Mission Liberty (29 page)

“Who’s this guy think he is?” Preacher Johnson said. “Baron von Richthofen? Who wants to be Snoopy and go get him?”

“Sergeant Green volunteering,” DeLuca heard over his headset.

“Hold on, Green,” DeLuca said. “I might have a better idea. Scottie, you there?”

“I’m on you,” Scott said. “What do you need?”

“We have two more Predators, fully loaded, right?”

“Three, six o’clock high, following you home,” Scott said. “But only one is loaded. You crashed the fourth. What about ’em?”

“Do Hellfires work air-to-air?”

“Not like Sparrows or Sidewinders, but they’ll work if you paint the target. Do you have lasers?”

“Negative,” DeLuca said. “Can you paint the rearmost ultralight with Pred one or two and fire on it with Pred Three? He’s
being a pain in the ass. Literally.”

“Absolutely,” Scott said.

“He’s not too small?”

“Not a problem,” Scott said.

“Then do it. And remember, I said
hind
most,” DeLuca repeated, swerving again. “Not the second-to-the-last guy, because that would be me.”

“Roger that,” Scott said. “You’re penultimate. Hang on one second. Target acquired. Locked on, and… firing.”

DeLuca looked behind him. He saw nothing, then a streak of light, and then the last ultralight exploded, the missile striking
it dead center, creating a ball of flame and a blossoming burst of debris that fell from the sky like fireworks.

A moment later, a strange-looking aircraft appeared about a hundred feet off his right wing, a white bulb-nosed torpedo-shaped
plane, something like a spoon turned upside down, with broad thin wings, the tail an inverted V. DeLuca had seen Predator
B-001s on the ground, but seeing one in the air seemed nevertheless odd and otherworldly. The pod in the nose contained the
aircraft’s forward-looking SAR, electro-optical and infrared sensors, GPS-INS guidance systems, and laser-target designator,
as well as the TV camera the remote pilot used to fly it, with a twin-blade turbo-prop mounted at the rear, above the tail
fins. Perhaps what made it so eerie was that the Pred was completely silent, or at least DeLuca heard nothing above the sound
of his own engine.

“You mind if I take your picture to e-mail to Mom?” Scott said. “Smile.”

DeLuca raised his right hand and touched it to his forehead.

“She’s going to like that one,” Scott said.

“It’ll give her a good idea of how much fun we’re having,” DeLuca agreed.

They followed the pipeline, easily visible in the moonlight to the naked eye, flying south from where the conduit emerged
from Lake Liger. The flying part was, once you got used to it, okay. DeLuca tried again not to think about how, or for that
matter where, he was going to land. Scott told him Sykes had made it, and that without knowing the details, it appeared that
Evelyn Warner and the others had reached the border and crossed successfully.

Even in darkness, DeLuca could see evidence of the miseries below. They flew at perhaps a thousand feet, he couldn’t be sure,
passing over a village where the thatched houses below were burning. They were low enough that they could make out, by the
light of the flames, troops running from hut to hut, and men firing back at them, men hacking at other men with machetes,
and men pleading for their lives, begging on both knees before being destroyed, a vision of hell, DeLuca thought, worse than
anything envisioned by the painters he’d studied in his art history class in college, those right-hand panels in the Renaissance
triptychs depicting hell as the artists envisioned it then—hell had gotten a lot worse in the intervening years. They saw
a line of vehicles moving away from the village in single file on a road below, some sort of convoy, DeLuca assumed. Scott
told him he thought it was a division of Ngwema’s men, closing on the capital. In the distance, DeLuca saw a faint glow on
the horizon and asked his son what was happening to the south.

“The orange glow is Port Ivory,” Scott said. “The city itself is blacked out. LPLF blew up the tank farm at the refinery yesterday
and it’s still burning. Circle west if you can—the wind is southwest to northeast. There’s a lot of black smoke that you’re
not going to want to fly through.”

“Hoolie, vector right of the flames ahead,” DeLuca told the leader of the formation.

“Roger that,” Hoolie replied.

“We’re going over the city, boys,” Preacher Johnson said. “Watch for triple A—we’re well in range. We probably look like a
flight of geese on anybody’s radar. And sound like a swarm of bees. You know why when you see a bunch of geese in the sky
and one side is always longer than the other—you know why that is, Agent DeLuca?”

