“Nobody. No one was here.”
“Somebody did. They forced me to eat—” A burst of his own vomit interrupted. Showering the motorcycle with his dinner.
Ghost One was well inside the dwelling, having passed another oblivious armed guard. He spotted a woman in black robes preparing dinner in pots on the floor. Approaching footsteps sounded from the patio and Ghost One backed up to a wall. The woman did a double-take in his direction. Unsure of her eyes.
“Did she see you?” Beacon’s voice crackled in a loud whisper.
Ghost One inched along the wall and crept up the stairs. The woman rose with a panicked expression. Her gaze focused on the spot where he just stood. She made a frantic praying gesture — blessing herself as she fled out a side door.
Ghost One continued up the stairs, entering a small bedroom with half a dozen mats on the floor. It was their arsenal. AKs, RPG-7s, RGB-6 semi-auto grenade launchers and F1 Russian hand grenades were strewn about. Along with archaic scales, a drum of gunpowder and electronic fuses. Crude bomb-making paraphernalia. None of it concerned him as he stalked toward a window overlooking the back yard.
He saw the heavy-set man, coming around. The others returned to their task at hand — dispensing religious justice within the ranks.
Ghost One removed a small, black remote-control device from inside a vest pocket. He pressed a button and leaned against a wall to shield himself. Sliding his gloved finger to the remote trigger. CLICKING it. Instantly, the torso of the large man exploded in a muffled blast. Ripping his innards inside out. Spraying the guards nearby with lethal shrapnel and tattered scraps of intestines.
Abbas screamed in Arabic. Ordering his men to take cover inside, following a pre-arranged defensive plan.
The entire ISIS unit scurried into the dwelling, like rats retreating to their holes. They trampled up the stairs to their arsenal. Ghost One watched and waited with his back to the wall, allowing each member to enter his kill zone, one by one. None aware of his presence. The door closed behind the last one, and as the savages went for their weapons, Ghost One lit them up with his suppressed MP10 submachine gun. Muzzle flashes echoed off the faces of the men as Ghost One methodically squeezed bursts of lead into them. From one man to the next. The last to drop dead was their leader, Ali Abbas.
“Whoooa!” Exclaimed Nick Baldo, a young techno-guru barely out of officer school. The Surveillance Science Specialist watched a feed from Ghost One’s helmet cam, seventy-five hundred miles away. The scrawny airman was clad in an olive green RPA flight duty uniform. “Givin’ it to the towel heads!” he exclaimed.
“You finished?” Warren McCreary asked. Not impressed with Baldo’s outburst.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
First Lieutenant McCreary served as the Combat Control Technician (CCT) for the operation. His call sign was Beacon. In his early thirties, McCreary was a man on the rise in the elite circles of the US Air Force. Ambitious and sharp, he possessed the acumen and the necessary political contacts to make a speedy ascent up the military food chain. McCreary commanded from a bank of monitors inside “the box,” a sealed ground control station at Holloman. Baldo was on his right, handling technical support, and RPA pilot Richard Douglas was on his left. Piloting a drone that gave them a real-time video feed of Ghost One.
Prowling behind them, like a panther waiting for the moment to strike, was the steely, sixty-year-old Major William Trest. Trest was a strict, war-hardened veteran. He wore dress Air Force blues that looked as fresh and stiff as the day they were issued. He stepped directly behind Airman Baldo. Just the shadow of the imposing figure made the young Airman nervous. Baldo’s back straightened and his eyes widened. His guilty conscience wondered what he had done wrong, anticipating a grilling from the Major.
Trest’s voice broke the tension, barking a command to both seated men. “Get him the hell out of there, and let me see MISTY IR with DoD map overlay.”
“Yes, sir,” McCreary replied.
“Roger that,” Baldo said. “Patching MISTY through from NRO, and your overlay is tracking now, sir.”
McCreary spoke into his headset, “Beacon to Ghost One, mission accomplished. Deploy IR chemlight and proceed to extraction zone.”
Ghost One trampled down the stairs and exited the mud dwelling. He cracked a small plastic tube forcing a chemical reaction. Invisible to the naked eye, the chemlight was as bright as a road flare through his night vision visor. He tossed the chemlight on the roof and broke into a jog, making a bee-line through the gate.
“Proceed to flashing marker for exfil,” McCreary ordered over his bone phone.
A flashing dot appeared on Ghost One’s face shield, guiding him to the exfil where team members would extract him.
The chemlight glowed on Douglas’s monitor, seen from a night vision camera on the drone he flew above Ghost One. “Target acquired and painted,” Douglas said as he aimed a cursor at the glowing light, “painting” it for a laser-guided bomb to see.
McCreary replied, “You’re cleared hot.”
“Firing from ten thousand feet.”
A GBU-12 Paveway II bomb dropped from the wing of the drone. The five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb plummeted fast.
Douglas counted down… “Five, four, three, two, one…” The monitor whited-out from the brilliant explosion.
“SPLASH!” Baldo said. “Direct hit on target.”
Four-hundred miles above, MISTY, a school bus-sized spy satellite captured the explosion. What made MISTY more elusive than other satellites was its camouflage space shield. A cone-shaped inflatable balloon would deploy if sensors detected radiation waves. The Mylar balloon deflected lasers and incoming microwave radiation — tools of detection used by the Russians and Chinese to hunt enemy spy satellites. MISTY relayed encrypted information to and from the command center of Project Cloudcroft.
On the other side of the planet at Holloman AFB were two rows of arch-roofed aircraft hangars, separated by a runway. Stealth Canyon. The hangars were home to the family of stealth aircraft stationed at the 49th Fighter Wing. The “barns,” as the airmen called them, were hollow metal shells providing shelter for the most cunning weapons ever devised by man.
Hangar 302 stood out from the others by the number of Security Forces guarding its perimeter. Clad in AF battle camouflage, the Security Forces were the Air Force’s version of Military Police.
To Air Force personnel passing by, a glimpse into Hangar 302 may have revealed two of the most advanced stealth aircraft in the world. The Aurora, code named Nightwing, and the new MQ-10S Angel of Death (AOD) stealth drone. The Aurora achieved mythical status with unheard of speed and maneuvering ability. Developed by Skunk Works at Groom Lake (Area 51), the Aurora was an hypersonic stealth aircraft capable of speeds over Mach 6 (4,500 mph). She could fly to any spot on the globe in under three hours.
The inside of Hangar 302 looked like a common aircraft hangar, but had features unlike any other hangar. Protective lead panels lined the walls — blocking infrared, T-ray and thermal spy technologies — limiting Russia and Chinese satellites from seeing inside. Banks of fluorescence in the ceiling provided the only interior light. Another peculiarity of Hangar 302 was the sandy brown ground control station inside. The box was off to the side, out of the way of the aircraft. The double doors that ran the length of its back were open for easy entry inside the box.