GI JOE: Ghost Viper

by Solosam

Lost in the deep jungles of Thailand, Mutt and Junkyard must join forces with Malay rebels, fight the forces of Cobra, and survive the insidious Ghost Vipers... All while struggling to keep their team alive and their souls intact.

1. Chapter 1

1

It's midnight over Thailand. We sit in darkness, hugging our rifles to our chests. The Tomahawk has no doors. We're moving at close to 100 knots, and we have to duck our heads to shield ourselves from the wind. Junkyard sits on the floor between my legs. I can't see his eyes beneath the dog-sized goggles, but I know he is watching me. Every thing I do is a cue to him. Right now, I have to show him that I am calm, even though I kind of want to scream.

Lift-Ticket brings us in over the southern Malay Peninsula. We fly nap-of-the-earth, following a river of ink while dodging between trees and hilltops. Radar cannot penetrate mountains and tree lines. This is the safest way to fly in the sense that it minimizes the risk of detection and, with it, anti-aircraft defenses. But it is also the most dangerous, especially at night. Every five seconds, Lift-Ticket reads off the altitude for the benefit of his co-pilot. We can hear him in our earpieces. "Thirty, thirty-five, thirty..." Every five seconds. It 's maddening. And when he says, "Thirty," he means thirty feet, not meters. If someone strung a power line across the river, it could kill us all.

There's no telling whether we are in hostile territory or not. The entire region is an ungovernable patchwork of ethnic and religious insurgencies. It's impossible to keep up with what group controls which village. In some places it changes weekly. Now, don't get me wrong. Thailand has a pretty decent and modernized military. Up until very recently, the Malay Peninsula rebels kept it down to a dull roar. It's only in the last six months or so that the place has really gone to pot. But we aren't here to play a part in their civil wars. There is one group that demands our undivided attention, and they aren't Thai.

"Two minutes!" Stalker says over the comm.

Time to go. I squat next to the right-side door with Junkyard. Outback lifts him into position and attaches him with snaps to the back of my vest. At this point, I'm wearing a dog the way someone would wear a rucksack. And let me tell you, sixty pounds of dog with all his kit is nothing to sneeze at.

So you're probably asking how, exactly, does one convince a dog to rappel out of a helicopter? Turns out, you select a special operations canine the exact same way you select a special operations soldier. You begin with an animal that is already trained for police or military work, and you ask for the best of the best. The trainers submit their toughest candidates. From those, you assess them and whittle the list down until you find that one-in-a-million super-dog. You want the ones that demonstrate the highest degree of self-discipline, stress resistance, and a hyper-competitive spirit that drives them to excel. Those are the dogs that will follow you through anything, even if it means dropping out of a helicopter.

"One minute!" Stalker says.

I grab a fistful of 7/16-inch nylon rope. Double-loop it through the carabiner and make sure the gate is locked. We drop a total of four ropes before we descend. There were too many obstacles on the ground for us to land the aircraft, so we have to do it the hard way. Fast-roping is the preferred method. This is when you drop a very thick rope and just hang with your hands and feet. You ride it down somewhat like a fireman's pole, although the L-shaped body position is different. The technique is fast, as the name implies, but it is also the more dangerous method. I have yet to figure out how to safely execute it when I have sixty pounds of dog hanging off my back. The usual outcome is that I lose my balance at the bottom and fall backwards, which runs the risk of injuring the animal. That is why I'm linked in for a rappel descent. It is slow and more onerous, but safer.

I will tell you this much: When Stalker gives the "Positions" signal, Joes don't fool around. The Tomahawk hasn't even made it to hover yet, and I'm already leaning out the side. I can only wonder what's going through Junkyard's head. But he takes it like a champ. He wouldn't be here if he couldn't learn to tolerate it. I give one good bound and there I am, dangling six or seven feet below the aircraft and watching the trees pass beneath us.

Now here's the tricky part. Tonight I'm doing a lock-in rappel. That means I have to swap my guide and break hands and let the rope slide through my fingers. It sounds complicated, but it's the best way to rappel. When the word comes to "Go," I just let the rope slide through my guide hand and I descend smoothly through the trees to the ground.

