Phoenix Sub Zero - Страница 5

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“What is the plan?”

Ahmed glanced at the electronic chart, wondering if this was the time to tell General Sihoud the rest of the bad news, perhaps the worst news of all. He saw Sihoud’s penetrating eyes and decided that Sihoud needed the facts, whether or not he elected to believe them.

“Before I go into the Scorpion deployment plan, I need to tell you about something else, something of an immediate nature”

“Another assassination plot. Colonel?”

“In a way, sir. I have been seeing intelligence that Coalition forces may plan a decapitation operation. They may try to take you out and we need to respond to that quickly.”

“There will be no decapitation. Rakish. These are the same people who fought Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Hussein. Not one of them was ever assassinated. Colonel.”

“Exactly, sir. That’s why we worry that you will be the first.”

“Your paranoia begins to reflect on you. Rakish. A warrior does not worry about assassination plots. But go ahead. What’s the proof?”

“A large airliner took off from Volgograd several hours ago on the way to Alma-Ata and disappeared over the Aral Sea. It never landed, yet it is not on our radars. It makes me very suspicious. This plane could be bringing paratroopers.”

“An airplane,” Sihoud said skeptically, beginning to lose interest. “An airplane lost on a radar screen. This is not something even worth a discussion. Colonel.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure you’re right, still … At about the same time the mystery jet took off, our geosynch satellite detected three sudden heat blooms in the Arabian Sea off Karachi and two more in the Mediterranean east of Cyprus.”

“Heat blooms …?”

“Infrared scanned heat sources, sudden and very hot.”

“Perhaps gun tests or flare launches. Disposal of defective ordnance, maybe.”

“Or maybe the Coalition is targeting us with cruise missiles. The heat blooms could have been their rocket motor first stages.”

“That’s it?”

“We can’t track cruise missiles from the ground, sir. We don’t know if they are coming. And the aircraft approach is perplexing. As I said, it could hold paratroopers.”

“Enough of this,” Sihoud said. “Two weeks ago you were certain a commando force had landed outside Ashkhabad and was coming for me. We never heard from them. I will not fight this war from the rear, Colonel. We must return to the field.”

Ahmed nodded, feeling equal parts frustration that Sihoud was not hearing him and hope that Sihoud was right.

SEVEN MILES SOUTH OF KIZYL-ARVAT, TURKMENISTAN

Augusta’s first-fired Javelin cruise missile hugged the ground, barely twenty feet above the brushland of the Turkmenian plains, flying at 650 miles per hour. As it did every six minutes, the onboard Javcalcor computer commanded a full self-check and the missile’s systems reported in. Fuel was getting low at forty percent; fuel flow rate was within limits. Compressor inlet, combustor discharge, and turbine discharge temperatures were all nominal. The warhead system reported satisfactory interlocks with the detonator train disconnected and open-circuited. The guidance system reported that the rudder and elevator control surfaces were functional. The navigation system was taking continuous fixes on the terrain-following contour-radar set, and the shape of the land below, matched the computer memory; the flatness of the Turkmenian Plain had caused some concern, but a backup star fix showed the terrain navigation to be within limits. The missile was about a half mile ahead of where the clock indicated it should be, and since arrival at the target at a precise moment in time was vital, the computer decided to slow the missile down by twenty feet per second. The amidships fuel flow control valve shut slightly, cutting down on the combustor fuel feed. The combustion chamber’s discharge temperature dropped and the turbine whined down slightly. Nozzle thrust fell a fraction and the missile slowed.

The computer scanned the memory map of the Turkmenian terrain and the approach to the Main Bunker Complex outside of Ashkhabad. The weapon would approach from the north at reduced altitude. At a range of one mile it would execute a pop-up maneuver, climbing almost vertically up to 2,000 feet, then arc over and dive into the bunker from directly overhead.

The computer reminded itself to wait 200 milliseconds after impact before detonating the warhead’s compact high explosive, to ensure the weapon had traveled all the way to the fourth sublevel before exploding — the target was almost 140 feet below the ground floor level of the mosque.

The missile’s only concern was successfully flying the remaining miles to the target and detonating in the proper sequence.

