Countdown to Midnight

Fifteen

The BushCat swooped low over a jagged, sawtooth saddle between two higher peaks and plunged down the other side. Hit by a powerful updraft boiling up those steep slopes, its fabric-covered wings flexed and rippled. “Hold together, baby,” Laura Van Horn said quietly, almost as a prayer. She throttled back slightly and raised the nose a couple of degrees to shed some velocity. Though solidly built for a light aircraft, the BushCat’s rated VNE, the speed it was never supposed to exceed, was only 108 knots. Going any faster risked having the plane’s aluminum frame fold up under the stress — instantly turning what had been a flyable machine into a tangled mess of torn fabric and crumpled metal spinning uncontrollably down out of the sky.

Nick Flynn gripped the strut over his head as she banked hard away from another soaring spire of rock. The lightweight aluminum bar was one of the structural members that formed the basic shell of their BushCat’s tiny cabin. Otherwise, the only thing between him and a couple of thousand feet of empty space was a thin layer of zippered Dacron-Trilam cloth.

Mountains rose on all sides, some more than ten thousand feet high. Their towering black masses blotted out whole swathes of stars in the night sky. Formed tens of millions of years ago by volcanic eruption and upthrust, the Jebel Barez ran like a spine of hardened lava through the central Iranian highlands — separating their more fertile plains from the vast, waterless deserts in the east.

Trying to navigate safely through this maze of razor-edged heights, sheer cliffs, and narrow, boulder-strewn clefts would have been tough enough in an aircraft equipped with terrain-following radar and sophisticated navigation systems tied into a full-spectrum heads-up display. It was an order of magnitude more difficult in a tiny plane fitted with only the bare minimum of electronics to save weight and electrical power. A GPS-linked digital map open on the BushCat’s sole multifunction display provided some idea of where they were… but for the most part, their survival depended on Van Horn’s skill as a pilot, her situational awareness, and her uncanny ability to anticipate danger and react in time.

Insane as this harrowing nighttime flight through mountains seemed, Flynn knew it was their only real chance to slip through Iran’s air defenses unnoticed. There were relatively few air surveillance radars and surface-to-air missile batteries sited to cover the sparsely populated eastern third of the country. That was not the case farther to the west and along the coast of the Persian Gulf, where a thickening web of interlocking radars, missile units, antiaircraft guns, and interceptor bases lay in wait for any intruder.

He swallowed hard as Van Horn pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing steeply to clear another ridge. Their airspeed bled off fast, dropping below fifty knots. Just before the BushCat stalled out, she lowered its nose again and dove — rolling to follow the trace of a slender gap between two much higher summits.

“You still with me, Tomcat?” she radioed.

“Roger that, Tiger Cat,” the Predator’s remote pilot replied tersely. “Still hanging on your six.”

Flynn could hear the tension in Sara McCulloch’s voice. Because her flight control inputs had to be relayed through a satellite link, there was always a tiny delay before the Predator responded to her commands. It wasn’t much, usually considerably less than a second. But even flying at only eighty knots, the UAV would travel more than a hundred feet in that short interval. And in this rugged country that was often the difference between survival and slamming head-on into a wall of rock. Trying to thread a remote-piloted drone through the middle of these mountains on its own would have been completely impossible. Only by closely following the IR beacon fixed to the BushCat’s tail could McCulloch maneuver her ungainly Predator away from obstacles in time… and then often only by the narrowest of margins.

His jaw clenched. If they lost the drone on the way in, this whole operation was a bust — and he and Laura Van Horn would find themselves trapped deep inside Iran, without any real hope of rescue. Right now, they had no room at all for error or accident. His college ROTC instructors would have failed him outright for coming up with a boneheaded scheme like this. And they probably would have been right, he knew. Friction — the combination of random and unforeseen events which could not be predicted — was the only real constant in war.

The BushCat climbed again, cresting over another narrow ridge with less than a hundred feet to spare. Ahead, the ground fell away sharply, spreading out into an open plain. A band of fields and orchards stretched north and south. Flanked by two rivers, the volcanic soil here was immensely fertile. A small sea of yellow lights off to their right marked the location of Jiroft, a city of nearly one hundred thousand people. Other faint specks of light here and there pinpointed several of the tiny farming villages which dotted the broad valley.

