Countdown to Midnight, page 13
“You think we’re being watched?”
“I know that we’re being watched,” Kossak countered gravely. “Certainly by at least one of that man Bokharai’s spies. And also quite likely by an agent for the local Taliban.”
Flynn nodded. Cover story or not, the presence of armed foreigners and a small squadron of different types of aircraft in this isolated corner of Afghanistan was bound to attract a lot of unwanted attention. But as long as both Bokharai and the Taliban anticipated making a profit from their activities here, neither side would want to cause trouble. In all probability, they would only watch and wait for several days to see what was really happening before they took any action. And that ought to give his Quartet Directorate team the opportunity it needed to carry out this mission—and then to vanish before the rival Afghan factions realized they had been duped. “Think you and Cooke and the others can hold down the fort here while I’m gone?” he asked.
“It will not be a problem,” the Pole assured him. “And if, as I expect, our friends in the Taliban come around soon demanding their own protection money, we will act like good little criminals and meekly pay what they ask.” His teeth showed again. “Admittedly, it would be cheaper and more satisfying to shoot them, but life is never perfect.”
Flynn nodded. This operation was expensive and getting more expensive by the minute. Between chartering the large Il-76 cargo jet, upgrading the BushCat and Predator as needed, and the bribes required to pay off potential troublemakers here in Afghanistan, the costs were already north of two million dollars. And unlike a government, the Quartet Directorate could not simply print more money. Thanks to shrewd investments made decades ago by its wealthier founding members, Four had deep pockets . . . but its resources were not limitless.
He shook himself mentally. That was another good reason to kick this mission into higher gear as planned. Besides, nothing about it would get easier or safer with the passage of time. With a curt, imperious gesture to the Pole for the benefit of any hidden observers, he headed straight for the BushCat, which was parked at the edge of the runway. Kossak trailed close behind him, still playing the role of a dutiful bodyguard protecting his dangerous employer.
The small fabric-skinned plane already had its propeller turning. Flynn came around behind the tail and ducked under its high overhead wing. There, safely out of sight of any watchers, he turned back to Kossak and thrust out his hand. “Okay, Tadeusz. Stay safe.”
“And you as well, Nick,” the Pole said solemnly as they clasped hands. “Good hunting.”
With a nod of thanks, Flynn swung away and climbed up into the cabin’s right-hand seat. He buckled in and put on a radio headset. Then he pulled the soft-sided door closed and latched it.
Laura Van Horn, looking far more comfortable now in jeans, a khaki shirt, and her own light jacket, was in the pilot’s seat on his left. Her eyes flicked from left to right across her instrument panel, studying the readings it showed. “Oil pressure and engine temperature are both in the green,” she confirmed aloud, evidently running through the last items of a preflight checklist. She reached out and tapped an icon on the large multifunction display Quartet Directorate technicians had installed in place of some of the original controls. A small bar turned from green to red. “Our transponder is off.”
She glanced sideways at him with a quick grin. “There’s no point in telling everyone where we are, right?”
Flynn nodded emphatically. Aircraft transponders were a critical part of air safety and traffic control. When interrogated by radar, a transponder automatically sent back a code identifying the plane and reported its current altitude. That gave radar operators a good picture of where all the aircraft flying in their sector were, greatly reducing the odds of midair collisions. But having a simpleminded radio transponder ever ready to blurt out your identity and precise location was the very last thing you wanted when you were attempting a covert, low-level penetration of hostile airspace.
Van Horn reached back into the tiny cargo area just aft of the BushCat’s cabin. Flynn’s small suitcase was already stowed there, behind his own seat. She turned back around holding two pairs of night vision goggles. She handed one to him and donned the other herself, adjusting it to fit over her radio headset.
He followed her lead and switched the goggles on. The darkness around him brightened immediately, turning their surroundings almost as clear as day, though without any real distinct color. Everything was in shades of black, white, and gray. The unlit gravel runway, largely invisible before, now stretched out plainly to both sides of the small plane. “Let there be light,” he said with satisfaction.
