Air Battle Force (8 page)

“General, think of your family,” someone else said. “Don't risk your life with this. It's just a machine. It's not worth it.”

Patrick still did not reply. In fact, for most of the five-hour-plus flight out of Central Asia, that's all Patrick had thought about—his son, Bradley, waiting for him back in Nevada. Bradley's mother, Wendy, had been brutally murdered during a mission in Libya, along with Patrick's younger brother, Paul. Patrick came home to see his son and bury his brother and then left again to try to rescue his wife when the exiled Libyan king located her in a Libyan prison.

The rescue mission was a failure: Wendy was killed, and Patrick barely made it out alive. He was finally able to bring her body home after the Libyan king set up a new constitutional government in Libya, and they cremated her remains and scattered her ashes in the Pacific Ocean. After that, Patrick vowed he would never leave Bradley's side. . . .

But he broke that promise shortly afterward, when President Thomas Thorn gave him Air Force major general's stars and command of the Air Battle Force wing at Battle Mountain. At first it was short trips away from home only, to the Tonopah Test Range or Dreamland, maybe to Washington. Bradley was being watched by Patrick's sisters either at his home in Battle Mountain or at their home in Sacramento; many times Patrick took his son with him. Bradley was making friends, playing T-ball, and he seemed happy to see his father when he finally came home, not traumatized or clingy. Bradley was a tough kid, Patrick thought. He had gone through a lot during his short life.

But now Patrick was on a weeklong mission, flying out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. He rationalized it by saying it was only a UCAV control-and-monitor mission—there were no plans whatsoever to fly over hostile territory, so he would be as safe as he could be in a 470,000-pound combat aircraft. Now even that flimsy rationalization was exploded. At the very worst there was an extremely good chance that he would leave his son an orphan—at best he was probably going to lose his commission. Again.

Finally the Hornets went away, glad to be out of midair-collision range with the bomber, and the Vampire was all by itself.

The bomber was several miles north of the island of Diego Garcia when the first engine flamed out from fuel starvation. “Shut down the opposite engine before you get two flaming out on the same side,” Rebecca told him, but Patrick was already ensuring that the computers were doing just that. Rebecca stared hard out her windscreen, but all she could see were blurs. “How are we doing?” No reply. “Patrick? You okay?”

“I . . . I was thinking about my son,” Patrick said. “I barely made it home after the Libyan ordeal and his mother's death, and now I might just orphan him with this stunt.”

“It's not too late to get out. I'm ready to go. All you have to do is say the word.”

Patrick paused—but only for a few moments. “No. We'll make it.”

“Puppeteer, you are too low,” the tower controller called. “Start a slow turn now, away from the final approach path, or you won't make it.”

“It's now or never, Patrick,” Rebecca said, firmly but evenly. “If you wait and try to turn too tight later, you'll stall and crash. If we lose another engine, we won't make it. And if we lose an engine while in the turn, we'll spin in so fast they'll need a dredger to dig us out of the ocean bottom. Turn now.”

“No. We can make it.”

“General, don't be stupid—”

“If we ditch, Rebecca, we'll lose a three-hundred-million-dollar plane,” Patrick said. “If we land and we end up crashing it on the runway, maybe even shutting the place down, so what? I doubt if we'd do more than three hundred million worth of damage.”

“You're nuts,” Furness said. “You have much more than just a problem with authority—you have some sort of sick death wish. Need I remind you, sir, what happened to you the last time you violated a direct order from the National Command Authority?”

“I was forced to retire from the Air Force within forty-eight hours.”

“That's right, sir,” Rebecca said. “And you nearly took me down with you.”

“We'll make it,” Patrick said. He keyed the microphone. “Diego Tower, Vampire Three-one on final for full-stop landing runway one-four.” He used his unclassified call sign on the open channel.

“Vampire Three-one, this is Diego Tower,” the voice of the British tower controller replied. “You do not have proper authority to land.”

“Diego Tower, Vampire Three-one is declaring an emergency for a flight-control malfunction, five minutes of fuel on board, requesting fire equipment standing by.”

