The Tupolev’s engines spun down. No other engine noise was apparent above the racket on the tarmac, but heat waves shimmered from the rear of the B-2. He started down the stairs, breathing the familiar scent of JP-8. It took him back to a kerosene heater warming the three-room boardinghouse in the Kentucky highlands where he’d grown up. He sniffed, almost expecting to smell wet grass and horse manure. As a child, he’d decided he’d make enough money to never have to live in a cold house again. He loved the country that had given him that chance and damned any son of a bitch who threatened her.
He jogged down the remaining stairs, then turned toward their new transport. Amid scrambling ground crews he spotted Top, standing in front of the B-2’s nose gear, red-faced, earmuff-style comm set over his head, swinging a clipboard, yelling into his mic.
Chapter 14
Charged
Red had never seen a B-2 up close. Their geometric silhouettes had flown over him a few times, but on the ground they looked nothing like the aggressive, athletic shape of the Tupolev, an aircraft thirty years their elder. This B-2 was short, fat, and dumpy as a huge black boomerang. It had a snout only an engineer could love.
Beneath the wing, abreast the portside landing gear, stood at least fifteen crewmen beside what looked like eight torpedoes lying on waist-high stands. “Cloaks,” Marksman said, pointing toward the black capsules.
Top snapped to attention, called the area up, and executed a perfect salute.
The colonel returned the show of respect. “At ease, first sergeant. We’re at your disposal. Get us fit and loaded.”
“Yes, sir!” The loadmaster’s voice sent a chill across Red’s shoulders, reminding him of an instructor for whom he held sincere disdain. It recalled his fiftieth push-up on a salt marsh after an early-morning ocean swim. The instructor was expounding on Red’s questionable ancestry and insulting his hygiene in a thunderous voice, while delivering kicks to his midsection. The guy wasn’t worried about conditioning. He was trying to wash him out.
“Yes, First Sergeant!” came a few automatic replies down the line, jerking him off the beach and dumping him back under the wing of the ugly B-2.
“Yep,” drawled Marksman.
What had the first sergeant just said? Red needed to stay sharp. Must be the lack of sleep. Everyone was jogging toward the hangar, so he followed.
Inside was a mess line on white plastic tables. Crossing the threshold, Jim shouted, “Last hot chow for a while. You heard Top. Don’t eat too much.” An obvious glance at Crawler. “We load in ten minutes.”
Experience said eat when you can, as fast as you can. Red downed a hot turkey sandwich in seconds, but only for the energy. Unexpected hunger like a bear’s at spring thaw surged up. He grabbed a second, slurped the gravy from the plate, and shoved half the sandwich in his mouth as they jogged to the latrine. Last call before an op—eat, hit the head, gear check, go.
Sitting across from each other without privacy stalls, the team cracked coarse jokes. Their repertoire hadn’t changed, which was strangely reassuring. Then it was back to the hangar, through yet another gear check and out onto the tarmac. The first sergeant directed each man to a specific cloak. One crewman stood at parade rest at the head of each. Red and Sergeant Lanyard were assigned an extra crewman since they’d never been dropped before.
Red ran his palms over the cloak’s surface. The tell-tale carbon fiber ridges beneath a charcoal matte coating bristled against his flesh. It was like a fat torpedo, maybe ten feet long and two feet across. At what looked to be the tail it necked down, then bulged back out like a bubble. Against the narrow section were four neatly folded aerofoils, like knives in slots.
The first crewman pushed a small black circle on the top edge and it swung down. A handle. The cloak broke open along its length. The inside was empty. The skin was only a quarter-inch thick, maybe less. “You mean that’s all that’ll be between me and the outside?” Red asked.
“Yes, sir.” The crewman smiled. “You guys are going in low, so these aren’t pressurized.” He held out a harness, like for a parachute, only minus the chute. Red slipped it on, maneuvering it around his gear, then lay flat in the cloak. The massive wing of the B-2 blocked the setting sun.
The crewman clipped the harness to a hard point above his head. “That’ll hold you upright when you hit water.”
Sergeant Crawler glanced up, sitting in the adjacent cloak adjusting his harness, then returned to the task at hand.