I'm still the slowest out of the bird. There's no way to see what's going on around me. Everything is pitch black and at this point my NODs would be almost useless. Not that I could change my route, even if I wanted to; I'm going down whether I like it or not. I feel tree branches slapping against me as we descend. It's when I stop getting beat up by the trees that I know I must be low to the ground. The left hand comes up to my chest to brake, and we slowly descend until my feet touch the earth. I quickly pull out the rest of the line, so that we don't get yanked back up into the air when the Tomahawk ascends. As soon as Stalker gives the "all clear," the ropes are reeled in so that they don't fly about and risk damaging something.

The six of us all take a knee there in the dark woods while the Tomahawk takes off into the night. Lift-Ticket will fly around a little bit and make a number of false insertions to throw the bad guys off, just in case they hear us. The Tomahawk is optimized for stealth with its weird, asymmetric rotor blades, but it's still not exactly a whisper. The first order of business is to go NODs-down and make sure we haven't just landed in the middle of an enemy formation. The Joes all go prone in a loose circle.

I still can't see a thing. NODs require at least a little bit of starlight in order to function properly. The canopy here is so thick it blocks everything out. Even when Stalker cracks an IR chem-light, the NODs only show you what is right in front of your face. I can see the bush directly in front of me, but everything beyond three feet is just inky blackness. If we were in a place with fewer obstacles and more even lighting it would work better. Hopefully, the enemy is suffering the same handicap.

No worries, though. I have a fix for this.

I grab the switches on my shoulders and cut sling load. Junkyard hits the ground and finds his footing, but he doesn't move. He has no idea where he is or what is about to happen. In an ambiguous situation, a dog will look to his Dad for an example of how to behave. Right now, he is probably thinking, 'Dad is cautious, so I will be cautious.' I put my dog whistle to my lips and give his first command: "Search." It sounds like a sharp whistle, followed by a longer whistle that rises and falls. This is the exact same command taught to bird-dogs when they are looking for a downed fowl. But in this case, Junkyard has been trained to circle the enemy and spot for humans.

This is what he has been waiting for. Junkyard takes off into the brush. He doesn't hop around like an idiot. Watching him move is like watching a shark. As it turns out, it's not enough for him to be a superdog. We've also added a few features Mother Nature never intended: Surgically implanted titanium teeth, and a vest that includes a mast-mounted night-vision camera, Kevlar body armor, and a half-dozen other gadgets to make the dog into a four-legged ISR platform.

This provides Junkyard an unusual degree of freedom. If Junk spots an enemy, his routine is to freeze and point. He will not bark, as that would reveal us. And I can't see him or call out to him. Back in the day, that means I would have had to keep him on a leash. Instead, I bring up my wrist computer. It's nothing fancy... Just a modified smart phone mated to a Kevlar arm brace. I've got a little poking thing on my index finger so I can manipulate the screen without removing my glove. This phone allows me to send a variety of commands to the vest, and receive data from it.

At this particular moment, my favorite app is dog-vision. A spring-loaded mast on Junkyard's back flips open. The mast-mounted camera transmits video straight to my wrist. We get to see the world the way Junkyard does... Low to the ground, jerking back and forth, a little fuzzy and indistinct. His big bucket head pops into the frame occasionally. Unfortunately, the camera's night vision doesn't work much better than my own NODs. I switch to thermals. This is rather more useful. I still can't make out the foliage, which is depicted in a generic gray. But every now and then I see a white shape that indicates a heat source. There are some rats and birds. Junkyard ignores them. I almost have a heart attack when he comes up on a cluster of human-shapes, but I realize that the camera is pointing back at us and I am looking at myself. Junkyard stops every few seconds to listen and smell, and it takes him about thirty seconds to circle our entire perimeter.

Two quick whistles tells Junkyard to come back. I make sure to scratch his head so that he knows he did good. Stalker waits for me to give the thumbs-up before he starts executing hand and arm signals. We move in teams of three (or rather, four in the case of Junkyard) and take off on a slow march perpendicular to the river. I'm on point. Junkyard leads the way. If it weren't for him, I'm sure I would have tripped over every fallen log and broken my nose on half a dozen trees. Every ten minutes or so he hears something in the bushes. Twice I have to deploy him to scout. But we don't encounter the enemy. Not yet.

I glance at my watch. 1706 hours Zulu time. That makes it... What? 0006 hours local? I don't know if it is tomorrow or yesterday. Time zones mess with my brain.

