Payback

“Bet?” It was Lewis, suddenly awake and sitting up. “Did I hear bet?”

Freeman smiled knowingly at Brady, who was sitting immediately to the general’s right. “Aussie’d bet on the sun not coming up. Next to watching that so-called football game down under, ‘Australian Rules’—an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one — Aussies are addicted to beer and gambling.”

“Yeah,” Salvini called out above the sustained roar of the Galaxy’s turbofans. “An Aussie gets wounded, they transfuse him with Foster’s Lager.”

“Foster’s, my ass!” Aussie corrected him, sitting up and assuming the air of an outraged connoisseur. “I only drink Castlemaine. That’s Castlemaine Four X to you, Mr. Salvini.” Aussie turned to look along the bench to the tall African-American. “What’s the bet, Shorty?”

“Data-block up there,” explained Brady, indicating the screen, “is telling us it’s fourteen — no, thirteen — minutes to the drop zone. Sal thinks it’ll be longer.”

“Ten minutes,” came the pilot’s warning, the headwind having now dissipated.

“Damn!” said Aussie. “I could have made some money.”

The red light was still on but already the Galaxy’s ramp yawn was under way, the great plane’s huge door lowering like the jaw of some airborne leviathan, the whine and howl of its hydraulic pressure lines mixing with the rush of cold air invading the huge, warm cave of the plane’s interior.

Far below, they could see a vast, cobalt-blue sea, wrinkled and flecked here and there by the short-lived whiteness of breaking waves. The loadmaster and another crew member released the tension lines. The crated equipment, which included the team’s eight individual eighty-pound combat packs, Freeman not needing one insofar as he’d been ordered by the President to stay at mission control, slid noisily but evenly down over the rows of precisely aligned rollers.

The drogue chute pack attached to the palletized load followed it out into the void in a long taper of bundled lines, the sudden unraveling and reefing of the three enormous nylon conical-ribbon drogue chutes, each 83.5 feet in diameter, sounding like a thousand tents struck by a banshee wind. The noise was so alarming that for several moments, before the tripetal blossoming of the drogues’ dazzling white canopies a half mile aft of the plane, Johnny Lee instinctively stepped back — onto Eddie Mervyn’s combat boots. Mervyn’s obscenity was unheard by his diving buddy, given the combined maelstrom of unraveling lines, slipstream, engine noise, and the racket created by the hundreds of well-oiled floor rollers still spinning, despite their load having exited, descending toward the sea. It was a sea that, given the centuries-old conflict between the two countries, was claimed by both Korea, as the East Sea, and by the inheritors of Nippon, as the Sea of Japan, even before Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and its brutal domination of the country until 1945.

“Go!” shouted the Air Force sergeant. The team stepped into space, Freeman and his first four from the ramp’s starboard side, Aussie and the remaining three from the port side, the roaring wind so cold, so fast, it took their breath away, heart rates increasing, the dot of Ullung Island coming up at them fast.

Then each man felt the sudden jerk, his body rising as his Mach III Alpha — the high-glide tactical parachute — took over. With the best glide-rate-to-descent ratio of any Special Forces chutes in the world and its eighteen ripple-arc panels and independently flexed left/right control cords, it allowed its jumper unprecedented maneuverability, despite each commando’s heavy combat pack.

The black basalt pinnacles of Ullung Island appeared momentarily to be sliding uphill, an optical illusion caused by the nine men’s alpha chutes inclining slightly against the horizontal during a short, sharp buffeting by updrafts. Beyond the island, Freeman and his men now saw the whitish gray slivers of the McCain’s 7th Fleet battle group, the carrier battle group out of COMPAC’s — Commander Pacific’s — base in Yokosuka, Japan. McCain was steaming, as expected, in the middle of her protective screen. Not surprisingly, the two attack subs, presumably fore and aft, were nowhere in sight.

Within McCain’s screen of twelve vessels, which included four destroyers, two frigates, two guided-missile Aegis cruisers, a replenishment vessel, and the two nuclear attack submarines, was the Wasp-class helo carrier transport USS Yorktown, carrying 2,100 Marines of a Marine Expeditionary Unit under the command of Colonel Jack Tibbet. Marines high and low were making bets as to whether the nine parachutists would be able to land on the “boat,” as the big aircraft carrier McCain was known to her six thousand personnel, the other ships’ sole reason for being in the battle group to protect Captain Crowley’s flat-top.

