It had been explained to him in some detail during the long flight in, but frankly it was hard to grasp.
It was not that it was complicated. It was more that it was quite loopy. It also was unnatural, decidedly only for the insane, and certainly the most terrifying way of boarding an aircraft that he had ever heard of. Bar none. In his considered opinion, it belonged only in cartoons. He could imagine Bugs Bunny having a high old time with it and Woody Woodpecker chortling with glee. But it was decidedly not for humans.
He thought about the procedure again and shuddered. It made throwing yourself out of an aircraft door with a backpack full of nylon tied together with string appear positively safe.
But if they were to get Fitzduane and his people out of terminal trouble, it was the only way.
The intercom crackled. 'We're going in,' said the pilot.
The GECAL crews readied their weapons.
And then the firing started.
Fitzduane and Cochrane put on the still-unconscious Lonsdale's suit and then scrambled into their own.
A webbing harness was built into each suit, and that in turn was attached to a line. The line looked disturbingly fragile. It looked scarcely strong enough to support one person, let alone three.
The bulkiest element of the package was a cylinder of helium. Fitzduane connected the helium as indicated and turned on the valve, and with surprising speed an airship-shaped balloon began to appear. It was bigger than he had expected and he wondered why, then realized it had the weight of five hundred feet of line to support.
He released the balloon and it ascended speedily, the line unraveling as it climbed until the umbilical was taut, trembling only slightly as the wind blew at the miniature airship up above.
'Eagle Friend,' he said into his radio. 'We're ready as we'll ever be – but I feel scared shitless. It'll never work.'
'It had better,' said Cochrane, who was surveying the approach through binoculars. 'The hostiles are learning. There is a platoon-sized group working its way up, and they'll be in range in a couple of minutes.'
He raised the Barrett. He was not as good as Al Lonsdale, but he was close. Conventional rifle range and the Barrett's range were two different orders of magnitude.
He aimed and fired rapidly.
The advancing unit's point man, platoon sergeant, and radio operator lay dead on the ground when he had finished, and the rest of the platoon had scurried for cover. Several were wounded by rock splinters gouged out by the massive multipurpose rounds.
There was a roar of aircraft engines and gunfire as Eagle Friend flew down the valley yet again and hosed the surviving mercenary troops.
Major Khalifa Sherrif was waiting with a SAM operator for exactly this development and held his position. Only his head was not under cover, and that seemed a reasonable risk. He wanted to see the kill. The aircraft was flying at just under 500 feet, he estimated, and was keeping surprisingly steady. The trooper would get a lock. They were going to get the aircraft.
The missile leaped from the launcher and soared toward the Combat Talon.
Bright orange fireballs drew glowing streaks in the sky as the Talon fired its antimissile flares.
The heat-seeking SAM, faced with an excess of choice, twisted and turned and plowed into the far side of the valley.
Fitzduane and Cochrane – Lonsdale, still unconscious, held up between them – looked at each other as the huge aircraft approached.
Two eight-foot arms attached to its nose were now extended in an open V to snare the thin line attached to the balloon. The balloon could be detected in the darkness by night-vision goggles, but there was also a strobe light flashing away at the top, shielded from the ground but in the line of sight of the pilot.
The aircraft was going to snare the thin line at something like 125 knots – 156 miles an hour – and Fitzduane did not want to think about what was going to happen next. Whatever he had been told in training, he imagined a horrendous jerk and horrible pain and his body being cut in half by the shock. And anyway, he did not like heights.
'Is this really a good idea?' he said to Cochrane.
'NO!' said Lee Cochrane, the chief of staff of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, whose enthusiasm for Washington and all its intrigues had suddenly been revived. I should be on the Hill, he thought. What the hell am I doing here! This stuff is dangerous!
It was a vain thought and ventured upon somewhat late in the day. The engine roar was magnified by the confines of the valley. It was going to happen.
It was happening – and it was unbelievable!
Suddenly, it was directly over them and all they could hear was this terrible throbbing roar and then they were airborne – whipped up into the air with less shock than a parachute opening – and the ground was receding and they were climbing higher and they were through the narrow end of the Funnel and over the abandoned airstrip and they were going higher and higher as the aircraft climbed to avoid mountains ahead and the slipstream whipped at them and it was much colder and Fitzduane realized the reason for the bulky suits.
Skyhook worked.
Instinct suggested that they should have been jerked half to death or sliced into segments by the sudden pull of the line, but the reality was that initially they were pulled up rather than forward, and only slowly – relatively speaking – brought up to the speed of the roaring aircraft. Though hard to grasp by the uninitiated, it was a simple matter of geometry.
Quietly and consistently, Skyhook had worked for nearly fifty years, from the North Pole to Southeast Asia, ever since Robert Edison Fulton had invented it and tested it at his home in Connecticut.
The front of the line was secured by the retrieval mechanism in the nose of the aircraft, and the balance of the line now stretched under the fuselage and for several hundred feet behind.
They were being towed like water skiers, except that the medium that was supporting them was air. Soon they would be winched in.
Al Lonsdale, braced between Fitzduane and Cochrane, groaned as the flow of chill air revived him. Still disoriented, he opened his eyes and all he could see was an impression of the ground rushing below at impossible speeds as he flew through the night air.
Shock and disbelief hit him.
Holy shit! Everything his mother had said was true. He had died and gone to heaven and now he was an angel and he could fly! It was terrifying and it was incredible and it was unbelievably exciting. Well, who would have guessed!
He could see a light up ahead, and slowly they approached it. It was strange. Somehow it all looked familiar. And then there was the engine noise. How many hours had he spent listening to that noise on the way to or from a mission?
His feet touched the ramp and he was pulled in by the winch crew and the ramp was raised.
He looked around, and beside him he could see Fitzduane and Cochrane, and they were grinning with relief and clapping each other on the back and the crew were smiling and there were the familiar smells of the cargo bay of a Lockheed Hercules C130 Combat Talon.
He felt confused. He had enjoyed being an angel, albeit surprised that some of his more exotic physical peccadilloes had not counted against him. For instance, there had been those two…
He glared at Fitzduane.
'Boss, this isn't Heaven,' he said indignantly.
Fitzduane gave the Bear a high five and then turned to Al.
'Well,' he said tiredly, but with a smile playing about his lips, 'it will do for me.'
