday or earlier this morning, and the Turks landed helos and light aircraft there in the eighties. I honestly don’t anticipate too much of a problem.”

  “You don’t have to try landing a Megafortress on a postage stamp,” said Ferris.

  “How long’s this going to take?” asked Major Alou.

  “Two days? Three?”

  “Two hours,” said Danny. “Maybe four.”

  “Two hours?” Alou laughed. “Right.”

  “The area will have to be examined before the explosion,” said Mrs. Klondike testily. “And then the detonation points calibrated and adjusted prior to the launch of the weapons. The captain is, as always, optimistic concerning the timetable.”

  “Nah. I have faith in you, Annie.”

  “It’s not the weapon I’m referring to.”

  “You’re getting a bulldozer in there?” asked Zen.

  “That part’s easy,” said Danny. “C-17 slows down and we kick it out the back.”

  “Who works it?”

  “My equipment guy, Egg Reagan.”

  “Oh, the Pave Low pilot,” Zen said, laughing. He’d heard two different versions of the Whiplash team member’s stint as a helicopter pilot the other day. One claimed that he’d almost put the bird into the side of Glass Mountain; the other claimed that he did.

  “Don’t worry,” said Danny. “You’ll be pulling operations there twenty-four hours from now. We may use two ‘dozers, just to be sure.”

  “Even if we take off in thirty minutes,” said Chris, “it’ll take twelve, fifteen hours to get there.”

  “Fourteen,” said Breanna. “With refueling. We can push it a little faster. Raven will launch the tactical sats to maintain communication with Dreamland Command.

  Quicksilver will take the Flighthawks and the AGMs.”

  “I have a question, Colonel,” said Zen, trying to ignore the stab of pain from his tooth as he spoke. “Why the hell is Saddam shooting at us now? What’s his game plan?

  Beat up on the Kurds?”

  Bastian had been involved in the planning for the air war during the Gulf conflict and had spent considerable time not only in Saudi Arabia but behind the scenes in D.C. That didn’t make him an expert on Saddam Hussein—in Zen’s opinion the dictator was certifiably in-sane—but if anyone on the base would have a good handle on the conflict there, it was the colonel.

  Dog got up and walked toward the front. He began slowly, deliberately, but as he came down the steps to the center of the semicircular room, his movements sped up.

  An ominous majesty seemed to descend over him even before he spoke.

  “I don’t know why the Iraqis are trying to provoke us.

  As far as I’m concerned, it’s irrelevant.” He was standing erect as he spoke, yet somehow seemed to draw himself even taller and straighter before continuing. “Getting to the Gulf is not going to be a picnic, and neither are the missions. But we’ve just lost three planes, and unofficially it doesn’t look good for two of the men. That toll may increase by the time you get there. This is precisely the sort of job we were created to handle. We’re going to do it, and do it well. Questions?”

  Dreamland

  1522

  AN HOUR AFTER COLONEL BASTIAN’S SPEECH, HIS DAUGHTER sat in the pilot’s seat of Quicksilver, going through her final preflight checks.

  “Check, check, double-check, green, green, green, chartreuse, green,” sang Chris Ferris, her copilot.

  “Chartreuse?” asked Breanna.

  “Did you know that chartreuse is green?”

  “Well, duh.”

  “I never knew that. Honest to God. I thought it was pink or something. Red.”

  “Any more colors on your chart today?”

  “Negative. Ready to take off, Captain. Good to have you back.”

  “Good to be back, Chris.” Breanna hunched her shoulders forward against her seat restraints, unlocking her muscles. She remembered Merce Alou’s preflight prayer.

  What the hell, she thought. Then she laughed, realizing it wasn’t exactly righteous to be using the word hell in connection to prayer, even in her mind.

  Then she prayed.

  Lord, help us today, she thought, then turned to Ferris.

  “Ready, Captain?”

  “And willing.”

  “Major Stockard, are you ready?”

  “I’m ready for you anytime, baby,” said Zen, who was sitting downstairs in the U/MF control bay.

  “A little decorum, Major,” snapped Breanna. She checked with each of her passengers in turn, making sure that they were all snugged and ready to go. Behind Breanna and Ferris on Quicksilver‘s stretched flight deck were the two specialists who would handle the electronics sniffing gear, Master Sergeant Kelly O’Brien and, on loan from an Army SOF unit, Sergeant First Class Sereph Habib.

