“You’re shitting me, right, Sarge?” Morris asked. The MC-17 started a steep right bank over the base, lining up on the downwind side for another pass. “This place got hit by four or five nukes, and you’re saying it’s not as bad as we thought?”
“I’m picking up less than twenty rads per hour,” Brigadier General David Luger radioed from Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base. “That’s good for about six hours — and safe endurance will be much longer in the Tin Man armor. Should be more than enough time.”
“The young sergeant is a little skittish because he hasn’t had any kids yet, and he’s afraid his family jewels might get zapped, sir.”
“You’re just jealous because no woman would have
“Save it for when you’re back home, boys,” Luger said. “Get ready.”
It took a few minutes, but soon the MC-17 was making another low approach over the devastated runway. The big transport swooped in, descending to just over forty feet above the runway. As soon as the plane leveled off, at the approach end of the runway, Daniels stepped off the edge of the cargo ramp, holding the rail gun in his hands at port arms.
Morris had practiced these jumps back at Battle Mountain a few times, but he was relatively new to the unit and didn’t quite fully trust all this high-tech gear. He had made many parachute jumps of all kinds in his Marine Corps career — free-fall, static-line, HALO — and he’d even jumped from moving helicopters without a parachute before in thirty-thirty jumps — thirty feet above water, traveling thirty knots. But he had never jumped from a moving transport plane going three hundred knots—
But now was not the time to question the wisdom of doing it. He briefly wondered which job was stupider — jumping off a cargo plane like this or riding in that crazy Condor insertion aircraft, like the commander and the sergeant major did: a plastic turd with wings, dropped from inside a B-52 flying at thirty-six thousand feet, then riding in it for over three hours right over the bad guys’ heads! Now,
As they fell to Earth, gyros and accelerometers in their electronic battle-armor suits told them which way they needed to lean into the fall and at the same time measured their speed and the distance to the ground and adjusted the thrusters on their boots to compensate for being pushed by the jet blast from the MC-17. As they neared the ground, their boot thrusters fired at full power, slowing their fall — but even so, Daniels hit the ground hard and clattered to the concrete in a heap.
“You okay, Sarge?” Morris radioed.
“Affirmative,” Daniels responded. He was unhurt, but the rail gun’s data and power cable had broken. He cursed to himself and set the rifle near a distance-remaining sign on the edge of the runway so he could find it again. “Broke my damned rail gun, though. Let’s move, Hulk.”
The two Tin Man commandos in microhydraulically powered exoskeletons, working together, had the runway completely cleared of debris in minutes, including a partially crushed fuel truck. By the time they finished and stepped clear of the runway, the MC-17 had come around once again, smoothly touched down, and quickly powered to a stop using thrust reversers.
Daniels, Morris, and the others on board the MC-17 worked fast. After the transport plane lowered its cargo ramp, they unloaded what it carried: two forty-six-foot-long self-contained nuclear-biological-chemical — (NBC) — weapon-decontamination trailers, pulled by diesel tugs; two rubber water bladders on flatbed trailers, each holding three thousand gallons of fresh water and pulled alongside the decontamination trailers; and twenty NBC technicians.
Led by Daniels and Morris, the group headed toward the central west side of the runway. Beside where the west cluster of aircraft hangars used to be located were two low structures, less than four feet aboveground and, amazingly, still intact — they were each little more than a roof composed of eighteen inches of solid reinforced concrete, with a single steel door facing the aircraft parking ramp. One decontamination trailer backed up to each steel door, and the Tin Man commandos attached protective plastic tunnels to each shelter entrance and to the trailer entry door.
“Knock knock, Sergeant Major,” Daniels radioed.
“Door’s coming open,” Marine Corps Sergeant Major Chris Wohl responded. A few moments later, the steel doors swung open, and six individuals ran out of the underground shelters and directly into each door marked ENTER on both decontamination trailers. After the first group entered the trailers, Chris Wohl and Colonel Hal Briggs both emerged from the shelters, wearing Tin Man battle armor.
The two knocked fists with Daniels and Morris in greeting. “Good to see you guys,” Hal Briggs said. “What’s the situation?”
“No opposition, aircraft is code one, all personnel good to go, sir,” Daniels responded.
“What are the radiation levels?”
“We’re reading about forty rads per hour here. That’s good for about four hours’ exposure time. It’s a bit higher out on the parking ramp, but the isolation chamber inside the MC-17 and in the cockpit is about ten to fifteen rads. The max we detected inside our suits has been five rads per hour.”
“We gotta hand it to the Russkies — they know how to build bomb shelters,” Hal said. “We picked up just five rads during the attack and less than two rads per hour since then. Pretty damned good.”
“How many made it inside, sir?”
It was obvious, even concealed by his battle armor, that Briggs was sorrowful. “We have fifty-one in our shelter and forty-two in the other,” Hal said. “We were shoulder to shoulder in there. We managed to grab about thirty Russians and take them in with us.”
“My God,” Daniels breathed. He knew that the Air Battle Force had flown about a hundred fifty personnel into Yakutsk with them on the MC-17s, plus several more on the Megafortresses. That meant that about ninety American technicians had died in the attack, plus the aircrew members who were caught on the ground when the nukes hit.
The decontamination trailers had four separate stations, each of which could accommodate six people at once. Each person removed excess contaminated equipment in the first room, which was ventilated with filtered air to remove any radioactive fallout. Next each person scrubbed and showered in warm water and detergent in the second compartment, with clothes still on. In the third compartment, clothing was stripped off under water-and- detergent showers and discarded; and in the fourth compartment, each person again showered and scrubbed in warm water and detergent, then dried with warm-air blowers that exhausted to the outside. The person then dressed in clean clothes, underwent a quick medical scan to be sure as many radioactive particles as possible were removed, then were transported back to the MC-17. A positive-pressure plastic tunnel led from the decontamination trailer to a shielded waiting area set up in the forward part of the cargo compartment, with a positive-pressure filtered-air ventilation system activated to keep radioactive particles out.
“Twenty minutes to do six people per trailer, about thirty-six people per hour — we should be done in less than three hours,” Hal Briggs radioed. “I’m not sure how we’ll decontaminate the Tin Man battle armor — we might end up leaving it behind and blowing it in place.”
“Decontaminate the armor if you can,” Dave Luger said, “but don’t waste time with it. If you can’t safely decontaminate it or keep it separate from the personnel, go ahead and blow the gear, and then get the hell out. We’ll be leaving the decontamination trailers behind, unfortunately.”
“Any activity around the base?” Briggs asked.
“Lots of it, but even the aircraft are staying at least ten miles away,” Luger said. “They know you’re there, but it looks like they’re leaving you alone — at least for now.”
That’s correct, sir,” General Nikolai Stepashin said. “Our reconnaissance aircraft observers believe that the aircraft is an American C-17 ‘Globemaster’ transport plane. It was carrying what they believe to be decontamination vehicles. They are attaching the vehicles to the base’s bomb shelters, waiting there a period of time, then driving over to the transport. It is apparent that the Americans are decontaminating their personnel and are preparing to airlift the survivors out of Yakutsk.”
“This is unbelievable!” President Anatoliy Gryzlov shouted. “I cannot believe the sheer audacity of these Americans! They have flown another military aircraft right past our air defenses and landed at a Russian air base
