The Rift (19 page)

There was Nightstalker Lite and Nightstalker Heavy, and then there was the FPF: Final Protective Fire. It’s a military term. For a firebase, this is where supporting artillery fire would be called in almost on top of the friendlies (and sometimes on top of them) in order to prevent it from being overrun. It was something that was only used as a last resort.

For the Nightstalkers, charged with saving humanity from an array of threats, their on-call FPF lumbered into the air from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. The venerable B-52 was carrying pods of AGM-129A cruise missiles on each wing, a total of twelve warheads. Ten of the warheads were conventional; two were nuclear.

Every time the Nightstalkers were alerted, a B-52 with this payload was scrambled.

They’d used the conventional cruise missiles in the past.

They had yet to use the nuclear warheads.

After the Pinnacle fiasco of the past year, the crews on this mission had been vetted by the Cellar. They would launch if Moms sent the correct order.

The B-52 rose up and turned to the southeast to go on station, drilling a hole in the sky over the vicinity of the Nightstalkers at a much higher altitude than the Spectre, waiting until needed or the mission was over and they could return home.

Most of the remaining Nightstalkers skipped the airfield and drive over entirely in the name of expediency.

Plus, they were just too damn cool to actually land with an airplane at an airfield. That was for civilians and the lesser Gods of Earth.

And Nada was racing toward the air-field in the backseat of the only F-22B Raptor ever produced. Every other Raptor in the inventory was an F-22A single-seater, coming in at $412 million per jet, which seemed a bit ludicrous to Nada, when some lunkhead pilot could put one into the side of a mountain with the w
rong twitch of the controls. But the 22B had been designed as a two-seat training version, the line dropped after only one test model produced, during budget cuts. Nada shuddered to think what this one cost. The U.S. had probably sent men to the moon for less. The craft was stationed at Edwards Air Force, and Ms. Jones had requisitioned it to race into LAX, pick up Nada, and then roar east at over Mach 2.

Closer at hand to the problem, Roland, Kirk, Mac, and Eagle were already dirty and in full gear, so they simply got on the C-130 cargo plane Ms. Jones commandeered for them from Pope Air Force Base, which picked them at the airstrip at Mackall. They rigged in flight, also putting together several pods of gear—since they didn’t have the boxes from the Snake—that they might possibly need. Mac, as always, went heavy on the explosives taken from the 18 Charlie (engineer) committee. Kirk made sure he had adequate commo for the entire team from the 18 Echo (communications) committee. Eagle pouted, because he didn’t have his beloved Snake and he hated someone else flying him.

Back at Camp Mackall, Sergeant Twackhammer pouted because they were flying off with a lot of the gear he needed to train new Green Berets.

And Roland went with two full pods of assorted weapons appropriated from the 18 Bravo (weapons) committee, including flamethrowers, just in case they did run into Fireflies. As the 130 made its final approach turn for the drop zone, Roland did one last check of the pods to make sure the drogue chutes were rigged correctly, and then he manhandled all the pods into line, hooking their chutes to the static line that ran from the front of the cargo bay into the tail section.

The loadmaster waved his hands and shouted, “Three minutes!”

The rear of the C-130 opened, with the ramp leveling out and the top portion disappearing into the upper tail section. Lights from houses, cars, and streetlights were clearly visible to the rear, bouncing around as the plane twisted and turned.

Roland hooked up behind everyone else and the pods. The other three hooked up in front of the pods, closer to the edge of the ramp.

They were five hundred feet above ground level, and through their night vision goggles, they could see rolling, wooded terrain below. Passing by to the south was a large cluster of lights: Maryville and Alcoa, two adjoining towns south of Knoxville.

They flashed over a section of lake/river as the loadmaster signaled one minute.

It was going to be tight because they (Roland actually) had to push all the bundles and themselves out along a bend in the river. The pilot had promised to bank hard and follow the river as best as possible, but the banking itself could be a problem.

What they didn’t want was Roland to land on someone’s roof.

