Airborne, northwest of the Philippines
1623
They rigged the MV-22 with buddy tanks on the lower fuselage, allowing the Osprey to refuel the Quick Birds en route to the atoll. It was a great plan in theory, one that worked perfectly in any number of computer simulations. In the real world, however, it was trickier than hell.
The small helos struggled to stay connected to the drogues fluttering behind the Osprey. The gyrating wash of the massive propellers tossed the small bodies up, down, and sideways. The pilots compared the energy needed just to work the stick to a ten-mile kayak race; their arms were burning even before the fuel started to flow. watching the sweat pour off his pilot, Danny wondered what he’d do if the man collapsed in midair. When the Quick Bird was finally topped off, it lurched so violently to the right, Danny thought they’d been clipped by something.
“We’re five minutes out,” said the pilot, no sign of stress in his voice.
“All right, listen up,” Danny said over the Dreamland frequency. “Flighthawks give us real time ninety seconds ahead of the assault, so we see what’s there when we go in. Boom-boom-boom, just like we drew it up.”
He’d drawn it up simple: one helicopter from the south, one from the east. The one from the south overflew the small dock and landed on the beach area. The other went directly to the building seventy yards from the water. The helos would suppress and defenses—the Flighthawk snaps Zen had taken showed there were no gun emplacements or heavy weapons, so resistance should amount to no more than hand-carried light machine guns. With the defenses neutralized, the two teams would rapid-rappel to the ground.
Stoner had concluded there should be no more than six people on the islands, given the small size of the building and the lack of cover elsewhere. Danny concurred. The takedown should go quickly.
In case it didn’t, the Osprey would circle in from the north, prepared to use the chain-gun in its chin if things got tough. Fentress and the Flighthawk, with their 20mm weapons loaded for bear, would be available for fire support as well.
The island was shaped like an upside-down L, with the observation post near the tip of the leg. The head of the letter had a rocky beach that could serve as a set-down point for the helos and Osprey once the atoll was secure.
“Hawk Leader to Whiplash One,” said Fentress over the common frequency. “Captain Freah, I’m ready when you are.”
“Roger that,” said Danny. He glanced at his watch, then back at the sitrep map in his smart helmet, which showed they were about twelve miles from the atoll. Fentress would start his pass when they hit five miles. “We’re just over three minutes from Alpha. We’ll keep you posted.”
“Hawk Leader.”
Fentress wasn’t Jeff Stockard and would never be, but he was definitely capable; Danny had no doubt he’d do this job well.
So if Danny left, would somebody else walk right in and pick up the slack?
Yeah.
“Team Two checking in,” said Powder, in charge of the second squad. “Hey, Cap, can we go for a swim when this is over?”
“Only if there’s a school of sharks nearby,” said Liu.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout,” said Powder.
“Hey, Cap, you ever have grilled shark?” asked Bison. “Serious food. You get a little lemon, maybe some herbs. Very nice.”
“I thought you only ate burgers and pizza,” said Danny.
“Burgers, pizza, and shark.”
They were eight miles from the atoll.
“All right. Sixty seconds, Hawk Leader,” said Danny.
“Copy that.”
Danny turned to look at his pilot, an Army officer who’d come over to Dreamland specifically for the Quick Bird program. Before that he’d flown with the special operations aviation group that worked with Special Forces, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR). The captains gave each other a thumbs-up; Danny sat back, clicked his viewer into the Flighthawk feed, and curled his thumbs around his restraints.
“Alpha,” he told Fentress.
“Alpha acknowledged,” said Flighhawk pilot. And the show began. “Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends… .”
All Danny saw at first was a blur of blue and white whipping across the screen. The blur settled into a hatched pattern of waves as the Flighthawk leveled off, then slowed. A brown bar appeared in the distance, growing into a cat stretched across a purple rug, morphing into the side of a mountain at the top of a black-blue desert. Light glinted like crystal arrows from the blue background. Then, the image seemed to snap, and now everything was in perfect focus. A small dock sat before him, a rubber speedboat tethered to one end; above it sat a green-yellow cottage, a shack really, made of palms—no panels designed to look like palms in the distance. Fishing poles, oddly oversized, sat in the water near the dock. There was a rock at the water’s edge.
No, not a rock. A housing for a radar.
“Infrared feed,” Danny told Fentress. The pilot must have anticipated him, for as the words left his mouth, the image flashed into a gray greenness, murky monotone as if the robot aircraft feeding if had dipped into the bottom of an algae-choked pond. It took nearly three seconds for the computer to artificially adjust its sensitivity, forming the blurs into an image. If froze frame, backed out twice—all obviously at Fentress’s command—then analyzed the picture, supplying white triangles that showed a total of five people on the islands: two near the docks, one in the hut, and two about twenty yards further north, possibly observing the water.