They moved as if linked: they would stop for a long sixty seconds, scanning the woods and the road, listening for sounds of men, vehicles, aircraft; then, together move another twenty or thirty yards and repeat the process. They used their night-vision goggles to carefully sweep the area.
After another ten minutes of movement, Gunny Lobato was beginning to get nervous — the target was nowhere to be seen. He signaled the radio operator to join up with him as the squad moved cautiously ahead. Lobato searched the forest, but with no luck. The target was still south of them; he had to be.
He had to be very—
Someone was kneeling at the base of a tree, just thirty feet ahead of Lobato. He appeared out of nowhere. He was slowly getting to his feet, but he was still hidden to Marine Corps Corporal John Butler, who was moving in his direction to Lobato’s right. Butler had just crouched down as he heard the faint rustle of leaves — he knew that something was out there, but he couldn’t see or identify it yet.
Lobato had raised his MP5 and had clicked on the small infrared sniperscope searchlight, which would provide bright illumination for anyone wearing PV-5 goggles, when suddenly the stranger whispered loudly, “Hey, Marine, I here. Here.”
Butler swung around, saw the stranger, and was about to fire when the man said quickly, “Top of the morning, Marine, top of the morning,” in a thick, Transylvanian-sounding accent.
“Hands up!” Lobato hissed, praying silently that Butler wouldn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t. The man’s hands shot up in the air. His right hand was empty; his left held a thin briefcase. “Drop the briefcase!” Lobato shouted.
“No!” the man shouted back.
In a flash Butler leaped toward the man, driving the butt of his rifle into the stranger’s solar plexus and dropping him to the ground. With an animal-like wooof! of air forced out of his lungs, the man collapsed, and Butler jumped on top of him, scrambling for the man’s hands.
Two other assault-team members rushed to Lobato’s side. They pried the man’s fingers off the briefcase, and one Marine took it away to examine it away from the others in case it was booby-trapped. Lobato knelt to the man and searched him, loosening all his clothing, running his gloved hands next to his skin to check for wires or weapons. It took several seconds, but finally the man began to regain his breath, grunting, “Top of the morning, top of the morning,” in a hoarse whisper.
The sound of the helicopter was getting closer — this guy’s identity had to be verified before they dared take off with him. “Midnight jaybird,” Lobato challenged. It was one of the code-word challenges devised with a nonverbal response, used in just these situations where the subject was unable to speak or wearing a gas mask. Butler took his knees off the man’s wrists, and he promptly interlaced his fingers together, thumbs bent. It was the right response. Wordlessly, Lobato ordered Butler to gag RAGANU and bind his hands in front of his body; then he reached down to his web belt and activated a tiny radio transmitter.
No sooner had he done that than a brilliant searchlight flared to life. The intense white beam focused squarely on the small group of American soldiers at the edge of the trees. The CIS attack helicopter had suddenly popped out from over the trees and had emerged practically right on top of them.
“Pilot, engineer, pickup signal.” The PAVE HAMMER CV-22’s crew chief, Master Sergeant Brown, dared not say anything more on inter-phone because he knew they were only milliseconds away from going into battle — or dying in a fiery crash. They had to save themselves before going back to save the assault team.
The PAVE HAMMER CV-22 was skimming over the dark waves of the Baltic Sea, less than six hundred feet above the surface-it would have been lower, except the north winds had picked up considerably and the turbulence threatened to throw them into the sea at any moment. Forty feet in front of the CV-22, at the same altitude, was the MC-130H COMBAT TALON aircraft. The huge dark cargo plane had unreeled one of its “hose-and-drogue” aerial-refueling systems-a three-foot lighted basket at the end of a fuel line-from a pod on the right wingtip, and Fell was taking on fuel at two hundred gallons per minute. The lighted ring around the edge of the basket was the only light on these two aircraft-at night, about three wingspans above the sea, traveling at four miles a minute. The two airplanes sped through the night with only a thin hose between them and disaster.
Hank Fell’s hands were grasping the controls with a hard death’s grip as he fought to maintain control. He knew the MC-130H was in front of him, somewhere, but he would see it only at less than twenty-feet range— just before a collision — so the probe kept on disconnecting from the drogue and he had to struggle to reconnect. Fell had swiveled the engine nacelles on the CV-22 to 30 degrees, an intermediate position between airplane and helicopter modes, to give him as much altitude control as possible while maintaining maximum forward airspeed — the COMBAT TALON aircraft was designed to refuel helicopters at low speeds, but in this turbulence and at this low altitude, a sudden wind shear could send the one-hundred-and-forty-thousand-pound special-operations plane into the sea without warning.
As if to underscore his fear, the MC-130H suddenly dipped precariously down by the tail as if wallowing in heavy seas. Fell could feel the buffeting of the plane’s four huge turboprops as the prop wash rolled over the CV-22, and he could hear power being applied. The hose dipped suddenly, then shot up and swayed from side to side as the COMBAT TALON pilot fought for control. The drogue popped off the CV-22’s probe, whipped violently in the swirling winds, and the padded canvas-covered basket hit the tilt-rotor aircraft’s windscreen with a loud thump! The MC-130H pilot pulled power back to try to get back into position.
Fell turned the nacelle angle-control upwards, moving the CV-22 more into HELICOPTER mode so he could safely decelerate. “Dammit! Signal breakaway!” Fell shouted. Watanabe flicked the exterior lights four times in rapid succession, and the drogue disappeared as the MC-130H pilot applied power again and climbed an extra one hundred feet. “How much fuel now, Marty?”
“We took on five thousand pounds,” Watanabe replied. “We have ten thousand total.”
“Is it enough?”
“Barely,” Watanabe replied. “Just barely. In, out, land back on the Mistress with one thousand pounds. Oslo is out unless we can get the MC-130 back after exfiltration-and that’s unlikely since he must be low on fuel.”
“Signal ‘terminate refueling,’ then,” Fell said. “We’re going in with What we got.” Watanabe gave the MC-130H crew six flashes of the lights — flash-flash, pause, flash-flash, pause, flash-flash — and the ghostly Outline of the COMBAT TALON disappeared.
They were headed east, back toward the target point east of the town of Liepaja — in fact, after air refueling they were only six miles from the coast. Things had changed very quickly. PATRIOT was no longer using Russian code words to warn the CV-22 crew of airborne threats — instead, he was on the secure HAVE QUICK scrambled channel, issuing threat information directly to Ladybug. Brown had set the CV-22’s entire INEWS (Integrated Electronic-Warfare System) jamming suite to full automatic, which would jam all surface-to-air and air-to-air radars, radio communications, and laser illuminators detected by the threat receiver. INEWS also automatically modulated the heat emissions from the CV-22 itself, effectively “jamming” its own infrared signature to provide limited protection against heat-seeking missiles.