We have probably moved a kilometer when Stalker calls a halt. Nobody relaxes. We all just go prone for a few minutes while he studies the map beneath a red light. Navigation by dead reckoning is all but impossible in a place like this. At least, until the some comes up and we can actually see where we are going. Thank God for Garmins. When Stalker is done examining the map, he visits each of us to check our status and let us know which way we are going. It is too early to talk. We have no idea whether there will be an enemy patrol coming to search for our insertion. Instead, Stalker just points at the map and traces the route from where we are to where we need to be. Then we're up and moving again.

Its harder than you'd think. The darkness and the dense foliage make movement difficult. But what's worse is the stress. I spend hours at a time in a state of red alert. Every step has to be carefully placed. Every moment I ask myself where I would take cover if things went wrong at exactly this moment. Every time Junkyard stops and listens, I have to hold my breath. The process is mentally exhausting. And on top of this, we have to build in the usual tricks, like listening stops and counter-surveillance switchbacks. We move slowly, but this is how it has to be. Even though the map says we are close to a road, we can't move in the open. Instead we stick to the forest, where every single step finds a vine, or a thorn-bush, or some other horrible thing to step on.

Beads of sweat cross my lips and I taste salt. I sip rubber-flavored water from the bladder mounted on my back. Three uncomfortable truths strike me: It is too hot, far too humid, and I'm way too old to be out here in the first place. Stalker taps me on the shoulder and points at his watch. 0200. And I think it myself, 'Seriously? We've only been out here two hours?' It feels like a week, and we've only gone nine klicks.

Then I see it. We are on the edge of the forest. I can see the amber glow of streetlights in the distance. It casts the clouds overhead in a baleful orange glow. Junkyard freezes. I've got my hand on his vest handle, and I don't so much see the change as I feel it. He might as well be made of stone. Point. I kneel behind him, looking through his ears and right down his nose as if I were sighting a rifle. Junkyard's head is angled off perhaps twenty degrees from our direction of travel. I raise a fist to signal a halt, and seat my weapon in my shoulder at the high ready position.

A long moment passes before I hear the grinding sound of tracked vehicles. This is, of course, Bad News. The edge of the treeline is perhaps thirty meters away. We advance together until I reach the very edge of the forest and then high-crawl the last five meters. From this position I can see a paved road running north-south. The ambient light and open spaces let my NODs work the way they were intended.

When I see what we're up against, I know we're about to die.

This is how my weekend starts.

2

Let's revisit yesterday.

It's 1700 when we come down the tarmac in Bangkok. The first thing that hits me is the unbearable, suffocating heat. Thailand only really has two seasons: Wet and dry. It goes without saying that it is just permanently hot, all year round. Now, I've been in some hot places, like Kuwait and Iraq. I remember time in tent city Ali Al Saleem, when I could cut new holes in the air conditioning ducts just so I could get a little cool air on my face. But the humidity makes Bangkok ten times worse. The air is thick enough that I feel like a lobster boiling in a pot.

And I'm not even worried for myself. I sweat. Big deal. You suck it up, hydrate, and maybe kick back a sports drink or two. The real problem is Junkyard. Dogs sweat a little bit through their paws, but they mostly shed heat by panting. If a dog is panting, he can't be sniffing. And if Junkyard isn't sniffing, he isn't doing his job. One of the advantages of using a mixed-breed like Junk is that his thinner coat makes him less prone to overheating than the German Shepherd or the Belgian Malinois. But still, have you ever tried to give a dog an IV? It's not fun for anyone.

The team starts with six. Seven, counting Junkyard. Which I do. With me are Flint, Outback, Low-Light, Bombstrike, and Dial-Tone. The first two are our gunslingers. The last three are the specialists. Low-Light is an expert marksman. Dial-Tone is our one-man walking Trojan satellite terminal. Bombstrike is the newest Joe. She is here to call in air support and act as ad-hoc air traffic control. We won't be seeing Lift-Ticket or Wild Bill again until it's go time. None of us are wearing uniforms. You know, not that anyone in GI Joe really wears a 'uniform' to begin with. Instead we each carry a green Army duffel over our shoulders that includes not just clothing but some of our more specialized equipment.

Stalker is the first to meet us on the flight line. I almost don't recognize him without his beret, but hats are prohibited on all runways as a safety precaution. He's joined by an older Colonel I don't recognize. His shoulder patch identifies him as belonging to USARPAC headquarters. The name reads 'Mewett.'

