Al-Jihad by Stephen Coonts ch 8-2

They were going down the road in knots of threes and fours. With the binoculars I counted them. Twenty-eight.

There was no way to know if that was all of them.

Crouching, I made my way to the courtyard side, where I could look down in, and listen.

No sound but the wind, which was out of the west at about fifteen knots, a typical desert day this time of year.

After a couple minutes of this, I inched my head over the edge for a look. Three bodies lay sprawled in the courtyard.

I had a fifty-foot rope in the rucksack. I tied one end around a chimney and tossed it over the wall on the side away from the main gate. Then I clambered over.

Safely on the ground, I kept close to the wall, out of sight of the openings above me. On the north side the edge of the ridge was close, about forty yards. I got opposite that point, gripped my rifle with both hands, and ran for it.

No shots.

Safely under the ledge, I sat down, caught my breath, and had a drink of water.

If there was anyone still in the fort waiting to ambush me, he could wait until doomsday for all I cared.

I moved downslope and around the ridge about a hundred yards to a place where I could see the runway and the airplanes and the road.

The figures were still distinct in my binoculars, walking briskly.

What would they do when they got to the airplanes? They would find the bodies of three men who died violently and three sabotaged airplanes. Three of the airplanes would appear to be intact.

The possibility that the intact airplanes were sabotaged would of course occur to them. I argued that they would not get in those planes, but would hunker down and wait until some of their friends came looking for them. Of course, the only food and water they had would be in the planes or what they had carried from the fort, but they could comfortably sit tight for a couple of days.

We couldn't. If the Libyan military found us, the Osprey would be MiG-meat and we would be doomed.

A thorough, careful preflight of the bizjets would turn up the bombs, of course. We needed to panic these people, not give them the time to search the jets or find holes to crawl into.

Panic was Julie's job. She had grinned when I told her how she would have to do it.

I used the binoculars to check the progress of the walking men. They were about a mile away now, approaching the mat where the airplanes were parked. The laggards were hurrying to catch up with the leaders. Apparently no one wanted to take the chance that he might be left behind.

Great outfit, that.

The head of the column had just reached the jets when I heard the Osprey. It was behind me, coming down the ridge.

In seconds it shot over the fort, which was to my left, and dived toward the runway.

Julie was a fine pilot, and the Osprey was an extraordinary machine. She kept the engines horizontal and made a high-speed pass over the bizjets, clearing the tail of the middle one by about fifty feet. I watched the whole show through my binoculars.

She gave the terrorists a good look at the U.S. Marine Corps markings on the plane.

The Osprey went out about a mile and began the transition to rotor-borne flight. I watched it slow, watched the engines tilt up, then watched it drop to just a few feet above the desert.

Julie kept the plane moving forward just fast enough to stay out of the tremendous dust cloud that the rotors kicked up, a speed of about twenty knots, I estimated.

She came slowly down the runway. Through the binoculars I saw the muzzle flashes as she squeezed off a burst from the flex Fifty. I knew she planned to shoot at one of the disabled jets, see if she could set it afire. The fuel tanks would still contain fuel vapor and oxygen, so a high-powered bullet in the right place should find something to ignite.

Swinging the binoculars to the planes, I was pleasantly surprised to see one erupt in flame.

Yep.

The Osprey accelerated. Julie rotated the engines down and climbed away.

The terrorists didn't know how many enemies they faced. Nor how many Ospreys were about. They were lightly armed and not equipped for a desert firefight, so they had limited options. Apparently that was the way they figured it, too, because in less than a minute the first jet taxied out. Another came right behind it. The third was a few seconds late, but it taxied onto the runway before the first reached the end and turned around.

The first plane had to wait for the other two. There was just room on the narrow strip for each of them to turn, but there was no pullout, no way for one plane to get out of the way of the other two. The first two had to wait until the last plane to leave the mat turned around in front of them.

Finally all three had turned and were sitting one behind the other, pointing west into the wind. The first plane rolled. Ten seconds later the second followed. The third waited maybe fifteen seconds, then it began rolling.

The first plane broke ground as Julie Giraud came screaming in from the east at a hundred feet above the ground. The Osprey looked to be flying almost flat out, which Julie said was about 270 knots.

She overtook the jets just as the third one broke ground.

She had moved a bit in front of it, still ripping along, when the second and third plane exploded. Looking through the binoculars, it looked as if the nose came off each plane. The damaged fuselages tilted down and smashed into the ground, making surprisingly little dust when they hit.

The first plane, a Lear I think, seemed undamaged.

The bomb must have failed to explode.

The pilot of the bizjet had his wheels retracted now, was accelerating with the nose down. But not fast enough. Julie Giraud was overtaking nicely.

Through the binoculars I saw the telltale wisp of smoke from the nose of the Osprey. She was using the gun.

The Lear continued to accelerate, now began to widen the distance between it and the trailing Osprey.

“It's going to get away,” I whispered. The words were just out of my mouth when the thing caught fire.

Trailing black smoke, the Lear did a slow roll over onto its back. The nose came down. The roll continued, but before the pil ot could level the wings the plane smeared itself across the earth in a gout of fire and smoke.