Marksman didn’t let it go by, though. “Can you repeat that so I can hear? It’s been a while. What happens when you hit the water?”
The crewman started to repeat his instructions. Crawler pointed and yelled, “Shut up or I’ll unhook this death trap and shove it up your ass!”
The young airman first-class froze with his mouth open, staring.
Marksman pressed down on Velcro flaps, securing ammo clips inside chest pouches. “Give the kid a break, Crawler. Just a damn joke.”
“And you!” Crawler wiggled his broad backside around to face Marksman. “You started it. If I wasn’t strapped in this coffin I’d kick your ass, too, you little prick!”
Red opened his mouth, but Jim beat him to it. “Gentlemen!” His sharp tone made Top sound soft spoken. “Like herding cats with you idiots.” Grins from the ground crew. “Grab-ass time’s over. Marksman, quit poking your bodyguard. Sergeant Crawler, stop bragging about how you’ve got a pair. Grab those marbles, lay down, and shut the hell up!”
Jim could intimidate and motivate in the same breath. A natural, Red noted.
The crewman laid him flat, right arm down, left arm bent at the elbow, hand on chest. “That’ll be most comfortable, sir. You can scratch and adjust most things.” He fitted the cloak’s earpiece and tucked the controller into Red’s hand, then adjusted the harness so it didn’t cut off circulation. “You’ll be pulling ten G’s hitting the water, for a couple seconds.”
He reminded Red several times that his back and neck needed to be as straight as possible when the light in front of his face lit red. “That’s when you’re about to hit the water. You’ll be coming in low on this one, so it’ll come on almost immediately after you’re dropped.” Since the water wasn’t deep, the drag chutes had been switched to a larger model. “Your terminal velocity will be around a hundred fifty miles per hour. That’ll mean a softer landing, but a higher chance of being picked up on radar. The pilot will slow a little for the drop. Expect two opening shocks. The first when the drag chute deploys. The second when you hit the water.”
Red frowned. “Won’t they hear us hitting?”
The airman shook his head. “Been at some test drops. They’re almost silent. The chutes are stealthy, the cloaks make a sound like doing a cannonball into a swimming pool. Unless some hadji’s waiting for you, they won’t know.”
After they hit, the cloak would rise to about ten feet of the surface, break open, and he could swim away.
“What happens to the cloak after that?”
“Except for the skin, everything’s off-the-shelf. It’s like riding a GPS-guided bomb into the water. After you swim away, they’ll fall to the bottom. There’s a charge in the nose and tail, like a grenade. Large enough to do the job but small enough to only make bubbles at the surface. They self-destruct after a couple minutes.”
His crewman glanced at the first sergeant, who was tapping his watch. The rest of the instructions were hasty, more like Cloak Drops for Dummies. After that both his crewmen stood next to the aerofoils and snapped to attention. Jim had said there’d be time to get him up to speed, but this would have to do.
Top scanned his crew and sounded off. “Arms check! No chambered rounds allowed on my aircraft. Once you’re wet, charge your weapon to your bloody heart’s content.”
The crewmen instructed the team to remove clips and cycle bolts. The tink of ammo hitting tarmac came from everywhere, since Jim required every weapon to be charged once they deployed, going against everything Red had ever hear
d in a safety-minded military. “Long story,” Jim would say, “but a kid in the Congo taught me the importance of always having a round chambered.”
“Your sidearm,” Crawler’s crewman said. He growled, but cycled the slide and removed the chambered round. “Your other sidearm.” Another snarl from Crawler. “Do you have any other weapons with chambered rounds?”
“Yeah, my dick’s a flamethrower. You need me to—”
“Crawler!”
He glanced at Jim and pursed his lips, then lifted his leg, pulling a tiny 32 auto from inside the boot. He released the round from the chamber and handed it to his crewman.
Jim pointed at Top. “First sergeant, double-check his buoyancy vest. He’s got fifty pounds of demo gear and already pushing reg weight.”
All ammo and grenades were checked to ensure nothing could be dislodged during turbulence or opening shock. There’d be no bending down to pick up something that dropped. Crewmen fit the team with diving masks, clipped weapons to vests, and rechecked communications gear—all with the precision of a drill team, in under five minutes.
