The oxygen, he noted now, had a slightly metallic taste.
Maybe, Toad decided, a little prayer wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t bother the Lord often, just checked in occasionally to let the man — or woman — upstairs know he was still down here kicking, but now, he thought, might be a good time to put in an earnest supplication from the heart.
Dear God, don’t let anything happen to Rita.
Jack Yocke was thinking exclusively about the upcoming free fall. Unlike Grafton and Tarkington, he had never ejected from an airplane, nor had he ever jumped out of one. He knew people whose idea of a perfect Saturday was to leap out of an airplane with six of their buddies and free fall, then float down in sport parachutes, those colorful flying wings. He had never had the slightest desire to join the macho brigade. Maybe those folks had maladjusted hormone levels or were trying to spice up dull, boring existences, but Jack Yocke was perfectly happy with his feet upon the ground. He still got dates when he wanted them and his dick got stiff at the right time, so why spit in the devil’s eye?
Part of the reason he was here, he admitted to himself, was Tarkington. The Toad-man had a knack of rubbing him the wrong way. That coolest-of-the-cool, studlier-than-thou attitude, that…asshole! So now here he was, getting colder and colder, about to fall over five fucking miles through the night sky, then ride a parachute — if that contraption of bedsheets and fishing lines opened — right smack into the middle of a goddamn war with a bunch of raghead Nazis.
What if the chute doesn’t open? I mean, really! You gotta lay there in the air like a store dummy for two minutes and forty seconds waiting…waiting…waiting… If you panicked and pulled the manual ripcord too high you might run out of oxygen, or drift away from the landing area and the support of your fellow soldiers. Or you might find yourself hanging up there when the helicopter gunships and troop transports came in with their blades whirling around, flak searching the darkness, cannon fire, machine gun bullets… No, Jack, don’t take a chance on pulling the ripcord too early. Wait for this seventy-nine-cent gizmo from Woolworth’s to do the job for you.
He would wait. Under absolutely no circumstances would he panic. He told himself that yet again, trying to believe it. He would close his eyes and wait until the chute opened. It would open. He assured himself of that for the fiftieth time. If it didn’t, by God, they would scrape him off the asphalt in the middle of the runway, his eyes scrunched shut, his hands and legs outstretched, still waiting.
Now, fifteen minutes after takeoff, Yocke was ready. He was properly psyched and ready to leap straight into hell. Then he looked at his watch and saw that they had over an hour to go.
Oh, Jesus!
Rita Moravia sat in almost total darkness with her back against the forward bulkhead of the Blackhawk’s passenger compartment. Sharing the compartment with her but quite invisible were the four European colonels “observing” and the two Russian flag officers.
The Russians also had escorts, Captain Iron Mike McElroy and one of his sergeants. Rita had briefed them carefully.
Right now she wasn’t thinking about the other passengers. She was listening to the muffled roar of the engines through her headset and thinking about her husband, Toad.
He would be okay, she assured herself. When she heard he was jumping she thought of the two steel pins in his leg and wondered if he should. When she mentioned his leg he glared at her.
Isn’t that just like a man? If the man is concerned he’s thoughtful, chivalrous, gallant. If a woman voices her concern she’s a nag.
So life isn’t fair. Tell it to Yocke and let him put it on the front page.
The navy had been a tough row to hoe. First the Naval Academy, then flight training, the squadrons, test pilot school — Rita had encountered subtle covert and overt discrimination every step of the way. Oh, the senior officers thought it would be fine to have women in the navy as long as the pretty ones wanted to be executive secretaries to those said senior officers, but women shouldn’t be on ships! Or in cockpits. Or where men were shooting. Or drinking. Or telling dirty jokes. Heaven forbid!
Jake Grafton didn’t think like that. Because he didn’t Rita had found herself riding the tip of the arrow, slaughtering doomed men with a 30mm cannon.
Here in the darkness inside this helicopter over the desert, Rita Moravia remembered that moment. She remembered the feel of her airplane, the look of the clouds, the look of the Iraqi plane on the parking mat as she dove at it, the Gs tugging at her as she maneuvered, the lighted reticle in the sight glass, the vibration as the cannon vomited out its shells, the smoke billowing skyward as she pulled up and banked away… Everything was crystal clear, engraved on her memory.
She had killed.
Oh, it had to be done… but she had done it.
She thought now that she understood those senior officers she had met through the years, understood that look in their eyes. It had been a tired look, a weary look.
Now she forgave them. Yet they were wrong.
Jake Grafton was right.
You can’t avoid it or wash it off your hands just because you didn’t get a Y chromosome and a penis. Oh no.
Little Toadlet inside of me, this world you will come into isn’t just flowers and teddy bears. Male or female, you are going to have to live, endure, survive, do the best you can. You must be strong, little one. Somehow, some way, you must find the strength to do what you believe to be right. And the strength to live with it afterward.
24
The cruisers were on the western side of the task force, arranged in a broad semicircle over five miles of ocean. The Tomahawk missiles popped out on cones of flame, rising and accelerating, then nosing over and descending to just a hundred feet above the sea as their turbofan engines took over. Missile followed missile, a total of fifteen in all. Their targets were five radar sites between Samarra and the southern border of Iraq, with each radar being the target of three missiles.
The last missile had just disappeared into the darkness when the carrier to the east of the cruisers turned into the wind and the first two of her aircraft rode the catapults into the night sky, one off the waist, one off the bow. The launch took seven minutes. The planes were still climbing away from the carrier when more Tomahawk missiles rippled from the cruiser’s launchers.
Meanwhile a half-dozen AH-64 Apaches were approaching their targets, two more Iraqi radar sites, at just forty feet above the desert sand. Apaches from the 101st Airborne Division had made a similar attack against radar sites only a few miles from these on the opening night of the Gulf War in 1991. The Iraqis had worked for two years to build these replacement sites, which now met the same fate as their predecessors. They were turned into twisted junk by a blizzard of Hellfire missiles, 2.75-inch rockets, and 30mm cannon shells.
Wild Weasel antimissile aircraft were already orbiting over Baghdad. Under their wings were the radar-killing beam-rider missiles that would take out Iraqi fire-control radars when they began transmitting. Since the Gulf War allied aircraft had routinely patrolled the skies over Iraq and they were there again tonight, waiting.
The two C-141s carrying navy SEALs crossed the border at thirty thousand feet on a direct course for the Iraqi air base at Samarra. Someone had suggested a feint toward Baghdad, but Jake Grafton vetoed that. The most valuable target in Iraq was at Samarra. Feints were merely a waste of fuel and precious time.