The B300 was a much improved version of the original NA-23, having longer range, more lift capacity and much improved avionics. Dubbed "Dodos," apparently because they just looked a little awkward, the NA-23s were an early post-Great Global War-vintage design, with twin turbo-prop engines. The newest was over thirty years old. They were, however, fairly simple and robust aircraft and most were still flying even four to five Terra Novan decades later.
To get to the B300 upgrade, the original Dodos were completely disassembled and everything from struts to skin microchecked for excess stress and wear. Then, the fuselage was reassembled, with an additional meter being added between the cockpit and the main cargo compartment. Completely new wings were attached, and to the wings, in lieu of the old turbo-props, new Whitefield-Prance WPT9A-76R turbo-prop engines were added, driving five-bladed propellers. Lengthened troop seats were installed, along with new avionics, and a generally improved cockpit layout
Before being deployed, two of the NA-23s had taken a short detour to Zion where a frame was built up around the aircraft and thin composite Carbon Fiber-Shiff Base Salt tiles added for decreased radar visibility. In addition, the original tail section was replaced with one of V-form. It was these that would drop the Cazadors.
The B300 was, for all practical purposes, a new plane superior in every way, to include operating cost, to the original Dodo. It was the reduced operating cost, as much as the increased capability, that had decided Carrera in favor of the conversion, despite a "fly away" price tag of nearly three million drachma per aircraft and five million for the two that had been stealthified. The legion could-indeed, probably would have to-rely upon the Dodos for critical resupply.
One of the Cazadors due to be inserted via the stealthy Dodos, Sergeant Emmanuel Robles, paced nervously up and down that portion of the terminal set aside for the Cazadors. From time to time he took from his wallet a picture of his wife and three children waiting back home in Balboa. He also spent a good deal of time praying.
It just doesn't feel right.
Mangesh, 12/2/461 AC
Carrera frantically paced the small headquarters set up in an old Sumeri police fort on the outskirts of the town.
"I don't see how the hell you can be so calm, Raul," he said.
Parilla, sitting calmly behind a field desk with his feet up and his hands clasped behind his head answered, "Why should I worry when you are worrying enough for both of us and three more men besides?"
Carrera stopped his pacing, opened his mouth as if to retort, and then began to laugh. "Okay, you win. I'll calm down."
"Care for a drink?" Parilla asked. "The good father presented me with a bottle of the local brandy. It's actually pretty good."
The look on Carrera's face as much as said, "Gimme." Parilla poured several ounces of the brandy into a metal cup and handed it over.
"You know what's bothering me, Raul?"
"No."
"It's the coalition headquarters down in al Jahara. D-Day is supposed to be the day after tomorrow. Ordinarily, I'd expect hourly intelligence updates to have begun by now. But there hasn't been a word or, at least, not a word to us."
"Do you think they've forgotten about us way down here?" Parilla asked.
"Maybe they forgot," Carrera answered, "and then maybe they're deliberately ignoring us. I've got a call in to a friend."
"So what are we going to do if they don't answer?"
"Send in the Cazador long-range recon teams anyway, tonight around midnight. They'll need that much time to get to their positions behind the Sumeri lines."
"And if D-Day is moved up? Or delayed? How do we get them out?" Parilla asked.
"I swear to God I'll start the war on my own if it's delayed. And if it's moved up without them telling us, I just might shoot that son of a bitch down in al Jahara."
Hewler International Airport, Yezidistan, nearly midnight, 12/2/461 AC
Robles still didn't like it. But there were the two stealth-modified Dodos, waiting with engines idling not one hundred meters from the terminal. There, lined up by the terminal door were the chutes for each man who would jump tonight. Standing by that door was the century commander and there, in his hand, were the orders to go.
The men were singing as they lined up to chute up. Ordinarily, Robles enjoyed the singing before a jump. Now it just irritated him, especially when the song came to the lines:
Thundering motors leave each man alone.
He thinks one more time of his loved ones back home.
Then come, mis compadres, to spring on command
To jump and to die for our people and land…
Chingada. Bunch of morbid bastards. Why the fuck did I ever sign up for this?
And then they were at the aircraft, the crew chiefs and their assistants helping the pack-mule-laden, barely mobile men to climb the ladders and shuffle up the ramps and then walking the lines to make sure everyone was buckled in.
The engines began to thunder in truth now as the Dodos rolled down the runway. The airfield was high where the air would normally be thin. Even so, in the dead of winter the air was cold and dense enough for lift. Robles felt the plane lurch upward, leaving the runway behind. There was a winding, grinding sound followed by a pair of thumps as the landing gear raised and stowed away. Then the planes veered eastward towards an area where reconnaissance showed little in the way of Sumeri troops to observe-or Sumeri air defense to engage-the aircraft as they passed.
En los aviones! Los aviones!
Nunca volveremos compadres…
Fuckers!
Royal Jahari Land Forces Headquarters, al Jahara, 12/2/461 AC
They'd found out, so they believed, where the dictator of Sumer was hiding. Thomas had delayed going after him immediately, pending legal review by his judge advocate general. This had taken long hours as the lawyers had argued back and forth about the propriety and legality of assassination, the strategic implications, the public relations aspects. What did lawyers have to do with strategy and PR? In the Federated States Army there was nothing that lawyers were not intimately involved with.
Too, Thomas had not wanted to appear indecisive or at the mercy of his JAG section. So he had kept mum, pending their review and approval. This had never actually come, as the JAG section itself was evenly split on the issue. Thomas had therefore bucked the decision up to Campos who had thrown a fit that the dictator wasn't already dead. "Awful shock" readily became "Awe shucks."
It was then that Thomas moved up D-Day by twenty-four hours. This gave just enough time for his own troops in al Jahara to move to their assault positions and for his aircraft to send stealthy birds with two thousand pound GLS guided bombs winging their way towards the implicated palace.
Unfortunately, it also gave time for the dictator to change palaces as was his habit.
As unfortunately, or even more so, it did not give Parilla and Carrera time to call back the two Nabakov-23 Dodos carrying seventysix airborne Cazadors before the planes went low behind a series of mountains and the Cazadors had jumped.
Interlude
14 May, 2070, Brussels, Belgium
Money was always tight in the EU and among its member states. The only place to find it was to raise taxes (and, with the various levels of government already confiscating over sixty percent of GDP, those were already onerous and rather unpopular) or to reduce military expenditures (and at less than one percent of GDP those were already anemic and still rather unpopular). Only if the construction of ships could be made in the guise of social welfare legislation would there be easy acquiescence.
The United States helped quite a bit, if not with money then with free technology transfers. This was actually critical as, in this year-of- something-other-than-Our-Lord, 2070, Europe was a technological backwater. Even with the money found, or looted, the expertise simply didn't exist anymore. So many of the highly talented had left for other climes, most notably and infuriatingly for the United States, that the Old World had fallen far behind.