Major Bangs worked furiously to secure extra fuel pods to the barrel of some kind of flamethrower, then wrapped them in fireproof tape before handing it off to one of his men and starting another. He did not spare a second to look at his men, hadn't spoken a word since they boarded. His concern for the safety of his men was scary in its fierce intensity, and Storch hadn't yet decided whether it was genuine, or just a symptom of his insanity. He looked sure enough that Storch would follow him, but only if the alternative was jumping off the helicopter in mid-flight. The pep talk he'd given Storch yesterday came up unbidden in his mind.
I'm afraid—
The other commander was a surprise, and not a pleasant one. Dr. Wittrock tapped at a laptop, its blue-white screen making his face a cadaverous white island in the murky red sea of the cabin lights. Periodically, he fiddled with the cable connecting his computer with one of the drives in the pizza-rack of nav and radar deflection systems beside the co-pilot's station. He wore an olive drab flight suit, a gashelmet and black jumpboots, but they only accentuated his frail, stooped physique. A mission with two commanders is a doomed mission, Storch thought, and with a civilian in charge—no, a scientist…
Although everyone around him worked as if they'd been drilling the Mission for years, he'd felt a reek of mickeymouse desperation penetrating to the core of its execution from the moment they'd awakened him this morning. That, at least, had been like the real Army.
Fingers clamping both his earlobes, jolting him with pain and the rush of blood goosed into his brain. Diebenkorn's face in his, eyes intent, like he'd been watching him sleep.
"Would you be ready if it was now?"
"What—where—" His head swam up out of dream-logic, tried to roll back over, saying,
this is just another dream,
but Diebenkorn's eyes said,
no
. "I'm awake," he mumbled. "I'm good."
"Good. Because it's now. Get your shit together." And he'd left the room, the door standing open to the flurry of running soldiers. As he disappeared, he holstered a pistol that Storch hadn't noticed hovering beside his temple. Were they being raided? No alarms, no gunfire.
It's now
.
What the fuck? He'd had only the vaguest idea of what the Mission was, knew only that the operation was imminent and that he had a part in it. There'd been no briefing, no review of plans like in Desert Storm, when they'd holed up in a remote tent at the edge of Bedrock for twenty-four hours before setting foot on the chopper. He supposed he understood the reasons for it: this operation would be contingent on any number of factors, from meteorology to the military, and probably had to be thrown together at a moment's notice. Also, Bangs had to know how Storch was trained. He'd know that Storch would meticulously plot and internalize his part of the Mission, so that the execution would be like another episode of a recurring dream. He'd need to shake every detail for oversights that could jeopardize his life in the field, and reject elements that didn't fit. He'd want to walk away from a plan that would mean certain death. Thus, the wake-up stunt.
He'd dressed and fallen into the flow of men towards the motor pool, where he'd stopped short and marveled at what he saw. The choppers were untarped and dressed out for take-off, only their rotor-blades furled in the massive space. Two crewmen unfolded out the rotor assembly of the Hind; presumably, they'd open up the Black Hawk after the Hind had taken off. Which would be easy, because the ceiling was gone; a brown mesh tarpaulin stretched over the yawning space above, but Storch could make out flecks of gray, cloudy sky through it.
Every outward inch of both helicopters was covered in a dull black surface that looked like foam rubber, inlaid with networks of heavy silver cable. Storch guessed it was Stealth technology, something the Mission scientists had helped the government develop and then stolen back.
Then he'd noticed the bomb racks under both choppers, and wondered if they'd get off the ground at all. The Black Hawk had over a dozen fat, barrel-shaped bombs and as many short-range missiles in a jungle-gym of a multitiered rig stretching out from the landing gear, and the Hind carried half again as large a payload, with missiles even hanging from secondary stabilizer wings above the loading doors. Surely they didn't intend to carry troops, too?
Finally, he'd noticed Medina standing beside the door, waiting patiently to be noticed. He handed Storch a bundle of heavy vinyl and a helmet. It looked like a GI spacesuit, and came with a Kevlar flak-vest and thigh-pads. It was the kind of fantasy protective gear the Pentagon might've issued in Desert Storm if they'd been intelligent and responsible fiscal planners and genuinely concerned for the welfare of their men. "Put this on," Medina said, "and get on the Black Hawk."
