Locked On

78

Clark and Chavez stood outside a Russian Air Force Antonov An-72 transport airplane parked on the tarmac at Krayniy airport near the town of Baikonur, twenty-five miles south of the Dnepr facility at the Cosmodrome and forty miles south of Yubileinaya Airport. The Antonov’s engines roared, even at idle.

Also parked there on the tarmac were four Mi-17 helicopters, a smaller Mi-8 helicopter, and a gargantuan Mi-26 helicopter. A flurry of men and women moved around the machines, fueling them and loading them under the artificial lights of auxiliary power units and portable spotlights.

A light blowing snow whipped around the only two Americans on the airfield.

“Has Nabiyev arrived yet?” Ding asked John.

“Yep, he’s up at Yubileinaya. He’ll be ferried over at 22:30.”

“Good.” Chavez was head to toe in black Nomex. He wore a helmet on his head, and an oxygen mask dangled from it. On his chest an HK UMP submachine gun, 40 caliber, hung over a chest rig full of magazines. Even with the silencer on the SMG’s barrel it was barely wider than Ding’s shoulders with the shoulder stock folded closed.

Domingo Chavez was kitted up just like he had been for many years back in Rainbow, although he did not use his old call sign. The man leading his former team was here and active on this mission, so his Rainbow Two call sign was not available. Instead he was handed the moniker Romeo Two by the Rainbow comms men. Someone joked that the R designation was due to the fact that Domingo was retired, but it didn’t matter to him. The men of the Rainbow teams could call him Domingo Chavez, for all he cared. He had so much else to worry about.

“You need help getting into your chute?” Clark asked.

Ding said, “Not from you, lefty.” Both men smiled dryly. The attempt at gallows humor fell short. Chavez said, “The loadmaster on board will get me set up.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “You’ve done damn fine work on this op, John. But still … we’re going to lose a lot of guys.”

Clark nodded, looked off at the choppers full of Rainbow men loading up. “I’m afraid you’re right. It’s all down to speed, surprise, and violence of action.”

“And any luck we can make along the way.”

John nodded again, then reached out to shake his son-in-law’s hand. He stopped midway, recognizing that the bandages were going to make a normal handshake impossible, so then he switched to his left.

Ding asked, “How bad are you hurting?”

Clark shrugged. “Broken ribs mask the broken hand. Broken hand masks the broken ribs.”

“So you’re golden, then?”

“Never better.”

The two men embraced warmly.

“See you when it’s over, Domingo.”

“You bet, John.”

A minute later, Chavez was on the An-72, and five minutes later Clark was on board one of the Mi-17s.

Al Darkur, Ryan, and Caruso followed Rehan and his entourage of ISI men and LeT operatives to the Lahore main railway station. The city was on a state of alert, which should have meant organized checkpoints and enforced curfews and the like, but Lahore was a city of ten million, and virtually all of them were certain tonight would be the beginning of a shooting war in their city, so there was much more chaos than order on the streets.

Ryan and Dominic rode in the back of the Volvo van with the major. Al Darkur had passed out police body armor and big G3 rifles to everyone in the truck, and he donned the same gear.

Fires burned in the city from the earlier artillery barrage, but no more shelling had occurred. The panicked citizenry would cause more casualties, Jack was certain, as he had seen dozens of car wrecks and fistfights and pushing and shoving at the rail station.

Rehan and his four-vehicle convoy pulled into the streets inside the station property, but then the rear car stopped suddenly, blocking the path of traffic. The other cars raced forward, the heavy crowds in the street scrambled out of the way.

“Shit!” said Ryan. He worried they would lose their man. They were a half-dozen vehicles behind the parked car, and they could just make out the top of the convoy vehicles as they turned east, remaining inside the grounds of the train station.

Al Darkur said, “We are dressed as police. We will dismount, but remember to act as police.”

And with that, Mohammed al Darkur and his two men climbed out of the Volvo, and the Americans followed. They left the car there in the road, a cacophony of horns honked in anger behind it.

They ran on between the cars, pushed their way onto the sidewalk, and sprinted after the convoy that was, again, bogged down in the thick pedestrian traffic around the train station.

Rehan and his men got through the scrum in the street, and then they turned and headed up a railway access road that crossed the fifteen tracks of the station as it headed to a large cluster of metal-roofed warehouses on the northern side. This was a quarter-mile away from the station and all of the passenger traffic.

With al Darkur and his two men in the lead and the two Americans behind, the five men on foot sprinted onto a public railway-crossing path above the employee road. Below them, the four vehicles pulled between several links of rusted rail cars sitting alone on the far side of the yard. The cars had no engines, they were just positioned there in front of a storage building alongside the tracks.

The five men on the crossing path stopped and watched the sixteen men get out of the vehicles and walk into the warehouse.

