Red Horseman

by Stephen Coonts

  Yocke began really sweating in the lecture that followed. A chief petty officer explained each piece of gear, explained about the wrist altimeter, how they should check it occasionally but wait for the main chute to deploy automatically—“It’ll work! Honest! It’s guaranteed. If it doesn’t, you bring it back and we’ll give you another”—how they would run out of the back of the C-141 in lines, lay themselves out in the air to keep from tumbling, steer in free fall, steer when the chute opened, how they should land.

  And when all the questions had been answered from the three neophytes, the final piece of advice: “Don’t think about it—just do it.”

  Jake Grafton had too many things on his mind to worry about the jump. As the C-141 climbed away from the runway, he adjusted his oxygen mask, ensured the oxygen was flowing and let the jumpmaster check his equipment, all the while trying to figure out what Saddam Hussein had done with the weapons. Were they still at the Samarra base, or had The Awesome outsmarted the Americans?

  Sitting beside the admiral, Toad Tarkington thought about the upcoming jump as the air inside the plane cooled. The red lights of the plane’s interior and the noise gave it the feel and sound of flight deck control, the handler’s kingdom in the bottom of a carrier’s island. And he had that night-cat-shot rock in the pit of his stomach.

  He looked at the blank faces and averted eyes of the SEALs around him and thought about Rita. Would she be all right? Had he made the right decision coming with Grafton? If they shot Rita down she had no parachute, no ejection seat—if that woman died Toad wanted to die with her. This thought had tripped across his synapses when he was weighing his request to accompany Grafton. Nuclear weapons to murder millions—with Jake Grafton alive and thinking, they had a chance to pull off this crazy assault. With him dead it would be just another bloodletting and probably end up too little, too late. Although racked with powerful misgivings, Toad had elected to go with his head and not his heart.

  The oxygen, he noted now, had a slightly metallic taste.

  Maybe, Toad decided, a little prayer wouldn’t hurt. He didn’t bother the Lord often, just checked in occasionally to let the man—or woman—upstairs know he was still down here kicking, but now, he thought, might be a good time to put in an earnest supplication from the heart.

  Dear God, don’t let anything happen to Rita.

  Jack Yocke was thinking exclusively about the upcoming free fall. Unlike Grafton and Tarkington, he had never ejected from an airplane, nor had he ever jumped out of one. He knew people whose idea of a perfect Saturday was to leap out of an airplane with six of their buddies and free fall, then float down in sport parachutes, those colorful flying wings. He had never had the slightest desire to join the macho brigade. Maybe those folks had maladjusted hormone levels or were trying to spice up dull, boring existences, but Jack Yocke was perfectly happy with his feet upon the ground. He still got dates when he wanted them and his dick got stiff at the right time, so why spit in the devil’s eye?

  Part of the reason he was here, he admitted to himself, was Tarkington. The Toad-man had a knack of rubbing him the wrong way. That coolest-of-the-cool, studlier-than-thou attitude, that…asshole! So now here he was, getting colder and colder, about to fall over five fucking miles through the night sky, then ride a parachute—if that contraption of bedsheets and fishing lines opened—right smack into the middle of a goddamn war with a bunch of raghead Nazis.

  What if the chute doesn’t open? I mean, really! You gotta lay there in the air like a store dummy for two minutes and forty seconds waiting…waiting…waiting… If you panicked and pulled the manual ripcord too high you might run out of oxygen, or drift away from the landing area and the support of your fellow soldiers. Or you might find yourself hanging up there when the helicopter gunships and troop transports came in with their blades whirling around, flak searching the darkness, cannon fire, machine gun bullets… No, Jack, don’t take a chance on pulling the ripcord too early. Wait for this seventy-nine-cent gizmo from Woolworth’s to do the job for you.

  He would wait. Under absolutely no circumstances would he panic. He told himself that yet again, trying to believe it. He would close his eyes and wait until the chute opened. It would open. He assured himself of that for the fiftieth time. If it didn’t, by God, they would scrape him off the asphalt in the middle of the runway, his eyes scrunched shut, his hands and legs outstretched, still waiting.

