behind it, then came back up and began firing at the oncoming troops.
He struck one soldier in the leg, caught another in the thigh, as they suddenly raked his position with so much fire that he could no long hear the whomping of rotors, only the echoing bang and subsequent ricocheting of rounds off metal.
He keyed the mike of his emergency radio. “This is Ghost Hawk on the ground! I’m being engaged by Russian infantry! What’s the ETA on that rescue bird?”
A sudden and nearby thump made him whirl.
Grenade. Right there.
He sprang up, knew that if he ran backward, they’d simply gun him down.
So he did what any other red-blooded American fighter pilot would do: he ran directly at the troops, screaming and firing.
The grenade exploded behind him, knocking him to his chest. That was when the first stabs of pain came, when he realized he’d been shot — and not just once.
He glanced up at the Russians, cursed as one came over, raised his pistol.
Stephanie’s voice was coming from the radio. He should have told her how he felt, should have told her what she meant to him.
But at least now, at the end, he had that music, that sweet music of her crying out.
As Major Stephanie Halverson lifted off, her eyes burned with the knowledge that Jake was dead.
She’d been monitoring the radio, had listened to his last transmission. She wanted more than anything to streak back there and finish off the men who had killed him. But it was too late now.
The skies above the Northwest Territories were alive with incoming transports and fighters, and Halverson and the other three pilots training at Igloo Base had been tasked with getting up there and intercepting as many as possible, all while attempting to evade detection from those fighters.
There would be no dogfight — just a standoff surgical removal of those lumbering AN-130s.
But she could barely keep her thoughts focused on the task. She kept telling herself that she shouldn’t have been so distant from him, that she could sense how he’d felt about her, that she, too, had felt the same.
She raced into the heavens, going supersonic, moving into her standoff position to begin launching missiles at the cargo planes, now at 28,450 feet and descending rapidly.
A check of the 130s’ range revealed they were about fifteen kilometers away, within the Sidewinder’s killing zone. Her electronic countermeasures — including the jamming of enemy radar systems — were fully engaged.
And her first two missiles were locked on.
Her wingman, Captain Lisa Johansson, call sign Sapphire, announced that she, too, was locked up and ready to fire. The other two JSF fighters were already engaging the enemy.
Halverson opened her mouth to give the order—
Just as the alarms went off in her cockpit.
Incoming enemy missiles launched from Sukhoi SU- 35 long-range interceptors. She already had the angle of arrival.
The computer identified the missiles as Vympel R-84s, the latest incarnation of Russia’s short-range, air-to- air missile, considered by most combat pilots to be one of the world’s most formidable weapons.
“Sapphire, abort missile launch! We got incoming. Check countermeasures. IR flares and chaff! Evade!”
SEVENTEEN
In February 2006, the Marine Corps Special Operation Command (MARSOC) was activated, which in effect made Force Recon Marines an official part of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) team along with the other special operations units — SEALS, Rangers, Army Special Forces, and Special Tactics teams. MARSOC was fully constituted in 2010 and became part of the Joint Strike Force at that time as well.
Consequently, when the Russians began their move into Canada, MARSOC was among the first to get the call.
And that particular call had funneled down through command to one Staff Sergeant Raymond McAllen, who was now sprinting back to his two-story barracks to get packed up and get the hell out of Southern California, bound for the Northwest Territories, more than two thousand miles away.
Elements of the 13th Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit (MEU) were being deployed from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton up to Alberta. They were pumped full of lightning and ready to crack and boom onto the scene. The only thing missing from all the excitement was Jonesy.
And his absence was sorely felt by the five remaining members of the Force Recon team: McAllen, Palladino, Szymanski, Friskis, and Gutierrez.
Five minutes prior, McAllen and the rest of the Outlaws had been listening to their company commander, Colonel Stack, going over the warning order; the CO singled out McAllen’s team to spearhead the company’s reconnaissance operations.
Marine Corps brass, along with the JSF, believed that the Russians would move a large ground force, maybe even a couple of brigades, into several areas of Alberta. They would take the town of High Level and use it as a staging area, and would also move down Highway 63 in the eastern part of Alberta toward Fort McMurray and the Athabasca Oil Sands north of “Fort Mac.”
Much to McAllen’s chagrin, his new assistant team leader, Sergeant Scott Rule, had to open his dumb-ass mouth and ask what was meant by “oil sands.” The CO loved to hear himself talk and loved to impress everyone with his attention to details, whether they put you to sleep or not. That he didn’t have a PowerPoint presentation was the only saving grace.
So they got the one-minute lecture about oil sands, a mixture of crude bitumen (a semisolid form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The CO even knew that the bitumen was used by the aboriginals back in the day to waterproof their canoes.
Point was, the oil sands could be turned into real, usable oil, and the Russians wanted control of all the reserves.
But they wouldn’t get them — not if United States Marines stood in their path.
Once McAllen and his boys arrived in Alberta, they would chopper way up Highway 63, establish a reconnaissance post, deploy two robo-soldiers that would be controlled by human operators, and confirm where lead elements of the enemy force were heading.
They were a small piece of a much larger defensive dubbed Operation Slay the Dragon by the JSF, an operation that included all branches of the U.S. and European Federation armed forces, with the Euros focusing on the major city of Edmonton.
Now, back in his barracks, a shirtless Sergeant Rule approached McAllen, cocked a brow, all pierced nipples and twenty tattoos. “Hey, Ray, you got a minute?”
“If this is about what we discussed earlier—”
“Look, man, you set me straight. I’m so squared away that if you brush against me, my corners will cut you.”
“Nice.”
“But I’ll never be Jonesy. Nobody will. Just want you to know that I’m giving you a hundred and ten percent. Always.”
“We’ll see how long it takes for you to create your own shadow. And I hope it’s a pretty long one. The other thing is, I got about eight, nine years on you. In my book, that makes me old school.” McAllen reached out and flicked one of Rule’s nipple rings. “Maybe the Corps’s gotten a little soft on this crap since you hide them under your shirt, but I haven’t.”
“I’ll remove them, Sergeant — if they bother you that much.”
“I just want to be sure we’re on the same page.”
“We are. Good. Now don’t forget to pack an extra sock.”
“Huh?”
