Jack Be Nimble: Tyro Book 2

by Ben English

  “Is that what you flew?” prompted the major.

  He shifted his weight. “Haven't been in one of those since the mess in Iran.”

  “Oh, the one America had nothing to do with?” He smiled but didn’t answer. “And just what were you doing then, Mr. Noel? Humanitarian efforts?”

  “Remember what a mess the European Union military made when it tried to intervene? The French air force got knocked right out of the sky. We were supposed to be on search-and-rescue. All sorts of disreputables on the ground back then.”

  Over on the Bata’ an an Osprey spun up and prepared to defy gravity. Alonzo heard the rotors, felt the thump-thump in his chest and in his blood.

  Tyro

  Nothing but desert; rocks, sand, and scrub streaking by a short distance below them.

  “We never would have been able to fly like this in one of the old Pave Lows,” Buck said. Lieutenant Junior Grade Alonzo Noel agreed.

  Since Buck Harper was a superior officer, since he was absolutely correct, and since LTJG Alonzo Noel had been in the military long enough to learn to properly react to rhetorical questions posed to him by a superior officer, he agreed, but kept his eyes on the terminal before him. They’d been in the air several hours, streaking north across scarred and burnt Iran, staying low under the afternoon sun. Bad enough to sneak into a hostile country during the day; both men kept an eye on their terrain following/terrain avoidance radar—the lowflyer’s autopilot - which kept them mere meters above the bomb-cracked hardpan and scrabble.

  Sharklike and winged, their shadow paced them, rippling across the broken earth a dozen meters below.

  For such a mission, this particular flying machine was unspeakably superior to any of the older, true helicopters. The MV-22B Osprey pitched and plunged up over a minor ridge, its twin prop-rotors growling, locked in the forward position, and Lieutenant Noel swallowed hard. Commander Buck Harper grunted again, as if to prove his point, and Alonzo returned in kind. The suite of Integrated Radio Frequency Countermeasures station took the whole of his attention, and while he’d rather be actually flying the damn Osprey, the SIRFC proved to be…interesting.

  Tactics and combat-info management came easy to him, though flying was the only thing he’d ever come to actually like about the Navy. He wasn’t rated as an electronic countermeasures officer, but he discovered he could manage the job. The advanced tactical terminal gave him a slew of mission-critical intelligence: satellite feed, GPS information, missile warning readouts. He kept one hand near the chaff-and-flare launcher; not two days previous another Osprey, flown by the European Union security force, had been turned into grey confetti over the Gulf.

  He'd rather be at the stick, driving, but for this mission Alonzo was the eyes and ears of the beast. Had to admit, Buck made a good call; though the lieutenant couldn’t understand what the older man saw in him, he loved the tactical position. Anybody else in charge, and a more senior officer would be sitting at tactical, but Buck made the call and back on their ship he went unchallenged. He was both prophet and prosecutor of eight successful infiltration missions—“snatch and grab” jobs—as part of the joint special operations air contingent on Bata’an.

  “Chief, one o’clock on the map,” Alonzo said, “another EU transponder.” The digital display showed the wrecked plane a full ten seconds before the Osprey shrieked over it. Alonzo barely had time to make out the signature markings proclaiming the crumpled wreck the property of the Armee de L'air.

  “Another Alpha jet, chief. Think the pilot ditched?”

  The French had not acquitted themselves well on the field of battle.

  Buck pursed his lips, eyes ahead. “We’ll do a sweep on our way back if there’s time,” he said. “It’s not on fire anymore; the pilot’s been on the ground long enough for the locals to find ‘im.” Alonzo failed to hear any hope in the older man’s voice, but again, murmured in agreement. The bloodless coupe in Iran that CNN trumpeted nightly had managed to efficiently punch every European Union peacekeeper out of the sky. Non-English news organizations had taken to calling the whole affair, “the revolt of the angry young men,” after its core cadre of Iran’s youthful military officers and the riotous sentiments they stirred in their civilian peers. The status quo was never enough for men like that. Worse yet if they found themselves trapped under unbending officers.

  Men his own age, Alonzo thought. Men with his own passions.

  But according to his own government, that was none of his business. Ostensibly.