The sounds of another artillery barrage on the city came from far to the south.

Ryan was panting from the run, but he said, “We need to get out of the open and get a better vantage point to watch that building.”

Al Darkur led them the rest of the way across the path, where they took over the second floor of a small boardinghouse.

While al Darkur assigned his two officers to guard the stairs, Caruso, Ryan, and the major entered the large dorm room that faced the train station. Ryan pulled his infrared binoculars from his backpack and scanned the area. Ghostly shapes moved between the parked rail cars, walking or running to and from the roads, climbing fences to get nearer to the active tracks.

These were civilians, people desperate to get out of the city.

He looked at the warehouse through his optics and he saw the glow of a man in an upstairs window. The man just stood there, looking out. To Ryan, the form looked like that of a sentry.

Another white glow appeared on the opposite corner window of the building a minute later.

He passed the binoculars to his cousin.

Al Darkur borrowed a scoped rifle and checked himself. He also looked over the space between his position and Rehan’s new location. “What’s that? One hundred fifty yards away?”

“Closer to two,” said Dominic.

“I’d like to get closer,” Ryan said, “but we’d have to cross a lot of open ground, go over about five sets of tracks, and then climb that cyclone fence on the other side.”

Al Darkur replied, “I can try and get more men here, but it won’t be anytime soon.”

Dom said, “What I’d give to know that fucker’s plan.”

Chavez jumped alone from the rear ramp of the Antonov An-72 at twenty-four thousand feet. He pulled his ripcord within seconds of exiting the aircraft, and within a minute of leaving the plane he was checking the GPS and altimeter on his wrist.

The winds immediately became a problem; he fought hard to stay on course, and he realized he was having trouble bleeding off the altitude fast enough. The op called for him on target right as the Mi-8 helicopter landed in front of the LCC, which meant he needed to time it just right. As it stood, he planned to be under canopy for just over twenty-two minutes.

He looked below — somewhere down there would be his target — but he could see nothing around him except for an impenetrable soupy blackness.

He’d executed dozens of these high-altitude, high-opening jumps in his Rainbow days, but the men currently assigned to Rainbow, while competent jumpers, did not have enough nighttime HAHO experience as far as Clark and Chavez were concerned. They would still be parachuting into the target in these swirling winds. Their role in this op was no picnic, but Clark’s mission called for someone to land on the roof of the LCC covertly, which meant a different type of jump.

There was another reason Chavez decided to jump alone. The sniper/spotter team watching the LCC had reported movement on the roof of the building — sentries scanning the sky for parachutes.

With the bad weather, Clark and Chavez were banking that one man could make it undetected, at least until he was in position to engage targets on the roof. But the chance of success for a covert jump onto the target declined with each additional chute in the air.

So Ding flew his ram jet chute through the snow alone.

The video feed showing Nabiyev in the back of the Mi-8 came online when a crewman boarded the chopper at the airport, shortly before takeoff. Nabiyev could speak directly with Safronov in the launch control room, though the video and audio were understandably a little choppy. Still, the camera served its function. It scanned around the helicopter to show just four men on board other than Israpil himself, who had been taken out of his handcuffs and dressed in a heavy coat and hat. Georgi asked him to look out the window and confirm when he could see the lights of the LCC, and the Dagestani prisoner positioned himself to do that.

The Rainbow sniper recon team that had been watching the LCC all day had moved from one thousand yards’ distance to only four hundred under cover of night. Now they were positioned deep in the grass with eyes on the rear of the LCC. They watched the building through their scopes. The intermittent lighting and the snowfall made the view through their glass confusing, but the spotter noticed a pair of long shadows moving against a steel heat exhaust unit on the north side of the roof. After tracking the movement for a long time, he saw the head of a man come into view for just a few seconds before it moved below his sight line. The spotter confirmed this with his sniper, then fingered the send button on his radio.

“Romeo Two, this is Charlie Two, over.”

“Romeo Two, go.”

“Be advised, we have two sentries on the roof.”

Nine hundred fifty feet above the LCC roof, Ding Chavez wanted to reply to the German-accented spotter that he couldn’t see shit. Only the GPS on his arm was directing him toward his target. It was down there somewhere, and he’d deal with any shitheads on the roof when he got there. Unless … “Charlie Two, Romeo Two. I’m not going to see those guys till I land on them. Are you in position to engage?”

Back on the ground, the sniper shook his head, and the spotter replied on his behalf, “Not at this point, Romeo, but we’re trying to get a target.”

“Roger that.”

Chavez felt for the UMP on his chest. It was there, in position, right over his body armor. He’d have to use it as soon as his feet touched the roof.

If his feet touched the roof. If he missed the roof, if some miscalculation took him off course or if some low-level gust pushed him away at the last second, then the entire mission would be in serious jeopardy.

