“Uh…past one quarter,” he said. They’d already passed the marker by the time he was conscious enough to notice and call it out. It was like a catapult launch, but one that didn’t end. A catapult stroke was over in 300 feet—about three seconds—and then the feeling like you were being crushed was over. This one extended past 6,000 feet, and—finally—ended up with them going considerably faster than what a Hornet was traveling at the end of the catapult stroke.
“Engines increasing to nominal…now,” Samkamka said through gritted teeth.
“Rockets out…now.” Bowden confirmed, watching both the timer and the runway markers.
The pressure on Bowden’s chest diminished as Samkamka eased the craft off the ground and put it into a right turn so they didn’t overfly the wreckage of the second aircraft.
“Jettisoning.” Bowden pushed the two release buttons and felt the thumps as the rockets were kicked away.
Bowden shook his head to clear it. He’d always thought being a naval aviator was the pinnacle of “badass.” He now knew he’d been wrong. “Let’s see if our weapons systems made it through that ride without shaking loose.”
Samkamka nodded. “Beginning systems checks.”
The ground continued to drop away as the horizon rushed at them.
* * *
Athena stopped alongside the wild whinnie as the trail ended in a near-vertical outcropping of rock and sandy soil about 100 feet high. Aliza looked up the hill as Cook moved alongside her.
“Just what I was afraid was going to happen if we came this way,” he said. “We’re not getting up that hill.”
Aliza sighed; Cook was right. No matter how strong and powerful the whinnies were, there was no way they were getting up the incline with riders and loads. It was so close to vertical that even ascent by a human was going to be perilous, at best. And with their current loads…
“I can try climbing up with a rope,” Parker said, reining in beside them. “Once I’m up there, I can help pull you up. The gear will still make it dangerous, though,” He assessed the steep slope again. “But this will be as far as we take the whinnies.”
Cook frowned at the long climb Parker was proposing. “If you can make it up there. The ground looks really soft. Pretty good chance of a landslide.”
“We’re not getting any closer to the target, Sarge, and going back will take too long.”
Cook looked over to Aliza, who shrugged. “You might as well let him try, Sergeant. As he said, we are running out of time.”
Parker started tying several coils of rope together. As he was working on lashing the third 20-meter section to the second, the wild whinnie grabbed the first rope in its teeth and sprinted up the slope. Although it had to step on some of the looser soil, causing clods of dirt and small stones to slide down the side of the hill, the whinnie was able to use the rocky outcroppings to turn and leap upward to the crest.
The rope was yanked from Parker’s hands as the whinnie achieved the summit, and the end of the rope pulled forward to rest at the base of the hill.
Aliza looked over to Cook, whose jaw was hanging open. “One stairway, no waiting,” she said, pleased that her use of American idiom had been, apparently, accurate. She dismounted. “Gentlemen, as you observed, time is short.”
* * *
The squad made it to the top of the rise and found another crevice that led in their direction of travel. Unfortunately, half the whinnies weren’t able to make the leaps necessary to get up the cliff, and the crevice that led forward was too narrow for the ones that could.
“We will go on our own from here,” Aliza said with a pat on Athena’s shoulder. They had taken off the saddles. Hopefully, the whinnies would wait for them; if not, it was going to be a long walk back to the base. As there was a chance of enemy action, though, they didn’t want to leave the whinnies tied up. Athena made a purring noise as she rubbed her nose on Aliza’s shoulder, who smiled and murmured, “Thank you, my friend.” Athena purred again.
Aliza walked over to the large male and patted him on the shoulder, too. “Thank you for showing us the way.”
The male also purred and turned to rub his nose on Aliza but wasn’t as gentle and knocked her back several feet. “Ouch,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. “We will have to work on your people skills.”
“All right,” Cook said, calling down from the top of the slope, “I’ve got the first good news of the day. I just found where we are on the map, and we’re closer to the target than I thought. We can still make it in time, but we’re going to have to hurry.”
