The younger man, the one that had been introduced as Burrows, was obviously a spook — CIA or NSA probably. Not that Blake held that against him. Whoever he was, he had volunteered for a one-way mission in service of his country and that had to count for something. Like the rest of them he wore the loose-fitting JSLIST protective suit over his battledress uniform, but his bore no name or rank insignia. It was also suspiciously new, as if the man was modelling it for the cover of the Marine Times.
The spook’s buddy was never going to grace any magazine covers. Blake guessed he must be pushing seventy, and age had dried him out like leather stretched over knotted wood. His JSLIST was new too, but he wore it open at the throat and Blake could see the old combat jacket beneath. It bore the name Carroll on faded name tape. Blake was pretty sure they hadn’t used that camouflage pattern since Vietnam. As well as the old man’s dog tags, the chain around the thick neck held half a dozen medallions of various saints and a big pewter crucifix.
The old dude carried a bolt action rifle that looked every day as old as its owner. The wood stock was worn smooth from decades of use, but the barrel and the upper receiver looked freshly blued. The damn thing was huge.
Blake’s pride and joy was a 1969 Pontiac Judge; he guessed that the exhaust on the old muscle car was bigger than the barrel on that rifle, but it would be a close run thing.
The old man caught him staring at the weapon.
“Many elephants where you’re from?” Blake shouted above the roar of the plane.
The old man smiled. “Not any more,” he said.
“That thing standard issue back in your day?”
“Son, this is a modified 600 Overkill. It’ll send a nine-hundred grain bullet downrange at twenty-four-hundred feet per second. ‘Standard’ is not the word I’d use.”
A nine hundred grain bullet! The rounds in Blake’s M4 weighed only sixty-two grains.
The noise from the Globemaster’s engines rose in pitch as the big plane fought for altitude.
“Hold onto your lunches, Marines,” said the pilot’s voice over the intercom. “We’re going to climb above the worst of the cloud. No point getting cooked before we get to the drop zone.”
Yeah, plenty of time for that later. Blake knew this was a one-way mission. Even the aircrew on the Globemaster were taking a hell of a risk getting this close to the cloud. But they needed data; they needed to know who had done this to them, and that meant sending in the Marines from the ‘BIRF.
Their best intelligence so far had concluded the bomb had come in by truck from Mexico. The target had probably been Phoenix, although so far every terrorist cell that had claimed responsibility had been dismissed as mere attention seekers. Thankfully, the complexities of maintaining a thermonuclear device had proved to be too much and the bomb had detonated prematurely in the Sonoran Desert.
They had caught a break, for sure, but it was still a devastating breach of security. They needed to know who had done this and whether they had the capacity to do it again, perhaps more successfully.
The engine note changed again. They were decelerating, getting ready for the drop. Deploying a Stryker by airdrop was unusual. Dropping the big, eight-wheeled vehicle with its crew and passengers inside was unheard of, but this was a special case. Their time on the ground was limited and precious. To maximize their mission time they were going to drop right through the cloud and land as close to the hypocentre of the explosion as they could. The Stryker’s thick armour and self-contained atmosphere would give them some protection as they plummeted through the thick smog of radioactive particles thrown up by the explosion.
Blake heard the rear door open and the noise, which had been deafening before, became ear-splitting.
“Drogue chute deployed,” said the Loadmaster over the ‘com and the Stryker started to quiver like a racehorse in the stalls. Blake pictured the little chute fluttering behind the open rear door of the Globemaster. Its job was to pull the main chutes, all eight of them, out of their sleeves.
“Brace yourselves people,” Blake shouted above the din. “The next one’s going to be a real kick in the ass.”
“Primary chutes deploying in three… two… one…”
When the primaries opened, Blake felt like someone had driven the Stryker at full speed into the side of a cliff. He was thrown against his harness by the sudden deceleration as an acre of parachute yanked the Stryker out of the back of the speeding plane. He couldn’t see out, but the dirty sunlight that slanted in through the hardened viewing slits scythed around the inside of the cramped vehicle as it spun.
This isn’t right. They shouldn’t be spinning like this. He felt a momentary stab of fear as the steel cage and everyone inside it plummeted toward the desert that was still a mile below. It was stupid; they’d all be dead soon enough anyway, but dying in a botched airdrop would mean they had failed. It would mean they would learn nothing about the attack, at least not without sending more men to their deaths. He remembered the billowing, radioactive cloud rolling upwards and outwards like a cancer eating up the sky. Blake took the fear and twisted it into anger, a cold resolve.
The Stryker swung like a pendulum until down became somewhere closer to where it ought to be. They were still spinning, but they were level and Blake could feel the deceleration pressing up through his boots as the giant chutes slowed their descent. They were safe, for now.
“Ooh rah!” he shouted and his team answered, even the old dude. Only the spook stayed silent.
From somewhere at the back a voice mimicked the cry of a child at a county fair. “Again… Again!”
Even with eight chutes, touchdown was hard.
Although their Stryker was a reconnaissance vehicle and carried more instruments than armaments, it shared the eight massive all-terrain tyres and rugged, armored chassis of its more aggressive cousins. Despite that, they hit the desert like a fifteen-ton sledgehammer.
Blake unstrapped and made his way up the narrow aisle to the front cabin where their driver, PFC Kareem Lyons was already gunning the Stryker’s Caterpillar turbo-diesel power plant to life.
The cabin was even more cramped than the troop transport bay behind. The driver and navigator sat in front of twin steering yokes staring through narrow viewports at the swirling dust storm outside.
“Bearing, Sergeant?” Lyons asked.
Blake checked the GPS, but as he had expected contact with the satellites above was patchy at best.
“North forty-five degrees west,” Blake replied, that should get them close enough. “Or as near as the terrain will let you.”
Lyons nodded, gunned the engine and the Stryker lurched forward, rocking like a ship.
They drove for about twenty minutes while Blake and his team of specialists took readings from the mass spectrometer and Geiger counter. The explosion had created its own weather system: the rising column of super-heated air had built what the meteorologists called a thermal low, not unlike a tropical cyclone. With so much heat to dissipate, Blake guessed the dust storm around them would last for days, maybe even weeks. The swirling sand was also building up a significant amount of static electricity that was playing hell with their instruments. The radio was useless. They had a communications laser that could squirt data up to the satellite, but the bandwidth was limited and even that would probably be greatly attenuated by the swirling dust.