Storch pointed at the Hind. "That's a Russian chopper."
"No shit," Medina replied. "Bought it off the Cubans. Carries more freight and firepower than anything we make."
"What about the briefing?" Storch asked without much hope.
Medina chuckled. "You missed it. It was a month ago. We'll fill you in, in the air."
"This is bullshit," Storch growled.
"Yeah, so? Just stay close to somebody who has the evac plan and the safehouse list memorized, and you'll be good."
Storch joined the milling group of eleven soldiers in their MOPP suits, checking out weapons from the armory adjacent to the motor pool. Another cause for slack-jawed staring. Their arsenal was as far past the Army's standard issue as the Army was above Turkish bandits. The infantry standard was a modified Pancor jackhammer, an automatic shotgun. About half were fitted with a beltfeed option, but Storch gave this up after inspecting the triple beltfeed and the curiously color-coded shells in each. He took a jackhammer, but slung an MP5 over his shoulder for the security of the familiar. There were flamethrowers with wide-gauge nozzles that seemed rigged to throw incendiary gel instead of liquid fuel, maybe even napalm. He reminded himself to stay the hell away from anyone with one of those.
Major Bangs had come in with Dr. Wittrock, and the men fell into formation without prompting. Storch noticed that they stood in two groups of four and a threesome. Storch drifted towards the three and stood with Medina, Draper and a wiry Texan named Tarnell, who favored him with a crooked smile before turning away. Against his natural and justifiable caution, Storch had immediately come to like Tarnell and supposed everybody else did the same. He was the kind of open, naturally charming soldier a unit needed to be more than just a gang of goons with guns. Whatever they were going to do, whoever they were going to do it to, if Tarnell was in his team, it couldn't be as bad as everybody feared. Of course, everybody else here was crazy…
Bangs signaled wordlessly for the floor. "It's now," he said, and the gravity of the words made every soldier stand a little taller under the crushing weight of their gear, as if the enemy were right outside. "Remember the briefings and follow the Mission protocols, but don't be robots. Expect extremely unconventional resistance, and be prepared for every contingency we discussed. This is our Mission. For whatever reason each of you has that says so, this has to be done. And we will do it. Now." He turned and started to get onboard, but Wittrock clamped his wrist and whispered agitatedly in his ear. Bangs turned and hissed something back that made Wittrock wince, then look in Storch's direction. "I want to take this up with Armitage," Wittrock announced loudly. "Now."
Bangs grabbed him more roughly than he needed to and waved Storch over. "Sergeant Storch. Apologies for cutting you out of the final briefings, but you looked like you needed the sleep, and somebody thought you were a security risk. You're on the D Team, with me. Your mission objective is twofold, thus the extra man, but your primary task is to protect this man," he said, pointing his finger in Wittrock's face. "If I think you're a risk, I'll take you out myself. Same goes for the other three, and you'll never see it coming. Will I have to put you down?"
Storch looked Wittrock over. The man clearly disliked and mistrusted him, but if he was going, he was important. Storch was going to free up a man for the other teams, which would probably comprise some sort of assault force. "You won't have any trouble from me, sir."
"Do you want to spend the night in storytime with Dr. Armitage, or do you want to do this thing?" Bangs asked, and Wittrock seemed to deflate. They got on the chopper.
They'd waited only five minutes after the tarp was rolled back and the Hind took off. The crew worked frantically on their rotors, then climbed down and in even as the pilot fired up the stack of computers behind his chair. Then the motor pool and the underground complex dropped away, and the desert horizon unfurled around them, a featureless brown plane sandwiched against a gray one, the buffer of setting sun melting away to the west. Storch recognized the place immediately. It was a junkyard that used to be a drive-in, just outside of Baker. He'd been here several times— with Harley Pettigrew, poking around amongst the totaled auto skeletons while Harley haggled with the "manager." He wondered how much else in the last eight years had been nothing like it seemed, passing unnoticed by his dulled, hermit's eyes.
