“What do you mean?” he asked as he took a piece of paper from Ambrose.
“The Brazilian Air Force has scrambled two Mirage fighters, and they are heading in a westerly direction. Fort Huachuca in Arizona has picked up radio chatter that says they have orders to shoot down a 747 overflying their airspace with hostile intent.”
The president read the handwritten note Ambrose had jotted down while talking with the intelligence-gathering station in Arizona. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Get me the secretary of state.”
“He’s already on the line, sir.”
The president walked past Ambrose and into his office. He picked up the receiver and the secretary was waiting.
“Get to the presidential residence and get him to rescind that order, now!” the president said angrily, not bowing to diplomatic formality. His patience was starting to wear thin after hours of consoling his wife about their daughter.
“Mr. President, Brazil insists it has every right to down that aircraft, and will do so if it doesn’t turn away from their airspace.”
“To hell with it. Tell him that aircraft is there to suppost a rescue operation and has no intention of harming any Brazilian nationals. They are support only.”
“I will try once again to get through,” the secretary lied. He knew the president had ordered the fighter groups onboard Nimitz and John C. Stennis to stand down and and that they should in no way come to the aid of Proteus.
The president hung up the phone and addressed Ambrose. “How did the Brazilian Air Force get the information on Proteus?”
“The weapons platform?” Ambrose asked, acting innocent of the knowledge.
“Someone passed them information. Find out who, and do it yesterday! Also, get me a direct line to COMMSURPAC; I can’t leave them boys hanging out there with nothing to protect them.”
Ambrose had never seen the man lose his temper before. He watched as the president turned and walked quickly to the Oval Office. If he called in protection for Proteus, there would be hell to pay, and their tracks would be covered by an overt act of war.
Ambrose relaxed as he saw the secretary’s makeshift plan take shape.
BLACK WATER TRIBUTARY
Newly appointed Second Lieutenant Will Mendenhall swallowed when he adjusted the magnification on his night-vision scope. Ten Zodiac-type rubber rafts entered the lagoon on the opposite side of the falls from where he had set up position. He removed his right hand and shook it, trying to get some feeling back into it after the long climb up the side of the falls. He had used the rough-hewn archway that covered the falls most of the way, and then he had to use the natural features of the terrain to ascend the rest. His hands had been severely cut and scraped from the jagged rocks and bushes. But he had finally made it only five minutes before he spied the first boat. He lowered the goggles and looked at his watch; it was 0515 in the morning. He hoped Ryan was in place, or else the team below in the mine was about to have a shitload of company. Neither Night Rider nor the major had answered his first three calls.
Mendenhall quickly removed the radio from his belt and made sure the frequency was set on channel 78, and then he took a deep breath.
“Night Rider, Night Rider, this is Conquistador, do you copy? Over!”
OPERATION SPOILED SPORT SOMEWHERE OVER BRAZIL
The converted 747–400 was cruising at twenty-eight thousand feet in clear skies. The pilot had been on the radio for the past hour talking with the Brazilian civil authorities and explaining that they had rudder difficulties and were circling while their flight engineer checked out their hydraulic systems. They were screaming bloody murder but what else could they do, allow an air cargo plane for an influential international company like Federal Express to crash because they couldn’t allow some extra time over their airspace?
Inside technicians were cursing and shouting at one another as they furiously worked on the system that wasn’t supposed to be fully operational for three more years. The megawatt-class, high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser system had malfunctioned four different times that day, causing fires in two of those incidents.
Ryan was watching the fiasco develop alongside two of his six-man Delta team when an air force major tapped him on the shoulder.
“We have Conquistador on the horn; he’s asking for Night Rider One,” the major said over the noise in the cargo bay.
Ryan nodded and followed him. “Tell those monkeys they’re on,” he said to the Delta sergeant, indicating the laser technicians. “And remind them that American lives are at stake.”
Ryan entered a separate area that was closed off and quiet. He leaned over the radio operator’s ejection seat, careful to avoid the ejection handle looped at the top. He picked up a headset and pushed the button on the long cord.
“Conquistador, this is Night Rider actual, over.”
“Night Rider, we have bandits approaching our pos, are you tracking, over.”
Ryan leaned over and whispered to the satellite officer, a lieutenant colonel who was looking at a real-time infrared image downloaded from Boris and Natasha.
“We currently count fifty-four targets and ten craft. The information has already been fed to the targeting computer,” the lieutenant colonel said.
“Roger, Conquistador, we are tracking, over.”
“Start the music, Night Rider, they are in our laps. Operation Spoiled Sport is on! Execute, execute, execute!”
Ryan knew it was Will Mendenhall on the radio so he decided to chance it. “Conquistador, you find a safe location. I don’t trust this thing. Over.”
“Been warned already, Night Rider, just get the bad guys. Conquistador is beating feet. Out.”