Van Horn took them down onto the deck, jogging first right and then back left to keep as much distance as possible between them and any settled places. The Predator tagged along behind. This far inside Iran, the passage of low-flying aircraft wasn’t likely to raise an alarm — but there also wasn’t any point in giving the fates extra opportunities to screw them over.

“That was some seriously badass flying,” Flynn told her quietly.

She nodded tightly. “Just don’t jinx us,” she warned. They still had two more stretches of rough country to pass through, both of them offshoots of the larger Jebel Barez chain. “What’s my current ETA to the landing zone?” she asked.

Flynn studied the terrain map on their multifunction display. He traced their planned flight path. On a straight line course, they were about eighty nautical miles from the LZ he’d picked out using a combination of satellite photos and topographical charts. Of course, there was no way they could fly anything like a direct approach across those mountains and escarpments, not if they wanted to stay low enough to avoid detection by Iranian radars. Dodging and weaving through meandering passes and valleys would add miles and miles to their journey. He did some quick mental math. “Sixty minutes, plus or minus ten either way,” he said.

Van Horn’s mouth turned down a bit. She reached out and touched the display, switching it to show their engine and other status readouts. “Given our current fuel state, that’s really pushing the envelope,” she commented coolly.

“Pushing the envelope so far that we run out of gas and fall out of the sky?” Flynn asked.

She sniffed. “Have a little faith, Nick. We’ll make it.” Then she turned her head and gave him a shit-eating grin. “Even if I have to make you get out and push.”

“You know, remind me to lecture you on basic physics sometime,” he shot back.

“I thought you ducked out on the hard sciences in school?” Van Horn reminded him.

“Sure, but I figured out gravity the one time I jumped off our garage roof to see if I could fly with a couple of cardboard wings strapped to my arms. Busted a leg and dislocated a shoulder finding out that I couldn’t.”

Van Horn looked sympathetic. “Tough break the week before your senior prom, I guess.”

“I was only six,” he said with wounded dignity.

Another wall of steep hills lined the horizon ahead of them. Higher peaks lofted beyond. Thankfully, they weren’t quite as daunting as the main range of the Jebel Barez — rising around two to three thousand feet above the valley floor. Van Horn pulled back on her stick a bit, beginning a shallow climb that would take them over the first rise ahead. She contacted the Predator. “We’re coming up to the next rollercoaster ride, Tomcat. Stick tight and stay sharp.”

“I’ll be on you like glue, Tiger Cat,” McCulloch assured her.

The BushCat zoomed low over a sharp-edged ridgeline devoid of any vegetation. These heights were completely barren, a sea of bare, blackened rock, wind-blasted boulders, and fans of loose gravel scree that would have looked at home on Mars. The little plane banked to avoid a slab-sided knob that spiked several hundred feet higher and then turned back to continue southwest.

“My bird is picking up intermittent radar pulses at our eleven o’clock,” the Predator’s remote pilot suddenly reported. “Signal strength is pretty low, but my computer evaluates the likely source as a Meraj-Four S-band phased array radar.” One of the modifications Quartet Directorate technicians had made to the drone for this operation was to install a radar warning system similar to those suggested for its far more capable successor, the MQ-9 Reaper. Without this capability, their two aircraft would have been forced to fly largely blind through Iran’s air defense network. Plotting a course that would evade fixed radar sites was relatively easy. But many of the advanced radars associated with Iran’s long-range surface-to-air missiles, like the Russian-built S-300s and its own Bavar-373 missiles, were road-mobile — making it very difficult to pin down their operating locations at any particular moment.

Flynn leaned forward and pulled up their map on the multifunction display. He studied the territory shown ahead of them, thinking fast. The Meraj-4 radar system was an expensive piece of hardware. Deploying one anywhere except to watch over high-priority targets like nuclear installations, airfields, and naval bases wouldn’t make much military sense. “My bet is that radar is positioned to cover the approaches to Bandar Abbas,” he told Van Horn.

Her mouth tightened. “Which puts us what? About a hundred and ten nautical miles away?”

“About that,” he agreed. “And getting closer all the time.”

Van Horn nodded. “No point in fooling around, then,” she said. “We need to really get down in the dirt.”