SEVENTY MILES NORTH OF ASHKHABAD, TURKMENISTAN

The 200-knot slipstream punched into seal commander Jack Morris’s guts and threatened to send him tumbling in spite of his textbook-correct body position. He bounced through the turbulence, feeling the shock of the cold after the shock of the wind began to die down. He sailed in the thunderous gale winds of free fall at 115 miles per hour, terminal velocity with his flying-squirrel thermal coveralls, wondering what the wind chill was — wind of 115 miles per, starting with air at forty below zero. Whatever it was, it would be cold enough to freeze him into an iceball in another few seconds if not for his electrically heated suit. He fell toward the black desert below, trying to see the luminescent altimeter.

This jump was to be a hop-and-pop, the free-fall portion less than a minute. As expected, he felt a minor jolt as the drogue chute popped out of his back, the altimeter automatically deploying the parachutes of the entire team at the same altitude. The drogue rose overhead and pulled out the silk of the mattress-shaped parasail. Jack Morris felt a hard jerk, as if the gallows trapdoor had opened and sent him dangling, but instead of choking him the harness gave him a stern kick in the crotch.

A half second later the bungee cord attached at one end to his harness and at the other to his heavy equipment crate grew taut as the box continued to fall. Taking the weight of the crate nearly deflated the parasail for a moment; Morris waited and let the chute stall out, knowing that this was the moment that killed most sky divers. A deploying canopy could tangle itself and get in the way of the reserve chute, like Bony Robbins’s had before Christmas. His main chute had become a cigarette, an obscenely tangled streamer flapping uselessly in the wind above him. Bony had struggled to cut away the main, but the reserve’s altimeter had kicked in and pushed out his reserve, which promptly became tangled in the main chute. Bony had hit the frozen cornfield at over 100 miles an hour. But Morris’s main behaved and filled with wind while the equipment crate settled out forty feet below. Morris steered south and looked for the rest of the 100-man force. In the moonless night, he couldn’t see anyone, but he could hear the canopies around him. There was no noise from the KC-lojet. It had already dived back down to terrain-hugging altitude now that the seals were out, most likely streaking home as fast as the coffee-drinking, paper-pushing zoomies could fly.

The jump point had been seventy miles from the UIF main bunker. They had left the jet at 45,000 feet and opened the parachutes after a minimal fall. Morris had counted on flying the parasails twenty miles with the wind. By the time they hit the desert floor, they would still be fifty miles from Sihoud’s living room. With fifteen minutes to assemble the desert patrol vehicles, that gave them an hour and a half to get to the bunker perimeter with a half hour of contingency time. So far the mission had been on-target: the jet hadn’t been gunned down and, assuming the bus drivers knew where the hell they were, the jump had gone off without incident. But every mission screwed up somewhere. The only difference between a successful raid and a miserable rout was the magnitude of the unexpected foul-up. Plenty could still go wrong, he thought as he glanced at the altimeter and compass. The landing could be rough with the equipment crates, perhaps injuring some of the men. The DPVS could be damaged, and without the desert patrol vehicles they would not make the fifty-mile trip in time. They might find company waiting when they landed, or at the bunker perimeter, or anywhere in between. And even once they secured the perimeter, the god damned Javelin cruise missiles might decide to hit the seals, and it would be Jimmy Carter and Iran all over again.

Morris turned up the thermostat on his suit, the fabric filled with electrical heat resistors like an electric blanket.

He continued flying the parasail south, his equipment crate swaying below him while he waited for the trip to end. Finally his altimeter read 1,000 feet, and he jettisoned the cargo crate. His chute seemed to fly up for a moment as his descent eased from the lost weight. Morris strained his ears and heard the sounds of parachutes popping open on a hundred equipment crates as they were released. The digital altimeter reeled off the numerals, until Morris’s toes were only a few hundred feet from the ground. He strained his senses, his eyes on where the horizon would be if it were visible, and tried to feel the ground with his mind. He’d always hated night jumps like these made on moonless nights; night-vision goggles had never worked for him on night drops, since the single combined monocular lens took away depth and caused vertigo. Somehow he had always been able to sense the approach of the ground at the last second, in time to flare out the parasail. Failure to pull its trailing edges down to stall it out meant crashing at up to forty miles per hour, enough kinetic energy to maim a man.