out enemy positions on the animated map. Finally, it was time for the star of the show to take the stage.
General Harris was a bear of a man, with close-cropped hair and a ruddy complexion.
'Bastards are on the move,' he began, wasting no time getting to the subject. 'They hit the UN troops here, there, and there yesterday. We hit 'em at 1800 yesterday and at 0400 this morning. Initial reports of the strike pack that came back from this morning's hit-and-run shows a concentration here, with supply lines running up here. Those of you who I briefed for the 0900 package will hit them here.'
The general used his laser pointer like a light saber to stab the here to which he referred.
'The distance is short,' he explained, looking at the pilots who had been assigned the 0900 sortie. 'You won't need extra fuel, so double up on JDAMs and blow the shit out of those bastards.'
He sucked a mouthful of tepid water from a plastic bottle and looked out into the crowd.
'I'm looking for mules,' he said, scanning the shoulder patches of the assembled pilots for the insignia of the 95th Reconnaissance Squadron. 'There's one. Did you come alone, Captain?'
'They're in the back, sir,' Jenna Munrough confirmed.
'Good, I'm glad y'all didn't oversleep. See me after class, we need to talk.'
With that, Harris turned to a mission overview for the C-130 crews, whose difficult mission for the day would be flying into Khartoum to pick up a UN regiment and haul them into a makeshift field that was only about three kilometers from the shooting. Troy had always been glad not to have wound up flying transports. Flying into harm's way was one thing — landing and taking off there was another thing.
'Let's get down to business,' Harris said, eyeing the three pilots from the 95th who had moved down to the front of the room when the rest of the personnel had moved out to go to work.
'This is Eritrea,' he said, changing the image on the screen. 'This is the source of all our migraines. This is the snakepit the Al-Qinamah rebels crawl out of… and this is the snakepit that the Al-Qinamah bastards crawl back into. We can't hit 'em there… same old drill, y'know.'
The three pilots from the 95th nodded. It had indeed been the same in numerous wars into which the United States had been pulled through the years. The bad guys had a safe haven — a safe snakepit in Harris's lexicon — where they could hide, untouched by American bombs or bullets, and where they could plan attacks against American troops or their allies.
'We got some wiggle room, though.' Harris nodded. 'The UN resolution has okayed recon flights over Eritrea… which is obviously where you come in. I have birds that conduct photorecon over Eritrea, but I need Sigint. That's why they sent you. Only ISR has the gear that can capture signals intel the way we need it captured.'
'I wouldn't have thought these guys were that sophisticated, sir,' Hal replied.
'That's what we all thought initially, but we thought wrong,' Harris replied. 'These bastards may look like a bunch of bush bunnies running around in makeshift uniforms, but they got people who are running some pretty complicated covert channels.'
Harris proceeded to explain their mission for the day, and for the coming days. They were to enter Eritrean airspace at various points along its vaguely defined border with Sudan, from different and random directions each day.
The three Falcon Force pilots walked to their birds separately, a team in name only. They would work together because they were professionals, not because they were comrades. After their shared experience in the Colville, Hal and Troy could share no camaraderie, only awkwardness. Though she had reamed Troy for what he had done, Jenna kept her distance from both. She had her own agenda to fulfill. Like so many female pilots tasked with flying combat missions, she was single-minded in her determination to prove herself at least an equal to those of the traditional combat pilot gender.
Hal, by virtue of his having logged slightly more time in an F-16, was designated as flight leader, and he took off first. Once they were airborne over the desert east of Atbara, Troy and Jenna tucked their Falcons into an echelon formation off his right wing.
Troy sat back in his cockpit and relaxed. It was all very orderly, just like many of the training missions that he had flown in an F-16, but today would be different. Unlike the training flights, and unlike all of his missions in an EC-32, today he would be over territory where people really might be shooting at him.
He wasn't scared. His emotions varied between a sense of unreality and an adrenaline-fueled excitement. Ever since he had been bounced off the fighter track and shunted into ISR, he had imagined that he would never get a chance to fly a fighter into combat. Today, all that changed. He caught himself worrying that he might not get shot at.
A few minutes later, Hal called the initial point and all three F-16s banked left and dropped to one thousand feet. As briefed, they separated to a distance of about a kilometer to provide greater triangulation on the electronic whispers they scooped into the AN/APY-77 and AN/ASD-83 surveillance pods that hung on pylons beneath their wings. Troy didn't understand exactly how those things worked, but that wasn't his job. His job was to get them where they needed to be in order to do their jobs, then flick the switch.
As the concrete-colored desert flashed beneath him, Troy kept his eyes on the horizon and on the countdown clock that told him when the flight had passed into Eritrean airspace. The little LED stopped at triple zero, and he engaged the surveillance gear. That was it. There was nothing else to do but fly the mission as briefed, making a series of coordinated turns until the flight path took him back to Atbara.
The Eritrean desert looked identical to the Sudanese desert — an endless sea of rolling hills, an occasional deep gully or canyon, and rarely any sign of habitation. What villages there were flashed by in an instant. Anyone below would not hear the fast-moving, low-flying Falcons until they had passed.
Hal led them into a slight left turn at the appointed moment and dropped to five hundred feet. The large town of Barentu was straight ahead. The turbulence stirred up at the lower altitude rocked the aircraft as they passed over the rooftops.
Hal was first and Jenna second.
About half a kilometer off his right wing, Troy saw a flash out of the corner of his eye. Someone down there was firing tracers, probably from an AK-47 or some such infantry weapon. They missed by a wide margin. It's very hard to hit an airplane at five hundred feet and nearly five hundred miles per hour with an AK-47 and little or no warning.
Suddenly, it was over. The F-16s were back over the open desert, making the series of turns that would take them back to Atbara.
As they climbed back up to a higher altitude with less turbulence, Troy realized how tightly he had been gripping the stick to control the aircraft at low level. He relaxed a bit and thought back to that thirty-second pass over Barentu.
Was that all there was to it?
This is a piece of cake.
Then he remembered the tracer rounds.
It was the first time in his flying career that somebody had been shooting at him for real. He guessed that it would not be the last.
Chapter 7
Emergency evacuation?
In the six weeks that Troy Loensch and the other ISR pilots had been attached to Task Force Sudan, enemy strength and enemy brazenness had increased, and now even the sprawling base at the Atbara Airport was in danger of being overrun by Al-Qinamah rebel forces.
Despite American air support, the Al-Qinamah had beaten Sudanese and UN troops in several key battles. There was even some doubt as to whether the UN could protect Khartoum itself from being sacked by the AlQinamah. At Atbara, the Task Force was formulating an emergency evacuation plan.
As Falcon Flight streaked across the border for the second mission of the day over Al-Qinamah — controlled Eritrea, Troy realized how tenuous things had become. On their earlier couple of dozen missions, the war had seemed so abstract. For pilots of fast reconnaissance aircraft, small-arms fire was a negligible threat. Then the bad
