Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (7 page)

           
“You don’t need my approval,
Chris.”

 
          
“Pardon
me, sir, but I do ...
we
do,” Wohl
said.

 
          
“
’Fraid so, Muck,” Hal said. “The Night Stalkers may be a private nonmilitary
unconventional action team, but the bottom line is: We’re a
team”

 
          
“We
don’t do anything unless we all agree to do it,” Paul chimed in. “One person
has veto power. One ‘no,’ even one ‘I’m not sure,’ and we scrub the mission.”

 
          
“That’s
the SOP, sir,” Wohl agreed. “We all do it, or no one does it.”

 
          
Patrick
hesitated. Something deep within him still maintained that this was wrong. He
was trained to fight, trained to use his brains and his training and experience
to fight and win battles—but this was not one of the battles he had in mind. He
wasn’t defending his home or his country or his family. This mission was to
destroy one country’s supposed threat to disrupt commerce in order to help a
multinational corporation earn more money. This was a job for a private
security company—or a mercenary force.

 
          
The
obvious question: Was Patrick turning into a mercenary? Was he going to start
fighting not for home or country or family, but for money?

 
          
Maybe
he was, at least for the moment. If his own military didn’t want him, maybe it
was time to fight for what he felt was right—and accept a little money to do
it.

 
          
“I’m
in,” Patrick heard himself say. “I’ll get a NIRTSat constellation up right
away, and get a few FlightHawks ready for air support.” The FlightHawks were
Sky Masters’s unmanned combat aircraft, capable of ground, air, or ship launch,
and equipped to carry a wide variety of sensors, cameras, radio gear—or
munitions. They were stealthy, accurate, and very effective.

 
          
“We’re
gone
!” Paul McLanahan shouted
excitedly, his electronically synthesized voice amplifying his happiness.
“Let’s go kick some Libyan rocket-launching ass!”

SAMAH
,
LIBYA
 
SEVERAL DAYS LATER

           
“Nike, say status,” Patrick
McLanahan whispered into the secure satellite link. A warning indicator on his
electronic visor had just advised him that one of his men had already engaged
the enemy. Just a few minutes into what was supposed to be a quick, silent
recon, they were made.

           
“Bad guy came out of nowhere, and
this damned suit blasted him before I could stop it,” retired U.S. Marine Corps
master sergeant Chris Wohl explained. “I’m secure, and I’m moving in.”

 
          
“This
is supposed to be a soft probe, Nike, not an assault. We can come back.”

 
          
“If
they’re alerted, they might move all their assets, and then we’d have to locate
them all over again,”

           
Wohl protested. “I think only one
guy saw me, and I don’t think he’s a sentry, so we still might have time.
Besides, you made this suit, not me. If you wanted a soft probe, you should’ve
showed me how to shut off the auto-bugzapper feature. I’m secure, and I’m
moving in.”

 
          
Once
a flamethrowing kick-ass Marine, always a kick-ass Marine, Patrick thought as
he checked the God’s-eye view display on his helmet-mounted electronic visor.
Patrick McLanahan was kneeling in a shallow gully just a few yards inside the
perimeter fence surrounding a newly discovered Libyan military base near Samah,
about two hundred miles south of Benghazi. The mission was to sneak in from
three different points, doing a soft probe on this remote desert base. Initial
intelligence reports said Samah was a terrorist training camp, but a few
unconfirmed reports received from the private intelligence sources said Samah
was a rocket base set up recently to secretly attack targets in
Egypt
,
Chad
,
Europe
, or
in the
Mediterranean
Sea
, possibly with
medium-range Russian-or Chinese-made rockets with chemical or biological
warheads.

 
          
The
plan was for all three infiltrators to go in simultaneously, take infrared or
night-vision digital images with their equipment, uplink it all to
reconnaissance satellites back to their headquarters, and get out without
anyone knowing they were there. If the Libyans discovered they had been
infiltrated, they might pack everything up and turn the base into an unassuming
training base.

 
          
But
Chris Wohl was by far the most experienced and well-trained commando among
them—and he ran on his own timetable, which was several steps ahead of everyone
else, constantly thinking and planning and reacting, leading the way. Patrick
should have known that Chris Wohl would want to make first contact.

 
          
The
God’s-eye overhead images that Patrick was studying were being transmitted via
satellite from stealth unmanned combat aircraft called FlightHawks. Two FlightHawks
had been launched from a Sky Masters Inc. DC-10 launch aircraft over the
Mediterranean Sea
while on a normal, routine flight from
Bahrain
to
Madrid
. The FlightHawks were autonomous UCAVs, or
unmanned combat air vehicles; although a ground controller could fly them, they
were designed to fly a preprogrammed flight plan and automatically react to
threats or new target instructions. One FlightHawk carried a LADAR, or laser
radar, that took images as crystal-clear as a high-resolution digital photograph,
then beamed those images down to Wendy on the
Catherine
as well as the men on the ground in
Libya
.