And if a gust came at the wrong time, pushing Ding to the eastern parking lot, where the big chopping rotor blades of the Mi-8 were spinning, Chavez would not stand a chance.

He checked his altimeter and his GPS and then pulled his toggles, adjusting the canopy of his ram-air chute above him to turn him slightly to the south.

At 10:30 on the nose, the Mi-8 approached the LCC. Safronov was still watching the video comm link to the helicopter, and Nabiyev saw the big bunker-looking building with the large bright lights on the roof. He took the camera from the cameraman and positioned it against the window so that Safronov himself could see. Georgi told Israpil that he would meet him inside the front door in minutes, and then Georgi ran out of the launch control center with several of his men. They descended the stairs, crossed the dark entry hall, and opened the blast-proof iron doors.

Four Jamaat Shariat gunmen took positions in the open doorway, but Georgi himself stood to the side; he only looked around the iron door, lest someone lurking out in the snow try and take a shot at him.

Behind them the foreign prisoners were led into the hall, then huddled against the wall by two guards.

The Russian helicopter landed at the far end of the parking lot, seventy yards from the blast-proof doors of the LCC, directly in the spotlight beams from the roof.

Safronov looked out the door into the swirling snow illuminated by the lights. He radioed his men on the roof and told them to be ready for anything, and to not forget to keep an eye out toward the back of the building as well.

The small side door of the chopper opened, and a bearded man in a hat and coat appeared. He covered his eyes against the light and slowly began walking across the hard-packed snow in the parking lot.

Georgi was already thinking about what he would say to the military commander of Jamaat Shariat. He would need to make certain the man had not been brainwashed, even though he had noticed no evidence of that in their previous conversations.

Chavez watched the chopper land, then turned his focus back to the roof of the LCC, two hundred feet below his boots. He would make his landing, thank God, though he would land faster and harder than he wanted. As he descended with a sharp bank to the south he made out one … two sentries posted there.

One hundred fifty feet down.

Just then the roof access door opened below him, sending more light across the roof. A third terrorist came through the door.

Fuck, thought Chavez. Three tangos, each on a different compass point from his landing site. He’d have to take them in rapid succession, nearly impossible when dealing with a rough landing, spotty lighting, and a weapon that he could not even bring to bear until he cut away from his canopy before it pulled him over the side of the roof.

One hundred feet.

Just then, Ding’s headset came to life.

“Romeo Two, Charlie Two. Have one target in sight on northwestern roof. Will engage on your command.”

“Waste him.”

“Repeat last command?”

Fucking Germans. “Engage.”

“Roger, engaging.”

Chavez turned all focus away from the man on the northwestern portion of the roof. That was no longer his responsibility. If the sniper missed, well, then Ding was fucked, but he couldn’t think about that now.

Twenty feet.

Chavez flared his chute and landed at a sprint. He kept running, pulled the disconnect ring on his chute and felt it drop free from his body. He grabbed his suppressed HK and spun toward the man at the access door. The terrorist had already lifted his Kalashnikov in Ding’s direction. Chavez dropped to the roof, rolled over his left shoulder, and came out of his roll on his knees.

He fired a three-round burst, catching the bearded terrorist in the throat. The AK flipped into the air, and the tango fell back into the doorway.

The suppressed gunfire, while certainly not silent, would not be heard over the sound of the Mi-8’s rotors.

Ding had already shifted focus to the right. As his eyes spun, he caught a distant unfocused image of a sentry on the northwest corner as his weapon rose, and then the left side of the sentry’s head exploded and the man dropped where he stood.

Chavez focused, though, on the man at the eastern portion of the roof now, just twenty-five feet or so from where the American knelt. The terrorist did not have a weapon up, though he was looking right into Ding’s eyes. As the Dagestani struggled to bring his sights to this new target who had just dropped out of the night sky, he shouted in fear.

Domingo Chavez, Romeo Two, double-tapped the man with two .45-caliber rounds to the forehead. The man backpedaled a few steps as he fell.

Ding stood, relaxed just slightly now that the last threat had been dealt with, and he reached for a fresh magazine for his UMP. While doing so he watched the stumbling sentry, waiting for him to fall onto the cold concrete roof.

But the dead man’s body had other plans. His rearward momentum continued to carry him back, and Chavez recognized in an instant of horror that the body would fall off the roof. He would land in a heap right in front of the door below, right in the lights illuminating the man walking from the chopper.

“Shit!” Chavez sprinted across the roof, desperate to catch the sentry before he tumbled off and gave away the entire operation right at its most vulnerable point.

Ding let go of his HK, launched off the ground, and in the air he reached at full extension for the dead man’s uniform.

The Jamaat Shariat gunman fell backward over the edge of the roof.