“Which will put us on a course to Juan Santamaria, sir?”
“If there are any questions about why you’re changing course, I don’t want Juan Santamaria to enter the conversation, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If I told you that we’re probably going to experience mechanical problems when Juan Santamaria is the closest alternate, then you would think I was prescient, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I guess I would.”
“Good. It is valuable for junior officers to believe their seniors have mysterious abilities and know things they don’t.”
Major Tanner smiled at Lieutenant General McNab. This was not the first Gray Fox mission he had flown for Special Operations, but it was the first on
e he’d flown on which McNab was being carried. Knowing this, Colonel Jake Torine had briefed Major Tanner and two other pilots on what they might expect from the legendary Special Forces officer. The two cogent points of the briefing were to expect the unexpected and don’t ask any questions or express an opinion unless asked to do so.
Major Tanner elected to violate one of the teachings of the briefing.
“Sir, is that where the 727 we missed in Chad is?” McNab looked at him coldly.
“There is an old saying in the Army, Major, that lieutenants should not marry, captains may marry, and majors should be very careful about being prescient. It probably has an application for the Air Force.”
“Yes, sir,” Tanner said. “We usually stop getting pinged by Cuban radar about here.” He pointed at the chart. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to encounter some upper-level turbulence a few miles south of that point.”
“You’ve been warned about premature prescience, Major, ” McNab said and smiled at him.
General McNab then climbed down from the cockpit and went into the cargo bay. Despite the size of the enormous aircraft, it was crowded. Six Little Birds, their rotors folded, took up much of the space. There were four five-hundred-gallon fuel bladders lashed to the floor. There were crates of ammunition and rockets and rations and perhaps thirty plastic coolers that bore the bright red legend:
BASE EXCHANGE
HURLBURT FIELD
HOME OF AIR FORCE SPECIAL OPERATIONS
Scattered throughout the cargo bay, sitting on whatever they could find to sit on except the uncomfortable aluminum-pipe-and-nylon-sheeting standard seats, were thirty Gray Fox special operators—six officers, twelve senior enlisted men, and the twelve Little Bird pilots. One of the pilots was a captain, one a lieutenant, and the others chief warrant officers, two of whom were CWO-5s whose pay was only slightly less than that of a lieutenant colonel. All the pilots, in addition to being carefully selected and highly trained Army aviators with a minimum of a thousand hours in the air as pilot in command, were also fully trained and qualified as Special Forces soldiers. Their mission, once they had delivered the Gray Fox team to the ground, was to switch roles from helicopter pilots to what everybody called “shooters.”
There were also a half dozen mechanics whose primary function was the folding of Little Bird rotor blades, loading the Little Birds onto the C-17, and then unloading them, unfolding the rotor blades, and making sure they were safe to fly when the C-17 touched down. There were also two avionics technicians to make sure everything electronic on the Little Birds was functioning properly and two armorers to handle the weaponry. The technicians, too, were all fully qualified Special Forces soldiers, and when the Little Birds had taken off they, too, would switch to being shooters and establish a perimeter guard around the Globemaster.
Just about everybody was drinking a Coke or a 7UP or munching on an ice-cream bar on a stick or wolfing down a hot dog heated in one of two microwave ovens that were carried along routinely even if they didn’t appear on any list of equipment.
The base exchange at Hurlburt had had a good day. General McNab would not have been at all surprised if some of the plastic coolers from the exchange held six, maybe eight, cases of beer on ice. He hadn’t asked or looked, nor was he worried. His people were pros; they wouldn’t take a sip until the job was done.
And three-quarters of the way down the cargo bay, on the only upholstered chair in the bay, a Gray Fox special operator sat before a fold-down shelf that held one of onetime sergeant Aloysius Francis Casey’s latest communications devices.
He had just stuffed perhaps a third of a chili-and-onion dog in his mouth when he saw General McNab walking toward him. He started to chew furiously as he started to stand up.
McNab signaled for him to keep his seat and waited for him to finish chewing.
“I understand we’re having a little communications problem, Sergeant Kensington,” General McNab said.
“Yes, sir?” Kensington replied, momentarily confused at first, then following.
“Everything but imagery is down, I understand?”
Sergeant Kensington turned to the control panel and flipped switches. Green LEDs went out as he did so.
“Yes, sir, nothing’s green but imagery.”
“Well, you never can really predict when these things are going to work and when they’re not, can you?”