"What the fuck?" Holt said.
The Serb soldiers charging through the gap in the wall were being hit, and hit hard. No one in the tower had started firing yet, but the enemy troops were going down in twos and threes and fours, and the rest were scattering. Mac's 60-gun began hammering away in short, sharp bursts, but the enemy's charge had already broken.
A lone figure was crouched in the breach in the wall, firing into the JNA troops from behind, his weapon scything down men with a deadly thud-thud-thud of full-auto shotgun fire.
"Doc!" Roselli's voice yelled over the tactical channel. "Jesus Christ, hold your fire upstairs, it's Doc!"
The Yugoslav soldiers still on their feet in the courtyard were surrendering now, throwing down their AK-copies and raising their hands. Doc's shotgun fell silent.
"Kos!" Murdock snapped. "Doc's at the wall, the bad guys are surrendering. Get your people out there and round 'em up!"
"Already on it, L-T." SEALs were spilling out into the courtyard, rounding up soldiers who'd suddenly been transformed from desperate, charging fanaticism to a kind of dazed and accepting docility.
Thunder pealed across the sky. Murdock looked up, half expecting to see Night Rider on his way in for another pass… but what he saw instead was the glow of afterburners, the too-quick-to-follow shadows of low-flying jets.
"Skipper!" Higgins called. "Night Rider's on the line. He says the Javelins are here."
"Javelin?" The code names were running together. He didn't remember that one. Was his mind starting to play tricks on him? God, he was tired.
"That's VFA-161, L-T. A Hornet squadron off the Jefferson."
Hornets! That's why he hadn't remembered the code name; "Javelins" was the unit name for a squadron of F/A-18s, deadly, carrier-borne aircraft with dual roles, both air-to-air and air-to-ground. The U.S. Marines swore by them for close ground support. Two of the aircraft were streaking in low above the lake, moving south to north. By the firelight, Murdock thought he could see the elongated shapes of bombs tumbling off the aircraft's wing racks, and a moment later, he heard the popcorn stuttering of clusterbomb bomblets detonating along the main highway. With a roar of exploding gasoline, fresh fires lit the night beyond the trees to the northwest.
"Skipper?" Higgins called. "I've got Chariot on the horn. Chariot and Achilles are inbound, ETA eight minutes."
Explosions roared from the direction of the road. More Hornets circled out of the night, their thunder pealing across the lake and echoing off the Mountainside.
"I think," Murdock said slowly, "that we can hold out that long. No problem."
He wondered if anyone else could see that his hands were shaking.
22
"Here they come, Boss."
Murdock looked up. A shadow moved in from the lake, slowing as it neared the castle, drifting above the courtyard, as black as death, the wind from its rotor wash blasting across the bailey like a hurricane. Orange flame spat from the Gatling in its starboard side, the cyclic so high that the gun didn't chatter, it moaned, a low-pitched groan that set Murdock's teeth on edge as it fired at some unseen target in the forest beyond the wall.
"Pave Low," MacKenzie said, almost reverently. "Come to Poppa, baby!"
The MH-53J — socially the Pave Low III — was a direct descendant of the Super Jolly Green Giants of Vietnam, a Sikorsky CH-53 updated for the '90s and extensively re-engineered. Equipped with infrared sensors and FLIR, inertial navigation, multi-mode radar, and a 7.62mm Gatling gun protruding from the starboard side behind the pilot's seat, the Pave Low could streak across the landscape at two hundred miles per hour in pitch blackness at an altitude of one hundred feet or less, navigating anywhere in the world through a GPS link. Its range was limited only by pilot fatigue, for the massive boom protruding forward from the starboard side of its nose could be used for in-flight refueling. A device called a hover coupler allowed the Pave Low III to perform that almost miraculous maneuver for a helicopter — a stable hover — even in darkness or in bad weather. By processing signals from five gyroscopes, an inertial guidance system, and a radar altimeter, the hover coupler literally took over the fine adjustments of pitch for both main and tail rotors, allowing the Pave Low to correct instantly for pitch, roll, yaw, and the effects of unexpected updrafts, downdrafts, crosswinds, and even the jolting change in weight as troops exited the aircraft.
One Pave Low III could carry thirty men. Four had been dispatched for the Alexander extraction, two under the code name Achilles, two under the name Chariot. There would be no aborted rescue mission this time, as there had been in the 1980 Iran hostage rescue, with the mission called off because too many of the helicopters developed mechanical difficulties on the way in.
The first Achilles Pave Low moved slowly across the sky until it was hovering forty feet above the castle keep, where Frazier and Papagos had only recently taken down the antenna array mounted there. The rear hatch was down — Murdock could see the green gleam of the go-light winking at him from inside the troop bay. Suddenly, a line spilled from the rear of the Pave Low, uncoiling to the tower roof, and then heavily armed men in black were fast-roping their way down, each hitting the tower, then moving aside as the next man in line dropped after him. Murdock had once participated in an exercise where thirty men had exited from a Pave Low in five seconds flat.
The first Pave Low hovered a moment longer, then moved off toward the south. A second Achilles chopper moved in, hovering above the bailey. A rope uncoiled, and men began spilling out, dropping rapidly and silently into the courtyard and spreading out with practiced efficiency, taking up positions around the castle perimeter. Seconds later, a SEAL in black combat gear and helmet, his face almost invisible beneath his camouflage paint, trotted up to Murdock. "Well, Blake," the figure said. "Been keeping yourself busy?"
Murdock didn't salute. SEALs don't in the field, not when an enemy sniper might be watching. "Busy enough, Captain Coburn," he said. Then he blurted it out, "One of my men is dead."
"I heard the report on the way in. The Slavic kid, Stepano."
"Yes, sir."
"Sorry to hear that."
"Yeah." SEALs expect to take losses in the field. People die in combat, and in a close-knit band of brothers like the Teams, those people were going to be guys you cared about.
Stepano hadn't been with Third Platoon long, but he was still one of them.
"You also saved the lives of one of our congressmen and her staff," Coburn said. "That was a damned fine piece of work. What's your situation here now?"
"No enemy contact since the Hornets arrived, sir. I've been in radio contact with Night Rider, and he's been keeping us posted on their movements. Looks like they're heading north just as fast as they can manage, with the Hornets snapping at their heels."
The second Achilles helicopter had moved off, joining the first in a slow, round-and-round circuit of Gorazamak, half a mile out.
Chariot came in next, another Pave Low III identical to the others, black and menacing. This time the helicopter moved in lower, barely skimming the castle's ramparts, turning slightly, then lowering itself toward the pavement.
It was a tight fit. Standard procedure for preparing a chopper landing zone called for clearing an area fifty meters across, with a further twenty meters beyond that cleared to within three feet of the ground. To do that, though, they'd have had to level the castle walls; the bailey was well over one hundred meters long but only about forty wide. The Pave Low III's fuselage was thirty meters long, and the rotors, when turning, reached twenty-four meters across. That left very little room at all for error.