“Who?” Boone asked.
The midshipman shook his head. “I don’t know exactly, sir. Dozens. I’ve found piles of clothes throughout the medical department. The missing people are leaving their clothes behind. But nobody’s seen them. It’s like they disappeared right off the ship!”
United States of America
Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, Colorado Springs
Local Time 2321 Hours
In the last six months of his new posting in the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, twenty-eight-year-old U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant James Franklin Manners had never before seen an attack as large as the one now spinning across the huge wall screen monitors. The feeds came directly from the satellites watching over the action that had broken out along the Turkish-Syrian border. The other men and women around Jim worked diligently at their assigned tasks, collating the real-time information and moving it on to the command post in Turkey.
Buried two thousand feet beneath the mountains that gave the complex its name, Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center remained the backbone of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). The United States and Canada had jointly maintained the command post since 1957, with subdivisions responsible for delivering warnings about aerospace dangers, missile attacks launched against North America or the United States, surveillance and protection of U.S. assets in space, and geopolitical events that could threaten the U.S. as well as troops abroad. The command center gathered, assembled, and interpreted data from numerous sources.
Jim tapped commands on his keyboard, bringing up the information from the geosynchronous satellites as well as the low-earth orbit satellites that still maintained a visual window on the aggressive combat theater that had erupted eighty-seven minutes, forty-three seconds ago. He adjusted his headset and listened to the ground communications streaming through the computer links.
“Excaliber, this is Phoenix. Are you prepared to take on wounded?” The transmission was slightly garbled by the cacophony of explosions taking place around the speaker. Despite the dire straits he’d found his group under, First Sergeant Samuel Adams Gander performed his job and reported the events as they occurred.
“Affirmative, Phoenix. Excaliber is ready, willing, and able to transport wounded back to Wasp. The cap’n has the ship’s hospital standing by if we can’t make use of local resources in Sanliurfa.”
Jim studied the terrain, spotting the wing units put into the air from USS Wasp’s deck out in the Mediterranean. The Marine pilots kept their aircraft flying smoothly, staying close to the hard deck. Tracking the Marine wing had been Jim’s primary job, and the task had been relatively simple—until now. Once the Syrian forces were engaged, tracking would become complicated. One of his main priorities was to keep the friendlies separated from the hostiles.
Jim’s guts churned as he watched the aircraft moving. He tagged them again with the computer, converting the visual feeds into digital tactical information that showed on the wall screen in front of him. A Syrian MiG popped onscreen as well. Jim noted that he already had a designation for the craft but reaffirmed the tag with frantic trackball movements and a couple keystrokes. He glanced at the computer monitor on his right.
The computer monitor showed the American air forces as blue triangles. The Syrian forces were red. Any unknown aircraft, and thank God there were none of those, would be rendered in green, all of them marked with digital readouts of elevation from the hard deck. The resulting effect would be viewer friendly, like a kid’s video game.
Suddenly, many of the blue triangles veered from the LZ the Rangers had set up along the ridgeline behind the border. In a heartbeat, that tightly knit group of helicopters became a tangled confusion.
Glancing back at the satellite visual, Jim watched in disbelief as highly trained Marine pilots somehow managed to crash their aircraft into each other. Only a few escaped the immediate destruction. Even so, others dropped from the sky without ever being touched.
In one split instant, the rescue effort became a catastrophe. What had once been efficient fighting machines suddenly became ripped and twisted debris. As Jim watched in stunned amazement, one of the Cobras blew up when it struck the ground. Somewhere in the areas of his mind that cataloged, identified, and reasoned out such occurrences, Jim knew that the Cobra’s ordnance must have blown. Fire wreathed the battered hulk, letting him know there would be few—if any—survivors.
“What just happened?” someone demanded.
“Man, this reminds me of what happened to the Russian air force when they tried to pull off that surprise attack on Israel in January last year.”
“Yeah,” someone else said nervously. “But that shouldn’t happen to us. We’re the good guys.”
Jim remembered the Russian attack and the way the Soviet aircraft had been swatted from the sky as if by an invisible hand. Footage of the failed attack still rolled on the Learning Channel and on The History Channel when Cold War programs aired.
Spinning in his chair, Jim gazed back at the observation post where the officers stood. Brigadier General Hamilton Farley stood with Canadian Brigadier General Victor Williams. General Farley was commander of the Cheyenne Mountain Command Center and General Williams served as second-in-command. Both men were stern and alert, not showing any signs of having been rousted from bed.
Jim looked for Colonel Morris Turner, the Canadian officer in charge of Charlie Crew, which was currently on duty. Colonel Turner had been standing in his customary position behind Jim, who was the newest member of the team. When he didn’t spot the colonel there, Jim glanced around the room. At present time, Charlie Crew consisted of thirty-seven individuals. Even considering that someone might have stepped away from their post, an event that Jim figured was never done during an alert situation because he’d never seen that happen, losing a person in the room was next to impossible.
Then he saw the uniform lying on the floor only a few feet from his chair. Colonel Turner’s name badge poked out from one of the buffed shoes.
Despite the training Charlie Crew had undergone,
