The Devil's Footprint (75 page)

"Coffee,
sir?" said an air force crewman.

Palmer shook
his head.
 
To be sipping coffee while
Mike Gannon was slugging it out on the ground seemed wrong.

"Take
some," said his air force colleague.
 
The man was looking at him with concern.
 
Palmer nodded and took it.

"The fast
movers are out," said a chief at a monitor.
 
"The count is good.
 
One F16 hit, but the pilot reckons he can
make it to Arkono.
 
SAMs
and triple-A pretty much wiped.
 
The Airborne are going in.
 
Spectres
and A10s are working the margins.
 
The
Kiowas say the Fourth of July is like nothing compared to what's going on down
there.
 
It's a field of fires,
sirs."

And the
division is jumping right into the middle, thought Palmer.
 
All the goddamn way.
 
Which is the way it should
be.
 
But why am I up here out of
harm's way when friends are fighting and dying?

Targeting was
approached as methodically as possible, but it was an imperfect world.

Palmer had
switched his focus to enemy armor deployment when the only heavy missile
battery the Barracuda strikes had missed got a lock on the lumbering C141 and
blew its left wing off at the root.

With fire
spreading throughout the fuselage, the doomed aircraft spiraled erratically
toward the ground below.

Desperately,
Palmer scrabbled for his ‘chute.
 
There
wasn't time to put it on.
 
He broke out
of the module and ran for a side door.

It was
open.
 
The rear air crew had already
jumped.

Holding on to
his parachute pack for dear life, he threw out into the safety of nothing.

Where was the
D ring?
 
He could not find it.

Above, at
23,000 feet, the reserve command-and-control aircraft had taken over.
 
You built redundancy into airborne missions.

The new
airborne command was fully operational before Palmer hit the ground.

26

Fitzduane let
his rucksack drop away on its line as he flared in.

The ruck would
hit first and he would land lighter, but that was not going to be much use if
he landed smack in front of a terrorist bunker.

It was not an
academic thought.
 
He was used to the
more maneuverable rectangular ram air ‘
chute,
and the
circular T15 the airborne used was markedly less responsive.

He had
remembered too late and now was going to pay the penalty.
 
What a fucking stupid, unprofessional error.

He hit hard
and then skidded onto his back.
 
Pain
shot through his body and then he smashed into something soft and
yielding.
 
Without question, it was the
worst landing he had made in he hated to think of how many jumps.
 
He was lying on — or half in — an eviscerated
body.
 
Whose side it belonged to it was
impossible to tell.

Flame stabbed
over his head and turned into green tracer.
 
The noise was deafening.

With horror he
realized he was lying directly under the firing aperture of the bunker.
 
The only good news was that the gun crew
inside had been temporarily blinded by his parachute wrapping itself around the
emplacement.

There was a
surge of flame as the heavy machine gun fired again through the folds of fabric
and his parachute ignited.

Fitzduane
rolled to one side, turning over again and again, and as he did so an AT4
rocket flamed out of the darkness and hit the bunker just below the
aperture.
 
The structure exploded.

Figures
stumbled out of a trench at the back of the bunker.
 
Silhouetted against the sudden flame of an A10
missile strike on the perimeter, he could see the curved magazines of AK-47s.

There were six
terrorists in the group.
 
Two seemed
dazed, but the others carried themselves as if they would like to find out who
had blown up their home.

Fitzduane's
M16 was still in its padded jump case.
 
He was of the opinion that this might be a great idea to avoid
unnecessary damage while training, but as a combat technique he thought it
sucked.
 
He was going to die because some
bean counter objected to wear and tear on the weaponry.
 
If he got back, he was going to find whoever
ordered this idiot shit and do something unfriendly to them.

He pulled a
Willie Pete from his map pocket, pulled the pin, hoped the fuse had been set correctly,
and waited three long seconds.

The terrorists
heard the sound of the pin being removed, but identifying a single sound when
the world is blowing up around you was not easy.
 
In the background Fitzduane could see the
breath of a dragon as an A10 blasted uranium-depleted shells at a terrorist
tank.

The tank
exploded as Fitzduane threw the grenade.

As the missile
left his fingers he drew his pistol and fired twice at one terrorist who had
been turning toward him.
 
The rounds hit
the man in the face and snapped his head back just as the phosphorus grenade
exploded.

Two terrorists
were left standing as white smoke eddied around them.
 
Both were burning, one screaming terribly.

Fitzduane
fired again, double-tapping head shots.

Both figures
slumped.

A smell of
still-burning flesh wafted toward him.
 
The phosphorus burned at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and was nearly
impossible to put out.

He cut his M16
out of its case with his fighting knife and jacked in a round.
 
The A10s and C130 Spectre gunships were pounding
the perimeter, but unless requested the center belonged to the airborne.

Despite the
background of flashes, it struck him that the place was damn dark, and then he
remembered the night-vision goggles on a cord around his neck under his
shirt.
 
He pulled them out and clipped
them on his Kevlar.

His heart gave
a sudden start.

Half a dozen
infrared-detectable laser beams were focused on his torso.
 
That they had not fired already was
encouraging, but the thought that six charged-up paratroops had him in their
sights was a little chilling.

"Dead
woodpecker," he croaked.

"Fuck ‘em
all, Colonel," said Brock cheerfully.

His shape
detached itself from the ground, moved forward, and then went down again.

I'm up, I'm seen,
I'm
down
.
 