  Now, fifteen minutes after takeoff, Yocke was ready. He was properly psyched and ready to leap straight into hell. Then he looked at his watch and saw that they had over an hour to go.

  Oh, Jesus!

  Rita Moravia sat in almost total darkness with her back against the forward bulkhead of the Blackhawk’s passenger compartment. Sharing the compartment with her but quite invisible were the four European colonels “observing” and the two Russian flag officers.

  The Russians also had escorts, Captain Iron Mike McElroy and one of his sergeants. Rita had briefed them carefully.

  Right now she wasn’t thinking about the other passengers. She was listening to the muffled roar of the engines through her headset and thinking about her husband, Toad.

  He would be okay, she assured herself. When she heard he was jumping she thought of the two steel pins in his leg and wondered if he should. When she mentioned his leg he glared at her.

  Isn’t that just like a man? If the man is concerned he’s thoughtful, chivalrous, gallant. If a woman voices her concern she’s a nag.

  So life isn’t fair. Tell it to Yocke and let him put it on the front page.

  The navy had been a tough row to hoe. First the Naval Academy, then flight training, the squadrons, test pilot school—Rita had encountered subtle covert and overt discrimination every step of the way. Oh, the senior officers thought it would be fine to have women in the navy as long as the pretty ones wanted to be executive secretaries to those said senior officers, but women shouldn’t be on ships! Or in cockpits. Or where men were shooting. Or drinking. Or telling dirty jokes. Heaven forbid!

  Jake Grafton didn’t think like that. Because he didn’t Rita had found herself riding the tip of the arrow, slaughtering doomed men with a 30mm cannon.

  Here in the darkness inside this helicopter over the desert, Rita Moravia remembered that moment. She remembered the feel of her airplane, the look of the clouds, the look of the Iraqi plane on the parking mat as she dove at it, the Gs tugging at her as she maneuvered, the lighted reticle in the sight glass, the vibration as the cannon vomited out its shells, the smoke billowing skyward as she pulled up and banked away… Everything was crystal clear, engraved on her memory.

  She had killed.

  Oh, it had to be done… but she had done it.

  She thought now that she understood those senior officers she had met through the years, understood that look in their eyes. It had been a tired look, a weary look.

  Now she forgave them. Yet they were wrong.

  Jake Grafton was right.

  You can’t avoid it or wash it off your hands just because you didn’t get a Y chromosome and a penis. Oh no.

  Little Toadlet inside of me, this world you will come into isn’t just flowers and teddy bears. Male or female, you are going to have to live, endure, survive, do the best you can. You must be strong, little one. Somehow, some way, you must find the strength to do what you believe to be right. And the strength to live with it afterward.

  24

  The cruisers were on the western side of the task force, arranged in a broad semicircle over five miles of ocean. The Tomahawk missiles popped out on cones of flame, rising and accelerating, then nosing over and descending to just a hundred feet above the sea as their turbofan engines took over. Missile followed missile, a total of fifteen in all. Their targets were five radar sites between Samarra and the southern border of Iraq, with each radar being the target of three missiles.

  The last missile had just disappeared into the darkness when the carrier to the east of the cruisers turned into
the wind and the first two of her aircraft rode the catapults into the night sky, one off the waist, one off the bow. The launch took seven minutes. The planes were still climbing away from the carrier when more Tomahawk missiles rippled from the cruiser’s launchers.

  Meanwhile a half-dozen AH-64 Apaches were approaching their targets, two more Iraqi radar sites, at just forty feet above the desert sand. Apaches from the 101st Airborne Division had made a similar attack against radar sites only a few miles from these on the opening night of the Gulf War in 1991. The Iraqis had worked for two years to build these replacement sites, which now met the same fate as their predecessors. They were turned into twisted junk by a blizzard of Hellfire missiles, 2.75-inch rockets, and 30mm cannon shells.

