Peacekeepers (1988) Page 4

  Dozens of planes were being sent against the aggressors, pilots from every available Peacekeepers' station were in their cockpits, hands on their flight controls. There were the usual delays and mix-ups, but Kelly suddenly felt free and happy, alone at the controls of an agile little flying machine, her every movement answered by a movement of the plane, her nerves melding with the machine's circuitry, the two of them mated more intimately than a man and a woman could ever be.

  The plane was as small as it could be made and still do its job. Using the latest in stealth technology, it flew in virtual silence, its quiet Stirling engine turning the six paddle blades of the propeller so gently that they barely made a sound. But the plane was slow, painfully slow. Built of wood and plastic, for the most part, it was designed to avoid detection by radar and infrared heat-seekers, not to outrun any opposition that might find her.

  To make it hard to find visually, Kelly was trained to fly close to the ground, hugging the hills and treetops, flirting with sudden downdrafts that could slam the fragile little plane into the ground.

  She thought of herself as a hunting owl, cruising silently through the night, seeking her prey. Everything she needed to know—rather, everything that Geneva could tell her had been fed to her through her radio earphones. Now, as she flew silently through the dark and treacherous mountain passes on the border of Eritrea, she maintained radio silence.

  I am an owl, Kelly told herself, a hunting owl. But there were hawks in the air, and the hunter must not allow herself to become the hunted. A modem jet fighter armed with air-to-air missiles or machine cannon that fired thousands of rounds per minute could destroy her within moments of sighting her. And the second or two delay built into her control system bothered her; a couple of seconds could be the difference between life and death.

  But they've got to see me first, Kelly told herself. Be silent. Be invisible.

  Despite the cold, she was perspiring now. Not from fear; it was the good kind of sweat that comes from a workout, from preparation for the kind of action that your mind and body have trained for over long grueling months.

  Virtually all the plane's systems were tied to buttons on the control column's head. With the flick of her thumb Kelly could make the plane loop or roll or angle steeply up into the dark sky. Like a figure skater, she thought. You and me, machine, we'll show them some Olympic style before we're through.

  She was picking up aggressor radio transmissions in her earphones now: she could not understand the language, so she flicked the rocker switch on the control board to her left that activated the language computer. It was too slow to be of much help, but it got a few words:

  ". . . tank column A . . . jump-off line . . . deploy . . ."

  With her left hand she tapped out a sequence on the ECM board, just by her elbow, then activated the sequence with the barest touch of a finger on the black button set into the gray control column head.

  Thousands of tiny metallic slivers poured out of a hatch just behind the cockpit, scattering into the dark night air like sparkling crystals of snow. But these dipoles, monomolecular thin, floated lightly in the calm predawn air.

  They would hover and drift for hours, wafting along on any stray air current that happened by, jamming radio communications up and down thousands of megahertz of the frequency scale.

  The Law of the Peacekeepers was: Destroy the weapons of war.

  One of the prime weapons of modem war was electronic communications. So the first rule of Peacekeeper tactics was: Screw up their comm system and you screw up their attack.

  Leaving a long cloud of jamming chaff behind her, Kelly swooped down a rugged tree-covered valley so low that she almost felt leaves brushing the plane's underside. A river glinted in the faint light. Kelly switched her display screen to infrared and, sure enough, there was a column of tanks snaking along the road that hugged the riverbank. Gray ugly bulks with long cannon poking out like erect penises.

  Have fun with your radios, fellas, she called to them silently.

  If the tanks reached the border and actually crossed into Sudanese territory, they would be guilty of aggression, and small, smart missiles launched from Peacekeeper command-and-control planes would greet them. But until they crossed the border, their crews were not to be endangered.

  Second rule of Peacekeeper tactics: You can't counterattack until the aggressor attacks. Show enough force to convince the aggressor that his attack will be stopped, but launch no weapon until aggression actually takes place.

