Air Battle Force (49 page)

“Yes, General Furness.”

“God damn you, Rebecca—you're fucking out of your mind!” Long shouted.

“Duty Officer, correction, show Colonel Long's specialty code now as Nine-X,” Rebecca ordered. The Eight-series codes were reserved for special-duty officers—usually officers stuck in an office somewhere insignificant until they could be reassigned or ousted, or for medical patients in hospitals. It was bad enough going from a Zero-series code—a commander—to an Eight-series. But the Nine-series specialty codes were reserved for officers doing time in prison, under investigation for criminal activities, or undergoing psychiatric treatment—untrainable, unpromotable, and unassignable. Long had just been sent to the Air Force's version of purgatory.

Moments later two Security Forces officers stepped quickly into the room. Both were pulling on leather gloves. After putting on his gloves, one of the officers pulled a stun gun out of its sheath, keeping it in view just long enough for Long to know he had it in his hand. The other officer took Long by the upper arm to lead him away; when Long tried to shrug off the officer's hand, the first officer immediately pinned Long's other arm behind him, and together the two officers handcuffed Long's arms behind his back and led him away.

At first McLanahan and Luger made absolutely no mention of the entire event once Rebecca had sat back down at her console and logged in. But after a few minutes Patrick half turned to her and asked, “Isn't that going to leave the Fifty-first short of aircraft commanders, Rebecca?”

“Who cares?” she replied. “We don't need aircrew members to fly my planes anymore, remember?” She looked at McLanahan and said, “I'm taking the first Air Battle team to Turkmenistan.”

“I need you here.”

“I'm going with the general, sir,” Daren Mace said.

“I need you
both
here.”

“Sir, I know what you're going to say, but you know it's not the right thing to do,” Rebecca said. “The virtual-cockpit control stuff is just too unpredictable and new to rely on with this mission. I'll fly with your unmanned toys, sir, but I'll insist on personally commanding the rest of the force. If you don't like it, too bad—sir.”

Patrick looked at both Furness and Mace, then nodded. “I wish I were going with you, that's all.”

“Say that more than once, sir, and I'll put you on a crew,” Rebecca said. She smiled, then added, “You've had your fun, Major General McLanahan. I've got a bunch of youngsters on this base who want a piece of the action now. You built this place as your command center—you should use it.”

Later that day

A string of six Russian Mi-6 transport helicopters swept in at high speed toward Mary. They flew less than a rotor's diameter above the desert floor, high enough to minimize the dust cloud kicked up by their huge blades but low enough to avoid detection by ground-based radars.

The Mi-6 transport helicopter, first rolled out almost fifty years earlier, was one of the world's largest, a perfect example of the old Soviet drive to build bigger and bigger war machines. Fitted with external wings to help provide lift and plenty of hardpoints for extended-range fuel tanks, the immense Mi-6 transports were the Russian army's most important heavy-lift helicopter. Each one carried forty fully armed combat troops and two BMD airborne-combat vehicles. The assault group had deployed from its base in Volgograd, refueled in Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, and had launched again with other helicopters carrying enormous fuel bladders. They landed in the wastelands of central Uzbekistan completely undetected by anyone, refueled from the bladders, and then began their assault into southwestern Turkmenistan.

For the Russian helicopter pilots manning the big transport and attack choppers on this mission, flying in this region of the world was a whole new experience. They truly believed that life for most of the people living in these wastelands couldn't have changed much in the past thousand years. Case in point: the camel caravans they encountered in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

As they raced across the desert, they saw dozens of groups of nomads scattered across the landscape. The gunners in the Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters locked up every one of them in their infrared targeting systems, ready to blast them to pieces—and at first, in Uzbekistan, a few groups did get blasted. But when they zoomed in on them with their telescopic sights, it turned out they really
were
just camel caravans traveling across the burning desert sands. Here it was, the twenty-first century, and there were still nomads riding their camels, the animals piled high with crates, blankets, and other odds and ends to trade or sell. No use in wasting precious ammunition on them.