* * * * *
Chapter 9
Samkamka rendezvoused with the other aircraft and flew in a loose cruise position on it. Bowden pursed his lips as the airspeed indicator continued to climb through 800 kilometers an hour. “We need to slow down,” he said.
“The dual-phase engines work most efficiently when supersonic,” Samkamka replied. “Mach 3 is best.”
“That’s great and all, but none of the things we have strapped to the craft have been flight tested for those speeds. The laser designator, especially, wasn’t designed to be flown in atmosphere and isn’t aerodynamic in the slightest. If you put too much of a load on it, you’re going to tear it off, and then where will we be?”
Samkamka grumbled a little, but then he called the lead aircraft and got them to slow down. Even at that speed, though, they passed over the mechanized columns in just over a minute and reached the contact point, fifty kilometers south of the J’Stull town, after a few minutes more. Behind the small town sat the mountain range, and in the valley directly behind the town, Bowden could see the antenna strung from one mountain to another. It seemed surreal to actually see it in person after all the target study and preparation. Especially since I never planned to be here.
“Cookie, this is Bluebird, over,” a voice said on the radio.
“Who is that?” Samkamka asked.
“That’s Byrd calling the ground troops,” Bowden replied.
“Cookie, this is Bluebird, over,” Byrd repeated.
“Where do you suppose the ground team is?” Samkamka asked. “Do you think they got captured?”
Bowden shrugged. “No idea. I hope they didn’t get caught. Maybe their radio is bad.”
Byrd tried one more time, but the soldiers on the ground still didn’t reply.
“Hornet, Bluebird.”
“Go ahead, Bluebird,” Bowden replied.
“I don’t know if you heard, but we’ve got negative comms with Cookie.”
“We heard.”
“We have the fuel to hold here and give them a chance to check in. Looks like two blimps in the target area. We’re going to thin them out while we wait.”
“Roger,” Bowden said as the other craft peeled off. “Good hunting.”
* * *
Ferenc shoved the throttles to the firewall, and Byrd looked at the pilot as the craft leaped forward.
Ferenc smiled. “You said speed is life. So, more is better, yes?”
Byrd nodded. “The worst place to be is low, slow, and out of ideas.” He nodded toward the target area. “Let’s go for the one on the left; it’s a little closer.”
The pilot nudged the thrusters gently and moved the nose of the craft toward the intended target.
“Master arm is on,” Byrd said, throwing the switch that energized the weapons system. “Sidewinder is selected.”
A veteran of numerous dogfights over Vietnam, Byrd knew what to expect. The adrenaline boost as the craft rocketed forward into the fight. The dilation of time. The sharpened focus. What he wasn’t prepared for was the relative difference in their target’s speed. Every other fight he’d been in, the MiGs had been going as fast—or faster—than his craft. Compared to the interface craft, now approaching the speed of sound, the blimp was at a standstill, and it expanded in the front canopy faster than any target he’d ever seen. Without his radar, he had to guess the distance, but with a closing velocity of more than a mile every
six seconds, it swelled quickly.
But it was also starting to drop a little lower on the windscreen. “Nose down a little,” he coached. “We have to be aimed at the gondola.” Ferenc dropped the nose of the craft until it was boresighted on the gondola.
“Fire!” Byrd yelled when they reached what he thought was five miles. Nothing. “Fire! Now!”
Still nothing.
“Shit!” Byrd exclaimed, figuring Ferenc had forgotten what he was supposed to do. It happened in combat, sometimes, where newer pilots lost track of what they were supposed to do next on their checklists. Byrd slapped the missile launch button on his console, and the missile roared off the left wing. “Break left!” he yelled. The blimp almost filled the windscreen.
They continued heading straight at it. Byrd risked a glance over at the pilot.