“What d’you think, sir?” Executive Officer John Cuso asked Crowley, who, as captain of the McCain, was also admiral of the fleet.

The diminutive Crowley, who’d stepped down from the bridge and made his way along the walkway known as “Vultures’ Row,” from where he had a high and open-aired view down onto the four and a half acres of flight deck, held Cuso’s question in abeyance. He watched his orange-vested swimmers drop like black stones from McCain’s CM-53E, the Super Sea Stallion’s rotors’ slap clearly audible for a change, now that the carrier’s air arm’s ops had been suspended, its eighty-two aircraft chained down to allow as much space as possible for the helicopter’s “triple P”—pick up personnel and pallet — retrieval crew to operate. This was a rare event in normal times, but less so in the world war against terrorism wherein U.S. supplies and combatants had to have RO/RO — roll-on, roll-off — capability across ever-shifting fronts, some of which existed one day and were gone the next.

“Depends on how much jump time they’ve racked up,” Crowley finally answered.

Cuso, the black XO, executive officer, recalled the only combat jump he’d made in his life, an “emergency eject” from his shot-up Tomcat. It was an event so terrifying, so fast, Cuso sent hurtling out of the fighter with such force, that initially he’d felt no pain. That came later, together with the naval medical board informing him that the injuries he’d sustained in his lower back and legs would not only end his career as an elite naval aviator, the creme de la creme of combat pilots, but would even deny him the opportunity to be a “bus” driver in commercial aviation.

Cuso shaded his eyes against the sparkling sea. “You know who they are exactly?” he asked Crowley.

“Don’t be silly, Commander. We aren’t privy to that kind of SOCOM Washbasin information. We just row the boat, do as we’re told.”

John Cuso smiled wryly at Crowley’s disdain for Special Operations Command and Washington, D.C.

“Used to be a time,” Crowley continued, “when we were given more than visiting Special Forces’ blood type, rank, and serial number. But now—” He exhaled wearily while watching the nine descending dots scattered high above the battle group. “—we’re damned lucky to be told where they’re going.”

The parachutists continued performing what appeared to be random gyrations but which, Crowley knew, were highly individually choreographed maneuvers designed to override and nullify the myriad unseen air currents that formed an invisible tangle of random vectors above the battle group. The sky above as much as the sea below him, the captain knew, was far from a uniform medium, consisting of phantom wind shears, crosswinds, and vicious gusts of air constantly in motion, so that the whole pattern of the invisible sky was ever changing as dramatically as the ceaseless reconfiguration of clouds.

Even before Douglas Freeman had reached the McCain’s fantail, stepping down onto it with all the grace of Baryishnikov, what seconds before had been a distant line of towering ice-cream-white on the horizon had already begun flattening out into what McCain’s weather office called L3s, shorthand for nascent and threatening thunderheads.

Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, and Bone Brady touched down within seconds of one another on the port side of the flight deck directly across from the carrier’s six-story-high island. Brady and Choir quickly turned to face their chutes, simultaneously running toward the wind-inflated nylon panels, quickly trying to reel in the chutes’ lines. In both their chutes, the air-filled panels collapsed obediently onto the hard deck. Aussie’s chute, however, broadsided by a sudden and powerful crosswind, one of those invisible demons of dog aviators and flight-deck crews alike, was blown back port aft, the small deck crew assigned to help running after him. Momentarily losing his footing, he tripped, being dragged unceremoniously across the tracks of catapults 3 and 4. In a second he was back on his feet, but unable to stop, glimpsing the black safety net that fringed the flight deck rushing toward him. He hit his emergency release buckle, but simultaneously fresh gusts reinflated his chute and he saw the safety netting flash by. A second later, his chute gone, he plummeted into the sea over fifty feet below, his swearing drowned unheard as he disappeared beneath the waves, his head bobbing up moments later in the carrier’s dangerously churning wake.