Darpa Alpha

“Thank you,” riposted Choir, “very much.”

Freeman was grinning, but Melissa Thomas, sitting at the rear of the starboard row of canvas-webbed seats by the Stallion’s door, wasn’t. She envied the ease with which each member of Freeman’s six-man SpecWar team enjoyed one another’s humor. She still couldn’t get that kind of response from her rifle squad, no matter that ever since she’d responded to the commercial on TV that showed marines fast-roping down from a haze-gray helicopter, freeze-framed as they raced into action from the helo, she’d done all that was required of her. “Can you do it?” the commercial’s narrator had challenged. “If you can, you’re one of the best.”

Her brother Danny “dissed” the ad as elitist, and that’s precisely what appealed to her — that and the stirring background rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” It was an old story: the military as the African American’s way out of the ghetto. If you couldn’t dribble and sink a basketball in her Detroit ghetto or get a scholarship to college, your horizons were very limited. The Marine Corps, after a dogged battle against Congress, had finally been forced to yield, and women were in. But that was only half the battle. Female marines had not been allowed in ground combat units. Being assigned to Operation Bird Rescue meant that Melissa Thomas was the first female marine in history to be purposely put in harm’s way rather than in a supportive capacity aboard ship. Melissa had learned much, particularly about self-reliance, the corps having the lowest officer-to-personnel ratio in any of the United States Armed Forces, and she said a prayer asking God to help her to be strong, conscious of the fact that she was a trailblazer, not only as an African American but as the first female marine to be in combat on the ground. She thought of the bus journey to Parris Island along the lonely, two-lane elevated road over the swamps and the ebb and flow of the salt marshes of South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, recalling the moment when she’d first come to stand in the painted yellow footprints in front of the receiving shed, knowing that there were drill instructors who wanted her to fail.

Ever since she was a young girl in Detroit she had always wanted to be part of a shipboard marine contingent, her uncle explaining how a marine’s original role in the English navy was to go aloft, high into the rigging, so as to snipe the enemy and to enforce the captain’s discipline on their own ship. With images of raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima dancing in her head during the hard, unforgiving physical and mental conditioning of Parris now behind her, she had become the first ever female marine combatant to be assigned to an amphibious unit aboard the floating military airbase called Yorktown. But with few exceptions, Melissa had been only grudgingly accepted by her fellow marines, an outsider informally assigned to little more than “swab deck” status aboard Yorktown, no matter that she had qualified in everything they threw at her. She’d run the marine gauntlet from the recruits’ “fright night” in her “Forming Phase” to Phase I’s backbreaking, sinew-sapping PT to Phase II’s mastery of the M16A2 5.56 mm combat rifle to North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune as the first female recruit ever to attend the School of Infantry, hitherto the sole preserve of male recruits. And finally, there was graduation day when her DI presented her with the coveted eagle-topped globe and anchor emblem of the United State Marine Corps, and for Melissa the special moment when she introduced her dad, now frail with age and eyes brimming with tears of pride, to DI Morgana Schmidt. Schmidt, a black belt — level martial arts drill instructor of the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion, had overseen recruit Thomas and the other 69 recruits in the platoon all the way from Pick-Up briefing to graduation, carefully, at times roughly, guiding Melissa through the morphing of yet another civilian into a United States Marine.

As the Super Stallion hit a series of sharp wind shears, she felt a wave of nausea pass through her, something she had not felt since experiencing what her DI had introduced as a “visit to the pool,” a gross understatement, if Melissa had ever heard one, of the terrifying requirement of each marine to float in full battle dress and boots in the dreaded water-training facility.

Even now, the memory of impending drowning and the palpable dread one experienced on approaching the hated drop boards over the water which she, like any other recruit, had to master, still haunted her dreams, and now, as the Stallion continued to buck, she prayed to God, as she had prayed with the Yorktown’s padre, that she would not find herself in deep water in combat.

As they approached the gray, socked-in coastline of Russia’s wild and lonely far eastern coast, turbulence struck the Super Stallions.