  Wild Weasel antimissile aircraft were already orbiting over Baghdad. Under their wings were the radar-killing beam-rider missiles that would take out Iraqi fire-control radars when they began transmitting. Since the Gulf War allied aircraft had routinely patrolled the skies over Iraq and they were there again tonight, waiting.

  The two C-141s carrying navy SEALs crossed the border at thirty thousand feet on a direct course for the Iraqi air base at Samarra. Someone had suggested a feint toward Baghdad, but Jake Grafton vetoed that. The most valuable target in Iraq was at Samarra. Feints were merely a waste of fuel and precious time.

  The Iraqi command center duty officer in Baghdad noticed on his radar presentations the flight of aircraft crossing the Kuwaiti border and another flight coming in from Arabia, all converging on Samarra. This was unusual, the deviation from the standard allied patrolling tactics that he had been briefed to look for. He was about to pick up his telephone when the first of the navy Tomahawk cruise missiles struck its target and one of his radars went blank. Then a second, and a third. Frantically he jiggled the hook on the telephone. The operator came on the line. Alas, Iraq’s fiber-optic, state-of-the-art military communications system was heavily damaged during the Gulf War and was still under repair. So the duty officer had to use the civilian telephone system.

  “The air base at Samarra, quickly.”

  What he would have said to the people at Samarra we will never know, for at that moment a Tomahawk missile penetrated the reinforced concrete wall of this command and control center and six-thousandths of a second after the initial impact its thousand-pound warhead detonated. The people inside the structure never felt a thing—they merely ceased to exist.

  The battle had begun.

  Flights of A-10 Warthogs and A-6 Intruders raced into the area around Baghdad and Samarra and began attacking antiaircraft missile sites. They were protected by electronic warfare jamming planes and a curtain of chaff that a flight of B-52s was dumping from thirty-six thousand feet.

  The SEALs in the C-141s were up and in line. Silent, tense, they watched the red jump light high in the rear of the compartment, above the open ramp that led into cold, black nothingness. Jake Grafton, Toad Tarkington and Jack Yocke were in the middle of the line against the starboard side of the aircraft.

  Jack Yocke had switched his mind off. He was running now on adrenaline and instinct.

  It was like being back on the high school basketball team waiting for a tipoff, all hot and sweaty, ready to go whichever way the ball bounced.

  Once his eyes caught a glimpse of the blackness yawning beyond the lead men, but he ignored it. Then the jump light turned yellow. The man behind him crowded him forward, so he took a step, nudging up toward Toad’s back.

  He was chanting into the oxygen mask: “Come on, baby, let’s do it! Let’s go, go, go, go,” so when the light turned green his muscles surged and he was charging right behind Toad and shouting “Go, go, go,” and the ramp wasn’t there anymore and he was falling, falling, falling into the infinite eternal darkness.

  Jake lay spread-eagle in the sky and waited for his eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. It would have been great if they could have worn the night-vision goggles, but those bulky headsets would have been torn off by the wind blast. In seconds he was up to terminal velocity, 120 miles per hour.

  He was still getting oxygen. Fine. So how many seconds had it been?

  He scanned, trying to pick up the men who were falling with him. He saw a few shapes in the darkness, but that was all. He concentrated on staring into the blackness below. Nothing was visible, of course, since there was a thin cloud layer at twenty thousand feet. After they were through that the lights of Samarra should be visible underneath, perhaps the air base lights if they were still on, and to the south, the lights of Baghdad.

  So he lay there in the sky feeling the cold wind tear at him, maintaining his balance. That was important, and extremely difficult to do in the darkness without a visual reference. All you could do was pray you didn’t tumble, and if that happened of course you would know it. Even though the wind was cold, he wasn’t freezing. His jumpsuit and clothes seemed to be enough. And as he fell the air would become warmer.

  What was down there? Were the Iraqis on full alert, or would the surprise be enough?

  Toad Tarkington had a problem. His goggles had somehow come off in the scramble out and now he was squinting against the wind. There was nothing to see, so he scrunched his eyes tightly closed and began counting. “One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three…”

  He was falling at the rate of two miles a minute, a mile every thirty seconds. At the end of a minute he should be through the cloud layer. Then he would open his eyes.