You took longer, and if your enemy
was remotely competent you died.
 
And God will miss you
.
 
Only the glint tape on his helmet —
detectable solely with the night vision goggles and the air force's equipment —
gave away his position.
 
Brock was one
mean mover, and judging by how little Fitzduane could see of his platoon as he
looked around, he had trained his men equally well.

"Situation?"
said
 
Fitzduane
.
 
Carlson had remarked that no matter how much
you prepared, command during the first thirty minutes of a large-scale drop was
at best all about managing chaos.
 
Even
in a tight insertion, heavy equipment ended up in the wrong place and units got
horribly mixed up.
 
Enemy fire and other
hostile action compounded the confusion.

An airborne
assault initially tended to be a controlled mess.
 
Resolving that mess was
less up to the commanders than to the initiative of little groups of
paratroopers.
 
In the opinion of
the airborne's critics, it was a horrible way to run a war and alarmingly
untidy.

The only thing
that could be said in its favor was that it worked.

"I've
rounded up most of the platoon," said Brock.
 
"Two are still missing, but they know
the objective.
 
Sorvino caught one from
that emplacement."
 
He made a
gesture toward the smoldering ruins of the heavy-machine-gun position.
 
"He's dead."

"Cochrane?"
said Fitzduane.

"We've
got him," said Brock.

"Give me
the rest of it," said Fitzduane.

"The air
force have
well and truly worked over the heavy hostile
positions," said Brock, "but there are a lot bad guys out there
spread out in small groups and moving around through linked spider holes and
tunnels.
 
That means you don't know where
they are going to pop up.
 
If their
shooting was a little better we'd have to earn our pay, but as it is they tend
to fire high and don't live long enough to adjust.
 
But we're taking some casualties.
 
There is just too much hot metal flying
around.
 
It will get easier when our
heavy stuff cuts in.
 
It will get a whole
lot worse if a reserve starts to throw at us.
 
It's their armor that worries me.
 
They're supposed to have it, but I don't see it.
 
So where is the stuff?
 
It's a fucking shell game."

The RT
operator called Brock and he took the proffered microphone.

Around their
position Fitzduane could hear and see the volume of fire emanating from the 82
^nd
rapidly increasing as units and impromptu fire teams got their bearings.
 
Targets were being identified and M60s were
methodically clearing out their designated sectors with SAWs, rifle fire, and
grenades.
 
Bunkers were being taken out
with AT4s and the smaller LAWS.

On a terrain
or model map, Madoa airfield encased in its perimeter defenses had seemed a
neat, manageable size.

On the ground,
it was brought home to Fitzduane just how large any full-size airfield really
was.
 
Two brigades of the 82
^nd
had dropped onto the place, and now, from his ground-hugging position, the area
looked surprisingly empty.
 
True,
competing tracers sliced the air and there were constant flashes and explosions
over a background of machine-gun and rifle fire, but there were almost no
people to be seen.

They were
surrounded by thousands of troops trying to kill each other, but from his
position they were invisible.
 
It was
disconcerting.
 
Fitzduane was used to
special-operations missions where your own group was so small virtually your
entire focus could be on the enemy.

In this
situation, managing your own team was almost an end in itself.
 
It was a whole new layer of worry, and it
brought home just what conventional command in combat was all about.
 
There was a paradox in the situation.
 
Special operations were intrinsically much
more difficult — but also they were easier.
 
Your training was better, funded, your equipment was normally better and
your focus was tighter.
 
Your main area
of responsibility was destroying the enemy.
 
It made life simpler.

Debris
fountained fifty feet away, and the blast made Fitzduane hug the ground.

Four further
explosions were even closer, but the line of impacts as the mortar bombs were
walked in passed in front of them.

"Eighty-two
millimeter," said Brock.
 
"Ten
to one they're moving the damn things around.
 
"Counterbattery takes care of that shit, but that's not going to be
a player until we've cleared the airfield.
 
The CB is like... delicate."

Fitzduane
smiled despite their decidedly hairy situation.
 
Dirt was still clumping down on his Kevlar.
 
A minor adjustment to the mortar's aiming
mechanism and the Scout Platoon would have to be raked up before being
body-bagged.

The
counterbattery radar was the one and only item that the airborne did not parachute
in.
 
It could track an incoming round in
flight and direct return fire before the enemy shell had even landed, but it
was sensitive equipment and needed to be flown in.
 
That could not be done until a safe landing
zone was cleared and the physical obstacles were removed.
 
Barriers of heavy rocks had been erected
across the runway, interspersed with mines.
 
It was all in a night's work to the paratroopers who dropped in with bulldozers
and combat engineers, but it took time.

Brock was
listening intently, a single earpiece pressed to his right ear.

"Affirmative,
Viper One."

A Hellfire
missile streaked diagonally across their line of sight and impacted about eight
hundred meters away.

A flash lit up
the sky, followed by a series of others as the mortar bombs blew.

Seconds
later, pink flame spat at the ground as a C130
Spectre gunship hosed the area with its 20mm Gatling.

"Straight
in the balls, Viper One," said Brock to the Kiowa Warrior pilot.

Two Kiowas, a
pair of
Sheridan
tanks, and air had been tasked to support Fitzduane's mission, which gave his
small unit the unusual luxury of being able to call in their own fire
support.
 
Normally they would have had to
go through channels.
 
The heavier the
weapon, the higher the clearance required.