  The U.S. claimed no official role in the Iranian national implosion, but when the Bata’an and half a dozen other Navy ships had slipped quietly into the Oman Sea and laid anchor off Chah Bahar, every hand on deck knew: There was a special operations team in-country, spreading careful chaos and disrupting the revolutionaries’ attempts to stabilize their leadership.

  Yesterday morning, as the angry young men took to the podium for their latest CNN-mediated press conference, they had inexplicably gone off the air. No one outside the country knew exactly what happened, but it was obvious the cadre had suffered some kind of swift, personal attack, and were soon retaliating with every asset available. Two Iranian divisions were mobilized immediately and turned inward to scour the country, and there were rumors of other disruptions, even a couple of army units fighting one another.

  Someone was on the ground, raising all kinds of hell.

  Another coup? Revolutionary aftershock? No one knew. In the esteemed opinion of the ex-military consultants, employed in the scores by each of the major news networks, no one insurgent group had the strength to oppose the revolutionaries and the “legitimate” army. It was an unknown factor. A mystery that Alonzo wouldn’t mind shaking hands with in a few minutes.

  Midavaine, their medic, the only woman onboard, sat quietly beside her small table of equipment.

  “Look at this,” Buck said, and the lieutenant glanced away from his readouts, blinked, and looked again. In the dying light, at least a dozen fires burned in the area they could see. Thin, grey smoke hung in layers over the hills. The landscape below was becoming uneven, splintered. Some hills rose 300 feet to be split even deeper by dark ravines.

  “Didn’t think there was enough stuff down there to burn so much,” Alonzo said.

  The Osprey glided through sunlight from a red, red sun. “Ay-yuh. Looks like somebody let their chickens out of the coop.”

  The tactical station, cycling continually through search-and-rescue transponder frequencies, gave a bleat. Alonzo checked the frequency. “Here we go, Chief.”

  “Why don’t you do the honors, son?”

  Alonzo cleared his throat and spoke into the mike. “This is Sparrowhawk. This is Sparrowhawk in the sky. Tyro, Tyro, you are five by five.” What kind of a callsign was ‘Tyro’?

  The response came immediately, impatiently. “Sparrowhawk, this is Tyro. Be advised we are on an unsecure frequency.”

  How the hell could that be? The radios used mutual security systems that shifted frequencies together every few seconds. None of the towelheads on the ground had anything capable of decrypting on the fly. “Tyro, prepare for exfil. Advise on LZ, say again, advise on LZ.”

  “Right. Same coordinates as the mission spec. Look for a long, fairly flat box canyon after the fourth ridge. A depression runs right up the middle of it. Set down as close as you can to the end of the depression, in the center of the canyon. Sort of a hill at the end.”

  This was the twitchy part. Lieutenant Noel tried to keep his mind off how helpless they’d be on the ground. The Osprey was heavily armored, but history taught you to bet on the weapon, not the armor.

  This part of the Great Kavir Desert couldn’t even be called strangely beautiful. It was busted, wasted, uneven. The Osprey slipped toward a rise of escarpments and hills that from a distance looked like broken fingernails on a misshapen, half-buried hand. The earth was colorless or red-orange. Pillars of eroded rock formed fantastically unsymmetrical cylinders and overhangs.


  They swept around a narrow hill, through greasy smoke.

  Alonzo took an MP5 from the locker and headed down the narrow cargo bay to the rear. He knew the drill. Provide cover or assist with first aid for the assets on the ground, then close the back door on their way up and out. His grip shook slightly as he snapped himself into the safety harness. This was getting easier, but he still got the shakes sometimes. He hit the release for the clamshell hatch and unsafed the assault rifle.

  The Osprey’s Rolls Royce/Allison turboshaft engines changed pitch. The process of conversion, when the prop blades turned from forward-facing to straight vertical, usually took twelve seconds. Buck was bringing her in harder than usual, Alonzo thought. Must be pretty bad on the ground. The whine and pitch of the engines changed as the rotors went vertical, and he could hear the whip-crack of rifle fire. Someone was shouting nearby, then a wave of sand and gravel blew back underneath the Osprey and they hit the soil, throwing the young man taut against his safety line.

