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What the hell, she thought. Then she laughed, realizing it wasn’t exactly righteous to be using the word hell in connection to prayer, even in her mind.
Then she prayed.
Lord, help us today, she thought, then turned to Ferris.
“Ready, Captain?”
“And willing.”
“Major Stockard, are you ready?”
“I’m ready for you anytime, baby,” said Zen, who was sitting downstairs in the U/MF control bay.
“A little decorum, Major,” snapped Breanna. She checked with each of her passengers in turn, making sure that they were all snugged and ready to go. Behind Breanna and Ferris on Quicksilver’s stretched flight deck were the two specialists who would handle the electronics sniffing gear, Master Sergeant Kelly O’Brien and, on loan from an Army SOF unit, Sergeant First Class Sereph Habib.
An Arab language specialist, Habib had been at nearby Edwards Air Force base for a joint services exercise and still seemed dazed at how quickly he had been shang-haied. He answered, “Present, ma’am,” when Breanna asked if he was ready to go.
The upstairs or back bay of Quicksilver—the domain of the defensive weapons operators in a standard B-52—ordinarily contained two additional Elint stations, as well as space for the collection computers that processed and stored the gathered intelligence. The secondary control panels for the gear had been removed to save space, as had some of the black boxes. In their place sat a collection of spare parts, two medium tents, sleeping bags, and enough MREs to ruin appetites for a week. In between the supplies were Jeff Hiu, one of the electronics wizards responsible for Quicksilver’s “Deep Drink” ALR-98 intercept receiver suite, and Staff Sergeant Louis Garcia, 92
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who’d brought along a Walkman and a sizable portion of his Bob Dylan collection.
No change of clothes, though.
Sitting next to Zen downstairs in what would have been the radar navigator/bombardier’s post on a standard B-52 was Captain Michael Fentress, Zen’s apprentice and gofer on the mission. Zen had included him in the mission reluctantly—after being ordered to do so by Colonel Bastian.
“For those of you who aren’t regular passengers, Quicksilver is not quite an airliner,” Bree told them.
“Please keep your restraints on until we reach altitude.
We have a long flight, and a bit of weather along the way, but we should be well over it. I’ll wake you up when we’re getting close to Turkey. Any questions?”
“Where’s the bathroom on this thing?” asked Habib.
There were a few snickers.
“Chris, can you help the sergeant out once we’re under way?”
“You got it.”
“Can you cross your legs until then, Sergeant?”
“Guess I’ll have to.”
Quicksilver’s four single-podded power plants were a special set of Pratt & Whitneys, highly modified from the engines originally developed for the F-22 Raptor. This latest variation on engine configuration for the Megafortress traded off a bit of speed for greatly increased range, but the thrusters could definitely get the plane off the ground in a hurry. Cleared by Dream Tower, Breanna pushed the slider to maximum takeoff power, released the brakes, and pointed Quicksilver’s new and still unpainted nose toward the wild blue. The plane lifted off smoothly, her wings drooping ever so slightly because of the weight of the Flighthawks strapped below. Breanna felt a brief flutter of apprehension as the indicated airspeed dropped a few sec-
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onds off the runway, but the problem was momentary, maybe even just an indicator glitch.
“We’re green, we’re green,” said Chris quickly.
“Clean the gear,” said Breanna.
The plane began picking up speed as the massive wheels slid up into their bays.
“Looking good, crew,” she said as they climbed through five thousand feet. “Just thirteen hours and fifty-nine minutes to go.”
Over the Pacific
1672
AMONG DREAMLAND’S LESS GLAMOROUS PROJECTS WAS
designing a replacement for the venerable C-130 Hercules transport, a capable and highly versatile aircraft that came in an almost endless series of flavors. The Hercules was such a successful aircraft, in fact, that the wizards at Dreamland could not hope to fully top her—though even Herky bird partisans might claim they had come close with the MC-17B/W, which was taking Danny Freah and his six-man Whiplash advance team to Turkey. Based on the short-field capable C-17, the MC-17B/W had been thoroughly refashioned. Besides the dark black paint job, the most noticeable difference between the Whiplash mutation and the standard Globemaster III was the multicon-figurable wingtips that made up about a third of the outer wing, just inside the winglets. The leading and trailing edges had double trapezoid panels that generally operated as standard leading and trailing edge slats, functioning much as the C-17’s considerably smaller ones did.
But the slats also had narrow hinge stakes, allowing them to be set as miniature wings; when set, they looked a little like small biplane sections at the end of each wing. The 94
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effect increased the aircraft’s ability to land on short airfields, even with a full load. Where the standard C-17
could deliver 150 troops or 81,000 pounds of cargo to an airstrip of 625 yards—an incredible achievement in itself—the MC-17B could land the same load in half the distance. The stock P&W PW2040s with their 41,700 pounds of thrust could get a fully loaded C-17 into the sky at 1,200 feet; the Whiplash version needed a hair under eight hundred, though that involved a bit of prayer and a stiff wind. And the notoriously turbulent airsteam that made certain parachuting deliveries difficult—especially those involving troops—had been tamed by the Dreamland experts.
To the seven men in the cargo area of the big plane, however, the major difference between the Dreamland mover and all others came down to eight regulation-size cots, one large-screen TV, and one oversize poker table, all squeezed into a self-contained, motorized trailer that had been designed to fit in the rear bay. Not only did it fit, but it left room for two large, skid-mounted bulldozers, which were to be air-dropped in a low-and-slow insertion at the temporary base.
Which they had never practiced from the aircraft.
Danny Freah was not worried about the drop; the mission specialists aboard the MC-17B/W had more than twenty-five years of experience between them, the pilot and copilot had been flying together for years, and, at least in theory, he thought the Whip Loader ought to be at least as good at delivering “packages” as the standard model. Nor was he concerned about Annie Klondike’s special-order AGM-86s; the diminutive weapons scientist had demonstrated her far-ranging talents often in the past. Freah wasn’t even bothered by the fact that “his”
MV-22 Osprey, which was too large to fit in the MC-17, wouldn’t be arriving in theater until a day, or maybe even RAZOR’S EDGE
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more, after he arrived. After all, they weren’t expected to go anywhere.
Freah’s worries had to do with intelligence, or rather, the lack of it. His entire store of information on the area they were flying into amounted to a single paragraph, which itself could be summarized in one word: mountainous. The area to the south was populated by Kurds, and it had been surveyed by American forces during Operation Provide Comfort in 1991. But things had changed dramatically there in the past five or six years. Some of the Kurds the Americans had helped in their rebellion against Saddam Hussein were now allied with the dictator. Others were involved in an all-out war with the Turks. And the CIA backgrounder he had on his notebook computer said that the Iranians were funding two other Kurd groups, trying to foment revolution, or at least give their old enemy Saddam Hussein headaches.
The Iranians weren’t likely to be friendly. The Iraqis definitely were enemies. The Kurds might or might not be, depending on their mood. The Turks, ostensibly allies, were arguably the most deadly of all.