Danny steadied his eyes on his MP-5, double-checking it to make sure it was ready. He had two clips ready in each vest pocket, along with a grenade, the pin taped so it couldn’t accidentally get snagged.
Good to go.
Chris had his face practically pasted to the screen, which was projecting an infrared image of the Somalian base, now just over twelve miles away.
“Nothing,” he said. “I see the SA-6’s, that’s all. But we’re still a good way off.”
“No Zeus?”
“No antiair guns at all. No other defenses.”
“AGMs to target, ten seconds,” said Bree. “Nine, eight, seven –”
“Wow, I see it!” shouted Chris, and in the next second the horizon lit with a yellow-red explosion. “Got him!”
The second cruise missile splashed five seconds later. Both completely obliterated their targets.
Breanna tenses, waiting for the RWR to warn her that the Somalians had belatedly turned on their antiaircraft radars.
Nada.
She activated the nightscope viewer panel. The view was limited to twelve degrees and Breanna never felt particularly comfortable with it, preferring the radar and IR scans. But the synthetic view didn’t mind the humid conditions caused by the recent rain, couldn’t be jammed, and was easy to sort when things got hot – pun intended.
“We’re going to be overhead in about sixty seconds,” she told Chris. “What do you think?”
“I don’t have a target,” he said. “Looks like the place is deserted. Shit, there are no secondaries. I think those SAMs were decoys.”
“Or we missed.”
“No.” Chris played with the resolutions on the screen. “I saw them. they’re gone. No related vehicles. I’m thinking decoys, Bree. Or they left. Place is deserted.”
“Vector Leader, this is Fort Two,” said Breanna, alerting the assault team. “SAMs have been splashed. No live defenses. Copy?”
“Roger, copy,” returned the ground mission commander from the Osprey. “We’ll proceed as planned.”
“Fort Two,” said Bree. She turned to her copilot. “Chris pull out the satellite maps. Give me a heading of that east-west road.”
“I can see it on the screen,” he told her. “What are you thinking?”
“Let’s see where it goes,” said Bree. She selected the FLIR imaging for her MUD, then banked the Megafortress to follow along the roadway. It rose through the hills toward northern Ethiopia, with a new leg skirting Hargyesa, a relative megalopolis. The road seemed deserted – or at least there were no warm engines or bodies on it, according to the FLIR.
“They could be anywhere, Bree,” said Chris. “We don’t want to get out too far from Vector, in case they run into problems.”
“I’m not intending on getting too far away, Chris,” she told him. “Relax.”
“I’m relaxed,” he said defensively. He checked his screen. “They’re thirty seconds away.”
Breanna swung out of the south leg of her orbit, heading back toward the center of the target area. She selected the starscope input for her screen, and saw two dark shadows leap into the green, wings tilting upward as they swept into a landing.
“Dead as a doornail,” said Chris, who was using the infrared to monitor the scene. “Nothing moving. Nothing hot.”
“You’re ready with the JSOWs just in case?”
“Now who’s getting tense?” asked Chris.
“Let’s open the bay doors just to be sure.”
“Roger that,” he snapped. She could quite tell if he was being sarcastic.
They’d planned to rappel, so hitting the ground behind the swirling motors was a bit of a letdown, but Danny could live with it. he and the rest of the Whiplash team spread out quickly, moving to cover the first team’s assault of the main building.
It wasn’t must of an assault. The Delta troopers had lowered themselves from their Osprey to the roof of the main building, working down to the main floor in about a fifth of the time a training exercise would have taken – less actually, since any training exercise would have used another Spec Ops team as enemies.
“We’re clear, Captain,” said the Delta commander over the com set. The lightweight Dreamland gear made him sound as if he were standing at Danny’s side. “We have blood on the floor in the basement, and some flight gear.”
“Shit. We’re too late.”
“All right. We’ll search and secure,” said the commander.
Danny cursed, then replayed the information to his men.
As soon as the ground team confirmed that the school was deserted, Breanna pointed Fort Two toward A-1, the airstrip close to the Gulf of Aden.
