"Fuckin' A!" another voice said.
"Anyway, you have the rest of the night to think this one over. We move out at eighteen-hundred hours tomorrow. There is no turning back at that point. Everybody understand? Good. That is all for now."
"Ten-Hut!" Captain Ramirez snapped. Everyone in the room jumped to attention as the briefer left. Then it was the captain's turn: "Okay, you heard the man. Give this one a real good think, people. I want you to come along on this one – hell, I need every one of you – but if you're not comfortable with the idea, I don't want you. You got any questions for me?" There weren't. "Okay. Some of you know people who got fucked up because of drugs. Maybe friends, maybe family, I don't know. What we have here is a chance to get even. Those bastards are fucking up our country, and it's time we taught 'em a little lesson. Think it over. If anyone has any problems, let me know right away. If anybody wants out, that's okay." His face and tone said something else entirely. Anyone who opted out would be seen by his officer as something less than a man, and that would be doubly painful since Ramirez had led his men, shared every hardship, and sweated with them through every step of training. He turned and left.
"Damn," Chavez observed finally. "I figured this was going to be a strange one, but… damn."
"I had a friend died of an OD," Vega said. "He was just playing around, y'know, not a regular user like, but I guess it was bad stuff. Scared the shit outa me. I never touched it again. I was pissed when that happened. Tomás was a friend, 'mano. The fucker sold him the shit, man, I wouldn't mind introducin' him to my SAW."
Chavez nodded as thoughtfully as his age and education allowed. He remembered the gangs who had been vicious enough in his early childhood, but that activity seemed almost playful in retrospect. Now the turf fights were not the mere symbolism over who dwelt on what block. Now it was over marketing position. There was serious money involved, more than enough to kill for. That was what had transformed his old neighborhood from a zone of poverty to an area of open combat. Some people he knew were afraid to walk their own streets because of other people with drugs and guns. Wild rounds came through windows and killed people in front of televisions, and the cops were often afraid to visit the projects unless they came with the numbers and weapons of an invading army… all because of drugs. And the people who caused it all were living high and safe, fifteen hundred miles away…
Chavez didn't begin to grasp how skillfully he and his fellows – even Captain Ramirez – had been manipulated. They were all soldiers who trained constantly to protect their country against its enemies, products of a system that took their youth and enthusiasm and gave it direction; that rewarded hard work with achievement and pride; that most of all gave their boundless energy purpose; that asked only for allegiance in return. Since enlisted soldiers most often come from the poorer strata of society, they all had learned that minority status did not matter – the Army rewarded performance without consideration to one's color or accent. All of these men were intimately aware of the social problems caused by drugs, and were part of a subculture in which drugs were not tolerated – the military's effort to expunge its ranks of drug users had been painful, but it had succeeded. Those who stayed in were people for whom the use of drugs was beyond the pale. They were the achievers from their neighborhoods. They were the success stories. They were the adventurous, the brave, the disciplined graduates of the mean streets for whom obstacles were things to be overcome, and for whom every instinct was to help others to do the same.
And that was the mission they all contemplated. Here was a chance to protect not only their country, but also the barrios from which they had all escaped. Already marked as achievers within the ranks of the Army's most demanding units, then given training to make them prouder still, they could no more decline participation in this mission than they could deny their manhood. There was not a man here who had not once in his life contemplated taking down a drug dealer. But the Army was letting them do something even better. Of course they'd do it.
"Blow the fuckers right out of the sky!" the squad's radio operator said. "Put a Sidewinder missile right up his ass! You got the right to remain dead, sucker!"
"Yeah," Vega agreed. "I wouldn't mind seeing that. Hell, I wouldn't mind it if we got to go after the big shots where they fucking live! Think we could get them, Ding?"
Chavez grinned. "You shittin' me, Julio? Who you suppose they got working for them, soldiers? Shit. Punks with machine guns, probably don't even keep 'em clean. Against us? Shit. Maybe against what they got down there, maybe, but against us? No chance, man. I'm talking dead meat. I just get in close, pop the sentries nice an' quiet with my H and K, an' let you turkeys do the easy stuff."
"More Ninja shit," a rifleman said lightly.
Ding pulled one of his throwing stars from his shirt pocket and flicked it into the doorframe fifteen feet away.
"Smile when you say that, boy." Chavez laughed.
"Hey, Ding, could you teach me to do that?" the rifleman asked. There was no further discussion of the mission's dangers, only of its opportunities.
They called him Bronco. His real name was Jeff Winters, and he was a newly promoted captain in the United States Air Force, but because his job was flying fighter aircraft he had to have a special name, known as a call sign. His resulted from a nearly forgotten party in Colorado – he'd graduated from the United States Air Force Academy – at which he'd fallen from a horse so gentle that the animal had nearly died of fright. The six-pack of Coors had contributed to the fall, along with the laughter that followed from his amused classmates, and one of them – the asshole was flying trash-haulers now, Winters told himself with a tight smile – assigned him the name on the spot. The classmate knew how to ride horses, Bronco told the night, but he hadn't made the grade to fly F-15-Charlies. The world wasn't exactly overrun with justice, but there was some to be found.
Which was the whole purpose of his special mission.
Winters was a small man, and a young one. Twenty-seven, to be exact, he already had seven hundred hours in the McDonnell-Douglas fighter. As some men were born to play baseball, or to act, or to drive race cars, Bronco Winters had entered the world for the single purpose of flying fighter planes. He had the sort of eyesight to make an ophthalmologist despair, coordination that combined the best of a concert pianist and the man on the flying trapeze, and a much rarer quality known in his tight community as SA – situational awareness. Winters always knew what was happening around him. His airplane was as natural a part of the young man as the muscles in his arm. He transmitted his wishes to the airplane and the F-15C complied at once, precisely mimicking the mental image in the pilot's mind. Where his mind went, the airplane followed.
At the moment he was orbiting two hundred miles off the Florida Gulf Coast. He'd taken off from Eglin Air Force Base forty minutes earlier, topped off his fuel from a KC-135 tanker, and now he had enough JP-5 aboard to fly for five hours if he took things easy, as he had every intention of doing. FAST-pack conformal fuel cells were attached along the sides of his aircraft. Ordinarily they were hung with missiles as well – the F-15 can carry as many as eight – but for this evening's mission the only ordnance aboard were the rounds for his 20mm rotary cannon, and these were always kept aboard the aircraft because their weight was a convenience in maintaining the Eagle's flying trim.
He flew in a racetrack pattern, his engines throttled down to loitering speed. Bronco's dark, sharp eyes swept continuously left and right, searching for the running lights of other aircraft but finding none among the stars. He wasn't the least bit bored. He was, rather, a man quietly delighted that the taxpayers of his country were actually foolish enough to give him over $30,000 per year to do something for which he would have been grateful to pay. Well, he told himself, I guess that's what I'm doing tonight.