Ryan nodded to the lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the operation and also that of targeting. His system relied on Boris and Natasha, whose infrared cameras locked onto the ring of balloon-carried heat emitters that circled the lagoon. Once that location and exact coordinates were fed into the targeting data, the KH-11 locked in on the individual heat sources of the men inside that target area or, more precisely, their body heat. The chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) would use the reaction of chlorine gas with liquid basic hydrogen peroxide to produce electronically excited gas-phase oxygen molecules. The oxygen would then transfer its energy to iodine atoms, which would emit radiation at 1.315 microns, producing a beam that would cleanly slice through solid steel. Assuming it worked.
The lieutenant colonel alerted the laser technicians—who actually worked for Northrop-Grumman—to activate in thirty seconds. Then he casually adjusted the mirror based inside the open barrel to disperse fifty-four separate high-energy beams that would target even moving objects—the mirror would separate and bounce the one main beam and split it into the individual killing lasers—all in theory, of course.
“Stand by to initiate,” he said into his headset.
Ryan frowned as he watched the targets getting closer to the falls. “Stand by to initiate” usually meant “stand by with the fire extinguishers,” he thought, as he closed his eyes in silent prayer for his friends.
Outside of the command center, the power grid went to maximum as the main generators kicked in. They reached 100 percent power without exploding, at least this time. At the same time on the targeting screen, ten illuminated circles centered around each individual target on the surface of the lagoon.
Outside the 747, a large port spiraled open fifteen feet below the cockpit. The pilot closed a specially made blind that would protect them from the intense light that would escape the port just feet from where he and his copilot sat.
“Stand by, system at one hundred three percent power and targets are acquired. FIRE COIL!”
Jason Ryan flinched as nothing happened.
“Wasn’t there supposed to be a power surge about right now?” he shouted angrily.
Outside the soundproof cabin and in the cockpit, the pilot saw thirteen alarms all start flashing at once. The red blinking
lights showed power loss in the 747’s main power systems. The four massive engines were powering down as if the pilot had slid the throttles back, and the nose of the giant 747–400 started dipping. The pilot immediately announced an emergency.
Ryan held onto one of the computer consoles and threw off his headset.
“Goddammit! We’re going to lose people down there!”
The lieutenant colonel in charge of the COIL called, “We’re about to lose the aircraft, Mr. Ryan!”
“This piece of shit needs to be lost! Goddamned technology, we can make fantastic video games but we can’t get one piece of military hardware to work as fucking designed!”
Ryan’s words were drowned out by the whine as the giant Boeing aircraft started to fall out of the sky.
Mendenhall was about to try the radio to raise Ryan again when suddenly the night around him lit up with large-caliber tracer fire from the lagoon. Someone in one of the Zodiacs had caught him on night-vision. Fifty-caliber rounds struck the rocks and bushes around him as he raised his nine-millimeter with one hand and tried the radio with the other. He fired down into the lagoon as he attempted to raise Night Rider.
Ryan was holding onto the same console, only now it was at an angle that clearly said the 747 was heading for the deck. He was calm as he had been though a similar situation before during his last days in the navy. You just had to know how to handle it, he thought.
One of the Northrop-Grumman technicians in the bay knew what had happened. He suspected it during the last test and was prepared for it. The main command console was patched into the Boeing power grid and when the targeting computer sent the command electronically to the COIL itself, the entire system shorted out. He pulled open the panel and found the wires he needed, and jerked on them. They came free and then he pulled the command wire and routed it through another power circuit. He quickly reattached the cockpit throttle input cable. Immediately, he was rewarded with the increasing whine of the four General Electric engines as they sparked back up to full power. The technician leaned over and struck the intercom.
“Power restored to aircraft systems. Power restored to COIL targeting!” The tech slid down along one of the interior bulkheads. Man, are heads going to roll when they find out they had routed one of the weapons systems through the platform power systems. Shit!
Ryan felt the nose come up as the power from the engines clearly indicated they were once again climbing.
“Rider, we’re taking heavy fire, over!” Ryan finally heard Mendenhall’s firm but harried call.
He was about to initiate the order to fire once again when the radar intercept officer at the front of the 747 called over the headsets: “We have two inbound bogies at fifty miles and closing fast. They snuck up on us. They’re squawking Brazilian Air Force and they are ordering us out of their airspace or they will open fire.”
“Time to firing sequence on Proteus?” Ryan asked loudly into the radio.
“Five minutes to bring up power,” the lieutenant colonel said as he quickly retargeted the scattered boats.
“Damn it, we’ll be a fireball in two minutes!”
The two Mirage 2000 fighters finally saw the anticollision lights of the 747 after the giant plane made a sudden dive for the jungle below. They adjusted their pattern to take up station one mile behind the large jet. The lead fighter armed his weapons. His orders were clear: down the Americans.
He used his thumb to select his weapon, two South African–made MAA-1 Piranhas, a short-range air-to-air missile relying on infrared passive guidance, which seeks the target’s heat emissions coming primarily from the engines. He immediately received guidance lock from the seeker heads of the two missiles themselves, which were poised on the launch rails beneath both wings just waiting for the electrical signal that would send them on their deadly way.
“Goddammit, they have missile lock on us, Ryan!” the pilot called over the radio.
