The Red Horseman (40 page)

“Have you ever made a delayed parachute drop?”

“I’ve done as many as you have, sir.”

“Okay, smart-ass. We’ll hold hands all
the way down.”

Jack Yocke had a request of his own when
Toad told him he was going in on a chopper with
Rita. “I’d like to go with you and the
admiral.”

“Yeah, I bet you would,” Toad said. “Forget
it, pencil pilot. We’ll give you a window seat
on the executive helicopter if you promise not
to pee your pants.”

“No, I want to jump with you guys. It’ll be
a great story.”

“You don’t seem to understand, Jack. We’ll be
the first guys in. This is a
twenty-eight-thousand-foot free fall at night
into a concentration of enemy troops who are probably
on full alert. There’ll be bullets flying around,
helicopter gunships blasting tanks, the whole
greasy enchilada. Get serious! Your mother wouldn’t
even let you play with a cap pistol when you were a
kid.”

“Let me ask the admiral.”

Grafton listened to Yocke state his case,
gave Toad an evil glance, and said, “Sure you
can come. Why not? The more the merrier.”

They started sweating during the suiting up at
20:00, after dinner in the main cafeteria. Camo
clothing, insulated one piece jumpsuit, jump
boots, helmet, silenced submachine gun,
ammo, knife, radio, canteen, flak
vest-“The bullets will bounce off like you’re fucking
Superman”-parachute harness, parachutes, oxygen
mask, oxygen supply system, gloves, jump
goggles, night vision goggles for on the ground . .

almost eighty pounds of equipment. They waddled when
they were finally outfitted.

“I don’t want a gun,” Yocke said.

“No weapon, no jump,” Jake Grafton
told him curtly.

“Your choice. I’m not taking a tourist into a
firefight, and that’s final.”

So they hung a submachine gun and ammo on
Yocke and he kept his mouth shut. As a final
indignity, Toad Tarkington smeared his face with
black camouflage grease.

It was bizarre. The SEAL’S looked like extras
from an Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick. Zap,
boom, pow! No doubt he did too. And they were
all grown men!

Yocke began really sweating in the lecture that
followed.

A chief petty officer explained each piece
of gear, explained about the wrist altimeter, how they
should check it occasionatly but wait for the main chute
to deploy automatically-“It’ll work!
Honest! It’s guaranteed. If it doesn’t, you
bring it back and we’ll give you another–how they
would run out of the back of the C-141 in lines, lay
themselves out in the air to keep from tumbling, steer in
free fall, steer when the chute opened, how they should
land.

And when all the questions had been answered from the three
neophytes, the final piece of advice:
“Don’t think about it-just do it.”

Jake Grafton had too many things on his mind
to worry about the jump. As the C-141 climbed
away from the runway, he adjusted his oxygen mask,
ensured the oxygen was flowing and let the jumpmaster
check his equipment, all the while trying to figure
out what Saddam Hussein had done with the weapons.
were they still at the Samarra base, or had The
Awesome outsmarted the Americans?

Sitting beside the admiral, Toad Tarkington
thought about the upcoming jump as the air inside the
plane cooled.

The red lights of the plane’s interior and the noise
gave it the feet and sound of flight deck control,
the handler’s kingdom in the bottom of a carrier’s
island. And he had that night-cat-shot rock in the
pit of his stomach, He looked at the
blank faces and averted eyes of the SEAL’S around
him and thought about Rita. Would she be all right? Had
he made the right decision coming with Grafton? If
they shot Rita down she had no parachute, no
ejection seat-if that woman died Toad wanted
to die with her. This thought had tripped across his
synapses when he was weighing his request
to accompany Grafton. Nuclear weapons
to murder millions-with Jake Grafton alive and
thinking, they had a chance to pull off this crazy
assault.

With him dead it would be just another bloodletting and
probably end up too little, too late. Although
racked with powerful misgivings, Toad had elected
to go with his head and not his heart.

The oxygen, he noted now, had a slightly
metallic taste.

Maybe, Toad decided, a little prayer wouldn’t
hurt. He didn’t bother the Lord often, just checked
in occasionally to let the man–comor woman-upstairs
know he was still down here kicking, but now, he thought,
might be a good time to put in an earnest supplication
from the heart.

Dear God, don’t let anything happen
to Rita.

Jack Yocke was thinking exclusively about the
upcoming free fall. Unlike Grafton and
Tarkington, he had never ejected from an
airplane, nor had he ever jumped out of one. He
knew people whose idea of a perfect Saturday was to leap
out of an airplane with six of their buddies and free
fall, then float down in sport parachutes, those
colorful flying wings. He had never had the
slightest desire to join the macho brigade.