“And a darned good thing, too,” Van Horn replied with a husky laugh. “Because otherwise I’d basically be flying blind.” She pushed another control, tuning the BushCat’s radio to a low-powered tactical channel. “Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat. We’re ready for takeoff,” she said into her headset mike. “Report your status.”
“Tomcat is in position, Tiger Cat,” Sara McCulloch replied from her remote piloting station inside the Il-76. “Ready when you are.”
“Copy that,” Van Horn said. “Rolling now.” She released the brakes and ran up her throttle a little more. The aircraft’s one-hundred horsepower Rotax 912ULS four-stroke engine responded smoothly. Slowly, the BushCat trundled forward onto the runway and, guided by her feet on the rudder pedals, swung into position. She braked to a stop. Then she reached up to the flaps control handle over her head, pulled it down a notch, and locked it in. “Flaps set at seventeen degrees.” She leaned forward and pushed another icon on her main display. “Fuel pump is on for takeoff.”
“Tomcat is standing by at your six,” McCulloch radioed. “I have your aft IR beacon in sight.”
Flynn checked one of the little mirrors the ground crew had attached just forward of the doors. There, back behind them near the north edge of the runway, he could see the Predator UAV. The praying mantis shape of the drone now looked pregnant. A streamlined cargo container had been slung below its long, thin fuselage. Fully loaded now, the Predator needed at least five thousand feet of runway to get into the air, a far cry from the few hundred feet required by the BushCat. Dust kicked up by the drone’s rear-mounted propeller eddied away downwind, appearing as a bright white plume in his night vision goggles.
“Tomcat, this is Tiger Cat,” Van Horn said calmly. “Departing runway one-six.”
She revved up again and started her takeoff roll. The little plane gathered speed fast and lifted off smoothly, climbing fast into the night sky. At five hundred feet, she pushed the flaps control handle back up and leveled off. They flew on low over Zaranj, continuing south by southeast at eighty-two knots to maintain the deception that they were headed for Pakistan.
Flynn checked the mirror again. The Predator was still on their tail, trailing them by several hundred yards. He turned back around in time to see the last clusters of mud-brick houses on the southern fringe of Zaranj sliding past beneath their wings. Ahead, beyond the BushCat’s whirring propeller, a desolate landscape stretched in all directions—an empty, lifeless country marked only by the snakelike ripples of bone-dry watercourses and low mounds of heaped earth and rock.
Twenty minutes later, Van Horn tweaked her centerline control stick to the right and forward a little, initiating a gentle, descending turn to the southwest. “Tomcat,” she radioed. “Starting my run for the border.”
“Copy that, Tiger Cat,” the drone’s remote pilot acknowledged. “Following you around.” A sensitive receiver aboard the Predator had picked up the BushCat’s short-range radio transmission and relayed it back to Zaranj via satellite link.
Concentrating hard, Van Horn leveled off again—this time at just a hundred feet. They were low enough now to make out individual boulders, lone dwarf trees, and clumps of withered thornbushes through the windshield. She continued making small adjustments to their altitude, climbing a few dozen feet to clear low rises and then descending back down into the shallow valleys beyond. “Next stop, Indian country,” she said conversationally. She shot Flynn a quick, slashing grin. “Having fun yet, Nick?”
“Oh, more than I can say, ma’am,” he drawled, working hard to sound unfazed. “But I’d sure appreciate it if you kept your eyes on the road.” He’d never much liked flying so close to the ground. And right now, he couldn’t help visualizing the little aircraft’s fixed landing gear smacking into a big rock or snagging in the branches of a tree—sending them cartwheeling to destruction. Then he shook his head at his own foolishness. All things considered, it was probably a bit late to start regretting his career choices.
Van Horn’s smile grew a little bigger. “Relax, cowboy. This is still the easy part of the trip. It only really gets hard when we hit the mountains.”
Flynn winced. “You know,” he said tightly. “Hit isn’t exactly the word I’d have chosen right there.”
She laughed. “I was speaking figuratively, not literally.” She shrugged. “Besides, if you’d been a professional aviator when you were in the Air Force, instead of an intelligence puke, you’d know that we call the process of interacting with the ground in an uncontrolled manner a crash.”
