The Seventh Angel - Страница 60

She opened the lid of the laptop, backed out of the error logs, and loaded the program modules she had written to prepare Mouse for this mission.

It took her only a few seconds to find the address in the program where the patch should have been installed. It wasn’t there.

Oh god! How had that happened? Had she forgotten to install the patch? She couldn’t have. There was just no way.

But she had forgotten. She’d been so cocky, so sure that she had done everything perfectly. And she had somehow forgotten a critical step. Maybe even the critical step.

This whole mess with the missile submarine could have been over by now, if she’d done her job. But she’d forgotten.

Or had she? What if it hadn’t been an accident? Or rather, what if she’d wanted to forget? Was that possible?

She didn’t like these Navy people. That wasn’t exactly a secret. And she didn’t want to be party to killing the crew of that submarine. That wasn’t a secret either.

Maybe she had made some subconscious decision to screw this up. She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel that way. But how would she know? How could she be sure?

What if this had been their one chance to get the sub? And she had screwed it up.

She closed the laptop again. What the hell was she going to do now?

CHAPTER 49

3 EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL COMPANY

ICE PACK — SOUTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH

0752 hours (7:52 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The U.S. Marine Corps CH-53D helicopter was flying low — the pilot hugging the ice, trying to blend his aircraft into the ground clutter to minimize detection by hostile radar.

Aft of the cockpit, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong and the three other Marines assigned to his EOD response element occupied only a small corner of the helicopter’s 30-foot-long cargo/troop compartment. The team’s detection gear and disruption equipment took up more room than the team itself, but the big compartment was still nearly as empty as the icy terrain they were flying above.

Gunny Armstrong looked over his team. Hicks and Travers were sleeping. Staff Sergeant Myers was peering out through one of the starboard windows. They were good Marines, all three of them. They were trained, and motivated, and damned good at their jobs. Gunny was proud to have them under his command.

He turned to look out of his own window. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said. He spoke at a normal volume, and his voice was lost against the howl of the helicopter’s turbines and the chop of the rotors. He was talking to himself, anyway. No one was supposed to hear. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said again. “It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna fucking work.”

He tugged the folds of his neck gator into a more comfortable position, and hauled the zipper of his ECWCS parka up another few notches. The parka, like the rest of Gunny’s Marine Corps issue survival gear, was part of the 2nd generation Extended Cold Weather Clothing System. And — like all the other ECWCS gear — it was patterned in the leafy greens, browns, and tans of the woodland camouflage scheme. There was supposed to be a white outer garment, for operations in snowy environments, but the Supply Sergeant had checked the wrong block on the requisition form, and they’d gotten a shipment of meat thermometers or something stupid like that.

So much for that camouflage shit. In their pretty green suits, Gunny and his fellow EOD techs were going to stand out against the ice and snow like a bulldozer in a bathtub. If anybody came looking for them, they’d be screwed. Of course, there was a good chance that they were screwed anyway.

Through the scratched Plexiglas window, the ice below was nearly a blur, sliding under the belly of the aircraft at 190 miles per hour. This entire mission was a blur. The whole thing had been thrown together at the last minute, with almost no preparation. And that was a good way to get Marines killed.

The plan called for the chopper to insert the team, and then turn south and head for the open sea, where it could refuel with one of the destroyers operating over the horizon. According to intel, the Op-Area was crawling with MiGs, and the CH-53 had a radar cross-section the size of a barn. Moving the aircraft to a standoff position made good tactical sense, but Gunny Armstrong didn’t like the idea of having his Marines stranded on the ice.

If the mission went sour, their options for rapid emergency evac were basically zero. Not that the ancient 53 was much of an evac platform anyway. The damned thing was older than Gunny’s father. It leaked, and rattled, and shook so hard that it wobbled your teeth. If this job was really as important as battalion was making it out to be, why hadn’t somebody called up one of the V-22s instead of this flying relic?