Flynn stared at her. “Our altitude’s only a hundred feet right now. That’s not down in the dirt?”

“Nope.” She pushed the stick forward and the BushCat dove again — dropping until its undercarriage almost seemed to be brushing against the earth. A little cloud of dust and sand kicked up by their propeller and the wind of their passage swirled away behind them. When a massive boulder loomed up through the windshield, she pulled back just far enough to skim a few feet above its cracked and pitted surface before lowering the aircraft’s nose again.

“Holy crap,” Flynn blurted out before he could stop himself. Instinctively, he grabbed again for the cabin strut over his head.

“Now this is flying in the dirt,” Van Horn said with satisfaction.

“No radar pulses detected,” the Predator’s remote pilot reported from her post at the Zaranj airport. “We’re masked by the terrain.”

“See?” She said with a rictus grin. “Piece of cake.”

Flynn kept his mouth shut. The sweat streaking her face told a different story.

Almost an hour later, they emerged from the last band of mountains on their flight path. A large barren plain opened up to the west, bordered on three sides by more rugged hills and ridges. A few scattered lights in the darkness pinpointed small villages, most of them built along a north-south, two-lane highway at the mouth of this basin. A patchwork of small fields and orchards surrounded these little clusters of flat-roofed buildings.

With the Predator right on its tail, the BushCat turned due west and flew on, still almost hugging the ground. They crossed the empty, unlit highway in the middle of a mile-wide gap between two of the towns.

Van Horn glanced to her left. The ground there rose in folds and ridges, climbing several hundred feet above the basin floor. Those hills would block any impulses from the Iranian air defense radars deployed south of them, near Bandar Abbas. She raised the BushCat’s nose and gained some altitude.

Flynn breathed out in relief.

“I was starting to wonder just how long you could hold your breath,” Van Horn observed wryly.

Even a couple of hundred feet gave them a much better look at the terrain they were flying over. Clumps of small shrubs and bare rock dotted the sprawling plain, but its most distinctive features were several alluvial fans that spread northward from the higher ground along its southern edge. These were the accumulations of sand and gravel which had been washed down off the hills over centuries and millennia and then deposited in triangle-shaped patterns across the basin.

Van Horn banked back north and flew low along one of these formations, closely studying the lay of the land through her goggles. The Predator peeled away from behind her and started slowly circling over the valley. At last she nodded. “Okay, this spot looks doable.” She glanced at Flynn. “But this could be a little rough,” she warned.

“I am in your hands, O great pilot,” he said solemnly.

She laughed. “Yeah, don’t you wish…”

Aware that he’d gone red, Flynn was suddenly very glad that their night vision gear only showed shades of light and dark.

All business now, Van Horn circled back the way they’d come and lined up with a shallow wadi at the heart of the alluvial fan. She reached up and pulled a control handle. The BushCat’s wing flaps came down, offering more lift, as she simultaneously throttled back.

Smoothly, they slanted down out of the sky and touched down on the sand surface with a jolt and a little bounce. The little plane shook and rattled, jarred slightly from side to side as it rolled down the dry streambed, with bigger rocks and clumps of brush blurring past on both sides. Plumes of dust and blown sand kicked up by its landing gear trailed behind the tail. Carefully, Van Horn throttled all the way back and applied her brakes gently. The BushCat came to rest a little under four hundred feet from its touchdown point. Its propeller slowed and stopped turning.

With a sense of relief at being back on solid ground, even if it was deep inside hostile territory, Flynn unbuckled his safety harness and unlatched the aircraft’s soft-sided door. He dropped lightly out onto the wadi’s sand-and-gravel floor and drew his pistol. Then, ducking back under the wing, he moved up the side of the dry stream. At the top, he went down on one knee — checking their surroundings through his night vision goggles. There was no sign of movement. And no new lights showed in any of the villages several miles to the east. From the looks of it, none of the locals — most of whom should be soundly asleep anyway — had noticed their landing.

Turning, he gave Van Horn a thumbs-up signal.

She nodded and radioed the Predator circling overhead. “Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat. We’re clear. The winds on the ground are very light, just occasional gusts from the west at less than five knots. Make your drop when ready.”

