Darpa Alpha

Yorktown to assist Crowley, had seen his share of helo assaults launched from the ship, but it was always a new and exciting experience for him. From Vultures’ Row, high in the control island, Cuso looked down at the frantic, yet endlessly rehearsed, preparations for combat. He could see the fifteen Super Stallions and Tibbet and Freeman crouching low as each was hurried aboard his respective chopper, a lead Super Stallion for Freeman, his six-man SpecOp team, mortar squad, and other marines aboard, a command Huey for Tibbet. Cuso wondered how many would return. What had Hitler said? Making war was like grabbing a gun and walking into a pitch-black room — anything could happen.

Each of the fifteen Super Stallions in Yorktown’s thirty-two-helo force would be carrying fifty fully loaded marines, which meant putting 750 marines in the target zone in the first assault wave — providing there was no interference en route. Each of the big Stallions had three.50-caliber machine guns, one located in the forward starboard crew door and two on pivot mounts for open-ramp firing, all three weapons fed by linked-belt.50-caliber ammunition. As the air armada rose above a blue, choppy sea, two-thirds of the total marine MEU combat force was en route toward the rugged coast of Russia’s far east, which was already in sight as a dark squiggle on the horizon.

Aboard his Huey, Colonel Tibbet was double-checking the landing area selected from the SATPIX where two Super Stallions were to deposit their sling-carried fifteen-thousand-pound bladders of aviation fuel for both helos and Harriers, should it become necessary to call for the Harriers to provide close air support and enough loiter time over the target. During the vital refueling, squads of marines would rush to form a defensive perimeter screen, though it was not anticipated that much ground fire at all would be encountered, given the absence of troops on SIGINT and SATPIX intel.

Though clouds appeared to be thickening and were clustering ominously along the coast, forming a line of ragged gray ahead of them, the rising of the thirty-two-aircraft armada made an impressive sight. An able force, if ever he’d seen one, thought Tibbet, whose high morale had been duly noted by Peter Norton who, in an attempt to contain his rising fear before the mission, had closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the happiest, most relaxing times of his youth — picnicking and swimming in the James River to beat the awful, humid heat of August.

As the low-flying MEU approached the coast, a Russian fisherman-cum-coastwatcher, Alexander Rostovich, whose great grandfather had been killed as an adviser to Ho Chi Minh’s legions against the Americans in Vietnam, was awakened to the choppers’ sound. Grabbing his binoculars, he glimpsed a white U.S. star with a white bar either side of it on one of the incoming helos of the U.S. air armada. Racing into his fishing hut, where he kept an old but reliable 8 mm Mauser that was always loaded for the sharks that bothered his nets when he was fishing off Timpevay Bay or for bears that could wipe out a year’s carefully tended vegetable patch in a few seconds, Rostovich raised the weapon and let fly a round at the armada, pulled back the bolt, swearing as he did so, rammed another round home, and fired again. By sheer dumb luck, this round hit the cockpit of a Stallion, spiderwebbing the copilot’s window screen and narrowly missing his head.

“Ground fire!” the copilot reported. “Three o’clock, from that hut down by that garden. Anyone see it? Along the cliff edge.”

“I’ve got it, Stallion. He’s mine,” came a voice, the violation of radio silence no serious thing, given the number of helos that were airborne and clearly visible to isolated settlements along the coast. In addition, the ABC, thanks to CNN, Al Jazeera, and all the others, clearly knew that the strike was imminent. One of the SuperCobras, feared by and known to Saddam’s soldiers as the “Skinny Birds,” peeled off into a steep, 180 m.p.h. dive, the helo firing its three-barrel rotary chin-mounted chain gun, the one-in-five red tracers dancing crazily about the hut. The hut collapsed, as did Rostovich. There was no fire or explosion, nothing more than a cloud of dust rising above the imploded hut, the coastwatcher lying spread-eagled in a garden of collapsed trellises. Little chance he was still alive. In any event, the target had been “neutralized.” Even so, Jack Tibbet did a one-eighty and called for the six Harriers. There was no way he could know how much ground fire was about to open up, and, with Crowley’s blessing, decided that he’d rather be called overcautious than unnecessarily risk his marines on the coast before they reached the target.

