Major Robert “Jinx” Jenks saw the cliffs coming toward him. Fast. Five hundred knots of fast. After glancing at his helmet display, he judged his designation and rolled right, hoping his wingman, a mile back and echelon right, was banking just as hard. Screaming over the sunlit waves, Jenks flew as low as he could without dipping his wings, hugging the radar shadow of the ridges. Punching it as if he intended to slam into the rank of cliffs at a forty-five- degree angle.
A lone aircraft shot north. One gleaming speck. Heading for the Haifa Gap.
Dawg Daniels. Good luck and good hunting.
Jenks pulled the old bird right as hard as he could, feeling every seam in the fuselage complain. In a flash, he registered hundreds of vehicles on the strip of beach below. He was flying sideways, fighting to pull his aircraft away from the cliffs. Which were reaching out to grab him.
As he leveled out, tear-off-the-shingles low and heading south, Jenks gave his wings a quick wag.
Next stop, crispy critters for Allah.
The men on the beach nearly opened fire. Wary of yet another drone attack. When they realized — a thousand men at once — that two USMC F/A-18s were shrieking overhead, a cheer went up that shook the Land of the Scriptures.
Lieutenant Colonel William “The Willies” Morrison turned his four strikers back out to sea. Just far enough to bank again and go straight in, self-escorted, guiding off the ruins of Hadera and the broken chimneys of his number-one marker, the wrecked power plant on the coast. Ahead and to his left, he saw Jenks and his wing-man scream up Highway 65.
This was old-school flying to Morrison, and he simultneously reveled in it and worried that, without all the magic guidance gear, they’d miss the target. Forbidden even to use the intercom until he had visual, he had to hope that he got where he was supposed to go and that Banger would pick up the target and put the ordnance where it belonged.
The mountains of the West Bank came up fast, a perfect match to the briefing imagery. The problem was what waited beyond the ridges.
The formation he had chosen was unorthodox. Any student who proposed it would’ve flunked out of Yuma, and no O-6 Marine aviator besides Dawg Daniels would’ve gone for it. But Dawg, bless him, just cared about accomplishing the mission. If a Pickett’s Charge of F/A-18s on line was the only hope of putting steel on target and then getting out of Dodge, Dawg was ready to fly top-cover with the chain of command.
Morrison considered himself the least-sentimental commander in the group. But when he thought of Dawg Daniels heading deep in a lone aircraft, his eyes almost teared up.
Jenks said a quick prayer and shot toward the pass, hoping his attack run would be a surprise for the other guy, not for him and his wing-man. Unable to look down at his knee board and hoping he remembered every detail of the Z diagram for the mission, he switched from air-to-air to air-to-ground mode.
He got his azimuth steering line on the long black snake of the road. Coming in at 300 feet, the earth a rush and a blur.
There it was, right where it was supposed to be. A very busy defensive layout centered on the pass.
“Target captured,” Shimmy said over the intercom.
Jenks put the target below his nose and lined up the diamond, waiting to reach his release altitude as he descended. He hoped his Dash-2, “Sticks” McCready, was maintaining his interval and not tempted to go down the same chute in this closed terrain. Plenty of bad guys. There was going to be a nasty frag pattern, too.
Jenks felt the lift as the bombs dropped from the wings. Hoping Shimmy could keep the laser on track. Doing it the old-fashioned way. GPS guidance was the stuff of fairy tales now.
“Chicken’s in the pot,” Shimmy told him over the intercom. “Take us home, stick monkey.”
Forty seconds after his pop, Jenks was out of the target area.
“Shimmy? Visual?”
There was a pause. It seemed to last for minutes. The reality was less than five seconds.
“Into the mountain. No chutes.”
Fuck.
But he thought, for one flashing instant, of Lowell MacCready’s wife. With whom he’d slept back at Cherry Point.
Now Sticks was dead.
The terrain was broken, and it was difficult to stay down tight on the deck as he pulled north, then headed west again. Had to hug the approved egress route, stay out of the artillery fan.
Jenks realized that he was drenched in sweat. His flight suit felt as if he’d put it on straight from the washing machine. Sweat stung his eyes, as well.
So much for central air, he told himself. Then he saw the glittering sea ahead.
Monk Morris wondered if he’d been a fool. Too macho. Too damned pigheaded to be trusted with the lives of United States Marines. Green-lighting those air attacks. Maybe the Air Force knew what it was doing, after all.
He ached for news. He knew that, in the great scheme of the war, seven aircraft didn’t amount to much. But two Marines who counted on him flew inside each one of them. And Dawg Daniels would’ve put his best men in the seats.
Dawg was a can-do Marine. Monk Morris saw himself the same way. Maybe it was a poor combination, he thought. Maybe, at this level, you needed somebody sensible enough to put on the brakes.
He stepped back inside his forward command post and asked, in a voice not quite so firm as he wanted it to be, “Any word on those air missions?”
Dawg Daniels left the nuclear ruins of Haifa behind, burning sky through the gap and bursting into the Jezreel Valley. So green it hurt the eyes. With clouds of artillery smoke thinning as they rose and spread into the atmosphere.
Big sky, little bullet. He hoped. He’d insisted that the artillery missions continue during his run, figuring that a cessation would alert the Jihadis that something was up. Only the defenses around Afula would be spared. Long enough for him to get clean imagery.
More rounds impacting at two o’clock. Somebody was getting a serious clobbering. Dawg didn’t like the idea of taking shrapnel from a Marine 155.
Well, you pays your money, and you takes your chance, he told himself.
He gave the old aircraft every last bit of juice, popping to 4,800 feet AGL. If the bad guys were going to get him, it was going to be now. While he was riding high enough to get the panoramic imagery that corps wanted.
In planning the mission, he’d rationalized the risk in terms of how many lives good intelligence could save in the coming assault on Afula; he figured an attack on the crossroads town was inevitable. But now he was flying on nerves, not reason, and living second to second. Hoping the pod cameras worked. And that the downlink functioned. And that his WSO wasn’t asleep at the wheel.
The aircraft roared over Afula and banked north. That quick. Pulling so many G’s that Dawg imagined rivets flying off the fuselage like popcorn. He dropped to 500 feet, as low as he could go in the broken terrain. With hills coming up fast, he pulled the aircraft up to 800, then 900.
Getting too old for this, he told himself. But in truth, he felt magnificently alive.
The plan was to leave the downlink — an uplink, really — turned on until they’d cleared Nazareth on the way out. Then no more emissions until they were wheels-down.
Mount Tabor on the right. Gotcha. Here we go. Hold on, ladies and gentlemen.