His only satisfaction lay in the knowledge that Master Sergeant Pike and Response Element One weren’t riding any better. They were at the western end of the Op-Area, flying in a CH-53 just as rickety as this old piece of crap, toward the Alfa and Bravo sites.

Gunny’s people, Response Element Two, had been assigned to the Charlie and Delta sites, at the eastern end of the Op-Area. Element One and Element Two had both been directed to work from north-to-south, disarming the northern sites first, and then moving down to handle the southern sites. The longer the disarming efforts dragged on, the more risk there was of being spotted by hostile forces.

In theory, by getting the most distant sites out of the way first, the teams would put themselves closer to evac if anything went wrong in the second half of the mission. It wasn’t much of a theory in Gunny’s book, since the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be any greater in the second half of the operation than it was in the first half. But that was the sort of half-bright thinking that the rear echelon types were famous for.

Nobody was calling this a suicide mission, but that’s what it was starting to smell like. His team of Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs had been assigned to locate and disarm multiple pre-positioned explosives packages of unknown size, strength, and configuration. They had no idea of what these packages might look like, no idea of how sensitive they might be to intrusion or tampering, and only rough estimates of their locations. To put the icing on the cake, they’d be working in near-arctic conditions, under a sky dominated by hostile air cover.

If that wasn’t brilliant tactical planning, Gunny didn’t know what was. He grunted. Some genius back at G3 needed to have his ass kicked for dreaming up a goat rodeo like this. If they got out of this alive, Gunny might just have to go look up the idiot in question, and kick down the door to his fucking office.

The idea made the Marine grin — a cold and feral expression, with no trace of humor in it. He was nearly ready for the purge now. Nearly annoyed enough, and worried enough, and frustrated enough for the final piece of his emotional preparation.

The purge had been Colonel Ziegler’s term, back when Gunny Armstrong had been a punk Pfc. with the 11th MEU in Iraq.

“You don’t start a patrol when you’ve got to take a dump,” Colonel Z had said. “You hit the head before you hit the trail. You get all the shit out of your body, so it doesn’t slow you down.”

“Well you’ve got to do the same thing for your brain,” the colonel had said. “You can’t go into combat with a bunch of unnecessary shit clogging up your brain. You’ve got to offload it. You’ve got to purge it. You’ve got to call up all of your doubts and angers ahead of time. Think about it. Stew over it. Get mad about it. And then get rid of it. Let it go, just like taking a dump. So when the time comes to be a Marine, you’ve got nothing else on your mind but being a Marine.”

As far as Gunny Armstrong was concerned, it had been good advice. It had gotten him through three tours in the sandbox. He figured it would probably see him through this mess as well.

He was mad now, and scared, and all the things a Marine cannot afford to be when he’s in the field. He could feel the knot of emotions building inside him, rising through his bones like the shriek of the chopper’s turbines. He wondered for a second if he should sneak something in there about his ex-wife, just to really push things over the top.

But he didn’t need it. He felt the internal safety valve in his chest lift, venting his rage and his fear, and he made no move to stop it. He slammed a fist into his sternum, to make sure that the imaginary tank of feelings emptied itself entirely. “Ooh-rah!” he said to himself. “Ooh-fucking-rah!”

The ritual did its job. He felt the calm descend over him. He was ready. He was focused. The only thoughts in his mind were of the mission, and his Marines. Everything else was insignificant bullshit.

The copilot’s voice crackled in the left ear of his headset. “Two minutes, Gunny.”

Gunny Armstrong felt for the talk button and keyed his mike. “Two minutes, aye. Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant.”

He looked out the window at jagged terrain of the ice pack. It was time to go kick some ass. Time to go be Marines.

CHAPTER 50

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN

THURSDAY; 07 MARCH

0821 hours (8:21 AM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

Captain Bowie leaned back in his chair, and set his coffee cup on the wardroom table. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Your Mouse unit decided on its own to abandon the search, and return to the position where we launched it?”