"Welcome to Thailand," Stalker says. "Hope you had a good nap, because this is about to get ugly." We collectively groan. Stalker is an old-school Joe. And I truly mean that. At one point, GI Joe was nothing but Stalker and Hawk sitting around a table with a stack of 'baseball cards,' trying to sort out who they wanted on the team and what it would look like. He's been everywhere from Tora Bora to the Borovian gulags. When he says this trip is going to be ugly, we believe him.

"And this is Colonel Mewett. He'll be briefing you on the situation. Drop your bags on the LMTV and hop in, because we're not stopping until we get to the TOC."

The LMTV is a 2.5 ton cargo truck with an open back. It's what you ride when the Army is too cheap to spring for a bus. The duffel bags get piled in the center, and we roll out of the airfield and towards the headquarters building. It's an older brick building that looks like it might date to the Vietnam. I suspect this is part of the Army's master plan to deceive the enemy by putting important facilities inside crappy buildings. But probably not.

We don't actually stop at the perimeter fence. No guard checks or baggage for us. Instead, the truck heads around the north side of the building where they have a large hangar door. We roll inside and the gate closes behind us. The hangar has been prepared for our arrival. Windows are blacked out. They've turned up the music, in case anyone tries to surveil us by bouncing a laser off the glass. The whole place smells like dust and diesel fuel. Colonel Mewett already has a projector ready. The image shows a map of Thailand. Or rather, the stretched-out bottom half of Thailand that we call the Malay Peninsula.

"This is Kaeng Udon," the Colonel explains. He points to a triangular piece of jungle wedged between Narathiwat and Pattani provinces. "And this is Bukhit Pajang." The map zooms in on an airfield. Bukhit Pajang sits on an awkward triangle of land just north west of a major river delta. The main runway is a two-mile north-south strip. A shorter, secondary runway forks off to the right. The eastern edge faces the sea. The center of the triangle includes terminal, hangars, tower.

"A private passenger jet carrying three crew and three passengers was hijacked this morning. Their plane transmitted a mayday signal and was forced down at the Bukhit Pajang airfield. The pilot ceased transmission shortly after landing. He describes being escorted to the ground by a pair of A-10 attack aircraft. We all know what that means."

He can only be talking about the Rattler, a design that Cobra cribbed from the A-10. They took the stock model and lengthened the fuselage to accommodate a traversing turret. The idea was that Rattler would have the ability to circle a point target while the gunner shot down at it from above, thereby giving the guns a longer time-on-target as opposed to strafing runs. They also re-worked the engines to mount on rotating wings, in order to give it a vertical-take-off capability.

"It has been three hours since the aircraft signaled the mayday. Your primary target is one Doctor Richard Burke. US citizen. Employed by DARPA. The other two passengers are his wife and daughter. The kidnappers have issued their demands, but we think they are just stalling. Based on the video they put out, we believe they are still being held in Bukhit Pajang. And we want you to mount a hostage-rescue operation within the next twelve hours."

There is a long silence in the room. We're all still trying to figure out if we heard him correctly. The very notion of mounting a hostage rescue in a time frame like this is unheard of. It is simply lunacy.

Flint is the first to speak. "And the Thai government is doing... What? Exactly?"

"They're letting us do what we do best," Stalker replies.

This clearly doesn't sit well with him. For a moment all he does is rock back and forth on his chair. The old hinges creak. He scratches the back of his head with this sort of passive-aggressive 'aw-shucks' routine. Then he shifts his weight, and the front legs of the chair snap down on the concrete floor. I never gelled with Flint. Too many SFOD-A types want to throw off that frat-boy ladies' man kind of vibe. This was the kind of guy who'd play volleyball with his shirt off just because he saw it in a movie. I imagined him getting beat up in High School and spent the next twenty years trying to compensate. He had recently switched over to one of those drum-fed AA-12 shotguns, and he rested it between his knees so that we'd all pay attention to his new toy.

"I'm sorry, sir," he says. "But maybe you could break it down for us."

Stalker shakes his head, but Mewett doesn't notice. "The Thai government just put out a message saying they won't take action," Mewett continues. "They are urging all parties to – and I quote – 'negotiate in good faith for the passengers' peaceful return.'"

