Sam thrust his chin in the nuke’s direction. “Well, since none of us are going to play with the bomb, we can devote all our time to working on E and E. And we’d better think of something in the next few hours.”
The most incredible aspect of it all, Tracy Wei-Liu thought, was how quiet the C-5 was. The plane was longer than a football field and almost seven stories high. And yet she’d never heard it until it was on the ground. And she never would have even seen it if she hadn’t been looking through the night-vision monocular Ritzik had given her.
Ritzik was pleased. The weather was perfect for a black op. It was overcast, with low clouds and a seventeen-hundred-foot ceiling. There was some minimal ambient light from the terminal building. But the runway and taxiway lighting and the orange sodium floodlights that illuminated the aprons and the tower had all been extinguished, plunging the airport into darkness. There’d been some complaining by the airport apparatchiki, but Talgat and a platoon of his Special Forces soldiers had smothered it within moments: “On
She’d waited for the plane, standing between Ritzik and Umarov. The three of them peered blindly into the gloom, the dark warehouse at their backs. And then the radio in Ritzik’s hand had come to life: “Cocoa Flight. Signal arrive-arrive.” Then Ritzik handed her the night-vision device, pointed to the northwest, past the end of the runway farthest from the terminal, and said, “They’re a mile out.”
Wei-Liu put the monocular to her eye and swept the horizon. “Where?” She could see no aircraft.
“Wait.”
She peered intently through the monocular. She saw the end of the runway clearly. And the fence line beyond it, and then nothing but darkness. “I can’t see anything.”
“You will.”
Wei-Liu refocused the night-vision device and pressed her eye against the rubber lens cup. And then she saw it. She was mesmerized.
It was awesome. Huge. Silent. Menacing. A behemoth. And completely blacked out. It materialized out of the void and was on the ground, its huge tires scuffing the runway, before she’d even heard the whine of its engines. She lowered her arm and looked over at Ritzik.
Umarov said, “Give me the glass, please, miss.” Wei-Liu handed it to him. He squinted through the lens. “They know where to go, Mike?”
“Yes,” Ritzik said. “They have a photograph. And Rowdy’s in the cockpit.” He brandished a small pair of flashlights and twisted the caps to turn them on. “I’m the ground crew tonight.”
Wei-Liu said, “Your batteries are dead.”
“No — these are infrared. Look through the NV.”{Night-Vision.}
Wei-Liu took the monocular back from Umarov and stared at the ground. “Whoa — that’s bright.” Ritzik dropped the radio into the pocket of his ill-fitting Kazakh blouse and headed for the warehouse. “You guys wait here until they shut down and chock the wheels.”
Even their equipment was different than she’d anticipated. She’d thought they’d all be in camouflage, carrying huge machine guns, wearing flak jackets, and strapped into harnesses dripping with grenades, like the photos of Special Forces teams she’d seen in Afghanistan.
She’d been partially correct. Certainly, the Rangers, who’d come through the troop doors, jumped off the plane, and set up a defense perimeter even before the engines had shut down, were dressed that way. They all had night-vision goggles attached to their helmets. They wore camouflage uniforms, flak jackets, and combat harnesses or load-bearing vests hung with equipment. The Rangers carried short carbines with electronic red-dot sights and sported side arms in thigh holsters. They wore dark knee and elbow pads over their uniforms, and Wei-Liu could make out black earpieces and small microphones under their Kevlar helmets, with wires running to the radios Velcro’d to their vests.