  The air was much clearer on the ground, and he could see the spec ops team, SEALs, whatever they were, at a distance, struggling up the canyon towards the Osprey. They wore the clothes of the local tribes, the Ghashghai, and their leader emerged out of the swirling dust and sound much like Moses off the mountain, robes awhirl, clutching a long sniper’s rifle.

  “You a medic?” he screamed over the rotors. He was an American after all. Alonzo cocked a thumb toward Midavaine, and the newcomer added, “We picked up a French airman. Collapsed lung, concussion, fractured arm.”

  Midavaine appeared behind them at the top of the gangway. “He’ll need to be stabilized before we take off. Any other injuries?”

  “Most of us have been hit, but we’ll make it to – what, a ship?”

  Alonzo nodded, surprised. The stranger really didn’t know who had come to the rescue. “Are you hit?” he asked the big figure, indistinct but for fierce eyes, dark with dirt—blood red in the smoky light. Several days’ worth of beard, singed.

  The other man’s eyes followed the quick twist of his neck, and he spun and dropped to one knee, bringing the rifle up in one smooth motion. Crack-crack!

  They came now, desert fighters, swarming in from the sides to flank the team below, streaming toward the base of the hill, around the cragged and cracked pillars of stone. The American had picked the LZ well, but there were so many unfriendlies—Alonzo pushed the panic down, down, pounded it hard under the weight of familiarity and will. He could see how they would come, moving quickly under the doctrine of maneuver and fire, accepting a few casualties but expecting to bury the Osprey under the law of averages. While nearly all of them wore robes common to the nomads, here and there among the loose breeches and burlap there was a patch of drab camouflage, or a beret.

  The American continued to fire, and as Alonzo watched, another officer fell. That was the key: Break the charge and take out the officers, just buy a bit more time. A flurry of snaps and hard clangs sounded across the body of the Osprey, and he remembered the weapon in his hands. The aircraft was hardened against ballistic attack, and suddenly seemed very solid and real behind him, like the MP5. He began firing as soon as anything came within range. The robed soldiers seemed a bit reluctant to press forward unless a uniformed officer was right there, screaming at them. Screams that stopped abruptly as the grimy American with the hunting rifle found a patch of camouflage through his long scope. He fired and paused, fired and paused, and fired again, breathing quiet and calm, like a sniper.

  He was like ice; grim, exact, his heart on a distant planet.

  They shot together, overlapping their fields of fire, covering one another. A few ragged bands attempted to rush the Osprey, but the two Americans knocked them down, threw them back. For the first time in his life, Alonzo Noel felt himself in the battle flow, in that clear yet horrible state of concentration gifted to soldiers under fire. An automatic weapons team attempted to set up under cover of a thin shelf of rock, and the two Americans shot together, blasting through the brittle rock, firing against the walls of the canyon, scattering bullets and death down the dusty avenues of shale.

  The other American was quite a shot. Whatever he aimed at crumpled and fell, leaking.

  Together they took a step backward into the relative safety of the Osprey, still hunting the officers, the loud sergeants and the men wearing radios. Alonzo paused to reload and saw the little group—Americans?—below, moving as fast as they could, straight towards salvation, up a sheltering ravine. The desert fighters on either side, however, had closed in near the mouth of the ravine, and hunkered down tightly. Not able to get at him or the other American, they waited for a sure chance at ambush.

  The ravine—a narrow gully, really—ended sixty feet from the Osprey. Might as well be a mile. Alonzo fed a fresh clip into his weapon and leaned out slightly, then slipped back as three of the rifles above jerked towards him.

  “Trap,” he whispered hoarsely at the American, who was still picking out targets. How far did the range of that rifle extend? “Maybe a dozen men, both sides of the gulch—”

  The other man grimaced, face twisted in fury, and fired again, twice more. “Let them come. Let ‘em all come.” He screamed out at the hills. “Come on, Mahmoud! I want to fight! I want to fight some more!”

  The engines of the Osprey still spun, but the area around the hill seemed to grow quiet. Buck was cursing steadily from the pilot’s position. Alonzo could almost hear the straggling party as it approached the mouth of the gulch. A lone figure dressed as a professional soldier stepped out from behind the rock several hundred yards above and behind the refugees, empty hands at his sides. He stood on the lip of the canyon, his voice echoed to them down the long corridor.