Maybe those folks had maladjusted hormone
levels or were trying to spice up dull, boring
existences, but Jack Yocke was perfectly happy
with his feet upon the ground. He still got dates when
he wanted them and his dick got stiff at the right
time, so why spit in the devil’s eye?

Part of the reason he was here, he admitted to himself,
was Tarkington.

The Toad-man had a knack of rubbing him the
wrong way. That coolest-of-the-cool,
studlier-than-thou attitude, that … asshole!
So now here he was, getting colder and colder, about
to fall over five fucking miles through the night
sky, then ride a parachute-if that contraption of
bedsheets and fishing lines opened-right smack into the
middle of a goddamn war with a bunch of
raghead Nazis.

What if the chute doesn’t open? I mean,
really! You gotta lay there in the air like a store
dummy for two minutes and forty seconds waiting
…

waiting … waiting … If you panicked and
pulled the manual ripcord too high you might
run out of oxygen, or drift away from the landing area
and the support of your fellow soldiers. Or you
might find yourself hanging up there when the helicopter
gunships and troop transports came in with their
blades whirling around, ilak searching the darkness,
cannon fire, machine gun bullets … No,
Jack, don’t take a chance on pulling the
ripcord too early. Wait for this
seventy-nine-cent gizmo from Woolworth’s to do the
job for you.

He would wait. Under absolutely no
circumstances would he panic. He told himself that
yet again, trying to believe it. He would close his
eyes and wait until the chute opened. It would
open. He assured himself of that for the fiftieth time.
If it didn’t, by God, they would scrape him off
the asphalt in the middle of the runway, his eyes
scrunched shut, his hands and legs
outstretched, still waiting.

Now, fifteen minutes after takeoff, Yocke was
ready. He was properly psyched and ready to leap
straight into hell.

Then he looked at his watch and saw that they had
over an hour to go.

Oh, Jesus”

Rita Moravia sat in almost total darkness with
her back against the forward bulkhead of the
Blackhawk’s passenger compartment. Sharing the compartment
with her but quite invisible were the four European
colonels “observing” and the two Russian flag
officers.

The Russians also had escorts, Captain
Iron Mike McElroy and one of his sergeants.
Rita had briefed them carefully.

Right now she wasn’t thinking about the other
passengers. She was listening to the muffled roar of the
engines through her headset and thinking about her husband,
Toad.

He would be okay, she assured herself. When she
heard he was jumping she thought of the two steel pins in
his leg and wondered if he should.

When she mentioned his leg he glared at her.

Isn’t that just like a man? If the man
is concerned he’s thoughtful, chivalrous, gallant.
If a woman voices her concern she’s a nag.

So life isn’t fair. Tell it to Yocke and
let him put it on the front page.

The navy had been a tough row to hoe. First the
Naval Academy, then flight training, the
squadrons, test pilot schoo-Rita had
encountered subtle covert and overt discrimination every
step of the way. Oh, the senior officers thought it would
be fine to have women in the navy as long as the pretty
ones wanted to be executive secretaries to those
said senior officers, but women shouldn’t be on ships!

Or in cockpits. Or where men were shooting. Or
drinking.

Or telling dirty jokes. Heaven forbid!

Jake Grafton didn’t think like that. Because he
didn’t Rita had found herself riding the tip of the
arrow, slaughtering doomed men with a 30mm cannon.

Here in the darkness inside this helicopter over the
desert, Rita Moravia remembered that moment.
She remembered the feel of her airplane, the
look of the clouds, the look of the Iraqi plane on
the parking mat as she dove at it, the Gs tugging at
her as she maneuvered, the lighted reticle in the
sight glass, the vibration as the cannon
vomited out its shells, the smoke billowing skyward
as she pulled up and banked away … Everything was
crystal clear, engraved on her memory.

She had killed.

Oh, it had to be done … but she had done it.

She thought now that she understood those senior officers
she had met through the years, understood that look in their
eyes. It had been a tired look, a weary
look.

Now she forgave them. Yet they were wrong.

Jake Grafton was right.

You can’t avoid it or wash it off your hands just because
you didn’t get a y chromosome and a penis.
Oh no.

Little Toadlet inside of me, this world you will come
into isn’tiustflowers and teddy bears. Male
orfemale, you are going to have to live, endure,
survive, do the best you can.