“Vampire Three-one, you
do not
have permission to land!” the controller shouted, his British accent getting thicker as he grew more and more agitated. “Discontinue approach, depart the pattern to the east, and remain clear of this airspace.”

“Puppeteer, this is Rainbow,” the American naval air operations officer cut in on the secure channel. “I order you to break off your approach and leave this airspace, or I will bust you so hard that you'll be lucky to get an assignment changing tires at the motor pool back at your home base rather than commanding it.”

Patrick ignored him. Yes, he was taking an awful risk, not just to his career—which was probably over at this point—but to everyone on the ground. This was loco. Why risk it? Why . . . ?

“Puppeteer, I order you to break off this approach,
now!
”

At that moment the computer said,
“Configuration warning.”

“Override,” Patrick ordered. “I'm leaving the gear up.”

“General . . . ?”

“I'm committed,” Patrick said to Rebecca's unasked question. They weren't going to make it. They were so low that Patrick couldn't see the runway anymore.

Just before he hit the water, Patrick pulled both throttles to IDLE, lifted them, and pulled them into cutoff. He then turned all the switches—ignition, power, and battery—off. They were passengers now, along for the ride.

The big bomber sank out of the sky like a stone. It smacked into the ocean less than a half mile from the approach end of the runway. The bomber skipped off the surface of the ocean, sailed into the air, and started to roll to its left—but just as it did, it skittered up onto the beach, crashed through the approach-end runway lighting, through the security fence, rolled right, and careened up onto the large mass aircraft-parking ramp on the north side of the runway. The bomber skidded to a halt on its belly just a few dozen yards away from several parked military aircraft.

The fire trucks were on the bomber within moments, dousing it with firefighting foam and water, but there was no fuel on the plane anyway, it didn't break apart, and it had been shut down long before landing. It looked like a wounded duck shot out of the air by a hunter, but it was intact.

“Oh, God—we made it!” Rebecca said breathlessly. “I don't believe it.”

“We made it,” Patrick breathed. “My God . . .” He made sure everything was switched off, then safed his and Rebecca's ejection seats, unlatched the upper escape hatch, and climbed up on top of the fuselage. They were helped down by rescue personnel and taken to the base hospital. A huge crowd of sailors and airmen had come out to watch the bomber belly flop onto their little island.

As they were being wheeled into the hospital, Patrick could see several naval officers striding toward him, all wearing the angriest, most chew-ass expressions he'd ever seen. Sailors and spectators quickly peeled out of their way as if they were radioactive. Patrick completely ignored them. Instead he looked up and spoke, “Patrick to Luger.”

“Go ahead, Muck,” David Luger said. Their subcutaneous microtransceiver system gave them global communications and datalink capability anywhere in the world, even on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. “Good to see you made it okay. Is Rebecca all right?”

“Yes, she's fine.”

“Good. The commander there wants to have a word with you. I'm sure CINCENT and SECDEF will be on the line soon, too.”

“I copy,” Patrick said. “But put me through to home first.”

“
Home?
Patrick, the admiral wants—”

“Dave, put me through to my son,
right now,
and that's an order,” Patrick said. “I've got to say hello to Bradley.”

That night

Even with a new government in place in Afghanistan, the border-crossing points were not very well manned on the Afghan side—even on the larger highways there was usually only a small inspection and customs building, with a swinging counterweighted metal pole to delineate the border itself. Infiltrators never used the border crossings anyway; no one ever wanted to visit Afghanistan, and the country was certainly not going to keep anyone from
leaving
—why did Afghanistan need an armed border crossing?

On the other side, however, it was a different matter. None of Afghanistan's neighbors wanted any refugees or accused terrorists to cross the borders freely, so the border checkpoints were usually well manned and well armed. Thus it was with the Republic of Turkmenistan.