Ferenc was staring at the blimp, his eyes wide and mouth open as he watched the missile race toward the floating oval. “Shit!” Byrd had heard of crews that had gotten target fixation and augured in—and had even had to yell at a pilot once to break him out of it—but as a backseater, he’d never seen the corresponding look on a pilot’s face. Until now.
The lights were on, but Ferenc had left the cockpit.
Byrd grabbed the control stick and ripped it to the left. He had a glimpse of one of the crewmen jumping off the blimp—the image of which now blocked any view of the sky—then the missile impacted the gondola, followed immediately by the right wing of Byrd’s interface craft.
* * *
Bowden watched in horror as the interface craft clipped the blimp at more than 800 kilometers an hour. The impact sheared the gondola from the airship, while simultaneously ripping the right wing from the interface craft.
Free of the weight of the gondola and with massive holes torn in the underside of the envelope, the blimp deflated like a balloon that had been blown up and then let go. It traced a lazy rising spiral as the plane went down and to the left, crashing just short of the antenna complex. Some of the debris may have ended up on the antenna’s panels, but nothing that couldn’t be easily and quickly cleaned off.
Bowden’s life—and Byrd’s friendly face—were in his mind’s eye as he saw the interface craft’s fuselage to roll to a stop. There’s no one left to destroy the antenna; it’s all on me.
“What just happened?” Samkamka asked. “Why did they do that?”
The remains of the blimp, deflated, floated down between the J’Stull town and the fireball that marked the end of the interface craft. In Bowden’s mind, the corpses of little kids bounced up and down on the gas bag as if it were a trampoline.
“What happened?” Samkamka asked again. The SpinDog’s voice was indistinct and came from somewhere far away. The little kids on the trampoline had all become girls with holes in their stomachs, blood spraying out as they bounced, streaking their bright white dresses.
“What happened?” Samkamka roared. He grabbed Bowden’s arm and tugged fiercely.
Bowden pulled his arm away, but the spell was broken. He shook his head and looked back at the crash site. The children were gone; all that remained was the pyre of a Marine aviator who’d given his life a long, long way from home.
“I don’t know,” Bowden said, trying to put himself in Byrd’s place. “It looks like they got too close to the blimp and flew into it. No way to know. They were going pretty fast, though. Maybe they just couldn’t pull out in time.” He shrugged. “Maybe they fixated on the target, too. They always tell you not to watch the missile come off the rails.”
“So, what do we do now?” Samkamka asked with a healthy amount of fear in his voice.
“We destroy the antenna,” Bowden said, and his voice dropped to little more than a whisper. “It’s all on us now.”
* * *
Dork’s stomach groaned as the squad came to a halt unexpectedly. He put his hands on his knees, trying desperately to keep everything inside where it belonged, but the pressure was building up, and if he didn’t get a rest stop soon, there were going to be issues. Explosive, nasty ones.
“Hey, Sublete,” Sergeant Cook said. “Have you heard anything from the aviators yet?”
“No,” the radioman replied. “I may not, either, as long as we’re down in this ass-crack.”
“According to the map, we’ve got about a mile to go, and then we’ll be at the target. We’ll pop up when we get there. No sense giving ourselves away early.”
Aliza looked at her watch. “According to what I was told and where we are, we should be hearing something very soon.”
As if she’d called it into being, the ground rumbled slightly. Seconds later, a Boom! rolled over them.
“What was that?” Aliza asked. “Are they bombing already?”
“I’ve been bombed before,” Sergeant Cook said. “That didn’t sound like a bomb, but something definitely blew up.”
“We had better hurry then,” Aliza said.
“Can I get a couple of minutes for a rest stop?” Dork asked. “I think I got some bad jerky or something. My insides are tied up in a knot, and I’m about to explode. I need to stop.”
“Seriously, Dork?” Cook said. “We’re almost there and you need to take a crap? Now?”