You must be strong, little one. Somehow, some way, you
must find the strength to do what you believe to be right.

And the strength to live with it afterward.

THE CRUISERS WERE ON THE WESTERN
SIDE OF THE TASK force, arranged in a
broad semicircle over five miles of ocean.
The Tomahawk missiles Popped out on
cones of flame, rising and accelerating, then nosing
over and descending to just a hundred feet above the sea
as their turbofan engines took over. Missile
followed missile, a total of fifteen in all.

Their targets were five radar sites between
Samarra and the southern border of Iraq, with each
radar being the target of three missiles.

The last missile had just disappeared into the darkness
when the carrier to the east of the cruisers turned into the
wind and the first two of her aircraft rode the
catapults into the night sky, one off the waist, one
off the bow. The launch took seven minutes. The
planes were still climbing away from the carrier when more
Tomahawk missiles rippled from the cruiser’s
launchers.

Meanwhile a half comdozen AH-64 Apaches
were apProaching their targets, two more Iraqi radar
sites, at just forty feet above the desert sand.

Apaches from the 101/ Airborne Division had
made a similar attack against radar sites only
a few miles from these on the opening night of the Gulf
War in 1991. The Iraqis had worked for two
years to build these replacement sites, which now met
the same fate as their predecessors. They were
turned into twisted junk by a blizzard of
Hellfire missiles, 2.75-inch rockets, and
30mm cannon shells.

Wild Weasel antimissile aircraft were
already orbiting over Baghdad.

Under their wings were the radar-killing beam-rider
missiles that would take out Iraqi fire-control
radars when they began transmitting. Since the
Gulf War allied aircraft had routinely
patrolled the skies over Iraq and they were there again
tonight, waiting.

The two C-141’s carrying navy SEAL’S
crossed the border at thirty thousand feet on a
direct course for the Iraqi air base at
Samarra. Someone had suggested a feint toward
Baghdad, but Jake Grafton vetoed that. The
most valuable target in Iraq was at Samarra.
Feints were merely a waste of fuel and precious
time.

The Iraqi command center duty officer in
Baghdad noticed on his radar presentations the
flight of aircraft crossing the Kuwaiti border
and another flight coming in from Arabia, all converging
on Samarra. This was unusual, the deviation from the
standard allied patrolling tactics that he had been
briefed to look for. He was about to pick up
his telephone when the first of the navy Tomahawk
cruise missiles struck its target and one of his
radars went blank.

Then a second, and a third. Frantically he
jiggled the hook on the telephone. The operator
came on the line. Alas, Iraq’s
fiber-optic, state-of-the-art military
communications system was heavily damaged during the
Gulf War and was still under repair. So the duty
officer had to use the civilian telephone system.

“The air base at Saman-a, quickly.”

What he would have said to the people at Samarra we will
never know, for at that moment a Tomahawk missile
and control center and six-thousandths of a second after
penetrated the reinforced concrete wall of this command the
initial impact its thousand-pound warhead
detonated.

The people inside the structure never felt a thing-they
merely ceased to exist.

The battle had begun.

Flights of A-10 Warthogs and A-6
Intruders raced into the area around Baghdad and
Samarra and began attacking antiaircraft
missile sites. They were protected
by electronic warfare jamming planes and a
curtain of chaff that a flight of B-52’s was
dumping from thirty-six thousand feet.

The SEAL’S in the C-141’s were up and in
line. Silent, tense, they watched the red jump
light high in the rear of the compartment, above the open
ramp that led into cold, black nothingness. Jake
Grafton, Toad Tarkington and Jack Yocke
were in the middle of the tine against the starboard side of the
aircraft.

Jack Yocke had switched his mind off. He was
running now on adrenaline and instinct.

It was like being back on the high school
basketball team waiting for a tipoff, all hot and
sweaty, ready to go whichever way the ball bounced.

Once his eyes caught a glimpse of the
blackness yawning beyond the lead men, but he ignored
it. Then the jump light turned yellow. The man
behind him crowded him forward, so he took a step,
nudging up toward Toad’s back.

He was chanting into the oxygen mask: “Come on,
baby, let’s do it! Let’s go, go, go, go,,, so
when the light turned green his muscles surged and
he was charging right behind Toad and shouting “Go, go, go,”
and the ramp wasn’t there anymore and he was falling,
falling, falling into the infinite eternal
darkness.

Jake lay spread-eagle in the sky and waited
for his eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. It
would have been great if they could have worn the night-vision
goggles, but those bulky headsets would have been torn
off by the wind blast. In seconds he was up
to terminal velocity, 120 miles per hour.

