True Valor (9 page)

There wasn’t time to savor it. She switched from talking to the carrier air traffic control center to the combat control center, cleared her panels to flight status, and scanned for weapons or navigation failures. The last thing she needed was for live ordnance to jam during the jolt of takeoff and be stuck a few feet away under her wing.

“Viper 01, airborne.”

She couldn’t see Thunder, but he was now in the climb-out pattern somewhere to her right. They would be flying a mile apart in a combat spread, protecting each other from a plane getting in their dangerous six o’clock blind spot. The full squadron would be in similar formations assigned to a half-mile-wide lane of airspace.

A touch of a button brought up the navigation markers she had preprogrammed into the system. They would enter Turkish airspace, fly the length of the country, and pass over the massive dams on the Euphrates. They would enter Iraq along the Tigris River valley.

Gracie arched her back and settled deep in the seat, getting comfortable; they would be flying over international waters, and then it would be land beneath them. Another long mission had begun.

Eight

* * *

FORWARD OPERATING LOCATION

T
URKEY
/I
RAQ
B
ORDER

Mission underway.”

The communications officer didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard. He was giving play-by-play and there was not a PJ in the room who wasn’t hanging on those words. The planes had just crossed into Iraqi airspace. Wolf and the other SEALs led by Bear Baker would soon be crossing the Syrian border to race for their pickup.

Striker glanced at the clock. Right on time. It was going to be a very long night. He got to his feet and stepped around Rich, who was spreading out his first of hundreds of games of solitaire. Bruce stepped outside. The sun had set over the Taurus Mountains and stars covered the sky. To the west the first clouds of the incoming cold front darkened the horizon. The temperature had dropped noticeably.

As soon as Iraq realized the extent of the strike, they would throw everything they had at the planes. Surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft artillery—as good as the coalition pilots were, there were still serious threats that could bring down a plane.

Bruce didn’t wear a maroon beret because the military thought it was a nice color. It spoke for all the blood PJs had spilled over the years doing this job. The motto they promised came from the heart. They went out that others might live.

Lord, don’t let me need to rescue a pilot. Please keep Grace and Wolf safe.
He could do what needed to be done. He could be brave. He just couldn’t always be there in time. He wanted no family to face devastating news tonight hearing a plane had gone down.

CNN would be going live as soon as it became apparent a strike of this scale was being executed. Jill would be watching, locked on every word of news. Bruce wished she had been able to talk with Wolf today.

Bruce had chosen the right profession. Nights like this confirmed it. No matter what the personal cost, he was the man on the front line to keep danger from touching those at home. He walked down to the flight line. Friends were risking their lives tonight. It was going to be a very long night.

Nine

* * *

TWENTY-TWO MILES INSIDE SYRIA

W
EST
OF
THE
T
OWN
OF
A
L
H
ASSAKEH

Wolf felt the sweat under his flak jacket freeze as the air rushed in the open door of the helicopter. He had the forward gun trained at the racing sand and the occasional break of scrub bushes that struggled to hold on to what soil there was in the rocky terrain at the edge of the desert. In the night vision goggles, the plants stood out as obstacles in the smooth backdrop, spots of accumulated heat cooling in the night air.

Most of Syria was desert, and while there was safety in the vast distances, there was also danger as sounds echoed and visibility stretched for miles.

Ahead of them, the lead helicopter raced toward the pickup with its engines red-lined for all the speed that could be pulled from them, taking the most risk by leading the way.

If the man had stood them up again, if he had set a trap . . . They were ready to hit hard in order to get out of the area. But if he did defect . . . It was a constant effort to avert war, Syria and Israel over the Golan Heights, Syria and Turkey over the simmering crisis of water as drought took hold in the region and dams along the Euphrates robbed Syria of critical water. Intelligence was everything in this conflict.

Wolf glanced over at his partner. Cougar was scanning the frequencies listening for anything out of the ordinary on the Syrian defense network. “Anything?”

Cougar gave a thumbs-up.

“Thirty seconds.”

Wolf shifted around as the warning came from the pilot. Bear in the lead helicopter would be taking the most risk, scoping out the area. Only then would they go in to bring the man out.

The helicopter ahead flashed red infrared strobes and moments later it flared, dropped speed, and began to circle. “Clear!”

Wolf braced his weight as the helicopter went nose down and spurted forward toward the pickup point. The lead gunship swerved left and took a defensive higher circle.

“Setting down.”

Sand rushed up as Wolf strained to see the man they had come to meet. A desert animal the size of a rabbit jumped and Wolf had to check the instinct to fire. He wanted to be the one racing out to grab the man, but that task had been given to Cougar and Pup. The arrangement had been precise. The man would be at the well, alone.

There!

Cougar and Pup jumped out and took off at a sprint.

It was an agonizing minute.

“Do you have him?” The terse request from the pilot in the chopper above broke the silence and put into words the growing unease with sitting exposed.
Come on. Come on.
Wolf willed his partner back.

Pup appeared from the whirling sand. Then their guest. Then Cougar.

Wolf snagged the man’s arm as Cougar literally threw him aboard. He tugged Pup aboard and then grabbed his partner. “We’ve got him. Go!”

The helicopter went airborne and a wall of sand rose to swallow them. They turned on a track to the north in order to exit the country along a different vector.

Time began to crawl by. Twenty-two miles was a lifetime of flight.

“We’ve got trouble coming,” Cougar said over the internal comm. “Fighters to the south are hearing orders. Push it to the border, gentlemen.”

Their pilot didn’t wait to see radar tracks to confirm what Cougar was overhearing on the burgeoning radio traffic. He angled the blades to maximum tolerance.

