Everything else was an accident.
Maybe it didn’t look like that from Roma’s perspective.
And maybe the lines he was drawing were too fine to be practical.
Aboard the Bennett,
above northeastern Romania
2201
“TWO MORE CONTACTS OVER THE BLACK SEA, SAME AS
before,” Rager told Dog as they circled above the area where the guerrillas had attacked.
“MiGs?”
“MiG-29s. Configuration: two AMRAAMskis, four small missiles, probably infrared AA-11 Archers,” said Rager.
AMRAAMski was slang for the Russian R-77 radar-guided antiair missile, a weapon somewhat similar to the American AMRAAM. AA-11 Archer was the NATO designation for Russia’s R-73 short-range heat-seekers. “They’re running a racetrack pattern 263 miles to our east.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“We going to take another run at them?” asked Sullivan.
“We have better things to do,” Dog told him. “We’ll ignore them as long as they keep their distance.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Then that will be their problem.”
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Near Tutova, northeastern Romania
2207
THE NEXT BARN THEY CAME TO LOOKED AS IF IT DATED FROM
the medieval ages. One of its stone walls had caved in, and the rear of the roof was gone. The soldiers searched it anyway, using flashlights to sort through the shadows.
A smaller outbuilding sat behind it. This too was made of stone—large, carefully cut rocks the size of suitcases, piled like a complicated jigsaw puzzle beneath a sharply raked wooden roof.
The door, though, was metal. And new. And ajar.
Danny knelt down near the entrance, covering the soldiers as they went inside. The building wasn’t big enough to fit a car, yet it reeked so badly of gasoline that his nose stung.
One of the soldiers emerged from the shed holding a small gas can. It was empty, as were the dozen others scattered inside. One had apparently spilled; the dirt floor was still muddy.
“Pretty recent,” said Danny, toeing his boot through the residue.
Back outside, the soldiers had finished going through the main building without finding anything and were now fanning out to search the nearby area. The yard was rutted with tire tracks, but there was no way to tell how recent they were.
A stream ran at the edge of the property, thirty feet from the building. Danny walked over to the shallow water, examining the rock-strewn bed. Though only an inch or so deep, the creek was nearly eight feet wide, more than enough for a car or small truck to drive down.
Were there tracks in it? He couldn’t be sure.
“Where does this go?” Danny asked Roma when the lieutenant came over to see what he was doing.
Roma shook his head and took out a map. Danny reached to the back of his helmet and clicked his radio on.
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DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
“Zen, that streambed behind the buildings where we are—can you check it out?”
“Stand by, Groundhog.”
Roma located it on his topo map and showed it to Danny.
The stream ran about a hundred yards before swinging by another road.
“I’d better send some men around to cut anyone off,” said the lieutenant, picking up his radio.
“Groundhog, this is Flighthawk leader. The stream runs down near a road that parallels the road you’re on.”
“Roger that. We’re looking at a map right now.”
“There’s a culvert farther up and then it goes back to the highway. I’ve looked up and down, can’t see anyone nearby.”
“You think a car could drive down it?” Danny asked.
“Hard to tell. It looks relatively level. There are a half-dozen properties along the way that have buildings the size you’re looking for.”
“Can you get low and slow and give me a feed?” asked Danny. “The stream first. The lieutenant’s going to send some men up it.”
“Yeah, roger that.”
Zen took two passes as Danny watched. It looked clear to him, though there were one or two places where someone might have been able to hide in the thick vegetation. Danny told Roma about them and started up with the men.
His suspicion that the guerrillas had used the creek as a road cooled as they went. While it looked flat from above, it gradually grew rockier and deeper, harder and harder for a car to pass.
The point man halted, then pointed to something on the bank.
Tire tracks veered up along the side.
“Flighthawk leader, we think we found the spot where they came off,” said Danny.
“Roger that, Groundhog,” said Zen.
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A second or so later Zen came back on the line, his voice tight.
“Four, five figures coming through the field to your north.
They have a heavy machine gun. Twenty yards.”
A split second later, the machine gun began chewing up the night.
Aboard EB-52 Johnson,
above northeastern Romania
2210
ZEN’S MOMENTUM TOOK HIM PAST THE GUERRILLAS BEFORE
he could fire. As he turned back, he launched an illumination flare to silhouette the attackers for the Romanians. Then he pushed the Flighthawk’s nose down, zeroing in on the machine gun. He sent a stream of 20mm rounds into the machine-gun spot. Two or three shadows began moving to his left, apparently running away.
“Bennett, we have contact on the ground,” Zen told Dog over the interphone.
“Copy that, Flighthawk leader.”
“Spiff, you see any vehicles moving on the roadway or behind that field anywhere?” Zen asked the radar operator.
“Negative.”
Turning back for another run, Zen realized he had lost track of where the Romanian soldiers were. Danny’s GPS
unit showed his location just south of the now mangled machine gun, but tracers were flying in every direction around him.
“Groundhog, I can’t get a good fix on your team’s position,” said Zen. “Where do you want me?”
“Stand by.”
“Roger that,” he answered, frustrated that he couldn’t do more.
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DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
Near Tutova, northeastern Romania
2213
ONE MOMENT DANNY HAD EVERYTHING SORTED OUT IN HIS
head—where the guerrillas were, where the soldiers were, where he was. Then it was as if the world had spun upside down. Everything around him was jumbled. He couldn’t tell who was firing at whom. Both the guerrillas and the Romanian soldiers had AK-47s, and even in harsh light thrown by the Flighthawk’s illumination flare, telling the running figures apart was next to impossible.
Someone ran up from the stream and yelled at him in Romanian. Danny yelled back in English, not understanding a word.
The soldier twisted toward the barn and began firing.
Danny couldn’t see his target, but apparently the soldier hit it, because he jumped up and started running in that direction.
Following, Danny got about four or five yards before tracers zipped so close he could practically feel their tailspin.
He threw himself down, then crawled to the soldier he’d been following. The man had been hit in the head four or five times. The bullets had ripped most of his skull apart.
A fresh salvo of gunfire flew from the barn. Danny flattened himself against the ground, using the dead man’s body as cover. The bullets were heavy caliber, and they tore up the ground in little clumps as they sprayed across the field.
“Zen, you see that machine gun twenty yards from the barn?” said Danny.
“I’m on it. Keep your guys away.”
Inaudible above the din and rendered invisible because of its black skin, the Flighthawk seemed to be a lightning bolt sent by God Himself. The earth reverberated as a tornado of dirt and lead swirled in a frantic vortex where Danny’s enemy had been. Gun and gunner disappeared in the swirl, consumed by its fury.
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The ricochets and shrapnel missed him, but not by much.