The place meant something even to those hardened by the death they had seen and dealt. A place of the faith of their country.
This wasn’t hunting terrorists who set off car bombs or a punitive raid, or an assassination of an enemy of the state. This was something unprecedented, even though they weren’t exactly sure what it was.
Sherev’s last words hit home. “Our goal is to recover the Grail and the Ark of the Covenant.”
“The what!” the unit commander asked, not certain he had heard correctly. “The Ark and the Grail. Get them and bring them back. And the urim and thummin.”
“And anyone we encounter?” the commander asked.
“There is an American woman by the name of Duncan, being held prisoner. Try to rescue her. Everyone else — kill them.”
The SATPhone received an imagery download from the closest spy satellite. Turcotte had the imagery displayed on his helmet screen, then he enhanced it. “The west side,” he told Sherev and Yakov.
“I don’t see it,” Yakov said.
“There’s a shadow,” Turcotte said. “That must be the spur. And a thin line indicating the trail.”
Sherev relayed the information on the exact location of the spur to the helicopters. “Lead Cobra will be on target in three minutes,” he informed Turcotte and Yakov.
Turcotte had one of his radios set to another frequency with which he was talking to the fire control officer of the AC-130.
“Specter,” he ordered as the computer switched him to that frequency.
Five thousand feet above the Sinai Peninsula, Captain Debbie Macomber heard Turcotte’s call in her headset and responded. “This is Spooky Four-Niner. Over.”
“This is Area Five-One-Six. Time on target? Over.”
Macomber had two main screens she was concerned with. One displayed the AN/AAQ-117 Forward Looking Infrared Radar and the other the APG-80 Fire Control display, the same as that used by the F-15E fighter. She was seated in a small, enclosed area in the front part of the cargo bay of the modified C-130 aircraft. On one side of her was the electronic warfare officer, and on the other the TV and IR sensor operators, who made sure she saw the targets regardless of light or weather conditions.
“Three minutes. We’ll be four thousand feet above highest ground point. Over.”
The rest of the large cargo bay held the weapons systems, all pointing out the left side of the craft — a GAU-12 25mm Gatling gun; an L60 40mm cannon; and farthest to the rear, an M-102 105mm cannon. Through the controls on the console in front of her, Macomber could fire all three guns at the same time at three different targets with pinpoint accuracy. Macomber could put a round in every square foot of a target the size of a football field in less than twenty seconds.
She had two primary methods of aiming the guns.
One was to run a computer program using targeting information from the intelligence information which she had programmed. The other was manually, which consisted of her tapping the interactive screen and the guns firing at whatever her finger touched.
Macomber was a graduate of the Air Force Academy who had fought to get this assignment: the first woman assigned to the elite Special Operations Wing that flew the Specters and Talons. She’d fought all her life. Her parents died in a car accident when she was three, and she was raised by her grandmother on a ranch in Montana, a place where most considered it a man’s land and a man’s job. A picture of her grandmother was taped to the monitor for inspiration.
“Do you have our friends accounted for?” Turcotte’s voice crackled in her ear. “Over.”
“See them clearly,” Macomber replied.
The Cobras were flying single-file in a draw, completely masked from Mount Sinai as they approached. The Blackhawks carrying the assault force were two minutes behind. It was precision flying, the sides of the canyon only a few feet from the tips of their blades on either side.
Since they were masked, they couldn’t see the cloud that began boiling out of the top of the mountain.
Turcotte felt the adrenaline kicking in. The suit was tight against his body, and for the first time he felt its power. If MJ-12 under the control of The Mission had siphoned Airlia technology to develop this, he felt it was appropriate it was being used in this assault. He turned and faced Yakov. The Russian gave him a thumbs-up. Sherev had one cup of the radio headset pressed tight against his right ear, listening to his helicopters’ frequency. Turcotte could hear all the frequencies overlapping each other in his helmet.
Through the skin of the bouncer, Turcotte could see the rock walls flashing by when he checked the view through his down mini-cams, sometimes less than a couple of feet away. He hoped they had the advantage of surprise. The tail boom of the last Blackhawk suddenly appeared ahead. He braced himself as the bouncer jerked upward over the lip of the canyon.
The Blackhawks were lined up in the canyon, moving at forty knots. Ahead of them were the Cobras, approaching the end of the canyon. Scanning up, Turcotte could see Mount Sinai — and the black cloud that now covered the top of its peak.
“This is not good,” Yakov understated.
The lead Cobra came out of the canyon and gained altitude, heading toward Mount Sinai. Behind it the other seven flared up, spreading out. “Hold the Blackhawks in the canyon,” Turcotte advised Sherev.
The Israeli relayed the order. Turcotte switched to the IR, then light amplification, but neither could penetrate the cloud.
Turcotte keyed his radio. “Spooky, can you see anything with your IR through that cloud? Over.”
The bouncer was now above the lead Cobra, less than three miles from the mountain.
Macomber had several views of Mount Sinai displayed in front of her. One was from a TV camera mounted in the nose of the plane, showing normal daylight view. Another was from the infrared sensor which normally could pierce through clouds and fog. But whatever was obscuring the top of the mountain was not a normal cloud or fogbank, as it was impervious to the IR imager. “Negative. I’ve got nothing.”
Yakov pointed. “There’s the spur.” A finger jutted up from the side of Mount Sinai, exactly as Burton had described, just below the cloud.
“I’m going to have the—” Sherev began, but his words were cut off by a bolt of lightning flashing out of the dark cloud. It struck the lead Cobra dead on. The helicopter exploded, debris littering the rocky ground.
The other attack gunships scattered. Another bolt, another helicopter gone. Sherev was yelling into his radio, trying to coordinate his forces. Turcotte contacted the Talon. “I need suppression, now!”
Macomber never fired without a clear lock on a target, given that the Specter gunship had all-weather, all-visibility capability. But throughout her career she’d had to work twice as hard as her male peers to be accepted in the elite Special Operations Wing, and that meant extra preparation. She hit one of the keys on her board and a computer simulation outlining Mount Sinai, as it had been mapped by satellite imagery, appeared on her targeting screen overlying the strange fog. She’d prepared a dozen firing programs and accessed one.