Realizing he was in an unwinnable fight, Flynn held up his hands in surrender.
Little more than a shadow gliding through darkness, the BushCat flew on just above the desert floor, arrowing southwest toward the border with Iran. The Predator tagged along behind it. They were still more than three hundred nautical miles and almost four hours flying time from their destination.
Fifteen
Deep in the Jebel Barez Mountain Range, Over Central Iran
Later That Night
The BushCat swooped low over a jagged, sawtooth saddle between two higher peaks and plunged down the other side. Hit by a powerful updraft boiling up those steep slopes, its fabric-covered wings flexed and rippled. “Hold together, baby,” Laura Van Horn said quietly, almost as a prayer. She throttled back slightly and raised the nose a couple of degrees to shed some velocity. Though solidly built for a light aircraft, the BushCat’s rated VNE, the speed it was never supposed to exceed, was only 108 knots. Going any faster risked having the plane’s aluminum frame fold up under the stress—instantly turning what had been a flyable machine into a tangled mess of torn fabric and crumpled metal spinning uncontrollably down out of the sky.
Nick Flynn gripped the strut over his head as she banked hard away from another soaring spire of rock. The lightweight aluminum bar was one of the structural members that formed the basic shell of their BushCat’s tiny cabin. Otherwise, the only thing between him and a couple of thousand feet of empty space was a thin layer of zippered Dacron-Trilam cloth.
Mountains rose on all sides, some more than ten thousand feet high. Their towering black masses blotted out whole swathes of stars in the night sky. Formed tens of millions of years ago by volcanic eruption and upthrust, the Jebel Barez ran like a spine of hardened lava through the central Iranian highlands—separating their more fertile plains from the vast, waterless deserts in the east.
Trying to navigate safely through this maze of razor-edged heights, sheer cliffs, and narrow, boulder-strewn clefts would have been tough enough in an aircraft equipped with terrain-following radar and sophisticated navigation systems tied into a full-spectrum heads-up display. It was an order of magnitude more difficult in a tiny plane fitted with only the bare minimum of electronics to save weight and electrical power. A GPS-linked digital map open on the BushCat’s sole multifunction display provided some idea of where they were . . . but for the most part, their survival depended on Van Horn’s skill as a pilot, her situational awareness, and her uncanny ability to anticipate danger and react in time.
Insane as this harrowing nighttime flight through mountains seemed, Flynn knew it was their only real chance to slip through Iran’s air defenses unnoticed. There were relatively few air surveillance radars and surface-to-air missile batteries sited to cover the sparsely populated eastern third of the country. That was not the case farther to the west and along the coast of the Persian Gulf, where a thickening web of interlocking radars, missile units, antiaircraft guns, and interceptor bases lay in wait for any intruder.
He swallowed hard as Van Horn pulled back sharply on the stick, climbing steeply to clear another ridge. Their airspeed bled off fast, dropping below fifty knots. Just before the BushCat stalled out, she lowered its nose again and dove—rolling to follow the trace of a slender gap between two much higher summits.
“You still with me, Tomcat?” she radioed.
“Roger that, Tiger Cat,” the Predator’s remote pilot replied tersely. “Still hanging on your six.”
Flynn could hear the tension in Sara McCulloch’s voice. Because her flight control inputs had to be relayed through a satellite link, there was always a tiny delay before the Predator responded to her commands. It wasn’t much, usually considerably less than a second. But even flying at only eighty knots, the UAV would travel more than a hundred feet in that short interval. And in this rugged country that was often the difference between survival and slamming head-on into a wall of rock. Trying to thread a remote-piloted drone through the middle of these mountains on its own would have been completely impossible. Only by closely following the IR beacon fixed to the BushCat’s tail could McCulloch maneuver her ungainly Predator away from obstacles in time . . . and then often only by the narrowest of margins.
His jaw clenched. If they lost the drone on the way in, this whole operation was a bust—and he and Laura Van Horn would find themselves trapped deep inside Iran, without any real hope of rescue. Right now, they had no room at all for error or accident. His college ROTC instructors would have failed him outright for coming up with a boneheaded scheme like this. And they probably would have been right, he knew. Friction—the combination of random and unforeseen events which could not be predicted—was the only real constant in war.