“I don’t give a damn, we have our orders! Now get us back into position and fire the damned weapon before we lose those people down there!”
The Brazilian fighter pilots were relieved to see the giant aircraft start a slow turn back to the east. Then they watched and followed the 747, hoping they were about to leave the area from the direction they had come. They didn’t know it was only starting to make a long and slow circle as their targets were reacquired. When the lead pilot saw they were commencing another attack run, he became angered at the perceived deception and quickly spurred the French-built fighter back into its optimum firing position. He knew the 747 was ten minutes away from a sure death as it slowly turned.
THE WHITE HOUSE
Ambrose nodded to the Secret Service agent outside the Oval Office and then walked in. The president was standing at his desk with his hands placed firmly on its top.
“What’s happening?”
The president didn’t answer. He was looking down in thought as the muscles in his jaw were clenching and unclenching. Then the phone buzzed.
“The president of Brazil is returning your call,” his secretary said from the outer office.
“Mr. President, what are you doing?” Ambrose asked nervously.
“Something I should have done from the beginning,” he said as he picked up the phone.
Ambrose froze. The man was calling the president of Brazil personally, circumventing the secretary of state.
“Mr. President, thank you for taking my call. I need to ask you to stand down your forces. The aircraft in question is on a mission to support a rescue operation only. There is no hostile intent on their part.”
Ambrose slowly tossed a file folder on the coffee table in the front of one of the couches and sat. He closed his eyes as he felt his career, even his freedom, slipping out of his grasp.
“Yes, Secretary Nussbaum has undoubtedly explained to you the circumstances surrounding the—”
The president fell silent as the conversation became one-sided. He listened intently for three minutes and then angrily pounded his fist on his desk. He thanked the president of Brazil and hung up. He then pressed the button on his intercom. “Get me Admiral Handley at COMSURPAC headquarters in Pearl Harbor, now!”
The tone emanating from the seeker heads of the Piranhas once again told the pilot his missiles had locked onto the 747 heat signature. He was moments away from triggering the weapon when his wingman called out frantically.
“We have two inbound targets closing in from the west! They are at mach two point two and coming on fast from low altitude; they must have been orbiting in our airspace somewhere!”
The flight lead removed his finger from the trigger and started looking to the west. It took him a moment to find the afterburner glare of the two hostile aircraft, but when he saw them he knew they had covered their approach by flying at tree canopy level. As he thought this he heard the telltale warning that his fighter was being painted by the enemy weapons radar. Then a split second later, the tone became louder and steady, and that was when he knew his Mirage had been locked onto by an enemy missile.
“Brazilian fighter planes, this is United States Navy fighter aircraft to your west. We ask that you alter your approach to United States experimental aircraft that is currently off course. Their overflight is an accident, repeat, it is accidental. We have orders to protect United States property at all costs. Do you read, Brazilian flight leader?”
A cheer rose inside the spacious area inside Proteus as the announcement was made that the Brazilian fighters had turned away. Ryan listened as the communications operator informed them that the attacking fighters had been called off by the Brazilian chief of staff, calling out of Brasília.
“Goddamn!” one of the Delta men said, shaking his head. “Someone told someone else we’re the good guys!”
“Colonel, how long until you have a firing solution?” Ryan asked.
“We have one now, but it looks like our targets are awful close to your nofire area; they are almost clear of the heat signature pattern.�
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“Fire, goddammit, FIRE!”
The 747 started to shake and vibrate. They heard the main generator kick over to full power. And that was when Ryan just knew the whole platform was going to explode.
BLACK WATER TRIBUTARY
Mendenhall heard the click as his weapons firing pin hit an empty chamber. He had just hoped he had poked a few holes in a few Zodiacs below. With that thought of devious hope came twenty heavy-caliber rounds. Their tracers phosphorous red and horrible to behold, they slammed into his position.
He lay back and fumbled for another magazine when the sky lit up with a green blaze that shocked him into stillness. As he watched upward in amazement, fifty-two fluorescent laser beams coursed through the clear night air with deadly silence. It looked as if they formed the spokes of a wheel as they struck and then moved like giant stirrers mixing a drink.
The lead Zodiacs exploded as the COIL made adjustments in her targeting. Men were sliced in two by the green mirror-enhanced lasers as they struck them and punctured easily though their clothes and flesh. They didn’t even have time to react as the airborne laser killed half of the assault element in a matter of 1.327 seconds.
The sky had formed into a giant pinwheel of green light, taking out the first twenty-five-plus men before they knew they had even been attacked. Will Mendenhall was in shock as the attack ended even before he had finished flinching. He rubbed his eyes from the sudden flash, then looked out over the water. He saw nothing but floating rubber and dead men. However, the last five Zodiacs had turned and tried desperately to make for the far end of the lagoon. After seeing the deaths of their comrades at the hands of something they would never understand, they thought a more stealthy attack might be in order.
Mendenhall turned away and sat down hard on the small outcropping of rock. He watched as the last remains of the lead boats of the assault element sank beneath the calm waters of the lagoon, never suspecting that there were survivors.
Legend: An Event Group Thriller Page 44