‘The other two groups loop around from another direction, and they smoke in low. One of ’em’s gonna make it, too. We’ve played it out a million times, Kolya. We know your radars, we know your bases, we know your airplanes, we know how you train. You’re not that hard to beat. And the Chinese, they studied with you, right? You taught them. They know your doctrine and everything.’
It was how he said it. No guile at all. And this was a man who had penetrated the North Vietnamese air defenses over eighty times. Eighty times.
‘So how do I -‘
‘Defend against it?’ Robin shrugged, bending down to examine the chart again. ‘I need better maps, but first thing, you examine the passes one at a time. You remember that a bomber isn’t a fighter. He can’t maneuver all that great, especially low. Most of what he’s doing is keeping the airplane from crunching into the ground, right? I don’t know about you, but that makes me nervous. He’s going to pick a valley he can maneuver in. Especially at night. You put your fighters there. You put ground radars there. You don’t need big sexy ones. That’s just a bell-ringer. Then you plan to catch him when he comes out.’
‘Move the defenses back? I can’t do that!’
‘You put your defenses where they can work, Kolya, not to follow a dotted line on a piece of paper. Or do you like eating Chinese all that much? That’s always been a weakness with you people. By the way, it also shortens your lines, right? You save money and assets. Next thing, you remember that the other guy, he knows how pilots think, too – a kill is a kill, right? Maybe there’s decoy groups designed to draw your people out, okay? We have scads of radar lures we plan to use. You have to allow for that. You control your people. They stay in their sectors unless you have a really good reason to move them…’
Colonel Grishanov had studied his profession for more than twenty years, had studied Luftwaffe documents not merely related to prisoner interrogation, but also classified studies of how the Kammhuber Line had been set up. This was incredible, almost enough to make him take a drink himself. But not quite, he told himself. This wasn’t a briefing document in the making, wasn’t a learned White Paper for delivery at the Voroshilov Academy. This was a learned book, highly classified, but a book: Origin and Evolution of American Bomber Doctrine. From such a book he could go on to marshal’s stars, all because of his American friend.
‘Let’s all stay back here,’ Marty Young said. ‘They’re shooting all live stuff.’
‘Makes sense to me,’ Dutch said. ‘I’m used to having things go off a couple hundred yards behind me.’
‘And four hundred knots of delta-V,’ Greer added for him.
‘A lot safer that way, James,’ Maxwell pointed out.
They stood behind an earthen berm, the official military term for a pile of dirt, two hundred yards from the camp. It made watching difficult, but two of the five had aviator’s eyes, and they knew where to look.
‘How long have they been moving in?’
‘About an hour. Any time now,’ Young breathed.
‘I can’t hear a thing,’ Admiral Maxwell whispered.
It was hard enough to see the site. The buildings were visible only because of their straight lines, something which nature abhors for one reason or another. Further concentration revealed the dark rectangles of windows. The guard towers, erected only that day, were hard to spot as well.
‘There’s a few tricks we play,’ Marty Young noted. ‘Everybody gets vitamin-A supplements for night vision… Maybe a few percentage points of improvement in night vision. You play every card in the deck, right?’ All they heard was the wind whispering through the treetops. There was a surreal element to being in the woods like this. Maxwell and Young were accustomed to the hum of an aircraft engine and the faint glow of instrument lights that their eyes scanned automatically between outward sweeps for hostile aircraft, and the gentle floating sensation of an aircraft moving through the night sky. Being rooted to the land gave the feeling of motion that didn’t exist as they waited to see something they had never experienced.
‘There!’
‘Bad news if you saw him move,’ Maxwell observed.
‘Sir, SENDER GREEN doesn’t have a parking lot with white cars on it,’ the voice pointed out. The fleeting shadow had been silhouetted against it, and only Kelly had seen it in any case.
‘I guess that’s right, Mr Clark.’
The radio sitting on the berm had been transmitting only the noise of static. That changed now, with four long dashes. They were answered at intervals by one, then two, then three, then four dots.
‘Teams in place,’ Kelly whispered. ‘Hold your ears. The senior grenadier takes the first shot when he’s ready, and that’s the kickoff.’
‘Shit,’ Greer sneered. He soon regretted it.
The first thing they heard was a distant mutter of twin-bladed helicopter rotors. Designed to make heads turn, and even though every man at the berm knew the plan in intimate detail, it still worked, which pleased Kelly no end. He’d drawn up much of the plan, after all. All heads turned but his.
Kelly thought he might have caught a glimpse of the tritium-painted M-79 sights of one grenadier, but it might as easily have been the blink of a lonely lightning bug. He saw the muted flash of a single launch, and not a second later the blinding white-red-black flash of a fragmentation grenade against the floor of one of the towers. The sudden, sharp bark made the men at his side jump, but Kelly wasn’t paying attention to that. The tower where men and guns would have been disintegrated. The echo had not yet dispersed through the theater of pines when the other three were similarly destroyed. Five seconds later the gunships came skimming in over the treetops, not fifty feet separating their rotors as minigune ripped into the barracks building, two long neon fingers reaching in. The grenadiers were already pumping white-phosphorus rounds into the windows, and any semblance of night vision was lost in an instant.
‘Jesus!’ The way that the spreading fountains of burning phosphorus were concealed inside the building made the spectacle only more horrid, while the miniguns concentrated on the exits.
‘Yeah,’ Kelly said, loudly to make himself heard. ‘Anybody inside is a crispy critter. The smart ones who try to run come right into the mini fire. Slick.’
The fire element of the Marine assault force continued to pour fire into the barracks and admin buildings while the snatch team raced to the prison block. Now the rescue choppers came in, behind the AH-1 Huey Cobras, landing noisily close to the main gate. The fire element split, with half deploying around the choppers while the other half continued to hose the barracks. One of the gunships began circling the area now, like an anxious sheepdog on the prowl for wolves.
The first Marines appeared, dragging the simulated prisoners in relays. Kelly could see Irvin checking and doing a count at the gate. There were shouts now, men calling off numbers and names, and the roar of the big Sikorsky choppers almost covered it all. The last Marines in were the fire-support teams, and then the rescue choppers increased power and lifted off into the darkness.
‘That was fast,’ Ritter breathed as the sound faded. A moment later two fire engines appeared to extinguish the blazes left behind by the various explosive devices.
‘That was fifteen seconds under nominal,’ Kelly said, holding up his watch.
‘What if something goes wrong, Mr Clark?’ Ritter asked.
Kelly’s face lit up in a wicked grin. ‘Some things did, sir. Four of the team were “killed” coming in. I assume maybe a broken leg or two -‘
‘Wait a minute, you mean there’s a chance -‘
‘Let me explain, sir?’ Kelly said. ‘From the photos there is no reason to believe there are any people between the LZ and the objective. No farming on those hills, okay? For tonight’s exercise, I eliminated four people at random. Call all of them broken legs. The people had to be carried into the objective and carried out, in case you didn’t notice. Backups on everything. Sir, I expect a clean mission, but I messed it up some tonight just to check.’
Ritter nodded, impressed. ‘I expected everything to be run by the book for this rehearsal.’
‘In combat things go wrong, sir. I allowed for that. Every man is cross-trained for at least one alternate job.’ Kelly rubbed his nose. He’d been nervous, too. ‘What you just saw was a successful simulated mission despite greater-than-expected complications. This one’s going to work, sir.’
‘Mr Clark, you sold me.’ The CIA field officer turned to the others. ‘What about medical support, that sort of thing?’