Arc Light (57 page)

Chandler snorted and ran for the door.

As he got there, Jennifer kissed Bailey on the cheek.
Wars have a way of speeding up romances,
Chandler thought. Bailey leapt for the door to follow the last soldiers down, two women who had sat near Chandler's bench way back in the hangar at March Air Force Base.

“Good luck!” Rebecca yelled as she slammed the door behind them.

The engines of the L-1011 were loud. On the runway, another jet could be heard taking off, no fuel being spared as the loud roar came almost as a crackle of sound. Chandler ran to pick up the few remaining bags and packs lying on the concrete. The baggage doors were already closed, and the Slovak soldiers rolled the stairway back just far enough to clear the plane's wing before taking off toward the bombed-out building at a dead run.

As Chandler passed under the wing, Golding increased the throttle and a burst of hot exhaust just about blew Chandler off his feet. There was a tremendous noise, like a ragged tear, as the engine revved up to higher power. Chandler dropped everything, going down on one knee, to hold his fingers to his ears. Bailey and the two women did the same. As the plane turned, the noise and pain abated and Chandler urged everyone to keep moving, his words muted by the ringing in his ears and drowned out by the still loud jet engines. The air was foul with the smell of exhaust.

There were no bags remaining to be carried off, so Chandler led the little group in pursuit of the line of troops trailing off into the grass at the side of the tarmac, the invisible clock against which they raced ticking on.

From the opposite side of the airfield, Chandler heard first one and then several explosions—more like loud pops—followed immediately by a loud and continuous whoosh. He looked over his shoulder as he ran and saw missiles riding a half dozen white plumes of smoke up from the ground in an arc that flattened parallel with the earth and headed off, away from the airport.

“Faster!” Chandler yelled.
We've gotta get our chemical gear on!
he thought, suddenly in a near panic. As they reached the grass, a man in a gas mask, hood, and heavy protective suit waved at them with his gloved hand. When they reached him, Chandler saw that there was a dry drainage ditch and that in it lay his troops. He slid down into the ditch, dropping his rifle and tearing into the pouch containing his chemical protective gear. The others did the same. No one said a word except for one of the women, who urged herself on as she mouthed the instructions on use of the gear one article at a time.

Mask,
Chandler thought to himself, working frantically.
Fold hood away, press against face, exhale. Cover air intake with hand. Inhale.
The gas mask sucked down against his face as it should.
Seal's good.
He pulled out the suit and climbed in, zipping it up and pulling the hood down over his shoulders.
Gloves on. Overshoes on. Done!

The man who had waved them over checked Chandler quickly, straightening some pieces of the suit's material and hood, and then moved on to the other late arrivals. It was, of course, Chandler realized, Barnes.

Chandler lay down just in time. Barnes and the others dropped a fraction of a second later, but safely. There had been no warning, just a hint of sound, a high-pitched whine increasing in intensity.

Two planes, wingtip to wingtip, had overflown the center of the airfield at incredible speed. Chandler had not followed them with his eyes. He had only gotten a snapshot through the lens of his mask and they were gone. They had come from the direction in which the missiles had departed, and in their wake a stupendous wall of sound broke down upon him and continued as a roar for some time, but there were no explosions. Chandler's heartbeat felt irregular and unnatural as he lay there, waiting.

As Chandler looked out onto the airfield, he saw to his horror the Delta jet turning only now onto the taxiway-turned-runway. And up above, spinning slowly toward the ground in an unalterable trajectory, was a string of bombs, clearly visible.

Time seemed to stand still. The Delta jet, turning, turning, would never make it. The bombs, on whose tails four air brakes like slowly turning propellers had spread out, forming a cross, arced down to their target. They came from high above at a steep angle, having been lobbed by the Russian jets seeking to escape the danger of the explosions.

Sitting squarely on the bombs' target, the Delta jet was just a bonus, a stroke of luck. Good luck for the enemy, bad for Golding, Frazier, Gator, Rebecca, and Jennifer, the Good Kid. Chandler forced himself to watch the final act.

CR-R-R-UMP, CR-R-R-UMP, CR-R-R-UMP, CR-R-R-UMP, CR-R-R-UMP, CR-R-R-UMP.
Chandler's head dropped involuntarily. The shock waves battered the fabric of his suit like puffs from a child's air rifle and shook the ground as the earth transmitted the blows to his body. His ears suffered an assault of sound unlike any he had ever thought possible. The sound itself distorted to a long crackle as it exceeded the decibel level that his ears could tolerate along all audible frequencies; the pain was excruciating.

Chandler forced himself to look up as the crackle became a snarl of echoes and was surprised by the momentary wobble of his head. The dizziness passed and he saw a nearly solid wall of jet black geysers rising from the center of the airfield and smoking debris beginning to rain down onto the concrete, some bouncing, others splatting. He stared at the sight for a long second or two, waiting for the horror to unfold. All at once, the nose of the Delta jet appeared on the right side of the wall of smoke, followed by its long body and finally the tail. The jet was picking up speed despite numerous ragged pockmarks along its smooth white fuselage.

From the same direction as the first fighter-bombers, another enemy aircraft screamed by. Again a string of bombs trailed, three like the six before them. But the Delta jet was clear of the bombs' target this time, far down the runway and gaining takeoff speed.