Tabadkan was typical of almost all of the Turkmen border checkpoints—a small but heavily fortified Turkmen border-guard base with a few support buildings, a large tent barracks for enlisted men and a towable building for the officers, a supply yard with portable fuel and water tanks—and a detainment camp. The Republic of Turkmenistan routinely turned away anyone—refugees or rich folks, it didn't matter—who did not have a visa and a letter of introduction or a travel itinerary drawn up by a Turkmen state travel bureau; but any people without proper identification papers or passports were placed in the detainment camp until their identities could be verified. The Afghan government usually sent officials to the border crossing to help in identifying its citizens and getting them released from Turkmen custody at least once a week, but in bad weather—or for a number of other reasons—it could sometimes take a month or more for anyone to come to this remote outpost.

So it was now—the detainment camp had almost a hundred detainees, substantially over its capacity. Women and children under age ten were in a separate sheltered area of the facility and were generally well treated; older boys and the men were in another section, exposed to the elements. Each man was given two carpets and a metal cup; four buckets of porridge made with mung beans and rice and four buckets of water had to serve about sixty men for the day. To keep warm, the men took turns around a single large peat brazier set in a lean-to made from hides—if a man was lucky, he might make a snack of a captured and roasted sand rat, jerboa, snake, or sand crocodile.

Zarazi examined all this with his binoculars from the relative safety of a sand dune about a kilometer east of the border crossing. The wind was howling now, at least forty kilometers an hour, blowing sand that stung like sandpaper rubbed across bare cheeks and foreheads. “Those bastards,” he spat. “They've got several dozen of our people caged up like animals.” He let his deputy commander, Jalaluddin Turabi, check through the binoculars. Sure enough, they looked like Taliban fighters, although from this range and with the winds kicking up, it was hard to be positive.

“No patrols out tonight,” Zarazi went on to Turabi, who was prone in the sand beside him, two scarves covering all but a tiny slit for his eyes. “We might actually pull this off, Jala.”

“We can just as easily go around this post, Wakil,” Turabi said worriedly. “We have enough supplies to last us another two or three days, long enough to make it to Yusof Mirzo'i or back to Andkhvoy. Once we get more weapons and ammo, we can come back for those men.”

“But they'll be waiting for us to head back toward the city,” Zarazi said. “They won't expect us to go across the border to Turkmenistan.”

“For good reason—there's nothing but unmanned oil wells, scorpions, and sandstorms for a hundred kilometers,” Turabi retorted. “If we make it to the Kara Kum River, we may survive, but there's nothing but Turkmen border guards until we reach Holach. What's the plan, Wakil?”

“The plan is to stay alive long enough to strike back at the blue-helmets and the Americans who drove us from our homes,” Zarazi replied bitterly. “Revenge is the reason we must survive.”

“There's no one to take out our revenge on in the Kara Kum wastelands, Wakil,” Turabi said. “Sure as hell not the Americans. They are nice and safe up in their supersonic stealth bombers, or sitting back at home flying their robot attack planes via satellite.”

“They are all cowards, and they must die like cowards,” Zarazi said. “I prayed to Allah while we were under attack, and I made a bargain with the Almighty—if He let me live, I would be His sword of vengeance. He answered my prayers, Jala. He is pointing the way, and the way is out there, in the desert—through this place, not around it.” He turned to his friend and fellow freedom fighter. “We will hoist the United Nations flags on our captured vehicles and turn on all the lights. We must act nice and friendly. Then we shall see what Allah has in store for us tonight.” Zarazi patted Turabi's face. “Time to get rid of the beards, my friend.”

“Military vehicles approaching!” a sentry shouted. “Someone coming in!”

The commander in charge had just settled in for a catnap when the cry was relayed to him. Swearing, he got to his feet and joined his senior sergeant at the observation window facing the checkpoint. The sergeant was trying to see who it was through a pair of binoculars. “Well, Sergeant?”

“Hard to tell through the sandstorm, sir,” the sergeant said. “It looks like a BTR towing a pickup truck—wait, sir, I see a flag now. A United Nations patrol. They look like they're towing a captured Taliban truck.”