A small flashing red box appeared just above the virtual horizon in her HUD. She nudged the stick again, lining up the yellow arrowhead with the target designator. Back up in the twenty-first, a CI would have handled all of this, with the pilot riding along just in case something went wrong. Of course, back up in the twenty-first she wouldn’t have been on a mission like this. She wasn’t a jet jockey-or hadn’t been, anyway. But thousands of hours flying light transport planes in and out of Third World death traps like Damascus and Addis Ababa had marked her out when the talent scouts had come calling. So now she flew jets.
Specifically she flew the contemporary version of the F-86F Saber jet.
“Three minutes to release. Slaving mission package to CI.”
The Trident’s CI, still speaking in the voice of an as-yet-unborn Lady Beckham, informed the squadron that she had taken over the bomb release. Hobbins wanted to grip the stick harder, but she forced herself to breathe out, to relax her hold on the plane, and let herself flow through the moment.
A quick check of the heads-up confirmed that all fifteen Sabers were in formation and lined up for the final run in. High above them, the Trident’s Big Eye tracked the jets feeding the data back to the stealth destroyer’s CI, which measured their progress against position fix emitters set in place by the Resistance, and calculated the time left to release while keeping the squadron on the correct heading.
The Chinooks had fallen well behind now. Hobbins would need a top-down view of the battlespace if she wanted to track their progress. Instead, she concentrated on the darkened world that was rushing past her bubble canopy, and the objective that lay just ahead. It was a cloudless night; the stars were pinpoint emeralds in her LLAMPS vision, the Central Massif a wall of lime-green negative space, blotting out the heavens to the southeast. Tactical readouts and rendered terrain display overlaid the soft luminous French countryside, where every human-made structure was drawn on her goggles in hard schematic outline. A dry stone wall. A tumbledown barn. A burned-out church.
And then, rushing toward them at a seemingly insane velocity, the target box and nearly two dozen smaller icons: flashing red triangles where the Big Eye had detected and designated antiaircraft guns and concentrations of armored vehicles.
“Begin climb. Begin climb. Begin climb.”
She pulled back on the stick, and the nose of the F-86 turned skyward. She could feel the g-force pressing her back into her seat, trying to squeeze the blood out of her brain and down into her butt, despite the pressure suit she was wearing.
“Begin dive. Begin dive. Begin dive.”
She pushed forward, and the virtual horizon floated up in her display as all the blood rushed back toward her head. Soon she was lancing down toward her objective, a hardened concrete silo system housing two dozen V3 missiles.
Hobbins centered herself as the final chime sounded.
“Bomb release in five, four, three…”
Lazy streams of wandering, badly directed tracer fire searched for her in the darkness.
“…two, one. Release. Release. Release.”
Hobbins felt the tug as her seven-hundred-kilo Penetrator dropped away. Concentrating furiously on the nav display, she pulled up and rolled to the west while the first explosions ripped apart the giant hidden complex beneath her. The shock waves buffeted her as she sped away, shaking the airframe so violently that she wondered if she might lose a wing.
There was a sharp stab of pain in her mouth, followed by the rush of something warm and salty. She’d bitten her tongue. Pouring on the acceleration, weaving around to follow the yellow arrowhead designator that kept her away from the rapidly diminishing flak streams, she dialed up a feed from the Big Eye, an infrared view from ten thousand meters up.
All fifteen jets were still flying, but one was trailing flames. It exploded as she watched, the detonation lost in a storm of much larger blasts as more Penetrators drilled deep into shattered concrete and went off, focusing their destructive energies down into the missile farm.
Secondary explosions of rocket fuel and warheads tore up the valley, negating the attacks on smaller individual targets.
“Shit,” muttered Hobbins. “That was a bit excessive.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Ronsard breathed.
“Nope,” Harry corrected him. “Professor Barnes Wallis, and about twenty years’ of uptime experience digging reinforced bunkers out of the Hindu Kush.”
Anjela Claudel’s voice, shocked and a little shaky, came in over his helmet systems. “But everyone will be dead. The scientists, too.”
“Not everyone,” said Harry. “We’ll lose everybody in the silos, but three-quarters of von Braun’s team live off-site in Complex B. That’s still standing.”
“How many of the Boche will be waiting for you, though?” asked Claudel.
Harry smiled. “Enough for everyone. Now, if you’ll just excuse me a moment.”
He pulled his combat goggles down over his eyes, the gelform seal molding itself to the contours of his face. He linked to the Big Eye and back to the Trident via flexipad. A dense, multicolored V3D representation appeared, showing the threat bubble out to eight kilometers. In smaller windows, live video ran of the blazing bunkers and the residential complex that was their objective. He was presented with immediate damage surveys, estimates of the number of enemy killed and incapacitated, the disposition of his own forces, and live intel from the Trident’s CIC. To the uninitiated it would seem an almost impenetrable mass of data, but it was as familiar to Harry as an old and much-loved children’s picture book.
The second squadron, under Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, was already setting down in their Landing Zone away to the west. The first choppers had disgorged their troops, who’d formed up just below a ridgeline overlooking Complex B.
Harry switched his view to a live feed of his squadron’s own LZ, overlaid with tactical and threat assessment data. They would be setting down another six hundred meters away, in a large field to the south.
The copilot’s voice cut in. “Strobe sighted. Verifying.”
An infrared strobe had just lit up, identifying the LZ, and Harry knew that the Big Eye had just focused at least half of its lenses and sensors on that area. All being well, one of Claudel’s Resistance cells would be down there, ready to lead them in. If that didn’t check out, and the Intel Division back on the Trident decided that the contact had been compromised, the area would be hosed down with autocannon and rocket fire, and they would move on to an alternative LZ.
He could sense Claudel’s tension next to him. “It is okay?” she asked.
Harry waited for the signal from the Trident.
The strobe kept flashing.
“It is okay?” she repeated. “Oui?”
A green ALL CLEAR finally appeared in his HUD.
“Oui,” he answered. “Lock and load, gentlemen. And mademoiselle, of course.”
Claudel smiled brilliantly as she prepped her old Sten gun with a metallic kerrchunk. Her white teeth and bright green eyes were quite arresting, even in the red light of the cabin. Harry checked himself, grinding down on a spark of attraction. He normally didn’t feel like getting a leg over until well after an op. But this had been happening a lot since his inserts had run out of neurochem inhibitor.
Oh well, perhaps if he lived…
“One minute.”
Suddenly they dipped and swooped to the right, leaving his stomach where it had been somewhere above them. The combat chief hit a switch, and the rear door of the Chinook opened with a slow, heavy whirring noise.
Dozens of people back in England were watching the ground below, alert for the slightest hint of a trap, but even so Harry was glad to see the chief giving it a severe eyeballing himself. That sort of attention to detail was how you got to be an old veteran rather than one of the poor fucking glorious dead.