Chandler covered his ears, trying to save whatever hearing he had left. He hadn't heard the L-1011's engines through the ringing in his ears even though he knew they must be at full power. Again he felt the thuds through the ground and the shock waves against his body, but the sound of the bombs' explosions was muffled by his hands and the reduced acuity of his damaged ears. From the location of the explosions, which fell in a line short of the black clouds still lingering from the first bombs, Chandler guessed that the taxiway-turned-runway was now destroyed also.

Golding's jet lifted slowly off the ground and headed away. Chandler just lay there. He could hear himself breathing and his heart beating, but his ears were ringing so loudly that it drowned out all sounds, the faint ache like an itch punctuated every so often by the surprise of a sharp jab of pain at which he winced. He felt completely insulated from his surroundings by the suit and mask, cut off, sealed off, from the world that he had left a few moments before. Chandler could hear a distant siren sounding the steady tone that was universal for “all clear.”

Barnes removed his mask and hood.

“Musta been runway-cratering bombs,” Barnes said looking at the receding Delta jet.

Chandler removed his mask and looked back at the smoky air
field, nodding his head in understanding. That would explain the survival of the L-1011. The bombs were designed with a delayed-action fuse so that they would burrow deep into the ground to dig up a large crater. Consequently, they blew all their energy upward in a steep inverted cone. Had those been ordinary high-explosive bombs bursting on impact or, worse yet, in the air twenty or thirty feet above ground, the Delta jet would have been destroyed by the blast effects alone.

Crews of engineers hustled their equipment from the bombed-out building over toward the impact zone. They stopped about a hundred yards away.

Barnes stood there, looking at Chandler and waiting for something. “Take 'em down off MOPP Four, Master Sergeant.”

Barnes held up his mask and waved it in the air. Everyone began removing their gear.

“Stow it all back in your pouches!”
he yelled.

“Looks like they're scared of something,” a soldier said as she watched the engineers, who appeared to be doing nothing while maintaining their distance, many lying on the ground.

“They're waitin' to see if there were any delayed-fuse bombs, or if any of 'em scattered any landmine submunitions around the craters,” a staff sergeant explained. “Them holes cost the Russians a lotta money to make. They package a bunch of shit to keep engineers from fixin' 'em too easy.”

“You want me to form everybody up, sir?” Barnes asked. “Sort out the gear while we send out a couple of NCOs to find out where the Combat Control Team is?”

“Yeah,” Chandler said. “Good idea.”

Chandler saw that Bailey had finished repacking his chemical gear and was kneeling on the ground in front of it. He appeared lost deep in thought, staring off at the black smudge on the horizon that was the exhaust of the departed Delta jet.

“Lieutenant Bailey,” Chandler said.

“Yes . . . yes, sir?” He snapped out of his reverie.

“Uh—Lieutenant,” Chandler said as he looked around. He looked over at the fence beyond their ditch. It was unguarded. “Why don't you, uh, determine what the local security situation is—make sure we've got a defensible position until somebody shows up here to process us.”

Bailey looked over at the chain link fence and said, “Yes, sir!”
A combat mission, his first!
Chandler thought, stifling a smile as he watched Bailey instantly come alive.
My first too.
“Should we load our rifles, sir?” Bailey asked.

“Uhm, sure, I guess so,” Chandler said. “Just don't chamber a
round and keep the safety on.” Bailey carefully, almost reverently, pulled a magazine out of his pouch and slid it into his M-16. Then, grabbing a couple of soldiers, he rose to the opposite side of the ditch and looked around.

Chandler turned to see the two NCOs that Barnes had dispatched jogging off with their rifles in different directions while out of the charred terminal building soldiers emerged in no particular order. They and Chandler's NCO approached and shook hands—a soul shake, with a dramatic flourish. Chandler's NCO talked to them for a second, then pointed in Chandler's direction and pressed on. The men began to walk slowly toward the edge of the tarmac by the ditch. They were soldiers from a flight just like theirs, Chandler surmised.

Chandler looked around again, seeking out something to do, but Barnes was organizing the sorting of the troops' gear. He scanned the horizon in all directions but could not see anyone around to meet them.

Nothing out on the runway except the Slovak engineers.
Maybe we should ask them,
he thought. Nobody else near the building, or out on the empty grass field between the tarmac and the fence. Nobody but Bailey and his two men, spread out in good military fashion.

That's odd,
Chandler thought.
There were security troops placed at regular intervals when we came in. Why would they leave this area totally undefended?

The answer came to him, not slowly, but instantaneously fully formed and complete.
“Bailey! Fre-e-e-eze!”
Chandler screamed at the top of his lungs. Two of the men froze, but the man on the far left turned, taking another step.

The explosion almost cracked Chandler's sanity. He watched in horror as the man was blown fifteen feet into the air, a lifeless rag doll. Slowly, the main portion of his body turned in the air and plopped gracelessly back onto the ground, spilling its once precious contents onto the grass all around. Bailey and the other man had both been blown or dived to the ground and lay there, not moving except to raise their heads to see the destruction the landmine had wrought.

The sound of the explosion echoed through the stillness off the surrounding buildings. Chandler's victim lay on the ground in a shapeless heap. He had in an instant simply been destroyed. There was no other word for it, looking at his body lying strewn about the green field. Not “Killed in Action,” KIA, but DIA, “Destroyed in Action.” And not just his body, but his universe, his life, all that he had been, lost forever as if in the flick of a switch.

I read all those manuals,
Chandler thought with a helpless, sinking feeling.
I'm as prepared as I could get, and still
. . . This was not training. This was the real thing, and it had taken less than ten minutes to confirm Chandler's worst fears.
I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!