Fifty kilometers outside Mary, the formation moved into trail position and descended lower to the desert floor in an attempt to hide themselves from patrols. All radio frequencies were silent. Once in a while the gunship crews would spot an explosion far on the horizon or receive a brief squeak on the threat-warning receiver, but there was no sign whatsoever of the presence of Taliban forces. The pilots had to be careful now—there were more oil wells in this area, and they were definitely flying low enough now to run into them—and the clouds of dust kicked up by their rotors were starting to limit visibility for the trailing helicopters.

“Approaching infiltration point,” the company commander announced. “Prepare for dismount.”

“Target, target, two o'clock!” one of the Mi-6 pilots shouted.

The lead gunship pilot swung his telescopic sensor in that direction—but it turned out to be a camel. The sight was so funny that the pilot couldn't help laughing. The big animal was truly comical, madly dashing away from the approaching helicopters, a few rugs and blankets that had broken loose from its back streaming behind it. As the pilot watched, the poor animal ran headlong into a fence surrounding a cluster of oil wells and collapsed in a tangle of legs and neck on the barbed wire. “No target,” the pilot said. “Another damned camel.”

“What should we do about those camel caravans we find out here?” the gunship pilot asked. “If the noise spooks those animals so bad, they could attract attention or set off an alarm in those oil well compounds.”

“Next time you see them, take them out,” the commander ordered.

Sure enough a few moments later the gunship pilot spotted several more groups of camel nomads huddled around some abandoned oil wells. “How in the hell can those people live out here like that?” he asked his gunner as he zoomed in the infrared image and centered his thirty-millimeter cannon's crosshairs on the first group. “They're fifty kilometers from the nearest shelter. No water, no food, no—”

The nomads started to move. A camel clambered to its feet and trundled off—and right behind where the camel had lain, the gunship commander clearly saw a man raise something to his shoulder. Seconds later a flash of light obscured the scene—but he knew what it was. “Missile attack!” he shouted. “We're under—”

The SA-14 antiaircraft missile hit the engine compartment of the hovering lead gunship, tearing the engines to pieces in a millisecond and sending the big helicopter spinning out of control sideways across the desert. In rapid succession a dozen more shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles shot out across the night sky, and almost all of them found their targets. In seconds all the Russian helicopters were on the ground. Only two of the half dozen Mi-6 transports and one Mi-24 gunship landed upright, and three of the fully loaded Mi-6s were on fire. A few troops ran out of the other downed helicopters, some carrying wounded.

“Open fire, fire at will,” Jalaluddin Turabi ordered on his command radio. The six antiaircraft squads deployed around the area threw aside their SA-14 launchers and uncovered their thirty-seven-millimeter machine guns from their hiding places in the sand, mounted them, and began firing at the survivors. A few Russian commandos returned fire, but in a matter of minutes the battle was over.

Turabi and his security forces carefully approached the hulks of the downed helicopters. The echoes of gunshots and the crackle and groaning of burning metal and burning Russian soldiers disturbed the desert stillness. Their grim job took nearly an hour—examining and, if necessary, dispatching almost three hundred Russian commandos strewn across the desert floor. “Three officers and twenty-one enlisted recovered alive, four armored personnel carriers still operational,” reported one of Turabi's senior platoon chiefs. “One helicopter gunship may be flyable. Want to try to fly it out of here, sir?”

“Burn it,” Turabi said. “Get the prisoners to Mary, and get replacement missiles and ammo sent out here on the double. This might be only the first wave of Russian troops moving into this area—we need to be ready in case the second assault is inbound.” Turabi had fought the Russians before, as a youngster recruited into the Afghan resistance in the 1980s, and he knew that they rarely moved in small numbers. When they moved into an area, they usually did it with large, overwhelming force, giving themselves at least a ten-to-one numerical advantage.

