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The MI-8 had slipped out of Huambo the previous evening and escaped interdiction for several reasons, but none of those were working this morning. The commander keyed his radio. “Dragon Leader, this is Key One. Put down the MI-8. Over.”

“Key One, this is Dragon Leader. Roger. Out.”

Forty miles away the MI-8 was flying just above the grass of the plateau, following the contour of the land. From above two A-10 Warthogs swooped down out of the sky. The pilot of the MI-8 saw them, but it was already over as the helicopter started to bob evasively. The 30mm Gatling guns in the nose of both planes spit out a solid line of bullets that intersected with the thin skin of the helicopter.

The chopper disintegrated under the barrage. The main part of the airframe slammed into open ground and exploded. The two A-10 pilots banked and did a flyby.

“Key One, this is Dragon Leader. Target is down. Over.”

“Any survivors? Over.”

“You’re going to have to pick the bodies up with an ice cream scoop. No survivors. Over.”

The commander nodded. “Let’s go in and confirm,” he ordered the pilots of the Black Hawks.

The three helicopters continued on course and soon the circling A-10s came into sight, like two circling buzzards. The helicopters set down near the wreckage. The fire was out and the smoldering remains of the MI-8 littered the ground amid the charred grass.

While his men secured the perimeter, the assault leader walked over to the main compartment. Or what he assumed was the main compartment—it was hard to tell what was what amid the twisted and blackened metal.

There were bodies in among the wreckage; more accurately, pieces of bodies. The commander tried to determine exactly how many there were, but the number of legs, arms, torsos, and heads scattered about didn’t quite make the math easy. At least ten dead, he estimated. A positive ID here was going to be impossible.

“Let’s bag these!” he called out. They were going to have to haul all this back and let the forensics people check dental charts.

Men grabbed body bags and began the grisly task of collecting pieces and parts.

West of Saurimo, Angola, 14 June

This mission had gone as smoothly as the first. Conner was satisfied with the results. Seeger had six minutes of air force fighters strafing MPLA trucks desperately trying to escape to the east. They’d choppered in ahead of the trucks, set down on a hill overlooking the road, then checked out the vehicles as they drove into view a few minutes later.

Captain Dorrick had confirmed the target and the next thing they knew death had descended from the sky, blasting the vehicles. The choppers showed up, and they were back on board. Conner’s head was spinning from the speed of it all.

Seated next to her, Riley was tired. He knew they all were. The air force could have just taken out those trucks, but everyone seemed to be playing this whole operation very carefully, making sure that all targets were double-checked and confirmed. He knew that Conner was part of the reason for that. In the modern world a minor event could have consequences far exceeding its actual impact if the media seized upon it. Public relations had become as important as—if not more important than—the actual conduct of the mission.

Riley noticed that the pilots were engaged in an extensive conversation and gestured for one of the crewmen to give him a headset. He settled the cups over his head. The pilots were talking to an AWACS, getting flight path instructions. The skies were crowded and a midair collision would make you just as dead as getting shot.

One of the door gunners called out an aircraft sighting to the pilots and Riley looked in the indicated direction. Three Black Hawks were off to their left, about four hundred yards away, also flying low. Riley squinted. The aircraft had refueling probes under their noses. That identified them to Riley as specially modified MH-60s from Task Force 160, the army’s elite helicopter unit. The doors were open and Riley could make out some men dressed in black in the rear.

He noticed that Seeger was filming the aircraft. Riley leaned forward and tapped him. “Might as well stop. They’re going to cut that.”

Even as Riley spoke, the three aircraft turned away to the south and disappeared.

On the other side of the helicopter, Sergeant Ku struggled to keep down his breakfast. Sweat was running down his back and he could feel the blood pounding in his forehead, behind his eyes.

A crew member noticed his distress and handed him a couple of barf bags. Ku bent over and vomited, filling the bag. He looked up, full bag in hand, embarrassed in spite of the way he felt. The American crewman pointed out the door and Ku chucked it out. By the time they got back to Cacolo, he had gone through three bags.

Pentagon, 14 June

In the War Room, deep underneath the Pentagon, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Lowell Cummings, watched the tape of the satellite feed that had come out of one of SNN’s crews—SNN-El. He nodded approvingly at the sight of the trucks getting obliterated by bombs and cannon fire.

There was a brief pause, then another scene came on. The three Special Operations Black Hawks came into view. “We’ve deleted that from what we allowed to go forward to Atlanta,” the public affairs colonel informed Cummings.

Cummings watched several other shots, mostly from Luanda, showing the arrival of the troops and equipment, and footage from the military’s own cameras showing smart bombs destroying targets in Angola.

All in all, the morning had worked out almost exactly according to plan, and Cummings was a good enough general to understand how unique that was. The operation was going well, but that didn’t mean Cummings was happy. He looked at the entire Angolan mission on two levels. The first was operational—the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the task the military was assigned by the president and Congress. Cummings’s dissatisfaction came from a different level—the task itself. He saw little purpose to it when viewed through the prism of national security, which was the basic principle he’d been trained on since he’d stood on the Plain at West Point as a seventeen-year-old plebe, thirty-two years ago.

What security interest did the United States have in Angola? It was a question Cummings had raised with the president and never received an answer to. In fact, he’d been told the question was the wrong one. This application of military force had little to do with security interests. It had to do with humanitarian and political interests.

The army had even coined a term for this kind of mission in the early nineties: OOTW. Operations other than war. For the past several years, the military had slid along the scale from preparing to fight World War III to performing more and more OOTW. And Cummings was caught in a bind. He didn’t like OOTW, but he also had to milk the OOTW cow in front of Congress to get funds to keep the force at a strength to be able to fight the real thing—war—if need be. And, ultimately, Cummings was a soldier. He would do what his commander in chief ordered.

