She shrugged. 'Nothing much. Called down the wrath of God on the unbelievers, maybe. Just a little.'
'I don't understand.'
'You will,' Carolyn Howorth said. 'Just be patient, and you will.'
The V-22 Osprey droned through the night, its enormous twin props in the forward flight configuration, driving the aircraft along at just over 270 knots. On the red-lit cargo deck, twenty-four men in combat dress that gave them the look of malevolent beings from another world quietly waited, their rucksacks parked between their booted feet.
'We're approaching the drop zone, Mr. Dean,' the cargo master said over the intercom. 'Ten more minutes to drop.' 'Right.'
Dean looked aft along the twin lines of black-garbed and masked men seated in the blood-tinted glow of the Osprey's cargo deck. Members of the ultra-secret Black Cat Bravo assault force assigned to the NSA's Deep Black program, they were the National Security Agency's premier military strike team — or would be after tonight. This would be their first operational mission.
Over the past several years of Deep Black's operational history, Desk Three agents had been limited in combat to the firepower they could carry on their person — generally a semiautomatic pistol. The standard wisdom of covert ops held that if you actually needed to use a firearm, your mission had failed.
There were times, however, when something more was needed than a sound-suppressed pistol, a means of delivering major firepower with surgical precision. Various branches of the U. S. military had such units — the Army's Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces, the U. S. Marines' Force Recon, the Navy's SEAL Teams — and Deep Black's Desk Three had worked with all of them, generally through the auspices of USSOCOM, the U. S. Special Operations Command.
But for the past two years Rubens and Charlie Dean both had been pushing for a special-capabilities unit answerable solely to Desk Three. The need had become particularly evident last year, when Dean had undertaken a Desk Three op in the Arctic far north and the takedown of a Russian ship illegally holding American personnel who'd been operating an ice cap weather station. A SEAL assault unit had taken the ship, but difficulties in command control, in communications, and between individual personnel had caused difficulties that Black Cat was designed to prevent.
The Black Cat units, Alpha on the West Coast, Bravo on the East, were the result.
Technically, the team members were, like Dean, civilians — 'technically' because although the NSA was subordinate to the U. S. Department of Defense, with either a lieutenant general or a vice admiral as director, the Agency operated in a kind of twilight world straddling both the civilian and the military defense communities.
Of course, the NSA officially didn't even have a field-active component or human intelligence capabilities. Its original charter called for the Agency to handle electronic and signals intelligence — SIGINT — only, which it did by monitoring radio broadcasts, phone and satellite communications, and Internet connections worldwide.
But Desk Three existed because sometimes a human being had to place a listening device in a telephone or an intercept unit inside a computer keyboard to eavesdrop on communications. And sometimes those humans needed a lot of firepower, fast.
Hence, Black Cat.
'Cougars!' Dean called over the team's radio channel. 'Switch to tank oh-two!'
The Osprey's cargo deck had already been depressurized, and every man there was breathing pure oxygen through an attachment to 02 lines along the cargo deck's internal fuselage walls. They'd been breathing pure oxygen for the past forty minutes in order to flush all of the nitrogen out of their bloodstreams. Each man now made the switch-over to his own, personal oxygen bottle, throwing a connector switch, then unthreading the aircraft supply line from their oxygen system: At these altitudes there simply wasn't enough oxygen in the air to keep a man aware and conscious for more than a few minutes.
One by one, the men along the starboard side each raised a black-gloved fist with the thumb extended up. The Osprey could carry twenty-four passengeis in two rows of seats, more if they were floor-loaded. Dean and his eleven men were Cougar Team. The twelve men on the port side comprised Jaguar Team and would remain in reserve.
'Cougars! Prepare for jump!'
The eleven men along the starboard side of the aircraft stood as one.
The bad guys had thrown the team a curve just over twenty-four hours ago by separating the two ships that, until now, had been lashed together. The Atlantis Queen was still less than half a mile away from the Pacific Sandpiper, but the two vessels would have to be taken down separately now.
And so a second assault force was approaching the Sandpiper on board the USS Ohio with an ASDS riding piggyback on its after deck and Navy SEALs preparing to deploy. Jaguar Team, which originally had been intended to land on the Sandpiper, would now hang back in the orbiting Osprey and jump where they were needed.
The Cougars began going through their final checkout.
Dean pressed a key on the panel strapped to his left forearm, and the LED screen lit up with pertinent data — his altitude above sea level, now 22,745 feet; the temperature outside, minus twenty-three degrees; the wind speed downloaded from the Osprey's computer; the atmospheric pressure… it was all there, right down to the wind speed above the water at the target. He pressed another key, and the atmospheric data were replaced by a bio stats screen, including, again, the outside temperature, as well as heart rate, blood pressure, and the flow rate of 02 through his face mask.
He pressed a third key, and those data were replaced by a navigational screen showing his precise longitude and latitude, plus his current velocity — 271 knots — as clocked by NAVSTAR-GPS satellites in medium Earth orbit, eleven thousand miles overhead. Most important was the tiny, glowing red arrow on the extreme right, by his wrist, accompanied by the numerals 96845, the last three of which were flickering so quickly they were blurred as the number dwindled. It was the range, in yards, to the target, which now lay about fifty-five miles to the northeast. The arrow gave the direction to. the Atlantis Queen and was now pointed at the front of the Osprey's troop bay.
The wrist pad gave him all the data he needed to conduct a HAHO paradrop and landing on what otherwise would have been an impossible target — a moving target, in pitch-blackness, that was just seventy feet long and about fifty wide.
Each of the other men in the assault had the same device, and each was cycling through the different screens now, making sure they were operational. Once certain that their electronic systems were good to go, they began the time-honored physical check, with each man checking the straps, weapons, gear, and buckles of the man beside him, then standing still as the two switched roles.
Each man in the assault team wore a black GORE-TEX jumpsuit over a Polartec liner, cold-weather gloves and overboots, and an HGU-55/P parachutist's helmet with a built-in communications system that would allow him to talk to the other team members and, via a relay through a nearby AWACs aircraft, with Desk Three. His lower face was covered by an MBU-12P pressure demand oxygen mask. His left eye was covered by an AN/PVS-14D night-vision monocular, which left his right eye dark-adapted in the dim red glow of the Osprey's cabin lights.
They carried a mix of weapons. Four, including Dean, carried the ubiquitous H&K SD5 with infrared laser targeting mounts and an integral sound suppressor. Four others carried a fairly new entry in the U. S. military arsenal, the AA-12 automatic combat shotgun, while the last four carried CAR-15 assault weapons. Each man also carried a SIG SAUER P226 with a sound suppressor screwed tight to the muzzle.
Dean finished checking the straps and harness fastenings on Tom Fredericks, the man immediately in front of him, making sure in particular that his combat shotgun was secure on his back and the hose from his 02 cylinder was clear and not going to be torn by an opening parachute. Then Dean clapped Fredericks on the shoulder and allowed the other man to check him.
Final checkout complete, the twelve of them stood single file, facing the still-closed boarding ramp of the aircraft.
And then there was nothing to do but wait.
Chapter 24