"They're probably in on it," Outback guesses. He sits in in a chair reversed, resting his crossed arms against the back. Outback, I can work with. Even by Joe standards, he was one of the most driven and purposeful men I'd ever met. The idiot wore a bare white t-shirt printed with the word 'Survival,' for reasons which remain opaque to me. I mean, everybody gets that it's his thing, but Snake Eyes doesn't show up with a t-shirt that actually says 'Ninja,' right? Doesn't matter. The man had this glassy Vietnam-vet stare and came packaged with a relentless, almost psychotic focus. He was a true Spartan; Where Flint wore Ray-Bans, Outback would just stripe his cheeks with Kiwi and call it a day.

"We don't think so," Stalker says. He paces the floor and stares off into space as he extemporizes. "In the last six months, the Thai government has essentially lost all influence in the Malay Peninsula. What used to be a manageable problem set has spun dangerously out of control. The government wants to work with us, and they recognize that only GI Joe has the skill set to deal with this. So they're going to do the right thing: Stay out of the way and let us do our business the way we see fit. And that's what we're going to do."

Flint is the first to say what the rest of us are thinking: "This is crazy."

"Um, yeah." Outback says. "I hate to say this. And I mean, I really hate to say this, but Flint is right. You're saying we are about to attempt a hostage rescue operation, on foreign soil, inside what we can only assume will be hostile territory."

"It's been done," Bombstrike suggests. "The Israelis did it in Uganda. They landed outside the airport and infiltrated in civilian vehicles."

"Yeah, and they got caught doing it. The only reason the hijackers didn't whack the hostages was because one of them had a sudden attack of conscience. I don't think counting on terrorists to do the right thing is a solid plan. Not to mention that they had a week to figure it out, and they got to debrief like half the passengers after the terrorists let them go." Outback stops to take a breath. "Here's the thing: This kind of operation takes a long time to prep. It's incredibly risky, even when we have the home field advantage. What you are proposing is basically suicide."

I've known Stalker for a long time. Longer than anyone in that room, in fact. The man doesn't flinch and he doesn't sweat. He just gives you this cold stare. It's the kind of look that lets you know he is reading you like a book, and he's just gotten to the part where he decides whether you're worth his time.

Outback flinches first.

"Look," he says. "I'm not saying I can't do it. Or I won't do it. I just want to make sure we really know what we are doing. I refuse to let this turn into a hash." There is an unspoken subtext here: 'Remember that time we went to Borovia, and you ended up in a gulag while I had to Shawshank my way out through the sewer?'

"We're going," Stalker says. "I know it's ate up, and I know its dangerous, and I know we don't have the time to think about it. But that's why they called us. Because we're the only ones who can figure it out. Everybody on your feet, and let's find some kit."

The toys: SCAR-L Mk16 carbines with ten-inch close quarters combat barrels. The SCAR is fundamentally similar to the standard M4, including an identical pistol grip so that the shooter doesn't have to re-learn the controls. SOCOM purchased several thousand of these in 2009 but canceled them later, on the grounds that the SCAR's modest performance improvements didn't justify the cost of entirely replacing the M4. One can only assume the phrase 'good enough for government work' is the motto of Army acquisition. Suffice to say, the fielded weapons removed from inventory went directly to the GI Joe arms room.

Add to this the infrared laser, under-barrel grenade launcher, and a reflex sight, and tie it all down with a length of 550 cord. I don't bother with the three-point sling. They're handy, but over-complicated and tend to get in the way if you need to crawl or hurdle and obstacle. Instead I just use the vanilla sling and loop it through a carabiner near the shoulder of my load-bearing vest.

I've already mentioned Flint's love affair with the AA-12. The ten pound close-quarters model comes with the thirteen-inch barrel. The weapon is fully automatic and feeds twelve-gauge double-ought buck from a twenty-shell drum. His vest has both shoulders lined with additional shot-shells worn Pancho Villa style.

Handgun of choice is the Marine Corps – approved M45A1. The pistol started life as a Colt M1911. Its been around for over a hundred years, and no one has figured out how to improve on the design. The best they could do was tack on a Picatinny rail and a Tritium night sight.

Clothing is eclectic to say the least. GI Joe is famous (read: notorious) for its antipathy to military dress codes. I say, there is a time and a place. Operating on a battlefield with regular line units to the left and right, it generally pays to look like some kind of soldier. After all, friendly fire is a stupid way to die. Joe teams rarely operate in these scenarios. When you're in a small team, showing up somewhere nobody expects to see you, you can afford to dress down a bit. And maybe, just maybe, that crazy costume you're wearing will make the enemy hesitate for that split-second while he tries to decide whether you are, in fact, a soldier.