“Why is that, Sergeant Johnson?”

“There’s more geese on that side,” Johnson said.

The northern suburbs of Port Ivory seemed quiet. Yet the vision of hell DeLuca had seen, passing over the village earlier,
was multiplied a thousand times as they approached the center of the city. He saw houses and buildings on fire, cars and buses
overturned and in flames, a crowd of men with machetes chasing a single man who stumbled as he fled, rooftop machine guns
mounted in sandbagged nests firing on crowds of rioters below, a line of tanks in a park firing on a row of apartment buildings,
people looting, people dying. He smelled smoke, and cordite, and something else, a faint chemical smell that burned his nostrils
and made him pull up on his control stick to get away from it.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Mustard gas,” Johnson said.

“Who’s using it, I wonder?” DeLuca asked.

“Could be anybody. You can make it yourself out of bleach and ammonia,” Johnson said. “People poison themselves all the time,
mixing the two to clean their bathroom floors.”

He felt the heat rising from the fires below, smoke in the air that made his eyes sting. Then, finally, he smelled the ocean,
a vast black expanse beyond the city. On the horizon, he saw a beacon suddenly shine straight up into the sky, a beam of light
like the searchlights DeLuca’s old man once chased in the family station wagon on Long Island when a new supermarket or car
dealership used them to advertise a grand opening.

“Suggest you head for the
Johnson,
” Scott said. “That’s the light you see ahead of you. I told them to clear the decks for you. You got a clear night with no
cross winds and calm seas, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“What are my other options?” DeLuca asked. “I’ve only been a pilot for a couple hours. I’m not sure I’m quite ready for a
carrier landing.”

“We’re out of other options, unfortunately,” General LeDoux said, his voice coming in on the headset. “The airport is a free-fire
zone, and there’s nowhere else to send you, I’m afraid.”

“Carrier it is then,” DeLuca said, gazing below as he realized he was now flying over open water, the beach behind him.

“It might be a moot point,” Vasquez said. “I’m out of gas. I’m on fumes. I don’t think I have enough to make the carrier.”

“Ditto that,” Johnson said. “Boys, check your gauges. How we doing?”

One by one, Johnson’s men reported in. They were all running low on fuel.

“Make the carrier deck if you can, straight ahead, but if your engine shuts off, I suggest you make a water landing,” Johnson
said.

“And just how do I do that?” one of his men asked.

“You’ll think of something,” Preacher Johnson told him.

“That’s an oxymoron,” someone else said.

“What is?”

“‘Water landing.’”

“General,” DeLuca said, “if you don’t mind, could you tell the
LBJ
’s search and rescue to get their swim fins and meet us halfway?”

“Already in the air,” LeDoux said. “We’ve got you on visual.”

“This is Captain Evans,” a new voice in DeLuca’s headset said. “I’m a pilot here at flight control and I’m going to talk to
you all about how to do this. You people really should leave the flying to the professionals, you know. All right. I want
you to slow your forward airspeed. Also jettison anything you might be carrying that adds any weight, weapons, etcetera—you
don’t need ’em anymore. We’re going to put you all in the water in a controlled ditch, rather than risk having your engines
fail you into a stall before you reach the ship. If they cut out, we believe you’ll still have glide. Take your shoes off
if you can, because you’re going to have to swim, and unbuckle your harnesses because you don’t want to go down with your
birds. We’re going to try to make a belly landing, as if you were flying an old-fashioned dumbo. You may or may not flip forward,
depending on how you hit it. You have great seas to do this on, boys, really smooth—you couldn’t have ordered anything better
…”

DeLuca realized that without a radio, MacKenzie didn’t know what was going on. He called her on her SATphone.

“They want us to land in the water,” DeLuca told her. “Listen to me carefully. Slow your forward airspeed. Jettison your weapons
and take off your shoes—you might want to remind Dennis that he crossed-trained from para-rescue and still owns two of the
swim records in the pool at Lackland. Control wants you to fly as low as you can…”

He saw, ahead, the searchlights from a fleet of rescue helicopters approaching, shining on the water to let everyone know
they were coming.

“I’m out of gas,” he heard someone report. “Going in.”

