27
Dr. John Jaeger stepped out of the Blackhawk helicopter and, holding his hat on his head, ran through the dust storm created by the downdraft of its rotors. Beyond the fog of sand, the harsh sun of the Tecuno plateau cut in and he slipped on his sunglasses with relief.
Madoa airfield was well and truly under the control of the 82 ^ nd Airborne. Around him paratroopers were methodically scouring every inch of the air base, while up above armed helicopters and gunships kept watch. Above them again there would be a combat air patrol.
It was over. But then again, you never quite knew.
Security was tight. A C130 making its approach fired red flares to distract any straggler with a handheld missile foolish enough to try anything, then dropped in like a stone in the stomach-wrenching maneuver know as a combat assault landing. Jaeger had experienced the procedure when he and his team were flown in, and suddenly he realized why the Airborne preferred to jump.
He found Fitzduane near what might have been some kind of barracks building. It was hard to tell after the air force had worked it over, but a cargo parachute had been erected like a giant tent to give some shade. Inside, the filtered light was curiously peaceful.
The Irishman was lying back in a wooden tub watching a yellow plastic duck bob up and down in the water in front of him. He had a glass of red wine in one hand.
Various other camouflaged figures sat in makeshift chairs in the general vicinity. He recognized Lonsdale and Cochrane, and there was a stocky lieutenant who looked as if he could life weights with his little finger. His eyes were closed. Farther back, other paratroopers were asleep.
'The tub was Oshima's, they tell me,' said Fitzduane. 'Damn near the only thing that wasn't blown to hell and back.'
Jaeger collapsed with some relief into what passed for a deck chair and accepted a glass of wine. 'The duck?' he said.
'The duck belongs to my son,' said Fitzduane. 'I gave it to him, but he loaned it to me. Sort of a good-luck charm. To bathe without one is uncivilized – though not everyone knows that.'
Jaeger drank his wine. The atmosphere was pleasantly relaxing. It was like sitting on the porch after you'd done everything that had to be done and now you could just swap yarns and listen to the crickets before falling asleep. Only, there weren't any crickets. Instead there were the snores of sleeping paratroopers and crawling things that were mostly lizards but were occasionally scorpions.
'So it worked,' he said. 'I was having a nightmare about the whole thing, but it really worked like we hoped. 'We've just checked the Devil's Footprint and the area all around. Not a trace of nerve agent. Nothing. And the gun is shredded. It really bloody worked.'
Fitzduane looked at him. 'Hoped?' he said incredulously. 'Tell me you were certain it would work, or I'll have Brock shoot you.'
'When you put it like that – I was certain,' said Jaeger. 'We fuck up on nukes now and then at Livermore, but when it comes to hydrogen superguns we're aces.'
'I'm going to shoot him,' said Brock sleepily. 'He didn't say positively.'
'But what about Oshima?' said Jaeger. 'Where's Oshima?'
'Good question,' said Fitzduane.
'Well, if she's inside the command bunker, she's dead,' said Jaeger. 'And so would you lot have been if you'd blown that door.'
There was silence. No one particularly wanted to be reminded of how close they had come to blasting their way into a slow and messy death. After Madoa Air Base had been secured, the command bunker had been drilled by a chemical warfare team and found to contain lethal quantities of Xyclax Gamma 18 under positive pressure. Opening the door would have cause the nerve agent to flood out into the subterranean complex and possibly to spread throughout the airfield itself.
The decision had been taken to seal off the bunker rather than break in, while the chemical-warfare team figured out a way to decontaminate it safely. The problem was not straightforward. The nerve gas was volatile and so would ignite, but if the bunker contained explosives in addition to the gas, the combination could be akin to exploding a rather large bomb. True, it was sixty feet underground, but the extensive subterranean evacuations meant that there was no guarantee the effects of an explosion would be contained.
Jaeger was confident that the problem was solvable, but meanwhile it meant that no one had actually physically searched the bunker. Special suits and equipment were being flown in. In the back of his mind was the thought that some 41,000 tons of chemical agent were lying around the former Soviet Union. This was a problem that was not going to go away.
'We don't think she's dead,' said Fitzduane. 'If the pattern is any indication, she is lying low waiting to make a break for it.'
'So you think she left the command bunker and is now hidden in some hidey hole under this place,' said Jaeger.
Fitzduane nodded.
'So one of these days – if your theory is right – she is going to pop out of the ground and make a run for it,' said Jaeger. 'But when and where? And how long can you wait? I love my country, but I know its faults. The U.S. of A. likes sprints, not marathons.'
General Mike Gannon was feeling progressively more impatient.
The 82 ^ nd Airborne was designed to carry out strategic missions rapidly and then be pulled out. Subduing the Devil's Footprint terrorist complex had been achieved. Keeping two brigades tied up now that the mission had been accomplished struck him as a misuse of resources.
He was itching to head back to Bragg.
'One goddamn terrorist and the entire division is tied up,' he growled. 'This is ridiculous. How much effort is Oshima worth? We've searched the entire Devil's Footprint complex, and diddly squat. She's either dead or she's long gone.'
'She's still here, General,' said Fitzduane with absolute certainty.
Gannon glared at him. Colonels were supposed to agree with generals, but this damned Irishman had his own way of doing things.
'I agree, sir,' said Dave Palmer.
Gannon's eyebrows shot skyward. Fitzduane was one thing, but Palmer was his exec and definitely part of the system. He was supposed to snap out 'Airborne!' in agreement and go with the flow.
'Colonel Palmer,' he said. 'Getting shot down and reincarnated has scrambled your brains. This division is not a democracy.'
'Airborne, sir,' said Palmer. He had a great deal of sympathy for the CG. Gannon genuinely cared about his men and fought to see that they were properly utilized. But on this issue he backed Fitzduane, and his eyes still showed it.
Mollified but not fooled, Gannon looked at Palmer, then at Fitzduane and the others in the group. He tapped the map. 'So where is she?' he said. 'And why haven't we found her? What haven't we done?'
'If she has run true to form,' said Fitzduane, 'she will have left the command bunker through an emergency tunnel and be holed up somewhere sixty feet underground waiting to make her move. The emergency tunnel will have been deliberately collapsed behind her. The only way we could have found her would have been by stumbling over her ventilation point, and even that would have been disguised.'
'Tunnels,' said Gannon in disgust. 'Hell of a way to fight a war. Vietnam was full of the things, and we never completely winkled the gutsy little bastards out of them. But who'd have thought they would have built hundreds of kilometers of the things.'
