Morris turned up the thermostat on his suit, the fabric filled with electrical heat resistors like an electric blanket.
He continued flying the parasail south, his equipment crate swaying below him while he waited for the trip to end. Finally his altimeter read 1,000 feet, and he jettisoned the cargo crate. His chute seemed to fly up for a moment as his descent eased from the lost weight. Morris strained his ears and heard the sounds of parachutes popping open on a hundred equipment crates as they were released. The digital altimeter reeled off the numerals, until Morris’s toes were only a few hundred feet from the ground. He strained his senses, his eyes on where the horizon would be if it were visible, and tried to feel the ground with his mind. He’d always hated night jumps like these made on moonless nights; night-vision goggles had never worked for him on night drops, since the single combined monocular lens took away depth and caused vertigo. Somehow he had always been able to sense the approach of the ground at the last second, in time to flare out the parasail. Failure to pull its trailing edges down to stall it out meant crashing at up to forty miles per hour, enough kinetic energy to maim a man.
He held his breath and waited, finally hearing more than seeing the ground. He pulled his chute-control cables from the harness straps all the way down to his knees, and the parasail wing-shaped canopy inclined upward into the air flow, tilting up like an airliner flaring out over a runway.
The aero-braking worked, slowing Morris almost to a stop, neatly collapsing the canopy just as his combat boots hit the sand at walking speed. Morris stepped away from the deflating parachute and let it flap in the wind on the sand. He released the tabs on his harness, unzipped and took off his flying squirrel suit, and dumped his oxygen mask on the pile, rolled it all up into a ball, and buried it in the sand. Surrounding him were a hundred seals doing the same. Morris reached into his vest and pulled out his night-vision goggles and strapped them on. The desert came to life around him, men scurrying for the equipment crates, pulling out weapons and ammunition and pieces of the desert patrol vehicles.
Morris walked the sand, watching his men opening the crates, a few men sent to find crates that had landed a few hundred feet outside the drop zone. The contents of the crates were snapped together quickly, the tightly packed crate contents becoming space frame vehicles, with aluminum tubes for the framing, collapsed tires with inflation bottles, unfolding seats made of lightweight and compact foam, the heaviest components the engines, the transmissions, and the machine guns. Not believing in keeping his hands clean, Morris bent to help one heaving group of men tilt an engine assembly up to accept the front portion of one of the DPV frames. The men worked frantically, bolting high-horsepower engines together in the dark, the clumsy night-vision goggles the only aid to sight. Morris stepped back and allowed himself a moment of pride. With a pit crew like this, any Indianapolis racer would be a winner. The moment ended too soon as Morris checked his watch. It had been eight minutes since his boots had hit the desert. Too damned long.
Morris found Black Bart Bartholomay and went over the assault plan one last time while an ensign and a chief assembled their DPV-4. Once completed, the lightweight and queer-looking vehicle resembled the bastard son of a moon buggy and a Baha race car. It held four seals, driver included, had oversized dune tires, two frame-mounted machine guns, and a 300 horsepower supercharged small-block Chevy. The desert burst into loud burbling noises, the drivers gunning their engines. Morris strapped on his motorcycle-style helmet, got the radio boom microphone adjusted, and loaded the clip into his MAC-10 machine gun, the weapon heavy and satisfying in his hand. Bart returned from a tour of their assembly area and reported that all DPVS were running and there had been no injuries on the insertion.
The mission was still on track, if a few minutes late.
Morris checked the DPVS geosatellite navigation system, the navsat receiver no bigger than a loaf of bread, and looked at the map. Heading one seven seven led straight into the main bunker. He climbed into the DPV with Bart driving, the ensign on the rear gun, the chief next to him. He tapped Bart’s thigh, and Bart cautiously accelerated, avoiding getting stuck in the sand, and the hightech dune buggy sped off to the south, two dozen buggies following behind it in a roaring race.
“How will we deliver the Scorpions to Washington? And how soon can we do it?” General Sihoud stared at the electronic chart on the wall and thought about the destiny of the Islamic people, how the Westerners had only gained a foothold on UIF soil so that their eventual withdrawal from Muslim territory would be that much more significant for the UIF.
After all, fourteen centuries ago Mohammed had himself been driven from Mecca to Medina — the holy exile, the hegira, during which Mohammed founded Islam. The Prophet had then fought his way back to Mecca in an astonishing and triumphant battle, winning an immortal glory. By the time he was forty Mohammed and Islam had taken over the Arab world.
Now Sihoud had been given the Scorpion, just as Mohammed had received supernatural power from the archangel Gabriel, and now the war would be won. The infidels would sneak away and hide, and Mohammed al-Sihoud would triumph. Sihoud truly believed that.
Chapter 2
Thursday, 26 December
Sihoud yawned. It was many hours past the time he had hoped to sleep, and there was more to do before dawn than stare at the machine’s screens. He had a war to win, troops to command, armies to move, but first he must deal with his Iranian chief of staff, the worrying technocrat Rakish Ahmed. Still, he reminded himself, Ahmed was more than worth his pay — he had delivered the Scorpion weapon. For that Sihoud could stand to indulge his worldly fears; he just wished Ahmed could comprehend that they were destined to prevail. He believed that.
Colonel Ahmed frowned in low conversation with one of the officers at the tactical command console, who occasionally put one finger in the air and talked into a secure radio-telephone.
Sihoud could see Ahmed’s expression grow darker. Finally he turned from the console and faced Sihoud, a pained look on his face.
“Sir, we need to leave, now. I believe an attack is imminent on this command center.” Ahmed had been trained by the Iranian Air Force to state the conclusion first, the supporting evidence last. It was a habit that irritated Sihoud, but he waited. “An antiaircraft station, the north post, reported radar contact on a large airborne blip. The radar was a height-finding unit, and reported the plane climbed up from zero to fourteen kilometers very rapidly, then dived back down again. At first we didn’t believe it, but the south station just confirmed, they saw the same thing. This correlates to the lost jetliner, sir. It has to be paratroopers.” Ahmed paused to grab a radio handset and barked orders into it, something about a Firestar fighter and a Kawasaki U-10 truck at the south utility tunnel exit.
Sihoud calmly shook his head. There were no paratroopers and there would be no withdrawal through the utility tunnel.