“I don’t know, Bree,” said Chris. “They could be anywhere. I’m thinking Mogadishu.”
“Mogadishu’s five hundred miles southeast of here.”
“My point exactly.”
Breanna didn’t think they would be lucky enough to find them on the ground. But she did want to see if her theory was at least possible. A-1 was a little more than seventy-five miles away, straight line back toward the northwest. While they didn’t have particularly fat fuel reserves, she figured they could get close enough to get a look at the airstrip before turning back to shepherd the Ospreys home.
“We’ll be within FLIR range in five minutes,” she told her copilot.
“Four and a half. I’ve already computed it,” he told her. “Man, I could go for a cigarette right about now.”
“I thought you gave up smoking.”
“Stuff like this tickles my throat,” he said. “Shit, we got something in the air.”
Chris seemed to be operating on a sixth sense, picking up something before the high-powered detectors had sniffed out the radar. But he was right – a Jay Bird radar had flicked on ahead. The computer poked a green puff in the radar-warning screen. It was below them, which seemed impossible since they were at only a thousand feet.
“The source is far off,” said Chris, hunkering over the screen and working the computer to refine the read. “This is on the ground, Bree. Shit, this has to be a MiG-21. Off, it’s off.”
“On the ground? Has to be A-1.”
“Yeah. Like it was a maintenance check or something. Or a decoy.”
“We’ll be close enough to find out pretty soon.”
“Be nice to have a pair of fighters covering our butts about now,” Chris said.
“We can deal with a MiG-21 ourselves,” said Breanna. “Ground radar?”
“Negative. Scope’s clean. No ground stations. Nothing. Of course, they could take off and turn it on once they were in the air. We’re sitting ducks here.”
“The MiG radar can’t find a standard B-52 at twenty miles,” said Bree.
“What I’m worried about are those MiG-29’s we saw before,” said Chris. “Maybe they’re Libyan fighters. Qadafi’s got a bunch of them.”
For once, his fear was well-founded. The passive sensors on the MiGs could theoretically allow the interceptors to target Fort Two from long range, possibly even before being detected by Fort Two’s own passive arrays.
“I think those MiGs we saw before are out there,” said Chris. “I think they’re waiting to ambush the Ospreys. They could be in those mountains ranges to the west.”
“If they came from Libya, they’d never have the range to linger,” said Bree.
“What if they launch from A-1? If it’s long enough for a MiG-21, they’d have no problem.”
Breanna leaned closer to her stick. They were above thirty miles from the airstrip.
“I think there’s something stalking us, maybe twelve miles off,” said Chris. “What do you think of turning on the active radar?”
“If there is something out there, it’ll tell them we’re here,” said Bree. “And it’s expressly against orders.”
“Well, there is that,” said Chris. “But getting shot down is too. If we hit the radar we can get a clear picture. We see something, we launch the Scorpions. I swear something’s watching for us, Bree. They’re to the west, right there.” He pointed across the cockpit. “I can feel it.”
“We’ll see them first,” said Breanna.
“Maybe. They could circle out through the hills, duck around us, go for the Ospreys. The rotor engines are monster signals for any IR seeker. They’ll be sitting ducks.”
Less than sixty seconds now separated them from the small airstrip where Breanna believed Smith and the others had been taken. Turn on the radar and they might never reach it.
On the other hand, if the MiGs were where Chris thought, the Ospreys would be sitting ducks.
“Go to search and scan,” she ordered.
“On it.”
Chris was wrong. The MiGs weren’t in the mountains to the west.
They were hugging the ground forty miles to the east, running south like all hell. There were four of them, and while two were within striking distance of Vector, they didn’t seem to be interested in the Ospreys – they were going for the F-117’s, just arriving on target with their Paveways as Breanna clicked the radio to broadcast a warning.
Northern Somalia
23 October, 0430
As the bus wound down out of the hills, they could smell the scent of the sea through the open window. The moon and stars were fading, the sky blending into early dawn.
“There’s an air base down there,” said Gunny, who was at the window. “Shit, Major, come tell me what I’m looking at.”
