Reno descended the ladder from a ruined van and stepped out into the darkness.
'Where the hell are the prisoners?'
'Over here, sir.' A flashlight clicked on, lighting the way.
Reno turned to his photographer. 'You're sure you've got the right goddamned film in?'
'Yes, sir. No problem, sir. The pictures are going to be great.'
Reno's boot caught something heavy and slightly giving and he almost fell face forward in the snow and mud. He slammed his boot down into the object to steady himself.
'What the hell's this?' he demanded angrily.
'Sir,' a voice came out of the darkness. 'That's one of the friendly casualties. When we were dismounting, the Iranians—'
'Get him the hell out of here,' Reno snapped. 'You,' he told the photographer. 'No more pictures until all of the casualties have been cleared away. Understand?'
'Yes, sir.'
Reno's dismounted cavalrymen scrambled to clear their fallen comrades from the scene, while the photographer arranged his battery-powered spotlights. In a few minutes, the photo session was able to resume.
Reno stood proudly in the cones of light, jauntily training an automatic rifle on a group of Iranian officers and men whose hands reached up to catch the falling snow.
It was a great day to be an American, Reno thought.
Air Captain Andreas Zeederberg of the South African Defense Force was in a bad mood. His deep penetration squadron had been only fitfully employed during the offensive, and now, promised a high priority mission, he found himself leading his aircraft against a rust heap.
'Old Noburu's got an itch,' his superior had told him, 'and we've got to scratch it.'
There were not even any verified military targets in the Omsk industrial complex. But, what the Japanese wanted, the Japanese got. Zeederberg liked to fly, and he liked to fight. But he was getting a bit weary of Japanese imperiousness. And now there was a damned outbreak of Runciman's disease back at base. The squadron's energies would have been better spent in displacing their entire operation to a new, uninfected site. Instead, they were wasting mission time bombing big pieces of junk into smaller pieces of junk.
Zeederberg smiled, despite himself. He pictured some poor old sod of a night watchman in the Omsk yards when the enhanced conventional explosives started going off. Wake up, Ivan. There's a nice little cossack.
In a way, you had to pity the Russians. Although they had certainly made a cock up out of their country, Zeederberg would have felt more at home fighting on their side against the Iranian brown boys. Still, you took your shilling and did what you were told.
Old Jappers with a touch of nerves. And everything going so well. They wanted the Omsk site leveled. Completely.
What's the hurry? Looking at the overhead photos, Zeederberg had figured that, if only they were patient, the place would fall apart on its own.
Suddenly, the aircraft leapt up into the darkness, then dropped again, bouncing his stomach toward his throat.
'Sorry about that, sir,' his copilot said. 'We're entering a bit of broken country. Nasty bit of desert. I can take her up, if you like. Two hundred meters ought to more than do it.'
'No. No, continue to fly nap-of-the-earth. We will regard this as a training flight. We shall make it have value.'
Zeederberg snapped on his clear-image monitor, inspecting the digitally reconstructed landscape. Barren. Utterly worthless country.
His copilot glanced over at him. 'Makes the Kalahari look like the Garden of Eden,' he said.
It occurred to Zeederberg that men would fight over anything.
'We'll hit a sort of low veld to the north, sir,' the copilot continued.
The navigator's voice came through the headset, unexpectedly nervous and alive. 'I've lost Big Sister. I think we're being jammed.'
'What are you talking about?' Zeederberg demanded. He hurriedly tried his communications set.
White noise.
'Any hostiles near our flight path?'
'Nothing registers,' the weapons officer responded. 'Looks like clear flying.'
Probably the damned Iranians, Zeederberg decided. Jamming indiscriminately. 'Keep your eyes open,' he told the commanders of the eight other aircraft in his squadron, using a burst of superhigh power. 'Minimize transmissions. Move directly for the target area. If we lose contact, each aircraft is responsible for carrying out the attack plan on its own.'
The other aircraft acknowledged. It was a bit difficult to hear, but they possessed the best communications gear the Japanese had to give, and they were flying in a comparatively tight formation. The messages could just get through. But communicating with a distant headquarters was out of the question. The jammers, whomever they belonged to, were very powerful.
Zeederberg felt wide awake now, despite the heaviness of the predawn hour. The jamming had gotten his attention. The on-board systems read the interference as broadband — not specifically aimed at his flight. But you could never be too careful.
The mission was growing a bit more interesting than he had expected.
'Let's go with full countermeasures suites on,' he told his copilot. 'I want to isolate the target area as soon as we're within jamming range. And then let's do another target readout. See if they've got the digital sat links jammed too.'
The copilot selected a low-horizon visual readout of the target area from a triangulation of Japanese reconnaissance satellites. The seam-frequency links still operated perfectly, making it clear that the hostile jamming was directed primarily at ground-force emitters.
At first glance, the imagery of the industrial park looked as dreary and uninteresting as it had the afternoon before, when Zeederberg had carried out his mission planning. Warehouses, gangways, mills, derelict fuel tanks.
He stared at the imagery of the wing-in-ground tactical transport, trying to place it by type. The craft certainly was not of Soviet manufacture. He knew he had seen this type of WIG before, in some journal or systems recognition refresher training. But he could not quite put a designation to it.
'Ever seen one of those?' he asked his copilot.
'No, sir. I don't believe I have.'
'And there's only one of them.'
'That's all I can see.'
'What the hell, though?' He had almost missed the ship. It was well camouflaged, with the sort of attenuated webbing that spread itself out from hidden pockets along the upper fuselage. The kind the Americans had pioneered.
'Christ almighty,' Zeederberg said quietly. 'That's American. It's bloody American.'
There was a dead silence between the two men in the forward cockpit. Then the navigator offered his view through the intercom:
'Perhaps the Russians have decided to buy American.'
Zeederberg was hurriedly calculating the time-distance factors remaining between his aircraft and their weapons release point.
'Well,' he said slowly, figuring all the while, 'they're about to find it a damned poor investment.'
16