“Blackbirds go!” ordered Crowley, and within minutes the Harriers, electing to make their short takeoff over the vertical lift to conserve fuel, were aloft, Freeman simultaneously requesting McCain’s vertical takeoff Joint Strike Fighters to assist in suppression of hostile ground fire, “should it become necessary,” the latter phrase a qualifier indicating that the American aircraft would not fire unless fired upon, a political fiction that might qualify as an acceptable order in the Byzantine business of the military’s post-op inquiries. All that was known in the fleet was that a Super Stallion had taken a hit, and “no,” the copilot rudely informed Tibbet’s G-2, “it was not a fucking bird. It was a fucking round, a fucking 7.62 mm rolling around in the damn cabin.” For all anyone, including Freeman and Tibbet, whose lead helos had already passed well beyond the fisherman’s hut, knew, the entire helo armada might be coming under ground fire. All everyone had heard for certain was that radio silence had been broken because a Super Stallion had come under ground fire. The Stallion had taken a “direct hit.” Soon the rumor amongst the fully laden combat troops, wedged uncomfortably between their web-seats and the fuselage, was that a Stallion had gone down.

“Anyone get out?”

“Don’t know.”

“Shit!”

In Aussie Lewis’s wry assessment, the usual fuckups had begun.

“Where are those friggin’ Blackbirds?” asked the Stallion’s copilot, who had narrowly missed being killed.

“On the way,” his pilot told him. Relax.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Relax, Evers,” repeated the pilot more sternly. “I know this is your first hot mission, but we’ve a ways to go. Freeman and Tibbet know what they’re doing.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know it’s hard, Dave, but you’ve been trained by the best. You’ll be fine.”

But there was trouble aboard the Stallion. It was coming from a hoarse-voiced general, Douglas Freeman, who, by sheer accident during a chat with a mortar crewman, discovered that the marine, indeed the entire mortar crew and one of its M40A1-marine-trained snipers aboard the Stallion, had by some oversight been through marine Colonel Cobb Martens’ weapons training battalion — made famous by Colonel Michael Nance — without having been given an AK-47 or AK-74 familiarization course. Freeman told the pilot to radio Tibbet, who, red-faced, sent an encrypted fast-blast message to Yorktown to the effect that anyone waiting in the second wave who was not familiar with firing either the AK-47 or AK-74 must be so instructed. Immediately.

There was a problem. There were no AK-47s or AK-74s on the Yorktown. It was an American ship, for crying out loud.

“What?” was the general’s thunderous reply. He couldn’t believe that in the twelve vessels that constituted the Seventh Fleet there wasn’t a single AK-47 in any of the ship’s armories. It seemed particularly improbable, given the popularity of the virtually indestructible Russian weapon among British and American Special Ops teams like his.

“I know where there’re some,” Aussie Lewis assured him. “Unofficial, of course. They’ve got ’em stashed in McCain’s armory. There’s an ex-marine captain there with special arms training. He was wounded in Iraq. He’s now working in McCain’s Blue Tile. He’s, ah, what you might call a ‘collector.’”

“Is he?” said Freeman who, turning to Lieutenant Terry Chester, one of Jack Tibbet’s platoon commanders, ordered, “Message Yorktown that Colonel Tibbet and I expect every marine to know how to fire and strip an AK-47 before our Stallions return to pick them up. If we get into a logistics screwup and anyone runs short of ammo, an AK-47 snatched off a dead Russian might be the thing that turns the tide.”

On the Yorktown, the general’s “turn the tide” phrase was met with skepticism, but not, as one might have expected, by the veterans, who knew how an extra clip of ammo could save your hide. The skepticism came more from those young Leathernecks who hadn’t been in action before, whose number comprised about seven hundred of the MEU’s total sixteen hundred personnel. Some of them, such as young Peter Norton, who, though he had never met Freeman, knew something of him, understood that he was fanatical about logistical details, one of his ruling adages being “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.” And had they known Freeman, skeptics would also have