Before Bosarelli could figure it out, they reached Hansell’s office. “This is where I get off,” the lieutenant said. “Go right in. He’s expecting you.”
Bosarelli wished he had a minute or two to shine his shoes and make sure his uniform was squared away. But he wasn’t about to keep Hansell waiting. He threw back his shoulders, stepped inside, and gave the general the crispest salute that he’d offered anyone since his first year as a cadet in Colorado Springs.
“Sir.”
“Colonel. Please sit. You’ve been flying the Here for eighteen years, is that right?” It wasn’t a question. Bosarelli nodded. “Your record’s spotless. Two years ago, you landed in Bagram on one engine.”
Bosarelli was thoroughly nervous now. Three-stars didn’t butter up lieutenant colonels this way unless they wanted something.
“And you requalified on the chutes just last year.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“I have a mission to discuss with you, Colonel. An unusual mission. You’re the first Here pilot I’m offering it to. But I want you to understand. This is a request. Not an order. No hard feelings if you say no.”
“Yes, sir. I accept, sir.”
“Thank you,” Hansell said. “But first I need to know if it’s even possible.”
For the next five minutes, Bosarelli sat silent as Hansell outlined what he wanted.
“So? Can we do it?” Hansell said when he was done. “I’d rather use a Predator”—a lightweight unmanned drone—“but they just don’t have the payload to make it work.”
Bosarelli wished he could ask who’d okayed this insane idea, and why. On second thought, he didn’t even want to know. Somebody up the chain, that was for sure. Way high up. Maybe all the way. He looked at the ceiling, avoiding Hansell’s ice-blue eyes, visualizing the steps he’d take.
“And we’d be doing this—”
“Tonight. The goal is four A.M.”
“No time like the present.” Craziest thing I’ve ever heard, Bosarelli didn’t say. He’d always wanted to be in the middle of the action. Now he was. Be careful what you wish for. “I think it’s possible, sir. In a way it’s a throwback, a big dumb bomb. I’ll need one other officer. Jim Keough ought to be game.” Bosarelli paused. “So assuming he’s in, obviously we’ll want altitude fuses. The JPFs, the new programmable ones. And, ah — Bosarelli stopped, not sure how much the general wanted to hear.
“Go on, Colonel.”
“I assume we’ve got the smart boys at JPL and AFKL”—the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio—“running sims to figure our trajectory after we flip the switches.”
“We’ll have projections within an hour.”
“Then, yeah, if they sign off. We can do it. And you’ll damn sure be able to see it a long way off.”
“So. Now you know. Are you still game? Take a minute, think it over.”
Bosarelli couldn’t pretend he wasn’t nervous. Any sane man would be. The risks were off the charts. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and Marines took chances just as big every day. No way was he turning this down. He got the words out fast, before he could change his mind. “I’d be honored. As long as you promise to come get us quick.”
“Understood. You have my word on that.” This time Hansell was the first to salute. “Thank you, Colonel.”
FOUR HOURS LATER, and Bosarelli and Major Jim Keough, his flight engineer, were at 22,000 feet, flying slowly east-southeast over the Pacific, giving Keough time to arm the fuses that would turn the C-130 into a sixty-five-ton bomb.
What they were planning wasn’t so different from what Mohamed Atta had done on September 11, Bosarelli thought. Though there was one very big difference.
Instead of its usual load of Humvees, Bosarelli’s C-130 carried twenty GBU-29 bombs, upgraded versions of the old MK-82. Each of the bombs held its standard load, 150 pounds of high explosive. They were scattered among forty-gallon drums that held roughly equal amounts of gasoline, benzene, and polystyrene plastic — the basic ingredients of napalm.
Officially, the United States had destroyed all its napalm bombs by 2001. The increasing lethality of conventional bombs eliminated the need for napalm, a jellied gasoline that burned as hot as 5,000 degrees. The stuff had been a public relations nightmare since Vietnam, when an Associated Press photographer had caught on camera the agony of a nine-year-old girl overtaken by a napalm bomb.
But though the premixed bombs were gone, the Air Force still stockpiled the raw ingredients necessary to make napalm. Despite napalm’s terrible reputation, there was nothing magical about it. The polystyrene simply made it a lot stickier than ordinary gasoline, so it was hard to scrape off. Once it touched something — an enemy soldier’s uniform, a little girl’s face — it burned until it was gone. Even more important for this mission, it burned much more slowly than gasoline.
KEOUGH STEPPED INTO THE COCKPIT. “Good to go.”
Bosarelli swung the C-130 to the right, tracing a long slow semicircle over the Pacific until they were heading west, back toward South Korea. It was just after 3:00 A.M. locally—3:00 P.M. in Washington — and the civilian flights into Seoul had ended for the night. The only other planes within thirty miles were friend-lies. Without being too obvious about it, the Air Force had put Bosarelli’s plane inside a bubble of fighter jets. Four F-16s were running interference along the North Korean border, with four more to the west, over the Yellow Sea, though they were being careful to give plenty of room to the Chinese jets patrolling to their west.
Meanwhile, the South Korean navy had been asked to send every ship it had into the Yellow Sea. A flotilla of cutters and frigates had fanned out from Incheon, heading west toward the Shandong Peninsula. Every boat was carrying loudspeakers, and at least one American military observer. But the boats had been absolutely prohibited from coming within eighty miles of the peninsula’s tip. At the same time, every available rescue helicopter, both South Korean and American, had been prepped for takeoff, though none was in the air as yet.
Back in the C-130, Bosarelli permitted himself a brief look through the wispy clouds at the sleeping countries below. The difference was literally white and black. South Korea glowed prosperously; North Korea lay in darkness. Somehow the view reassured Bosarelli. He might never know the point of this mission. But he believed, had to believe, that he was fighting for the right side.
AT LANGLEY, EXLEY AND SHAFER were getting hourly updates. So far, the mission was on track — though so far, nothing had really happened. Exley still couldn’t quite believe the president had agreed to her proposal.
After the confrontation with Duto, the meeting in the White House had been oddly anticlimactic. They’d helicoptered onto the White House lawn and been ushered straight into the Oval Office, where the president and the national security adviser were waiting. Exley had again recounted her conversation with Wells, and told them of her plan to rescue him.
Then Duto had made plain what he thought.
“Not to sugarcoat this, sir. There’s almost no chance of success. If it weren’t for what Ms. Exley and Mr. Wells did in New York, I wouldn’t even have bothered you with it.”
The president murmured something to his national security adviser, who nodded. Exley didn’t like either of them, but she had to admire their composure. She couldn’t tell what they thought of the idea.
The president turned to Duto. “If it doesn’t work? What’s our downside?”
“Well, sir, given the current tensions, the ultimate downside is that the Chinese could view it as an act of war.”