Strike Eagle

Chapter 21

Sloughing through the jungle, Bruce had no time to think about the pain. For the first few minutes his ankle had hurt. Now the tingling had gone away and all that remained was a tight feeling. If only the swelling would stay down for a few more hours …

The rain had ceased to be a factor. It seemed as if he had been hiking for all his life in the wetness. Squishy shoes, chafing clothes … and constant rivulets of water ran down his face. It just didn’t matter anymore.

Pompano trooped ahead, never looking behind him and moving through the jungle like a machine. Every once in a while he stopped to look at his compass, but there were no rest breaks or pep talks. Just straight ahead to his destination.

It had been three hours, and Bruce had lost track of how far they had gone. After the first steep climb, they had encountered no other hill. The jungle had no outstanding landmarks. They could have been traveling in circles, for all that Bruce could tell. There were about five feet between the trees; low brush filled the intervening space. Often the sight of a banana plants would break up the monotony, but it was like living in an infinite world of trees and brush.

And rain.

He almost bumped into Pompano when the old man suddenly stopped. Bruce spoke in a whisper. “Are we there?”

Pompano shook his head. He consulted his watch. “Another half hour.”

Bruce broke out a canteen and drank deeply. He offered it to the old man. Pompano hesitated, then took a drink.

Bruce shifted his weight; his ankle yelped at him. “Where are we going?”

Pompano blinked. He studied Bruce for a moment. “We are going to a clearing, about a half mile wide, with a house in the center. I had the helicopter place us four miles away, on the other side of a ridge.”

“That was the hill we climbed about two hours ago.”

Pompano looked at Bruce. “It is time to start listening for … the others. There are some guards, but they are concentrated by the road and just outside of the clearing. There should be one sensor not far away. I doubt whether Cervante planted any on his own away from the road, but I cannot be sure.”

Bruce wet his lips. The stop had given his legs a rest, but feeling now returned to his ankle. “What’s the plan? You said we could get in without being seen.”

“Once it is dark we can slip up to the house. Cervante is a man of habit, and I think he will keep your vice president, and Yolanda …” Pompano hesitated, then spoke hurriedly, “in the side bedrooms. The house is not alarmed, and we can take our time getting them out.”

Bruce shook his head. The plan didn’t make him feel any more comfortable. You just don’t waltz into a place and leave unnoticed! “I don’t know.…”

“Cervante has guarded the entrance to the plantation. He is sure that no one could get in without being detected.”

Bruce knelt down and itched at his leg. His pistol slapped at his side. He tightened the holster and ran his hand over the long silencer. Just in case, he thought. His ankle felt worse and worse. He straightened. “Let’s get going.”

Pompano turned, consulted his compass, and took off.

As Bruce followed, he felt inwardly relieved. It was the first civil conversation he had had with the man.

Thirty-seven thousand feet above the ground the cloud layer broke into crystal-clear sky. Maddog Flight orbited a good five hundred feet above the top of the clouds.

Catman kept in a loose trail, bringing up the rear of the three-ship formation. The F-15Es were in a near constant bank. They didn’t want to be far from the action when the call came.

The clouds seemed to extend forever. Twenty miles away, a KC-10A tanker pulled in and started its own orbit. If the fighters needed fuel, they had their very own gas station.

Catman flipped on the intercom. “Robin — you still awake?”

“Negatory, Catman. You woke me right in the middle of a dream.”

“What do you think is going on down there?”

Silence. Then “Besides the rain?”

“Rog.”

“Beats me. You think Assassin is having fun?”

“Get real.”

Robin was silent for a minute. “Look on the bright side. He’s got a hell of a lot of trees to hide behind.”

“Yeah. Just like jungle survival.”

Catman glanced at the LANTIRN interface on the heads-up display. The tiny pod fixed underneath the left air inlet was the key to eventual success. The infrared optics were cued by the F-15’s GPS and inertial navigation system, and they granted the pilots enough precision to lay their weapons down in the crappy weather.

Just roll into the clear, following the LANTIRN, and trusting in the electronics all the way. They’d even have to pull up while still in the clouds.…

Catman hoped that the Special Ops boys would feed them the right data for the flight profile. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if something went wrong. Three hundred feet above ground level — where the clouds broke — was not a long distance to react, even if they did go in on a shallow angle.

Captain Richard Head positioned the “1 to 50,000 map” right up to the windshield. A lime-green Day-Glo line zig-zagged across the map, outlining the path that they had followed into the jungle.

