The sleek Gulfstream II, which the Navy called the VC-11, rolled off North Island using only handheld blinkers from the tower for control. Because of the blackout the tower was down. The bird was usually reserved for VIPs for fast trips. Lately the SEALs had been in the fast-trip category and had used the business jet several times. It was made by Grumman, now called Gulfstream Aerospace, held a crew of three, and could carry nineteen passengers in the best airliner recliner seats.
The Gulfstream has a wingspan of sixty-nine feet and is eighty feet long. It uses two Rolls Royce MK 511-8 turbofan engines that push her along at 505 miles an hour with a ceiling of 43,000 feet. Range was no problem getting to Sacramento. The bird would do 4,275 miles without gulping any new fuel.
They landed VFR at the Sacramento airport, working through a series of blinker signals and filtering in with hardly any air traffic. Flight time was a little over an hour and a half. More than twenty airliners sat on the ground, not able to take off due to the blackout that had shut down all air-control facilities. The Gulfstream pilots did a lot of looking around the sky before they brought the ship into Sacramento airport, to be sure that there were no other aircraft in the same area at the same time.
They taxied to the transient plane hangar and were met by an airport safety jeep. The driver talked to Murdock. Then the SEALs picked up their drag bags and gear and headed past the business jet fifty yards to where a CH-46 sat with two armed guards around it. The time was slightly after 1335.
Jaybird couldn’t let it pass. “Hey, guys, we in a hot LZ here or what? Why the cannons?”
A second class glared at him. “Loudmouth, they just lost three CH-53’s over there where we’re going. We don’t want to lose this one. Any objections?”
“None at all,” Bradford said as he walked past the guard and into the bird. The rest of the SEALs climbed on board and sat down where they could find a spot on the floor. This wouldn’t be a luxury flight. Murdock and DeWitt talked with the pilot outside, and then all came in and the two guards moved to the side doors and hooked up their machine guns on swivel mounts.
“How many civilians are we hunting up there in cold country?” Canzoneri asked.
Murdock looked up from a map he was studying. “Our orders didn’t say. Just the Presidential party. Could be ten or twelve, maybe with six or eight Secret Service agents along.”
“Those guys still carry the Ingrams under their coats?” Jefferson asked. “Think for an outing like this they’d get some long guns to take along.”
Murdock pulled down his lip mike on the Motorola. “Listen up. The pilot gave me a message from Don Stroh. There were supposed to be two Army Ranger platoons waiting for us here with their choppers going along on this ride. They got hung up at an airport and the locals wouldn’t let them take off. They were up the coast somewhere that’s still blacked out, and the local sheriff clamped down and blocked the runways with fire-fighting trucks. So for the first phase, we’re on our own.”
“Shit, they don’t get to come to the party,” Jaybird said. “Bet they are pissed.”
“We’ve got six hours of daylight left. Take us maybe half an hour to get up to the PD. From the Point of Departure, we’ll work up hill toward the ranch. We’ll go cross-country, and we don’t know where the sneaky North Koreans are, or if they’re still even in the area.”
“Wilderness, you said, up in there,” DeWitt said. “Where could they go?”
“From the sound of things, the Ks have been planning this thing for some time,” Lam said. “They could have come in as civilians, hired a pair of choppers, and moved in forty men, made their hit, and gone out the same way they choppered in.”
The engines on the big chopper started and revved up, and soon they lifted off and flew northeast.
“We’ll be about ten miles north of Placerville,” Murdock shouted to DeWitt, who sat beside him. “Damn rugged country. I don’t know how the owner gets to his ranch. Probably made his own road into the place.”
“This dude ranch. Do they have guests there while the President is there?” DeWitt called.
Murdock shook his head. “Last radio message said no guests, just the President and his team and Secret Service.”
“No recon, no data, we’re really going in blind.”
“That’s why you earn the big bucks, DeWitt. Our first job is to find the ranch and see if anyone is there. Depending on what we find, we figure out what to do next.”
“We have the SATCOM,” DeWitt said.
“The pilot says he’s to stay in the general area. If we want him we should use our Motorolas, or fire a red flare. He’ll jump ahead if we’re getting out of the five-mile radio range.”
“He can talk to his home base?”
“Right, Lemoore Naval Air Station down below Fresno.”
They were quiet then, watching the country out the side doors. The chopper had moved up to a thousand feet over the terrain, and had to keep climbing as the ground rose into the foothills, then into the Sierra Nevadas themselves.
The crew chief came back and hollered at Murdock. “Ten minutes to our LZ. The lieutenant says he’ll let you off, then move back three miles and shut down.”
“Tell him to keep his Motorola on too,” Murdock said. The sailor nodded and went back to the cockpit.
Five minutes later the chopper pilot found a road through the wilderness, and followed it to a spot where a small bridge spanned a stream. He put the bird down just past the bridge and the SEALs poured out each door, setting up an immediate perimeter around the CH-46.
When the SEALs had cleared the ship, the pilot lifted off, showering the men with dust, dirt, and a few stray pebbles from the downward wash of the rotor blades. Then it was up and away. The SEALs formed up in twin diamonds and began to move on a compass bearing due west. The immediate area had an open space near the creek and extending a quarter of a mile to the start of the timbered slope that lifted upward.
They established a pace of about three miles to the hour, due to the altitude and the drag bags. The idea of the bags was that by pulling them along, most of the weight rested on the ground and the man didn’t have to carry it, just drag it.
The timber was mostly pine and some fir, with clumps of oak and cedar. They moved through it with Lam fifty yards out front watching, checking out any problems he could see.
They had covered a mile and a half up the slopes when they came to a fence. It was new, with steel posts set in concrete and four strands of bright new barbed wire. The SEALs stepped between the middle two strands, and then pulled the drag bags under the bottom one.
On the point, Lam hit the dirt when he heard something to his left. He lifted up and looked, then dropped down. A moment later a pair of steers walked past some brush, grazing as they moved slowly toward the men. Neither animal looked up. Lam grinned and reported his find to the troops, then kept moving forward.
A mile later they came to the top of a sharp little ridge, and Lam eased up so he could look over it without skylining himself and becoming an easy target. He peered under the brim of his floppy hat and just over the ridgeline. Ahead a thousand yards on a broad mesa, he could see the ranch buildings. He called up Murdock, who took a look at them with his binoculars.
“Okay, we’ve got the buildings. Looks like they’re set on a flat area. I can’t see any movement or any bodies. How about you?”
“Saw one man run from the ranch house out to the next building to the left. Only action. So there are troops in there.”
“So where is the President and his people?”
“What would we do in the same situation?” Lam asked. “If we had this spot and overwhelming firepower moved in, we wouldn’t be able to hold the buildings, right? So where would we go?”
“Scatter and make a lot of trails for the bad guys to try to follow,” Murdock said.