And then he heard his own engine sputter for a few moments and cut out. He was about ten feet above the surface, the water
racing past beneath his feet.

“If you cut out, wait until you’re nearly down and pull back…” Evans said, as DeLuca followed his instructions, and then
he was down, the water shaking him with a jolt that bounced him in his seat, his head cracking against the brace overhead
as the machine tumbled forward and flipped upside down.

Suddenly there was water everywhere.

Blackness. He was upside down.

His foot was stuck. He couldn’t move it.

He held his breath and freed his foot.

Tumbling.

He was underwater.

He swam for the surface, kicking as hard as he could, his lungs about to burst.

He made the surface, gasping for air, and treaded water. He saw, floating about ten feet from him, a small green chemlite,
six inches long and no thicker than a finger, so he swam to it and waved it overhead.

He saw a helicopter, maybe three hundred meters off, holding position above a crashed vehicle. No one saw him, so he decided
to swim for the helicopter.

Then he was bathed in a wash of bright light as a second chopper approached from the rear and slowed to a stationary hover.
He saw a pair of divers bail out the back as the HH-60 low-slowed in a circle. The divers swam to him. The first one to reach
him took off his facemask and left it on his forehead.

“Are you hurt?” the swimmer asked.

“I’m all right,” DeLuca said.

“Sergeant Mark Lewis,” the diver said. “This is Sergeant Cliff Eberhardt. We’ll be your rescuers tonight.”

DeLuca was distracted when a marksman on the HH-60 began firing at them, the bullets zipping into the water all around them.

“Why’s he shooting at us?” DeLuca said as the flight engineer aboard the HH-60 lowered a penetrator on a steel cable. The
SEAL didn’t answer, straddling the paddles at the bottom of the penetrator and instructing DeLuca to put his legs over his
own and buckle on. The marksman continued to fire as DeLuca was hoisted up into the helicopter. They waited a minute longer
to extract the remaining SEAL.

“What were you shooting at?” DeLuca asked the marksman, once he’d caught his breath. The shooter handed him a pair of infrared
goggles and invited him to have a look for himself. DeLuca donned the goggles, built to reveal the body heat of anybody or
anything within its field of vision. When he did, he saw, swimming below the surface, seven or eight large sharks, though
it was hard to count them because of how they kept moving on top of each other.

“Probably wondering where their dinner went,” the marksman said. “Bull sharks, I think.”

“I know some crocodiles they should meet,” DeLuca said.

Once aboard the USS
Lyndon Johnson,
DeLuca and Preacher Johnson took stock. Johnson collected a hundred dollars each from the men he’d bet that he could land
his HAHO jump within ten feet of DeLuca, and another hundred each from three men who’d gone double or nothing that they weren’t
going to get out alive. Two of his TF-21 team members had broken limbs and one cracked out six of his front teeth when his
face hit the windshield when he ditched, but these were things Johnson considered minor injuries.

Mack and Dennis were good, and in fact, the ultralight they’d ditched in had stayed upright and actually floated long enough
for the SEALs to pull them out with little trouble. Vasquez had ignored Captain Evans’s advice and landed safely on the flight
deck, where some of the Hornet and Prowler pilots were pointing at his aircraft and laughing at it before pushing it over
the side.

Crew members brought them dry clothes to change into and hot coffee to warm them—Mack asked for a Venti half-caf soy vanilla
latte—and then the crew members showed them to quarters where they could clean up.

An hour later, the vertical takeoff V-22 Osprey that Captain McKinley had sent to retrieve Dan Sykes returned. He was given
fifteen minutes to relax before the debriefing.

They met in the conference room off the flight deck. General LeDoux brought them up to speed on what was happening in country,
showing them a map of where the fighting was taking place, the conflict spread across all of southern and much of central
Liger. When Mack asked him specifically what had happened in the village of Sagoa, LeDoux clicked the mouse on his computer,
summoned the falcon view, and explained that there’d been reports of extremely fierce fighting in Sagoa, with heavy casualties.
He zoomed in close enough for MacKenzie to see that the village had been destroyed. A large number of people lay dead in the
village square.

“Are those civilians?” she asked.

“We can’t tell,” LeDoux said. “We’re going back for better pictures in the morning. I’m not sure when we’ll get around to
processing the data, frankly. It’s a pretty big theater right now.”