In the hour-long flight, Medina had taken it upon himself to fill Storch in on the rough outlines of the mission, and it'd been then, with the sickening dip and sway of the helicopter, the enervating red dimness of the cabin, the stink of gun oil, sweat, fuel and napalm, and the clear understanding of what they were about to do laid out before him, that he'd felt the urge to vomit.
He sat back now and tried to break the Mission down into a piece he could swallow. He was going to protect a man, a package of vital strategic value, nothing more. That was his job, and he could do it, the rest of it was somebody else's job, he just had to guard the scientist.
Draper nudged him, leaned in close to whisper in his ear. "Sorry about before," he said. "At the truckstop."
"'Salright," Storch said, wanting to be left alone.
"I didn't want to grease you, buddy," Draper went on. "I was just following orders. From that asshole." and he pointed at Wittrock. The physicist never looked up from his computer.
Outside, the rolling Inyo Mountains dropped away and the drained dust-plain of the Owens Valley opened out beneath them. On the northern horizon, about five miles off, Storch glimpsed the feeble glow of a town, maybe Big Pine, maybe Independence. The helicopter bore due west as it came out of the mountains; the side-door spotter shouted into his headset that he had a visual mark on Highway 395, and Major Bangs called five minutes to target. The soldiers stood and secured their gear, bunched together into their three-man teams.
Storch stood between Medina and Draper with his eyes closed, and tried to find a quiet place. In all the violence and panic and confusion of the last week, the only bright, silent center he could grasp was yesterday, when he'd lain in the sickbay, and the pretty nurse, who looked more like an Indian than a Mexican, and had a mean mouth but soft eyes, had watched him. Probably, she thought he was asleep, and Storch wasn't about to disabuse her of it, if it meant she'd start up talking again, or worse, go away. Where any other person in the world might've creeped him out by lurking over him in a position of weakness, it had made him feel warm and safe, like he could go to sleep for real and not have the Hostage Show dream, or wake up to the Headache. It wasn't that Storch was some kind of lonely bedwetter who yearned for human contact but couldn't deal with it while conscious—rather, he'd felt he could stand her looking at him for so long because he could see through his slitted eyes that she was really trying to see him. He wondered if he could get her to shut up and look at him like that when he was really awake, after all this.
After. That's funny, Storch.
"Arms up and helmets on, we're one minute to target," Bangs shouted. Storch clamped his helmet down on his head and held his breath. The worse-than-puke stench of new plastic flooded his nostrils, seemed to solidify into slime on his tongue. Medina reached over and connected his airfeed to the canister sewed into the small of his back, dogged the seals on his helmet and gave him a thumbs-up. The canned air was better than nothing, but not by much. Storch made himself take several deep gulps, holding each for several seconds to try to get his panic in check.
Nobody else is freaking out.
He began to calm down, and took in the genius of the helmet without hating it much less. A gasmask built into a full enclosure steel and high-impact plastic helmet, the visor allowed a full field view, and seals could be opened to breathe filtered ambient air when the canister ran out.
A headset built into the helmet fed him the sound of every soldier's labored breathing, and via Bangs's frequency, the muted rapid-fire chatter of the pilots and crews of both choppers. The Mission moved forward like a live thing, and they were its muscles, and its claws.
Bangs bulled his way down the crowded catwalk and stood in the open loading door. His big broad face was stretched tighter than a drum, but there was no shake to it. Putting troops on the ground, Storch decided, the Major was anything but afraid. "The world is not going to understand what we are about to do. They are going to brand us terrorists and extremists, and it is very doubtful that any of us will live to see them, in the fullness of time, come to recognize the importance of our sacrifice. I want to thank each and every one of you for participating in this Mission, for turning your back on country and the order of law to do what's right. And it is: if you never hear it again, I want you to fix this in your brains and take it to your graves. This is right. This is just.
This is the natural order
. It's been a privilege to serve with you all. Twenty seconds to target. Ivan, advance on target and commence strategic bombing."