“Rise and shine, Sam. Got your target on radar. Eighteen minutes out.”
Fisher opened his eyes; he hadn’t realized he’d dozed off. Unlocking the emotional box into which he’d put Peter’s death had evidently helped. “I’m up.”
“Franco’s coming back to help. No worries, we used him as a guinea pig on this thing. He knows it backward and forward.”
Fisher rolled upright and put his stocking feet on the floor; through the chilled, nonskid metal he could feel the thrumming of the Osprey’s engines. Franco appeared at the edge of the cot and handed him a cup of coffee and an energy bar wrapped in plain white wrapping with the words, in black, ENERGY SUPPLEMENT, FRENCH VANILLA, ONE EACH, A/N 468431 stenciled on the side. It was as thick as Fisher’s wrist and nearly as long as a paperback book.
Fisher took it and looked at Franco. “Got some heft to it, doesn’t it?”
“Another DARPA product. Coming soon, government-issue Kit Kat bars.”
Fisher smiled at him. “Franco, was that a joke?”
“Uh, yeah… I guess so. Anyway, I’ve tried them. Not bad. Three of these a day, and you’ve got all the nutrients and calories you need.”
Next they’ll come up with dehydrated water, Fisher thought with a rueful smile.
“When you’re ready,” Franco said, “I’ll meet you at the ramp.”
Fisher downed his coffee, gulped down the energy bar, which was, in fact, palatable if not wholly chewable, then donned his tac suit and web harness and settled the SVT strap around his throat. “Up on SVT,” he told Bird and Sandy.
“Four minutes to ramp down,” Bird replied.
Fisher walked back to the ramp, where Franco was kneeling at the winch, working.
“Ready?”
“Yes, sir. Same principle as fast-roping except for the altitude.”
This was a huge understatement, Fisher knew. A standard fast-rope insertion by a hovering helo or Osprey was done at an altitude of fifty to ninety feet. What Bird and Sandy had been practicing was still in the experimental stages: HADFR (high-altitude dynamic fast-roping) — in other words, fast-roping at four hundred to five hundred feet above a moving target. There were a number of problems with this, primarily wind shear and targeting, which were different sides of the same coin. At five hundred feet, the force of the wind on the unfortunate soul dangling at the end of the fast rope — also called the worm — was considerable and unpredictable, often driving the worm far behind and to the side of the aircraft. The other side of the coin — targeting — was dicey because the flight crew would have either a degraded visual fix on the target or, in the case of bad weather or darkness, no fix at all.
Bird and Sandy had solved these problems with a custom-designed clear Lexan fairing that would hang, affixed, to the rope before the worm. Much like the curved shield carried by riot control police, the fairing cut the wind and decreased the drag to nearly zero. The targeting issue was solved in two parts: First, by a wireless transmitter that would feed real-time video from Fisher’s NV goggles straight to an LCD screen mounted between Sandy and Bird; and second, by a miniature LTD (laser target designator) pod strapped to Fisher’s wrist and index finger that not only uploaded his desired landing point but also his position relative to it. What Fisher saw, Bird would see; where Fisher pointed his LTD would be where Bird steered the Osprey. Fisher had to only look and point and then unhook himself when he was over the target.
HADFR addressed the primary drawback of standard fast-roping: noise. Helicopters and Ospreys were loud. There was no mistaking either the thunderous chop of rotors approaching your position nor the down blast fifty feet above your head as the craft went into a hover to deploy fast-roping troops. For bad guys the din was as good as an early warning alarm.
The issue that could complicate this particular HADFR was that Legard’s ship, the Gosselin, had a robust navigation radar with an operable ceiling of seven hundred feet. Bird would have to work some of what Fisher had come to call his “aviational magic,” or as Bird himself called it, “sleight of wing.”
Franco finished cinching the rig onto Fisher, then patted him on the shoulder.
Bird said in his ear, “Two minutes to ramp down. How’re ya feeling, Sam?”
“Like a flying worm.”
14
Fisher felt and heard the Osprey’s engines slow as Bird throttled back and rotated the nacelles to three-quarters, bleeding off speed for altitude as he dropped the craft into the Gosselin’s radar bubble. The Osprey would be directly over the ship now, Fisher knew, but in one of its radar blind spots — the other being a ring approximately three hundred yards in diameter around the ship at wave-top height, where the radar’s signal would be lost in sea clutter.
“One minute to ramp down,” Sandy called in Fisher’s ear. “We’re matching up the couplers. Stand by.”
Like Pave Low special operations helicopters, this generation of Osprey was equipped with what was called a hover coupler. When engaged, the coupler could lock the craft into either a precise fixed spot over the earth’s surface or slave its position to a designated target, in this case the Gosselin as it steamed out of the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Gaspé Passage.
“Not going anywhere,” Fisher replied. Yet. He felt that familiar and welcome anticipation/adrenaline flutter in his belly. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, centering himself. As it always did, the image of his daughter Sarah’s face appeared before his eyes. This had become a ritual for Fisher, a good luck touchstone he performed before each mission. He opened his eyes. Focus, Sam. Time to work.
Outside, over the roar of the engines, he could hear the hail-like splatter of rain on the fuselage. “Weather report, Sandy?”
“True winds light, three to five from the northwest; relative winds between us and the target’s deck, fifteen to seventeen knots; heavy and steady rain; temperature forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”
“All in all,” Bird added, “a downright lovely day.”
“I’m sure they’ve got coffee aboard,” Fisher replied. “I’ll see if I can scare up a cup.”
“Altitude, four hundred ninety-one. Ramp down in thirty seconds. We’re slaved to the target. As soon as you’re out the door, steering and cable slack on your command.”
The cabin lights blinked out, then glowed back to life in night-vision-friendly red.
“Roger,” Fisher said, and pulled up the hood on his tac suit and settled his goggles over his eyes. A thought occurred to him. He leaned closer to Franco, who was buckling into a safety rig on the bulkhead, and said, “The fairing—”
“Freshly coated in DARPA’s own version of Rain-X. Water should bead up and roll away.”
“Right.”
“Ramp coming down.”
A moment later Fisher heard the whirring of the ramp’s motors. Accompanied by a sucking whoosh of cold air, the ramp’s lip parted from the curved edge of the fuselage’s tail, and a slice of black sky appeared. The ramp continued descending, then stopped, fully open. Outside, Fisher could see skeins of clouds whipping past the opening and, in the breaks between the clouds, the distant twinkling of lights; the ships moving up and down the St. Lawrence showing up as individual specks, the cities and highways along the Seaway as threads and clusters.
Franco patted him on the shoulder again and called into his ear, “Whenever you’re ready.”
Fisher nodded, performed a final check of his rigging, then turned around so he was facing forward, then back-stepped up to the edge of the ramp until his heels were dangling in space, then coiled his legs and launched himself backward.