“Back at the road. We should get it.”
“Yeah,” said Danny.
“What’s the matter?”
“What do you figure they were doing up here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody probably heard the explosion,” he said. “I don’t know how long we’ve got.”
The sat phone rang. It was Nuri.
“Freah.”
“Glad to hear you’re OK,” said Nuri, who’d just been talking to Breanna. “Listen, the Iranians have mobilized. Their president thinks the Guard is revolting against him. Which is a pretty good assumption.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“They’ve started blocking off the roads. We just barely turned away from one before we would have been caught. I don’t think I can get to the boat, so I’m going to come up to the field.”
“All right.”
“We’re forty-five minutes away. Maybe less, if Flash keeps us on the roadway.”
“Be careful. Hera just picked off two soldiers on patrol. What kind of shape are you guys in?”
“Shape? You mean wounded? Both of us are OK. I have Tarid with me. His leg is shot up. Why?”
“You have experience moving nuclear weapons?”
“You mean the warhead?”
“Yeah.”
“No experience. I’ve seen pictures of them exploding. That was back in high school.”
“All right. Get here as soon as you can.”
“We’re on our way.”
“What are you thinking?” Hera asked when he put down the phone.
“I think if we wait for Delta, we’ll be dead when they get here.” He punched Breanna’s number into the sat phone.
81
The aborted attempt on the president of Iran had sent the country into high alert. Army troops were moving on Revolutionary Guard installations around the country; half a dozen were already fighting pitched battles. Two Iranian warships were having a gun battle with Guard raiders — essentially speedboats with guns — in the Persian Gulf, and the air force had scrambled all of its aircraft.
The U.S. Air Force strike package tasked to hit the missile base was being held on the ground; the plan now was for the group to follow up and hit the base once the warhead had been removed.
A second group of fighters, along with AWACS, a tanker, and other support units was being readied to act as escorts for the Ospreys. Rather than accompanying the transports, the flight group would operate over the Iraqi border, just close enough to come to the rescue if something happened. The idea was that any activity would alert the Iranians that something was going on. If they didn’t know something was up, the Ospreys would be able to scoot over and back without being detected.
That was the theory anyway.
“Danny, everything’s moving on schedule,” Breanna told him as soon as he called. “We’ll have you out in a few hours.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to be quick enough.” He explained what had happened.
“Get out of there and find a quiet place to hide,” Breanna told him. “Change the rendezvous with Nuri.”
“If we do that, they’ll end up with the warhead,” Danny said. “I have a better idea. You’re in an MC-17, right?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you can land on the strip here. It’s hard-packed.”
Breanna brought it up on the screen and looked at the specs. It was just long enough for the C-17.
And it was less than an hour away. They could land and be back over the Iraq border as the sun was rising.
She turned to the pilot. “Do you think we could get in and out of Iraq in one piece?”
“Colonel, I thought you’d never ask.”
“Danny,” said Breanna, “We’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
82
Several army vehicles passed Nuri and Flash as they made their way to the field. Nuri ducked a little lower in the seat each time. A fatalism had settled over him; he was sure they were going to die now, apprehended probably by chance. He’d run his streak of luck too far into the ground for the result to be anything else.
Flash was too busy paying attention to the road to feel optimistic or pessimistic about anything.
“There,” said Nuri, pointing to the turnoff. “Stop in front of the gate. I’ll put some video bugs to cover the road before we go up.”
Danny and Hera had left the gate open when they retrieved the Iranian army vehicle. Nuri and Flash found them next to the van at the end of the airstrip.
“Put the car back on the other side, opposite the missile storage building,” Danny told him. “The army Jeep is there, along with a couple of others that were here.”
“What building?” asked Flash.
Danny pointed to the wreckage. “Leave the lights off.”
“Help me with Tarid,” Nuri told him. “He’s a bit heavy.”
“How’d you knock him out?”
“Morphine, and lots of it. He’s probably due for another hit. He took a bullet in his leg, but I don’t think it’s too bad.”
They carried him to the van, where the Iranian they’d helped earlier was still clinging to life.
“How long before the C-17 gets here?” Nuri asked.
“Ten minutes now,” said Danny. “A little more.”
“You sure they can land here?”
“I’ve seen them land on smaller strips.”
“You’ve seen everything, huh?”
“Not everything.” Danny stared at Nuri. “I’m just as scared as you are,” he told him. “But we’ll get out of here.”
Neither one of them spoke for a moment.
“Where’s the warhead?” asked Nuri finally.
“It’s up by the wreckage.”
“How do we get it into the plane?”
“We’ll have to rig something to carry it,” said Danny. “They usually have a come-along and some other loading tools in the back.”
“Why don’t we use the van to pull it in?” said Nuri. “If we can get it into the back.”
“Actually, we could just drag it,” said Danny. “If we had a chain.”
“The one on the fence at the gate.”
“Good idea.”
They took Tarid and the wounded Iranian out, then drove down and got the chain. As the van backed up near the warhead, Danny realized they could tip it into the back if they could lift it just a little. The gear the Iranians had used to move it around had been destroyed by the fire, but Flash figured out how to use the van’s jack to push the nose of the warhead cone up just enough to get it onto the bed of the van. Pushing back slowly, they levered it far enough inside to get it in.
“Sucker is heavy,” said Flash.
“Not as heavy as you’d think,” said Danny. “Look at it. It fits in the back of the van.”
“Considering what it can do, it ought to weigh a million pounds,” said Nuri.
“Exactly.”
“You sure it ain’t going to blow us up?” said Flash.
Before Danny could answer, the high-pitched whine of the approaching MC-17’s engines broke over the hillside.
It was no hyperbole to say that the MC-17 had no peer among jet transports when it came to flying behind enemy lines. The stock version of the aircraft had been designed to operate under battlefield conditions, landing and taking off from short, barely improved airfields, and it did that job superbly. The MC-17/M shared those qualities, and added a few of its own. It could fly in the nap of the earth, hugging the ground to avoid enemy radar. It could maintain its course to within a half meter over a 3,000-mile, turn-filled route — no easy task, even for a GPS-aided computer. And it could land in a dust bowl without damaging its engines.
Actually, the latter was not part of the design specs. While the engines were designed and situated to minimize the potential for damage, especially from bird strikes, there was only so much the engineers could do. Their debates about where to draw the line had filled several long and surprisingly heated meetings at Dreamland, not to mention countless sessions after hours in the all-ranks “lounge,” aka bar.