“I can’t run with confidence,” Dork replied. “I’m having to squeeze my cheeks together, hard, just to walk.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Cook said. “We don’t have time for this. Take your crap and catch up to us.” He looked at his map. “There’s only one fork in front of us. When you get there, go right.”
“I’ll be right with you,” Dork said, stepping aside as everyone went past. No matter how badly he had to go, he couldn’t do it with the woman watching. That wouldn’t be right. Once she was out of sight, though, he couldn’t get his trousers down fast enough.
* * * * *
Chapter 10
“Blow up the antenna?” Samkamka asked. “All by ourselves? How?”
“Well, first we’re going to have to blow up that last blimp, then we’re going to have to self-designate the control station for the antenna and bomb the shit out of it.”
“But I thought we needed to drop the transmitter facility, too.”
Bowden shrugged. “It would be nice if we could, but we don’t have a chance in hell of doing it. In my Hornet, back home? Sure, I could do that. With all this jury-rigged shit? I’ll be happy to just take the control station out. Even so, the columns being led by Moorefield and Tapper will probably still have to roll in here hard and hit this thing again. If they can push through, that is. Our intel on ground defenses was incomplete to start with, and we haven’t had an update in forty-eight hours. But at least the satraps won’t get a message off today or any time for the next week or two.”
“I think we should abort the mission,” Samkamka said. “We no longer have the other aircraft to ensure success.”
“No, we don’t,” Bowden said, “but this mission was planned all along as something one aircraft could do, it if had to.” It just wasn’t supposed to be mine! “We had three airborne so that two could make it to the target and at least one would have weapons that worked and could hit the array.” He shook his head. “No. We press on.”
“I am the pilot of this craft. If I say we go back, then we go back.”
“Sure you are, Samkamka, and if that’s what you decide, I can’t stop you, but let’s look at what’s already been invested in this attack. One aircraft with its gear ripped off is back at the airfield. That plane will fly again—maybe—but not for a while. The one Ferenc and Byrd were in is gone. And we’re never going to have the opportunity that we do now.
“What’s worse, though, is that the J’Stull are almost ready to transmit. If we don’t stop them—now, today—then they’re going to get a message off to Kulsis. I’m not going to be the one who could have stopped it but didn’t. If we go back without hitting the target, you’re the one who’s going to have to explain it to the Primus. You’ll have to explain why you chickened out and
decided not to attack the target when we were within visual range with a full bomb load and only one blimp in our way.”
Samkamka shied away at the mention of the Primus, and Bowden knew he had him.
“So, what’s it going to be?” Bowden asked. “Are we going to do this, or are we going to go back to base with our tails between our legs?”
“I do not have a tail,” Samkamka muttered stubbornly. Bowden continued to glare at him, and the pilot finally sighed. “Yes, we will do this, but I do not want to fly into the blimp.”
“Neither do I,” Bowden said. Nor do I want to do the rest of this crap, but there’s no one else who can. He set his shoulders and looked out the front windscreen. “Let’s keep the airspeed at about 700 kilometers per hour. That will be fast enough to make us hard to hit, but slow enough to get things done.”
“What do I do?”
“You fly this thing straight at the blimp, and I’ll fire the missile. We’ll take out the blimp, then come back around to drop bombs on the control station. Sound good?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You left out, ‘Then we fly home and get drunk with the local women.’”
Bowden smiled. “Okay, after we drop our bombs and flatten the control station, we fly home and get drunk with the local women.”
Samkamka laughed long and hard. “Now that, my friend, is a plan I can embrace. Let us do precisely that.”
* * *
Dork cleaned up the best he could, pulled his pants up, and grabbed the designator pack. It had taken a little longer than he’d wanted, but now he knew he could jog; he would catch up to the squad in no time.
Two minutes later, he came to the fork in the crevice and stopped, unable to remember which way Sergeant Cook had said to go. The ground was hard, and there were no boot prints he could use to indicate the correct direction of travel.
Waveoff (Murphy's Lawless Book 6) Page 7