  Corollary No. 1: It makes no difference why an attack is launched, or by whom. The Peacekeepers' mission is to prevent the attack from succeeding. We are police, not judges.

  Kelly had seen what those smart missiles could do.

  Barely an arm's length in size, their warheads were nonexplosive slugs of spent uranium, so dense that they sliced through a hundred millimeters of armor like a bullet goes through butter.

  The Law said to destroy the weapons, not the men. But men operated the weapons. Men carried them or rode inside them.

  A tank is a rolling armory, filled with highly flammable fuel and explosive ammunition. Hit it with a hypervelocity slug almost anywhere and it will burst into flame or blow up like a mini volcano. The men inside have no chance to escape. And the missile, small as it is, is directed by a thumbnail-sized computer chip that will guide it to its target with the dogged accuracy of a Mach 10 assassin.

  Banking slightly for a better look at the slowly moving column of tanks, Kelly found herself wishing that her chaff fouled their communications so thoroughly that they had to stop short of the border. Otherwise, most of those million-dollar tanks would be destroyed by thousand-dollar missiles. And the men in them would die. Young men foolish enough to believe that their nation had a right to invade its neighbor. Or serious enough to believe that they must obey their orders, no matter what. Young men who looked forward to life, to marriage, to families and honored old age where they would tell their grandchildren stories about their famous battles and noble heroism.

  They would die ingloriously, roasted inside their tanks, screaming with their last breath as the flames seared their lungs.

  But she had other work to do.

  Third rule of Peacekeeper tactics: A mechanized army needs fuel and ammunition. Cut off those supplies and you stop the army just as effectively as if you had killed all its troops.

  Kelly's plane was a scout, not a missile platform. It was unarmed. If she was a hunting owl, she hunted for information, not victims. Somewhere in this treacherous maze of deeply scoured river valleys and arid tablelands there were supply dumps, fuel depots, ammunition magazines that provided the blood and sinew of the attacking army.

  Kelly's task was to find them. Quickly.

  If it had been an easy assignment, she would not have gotten it. If the dumps could have been found by satellite reconnaissance, they would already be targeted for attack.

  But the Eritreans had worked long and patiently for this invasion of their neighbor. They had dug their supply dumps deeply underground, as protection against both the prying satellite eyes of the Peacekeepers and the inevitable pounding of missiles and long-range artillery, once the dumps had been located.

  Kelly and her owllike aircraft had to fly through those tortuous valleys hunting, seeking, scanning up and down the spectrum with sensors that could detect heat, light, magnetic fields, even odors. And she had to find the dumps before the sun got high enough to fill those valleys with light. In daylight, her little unarmed craft would be spotted, inevitably. And once found, it would be swiftly and mercilessly destroyed.

  All her sensors were alive and scanning now, as Kelly gently, deftly flew the tiny plane down one twisting valley after another. She felt tense, yet strangely at peace. She knew the stakes, and the danger, yet as long as she was at the controls of her agile little craft she was happy. Like being alone out on the ice: nothing in the world mattered except your own actions. There was no audience here, no judges. Kelly felt
happy and free. And alone.

  But the eastern sky was brightening, and her time was growing short.

  The sensors were picking up data now, large clumps of metal buried here, unmistakable heat radiations emanating from there, molecules of human sweat and machine oil and plastic explosive wafting up from that mound of freshly turned earth. She squirted the data in highly compressed bursts of laser light up to a waiting satellite, hoping that the Eritreans did not have the sophisticated comm equipment needed to detect such transmissions and home in on her plane.

  There were many such planes flitting across the honeycomb of valleys, each pilot hoping that the Eritreans did not catch its transmissions, did not find it before it had completed its task and flown safely home.

  Small stuff, Kelly realized as she scanned the data her screens displayed. None of the dumps she had found were terribly important. Local depots for the reserves. Where was the big stuff, the major ammo and fuel supplies for the main forces? It couldn't be farther back, deeper inside the country, she reasoned. They must have dug it in somewhere closer to the border.