Each one of us picks up an MBITR hand-held radio and integrated headset. Each team member also carries an Iridium satellite phone with encrypted key card. Special mention must be made of the Panoramic Night Vision. I don't know what other units call them, but Joes tend to refer to them as the 'Spider-Goggles.' They come with four lenses piped into two optics, intended to widen the user's field of vision to somewhere around ninety-five degrees. This is more than double what you'd get from the standard PVS-14 monocular. For the same of comparison, the average human has a field of view between one-eighty and one-ninety degrees, so looking through a PVS-14 feels a bit like staring through a toilet paper tube.

Outback totes the M240L machine gun. Even in short-barrel weight-reduced configuration, it still clocks in at twenty-two pounds empty. The ammunition sits on his back in a modified ruck. The belt feeds from the pack through a tray mounted over the shoulder, and down into the weapon. In addition to all this, Dial-Tone is rucking that weird man-portable SIPR thing on his back. Bombstrike carries one of the larger SINCGARs radios. And Low-Light comes armed with a Barret M107 sniper rifle, just in case we need to reach out and touch somebody.

It's already getting dark and the chopper is waiting on the flight line. The Tomahawk is one of those experimental vehicles that GI Joe loves so much. It is essentially the same air-frame as the CH47 Chinook, and there all similarity ends. The Tomahawk moves both primary engines to sit beneath the front rotor, and adds an additional engine beneath the tail. The tail also houses a new rotor in a pivoting fantail assembly. Like most SF helicopter variants the Tomahawk includes a refueling probe, while asymmetric rotor blades drastically cut down on the noise. It's good, but still not quiet enough for us to count on landing undetected. There is really only one solution: Come in low and fast, make a couple of false insertions, and let us ruck it to the target site. Let's hope everyone paid attention in Air Assault.

It's ten minutes to go time, and I'm strapping Junkyard into his vest. Junk is an older dog; A Rottie-Shepherd mix I trained myself. That was before the special operations community standardized their canine program and selected the Malinois as the breed of choice. But he's the kind of one-in-a-million superdog that can run with the best.

"Is he ready for this?" Bombstrike asks.

"Of course he's ready. Are you?"

"I guess we'll find out. Is this idea really as crazy as Outback thinks it is?"

I can't help but laugh. "Oh, they wouldn't be bringing us in if it wasn't at least a little bit crazy. But I think we need to look at the bigger picture."

Bombstrike watches me load Junkyard into the plane. I snap his vest to a cargo hook in the floor, so as to secure him in the aircraft. Junk has been thoroughly desensitized to helicopters, and I've even rappelled out of a few with him. One time I even took him on a parachute jump. But he still appreciates some reassurance.

Eventually she gets tired of waiting for me to finish my thought. "And what is the bigger picture?"

"The plane was captured three hours ago, and we have twelve hours to finish this mission. Think about that. Nobody is going to even try to talk this one out. We are talking about a major operation that is insanely dangerous and could be politically embarrassing. That means the White House found out about this, decided on the most dangerous course of action, and called us up all in the space of about twenty minutes. I find that hard to believe. No one, in all of human history, has ever launched a hostage rescue mission that fast. It doesn't happen. There are American citizens who have been held captive for years without a rescue attempt. So what is it about this one particular Doctor that makes him worth accepting the risk?"

"Beats me," Bombstrike says. "What's the saying? 'Ours is not to reason why?'"

"That was 'Charge of the Light Brigade,'" I say. "And they got their asses kicked. Trust me, if you stay in this outfit more than a day or two you'll realize that these are the kinds of questions that come back to bite us in the rear."

3

The HISS is an infantry fighting vehicle manufactured by Cobra-run industries and sold in thirty-six states that we know of. Like most Cobra vehicles, it is a strange piece of work. The single-man cockpit sits behind an armored glass canopy, and the gunner-slash-commander is seated in an open turret with double 30mm auto-cannons. Other tanks rest the hull between the treads in order to reduce the tank's profile and increase crew survivability. The HISS, in contrast, perches on top of the treads. This increases the profile dramatically and thereby makes the slab-sided crew compartment more vulnerable to weapons fire. On the other hand, it narrows the track base and allows for the construction of a v-shaped hull. Between this and the large track assemblies, the crew is well-protected against land mines and other explosives. All of these features make it an ideal vehicle for asymmetric warfare in dense jungle terrain where sight lines are restricted and improvised explosives a tool of choice.

