He cringed, expecting to hit hard and on his face; instead his chest and face landed on a large, soft pillow.
Not a pillow, but the stomach of a dead Iranian soldier.
Danny turned his head to the side, his helmet’s visor magnifying the dead man’s green eyes. Wide open in the dim light, they stared at him as if to ask why he had come.
Danny pushed himself upward, ignoring his throbbing knee. The disk array sat on the floor a few yards ahead.
He moved toward it, meanwhile scanning the interior.
Two large suitcaselike arrays sat next to a small screen; he slung his gun over his shoulder and hoisted them from the floor. They were lighter than he thought but hard to hold in his hands as he began picking his way back outside.
He’d gotten about a third of the way when a fresh explosion rocked the building. He stopped, regaining his balance, then began again. He could hear the helicopter revving outside, felt his own adrenaline surging.
This is why I’m here, he thought. How could he tell RAZOR’S EDGE
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Jemma that? How could he explain it to her friends or politicos, to anyone who wasn’t right in the middle of things?
It was more than the rush. Part of it had to do with pa-triotism, or fulfilling your duty, or something difficult to put exactly into words, even to your wife. Danny pushed forward, sliding against a piece of mangled machinery, ducking to his right. An automatic weapon popped outside.
A hand grabbed him from the side, a hard clamp that whipped him around and threw him down. An AK-47 appeared over him as he fell, the gun barrel flaring.
In that moment Captain Danny Freah knew what heaven would be like. For all his years of protesting that he was not religious, for all his poor churchgoing, his in-frequent prayers—in the moment that bullets flew toward his chest, he felt the warmth of unending rest. Something soft and feminine whispered in his ear, a voice not unlike his wife’s, telling him he had nothing to fear forever more.
Then hell opened up with a violent thunderclap, light-ning shrieking in a violent arc. Debris fell around him, clumps of dirt and sod as he was buried alive.
Hands pulled him up, warm hands, old hands.
“Shittin’ fuckin’ hell, that raghead almost got you point-blank,” shouted Gunny, who’d somehow materialized over him. He had his arm wrapped around Danny’s chest—Gunny had pulled him down—and began dragging him outside. “Beat shit hell outta your pizza boxes.”
“Yeah,” said Danny, still dazed.
“Well come the fuck on,” said the Marine sergeant. His machine gun still smoked in his hands.
“Yeah,” said Danny. He paused at the wall, then leaped back to grab the mangled disk arrays, pulling them with him outside.
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The sun washed everything pure and white—even the three bodies of Iranian soldiers who had tried to cut off their escape.
“Let’s go!” yelled Liu, running up to grab one of the boxes from Danny’s hands. “The whole Iranian air force is coming for us.”
“What’s that, a pair of fuckin’ crop dusters?” said Gunny.
“Try a dozen MiG-29s and six F-5s for starters,” said Liu, physically pushing Danny into the helicopter. “The Megafortress is going to blow up the building—we don’t need charges. Let’s go!”
Aboard Raven , over Iran 1903
ZEN HAD TO CHECK HIS FUEL AS HE ROSE TO CONFRONT
the jets scrambling from Tabriz. The two planes, ID’d as F-5Es, were relatively primitive, unlike the MiGs coming off the concrete at Hamadian and Kemanshah. But they were more than a match for the Hind and close enough to intercept them.
“I’m zero-two on the lead plane,” he told Alou.
“Copy that. Launching JSOW on laser site,” replied the pilot.
Raven was running behind the Flighthawk by seven miles; even if the primitive radars in the F-5E Tigers would have difficulty spotting it, by the time Hawk One closed on them the black plane would probably be visible, at least as a disconcerting speck in the distance.
There was a dull clunk from somewhere far behind Zen as the smart bomb popped off the rotary launcher in the rear bay.
“I’m going to head-on the son of a bitch,” he said, as RAZOR’S EDGE
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much a note to himself as a piece of intelligence for the Raven pilot. “Break north. Stay with me.”
“Copy that.”
“Impact at three, two …” said the copilot, counting down the bomb hit on the laser.
Zen lost track of the conversation on the flight deck as the weapon scored a direct hit on the director assembly. Gray and black smoke furled and then mushroomed from the hole in the center of the building. A concussion shook the building, shattering five of the supports and causing the north wall to implode.
Then things got nasty.
As the explosion vaporized the metal tube and stand at the heart of the director, shrapnel from the smart bomb shot through a four-inch gas pipe near the side of the building. A second or so later the escaping gas was ignited by a fire that had licked its way out from one of the control units. The flames flew back into a large, pressur-ized reservoir tank. This exploded so brightly it set off the IR warning in the Megafortress’s tail, even though by now they were a good distance away. The building’s roof vaporized into a skyrocketing fireball, which burned so quickly that it blew itself out—though not before rising nearly a thousand feet and incinerating everyone who had been in the shed when the bomb hit.
Zen turned his attention back to his own targets. The Iranian jets, flying at just over the speed of sound, were at twelve and fourteen thousand feet, respectively, separated by about a half mile. They were traveling much too fast to engage the Hind; belatedly, they began to slow. The computer plotted Zen’s attack for him, and diplomati-cally didn’t post the odds of a heads-on attack with a cannon working at such speeds. His goal, however, wasn’t to nail them but simply break their approach.
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The computer cued him to fire before he could even see the first aircraft. He waited an extra second, squeezed the trigger, then corrected right to get a quick shot on the second aircraft. As he started to bank, something red flew through it; one of his bullets had managed to rip through the fuel lines of the lead aircraft, turning it into a fireball.
It was a one in a thousand shot—Zen thought to himself that he should have played the lottery that day.
The second airplane turned hard to the north, accelerating away and taking itself out of the equation. Zen didn’t care—he threw the Flighthawk south and began hunting for the MiG-29s.
“Good shooting,” said Alou.
“Thanks.”
“Bandits are accelerating,” reported the copilot. “Positive IDs—Fulcrum Cs. You have two bearing one-niner off your nose.”
“Slot Dance radar is active. Velocity-search mode,”
added the radar operator. “Should we jam?”
“Let’s hold that off as long as possible,” said Alou.
“They may not know we’re here. Zen?”
“Yeah, roger that. Working on an intercept,” he said.
“Fentress?”
“Boss?”
“Keep an eye on my fuel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Actually, the computer would do so, but Zen suddenly felt he wanted Fentress in the mix.
“Hawk One is being scanned,” warned the computer as he crossed to within ten miles of the easternmost MiG.
“MiGs are coming for us,” warned the copilot. “We’re inside Aphid range—they don’t seem to have us yet.”
“Go to ECMs,” said Alou.
“If you go to ECMs you’re going to cut down my ma-neuverability,” warned Zen. While the Flighthawk and C3
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used uninterruptible bands, its backup circuits were limited by the fuzz, and as a precaution the Flighthawk had to stay within five miles of the mothership. “Wait until they lock.”