  This fall was a whole hell of a lot different than the last time he jumped, that time in Nevada when he and Rita had nearly bought the farm.

  Actually this wasn’t bad. He could feel the cold but he wasn’t freezing. And nobody was shooting.

  They were going to be shooting on the ground. Toad was certain of that. The most dangerous part of this whole jump was the last few hundred feet, when any Iraqi draftee who could lift a rifle would have a free shot.

  The thing to do was to get the weapon out when the parachute deployed and be ready. He rehearsed the moves that he would make, how he would get the weapon free and cycle the bolt. Ahmad the Awful might get his shot at the ol’ Horny Toad, but it wouldn’t be free.

  Yocke wasn’t counting. He was trying to stabilize himself in the spread-eagle position. He could feel the dizziness of rotation, and try as he might, he couldn’t seem to stop it. Damn!

  And he had lost track of the time. Well, two minutes and forty seconds was an entire lifetime. He would still be falling like this in the middle of next week if he didn’t get stabilized.

  He forced himself to spread his arms and hands to full extension. According to the chief who had briefed them, that should stop the tumbling.

  But he wasn’t spread out. Now he realized that he was almost doubled up at the waist. He was so pumped up he couldn’t even tell what position his body was in!

  He forced himself to full extension. The rotating feeling slowed. And stopped.

  And he was still chanting. “Go go go…” He stopped and took a deep, ragged breath.

  He stared straight ahead, which must be down. The wind was in his face, trying to pull his arms and legs backward, so straight ahead must be down.

  Thirty years of life, and all of it led up to this. School, work, family, women, good moments and bad, and all of it was mere prelude for this moment, this free fall into a cold, black eternity.

  Jack Yocke began to laugh. He laughed until he choked, then decided he might be getting hysterical, and stopped himself.

  How long has it been?

  Does it matter?

  And the answer came back. No.

  He fell on toward the waiting earth.

  Jake knew he was through the cloud layer when lights suddenly appeared in the velvet blackness below. There was Samarra, and the base almost directly under him. He twisted his head so he could see Baghdad. The navy and air force were doing their job, he noted. In the blackness he saw the wink and twinkle of explosions, here and there jeweled strings of tracers streaking t
hrough the darkness at odd angles. No sounds, just muzzle blasts and flashes of warheads and those twinkling strings of tracers.

  He tried to steer toward the center of the air base below, that black spot where the runways must intersect.

  Now the two-miles-per-minute rate of fall was quite discernible. The lights below were coming up at sickening speed. Even though he had spent years flying tactical aircraft at night, the visual impact of his rate of descent was disconcerting. Would the parachute open?

  This question must run through the mind of every free fall parachutist. Jake Grafton had a pragmatic faith in military equipment—through the years he had occasionally witnessed the spectacular, usually fatal, outcome when vital equipment failed.

  He pulled his left wrist in and examined the luminous hands of the wrist altimeter. Three thousand feet still to fall!

  How many seconds?

  The math was too much. He waited, noting the absence of muzzle flashes. Maybe they had achieved surprise!

  Toad’s eyes were slits, staring at the lights rushing up at him. He reached for and grasped the manual ripcord. And waited.

  The runways were plainly visible, and the hangar. There was a plane!

  How high was he? Still a couple—

  The opening of the chute almost tore his boots off.

  Toad took off the oxygen mask and threw it away, then began checking his equipment. He still had it. All right! He got the submachine gun unslung and checked the magazine.

  Still no muzzle flashes on the airfield directly below. Please God, let them be asleep!

  Jack Yocke was chanting again, some mindless sound he repeated over and over as he fell toward the lights on the earth below.

  The air was warmer here. In one corner of his mind he took note of that fact, but the flashing, twinkling lights embedded in the velvet, Stygian blackness claimed the rest of his attention. The lights were coming closer, growing larger. He could even hear muffled explosions. They were having a war down there, and he was falling into it at two miles per minute.