 
          
The
FlightHawk’s ground monitors and controllers were Patrick’s wife and
electronics wizard, Wendy Tork McLanahan, as well as Patrick’s longtime partner
and friend, engineering expert David Luger, based aboard a converted salvage
ship a hundred miles off the Libyan coast in the
Mediterranean Sea
. The team’s infiltration and exfiltration
aircraft, a CV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft, could take off, land,
refuel, and be serviced on the cargo ship in hiding. The ship, a
Lithuanian-flagged and fully registered and functioning rescue and salvage
vessel named S.S.
Catherine the Great
_f
had a contingent of fifty highly trained commandos and enough firepower on
board to start a small war.

 
          
The
commandos on this mission also had another high-tech weapon in their arsenal:
their improved “Tin Man” electronic battle armor. Also developed by Sky Masters
Inc., the armor used a special electroreactive technology that caused
ordinary-looking and -feeling fabric instantly to harden to several times the
strength of steel when sharply struck. The suit also contained self-contained breathing
apparatus, temperature control, communications, long-range visual and aural
detection and tracking sensors, mobility enhancers—compressed-air jump jets in
the boots—and self-protection weapons. The self-defense weapon was an
electrical discharge device that disabled the enemy with a bolt of high-voltage
energy; it operated automatically, tied to the suit’s sensors, and was able to
fire instantly in any direction out to thirty feet from electrodes on both
shoulders if an enemy was detected.

 
          
The
newest feature of their battle armor: a microhydraulically controlled
fibersteel exoskeleton that gave the wearer the strength and power of a
multimillion-dollar robot. The exoskeleton ran along the back, shoulders, arms,
legs, and neck, and amplified the wearer’s muscular strength a hundred times;
yet the exoskeleton and its control systems weighed only a few pounds and used
very little power.

 
          
The
armor could save its wearers from most small- and medium-sized infantry attacks
and even some light armored attacks, but every attack drained precious power
from the suit quickly, and they were several hundred miles from help. The Tin
Man technology was designed to save its wearer from attack long enough to
escape a defensive, patrol, or security engagement, not to press an assault
against a superior fighting force. The longer Wohl stayed in the area after the
alarm was sounded, the more danger he was in.

 
          
Through
his electronic visor, Patrick could see that Wohl had stopped just outside an
area that had previously been identified in satellite photos as a garbage dump,
known by its map coordinate Bravo Two. The area was unguarded and unsecured,
and military and civilian personnel passed by it constantly without being
stopped or challenged by anyone—there was no reason to suspect it was anything
else but a garbage dump. Patrick had dismissed it in their search. “Nike, what
are you doing at Bravo Two?”

 
          
“I
want to check this place out,” Wohl replied. “I’m secure.”

 
          
“Nike,
let’s stick with the recon plan, shall we?”

 
          
“I’ll
be back on schedule in no time.”

 
          
“Stalkers,
looks like there’s some activity on this side of the base—your guy might have
missed a bed check or something,” ex-Air Force security officer and commando
Hal Briggs reported. The commandos on this mission were spread out around the
sprawling, isolated desert base in strategic support locations, and moving from
one spot to another without attracting any attention took time. “They’re doing
a search around the perimeter. Might as well let Nike poke around a bit
more—he’s safe there for now.”

 
          
“If
the alarm’s been sounded, we need to bug out of here,” Patrick said. “Your best
exit point now is Alpha One, Nike. Get moving.” To Briggs, he added, “Taurus,
can you cover him?”

 
          
“Dammit,
Castor, we traveled too far to turn around the moment someone has a bad dream,”
Wohl radioed. “I’m secure, and I think I found something interesting, so I’m
staying put for sixty lousy seconds longer. The FlightHawks will have to RTB in
less than fifteen minutes anyway—they might not complete a full reconnoiter,
and there won’t be time to recover, refuel, and relaunch them before daybreak.
I’m
staying
. If you don’t like it,
come in here and try to drag me back. Nike
out."

 
          
McLanahan
cursed again—it seemed as if he was doing that a lot lately—and wished for one
of his long-range bombers loaded with smart bombs to be flying overhead right
about now. Twice retired from the United States Air Force—the last time
involuntarily—Patrick had been a one-star general, the deputy commander of one
of the world’s most secret weapons development and testing facilities, the High
Technology Aerospace Weapons Center (HAWC), Elliott Air Force Base, Groom Lake,
Nevada. The weapons from that facility had many times been used in real-world
conflicts, from
Russia
to
China
to
America
and everywhere in between, and Patrick had been a part of the action
originating there for over a decade. Patrick had seen and experienced the
best—and worst—of both human suffering and technological amazement.

 
          
But
they would probably not see action within a decade, if ever, because few
politicians and bureaucrats—including, in Patrick’s estimation, the current
administration of U.S. President Thomas Nathaniel Thom—had the guts to use
them. Just one of HAWC’s Megafortress bombers could destroy several dozen
armored vehicles and keep an entire battalion of troops at bay, without being
detected on radar and without exposing itself to undue risk; if they were given
the order, one Megafortress could destroy the entire base without so much as
rustling an innocent civilian’s tent flap, if there were any here. They had already
proven the value of a small commando team paired up with one stealth bomber in
the skies over
Russia
, right near
Moscow
itself.

 
          
But
since then, Thom had all but shut down HAWC and had sent most of America’s
fleet of bombers to the Bone- yard, along with about a third of the active-duty
military and other deep cuts in tactical weapons and units. McLanahan and the
other commandos here at Samah were not here under government sanction. It was
dirty, difficult, and dangerous work.