  An Arab language specialist, Habib had been at nearby Edwards Air Force base for a joint services exercise and still seemed dazed at how quickly he had been shanghaied. He answered, “Present, ma’am,” when Breanna asked if he was ready to go.

  The upstairs or back bay of Quicksilver—the domain of the defensive weapons operators in a standard B-52—ordinarily contained two additional Elint stations, as well as space for the collection computers that processed and stored the gathered intelligence. The secondary control panels for the gear had been removed to save space, as had some of the black boxes. In their place sat a collection of spare parts, two medium tents, sleeping bags, and enough MREs to ruin appetites for a week. In between the supplies were Jeff Hiu, one of the electronics wizards responsible for Quicksilver‘s “Deep Drink” ALR-98 intercept receiver suite, and Staff Sergeant Louis Garcia, who’d brought along a Walkman and a sizable portion of his Bob Dylan collection.

  No change of clothes, though.

  Sitting next to Zen downstairs in what would have been the radar navigator/bombardier’s post on a standard B-52 was Captain Michael Fentress, Zen’s apprentice and gofer on the mission. Zen had included him in the mission reluctantly—after being ordered to do so by Colonel Bastian.

  “For those of you who aren’t regular passengers, Quicksilver is not quite an airliner,” Bree told them.

  “Please keep your restraints on until we reach altitude.

  We have a long flight, and a bit of weather along the way, but we should be well over it. I’ll wake you up when we’re getting close to Turkey. Any questions?”

  “Where’s the bathroom on this thing?” asked Habib.

  There were a few snickers.

  “Chris, can you help the sergeant out once we’re under way?”

  “You got it.”

  “Can you cross your legs until then, Sergeant?”

  “Guess I’ll have to.”

  Quicksilver‘s four single-podded power plants were a special set of Pratt Whitneys, highly modified from the engines originally developed for the F-22 Raptor. This latest variation on engine configuration for the Megafortress traded off a bit of speed for greatly increased range, but th
e thrusters could definitely get the plane off the ground in a hurry. Cleared by Dream Tower, Breanna pushed the slider to maximum takeoff power, released the brakes, and pointed Quicksilver‘s new and still unpainted nose toward the wild blue. The plane lifted off smoothly, her wings drooping ever so slightly because of the weight of the Flighthawks strapped below. Breanna felt a brief flutter of apprehension as the indicated airspeed dropped a few seconds off the runway, but the problem was momentary, maybe even just an indicator glitch.

  “We’re green, we’re green,” said Chris quickly.

  “Clean the gear,” said Breanna.

  The plane began picking up speed as the massive wheels slid up into their bays.

  “Looking good, crew,” she said as they climbed through five thousand feet. “Just thirteen hours and fifty-nine minutes to go.”

  Over the Pacific

  1672

  AMONG DREAMLAND’S LESS GLAMOROUS PROJECTS WAS designing a replacement for the venerable C-130 Hercules transport, a capable and highly versatile aircraft that came in an almost endless series of flavors. The Hercules was such a successful aircraft, in fact, that the wizards at Dreamland could not hope to fully top her—though even Herky bird partisans might claim they had come close with the MC-17B/W, which was taking Danny Freah and his six-man Whiplash advance team to Turkey. Based on the short-field capable C-17, the MC-17B/W had been thoroughly refashioned. Besides the dark black paint job, the most noticeable difference between the Whiplash mutation and the standard Globemaster III was the multiconfigurable wingtips that made up about a third of the outer wing, just inside the winglets. The leading and trailing edges had double trapezoid panels that generally operated as standard leading and trailing edge slats, functioning much as the C-17’s considerably smaller ones did.

  But the slats also had narrow hinge stakes, allowing them to be set as miniature wings; when set, they looked a little like small biplane sections at the end of each wing. The effect increased the aircraft’s ability to land on short airfields, even with a full load. Where the standard C-17 could deliver 150 troops or 81,000 pounds of cargo to an airstrip of 625 yards—an incredible achievement in itself—the MC-17B could land the same load in half the distance. The stock PW PW2040s with their 41,700 pounds of thrust could get a fully loaded C-17 into the sky at 1,200 feet; the Whiplash version needed a hair under eight hundred, though that involved a bit of prayer and a stiff wind. And the notoriously turbulent airsteam that made certain parachuting deliveries difficult—especially those involving troops—had been tamed by the Dreamland experts.