“Right that, Tiger Cat,” McCulloch answered from her remote station back at Zaranj. “Stand by.” The Predator broke out of its orbit and flew a short distance to the west, climbing to around five hundred feet. “Dropping now.”

Abruptly, the streamlined cargo container slung under the drone’s long fuselage detached. It plunged toward the ground. A moment later, a parachute blossomed above the falling container, dramatically slowing its descent. It slid downwind and thumped to the ground in a puff of dust about fifty yards from the BushCat. The parachute canopy immediately collapsed, fluttering only a little in the light winds.

Flynn sprinted over to the grounded container. It was about eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high. He knelt beside it and reeled in the parachute, compressing it into a compact, easily handled bundle at the same time.

Van Horn joined him just as he finished undoing the straps that held the cargo container shut. She helped him pull it open. Mesh netting and more restraints secured five, five-gallon fuel cans at one end. They took up about a quarter of the interior. “Well, gee, I guess I get to fly out of here after all,” she remarked with a note of quiet relief. The nearly four hundred nautical mile trip here had almost completely drained the BushCat’s relatively small gas tank. Refueling with supplies flown in by the Predator had been their only hope of allowing the light aircraft to make it back to Afghanistan.

Flynn nodded. “And my next ride’s intact, too.” He patted the small motorcycle fitted tightly into the rest of the cargo container. It was a battered-looking Austrian-made KTM 250 XC-F dirt bike. Motorbikes were a common mode of transportation in Iran’s cities and countryside, so this one shouldn’t draw undesirable attention.

The next hour passed in a flurry of hard work — carting fuel cans back to the BushCat and emptying them into its gas tank, and then hastily camouflaging the empty cargo crate with dried brush and dirt. With that done, Flynn wheeled the motorbike over to the grounded plane.

Van Horn handed him his small suitcase. She watched while he strapped it precariously onto the back of the dirt bike. “Well, Señor Duarte,” she said quietly. “I guess this is where we say goodbye.”

He nodded soberly. His Persian wasn’t fluent enough for him to masquerade as a native Iranian, so he’d opted to stick with his cover as a Venezuelan, although this time with a passport and travel documents that identified him as a minor official in the South American nation’s Ministry of Petroleum. Caracas’s revolutionary government was a close ally of Tehran’s dictatorial regime, so travel between the two countries was reasonably common.

His forged documents, produced by the Quartet Directorate’s top experts, were excellent. They were so good, in fact, that in almost any other country, he could have simply flown in aboard a regular commercial flight, trusting that his false identity papers would pass inspection. Unfortunately, Iran’s Islamic government now required every foreign traveler to obtain a special computer-generated visa authorization code before arriving. This new process gave its security officials plenty of time to break anything but the most elaborate and detailed cover story — something that Four had no time to develop for him. Without a genuine code, Flynn would have been arrested the moment his phony papers were scanned at an airport or other point of entry. As it was, he’d have to be extremely careful not to attract close scrutiny from any Iranian authorities. One simple computer check would doom him.

This mission was a high-wire act from beginning to end. Over the equivalent of a pool of molten lava. And all without a net, he realized uneasily. Once the BushCat took off, he would be completely on his own.

Van Horn must have read his gloomy thoughts. She grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down for a deep, fierce kiss. “You take care, Nick,” she said sternly, stepping back. “Do not piss me off by getting yourself killed.”

Taken completely by surprise, Flynn grinned almost unwillingly. “I’ll do my best to avoid that,” he promised. “On my honor.” He held up his right hand, palm out, with the middle three fingers vertical and his thumb holding the little finger down.

She raised an eyebrow at the gesture. “You were a Boy Scout?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Somehow that just figures,” Van Horn said with a headshake. “Okay, then, I’ll hold you to your pledge.” After one final searching look at him, she climbed back into the light plane and started it up.

Five minutes later, Flynn sat astride the dirt bike, watching as the BushCat lumbered down the wadi, steadily gathering speed in a cloud of prop-blown sand. At last, seeming almost reluctant to break contact with the earth, the small aircraft lifted off. Slowly, it climbed away, already banking around to head east. He raised an arm in farewell and saw its wings rock back and forth once in response.

Within moments, the BushCat, again trailed by the Predator UAV, was only visible as a tiny dot in the night sky. And then, quite suddenly, it was gone.