Strike Eagle (29 page)

Chapter 21

Friday, 22 June

Tarlac

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.”