As jumpmaster, Mac knelt down and grabbed the hydraulic arm on the right side of the open ramp. He had a main parachute on his back but no reserve. They were jumping so low that if the main didn’t deploy, there wasn’t time for a reserve. He peered forward through his night vision goggles. He spotted the blinking infrared strobe ahead and to the right, around a bend in the river.

They were on target.

Mac stood and secured his night vision goggles in a waterproof case. He stared up into the tail, at the glowing red light. The moment it turned green he shouted, “Follow me” and stepped off the ramp.

The C-130 was slewing, following the curve in the Tennessee River around Keller Bend on the north side of the river. Eagle and Kirk followed Mac as quickly as they could move, falling off the ramp. Their static lines played out, pulling the deployment bags on their chutes out, and then the chutes themselves snapped open, all within five seconds.

Which was fortunate, because they had another eight seconds before hitting the water even with open chutes.

On the C-130, Roland shoved the bundles, sending them tumbling. He staggered and almost fell as the C-130 abruptly angled to the right as the pilots turned to follow the river around Jackson Bend on the south side of the river. One of the bundles, filled with weapons, got caught up under the hydraulic arm, and Roland was damned if he was going without his toys.

“Go! Go!” the crew chief was shouting, unusually excited for some reason.

Roland grabbed the bundle, pulled it loose, and tossed it out.

Then he was tossed out of the airplane himself as the pilots abruptly pulled back on their yokes, angling the nose of the plane almost straight up.

Roland found out the reason five seconds later as his chute finished deploying and he checked canopy, as per Protocol, and then looked down to get oriented and saw the high power lines directly below him. Lines that the aircraft had just barely cleared. He grabbed toggles and tried to turn, but it was too late.

He expertly passed between two high-tension lines and then his chute got caught in them. Roland came to an abrupt halt, dangling eighty feet above the river with high voltage racing across the lines above his head.

The only thing keeping him from being fried was that he hadn’t completed the circuit with either the river or the ground.

That was about the only good news for him.

For the others, they had softer landings than a normal land jump, which was the good part of a water jump.

The bad part of a water jump was the water. Mac, Kirk, and Eagle splashed down, went under, then bobbed to the surface as their chutes came down on top of them, turning the dark night almost completely black.

They had a couple of minutes before the chutes became waterlogged and sank—with them inside. So each one did as they’d been trained. Reached up, found a line, and followed it out to the edge of the chute and clear air. Then they unbuckled and pushed the parachute away, slipped on the fins tied off to their sides, and began, well, finning.

The F-22B Raptor touched down with a scorch of black rubber, expensive rubber, since the government bought “special tires” for the “special” plane, and given the price, they were probably leaving at least a few Gs worth of rubber, Nada estimated, on the Knoxville Airport tarmac. Nada was relieved the pilot actually came to a halt next to the Blackhawk helicopter. He’d been envisioning having to do a tuck and roll, jumping from a moving plane, as fast as they’d been flying across the country.

The blue bulb was still in his breast pocket.

Nada managed to climb out of the cockpit, have the blessed relief of the ground beneath his feet for fifteen seconds, and then he was on board the Blackhawk, opening up a kit bag full of the good stuff and trading in his civvies for battle gear as the helicopter took off.

Nothing but good times ahead.

He realized he was looking forward to seeing Scout as he switched the bulb from his civilian shirt into one of the many pouches on his MOLLE vest. It meant he was carrying two less thirty-round magazines but he was beginning to realize he had to live life on the edge in order to experience it more fully.

As if he hadn’t been doing so for decades.

Just differently.

Burns had been driving along the river on the north side, getting as close to it as the roads allowed.

He was searching.

He was currently pulled over on the side of Tedford Road, underneath a set of high power lines. The road was just short of ending at Tooles Bend Road, which went under I-140, a spur of Interstate 40 that connected it with Maryville to the south. It was all quite confusing, but GPS helped a lot.