Minutes before, a few hundred copies of the map had been scanned and e-mailed to the SEALs and other special operations troops searching for the vice president. Battlefield iPads and printers — durable enough to withstand being dropped into combat from the back of a C-17—were in use throughout the search areas. The entire search team was rerouted up to the area where Bruce had been dropped. They would set up roadblocks and wait.

Head squinted at the map and tried to figure out a faster way to return to the drop area. If the new avionics upgrade had come in, he’d be able to map the route on Google Earth. But for now he used the paper map and followed the rough contours of hills, ridge lines, and mountains that peppered the northwestern part of Luzon. A town called Tarlac seemed to be the closest seat of population. There were no other features except for a few towers and a handful of bridges.

Gould popped into the cockpit and slipped into the right-hand seat. He glanced at the map. “What do ya think — half an hour to get there?”

Head jabbed a finger at the map. “At least. You know, I’m not too crazy about going back and forth between the drop area and here, having to refuel if we’re forced to loiter.”

“If this is so all-fired important, then why can’t they swap us off with another Black Hawk?”

“Good question. But since we’re the only chopper around, I guess we’re it.”

“Still, you’d think they’d pull some of the other guys off the search effort.”

“They will. I was told to yell if we needed help, and they’ll get someone out to us.”

“Hell of a way to run a war. Sometimes I wonder what the commanders are thinking when they come up with war plans like this.”

Head folded the map and leaned over to stick it in the leg pocket of his flight suit. “Hey, don’t complain. That’s all you pilots ever do: bitch, bitch, bitch. Let’s get back up there.”

“I thought you were worried about having to keep coming back to refuel?”

“I am. But if we land outside of Tarlac, we’ll save fuel and be a half hour closer.”

General Simone stood behind his high-backed chair in the center of the Thirteenth Air Force Command Post. An array of oversized, high-definition color liquid-crystal displays covered the walls.

He stared at a computer-enhanced display of two blobs slowly moving through the jungle. Taken from the MC-130 orbiting three thousand feet above, the images faded in and out as Bruce and Pompano stepped around trees and scrub brush. The view slowly rotated as the MC-130 kept in a continuous bank, circling the two. The signal was shot to a geosynchronous AEHF satellite 22,400 miles above the Earth, then relayed back to the command post.

The next screen had the same wobbly infrared features, but it showed the top part of what appeared to be a plantation. The airy house was located in the center of a clearing. People moved around the perimeter of the house. A close-up view showed men carrying rifles.

The details of the house were smeared — because of a huge heat source and the clouds, said a lieutenant from Intelligence — which diffused the IR radiation getting to the sensors on board the MC-130. They couldn’t tell if the HPM weapon was there or not, so to play it safe they had to keep away.

Bruce and Pompano were half a mile from the clearing. Their progress had slowed. No guards were around them.

The other screens displayed various communication links, aircraft in the air, and their locations. People walked through the command post, updating the screens and constantly feeding information into the combat-control database.

Simone studied the screens with a tight mouth. He picked up a phone on a stand at his right. “Get me General Newman.”

Thirty seconds later, the Chief was on the line. “Pete. What’s the status?”

Simone drew in a breath. If it hadn’t been for Newman’s backing, Simone would now be commanding the Army Air Force Base Exchange Service, banished from operational command by the other generals who had disliked his style. He could be frank with the Chief.

“It’s going, General. Thank God the Seventh Fleet is out and not at Subic. Can you imagine Admiral Greshan trying to pull rank and heading this thing up?”

“Greshan wouldn’t have fallen for that crazy stunt of sending Steele out with that old man.”

“And the vice president would be a dead man.” The adjective Vice was faintly stressed. “But that’s not the reason I’m calling.”

“Shoot.”

“We’re tracking Steele.”

“Have you located Adleman?”

“No, sir. He’s probably inside the plantation house we’ve located, along with Pompano’s daughter. It will be getting dark here in less than two hours. My guess is that Steele is going to wait until dark, then try to sneak up to the house.”

“Do you think they can do it?”

“I don’t know. But this Pompano is good. He’s had years of experience getting through the jungle. It’s his territory. On the other hand, I’m worried about his allegiance.”

“What about Steele?”

Simone leaned forward against the chair. He watched the ghostly image of Bruce slipping through the jungle. The lieutenant’s body stood out in the infrared, hotter than the surrounding rain-soaked foliage, even though no features could be discerned. “He’s right at his peak — we couldn’t have sent him to Jungle Survival School at any better time.”