The BushCat climbed again, cresting over another narrow ridge with less than a hundred feet to spare. Ahead, the ground fell away sharply, spreading out into an open plain. A band of fields and orchards stretched north and south. Flanked by two rivers, the volcanic soil here was immensely fertile. A small sea of yellow lights off to their right marked the location of Jiroft, a city of nearly one hundred thousand people. Other faint specks of light here and there pinpointed several of the tiny farming villages which dotted the broad valley.
Van Horn took them down onto the deck, jogging first right and then back left to keep as much distance as possible between them and any settled places. The Predator tagged along behind. This far inside Iran, the passage of low-flying aircraft wasn’t likely to raise an alarm—but there also wasn’t any point in giving the fates extra opportunities to screw them over.
“That was some seriously badass flying,” Flynn told her quietly.
She nodded tightly. “Just don’t jinx us,” she warned. They still had two more stretches of rough country to pass through, both of them offshoots of the larger Jebel Barez chain. “What’s my current ETA to the landing zone?” she asked.
Flynn studied the terrain map on their multifunction display. He traced their planned flight path. On a straight line course, they were about eighty nautical miles from the LZ he’d picked out using a combination of satellite photos and topographical charts. Of course, there was no way they could fly anything like a direct approach across those mountains and escarpments, not if they wanted to stay low enough to avoid detection by Iranian radars. Dodging and weaving through meandering passes and valleys would add miles and miles to their journey. He did some quick mental math. “Sixty minutes, plus or minus ten either way,” he said.
Van Horn’s mouth turned down a bit. She reached out and touched the display, switching it to show their engine and other status readouts. “Given our current fuel state, that’s really pushing the envelope,” she commented coolly.
“Pushing the envelope so far that we run out of gas and fall out of the sky?” Flynn asked.
She sniffed. “Have a little faith, Nick. We’ll make it.” Then she turned her head and gave him a shit-eating grin. “Even if I have to make you get out and push.”
“You know, remind me to lecture you on basic physics sometime,” he shot back.
“I thought you ducked out on the hard sciences in school?” Van Horn reminded him.
“Sure, but I figured out gravity the one time I jumped off our garage roof to see if I could fly with a couple of cardboard wings strapped to my arms. Busted a leg and dislocated a shoulder finding out that I couldn’t.”
Van Horn looked sympathetic. “Tough break the week before your senior prom, I guess.”
“I was only six,” he said with wounded dignity.
Another wall of steep hills lined the horizon ahead of them. Higher peaks lofted beyond. Thankfully, they weren’t quite as daunting as the main range of the Jebel Barez—rising around two to three thousand feet above the valley floor. Van Horn pulled back on her stick a bit, beginning a shallow climb that would take them over the first rise ahead. She contacted the Predator. “We’re coming up to the next rollercoaster ride, Tomcat. Stick tight and stay sharp.”
“I’ll be on you like glue, Tiger Cat,” McCulloch assured her.
The BushCat zoomed low over a sharp-edged ridgeline devoid of any vegetation. These heights were completely barren, a sea of bare, blackened rock, wind-blasted boulders, and fans of loose gravel scree that would have looked at home on Mars. The little plane banked to avoid a slab-sided knob that spiked several hundred feet higher and then turned back to continue southwest.
“My bird is picking up intermittent radar pulses at our eleven o’clock,” the Predator’s remote pilot suddenly reported. “Signal strength is pretty low, but my computer evaluates the likely source as a Meraj-Four S-band phased array radar.” One of the modifications Quartet Directorate technicians had made to the drone for this operation was to install a radar warning system similar to those suggested for its far more capable successor, the MQ-9 Reaper. Without this capability, their two aircraft would have been forced to fly largely blind through Iran’s air defense network. Plotting a course that would evade fixed radar sites was relatively easy. But many of the advanced radars associated with Iran’s long-range surface-to-air missiles, like the Russian-built S-300s and its own Bavar-373 missiles, were road-mobile—making it very difficult to pin down their operating locations at any particular moment.
