pounding Iraqi positions in Kuwait. Upgrades to the facility allowed it to base B-1s and B-2s during the Afghanistan campaign and again in 2003 for the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Strapped in the observer’s seat behind the pilot of the C-17 Globemaster cargo jet, Mercer had a clear view as the giant aircraft descended from out of the clouds after twenty hours of flight. The atoll was shaped like a squashed circle, an open ring of coral and sand that bulged on one side. It was there that an air base had been hacked from the jungle. As the plane dropped farther, he could see the long runway paralleling the beach and acres upon acres of parking ramps. He counted two dozen aircraft before giving up. Behind the landing strip was a village of prefabricated buildings constructed for those posted at this isolated location. Farther on was Camp Justice, a facility built in the wake of the September 11 attacks that housed military personnel involved in the global war on terror. Beyond the island nothing but ocean stretched to the horizon.
“We call it the dirt aircraft carrier,” the pilot called over the intercom, her voice filled with a Texas drawl. “Folks based here call it Gilligan’s Isle with guns.”
“Ever been here before?” Mercer asked Sykes, seated next to him in the second observer’s seat.
“Couple of times. Damn! That was a secret. Remind me I have to kill you later.”
The pilot eased back on the quad throttle controls and activated the thrust vectoring system that allowed the two-hundred-eighty-ton aircraft to land in less than three thousand feet no matter how large the load she carried. The air was thick and humid and the four engines labored.
Thundering over the runway threshold, the Globemaster floated on ground effects for a few hundred feet before settling on its multiple landing trucks. Without concern for passenger safety beyond getting them to their destination alive, the air force major slammed home the thrust reversers and Mercer pitched against his harness.
Almost immediately the plane slowed to taxi speed and swung off the 11,800-foot runway.
Now that they were on the ground, Mercer saw that the planes he’d noticed during their descent were B-52s, the venerable strategic bomber whose crews were generally younger than the aircraft they flew. At the end of the parking ramp were four futuristic buildings that looked like flattened domes. These round structures measured two hundred fifty feet wide and were almost six stories tall. The C-17 taxied to a spot in front of the last building and the pilot cut the engines. After being assailed by the whine of the turbojets for so long, the silence was disconcerting.
Mercer peered through the windscreen. The building was a hangar with open clamshell doors. Tropical light flooded the interior and yet the aircraft in the center of the cavernous space seemed to absorb it all. Although he’d seen the same plane the day before at Area 51, seeing it deployed and knowing what they would be attempting soon sent the first pangs of fear into his gut. Mercer’s fists clenched and he had to consciously work to get them to relax. Sykes noticed but said nothing.
Officially designated Spirit, the bat-winged B-2 had been dubbed the stealth bomber by the media. The aircraft in the hangar was part of the 509th Bomb Wing out of Whiteman AFB, Missouri. She was number 82-1065, a last-generation block 30 with every conceivable upgrade the builders at Northrop and the air force could devise. With an unlimited range due to her in-flight refueling capability, the stealth was the ultimate weapon of the U.S. doctrine of force projection. It could carry a variety of payloads in her rotary launchers, everything from thirty-six cluster bombs with their hundreds of individual bomblets to eight five-thousand-pound GBU-37 “bunker busters” to sixteen B83 multimegaton thermonuclear bombs capable of leveling entire cities.
For the past several months this particular B-2 had been stationed at Area 51, the linchpin to the development of the MMU-22 — what Sykes’s troops affectionately called the monkey bomb.
The concept for this secret weapon came from the military’s perceived need to covertly insert a commando team inside an area protected by heavy air defenses. Up until the development of the MMU-22 the only options were for troops to land beyond the radar umbrella and slog in on foot or risk a HALO (High Altitude Low Opening) parachute jump off the back ramp of a C-130. However, the Hercules cargo plane was as stealthy as a zeppelin and not much faster. Something better was needed, a covert way to get Special Operations soldiers to where they needed to be.