The first sergeant yelled, “Lockdown!” The world went dark as the door to Red’s cloak hinged closed, like a coffin.
* * *
Red’s eyes burned from lack of sleep. Or maybe it was the resinous stink coming off the cloak. He closed them tightly, attempting to make them water. He tried to rub them with his free hand, but only hit his diving mask.
It didn’t take long for the air to grow thin and the walls to press in. He’d thought this might happen again. It had in SERE training last time, at the resistance phase, the “R” of the acronym. SERE prepared pilots and crew in case they were downed and captured. He’d been shoved into a crouch, head between his knees, then crammed into a crate and kept there for what seemed like hours. His spine had ached from the unfamiliar hunch. His legs had turned numb, a welcome relief from the throbbing. Once he’d been released, it took effort to stand, all the while taking blows from the guards.
Remembering the sheer misery of that crate helped the walls of the cloak recede. At least here he could move a little. A dim light glowed above his head as his eyes adjusted. It wasn’t much, but helped.
The low purr of two munitions loaders reverberated outside, vibrations coming up through the cloak stand. Their tires scrubbed close, then pulled away. He’d be next.
His cloak jolted as the second loader picked it up and rolled underneath the bomb bay. Two men spoke nearby, only a mumble by the time the sound came through the cloak walls. More jolting and clacking, then a final clunk as the loader let go and he was suspended in place.
Here I am, inside a carbon egg, half paralyzed, suspended by a couple milspec pins in the belly of a strategic bomber.
He wriggled down a few inches to take the slack out of the harness. That might keep him from getting snatched unconscious when his cloak hit water. Nothing else left to do. He was done, for now. Everything since Lori had been taken was a blur. Recall, saying good-bye to the kids, op prep, the flight over. Even the sleepless night pacing the hangar was dreamlike. No, nightmarish. He was alone, but without any reassurance that he was getting closer to her recovery.
He wasn’t getting out till he was underwater in Iran. It was like his first jump, kneeling in the door of the OV-10, one hand on the floor, the other on the jamb. That unnatural feeling of balancing on the threshold, looking past his nose down to blue-gray landscape from twelve thousand feet. The slipstream slapping his flight suit against his shin, the jump master slapping him on the ass, yelling Go! He had leaned into that terrible wind and arched hard. Then seen the shrinking prick waving back and had thought I just screwed up. Several hundred jumps later, he could almost sleep on the way down. It was okay. This was his first cloaked drop, and he hoped it would be his last.
Lori knows I’ll be coming. Red couldn’t disappoint her.
“Comm check,” came through the earpiece. Jim’s voice. “Carter is a go.” Red pressed the button to confirm the same, along with several others. “Crawler is a go,” came through with a marked edge, followed by silence.
“Marksman, you there?” Jim asked. A comm clicked on, then the low buzz of snoring. Muffled laughter came through the resinous skin from all directions.
“Comms are a go,” Jim continued. “We’ve got six hours till drop. I’ll call fifteen minutes prior. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. Comm out.” Jim’s way of saying get sleep, if you can.
The engines wound higher, and the jet rolled with a lurch. Red sat up and smacked his head against a rib on the back of the cloak door. Resting back, he glanced down his nose and checked the time. They’d deplaned only thirty minutes prior. The carbon fibers in front of his nose made a frozen tapestry. The strands wove, interconnected to form a fabric stronger than any single material could be by itself. Jim knew how to build and hold a team together, each member coming at the same op from different directions, carrying divergent skills. That was his strength, but also the team’s greatest weakness.
Am I a weakness? Will my shoulders ever be as broad as his?
Wheels up.
Chapter 15
Coffin
Red’s cloak rocked and jolted inside the B-2. Instead of finding clear air, they were at low altitude, taking paths to avoid radar and hiding in the shadows of ground features. That was one of the ways the pilots hid the bomber. Even with its radar-absorbing skin and angular shapes, sophisticated equipment could still find it under the right circumstances.