  “Listen to me, infidel!” A spare man, with longer hair than was common among people of the area. Speaking in English. “Your bird is here; you can fly away. Leave us those below and you lose nothing.”

  The robed American ran the bolt on his rifle, quietly, but did not fire. Two men joined the speaker on the ridgeline. Both carried rifles.

  “Think it well. You leave here alive, and with the honor of the Ghashghai. The fools already think you are an efreet.” There was a note of respect in the thin voice. “There is no dishonor in flying away safely, alone. You will not leave otherways.”

  The hail of small arms fire on the fuselage ceased. Alonzo gathered himself to press the attack, then stopped in surprise as the American stepped out into the burnt light.

  His rifle held loosely at the end of one long arm, the other hand up, palm out, empty. His voice boomed back, for the first time sounding implacably familiar. Alonzo spoke some Farsi, and the American’s accent made it even easier to understand. He spoke to the robed men on the canyon walls. “Brothers, we are leaving, now. Are you prepared to meet Allah? Is your honor yet sufficient?” He set his rifle down and raised both arms, in anything but a gesture of submission.

  A few of the desert dwellers, those farthest from the remaining officers, peeled back from the edges of their cover, and melted away into the smoky scrub.

  The narrow man atop the ridge shook his head in mock sadness. “This ends in your death. Your magic is not sufficient to carry you out of today.” He said something else, obviously in the local patois, and the men on either side of the canyon wall began to move.

  The little party of wounded, near the end of the sheltering ravine, fell to the earth and covered their heads as best they could. Alonzo swore and raised the MP5—

  The American hardly moved. One second his hands were upraised, empty, then he held a thin, stubby bar, and the next instant the world itself rippled and stuttered into a reverse rain of heat made solid. Alonzo saw the whole thing, even as the explosion’s backwash blasted him to the end of his towline: Twin sheets of flame along either side of the LZ, right into the faces of the desert fighters, like two huge hands of dust and fire roaring out of the earth and slapping the sides of the canyon.

  The American kept his fee
t—somehow finding the eye of the storm—threw his rifle up into his arms, elbow high, and loosed five quick shots at the frozen figures on the ridgeline. Men fell all around Mahmoud, then the upsweep of grit and pulverized rock swept over them all.

  The cloud of dust thrown up by the explosion hung in the air like fog. Only a tapering path from the ravine to the Osprey remained clear. The American rocketed through another magazine change but found nothing to aim at. Alonzo watched as he dropped his rifle and sprinted to the slope of the ravine, disappearing over the edge.

  Only to immediately reappear, pushing a man in a French air force uniform. “Allez-vous-en! Maintenaint!” Alonzo threw off his safety harness and helped the bloody airman up the Osprey’s gangway. The French uniform trailed from him in tatters, and his eyes rolled loosely around the medical bay, but someone else helped Alonzo lift, someone short, heaving from under the other arm. Even under the desert garb, unmistakably a woman.

  Midavaine took the wounded Frenchman and the other woman collapsed against the bulkhead. Alonzo passed three more raggedly cloaked figures on his way back outside, found his MP5 on the lanyard around his neck, and looked for the American.

  He was hefting a large pack out of the ravine.

  “Just leave the damn thing; let’s go!” Alonzo shouted at him. The dust was clearing, and Alonzo registered the shouts and screams for the first time. The ridgeline where Mahmoud had stood was empty. Loaded to the gills with adrenaline, Alonzo clutched his rifle tighter.

  The American shooter threw the knapsack into the Osprey. “This is what you came for, not us.” The rotors began to spin up. “Get this to—”

  An unfamiliar buzz sounded through the cabin, and Alonzo felt his joints go weak. He’d heard it during training, in the simulator, and in the systems check, but now, no, oh God, please—

  Buck suddenly went silent, his arms nearly a blur as he worked the controls. The others in the cabin looked around blankly, too exhausted for fear. Or maybe they didn’t know the alarm meant they were targeted by a surface-to-air weapon.