Shadow Command

exasperation at all, “unless they have audio sensors.”

“If we had proper intel before starting this mission, we’d know if the Iranians had audio sensors,” Macomber groused some more. “We need to plan delaying the drone launch until we’re within two miles of the base, not three. You got that, Turlock?”

“Roger,” Charlie acknowledged.

“Next I need—” Macomber stopped when he noticed a flicker of a target indicator appearing again in the very periphery of his electronic visor’s field of view. “Dammit, there it is again. Wohl, did you see it?”

“I saw it that time, but it’s gone,” Wohl responded. “I’m scanning that area…negative contact. Probably just a momentary sensor sparkle.”

“Wohl, in my book, there’s no such thing as ‘sensor sparkle,’” Macomber said. “There’s something out ahead of you causing that return. Get on it.”

“Roger,” Wohl responded. “Moving off-track.” He used a small thumbwheel mouse to change direction in the animation, waiting every few meters until the computer added available detail and plotted more warnings or cautions regarding whatever lay ahead. The process was slow because of all the wireless computer activity, but it was the only available means they had of rehearsing their operation and getting ready to fly it at the same time.

“We’re supposed to be commandos — there’s no such thing as a ‘track’ for us,” Macomber said. “We have an objective and a million different ways of getting there. It should be a damned piece of cake with all these pretty pictures floating in front of us — why is this making my head hurt?” Neither Turlock nor Wohl replied — they had grown quite accustomed to Macomber’s complaining. “Anything yet, Wohl?”

“Stand by.”

“Looks like tire tracks just past the wash,” Charlie reported. “Not very deep — Humvee-sized vehicle.”

“That’s new,” Macomber said. He checked the source data tags. “Fresh intel — downloaded in just the past fifteen minutes by a low-altitude SAR. A perimeter patrol, I’d guess.”

“No sign of vehicles.”

“That’s the reason we’re doing this, isn’t it, kids? Maybe the general was right after all.” It sounded to both Wohl and Turlock as if Macomber hated to admit that the general could be right. “Let’s proceed and see what —”

“Crew, this is the MC,” the mission commander, Marine Corps Major Jim Terranova, cut in over the intercom, “we’ve commenced our countdown to takeoff, T-minus fifty-six minutes and counting. Run your pre-takeoff checklists and prepare to report in.”

“Roger, S-One copies,” Macomber responded…except, as he noted himself with not a small bit of shock, that his words came out through an instantly dry, raspy throat and vocal cords, with barely enough breath for the words to escape his lips.

If there was one thing these guys at the High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and the Air Battle Force were really good at, Macomber had learned early on, it would definitely be computer simulations. These guys ran simulations on everything — for every hour of real flight time, these guys probably did twenty hours on a computer simulator beforehand. The machines ranged from simple desktop computers with photo-realistic displays to full-scale aircraft mockups that did everything from drip hydraulic fluid to smoke and catch on fire if you did something wrong. Everyone did them: air crews, maintenance, security, battle staff, command post, even administration and support staffs conducted drills and simulations regularly.

A good percentage of all the personnel at both Elliott and Battle Mountain Air Bases, probably one-tenth of the five thousand or so at both locations, were involved solely in computer programming, with other private and military computer centers tied in all around the world contributing the latest codes, routines, subroutines, and devices; and at least a third of all the code these top secret super-geeks wrote 24/7 had to be involved solely with simulations. This was his first real trip into space, but the simulations were so realistic and so numerous that he truly felt as if he had done this dozens of times before…

…until just now, when the mission commander announced they were less than an hour from takeoff. He had been so busy preparing for the approach and infiltration into Soltanabad — just three hours to get ready, when he demanded no less than three days to prepare in the Combat Weather Squadron! — that he had completely forgotten that they were going to be blasted into space to get there!

But now that frightening reality hit home with full force. He was not going to just pile his gear into a C-17 Globemaster II or C-130 Hercules for a multiday trip to some isolated airstrip in the middle of nowhere — he was going to be shot almost a hundred miles into space, then flutter down through the atmosphere through hostile airspace to a landing in a desert in northeastern Iran, where quite possibly an entire brigade of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps fighters, the elite of the former theocratic regime’s terror army, could be waiting for them.

In the time it would normally take for him to just arrive at his first transition base en route to his destination, this mission would be completed! That simple fact was absolutely astounding, almost unbelievable. The time compression was almost too much to comprehend. And yet, here he was, sitting in the actual spacecraft — not a simulator — and the clock was ticking. By the time the sun rose again, this mission would be over, and he’d be debriefing it. He would have entered low-Earth orbit, traveled halfway across the globe, landed in Iran, scoped it out, blasted off again, re-entered low-Earth orbit, and hopefully landed at a friendly base…

…or he’d be dead. There were a million unforeseen and un-simulatable things that could kill them, along with the hundred or so simulatable things they practiced dealing with day after day, and even when they knew something bad was going to happen, sometimes they couldn’t deal with it. It would either work out okay, or they’d be dead…or a hundred other things could happen. Whatever would happen, it was all going to happen now.

Macomber certainly felt the danger and the uncertainty…but as it so often did, the frenetic pace of every activity dealing with McLanahan and everyone at the High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center and the Air Battle Force quickly pushed every other feeling of dread out of his conscious mind. It seemed a dozen voices — some human, but most computerized — were speaking to him at the same time, and all needed acknowledgment or an action, or the speaking quickly changed to “demanding.” If he didn’t respond quickly enough, the computer usually ratted on him, and a rather irate human voice — usually the mission commander but sometimes Brigadier General David Luger, the deputy commander himself, if it was critical enough — repeated the demand.

He was accustomed to performing and succeeding under intense pressure — that was the common denominator for any Special Operations commando — but this was something entirely different: because at the end of all the sometimes chaotic preparation, they were going to shoot his ass into space! It seemed Terranova made the announcement just moments earlier when Macomber felt the Black Stallion move as four Laser Pulse Detonation Rocket System engines, or “leopards,” in full turbofan propulsion mode, easily propelled the aircraft to Dreamland’s four-mile-long dry lake bed runway.

Whack was not afraid of flying, but takeoffs were definitely his most fearsome phase of flight — all that power behind them, the engines running up to full power sucking up tons of fuel per minute, the noise deafening, the vibration its most intense, but the aircraft still moving relatively slowly. He had done many Black Stallion takeoffs in the simulator, and he knew that the performance numbers even with the spacecraft still in the atmosphere were impressive, but for this part he was definitely on pins and needles.

The initial takeoff from the dry lake bed runway at Elliott Air Force Base was indeed spectacular — a massive shove as the LPDRS engines in turbofan mode moved into full military thrust, then a rapid, high-angle climb-out at well over ten thousand feet per minute after a short takeoff roll. The first few seconds of the run-up and takeoff roll seemed normal…but that was it. At full military power in turbofan mode, the four LPDRS engines developed one hundred thousand pounds of thrust each, optimized by solid-state laser igniters that superheated the jet fuel before ignition.

But high-performance takeoffs were nothing new to Whack or to most commandos and others who flew in and out of hostile airstrips. He had been in several huge C-17 Globemaster II and C-130 Hercules transport planes where they had to do max-performance takeoffs to get out of range of hostile shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles in the vicinity of the airstrip, and those planes were many times larger and far less high-tech than the Black Stallion. There was nothing more frightening than the feel of a screaming five-hundred-thousand-pound C-17 Globemaster III