As he floated there with a front-row seat, his pulse increasing, his breath growing shallow, every muscle in his body beginning to tense.
Until suddenly someone struck him with a terrible thud, knocking him around into an uncontrollable barrel roll.
Flames flashed by.
He’d been hit by one of the dead guys.
He had to recover and fast. The longer he rolled, the longer it’d take to recover.
He arched his back, extended his arms, but kept rolling. Someone called his name.
Part of him thought it was no good. He should’ve died back in Moscow with the rest of them. He’d been living on borrowed time.
Then he heard Rakken telling him how lucky he was, having escaped death twice. Why not make it a hat trick?
Hell, he could’ve been blown up with the plane. Giving up now would be a terrible waste.
And then he thought about his dead brothers. They needed him to carry on. He remembered the last few lines of the Special Forces Creed:
I am a member of my nation’s chosen soldiery. God grant that I may not be found wanting, that I will not fail this sacred trust.
A sacred trust.
Damn it, he would not let them down.
He arched his back again, thrust out his arms, and screamed to regain control.
The roll slowed, and he was disoriented, the altimeter’s digital readout ticking off his descent, the ground still spinning a little, but he was on his belly, and his detachment commander was calling him on the radio.
He took a deep breath, about to answer, when he spotted the long column of smoke in the distance…
Where the C-130 had once been.
NINETEEN
Rearmed and refueled, Major Stephanie Halverson streaked down the runway, engine roaring, her gear just leaving the ground as dozens of Russian bombs finally hit Igloo Base.
She pulled up and away, banked left, and came around to witness a chilling sight.
The snow-covered Quonset huts housing the enlisted soldiers’ bunks, the offices, and the officers’ quarters burst apart, ragged pieces of metal flying everywhere as chutes of fire swept through them and ignited the stands of lodgepole pines behind the base.
Barely two seconds later, the refueling trucks went up like dominoes, their crews trying to evacuate in HMMWVs but caught in the blast.
Those explosions triggered several more among the smaller vehicles parked nearby, just outside the two hangar facilities that stood only a moment more before two bombs suddenly obliterated them.
Inevitably, the small, five-story tower and adjacent command center took one, two, three direct hits from thousand-pound bombs and were lost in mushroom clouds that rose and collided with each other, throwing up a black wall of fire-filled smoke.
Halverson was exhausted, overtired, her thoughts consumed by horror and disbelief.
From her vantage point, the devastation below was silent and seemingly less significant.
But she’d met nearly everyone at that base, and she realized now that there would be no survivors.
“Oh, God, Siren, you see that?” asked Sapphire.
She could barely answer. “Yeah.”
They had one job left, one last sortie.
There was nowhere to refuel. Nowhere to rearm. And the last orders they’d received from Igloo were to engage the enemy.
So they would.
She and Lisa Johansson were the only two left. Had their refueling gone a minute longer, they, of course, would already be dead.
Dozens of Russian cargo ships soared through the sky, their escort fighters engaging the squadrons from Alaska.
“Where are the Canadians?” Sapphire asked.
“I don’t know, but I have a feeling they won’t watch this happen for very long.”
“Roger that.”
Halverson took a long breath to steady her nerves. “This is it, girl. You ready?”
“Ready.”
“Let’s go get ’em!” With that, she engaged the afterburner, accelerating with a force that was hard to describe to someone who’d never sat in a cockpit.
Just as she hit Mach 1, the Prandtl-Glauert singularity occurred, a vapor cone caused by a sudden drop in air pressure that extended from the wings to her tail. She left the cone behind in her exhaust trail.
They held their steady course, ascending over the enemy aircraft, bound for coordinates seventy-five kilometers northwest of Behchoko, where dozens of AN-130s had landed and were off-loading their BMP-3s.
The five-hundred-pound JDAMs under Halverson’s wings were accurate to within thirteen meters, and she and Sapphire could launch those precision-guided bombs from up to twenty-four kilometers away during a low-altitude launch or up to sixty-four kilometers during a high-altitude launch. You plugged in the coordinates, delivered the munitions—
Barring of course, angry swarms of Russian fighters whose pilots thought otherwise.
The AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons in the F-35B’s internal bays were the “C” variant developed for the Navy. The weapon utilized a combination of an imaging infrared (IIR) terminal seeker and a two-way data link to achieve point accuracy and was designed to attack point targets. It was a thousand pounds of general purpose destruction.
And it was most definitely time for her and Sapphire to flash their fangs and lighten their loads.
“Two minutes,” Halverson warned her wingman.
“Roger that. I have two targets on the ground on the east side of their staging area, over.”
“I see them,” Halverson said, checking her own display. “I’ve got two more 130s on the west side. Christ, you see all those BMPs?”
“I do. Two bad we weren’t packing more punch.”
Sapphire was right. Thousand-pound JDAMs instead of five hundred would have really done the job.
“One minute,” Halverson announced.
That’s all we need is one minute, thought Halverson. She glanced up through the canopy, where the first streaks of dawn turned the sky a light purple on the horizon.
Just thirty seconds now. Give me thirty seconds.
Sapphire cursed into the radio. “Four bogeys at our eleven o’clock, closing in.”
Halverson swore under her breath as she checked her own radar. “They ain’t ours.”
“Nope. Got ID: Su-98s. Countermeasures seem ineffective. I think they have us. We better launch before they do!”
The Sukhoi S-98 was Russia’s latest single-seat fighter, deemed by most JSF pilots as the most deadly in its arsenal and capable of carrying up to 18,000 pounds of ordnance.
“Just keep course. Fifteen seconds.”
“They’re going to get missile lock!”
Halverson’s voice turned strangely calm as her years of training kicked in, like muscle memory. “Sapphire, let’s make it all worth it. We’re almost there.”
“Oh my God,” gasped Sapphire. “We won’t make it!”
“Hang on! Five, four, three, two… Bombs away! Flares, chaff, evade!” Halverson cried.
The two JDAMs fell away from her wings as behind her, the chaff and flares ignited.
Sapphire did likewise, and Halverson lost sight of her as they both rolled inverted and dove away in a split S, the oldest trick in the book, hoping the sudden maneuver would prevent those Su-98 pilots from getting missile lock.
As she came upright, flying in the Russians’ direction about two thousand feet below, the bad news flashed: missiles locked.
And her wingman confirmed the next inescapable fact: “Siren, they’ve fired!”
Halverson longed for the days of good old dogfighting, when maybe she and Sapphire could’ve pulled out the old Thach Weave, one of them baiting an enemy pilot while the other waxed him from the side.