you seriously are on their way. Better to tell us the truth. What they do to a man isn’t decent.”
The other laughed. “And what they’ll do to a Christian… I don’t like to think of such things…”
“Get him up,” Deep Voice commanded.
Through the ringing and hammering inside his skull, Nasr heard a door open. Or thought he did. Then he dreamed that an overhead light went on and several figures stood over him.
“You asses,” a new voice said. “Who gave you permission to do this? To an innocent man?”
Deep Voice tried to stutter out an answer. Shocked. Or just confused.
Through one badly swollen eyelid, Nasr thought he saw one man strike another.
“I should do the same thing done to
Nasr was utterly confused. Were they speaking about him? Was there another captive in the room?
Heavy arms lifted him to his feet. But he couldn’t stand.
“Hold on to him,” the new voice commanded. “Or I’ll have the flesh stripped from your bodies and fed to your children.”
Out in the corridor, as they dragged him along, Nasr was able to make out a few things. White walls. Daylight through smudged windows. A scarred floor. And the old man who had been his accuser. He was being dragged in the opposite direction.
The old man was slopped with blood, and he whimpered. His nose had been cut off. It made him sound like a cartoon character.
FIVE
“Our Air Force brethren claim it’s suicide,” Harris said. Behind him, soldiers packed up the last odds and ends required to stand up the corps forward command post on solid ground.
“Well,” Andretti, the G-3, said, “the Marines are willing to give it a try. They think they can put in one wave of deep air strikes behind EW drones and count on local surprise. Since nobody’s flying on either side.”
“Except the damned UAVs.”
The operations officer shook his head. “I’d trade every missile system we’ve got for a platoon of those old Vulcans, sir. Or Navy chain guns.”
“So which targets does Monk Morris rate as important enough to risk a chunk of his air group?”
“I’ve got them on a map.”
A specialist carrying a display screen bumped the general from behind and excused himself.
“Just talk me through the missions.”
Colonel Andretti nodded. “First, he wants to use 2,000-pound bombs and fuel-air explosives on the Umm el Fahm pass. Before the lead Marine battalion gets there — and they’re on the way. General Morris believes that, given the no-fly environment, he really can take the Jihadis by surprise.”
“Serious defense down there? Or just a blocking position?”
“The latter. Big one, though. General Morris thinks it could get messy. He doesn’t want to risk unnecessary blue casualties.”
“That pass is heavily built-up. Locals still there?”
“Morris’s Two thinks they’ve headed for the hills.”
“Even if most of them bailed, we’ll still have some civilians hunkered down in their homes. Human nature.”
“Want me to red-light the mission, sir?”
Harris chewed on it. For about fifteen seconds. “No. If Monk thinks it’s worth risking his pilots plus noncombatant casualties to get that pass open, I’ll defer to his judgment. Next target?”
“Assembly area outside of Jenin. We have imagery and SF HUMINT on that one. Big target. And clean.”
“Cluster bombs?”
“Mixed ordnance.”
“How many aircraft? Jenin’s getting deep.”
“Four on Jenin. Two on Umm el Fahm.”
“Let’s hope they hit. There isn’t going to be a second chance. Last mission?”
“That’s our request. Since they’re determined to fly. Recce over the Afula defenses. One aircraft.”
“Downlink working? Can it cut through all the soup?”
“We won’t really know until the mission’s in the air. Doubt the WSO will go hot until he’s on final approach.”
“Hate to lose aircrew if we can’t even get the feed.”
“We can always download the images once they get back to Cyprus.”
“Yes, sir. Fourteen Marine aviators. And seven jets.”
Harris folded his arms across his chest. “What’s at stake, Mike, is the future use of air in this campaign. If Monk Morris’s boys go down in flames, I won’t get one damned Air Force mission this side of Iceland.”
“And if they make it back to base? You’ll have a club to beat the zoomies with, sir.”
Harris shook his head. “I don’t want to beat up the Air Force. I just want them to help us beat our enemies.” He grunted. “All right. We’re wasting time. Tell them they’ve got the green light from corps. For all three missions. And God help them.”
Dawg Daniels flew low over the water. Jovial with his subordinates on the ground, the group commander was solemn now. This mission would decide whether he and his men sat out the rest of the war. And Dawg Daniels did not intend to spend his days getting a tan on a beach in Cyprus.
He knew he shouldn’t be flying the mission himself. But none of them knew what was waiting for them — how quickly the radars would pick them up, despite the jamming, whether enemy drones would be flying CAP and waiting for them, how thick the air defenses on the ground would be… or even if the Jihadis’ jammers would screw up their electronics so badly that the patched-with-Band-Aids F/A-18Ds would fall out of the sky.
On the other hand, Daniels was glad to have the F/A-18s, rather than the F-35s that had been taken from them to build out the MOBIC air arm. The F-35s were unable to stay in the air in the hyper emissions environment of the war, where artificial electromagnetic pulses were the least of any digital system’s problems.
You didn’t look down when you were this low. That was the one guaranteed way to go nose in the water. You just monitored the altitude number on the upper right of your helmet display and watched the horizon. Hoping your electronics maintained their integrity and didn’t take you diving for mermaids.
He prayed that all seven aircraft would make it to their targets but figured it was too much to ask that all seven would make it back to Cyprus.
His group’s informal motto was “Semper Fly.” He’d taken a lot of razzing about it when the Air Force pushed through the order to ground all manned aircraft “until the threat environment clarified.” If the blue-suiters didn’t want to go downtown, fine. But Dawg Daniels believed that Marines should make decisions for Marines.
Now he was out to prove that manned airpower was still a player. That pilots were still in the game. And he hoped he wasn’t wasting his Marines’ lives.
And God, he loved to fly.
Despite the presence of his weapons systems officer in the dual cockpit, Dawg felt peculiarly alone. No intercom chatter permitted until they were on the target run. And no radio transmissions at any time. The only exception was if an aircraft was going down. The codeword for that was “Mudpie.”
Dawg’s initial impulse had been to ask for volunteers. But he decided that was the weak man’s way out of the moral dilemma the mission posed. So he just selected the pilots he thought would get the job done. Rank immaterial. If feelings were hurt, so be it. At least those with hurt feelings would be alive for evening chow.