He was still getting oxygen. Fine. So how many
seconds had it been?

He scanned, trying to pick up the men who were
failing with him. He saw a few shapes in the
darkness, but that was all. He concentrated on staring
into the blackness below. Nothing was visible, of course,
since there was a thin cloud layer at twenty thousand
feet. After they were through that the lights of Samarra should
be visible ur neath, perhaps the air base lights if
they were still on, to the south, the lights of Baghdad.

So he lay there in the sky feeling the cold wind
tear at him, maintaining his balance. That was
important, and extremely difficult to do in the
darkness without a visual reference. All you could do was
pray you didn’t tumble, ow it. Even and if that
happened of course you would kn though the wind was cold,
he wasn’t freezing. His jumpsuit and clothes
seemed to be enough. And as he fell the air
would become warmer.

What was down there? were the Iraqis on full
alert, or would the surprise be enough?

Toad Tarkington had a problem. His goggles
had somehow come off in the scramble out and now he was
squinting against the wind. There was nothing to see, so he
scrunched his eyes tightly closed and began counting.

“One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three .

He was falling at the rate of two miles a
minute, a mile every thirty seconds. At the end
of a minute he should be through the cloud layer.

Then he would open his eyes.

This fall was a whole hell of a lot different
than the last time he jumped, that time in Nevada when
he and Rita had nearly bought the farin.

Actually this wasn’t bad. He could feel the
cold but he wasn’t freezing. And nobody was
shooting.

They were going to be shooting on the ground. Toad was
certain of that.

The most dangerous part of this whole jump was the
last few hundred feet, when any Iraqi
draftee who could lift a rifle would have a free
shot.

The thing to do was to get the weapon out when the
parachute deployed and be ready. He rehearsed the
moves that he would make, how he would get the weapon
free and cycle the bolt. Ahmad the Awful might
get his shot at the ol’ Horny Toad, but it
wouldn’t be free.

Yocke wasn’t counting. He was trying
to stabilize himself in the spread-eagle position.
He could feet the dizziness of rotation, and try as
he might, he couldn’t seem to stop it.

Damn!

And he had lost track of the time. Well, two
minutes and forty seconds was an entire lifetime.
He would still be falling like this in the middle of next
week if he didn’t get stabilized.

He forced himself to spread his arms and hands to full
extension.

According to the chief who had briefed them, that should stop
the tumbling.

But he wasn’t spread out. Now he realized that
he was almost doubled up at the waist. He was so
pumped up he couldn’t even tell what position his
body was in!

He forced himself to full extension. The rotating
feeling slowed. And stopped.

And he was still chanting. “Go go go . . .”
He stopped and took a deep, ragged breath.

He stared straight ahead, which must be down. The
wind was in his face, trying to pull his arms and legs
backward, so straight ahead must be down.

Thirty years of life, and all of it led up
to this. School, work, family, women, good moments and
bad, and all of it was mere prelude for this moment, this
free fall into a cold, black eternity.

Jack Yocke began to laugh. He laughed
until he choked, then decided he might be getting
hysterical, and stopped himself.

How long has it been?

Does it matter?

And the answer came back. No.

He fell on toward the waiting earth.

Jake knew he was through the cloud layer when
lights suddenly appeared in the velvet blackness
below. There was Samarra, and the base almost directly
under him. He twisted his head so he could see
Baghdad. The navy and air force were doing their job,
he noted. In the blackness he saw the wink and
twinkle of explosions, here and there jeweled strings of
tracers streaking through the darkness at odd angles.
No sounds, just muzzle blasts and flashes of
warheads and those twinkling strings of tracers.

He tried to steer toward the center of the air base
below, that black spot where the runways must
intersect.

Now the two-miles-per-minute rate of fall was
quite discernible. The lights below were coming up at sickening
speed. Even though he had spent years flying
tactical aircraft at night, the visual
impact of his rate of descent was disconcerting. Would
the parachute open?

This question must run through the mind of every free fall
parachutist.

Jake Grafton had a pragmatic faith in
military equipment-through the years he had occasionally
witnessed the spectacular, usually fatal, outcome
when vital equipment failed.

He pulled his left wrist in and examined the
luminous hands of the wrist altimeter. Three thousand
feet still to fall!

How many seconds?

The math was too much. He waited, noting the
absence of muzzle flashes.

Maybe they had achieved surprise!

Toad’s eyes were slits, staring at the lights
rushing up at him. He reached forand grasped the
manual ripcord. And waited.