  The sky was bright enough now to make the stars fade, although the ground below her was still cloaked in shadow.

  Kelly debated asking Geneva for permission to turn around, rather than continue her route deeper into the Eritrean territory.

  "Fuck it," she muttered to herself. "By the time they make up their minds it'll be broad daylight out here."

  She banked the little plane on its left wingtip and started to retrace her path. Climbing above the crest of the valley, she began a weaving flight path that took her back and forth across the four major valley chains of her assigned territory.

  There's got to be a major dump around here somewhere, she insisted to herself. There's got to be.

  If there was not, she knew, she was in trouble. If the main supply dump was deeper inside Eritrea and she had missed it because she had failed to carry out her full assignment, she would be risking the lives not only of Eritreans and Sudanese, but Peacekeepers as well. She would be risking her own career, her own future, too.

  The plane's sensors faithfully picked up all the small dumps she had found on her flight in. Even this high up, they were detectable.

  But where's the biggie? Kelly worried.

  She felt a jolt of panic when she noticed the shadow of her plane racing along the ground ahead of her. The sun was up over the horizon now, and she was high enough to be easily visible to anyone who happened to look up.

  Gritting her teeth, she kept stubbornly to her plan, crisscrossing the valleys, back and forth, weaving a path to the frontier. She could see columns of tanks and trucks below her, some of them moving sluggishly forward, others stopped. Long ugly artillery pieces were firing now, sending shells whistling across the border into the Sudan.

  The attack had begun.

  They've actually started a war, Kelly said to herself, feeling shock and anger flooding through her. Can we stop it? Can we?

  Far ahead, she saw columns of smoke rising black and oily into the brightening sky. Men were dying there.

  Quickly she flicked her fingers across the display controls.

  Forward and rear observation scopes: no other aircraft in sight. So far so good, she thought. I haven't been found. Yet.

  The infrared scanner showed an anomaly off to her left: a hot spot along the face of a steep rocky slope that plunged down to the riverbed. Kelly banked slightly and watched the sensor displays hopefully.

  It was a cave in the face of the deeply scoured hillside.

  Ages of sudden rainstorms had seamed the slope like rumpled gray corduroy.

  "Just a friggin' cave," Kelly muttered, disappointed.

  Until she noticed that a fairly broad road had been built up in a series of switchbacks from the valley floor to the lip of the cave's entrance. It was a dirt road, rough, dangerous if it rained. But this was the dry season, and a single truck was jouncing up that road at a fairly high rate of speed, spewing a rooster tail of dust from its rear tires.

  Kelly coasted her plane lower, below the crest of the hills that formed the valley. Hidden down among the scruffy trees that lined the riverbank was a column of trucks, their motors running, judging from the heat emissions.

  Punching her comm keypad furiously, Kelly sang into her microphone, "I've found it! Major supply dump, not more than ten klicks from the frontier!" She squirted the data to the commsat without taking the time to code or compress it.

  She knew that the monitors in Geneva—and Ottawa, for that matter—would home in on her transmission. So would the Eritreans, most likely.

  It was not Robbie's voice that replied, an agonizing ten seconds later, "It might be a supply dump, but how can you be sure?"

  "The truck convoy, dammit!" Kelly shouted back, annoyed.

  "They're starting up the road!"

  And they were. The trucks seemed empty. They were going up the steep road to the cavern, where they would be loaded with the fuel and ammunition necessary to continue the battle.

  "Even if you are right," came the voice from Geneva—tense, a slight Norse accent in it—"we have no means to get at the dump. It is too well protected."

  Kelly said nothing. She knew what would come next.

  "Return to your base of operations. Your mission is terminated."

  Kelly bit her lip in frustration. Then a warning screech on her instrument panel told her that she was being scanned by a radar beam. Ordinarily that would not have bothered her. But in morning's brightening light, with a few hundred enemy soldiers below her, she knew she was in trouble.

