An instant later the high clouds gave a piercing hiss and a Hellfire missile struck the men above with pinpoint accuracy. The entire mountain shook with the explosion.
On the narrow ledge below, Ronnie screamed. Her wrist slipped from Quinn’s grip and they began to slide on loose shale toward the jagged lip of rock-and oblivion.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Northern Virginia
Jacques Thibodaux paced the oblong tile floor in front of the bank of blinking flat-screen computer monitors and glowing digitized maps of China and Afghanistan. The whir of cooling fans gave the place the feeling of a giant white noise machine. Thibodaux had to keep his hands behind his back to keep from slapping the big-eared Air Force staff sergeant sitting behind a computerized instrument panel and beefed-up military version of a game controller. On the wall above hung a three-foot blue banner bearing the motto of his secret unit in ornate golden script: hic sunt dracones — “Here There Be Dragons.”
A red dot pulsed on the tightly stacked topographic lines of the map, seventeen miles across the Chinese border into the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.
An emotionless female voice, like the ones that warned military pilots to “pull up, pull up” and avoid low terrain, sounded the alarm of “Impact… impact…” followed by a repeated set of GPS coordinates.
Staff Sergeant Guttman, the big-eared object of the Marine’s wrath, banged away furiously at the keyboard beside his game controller. His wide eyes blinked in teenage dismay at the instrument display on the panel before him.
A video game prodigy, he was one of a new generation of Air Force pilots assigned to Detachment Seven, the highly classified unit within the Fifty-third Test and Evaluation Group based at Eglin AFB. He was the primary pilot of the AX7 Damocles, a top-secret, Tier III-high-altitude, low-observable drone. Developed by Lockheed Martin’s infamous Skunk Works project office, Damocles differed from the RQ-170 Sentinel in several ways, the most notable being that it carried a payload of weapons. Like the mythical sword on a single horsehair, Damo could loiter above the enemy for nearly two days at altitudes well over sixty-five thousand feet.
The emotionless female voice continued: “Impact… impact…”
Thibodaux stopped to rest both hands flat on the counter, breathing down the kid’s neck. “Somebody wanna tell me what Bitchin’ Betty’s talkin’ about?”
“I swear, sir.” Guttman looked up, terrified. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t deploy anything.”
Win Palmer sat in a leather office chair along the back wall of the narrow control room, across from Staff Sergeant Guttman. The windowless trailer was more like a submarine than an Air Force control center. The national security advisor’s arms were folded across the chest of his white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
“What deployed?” Palmer asked. “A Tomahawk or the Hellfire?”
“The one-fourteen, sir,” Guttman chirped, his voice cracking from youth and fear. “The Hellfire.”
“Very good,” Palmer said. He leaned back, nodding as if relieved. “Damocles is normally armed with four Tomahawk missiles. We replaced one with a Hellfire to give Quinn close air support for this mission.”
“And?” Thibodaux wanted to say, What the hell does that mean? But even he knew there were limits to ways you spoke to the president’s right-hand man.
“The Breitling Mrs. Miyagi gave him,” Palmer explained. “We programed Damocles to lock on to the watch when the ELT antenna was activated. The Hellfire would then deploy on a two-second delay. With travel time from altitude, that would give Quinn between five and seven seconds before impact.”
“You mean to tell me”-Thibodaux’s face burned red-“you just shot a Hellfire missile at Jericho?”
Guttman shook his head. He forced a sick smile. The kid was actually wearing multicolored braces on his teeth. “No, sir, at least not unless he told us to. The Breitling Emergency pings at two hundred and forty-three megahertz for your basic military frequency. Mr. Palmer’s shop tweaked it to talk to Damo and Damo only. When your friend pulled the pin, the watch sent up a signal that went out like a giant cone. Damocles just had to lob one in the basket of that cone, so to speak. The Hellfire followed the signal down to the watch with less than one meter of error.”
“Yeah, well,” the big Cajun harrumphed, exhausted at being trapped stateside while Jericho was in danger, again. “Does Damo have a camera?”
“Multiple,” Guttman said, puffing up his chest like a proud father. “Conventional and infrared-all mounted on a Gorgon Stare Pod-”
“Excellent,” Thibodaux said. “Then get her zoomed in and let’s make sure he’s okay.”
Guttman shot a terrified look at Palmer.
“Can’t do that, Jacques.” The national security advisor frowned. “The AX7 is a stealth platform, but it does leave some signature. With the Hellfire deployment, they’ll be searching for us as it is. If we bring the drone lower to look through the cloud layer the Chinese will shoot her out of the sky. The Red Army has an air defense battery just outside of Kashgar. Too close.”
Thibodaux rubbed his jaw. “You once said you wouldn’t drop us in the grease without fair warning. Looks to me like Jericho is fryin’ out there and you don’t give a shit.”
Palmer shook his head slowly. If he was offended, he didn’t show it. “Quinn was fully briefed, Jacques. He knew how to deploy the weapon and how far away he had to be. He’s alive now or he isn’t. I’m betting he had an escape plan before he pulled the wire.”
“We should at least look.” Thibodaux rolled his shoulders, trying in vain not to let his temper get the best of him.
“No one wants to more than I do,” Palmer said.
“I’ll bet I do.” The Marine stared hard.
“Easy to say, Jacques, when you only have your friend to consider
…” Palmer studied him a long moment before nodding slowly, opening both hands. “But okay. You’re in charge now. You say the word and Sergeant Guttman will bring Damocles out of near orbit to check on our friend Quinn. Don’t worry about the little dustup with China, Pakistan, and the rest of the world over our previously top-secret invisible armed UAV.” The national security advisor turned to Guttman. “This man says the word and you bring her down.”
“Sir…” Guttman stammered, looking like he might have already wet his pants.
“Just do it, son.”
Thibodaux stood completely still, glaring at the ashen staff sergeant.
“Shit!” he finally spat, throwing up his hands. “Just forget it.”
Across the room, Palmer released a pent-up breath. Guttman slouched in his seat, looking as if he might weep.
“There are damn few people in the world we can trust now, Jacques,” Palmer said. “The last thing we need is for what we’re doing to end up on WikiLeaks. We’ve got to believe Jericho knows what he’s doing… Give him a chance.”
“I know.” Thibodaux nodded. His neck burned with a mix of worry over Quinn and pity for men like Palmer who had so many layers of convoluted junk to consider. He preferred the heat of battle when it was kill or be killed. The political side of matters fatigued him. He turned to leave. Camille was in the hospital on bed rest and he hated to leave her alone too long.
“Jacques,” Palmer called.
He stopped at the coded, metal door.
“Sir?”
“For the record, I wouldn’t have made that offer if that had been another Marine out there.”
Thibodaux grinned. “Shows how much you know, sir. I adopted Chair Force into the Corps about an hour after I met him.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Jericho clenched every muscle in his body. The veins on the side of his neck swelled as he strained with his left arm to hold on to Ronnie where she dangled five thousand feet above the hungry rocks below. He lay on his stomach, the crook of his right elbow clutching a nubbin of stone where they’d landed on the ledge roughly the size of a kitchen counter an instant before the Hellfire strike. The camel herder had fallen to his death and the two bandits left topside had been reduced to fine bits of ash.