“Need a bag?” Sal asked Choir.

“How ’bout a bucket?” proffered Aussie.

Choir’s expression segued from mild anxiety into a broad smile. “I’m feeling great.”

The Stallion dropped again, the G-force lifting many of the marines off the web-seats to clearly voiced expressions of disapproval from the men and Melissa who, on this helo alone, formed a third of the MEU’s Bravo rifle company which, in turn, constituted one of the three rifle companies of what would be the MEU’s battalion landing team.

Freeman saw the alarm on Melissa’s face, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared, marine discipline arresting any potential show of alarm. For her to have complained or even sworn would have immediately been seen as a typical “skirt” reaction. The parent in Freeman wanted to reassure her that the turbulence would probably subside as soon as they passed over the coastal mountains between Glazkovka and Cape Titova on the air route that he and Tibbet had selected through the valleys between the Kiyevka and Ussuri rivers. But the officer in him told him not to single her out; it would only reinforce her marginalization, which he’d sensed, albeit subtly, during liftoff from Yorktown. Still—

“Well,” announced the Stallion’s crew chief, “we’re well past Cape Titova!” Hoots and laughter followed.

“Bring it on!” yelled someone.

Freeman saw Melissa Thomas smile, trying to be one of the boys, and he empathized with her sense of being an outsider — everyone had such moments — and thought about how he might help her to feel included in the team. He asked a marine in the mortar squad, a loader, about Thomas’s classification.

“She’s an E-2, S/S, sir.”

“Ah,” said Freeman, the designation telling him she was a private first class with sniping credentials. Impressive.

“Yes, sir,” continued the loader. “She’s a good shot.”

A “good shot” was an understatement. S/S told the general that this marine with the shy, dark eyes had been tough enough to have graduated from Parris with not only a high score in marksmanship but also the designation “Scout/Sniper.” It was an outstanding achievement, but for a woman in a man’s world, it was yet another way of moving herself, albeit unwittingly, further from her fellow marines. The rifle with the big scope told Freeman that Melissa must have been able to repeatedly hit a man-sized target in the head at ranges greater than half a mile. You didn’t have to be a giant to do that occasionally, but to do it consistently meant you had to be strong and have iron nerves. “Nerves of iron,” Freeman used to tell his recruits, “not nerves of steel, because steel springs back at you. No, you need iron will to lie there for hours in your hide, not moving so much as a hair. Waiting, controlling your bladder sphincter through sheer will. You might have the luxury of a scope spotter to share the mission with you, or you might be alone.” It was Douglas Freeman’s intention, as had always been his inclination, to make the outsider feel at home.

A collective groan greeted another sudden gut-plummeting drop in an air pocket, Aussie catching a glimpse out of one of the Super Stallion’s starboard windows of a white squiggle of river which he guessed must be the Kiyevka, and farther west, ragged fragments of mountain mist above woods that in parts obliterated the sliver of another river cutting through forests as thick and dark as anything he’d seen on the other side of the world at Priest Lake.

The general too had seen the black forests and detected a heightened tone of urgency rushing back from the Stallion’s cockpit into the forty or so pack-laden marines of Bravo rifle company. For a millisecond Eddie Mervyn and interpreter Johnny Lee saw what looked like a marine Harrier diving through the gray stratus, and detected an acrid smell invading the cabin.

“Hold tight!” yelled the crew chief. “Evasive action.”

“Another fucking fisherman?” said Aussie.

“More than one,” said the crew chief unsmilingly.

The Stallion was bucking and yawing violently amid a black, pock-scarred sky, the pilot battling the yoke, fighting to evade the AA fire.

“Oh, shit!” said a marine, one of the few who had a clear view through one of the square windows over the helo’s stubby portside wing. A loud ripping noise cut through the vibrating roar of the Stallion’s three engines and the deep thumping of its rotors as the helo’s gunners opened up, hot shell casings momentarily glinting golden in a