“Yes, sir,” the platoon chief said. “Outstanding job, sir. It was a perfectly executed ambush. Brilliant idea using the camels to disguise our positions. The Russians must've actually thought we were a bunch of desert rats. They flew right up to us as if they didn't even know we were here.”

Turabi surveyed the area. The massive burned hulks of the Mi-6 helicopters looked like the carcasses of some sort of prehistoric dinosaurs littering the desert. The smell of burning flesh and jet fuel was almost overpowering, but Turabi had seen too much death on this campaign to be sickened by it now. He scowled at his senior chief. “Two months ago, Anwar, we
were
nothing but a bunch of desert rats,” Turabi said. “But at least we had a purpose and a mission. What are we now? Nothing but a bunch of invaders and murderers.”

“We are soldiers.”

“Soldiers fight to defend their homes and repel aggressors,” Turabi said. “We do neither. We attack and pillage and kill, for no apparent reason. That makes us marauders, not heroes.”

“Tomorrow we might be as dead and crispy as those Russians,” the chief said. “Tonight we are victorious. That is good enough for me right now.” He bowed his head briefly in respect and left to carry out Turabi's orders, obviously uncomfortable with the direction this discussion was taking.

Jalaluddin Turabi had to remind himself—
again
—to be careful about verbalizing his doubts and inner conflicts with his men. It was a very successful operation, well planned and executed. Their losses had been minimal; the Russians' overconfidence cost them dearly. It was necessary for the men to know he was proud of their courage and discipline. Instead he had moaned to the senior chief about how all of this was a waste. How were the men supposed to react after hearing something like that?

This war was far from over, Turabi reminded himself, and he was farther than ever from home. He had to rely on these men, and they had to rely on him, if they had any chance whatsoever of making it home again.

A short time later

“Oh . . . my . . . God,” faltered General Anatoliy Gryzlov, chief of staff of the Russian military forces. He immediately slammed the phone down, jumped from his seat, and dashed to his private elevator, which took him down to the underground Central Military Command Center at Frunze Embankment. “What in hell happened out there in Turkmenistan?” he thundered as soon as he entered the chamber.

“An ambush. They were waiting for us, sir,” the senior controller replied. “We're repositioning satellites to get a better look at the northeast quadrant of Mary, but we feel it was a freak occurrence—our forces were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The opposing force could not have been more than company size, well hidden, and armed with shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.”

“Ni pizdf!”
Gryzlov swore, banging a fist on the desk. He thought for a moment, but he had already made up his mind long before he reached the command center. “Get the entire staff in here immediately. I was briefed on an air-invasion plan as a contingency operation—I want that plan set in motion immediately. I want all the airspace around Turkmenistan closed off and ten tactical-attack air regiments on the ground in Mary and Ashkhabad within forty-eight hours.” He picked up the direct line to the president's office in the Kremlin. “I want to speak with him
immediately
—I don't care who he's meeting with.”

“What in hell is so important, General?” Sen'kov said a few minutes later when he came on the line. “I'm in a very important meeting with—”

“Mr. President, I lost three hundred soldiers last night in Turkmenistan.”

“Sraka,”
Sen'kov muttered. The line was silent for a moment, and then Gryzlov could hear Sen'kov ordering the room cleared. “All right, damn it, get over here as fast as you can.”

“I will tell you what happened and what I will do about it
now,
Mr. President. I'm not going to waste more time taking crap from you!”

“Watch your tongue, General!”

“Yimu adin huy kto ty yest!”
Gryzlov said. “I don't care who the hell you are now, sir. All I care about is teaching those Taliban bastards the dangers of raising a weapon at a Russian soldier!”

“Relax, General. Get over here and—”

“Sir, I'm sending in an air strike against the known Taliban positions in Mary,” Gryzlov interrupted. “First I'm going to order a complete air blockade of Turkmenistan. No one enters or leaves the country without my express permission.”

“The American secretary of state's delegation is due to arrive in twenty-four hours.”