In the late 1990s, a British defense contractor was working on the development of pods that could be mounted under the wings of the Harrier jump jet. These man-sized capsules were designed for the rapid evacuation of wounded soldiers from deep behind enemy lines. Someone at the Pentagon expanded on the idea and wondered if it was possible to infiltrate troops the same way, but using a stealth platform such as the B-2 or F-117 Nighthawk fighter/bomber. From that abstraction grew the MMU-22.
The pods were slightly larger than telephone booths, doped in radar-absorbing composite material and formed in angular shapes to deflect incoming radar. Using the same global positioning satellite system that gave American bombs such precision, an onboard computer steered the MMU-22 as it fell. At a predetermined height, usually the minimum safe distance above the ground, the parachute would be deployed. Booker Sykes claimed accuracy of within twenty feet even in a crosswind of up to thirty knots.
Inside the pod, a Special Forces soldier was provided with enough room to stretch out, storage for combat harnesses, packs, equipment and the weapons necessary for their mission. While confining, the monkey bombs were lined with high-tech memory foam that made them relatively comfortable, provided the person inside didn’t suffer from claustrophobia. As Sykes had mentioned, there was a relief tube for a soldier to empty his bladder as well as a closed-circuit television attached to a camera at the bottom of the pod to give a view of the landing site during the descent.
Sykes loosened his safety straps and leaned over to Mercer. “Little more intimidating now that we’re here, huh?”
The B-2 resembled a black manta ray, its partially buried engine nacelles being the gills to feed the four General Electric F-118 turbofans, the bulbous cockpit the creature’s eyes. Even resting at its hard stand, the aircraft radiated menace. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Ten minutes later they were sweating on the tarmac. A steady breeze carried the iodine taste of the sea but provided no relief from the humidity. The ramp at the back of the C-17 was down and the aircraft’s loadmaster was coordinating a fleet of forklifts to remove the MMUs from the plane’s hold. Despite the tight security at Area 51 and here at Diego Garcia, the pods were crated in containers labeled MACHINE PARTS and wouldn’t be unpacked until they were in the hangar and the doors closed. There were eight MMUs in total, seven for Sykes and his Delta Force team and one for Mercer.
The six men, hand selected by Sykes, were perhaps the best-trained soldiers the United States had ever produced. They all came from the army and had excelled from their first days of basic training and in their extensive training since. Specialists in all forms of combat, they’d also learned to operate with initiative and flexibility. They were tighter knit than brothers, hard men who had trained through the human instinct of self-preservation to put their lives in the hands of the others. In Kosovo and Afghanistan and Iraq and a dozen other hot spots around the globe their bonds had been tempered by combat.
Because the occupant of the monkey bomb was virtually powerless once the weapon was loaded into the B- 2, Mercer’s two days of orientation in Nevada was more for the Delta operators to assess him for themselves. New members seconded to the team, soldiers who’d already proved they belonged through years in the military, still needed months of initiation and indoctrination before they were accepted.
It wasn’t enough for the men that Sykes had said Mercer was all right. He had to prove it himself. In the thirty hours he’d spent with just the men, not Sykes, he was forced on two five-mile runs, endured numerous timed sprints through an impromptu obstacle course, expended about a thousand rounds of ammunition on a firing range and went on three static line parachute jumps (the jump master had explained why he wanted to see three jumps by telling Mercer anyone can fall from an airplane once, only a few will try it a second time and only damned fools go back for thirds and those were the kind he wanted).
In the end, the team’s senior noncom, Angel Lopez, a streetwise Honduran immigrant who went by the nickname Grumpy, had pronounced Mercer just marginally more fit than a week-old corpse. In keeping with the sequence of names the men chose for each other — Sykes being Doc, the son of a preacher who struck out consistently with women getting called Bashful, the team’s jokester going by Dopey, and so on — Mercer was given the ignominious name of Snow White.
Mercer and Sykes strolled past the hangar. In the background they could hear Grumpy snarling at the men. “H’okay people, we got twenty hours until we launch and twenty-four hours of work. I want a full weapons check, equipment breakdown and ammo load distribution in twenty mikes.”