The runways were plainly visible, and the hangar.
There was a plane!

How high was he? Still a couple The opening of the
chute almost tore his boots off.

Toad took off the oxygen mask and threw it
away, then began checking his equipment. He still had
it. All right! He got the submachine gun
unslung and checked the magazine.

Still no muzzle flashes on the airfield
directly below.

Please God, let them be asleep!

Jack Yocke was chanting again, some mindless sound
he repeated over and over as he fell toward the
lights on the earth below.

The air was warmer here. In one corner of his mind
he took note of that fact, but the flashing, twinkling
lights embedded in the velvet, Stygian blackness
claimed the rest of his attention. The lights were coming
closer, growing larger. He could even hear muffled
explosions. They were having a war down there, and he was
falling into it at two miles per minute.

He caught himself fumbling for the ripcord. No.
No! No!

The lights were rushing toward him now, faster and
faster and fast-a tremendous jolt jerked his
head up and tore at his crotch.

He yelled. Into the oxygen mask.

And he was hanging by the harness, the fierce wind now
a zephyour. He tore at the oxygen mask and
succeeded in freeing one side of it.

He was drifting. Where? What was that lighted
complex there?

The city! God, he was coming down into the city of
Sa marra, not the airfield, which was over there to the
right.

Buildings below, streets …

He pulled on the left side of the parachute
risers and felt himself slowly turn in the air. Now
he was going toward a street. Good! He looked
up, trying to see the parachute.

He could just make out its vague, winglike shape.
Where are those cords that you use to steer it? He
fumbled, tryin now to find them. Oh well, he was
coming down into that street Something tore at his feet and
he tumbled forward all in a heap, the wind knocked
out of him.

He rolled over on his back, gasping.

Alive! Thank God!

Something tugged at his shoulders. The chute was on the
ground, tugging in the gentle breeze.
Clumsily he got to his feet and fumbled in the
darkness for the Koch fittings that held the parachute
on. He got them released. The chute began
to move away.

He let it go as he stood there staring all about him
at the buildings, the windows, the empty street lit
by the occasional streetlight. No one about. No
Iraqis, which was wonderful, but no SEAL’S either.

In the pregnant gloom of an Arab street his
euphoria gave way to fear.

He scuttled to the doorway of a building and
stood sheltered there, looking and listening as the sounds of
battle echoed off the buildings.

The swelling, fading, then swelling sound of jet
engines set his teeth on edge. His hands were shaking,
he realized, and he was biting his lip.

Which way was the airfield?

He had no idea. It had been on his right as he
descended but he had hit the street and tumbled and
lost all sense of direction, so now he gazed
upward at the three- and fourstory buildings, trying
to decide in which direction the airfield lay as the
fear congealed into a lump of ice in his chest.

He found that he had the submachine gun in his
hands.

The hard coolness of the plastic and metal should have
comforted him somewhat, but if it did he didn’t feel
the effect.

As he tried to remember what the map had looked
like when he studied it several hours ago surrounded
by SEAL’S'-IN his former life, before he leaped through
that extraordinary threshold from the airplane into the
voidhe drew a total blank. He had
absolutely no idea where in the city he was or in
which direction the airfield lay.

He stood paralyzed. He was panting and he was
desperately afraid, a freezing, numbing fear that
left him unable to think, unable to move.

The parachute finally brought him out of it. The white
silk had draped itself around a car and fluttered ever so
gently in the wind. Anyone looking out a window would
see it. Anyone who came along, anyone who
Jack Yocke stepped from the safety of the doorway
and started along the sidewalk. His steps quickened.
He ran.

He had gone several blocks and just crossed a
fairly wide street at a hell-bent gallop
when he heard the truck. The noise of a big engine
at full throttle boomed off the buildings and
penetrated his fear-soaked brain. He
dove into a doorway as a large army truck thundered
across the intersection he had just crossed.

Follow it! Yes. It must be going toward the
base.

He waited until the engine noise died away,
then willed his legs to move.

He was in the middle of the street when a jet
streaked overhead just above the housetops-the thunder of its
engines arrived all at once and temporarily
deafened Yocke.

The glass in several windows broke and fell to the
sidewalk.

The roar faded almost as fast as it came and left
a terrifying silence in its wake.

Someone was looking out a window. He caught a
glimpse of a face. He kept going. His pace was
slower now, more sure. He wiped the sweat from his
face with his fight hand, then grasped his weapon again.
He held it in front of him, ready.