"Most days. Had a day off 'cause they've got a big thing going that doesn't involve us… can't talk about it."
"Yeah… I understand," Carl said. "When you comin' home?"
"Can't say. You know these open-ended enlistments. Used to be that there were tours of duty, y'know. Now, nobody knows. It will be a while."
"Take care of yourself."
"I will."
Troy signed off with the usual niceties and tried his mother. Still nobody home. She didn't like carrying her cell phone.
He started dialing Cassie's cell phone, stopped after the 310, hesitated, and dialed again.
"Hey," Cassie said, sounding distracted.
"Hey, babe, it's Troy."
"Wow, hey… what's up?" Cassie said after a pause. "Just thought I'd give you a call."
"Cool… that's great," she said, sounding distracted. "What time is it over there?"
As he answered, he could hear her telling someone that she was talking to Troy.
"Where you at?" he asked. "Who you with there?" "Yolanda and Trina, everybody's in the office today…..
Yolanda wants to know what you're doing over there." "Flying jets." That was the simplest way to describe it. "Yolanda says 'cool,' wants to know when you're gonna give her a ride in one."
"Tell her if she shows up here, I'll try to squeeze her in."
"You gonna squeeze me in, big guy?" Cassie asked. "You know it, girl."
"When you comin' home?"
"I don't know… this thing keeps dragging on." "What's going on that it's taking so long?"
"Endless supply of bad guys, I guess… can't say more than that….. I sure am looking forward to… y'know… getting back there and squeezing you in and…"
"Me too, big guy," Cassie interrupted hurriedly. "Listen, I gotta run. Talk to you soon… love you lots." Troy was about to reply in kind, but Cassie had already hung up.
Chapter 13
"Didn't think we were on for the Dhuladhiya mission," Jenna drawled as she caught up to her Falcon Force teammates heading for a rare late-evening briefing. "Thought it was a strike mission. I thought I was a snooper, not a shooter."
"I heard that Harris wants us to snoop on the shooters," Hal said. "I guess we'll fly in right after they shoot, and snoop on what's left."
"At least we had a day and a half and a good night's sleep," Troy Loensch added. He was walking behind them slightly, keeping an eye open for the kind of groping that he expected was going on between them, but saw none. Groping? Maybe he was reading too much into it. She had, after all, merely patted him — even if it was on his ass.
They arrived in the briefing room, finding it unusually full. The forty-eight hours of downtime had become thirty-six hours, and now it was over — before the second of the two good nights of sleep for which they had hoped.
The strike mission was due to launch at 0300 so that they would be over the target in the predawn darkness. Indeed, Harris had decided to have Falcon Force fly a poststrike assessment package.
The 334th Air Expeditionary Wing planning staff, standing in the front of the room, looked exhausted. They had pulled an all-nighter and had been working all the next day. After they unveiled their master plan, they could all sleep — while the aircrews went to work.
There was an air of excitement in the room, the anxious excitement born of the anticipation of a larger-thanusual mission. After the conference at Joint Task Force headquarters, General Harris was anxious to prove that his airpower could do the job, and he was making it a maximum effort.
There were two fighter/ground attack squadrons assigned to the 334th. Between them, they could muster thirty-four F-16s. In normal operations, some of these were routinely reconfigured from carrying ordnance to flying reconnaissance missions such as poststrike assessment. Tonight, he wanted all of them carrying weapons.
This left the three Falcon Force ISR birds as the only F-16s available for snooping, and they got the job.
On the screen were images that Troy had brought back of Dhuladhiya. Overlaying these were circles and arrows that indicated where the barges carrying weapons would be. In a satellite image less than six hours old, a freighter labeled as Iranian by the intel analysts could be seen unloading crates onto a barge near an inlet on the island. This was the smoking gun — or rather the guns that would be smoking as soon as the bad guys could get them within range of UN or U. S. personnel.
"Falcon One, clear for runway two-niner."
Troy breathed a sigh of relief. Hal was now taxiing toward Atbara's runway. Next, it would be Jenna's turn, and finally his. After an hour of sitting in their cockpits watching the strike package take off — tongue after tongue of flaming turbofan engines — it would be good to get moving.
They flew the same flight plan as they had on their earlier reconnaissance of the Dahlak Archipelago. This time, though, the distance ahead of them was filled with the winking red lights of the strike aircraft.
An hour later, as they descended to the flight level for the attack, Troy could hear the voices in his headset of pilots far ahead as they began to drop ordnance.
There were some excited boasts as hits were reported on barges. The GBU-32 JDAM smart bomb was deadly accurate, and it was also just plain deadly.
Suddenly the tone of the chatter changed.
"Aspen Four… taking ground fire."
"Maple One… I see tracers at two o'clock… one o'clock."
"Aspen One… I got tracers at eleven… everywhere!" "Think I see a SAM… Ponderosa Two… SAM incoming…"
"Mayday… repeat… mayday…"
"This is Ponderosa One… we are egressing over Eritrea and walking into a wall of SAMs."
"We got SAMs coming off that damned island too!" "Aspen Four looks like he got hit…"
"Aspen Four, this is Aspen One, can you read me…
come on, talk to me… Aspen flight… climb to…" "Mayday… this is Maple Four… I'm hit!"
The lump rose in Troy's throat. In the distance, he could see the carnage, a sky full of explosions and white hot streaks of SAMs climbing through the darkness. The American F-16s had raced into the target area in close formation and were too close to take evasive action without risking in-flight collisions. They had to just grit their teeth and plow though it.
"Why?" Jenna said out loud. "How?"
"Somebody got tipped we were coming," Troy snarled angrily.
"Roger that, Falcon Three," Hal said, trying to remain calm. "Climb to ten thousand and maintain heading."
The surface-to-air missiles were fused for the altitude at which the bombers had been flying. Hal figured that Falcon Force could still complete its mission at a higher, safer altitude.
As they came across Dhuladhiya, the ground and sea beneath them were on fire with burning ships and the tracers and streaks from SAMs targeting airplanes.
In the distance, Troy could see the unmistakable plume of a burning aircraft falling to earth.
"Wish we were carrying HARMs on this flight," Hal said. The planners had taken the calculated risk of loading the attackers for strikes on boats and barges. Nobody had anticipated surface-to-air missiles, certainly not so many. Indeed, there had been no sign of them in the recon data brought back by Falcon Force.
The flight plan for their return called for the American aircraft to cross onto the African mainland by way of the narrow, lightly populated strip of Eritrea that led into the Denakil Depression where Troy and Jenna had earlier tangled with the Eritrean MiGs. Unfortunately, as soon as they made landfall, the aircraft came under attack from a second defensive line of surface-to-air missiles. The strike commander had ordered the aircraft to scatter, but not before at least three, and possibly more, had been hit.