Wolf watched the night sky for moving points of light on the horizon. He could fight a man. He couldn’t fight a plane.

OPERATION NORTHERN WATCH

N
ORTHERN
I
RAQ
, T
HIRTY-
S
IXTH
P
ARALLEL

“Viper 02, radar check.”

Grace scanned the displays. Long-range radar showed the friendly signatures of their own strike fighters at twenty-eight miles west. She toggled a switch. Threat radar was seeking to the south and one far to the west was reflecting their direction. Syria was still quiet. “We’re clear.”

She felt for the others in the strike package who were getting the brunt of the Iraqi reaction. In the distance the barrage of exploding AAA was bright in her nightscope.

Flying two feet off Thunder’s wing in formation was an experience. Peter began the curl to reverse their track and smoothly took them to the lower altitude in the tasking orders. She matched his moves. So far this mission had ticked off like clockwork. Syria was now on her left. They were at the halfway point.

Her radar showed a response from an IFF transponder far inside Syria. Gracie looked twice and went to a targeted search. “Sixteen miles, ten o’clock, low.”

“Cowboys,” Peter replied after he took a look.

The radar tracks were lifting out of the background clutter moving on a vector north. They were distinctive blips now. A Pave Hawk and a Pave Low III, the helicopters were flying close to the ground. Some sort of special op was underway deep inside Syria. It explained the change to their tasking orders.

Wol
f
?
It would fit a SEAL op.

A bright flash lit up the skyline over Mosul. Gracie glanced at the time. The power station should have just been hit. It was the key node for Iraqi’s entire air defense grid. It was also the last strike point for the mission. The fighters should be racing back north to the Turkish border.

Peter led them in a change of altitude again.

Warning tones burst on around the cockpit.

“Break!” Peter ordered.

Gracie rolled hard right away from Peter as he broke high. A tracking radar had painted them. She flipped a switch with her thumb to change from air-to-air to air-to-ground.

Warble tones sounded as a surface-to-air missile cone of energy searched the sky.

She slammed the stick back to get altitude.

A SAM raced up from the ground, a white heat trail blazing in the night.

A low shot. The helicopters were being targeted. It was cold comfort. She had a reasonable probability of breaking lock whereas the helicopters were practically stationary targets for a missile.

The helicopter pilots reacted and were already racing apart in ninety-degree angles, firing chaff as they jinked directions. The trailing helicopter didn’t have a chance. The SAM exploded in a bright fireball. The helicopter showed briefly on the other side of the fireball and then disappeared from view.

Wolf
.

Lord, don’t let it be Wolf.

“He’s down,” Peter said, his voice cold. He immediately passed the vectors to the circling AWACs.

Come on, lock on.
Gracie listened to the HARM missile search for a lock on the radar that had directed that SAM. The seeker warbled in her ear but never pitched high. They’d fired point- blank and the radar was already off. “No lock.”

“Close to half a mile.”

She was relieved at the order. Whoever was down below was a friend. She moved closer to the Syrian border to tighten the air cover even while she tensed for another SAM to suddenly come up at them.

“Bandits at 38 south, climbing,” Peter warned.

She went to long radar. Syrian fighters were taking off.

She prayed they stayed on their side of the border.

SYRIA/IRAQ BORDER

The ground exploded under them in an upshoot of sand. Wolf had crashed before but nothing like this. He saw the falling tail rudder hit the ground and explode. “Don’t,” he yelled at Cougar as he reached out and yanked his partner back inside. “We landed in a minefield!”

He strained to look forward. The pilot was moving but the copilot was slumped. The noise was deafening as the pilot struggled to kill engines still turning. The hardened undercarriage had saved their lives but the probability of fire was high if the fuel tanks leaked.

He shoved their guest back into the center seat. “Pup, cover him.” The youngest SEAL in the squadron already had his sidearm out. Defector or not, the man would turn them in to try to save his own hide.

“Get on the door gun and hit anything that moves,” Wolf yelled to Cougar. He struggled forward to help with the copilot. Grace nagged at him about getting into trouble. This was beyond trouble.

A minefield, but which side of the border? Syria or Iraq?

A bullet slapped at the inside roof of the chopper. And Wolf started praying. A sniper had already found them.

Ten

* * *

SYRIA/IRAQ BORDER

A minefield. Striker braced against the restraint harness as the Pave Low helicopter raced south. He’d gone into tough places before, but this had him wishing he’d finished writing Grace a very special letter. One that began
Dear Darling . . .

He secured another clip for his weapon. There were times he appreciated being a soldier first. They would have to hover high and hoist the SEALs out so as not to set off more mines with the change in air pressure. The lead SEAL helicopter could provide cover but it couldn’t get to the men on the ground without help.

Sand was swirling behind the Pave Low as Dasher hugged the ground. His friend was one of the best pilots in the 720th Special Tactics Group, but that didn’t eliminate the nerves tightening Striker’s gut. He hated being this distance from the ground. He preferred a height he could parachute from, not one that threatened to slam him into the ground if they breathed the wrong direction.

Striker braced his hands on the crash bar as the helicopter flared and abruptly dropped speed. The gunship providing their escort continued at maximum speed to join up with the circling helicopter. His night vision goggles picked up the radiating heat of the shot-down helicopter in the distance. A surface-to-air missile had brought it down. Another one would likely be waiting with their name on it. Over his headset he could hear the SEALs talking about a sniper.

“Air cover?”

His partner Rich was searching for it. “There! Seven o’clock low.”

Bruce found the blur in the sky and realized as the image clari-fied that the planes were racing directly at them. There were two of them but they looked like one dot in the sky they were hugging so close together. “Do they know we’re the good guys?”