But it wasn’t only for national policy reasons that Cummings disliked OOTW. He was very concerned about the effect these types of missions had on the morale and training of the armed forces. Troops deployed on peacekeeping operations weren’t training for war during the duration of the deployment. Those same troops had also joined the military for reasons other than acting as world policeman, feeder of the poor, and health-care provider. Especially most of the troops that were constantly being deployed on these missions: men who had volunteered for airborne or Special Forces duty did not exactly enjoy playing the role of peacekeeper.

Neither did these soldiers enjoy being gone from home months at a time on the numerous deployments these missions entailed. The toll on families and morale was very high. Cummings had sworn the same oath all the men and women in the service had—to defend the Country and the Constitution—and many OOTW missions didn’t seem to have much to do with that oath.

Cummings looked at the current status report of the Angolan deployment. The 82d was doing well. On schedule, maybe even ahead of schedule. But that didn’t thrill Cummings. His first line of defense to any world crisis—the army’s only airborne division—was being sucked into this mission, and he didn’t have another one to fill the gap if there was trouble somewhere else in the world. His only hope was that this would be over quickly with as little bloodshed as possible.

Luanda, Angola, 14 June

The 82d Airborne was the army’s most mobile division, priding itself on its ability to deploy rapidly anywhere in the world. It was outdoing itself in its effort to get to Angola. The first wave of troops had boarded C-141 Starlifters at Pope Air Force Base, adjacent to the Fort Bragg reservation, within two hours of the alert notification.

In-flight refueling had cut transport time down to pure flight time between North Carolina and Angola. The lead C-141 touched down at the capital city’s airfield ahead of schedule, a fact that the division commander—General Scott—made sure to mention to the press representatives who dutifully filmed the first red-bereted paratroopers as they walked off the ramp of the aircraft.

Behind that first load of one hundred and fifty troops was an aerial line stretching across the Atlantic back to the States carrying two full brigades of the division—over ten thousand men. Their heavy equipment had been loaded onto ships three weeks ago and was already in port. Within seventy-two hours, General Scott promised the press and the world, the 82d would be here in full force, ready to fight.

Angola-Namibia Border, 14 June

General Nystroom was satisfied as he reviewed after-action reports transmitted to his headquarters. The morning’s air attacks had gone very well indeed. The American plan had worked as promised. In fact, even better than promised.

The UNITA Air Force didn’t exist anymore. Over 80 percent of what they had estimated UNITA’s armor strength to have been was confirmed destroyed. The Americans’ 82d Airborne Division’s first elements were on the ground to the north in Luanda.

Nystroom knew it would take the Americans a few days to get their infantry forces organized and begin combat operations. His own main elements were ready. He was just waiting for further intelligence from the scouts he had sent across the border.

He had two main questions right now. Would UNITA give up the fight or would it slip away into the bush and continue the war? And where was Savimbi? The answer to the first, no one knew and only time would tell. For the second, the American intelligence officers were being very coy. He knew they had plastered Huambo.

So with all the good news, Nystroom thought, he would have to look very hard to find something to worry about, but that was his job. He grabbed another batch of intelligence reports and began poring through them.

National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, 14 June

A busy morning, Waker noted as he watched all the activity in the air and on the ground in Angola. The devices he was tied into were so sophisticated that they picked up much more information than any single person—or even a staff of people—could possibly ingest, never mind digest. So far, Waker’s job had been simply to make sure that the devices were working and the information was recorded. No one had yet made any requests for information from the NSA. The commanders on the ground over in Africa seemed to be satisfied with the information fed to them directly from their own intelligence sources within the Pentagon and on the ground and sky over Angola.

Waker and the NSA computer were also supposed to look for patterns in the information, but the only pattern that was discernible so far was that things were going according to plan for the U.S. and Pan-African forces.

As part of his responsibilities, Waker was also checking out the countries bordering Angola. He had several different displays of the Pan-African forces massing along the Angola-Namibia border, but that was in the operations plan. The waters off the coast were empty except for the Abraham Lincoln task force. Zaire to the north and Zambia to the east were quiet. No unexpected troop movements in either country, not that there had been any fear that there might be.

Waker hadn’t forgotten the transmission out of the Lunda Norte region, but according to the computer, there had been nothing further happening there. With time on his hands, Waker decided to play around a little. He keyed in on the transmissions going to and from the headquarters of the PAF forces to their ground commander in Namibia and began giving the computer various attack angles to work on them. It couldn’t hurt to break the South Africans’ code system. It would give Waker something to put on his next evaluation support form.

One thing Waker found interesting after a cursory evaluation of the South African code and a comparison of it to the one that had come out of Lunda Norte the previous day was the difference between the two—the latter had been much more sophisticated. The question then was: who in Angola was using a more secure code than the South African Army?

Vicinity Luia River, Angola, 14 June

Quinn pulled the earplug out and carefully coiled the headset, placing it in its special compartment on the radio backpack.

“What’s the word?” Trent asked.

“The American Eighty-second Airborne is landing in Luanda. The American headquarters says they destroyed most of UNITA’s planes and armor this morning.”

Quinn thought one of the greatest intelligence breakthroughs in the last decade out in the bush was the AM broadcast out of Kinshasa of SNN’s audio feed. Here in the middle of the African veldt, he could get the same words that the president of the United States and other heads of state watched on their TVs.

“Those two fellows aren’t feeling any better,” Trent said. “And now a couple more aren’t feeling too good.”

“What’s wrong with them?” Quinn asked.

“Fever, sick to their stomach. Headaches.”