“Not going to happen,” said Jeff.
“You sure you don’t want us to fly over them and jump on the plane?” said Freah. The pilot glanced at him as if he were being serious.
Danny wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t.
“If you think you can make it, sure,” said Zen.
“No fucking way,” said the Osprey pilot.
“I think I can take out their engines without completely destroying the plane,” said Stockard. “You guys jump in once they’re in the water.”
“What do you think his guards are going to think of that?”
“Hopefully we catch them by surprise. Maybe we offer to let them go. I don’t know. I do know that the plane has to be stopped, one way or another.”
“One way or another.”
“I can take out the engines. I guarantee it.”
“How many soldiers does he have in there with him, Jeff?” asked Freah.
“Hold on and I’ll find out.”
Danny turned back to his men. “Liu, get the snipe gear.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant. He jumped up and went to grab the kit.
“I don’t know if I can hold us still enough for a sharpshooter,” said the Osprey pilot.
Danny nodded. “Yeah, I don’t think so either.”
Jeff pushed the throttle to max, whipping the Flighthawk downward in a screaming beeline at the Piaggio’s bow. He pulled hard, cutting a near-ten-g turn almost on top of the seaplane’s windshield.
The airplane stuttered downward. Mack’s voice, obviously shaking, screamed a strong of obscenities over the radio.
Jeff didn’t answer. It was pretty stupid of Mack to transmit. In fact, he should have used the diversion to knock out his captors – or jump from the plane.
Right.
Did he want to die?
“Two people, both in the front,” said Jennifer, reviewing the video at ultra-slow motion. “One on the right has got some clerical-type clothes.”
“Hopefully Mack hasn’t converted,” said Jeff, relaying the information to Danny.
The gun was against his neck.
“Honest to God. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” repeated Mack. “They must have fired a missile at us. I just barely got the hell out of the way.”
“If anything else attacks us, if you divert from the course I have set for you, you will die,” said the Imam. “The border is ahead. When the Egyptian planes challenge you, fall in behind them.”
One target. With any other weapon, it’d be impossible.
Buy gray-haired ol’ Anna Klondike’s magic gun?
Child’s play, no? She’d said it could shoot through glass.
Too bad she wasn’t here to take the shot herself.
Danny took the gun in his hand. Powder was the best shot, but he took forever to aim. On a quick see-’em, nail-’em, Liu was the man to go to.
Or Danny.
Had to be Danny. He couldn’t let one of the other guys live with missing.
Because he was going to miss. They’ be moving, his target would be moving. They would be no closer than three hundred feet. He’d have an instant to aim and react.
Ha.
Danny pulled on the visor, clicked the edge to get it active. Then he edged toward the Osprey’s rear door.
“All right, lower it,” he said after strapping a belt around one of the toggle restraints.
“Let me take the shot, Captain,” said Powder. “I can make it.”
“Piece of cake with this gear,” Danny told him.
“We’re going to have maybe a half second when Major Stockard blows out the engines and we pass in front of them,” said Powder. “No offense, Cap, but you know I’m a better shot.”
The Osprey began bucking as the door was opened.
“Hold it steady!” Danny screamed. “This is going to be hard enough!”
“Fuck you. I’m trying,” said the pilot over the com unit.
No way he was making the shot.
Zen waited for the Osprey pilot to tell him he was ready. The Egyptian fighters were now less than thirty seconds away, as was their country’s border. The Tomcats were about sixty seconds behind.
Sweat poured from every pore in his body, from his forehead to his back to his toes. His mouth felt like a smelter’s forge.
“We’re ready,” said the Osprey pilot.
Did he want to kill Mack, get his revenge? He could, easily. Hell, he’d essentially been ordered to.
No one would know he’d done it on purpose. All he had to do was stay on the trigger a hair second too long as the Flighthawk swooped in, or give just a hiccup’s worth of rudder the wrong way.
Or miss altogether. Let the Tomcats take the blame for killing him.
Jeff didn’t want to kill him. Just cripple him.
True revenge.
He couldn’t. Too many things prevented him. Duty. His conscience. Bree, in an odd way.
“We’re ready,” repeated the Osprey pilot, and Zen nailed the Flighthawk down, zooming toward the Piaggio, nudging the right engine into the right boresight.
An inch the wrong way.
He squeezed. A thin line of smoke appeared behind the propeller on the right engine. Before the line turned into a wedge he had leaned ever so slightly left, put three rounds into the second engine, depriving the Piaggio of power.
Danny bent his legs against the Osprey’s momentum as the rotocraft shot forward. The seaplane seemed to stop in midair, its nose falling right beneath him.
He saw the bastard Iranian, right through the glass. The man had a gun, but Danny didn’t see that, saw only the wide base of his neck above the canopy edge.
He squeezed the trigger.
There was a pop, the sound a champagne cork makes.
So this is what fate sounds like, Mack thought. this is what it feels like to die.
Then he realized he wasn’t dead at all.
Mack pulled on the controls, trying to hold the seaplane in an unpowered guide into the water.
In the next instant he slammed forward, waves lapping and someone screaming in his ears. He heard himself say he was alive and he heard someone, maybe the Imam, maybe Jeff Stockard, maybe his own conscience, tell him it was more than he deserved.
Dreamland
24 October, 0700 local
By the time Colonel Bastian was able to get time on the secure satellite line to Greece, he’d seen the CNN report on the raids twice. In the sonorous words of the overpaid commentator, the ‘Greater Islamic League is defunct and peace is once more assured.’
Dog wasn’t so sure. True, the Iranian mullahs had officially withdrawn with threat to attack shipping in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. And since they no longer had Silkworm missiles or MiGs, perhaps their pledge to ‘work with the UN and OPEC’ on ‘important matters of commerce’ could be taken at face value.
And true, the Libyans had been so decimated by the attacks on their facilities that their exalted leader would have to dip into his dress allowance for at least a decade to restock supplies.
Only two U.S. servicemen had died in combat, and another killed by his captors while a prisoner in Somalia. All other U.S. personnel were safe, including Mack Smith. The downed stealth fighter had been destroyed,
