The Splendor was a Bahamian-flagged fifty-six-foot yacht. Capable of carrying two tons of product and fourteen battle-hardened crewmembers. It had a helicopter on the rear deck underneath a tarp, a last-ditch escape device.
And zero women in bikinis.
It was the latter that was the oversight. Splendor had come up the Tenn-Tom, into the Tennessee River, up through the locks to Knoxville and off-loaded its cargo, all on schedule and according to plan. But now, giving in to the needs of the crew, the captain had the armored yacht anchored in a cove on the north side of the river while they took the two skiffs to a local marina, where they took limousines for a night on the town.
A successful mission deserved a reward.
There was one man left on board for guard duty.
Except as Nada would have told them, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings, or in this case, the boat is back home.
The one thing Ms. Jones had over Hannah was the ability to bring in the thunder and lightning. The Cellar always operated on the down low. The Nightstalkers often tried that approach, aka Moms going to Scout’s house, but when in doubt, they brought in the sledgehammer.
Elements of that hammer were now arriving in Knoxville
First in was an AC-130, which could be considered lightning. Based on the venerable C-130 Hercules airframe, the Spectre gunship was designed to rain hell down from the sky. Along the left side of the plane were a 40-mm Gatling gun, a 25-mm Gatling gun, and a 105-mm breech-loading howitzer. Crews boasted they could put a round in every square inch of a football field in five seconds. They’d backed up that boast on battlefields ranging from Vietnam to Grenada, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other lesser-known conflicts.
It wasn’t coincidence that the plane was the first to arrive. Spectre had been alerted earlier in the day out of Hurlburt Field in Florida by Ms. Jones as potential support for Neeley’s mission. Just in case. The reality was that Ms. Jones had scrambled the plane and other resources on the chance that Neeley didn’t succeed, which was likely, in her opinion.
She hadn’t, but in doing so they’d lost track of Burns, so the plane had refueled in the air and then spent time circling around over middle Tennessee, awaiting orders.
A half hour later, as darkness had completely settled over Knoxville and the vicinity, more support came flying in.
First, four Apache helicopters, loaded with live munitions, out of Fort Knox.
Then a C-130 full of Rangers from Hunter Army Airfield outside of Savannah, Georgia, in case the team needed the elite infantry and to provide security at the FOB. And then, as they had done last year in North Carolina, on board a lumbering C-5 cargo plane was a pair of M777, 155-mm howitzers. Packed along with their crews were a couple of pallets of M982 Excalibur GPS-guided munitions. These were laser-guided rounds, allowing for pinpoint accuracy, especially useful when firing around civilian communities. With a range of twenty-five miles, the big guns covered a lot of ground from the airstrip, from the foothills of the Smokies to the south to north of Knoxville and a good stretch of the Tennessee River east and west. As soon as they were unloaded, they were emplaced in a low field behind the hangar, out of sight of the civilian terminal, and readied for fire missions. Rangers were patrolling the perimeter, and the road that ran around the back side of the airfield had been closed off due to a “water main break.”
There was Nightstalker Lite and Nightstalker Heavy, and then there was the FPF: Final Protective Fire. It’s a military term. For a firebase, this is where supporting artillery fire would be called in almost on top of the friendlies (and sometimes on top of them) in order to prevent it from being overrun. It was something that was only used as a last resort.
For the Nightstalkers, charged with saving humanity from an array of threats, their on-call FPF lumbered into the air from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. The venerable B-52 was carrying pods of AGM-129A cruise missiles on each wing, a total of twelve warheads. Ten of the warheads were conventional; two were nuclear.
Every time the Nightstalkers were alerted, a B-52 with this payload was scrambled.
They’d used the conventional cruise missiles in the past.
They had yet to use the nuclear warheads.
After the Pinnacle fiasco of the past year, the crews on this mission had been vetted by the Cellar. They would launch if Moms sent the correct order.
The B-52 rose up and turned to the southeast to go on station, drilling a hole in the sky over the vicinity of the Nightstalkers at a much higher altitude than the Spectre, waiting until needed or the mission was over and they could return home.
Most of the remaining Nightstalkers skipped the airfield and drive over entirely in the name of expediency.
Plus, they were just too damn cool to actually land with an airplane at an airfield. That was for civilians and the lesser Gods of Earth.
And Nada was racing toward the air-field in the backseat of the only F-22B Raptor ever produced. Every other Raptor in the inventory was an F-22A single-seater, coming in at $412 million per jet, which seemed a bit ludicrous to Nada, when some lunkhead pilot could put one into the side of a mountain with the wrong twitch of the controls. But the 22B had been designed as a two-seat training version, the line dropped after only one test model produced, during budget cuts. Nada shuddered to think what this one cost. The U.S. had probably sent men to the moon for less. The craft was stationed at Edwards Air Force, and Ms. Jones had requisitioned it to race into LAX, pick up Nada, and then roar east at over Mach 2.
Closer at hand to the problem, Roland, Kirk, Mac, and Eagle were already dirty and in full gear, so they simply got on the C-130 cargo plane Ms. Jones commandeered for them from Pope Air Force Base, which picked them at the airstrip at Mackall. They rigged in flight, also putting together several pods of gear — since they didn’t have the boxes from the Snake — that they might possibly need. Mac, as always, went heavy on the explosives taken from the 18 Charlie (engineer) committee. Kirk made sure he had adequate commo for the entire team from the 18 Echo (communications) committee. Eagle pouted, because he didn’t have his beloved Snake and he hated someone else flying him.
Back at Camp Mackall, Sergeant Twackhammer pouted because they were flying off with a lot of the gear he needed to train new Green Berets.
And Roland went with two full pods of assorted weapons appropriated from the 18 Bravo (weapons) committee, including flamethrowers, just in case they did run into Fireflies. As the 130 made its final approach turn for the drop zone, Roland did one last check of the pods to make sure the drogue chutes were rigged correctly, and then he manhandled all the pods into line, hooking their chutes to the static line that ran from the front of the cargo bay into the tail section.
The loadmaster waved his hands and shouted, “Three minutes!”
The rear of the C-130 opened, with the ramp leveling out and the top portion disappearing into the upper tail section. Lights from houses, cars, and streetlights were clearly visible to the rear, bouncing around as the plane twisted and turned.
Roland hooked up behind everyone else and the pods. The other three hooked up in front of the pods, closer to the edge of the ramp.
They were five hundred feet above ground level, and through their night vision goggles, they could see rolling, wooded terrain below. Passing by to the south was a large cluster of lights: Maryville and Alcoa, two adjoining towns south of Knoxville.
They flashed over a section of lake/river as the loadmaster signaled one minute.
It was going to be tight because they (Roland actually) had to push all the bundles and themselves out along a bend in the river. The pilot had promised to bank hard and follow the river as best as possible, but the banking itself could be a problem.