“Good. Good. The only thing that worries me is getting them out. Dropping a line from a helicopter seems awfully risky.”

“We’re using the Black Hawk to drop a Fulton Recovery System. Once the balloon is up, the vice president can be taken out of there in seconds, hopefully surprising the bad guys before they can use their HPM weapon. Bruce and Pompano will hide in the jungle. We’re already feeding targeting information into a flight of F-15Es. The Strike Eagles will give Steele the cover he needs.”

Newman was silent for a long time. “I don’t want to second-guess you, Pete—”

“You’re not, general. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve had all the Black Hawks and Jolly Greens deployed out to Subic. We’re loading another cadre of Navy SEALs on board — the nearest thing we’ve got to an assault force here. At the first sign of trouble, we’re dropping the SEALs into that clearing. But if we do that, we’ve got to take out that HPM weapon first.”

“You’ll risk killing the vice president.”

“We believe they’ll kill the girl first, then use Adleman as a bargaining chip. If we’re quick enough, we will succeed.”

Newman remained silent for a moment. “I don’t like any of this, not one bit, Pete. It’s too quick, and the odds are in their favor.”

“General, there’s a young man out there in the rain risking his life for the vice president, and another man risking his life for his daughter, and that’s our best bet. I don’t like any of the things we’re doing, but it’s better than rolling over and playing dead.”

“Pete … thanks. And keep me informed.”

“Thank you, sir.” Simone hung up and turned back to the screen. The image of Bruce Steele wavered in and out of view. On an adjacent screen, figures showed thirty-four Air Force helicopters at Subic. Eight of them were loaded with the remainder of the SEALs who were not already in the jungle.

The other helicopters were ready to be used as backups and to fly support personnel into the area. The one Black Hawk set aside for delivering the Fulton Recovery System was already in the air. As much as it went against his grain, there was nothing more he could do except to wait.

Bruce glanced at his watch. Water covered the clock’s face, but the numbers 1733 blinked up at him. Another hour until sunset.

Pompano moved ahead of him, pushing thick jungle growth out of the way. They had slowed their pace. Bruce tried to pick out any signs of human life — threads from a shirt caught in the branches, broken leaves, or broken branches that were shoulder high.

Pompano was certain that they would soon reach the clearing. He slowed to almost a crawl and seemed even more careful where he stepped. He reminded Bruce, in the way he handled himself, of Abuj.

Suddenly Bruce froze. Pompano had stopped. Bruce strained to hear, but couldn’t make out anything except the incessant dripping of water as it cascaded down the leaves.

Pompano barely turned his head to look at Bruce. He didn’t speak, but Bruce could tell what he was thinking, just by his eyes.

Yolanda.

Pompano crept forward. One foot up, then slowly down to the ground, applying weight, testing to ensure that no stray sticks were underneath his foot, ready to snap in an unnatural sound.

Bruce imitated the old man and forgot about the time. He was almost afraid to breathe, for fear that the very sound of the air coming out of his nostrils would alert the Huks.

Step, move, test. It was a pattern he recreated a thousand times. Step, move, test.

With this slow cadence, Bruce’s ankle began to throb. He imagined it swelling, engorged with blood. Soon he would no longer be able to stand the pain.…

Pompano stopped.

Bruce squinted past the old man. Just ahead, Bruce could barely make out light — not shining at them, but rather diffusing though the heavy canopy of green. It had to be the clearing.

Bruce glanced at his wrist. 1801. A half hour until dark.

A half hour to rest, to run over the plan, to mentally steel himself for what was to come. A half hour to pray that he wouldn’t trip up; a half hour to pool the energy he needed for the rescue.

Or the last half hour he had left to live.

Cervante frowned. It wasn’t the shrieks of the girl that disturbed him. The men were just having their fun, spending time enjoying her.

No, it wasn’t her cries, or even the sobs. Cervante had decided to wait, to be one of the last to have her.

What disturbed Cervante was something subtler. Something just out of range of his hearing. A low rumble.

He stepped outside. By the side of the house, just visible around the corner, was the back of the truck holding the high-power microwave weapon. The smells of dinner wafted out from the back of the house. The walls muffled Yolanda’s voice. He wondered if he were hearing things. It resembled a giant gathering of … mosquitoes … buzzing somewhere out in the jungle.

