“INCOMING!” Chief Adams screamed.
“Bulldog Four, Bulldog Four, vector bogie, angle one seven five, angels thirty,” the AWACs technician said, then changed to intercom. “Sir, I’ve got a Mig-27 closing on Bulldog Four, but I’m getting a weird intermittent on my screen in the area.”
The group commander in charge of the Aleppo patch brought up the screen and gave it a quick read. He was an experienced officer with hours of managing mock dogfights and this one was going more or less like training. The Syrian fighter pilots were generally chosen for their social position, rather than their skill. For all of that, they were probably the best the third world had to offer. Which simply meant that the F-15s and F-16s of the Combat Air Patrols were having a harder time killing them. So far, no American plane had been successfully engaged by either the Syrian pilots or their much more dangerous SAMs. But anything could change that so he gave the screen a close study, noting the marker for the F-15 and the intermittent radar tracks. He puzzled over those, hooking one for closer scrutiny, then noted the altitude change on the nearly motionless tracks, and blanched.
“Bulldog Four! Bulldog Four! Break left and dive! Say again, break left and dive!”
Bulldog Four was an F-15C, the best damned fighter in the world in Major Mike Speare’s opinion and he was the best damned pilot in the world. And he didn’t have anything on his threat receptors. But he was an experienced fighter pilot and he’d learned to trust the AWACs people in the bones, so without a thought he broke left as hard as he could handle, pulling the Gs up to fifteen and turning his head right to see if he could spot the threat. What he saw, literally, made him piss his pants. Mostly it was just two very wide eyeballs above a pressure mask and a heavily rigged figure dropping through the air. The wing of his F-15 missed the descending HALO jumper by less than five meters.
“Holy shit!” he bellowed. “I almost hit a fucking jumper!”
“All aircraft, be aware,” the AWACs mission officer said. “SEAL HALO team dropping near point 1148, currently Angels 32. All aircraft, avoid 1148 for five minutes and do not fire into region. Bulldog Four, turn right, descend to Angels Twenty and engage bandit point 1273 Angels Fourteen.”
“Bandit locked,” Speare said, calming. “Go Slammer.”
Meat Two, the lowest jumper in the stick, had been nearly hit by the F-15 and the wash from it picked up him and Vahn and spun the two of them through the air like tops. The stick broke apart as it entered the wash, all of the jumpers going into out-of-control condition, which meant being whirled like leaves in a tornado.
“Ruck loose,” Roman called as his rucksack bulging with ammunition and gear broke away from its rigging straps and dropped to the end of its descent line. Since he was spinning through the air at the time, the momentum of the heavy rucksack turned him into something like a bolo, spinning horizontally in the air with blood rushing into his head with the building G forces.
“Holy shit!” Simmons shouted when he saw the ruck coming towards him. He desperately flopped into a position he’d never heard of, basically on his side and banking as well as he could, and saw the ruck flash past his face. He heard a grunt and looked over to see Meat One spinning off, limp and out of control, and the ruck dropping. It had apparently hit the Meat full force and lost most of its momentum.
“Meat One, you read?” The junior NCO got back into position and delta tracked towards the meat who was descending on his back.
“This is Vahn. Meat Two is either dead or unconscious from the miss.”
“Ditto Meat One,” Simmons said, catching up to the jumper and trying to get a look at him. His mask was still attached, which was all that he could say at the moment. “He got hit by Roman’s ruck. Roman, you there?”
“Trying to catch my damned ruck,” Roman gasped. “Okay, it’s official. This job is just too fucking exciting sometimes.”
“Vahn, Simmons, hold onto the Meats until we get to opening, then release. They’ll drop towards the target and the chute will pop on its own at Angels Two. We’ll try to find them and recover them after the mission. Team Check.”
“Chief.” “Simmons.” “Vahn.” “Roman, and I have to say that I take it back, this was a bad idea.” “Sherman, ditto.” “Meat Three, here. With all due respect, ditto.”
They raced through the clouds, descending at nearly 150 mph, and Vahn finally got a look at the ground. They were following the OIC, who was tracking on GPS, but it didn’t matter anymore. Below twenty thousand feet now, they could see the target and even see the smoke still billowing from the fires in the underground facility.
“Be advised, that smoke is hazardous to your health,” the OIC said. “We’re going to go in to the south, just inside the perimeter fence. Spirit in the Sky, I want a JDAMs at point North 23145 East 14315, now, now, now. Given forty seconds, we should be on the ground just after it lands.”
“Sir, this is Meat Three.”
“Go ahead, Johnson.”
“I would like to state that I made a serious mistake when I didn’t ring out in BUDS, sir, with all due respect.”
There were chuckles on the team net and the OIC nodded his head.
“I think we’re all with you there, son,” the OIC said. “With the possible exception of the chief.”
“Nope,” the chief replied. “Gotta agree. This is even worse than 201.” An air-to-air missile flashed by below them and they could see the silhouette of a Soviet style fighter, banking and climbing over the target. “Much worse.”
“Mr. Ghost?”
Mike looked up into a fairly beatific face and a pair of really shapely breasts and smiled.
“Thank you,” he muttered. “Valhalla is real.”
“You passed out,” Britney said. “They ran away again. What do we do?”
“Get in the room,” Mike whispered, trying to move and realizing that he just didn’t have the blood left. He was surprised he could think and his vision was going again. “I’m done. All of you, in the room. Get guns. Amy show. Hold the door. I hear the angels call my name…”
“He’s out again,” Britney said. “Thumper, help me drag him into the room.”
Between the two of them they got him into the torture room and laid out by the dais. Then, with a great deal of trepidation, Britney picked up one of the rifles.
“How do you use this?” she asked Amy.
“First of all,” Amy said carefully, “you put the safety on.”
“What’s a safety?”
“Coming up on pull,” the OIC called. “Spread the stack.”
The thickening air was noticeable as they descended and they had actually slowed. But they were still approaching the ground rapidly. The jumpers rotated away from each other and spread out, Vahn and Simmons moving to position and then more or less tossing the two dead or unconscious jumpers away.
“And… pull,” the OIC called.
Almost simultaneously, seven chutes opened and began banking towards the darkened facility below.
“Oh, Spirit in the Sky,” the OIC caroled. “Where’s our JDAMs?”
As he asked the ground below was riven by a massive explosion and the shockwave slammed into their bodies.
“Thank you, Great Spirit,” Roman said.
“Head for the impact point,” the OIC called. “Ready personals. We’re going straight in.”
There were a series of screams as a massive explosion shook the room and concrete dust drifted down. Amy rolled into the room, her hands clamped over her ears and screaming in pain.
“Amy?” Britney yelled, grabbing her by the arms. “Are you okay?”
“Ow FUCK!” Amy shouted, shaking her head. “The blast must have gotten magnified by the corridor. That really hurt!” She rolled back into the doorway, shaking her head and clearly disoriented. “Babe! Flares!” she yelled, pointing down the corridor. “Flares, Babe!”