“I’ll see you on the ground,” Duncan said.
Turcotte turned and climbed the stairs that led to the massive flight deck of the Washington. There was a warm breeze blowing in from the seaward side. Looking across the flight deck, Turcotte could see SAS troopers rigging equipment. Some were doing a last-minute cleaning of their weapons, others honing knives or smearing camouflage paint onto their faces. Pilots from both the Army and Navy were walking around their aircraft, using red-lens flashlights to do a final visual inspection.
A figure loomed up in the dark and a rich British accent rolled across the flight deck. “You Turcotte?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Ridley. Commander, HAHO detachment, Twenty-first SAS. I understand you’re coming with us?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’ll assume you know what you’re doing. You jump last and don’t get in anybody’s way or you’re bloody well likely to get shot, and you won’t catch me crying in my tea over that. Clear?” Ridley was already walking toward their aircraft.
“Clear.”
“Turcotte,” Ridley said. “Sounds fucking French.”
“I’m Canuck,” Turcotte said. They came up to a C-2 cargo plane.
Ridley handed him a parachute. “Packed it myself. What the bloody hell is a Canuck?”
“French-Indian,” Turcotte said. “I’m from Maine. There’s a lot of us in the backwoods there.” He put the chute on his back.
Ridley was behind him, reaching between his legs with a strap. “Left leg,” he announced.
“Left leg,” Turcotte repeated, snapping it into the proper receiver. He felt comfortable around Ridley’s gruff manner. He’d met many men like that in his years working special operations. Turcotte had even worked with the SAS before in Europe, when he’d done counterterrorism work. He knew the Special Air Service to be top-notch professionals who got the job done.
Quickly Turcotte rigged and climbed into the plane. The C-2 was the largest aircraft the Washington had in its inventory. It normally moved personnel and equipment from the vessel to shore and back. Right now the small cargo bay held sixteen heavily armed SAS troopers in tight proximity to each other.
Turcotte smelled the familiar pungent odor of engine exhaust and JP-4 jet fuel, reminding him of other missions in other parts of the globe. The back ramp to the C-2 closed and the plane taxied to its takeoff position. The engine noise peaked and then they were moving, rolling across the steel deck. There was a sudden, short drop, then the nose of the plane tilted up and they were climbing in altitude. Below and behind them, like fireflies in the dark, helicopters lifted and followed.
“Ten minutes!” the SAS jumpmaster said. The message was picked up by the throat mike wrapped tightly around his neck and transmitted to the earpieces of all the jumpers, Turcotte included.
Turcotte did one last check of his gear, making sure everything was functioning properly. He looked around at the other men in the cargo bay. He was the only one in a single rig. The SAS troopers were wearing dual rigs — two people hooked together in harness with one chute. Turcotte had never seen that used for military purposes before. Usually such rigs were used by civilian jump instructors to train novice jumpers.
The jumpmaster continued, pantomiming the commands with his hands. “Six minutes. Switch to your personal oxygen and break your chem lights.”
Turcotte stood up at the front of the cargo bay. He unhooked from the console in the center of the cargo bay that had been supplying his oxygen and hooked in to the small tank on his chest. He took a deep breath and then broke the chem light on the back of his helmet, activating its glow.
“Depressurizing,” the crew chief announced.
A crack appeared at the back of the plane as the back ramp began opening. The bottom half leveled out, forming a platform, while the top half disappeared into the tail section. Turcotte swallowed, his ears popping.
“Stand by,” the jumpmaster called out over the FM radio. He moved forward until he was at the very edge, looking into the dark night sky.
Turcotte knew they were over fourteen miles offset from the Terra-Lei compound and should be attracting no interest from ground-based radar at this distance.
“Go!” The jumpmaster and his buddy were gone. The others walked off, the pairs moving in unison. Turcotte went last, throwing himself into the slipstream and immediately spreading his legs and arms and arching his back, getting stable.
He counted to three, then pulled his ripcord. The chute blossomed above his head. He slid the night vision goggles down on his helmet, checked his chute, then looked down. He counted eight sets of chem lights below him. He turned and followed their path as the SAS troopers began flying their chutes toward the target. With over six miles of vertical drop, they could cover quite a bit of distance laterally using their chutes as wings. Turcotte didn’t know what the current record was, but he had heard of HAHO teams covering over twenty-five lateral miles on a jump. He felt confident that with the sophisticated guidance rigs the front man of each pair of jumpers had on top of his reserve chute, they would find the target. All Turcotte had to do was follow. And, as Ridley had warned, stay out of the way as the SAS did its job.
Turcotte was cold for the first time in weeks since leaving Easter Island. Even at this latitude thirty thousand feet meant thin air and low temperatures. Turcotte’s hands were on the toggles that controlled the chute, both turning and descent rate. He adjusted as the line of chem lights below him changed direction slightly. He checked his altimeter: twenty thousand feet.
Fifty kilometers away the first wave of the air assault element was flying toward the target. Four Task Force 160 AH-6’s — known as Little Birds— led the way. They were modified OH-6 Cayuse observation helicopters. The AH-6 was designed as one of the quietest helicopters in the world, capable of hovering a couple of hundred meters from a person and not being heard. The two pilots both wore night vision goggles and used forward-looking infrared radar to fly in the night.
Two Little Birds carried 7.62mm minigun pods and the other two 2.75-inch rocket pods. In the backseat of each aircraft SAS snipers armed with thermal scopes provided additional firepower. The SAS troopers wore body harnesses and could lean completely out of the helicopter to fire their rifles.
Ten kilometers behind the Little Birds, four Apache gunships followed. Besides the 30mm chain gun mounted under the nose, the weapons pylons of each bristled with Hellfire missiles. A Black Hawk helicopter was directly behind the Apaches: Colonel Spearson’s command aircraft. And ten kilometers behind the Apaches came Spearson’s main ground force: eight Black Hawks carrying ninety-six SAS troopers ready for battle.
At a higher altitude and circling, the air strike force from the George Washington was poised. It consisted of F-4G Wild Weasels to suppress air defense and F-14 Tomcats with laser-guided munitions. And circling high above it all off the coast was the AWACS, coordinating carefully with Colonel Spearson to make sure that everything arrived on target at just the right moment.
Next to Colonel Spearson, in the command Black Hawk helicopter, Lisa Duncan felt reasonably calm. She had always handled stress and crisis well, and this was to be no exception.
She’d moved up in Washington for years until getting her last assignment, as presidential science adviser to Majestic-12. The fact that when she had been given the assignment she had only known of that organization as a rumor, had been the very reason the President had picked her. Even he hadn’t known exactly what Majestic-12 was, having been briefed when coming into office that MJ-12, as insiders called it, was a committee established after World War II to look into the discovery of various alien artifacts. At the briefing the head of MJ-12, General Gullick, had not told the President exactly what it was they had hidden at Area 51 in Nevada that required over $3 billion a year in black budget funding, other than to hint that they had recovered several types of alien craft, all in nonflying condition.