The mosquitoes would come when the rain stopped, but he knew that they were not flying now.

Cervante pushed back inside. The corner room held all the electronic equipment. He picked up a microphone. “Any activity?”

A voice came back seconds later. “No traffic.”

Cervante frowned. He walked over to the bank of detectors set up by Pompano. Each detector had a long line running from it. He put his ear to each speaker, but heard nothing other than the damned rain, falling from the clouds.

Still not satisfied, he stepped from the side office and went back into the front room. The girl’s cries were already growing weaker. What would they be like in another seven or eight hours?

A young Huk stumbled from the back, pulling up his pants and grinning stupidly. Cervante waved an arm toward the door. “Get the high-power microwave weapon ready.”

“Are the Americans coming?” The man’s voice was instantly alert.

Cervante listened for a moment.

Nothing.

Still …

“Probably not. But it will be good practice for you to prepare the device.” When the man did not immediately leave, Cervante growled, “Quickly!”

Colonel Ben Lutler watched over the shoulder of one of the Electronic Warfare Officers in the back of the MC-130. Black cloth was thrown back on top of the array of instruments. When the MC-130 was not operational, the cloth ensured that no unauthorized people would be able to look at the sophisticated electronics.

The EWO intently watched his screen. Sensors were trained on the house in the middle of the clearing; all he saw was a bright blob, no detail possible with the amount of heat coming from inside.

People walking away from the house came gradually into view once they were ten or so yards away. The farther they got from the house, the better the infrared sensors worked — but the clouds still masked the detail.

Lutler straightened and started for the cockpit; the EWO was so wrapped up in his surveillance, he didn’t even notice Lutler leave.

As he approached the cockpit, Lutler knew the sun would soon set, enabling even more infrared detail to be picked out. But he also knew that whatever was inside the house would remain hidden, like a jealous mother guarding her young.

Bruce stretched his legs. His ankle was growing more painful.

He tried to ignore it, and swung his M-16 around to prop his leg up. Fumbling with his holster, he pulled out his service revolver and stared at the silencer attached to the barrel. A faint smell of gun oil drifted through the drizzle. If he was going to use anything, he’d use this first. He’d save the M-16 for later — after all hell broke loose.

Pop!

Bruce froze.

The sound came again. Faint. It was as if … someone had moved just inside of the clearing, walking lightly on the grass.

Bruce held his breath.

Pompano opened his eyes. He stared at Bruce and kept still. The sound grew louder.

Something thrashed in the leaves. A branch rustled where it was moved, brushed back.…

Bruce grasped his revolver, moving it slowly up … up until it pointed at head level. The gun shook. He tried to keep it steady, but rain, sweat, and blurry vision kept him from seeing straight.

Pop!

Silence.

Footsteps, and the person walked away. The noise was quickly lost in the symphony of sounds that surrounded them.

Bruce lowered the gun. The silencer made the gun feel heavy. He hadn’t noticed it at the time.

He felt drained, exhausted from the wait — and they hadn’t even started.

Bruce holstered the weapon, allowing the barrel to slide down into the stiff leather. His chest hurt — he realized that he had been holding his breath when the guard walked by. But he had survived. Survived the jungle, and now survived the first line of defense that surrounded their prize.

In the growing darkness, Pompano watched, unblinking. His cheek was raw, a scab not yet having formed by his temple. He spoke a single word: “Come.”

“Over there.” Captain Bob Gould pointed across the cockpit. Head saw a paved parking lot next to an old store.

The store looked deserted. Head craned his neck, surveying the area. No towers, telephone or power lines. “How far are we from the drop-off point?”

“Ten miles.”

“Let’s go for it.”

As he brought the Black Hawk around, Gould got on the radio and informed the Thirteenth Air Force of their position.

The sun’s last rays ignited the clouds below, turning them into giant fields of pink cotton candy. Catman watched the spectacle with only half a mind. Most of his attention was focused on the giant KC-10 Extender flying thirty feet in front of him. The aerial refueling boom was pumping fifteen hundred gallons of JP-4 into the F-15. For the last six minutes, Catman’s fighter had been gulping down fuel.

“Break away, break away!” At the command from the boom operator, Catman banked down and off to the left. Catman clicked his mike.

“Lead, three. Break away, break—”

He was interrupted by Skipper’s voice. “Three, lead. Rejoin at orbit point. Assassin’s going in. I say again, Assassin’s going in.”

Catman drew his mouth tight as he pulled toward the rendezvous point.