Only the faintest whine from the engines came through the cloak shell. His crewman had said on the ground it only sounded like a distant airliner, even if flying a hundred feet off the deck. The low hum of something, maybe a hydraulic motor, was outside near his right thigh. From that same direction a high-pitched whine cut in with every move of the aircraft. Probably some sort of avionics controller.
“Won’t they be able to see us, even with all your radar-absorbing crap?” Crawler had asked the pilot who’d been walking around the wing, doing his preflight.
“Nah,” he’d said, expression masked by sunglasses.
“Don’t they have mobile shit? I mean, someone told me you never know where their radar is gonna be.”
“We’ll see it. All of it. Where it goes. We’ll stay low, in the shadows.”
“What you mean you’ll see it?”
A smile was his only explanation as the pilot had run his hand along the aileron, then turned his back and continued under the body.
Reacting to turbulence, the high-pitched whine of the controller was constant for a minute. Red had to adjust also. For the next few hours he had no control. It was strangely comforting, like being on a long bus ride, trusting the driver to get him there. The jostling of the cloak and whine from outside became rhythmical, then soothing. Like the rumba class he’d taken Lori to three anniversaries ago. He’d finally gotten it when he relaxed.
* * *
“Wakey-wakey,” Jim barked through the comm. “Fifteen minutes to drop.”
Red opened his eyes and looked down his nose. The face of his watch glowed 2043. When did he fall asleep? A nap was a good thing.
He tried to rub his eyes with his free hand, but hit his diving mask again. He pressed his comm button and said, “Red’s a go.” The rest of the team echoed in sequence, even Marksman.
“The navigator said we’re on schedule for a drop at 2100Z, maybe a minute early. Rendezvous at 2115, kick in the doors at 2145, last train leaves the station at 2215.”
Red had been reciting the time line in his sleep. He ran through the op plan again to ensure he was fully awake. “Two opening shocks,” his crewman had said. “One when the drag chute opens and another when you hit water.”
Jim cut in while Red was mentally kicking in the doors again. “The pilot just gave me our two-minute warning. Last call for alcohol. See you in the water. Comm out.” Jim tried, but his humor always fell flat.
The next minute and a half stretched. A green LED he hadn’t se
en before glowed near Red’s forehead. He grabbed the mouthpiece to a miniature scuba air supply and wrapped his lips around it. To maximize stealth they’d be released immediately once he heard the bay doors open—radar could reflect off all kinds of things inside the bomb bay. A small jolt, a couple of hydraulic pulsations, and the bay doors opened. Air pounded the outside of the cloak. A cool breeze came from a small vent above his head and chilled him down his spine. Several rapid clicks signaled the others being dropped.
Then he was weightless, released, following them down into blackness.
A loud clack sounded above his head as the drag chute released. The airfoils unfolded with the whine of electric servos directing him to his coordinates. No opening shock.
Shit! The drag chute should have deployed. Maybe a streamer? But that never happens to drag chutes. The green light changed to red, warning him he was about to hit water. He hoped it was sensory overload. Maybe he’d missed the opening shock.
He racked his chin into his chest, straightened his back, and braced for impact. He managed to cross himself, hitting his diving mask yet again. His crewman had said the cloak was designed to take it, even without a drag chute, but how deep was the sinkhole in the Pardis River?
Not very.
* * *
Red opened his eyes. Cold water splashing on the back of his neck snapped him conscious. His head hung and water was up to his belly. The dim light still glowed and his mouthpiece was dangling. Water was shooting in through the air vent above his head. That was normal, except his crewman had told him there’d only be a gallon or two in the cloak by the time it opened. He’d also said the cloak would be horizontal on the trip up, but now he was hanging in the harness at a steep downward angle.
His adrenaline came online as he remembered no opening shock. He checked his watch. 2105. They’d dropped a little early, so he’d been unconscious for six minutes. He put in his mouthpiece, trying to breathe slowly from the tiny air supply that was only supposed to be sufficient for a few breaths before surfacing. No opening shock meant he had hit at full speed. The high-velocity stream coming through the vent meant he was deep, lots of pressure, maybe stuck on the bottom. If it was soft, he could be completely buried. It didn’t matter if he didn’t get out soon—he’d drown or the cloak’s self-destruction would bring everything to a merciful end.
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