  By reflex, she craned her head to look above, then checked the display screens. A couple of contrails way up there. If she tried to climb out of this valley, those two jet fighters would be on her like stooping hawks.

  Kelly took a deep breath and weighed her options.

  Blowing her breath out through puffed cheeks, she said aloud, "Might as well find out for sure if I'm right."

  She pushed the throttle forward and angled the little plane directly toward the mouth of the cave.

  Tracers sizzled past her forward screen, and her acoustic sensors picked up the sounds of many shots: small-arms fire, for the most part. The troops down there were using her for target practice. They're lousy shots, Kelly told herself. Then she added. Thank God.

  Kelly dove at maximum speed, nearly as fast as a modem sports car, through a fusilade of rifle and machinegun fire, and flew directly at the yawning cavern. It was dark inside, but the plane's sensors immediately displayed the forward view in false-color infrared.

  It's their main dump, all right, Kelly told herself. She saw it all as if in freeze-frame, a bare fraction of a second, yet she made out every detail:

  Dozens of trucks were already inside the mammoth cave, in the process of being loaded by troops suddenly startled to find an airplane buzzing straight at them. Some men stood frozen with wide-eyed fright, staring directly at her, while others were scattering, ducking under the trucks or racing for the cave's entrance.

  The cave was crammed with stacks of fuel drums, cases of ammunition. Be nice to know who they bought all this crap from, Kelly thought. For the briefest flash of an instant she considered trying to pull up and eluding the fighters waiting for her. Maybe the cameras have picked up valuable information on who's supplying this war, she thought.

  But she knew that was idle fancy. This mission was terminated. Not by Geneva, but by the gunners who would shoot the plane to pieces once she tried to make it to the border.

  So she did not pull up. She leaned on the throttle, hurtling the plane directly into the cave's mouth and a massive stack of fuel drums. She neither heard nor felt the explosion.

  For long seconds Kelly sat in the contoured chair of the cockpit, staring at the darkened screen. Her hands were trembling too badly to even try to unlatch the canopy. A technician lifted it open and stared down at her. Usually the techs were grinning and cracking jokes after a mission.

&nb
sp; But this one looked solemn.

  "You okay?" she asked.

  Kelly managed a nod. Sure, she answered silently. For a pilot who's just kamikazed, I'm fine.

  Another etch, a swarthy male, appeared on the other side of the cockpit and helped Kelly to her feet. She stepped carefully over the control banks and onto the concrete floor of the Ottawa station's teleoperations chamber. Two other teleoperator cockpits were tightly closed, with teams of technicians huddled over the consoles grouped around them. The fourth cockpit was open and empty.

  The captain in charge of the station's teleoperations unit strode from his desk toward Kelly, his face grim. He was a sour-faced, stocky Asian with a vaguely menacing mustache, all formality and spit and polish.

  "We lost one RPV due to ground fire," he said in a furious whisper, "and one deliberately destroyed by its operator."

  "But I . . ."

  "There is no need for you to defend yourself. Lieutenant Kelly. A board of review will examine the tapes of your mission and make its recommendations. Dismissed."

  He turned on his polished heel and strode back to his desk.

  Anger replaced Kelly's emotional exhaustion. RPV, she fumed to herself. Operator. They're planes, dammit. And I'm a pilot!

  But she knew it was not so. They were remotely piloted vehicles, just as the captain had said. And expensive enough so that deliberately crashing one was cause for a review board to be convened. Then Kelly remembered that she had also tossed away her prescribed flight plan. The review board would not go gently, she realized.

  She dragged herself tiredly down the corridor toward the locker room, longing now for her bunk and the oblivion of sleep.

  Halfway there, Robbie popped out of the monitoring center, his smile dazzling.

  "Hi there. Angel Star! Good job!"

  Kelly forced the comers of her mouth upward a notch.

  From behind Robbie's tall, broad-shouldered form she saw most of the other monitors pushing through the doors and spilling out into the corridor. It can't be a shift change, she thought. Nobody else has gone in.