mandate was a mandate, and the Brazilians had been unyielding in the restrictions imposed upon UpLink’s offensive aircraft capabilities.
“… got it?” Graham finished.
“Got it,” Winter said.
And reached for his weapons console.
Crouched over a sealed crate in the cargo bay of the DC-3, Manuel worked sweatily at its lid with a crowbar he’d snatched from a tool compartment behind the pilot’s cabin. His face dripped with moisture, and he could feel the downwash of the Osprey’s rotors through the bay door behind him, blasting sand and pebbles against the back of his head.
One comer of the lid came loose and Manuel shuffled quickly around on his knees to pry at another. He had managed to dash up the freight ramp and shelter himself in the plane as the first rockets from above had discharged their blinding flashes; an instant later the Osprey’s machine gun had opened fire. Peering outside, he’d seen his men stagger and fall across the smoke-covered airstrip, but then had noticed they were falling
Now, as then, Manuel would exploit it.
The second comer of the lid separated, the nails that anchored it to the crate bending as they were torn free. Breathless, panting, the wound on his arm reopened from his exertions and staining his bandages with fresh blots of crimson, Manual flung the crowbar carelessly aside, slipped the fingers of both hands under lid, and then hefted it up with a grunt of exertion.
The lid came off with a splintering crack of wood.
Manuel hurriedly reached inside the crate, his hands ripping layers of fibrous packing material out by the wad until, at last, they found the Stinger surface-to-air missile launcher.
The pilot of Batter Two had remained in a circular hover-and-support pattern above the field as Batter One had alighted, lowering its aft cargo ramp to discharge its strike team.
With only a dozen or so hostiles in the runway area, most of them incapacitated by the Sunbursts and Peace-maker rounds, there was little for the team to do but cleanup work. Minutes after Batter One landed, Graham radioed up word that the field was fairly well secured.
“Thanks for the assist, Batter Two,” he said. “Good luck in the valley below.”
“Roger, on our way,” the pilot of the airborne Osprey said, and veered off toward the ledge where it would drop its rappellers.
That was when Manuel stepped out onto the loading ramp of the DC-3 transport, the man-portable SAM launcher on his shoulder.
Manuel had little to decide in choosing his target: The Osprey on the ground had already discharged its men, and the one still in the sky was full of them.
His eye to the sight of the lightweight fiberglass launcher, his hand on its grip-stock, he angled it toward the flying aircraft and activated its argon-cooled IR seeker unit with the touch of a switch. A shaved second later he heard the beep tone indicating a lock-on, and pulled the Stinger’s trigger.
His heart stroked once, twice in his chest.
The missile shot toward the departing Osprey with a
The pilot and co-pilot of Batter Two did not see the plume of the heat-seeking missile as it streaked toward their fuselage, but the sensor pods on its nose and tail did, and instantly informed them of the threat via readouts on their dashboard and HUDs. At their low-level height above the plateau, the missile would only take a matter of three or four seconds to close, too quickly for an evasive maneuver, or for the limitations of human reaction time to allow either crew member to engage the Osprey’s IR countermeasures set.
Which was why its GAPSFREE avionics were failsafed to do so automatically.
Two independent defenses awakened at once: a thermal chaff/decoy dispenser on either wing that ejected bundles of aluminum strips and incendiary flares into the air, scattering infrared bogies to confound the missile’s nose-cone guidance system, and an infrared pulse lamp that accomplished much the same thing with tiny gusts of energy emitted at right angles to the fuselage.
The Stinger missile tracked yards wide of its mark to finally detonate against a blank wall of sandstone in its declining arc, harming nothing but the weeds and brambles clinging to its face.
Though Ralph Peterson had been with Sword for almost three years without ever having needed to use a weapon off the target range, his first shots fired in action would be lethal ones.
The night the ISS Compound was raided, he’d been on his day shift rotation, off duty, picking up a pretty girl in a Cuiaba barroom. He’d never thought he could possibly regret getting invited back to her apartment, but that turned out to be the case just the next day, when he reported to base and heard about the raid — and about the men who had died defending the facility in his absence.
He was not going to let anyone else be murdered without doing whatever he could to prevent it.
Peterson caught sight of the guy with the Stinger an instant after the SAM was triggered and twisted his VVRS barrel control to its man-killer setting, taking no chances. Then he called out for him to disarm, noticing an assault rifle over his shoulder in addition to the missile launcher in his grasp.
The guy half-obeyed his warning and did
As Manuel raised and angled the Steyr in Peterson’s direction, his movement a near-blur, Peterson hit him with two short bursts, aiming directly at his heart.
Blood sprayed from the center of Manuel’s chest, then ejaculated from his mouth in a red gush.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
After dropping four hundred feet from the table of the plateau in its VTOL attitude, Batter Two perched on a weathered spur of cliff above the ravine, its LZ chosen after careful examination of relief maps prepared from Hawkeye-I’s stereoscopic terrain images. From here its twenty-five-man strike team would rappel another hundred feet down to the floor of the trench, then wind their way between its sheer sandstone walls to the hostile camp.
The Osprey’s cargo ramp opened and the rappellers, led by Dan Carlysle, debarked in hurried single file, night-vision goggles lowered over their eyes, rubber-soled boots crunching on the rocky earth.
There were five ropes, five climbers to each. Removing blade-type titanium pitons from their web rigs, the men drove them into the projecting rock with mountaineer hammers, slipped their ropes into the piton rings, fastened them with square knots, and tossed the ropes over the side of the cliff, glancing downward as they uncoiled to make sure they were long enough to reach bottom.
Gloved hands gripped the ropes. One, two, three, four, five hard tugs tested that the pitons were securely anchored. Five nods confirmed that they were.
Straddling their ropes as they faced the anchor points, the lead men wound the ropes into harnesses around their bodies — once around the hip, then diagonally across the chest and back over the opposite shoulder. This done, they began their rapid descent along the cliff wall.
They moved in a kind of springing hopskip, bodies leaned out and away from the slope, backs straight, legs spread wide, treaded boot bottoms scuffing along the furrowed rock face. Their braking hands were down, their opposite hands raised to guide them along the rope-lengths.
The satellite maps had indicated firm, hard slope along most of the decline — favorable conditions — and that was essentially what they encountered. The last ten yards were more difficult to traverse, a scree of pebbles and