And right now we are staring at one sitting squarely in the road not fifty meters from us. The huge treads churn the muddy ground. An IR spotlight sweeps left to right as the turret traverses. Cobra Vipers march down the path. Their faces are hidden by featureless chrome masks and their own night optics. They carry those 'Viper Rifles,' as we call them: The 7.62mm AK clones mated to 20mm grenade launchers.

The mud is suddenly very attractive to me. I fall flat and press my chin against the earth. Junkyard knows the drill. He drops next to me, and I hug him tight against my body. From an ambush position like this, we stand a chance of dropping all five Vipers before they kill us. But there is practically not much we can do to hurt the HISS. It's truly scary how close we can get in this dense jungle without truly knowing what is going on around us.

A Viper's polished jackboot crushes a twig not two feet from my face. He is so close, I could reach out and touch him. If he looks down, we die. If he is wearing thermals, we die. If somebody sneezes, we die. If Stalker doesn't cover up that IR chem as fast as humanly possible, then – you guessed it – we die.

I understand some people do normal things for a living. They go home and their spouse asks, "So, what did you do today?" And they say something like, "Well, I approved somebody's patent," or "I delivered bread to the supermarket." I wonder what that's like.

The Viper glances into the forest. His shoulders are sagging. His left arm is gripping his right wrist, with the rifle cradled between them. It has been a long night, and he is fatigued. I know the feeling. He just wants to go back to wherever he calls home to play video games and get some rack time. I suspect he is just scanning at eye level. Nothing to see here. Move along.

They pass by, and I can finally exhale. The patrol vanishes quickly. We wait until the HISS is beyond our hearing, and then we wait some more. When I'm satisfied that they have moved on, I try to rise. Before I even get to my knees, Junkyard alerts again. I freeze, and silently curse myself. It would be just like Cobra to leave a straggler, exactly for such an event. I sit there in a crouch for a few moments, but see nothing. Just as I'm losing patience, a tree branch moves. I catch it out of the corner of my eye. And then I dwell on it. But I see nothing, even through the NODs.

Stalker taps me on the shoulder. We have a short conversation using hand-and-arm signals. 'What did you see?' he asks.

"Movement," I reply.

"Infantry?"

"Don't know."

I can't see his expression in the darkness, but I'm sure he isn't happy. It's time to go. We move back into the forest about fifty meters and hold council.

"This is bad," Outback whispers.

"We'll deal with it," Stalker says. "We always do. Bombstrike... Got any air support for us?"

"Not until we are on target." We know the drill. The airstrike is a package. It moves in a carefully orchestrated sequence of surveillance, followed by attack aircraft, and finally the extraction. It has to be launched hours in advance of the on-ground action, and strike within thirty seconds of the anticipated time-on-target. If they launch too early, everyone between here and China will know what we are up to.

"We move out as planned. Mutt, keep point. Dial-Tone, send a sit-rep to Main. Let's go." We give Dial-Tone a minute to radio the Flagg and send up his spot report: Description and location of enemy forces.

We move parallel to the road now. It isn't far. Only four kilometers, and yet it takes us most of an hour. The caution pays off. By some miracle we avoid enemy contact. As we close on the last five hundred meters we look for a place to launch our bird. When we find a small clearing, Bombstrike takes a knee and readies her favorite toy. The Raven has been in the inventory for a few years. It is essentially a flying camera. The fuselage is the size of a football and it launches the same way. Bombstrike unfolds the wings, cocks her arm back, and throws it up into the air. Once launched a miniature propeller takes over. The Raven begins to circle the airfield. Each of us can tap into the video feed through our wrist-mounted computers.

NODs are unnecessary at this point. Stadium lighting and sodium lamps paint the world in shades of amber. We are on the west edge of the airport, facing the larger north-south runway. If Bombstrike's Raven is right, we should be able to ignore the eastern runway and focus all of our firepower on the west runway terminal. We are closest to the control tower, perhaps one hundred meters away. Beyond that is the terminal itself, and then a series of small hangars. I can see the captured Learjet parked outside. The facilities are very small small, for which we are thankful. I don't see any other civilian aircraft. I can only speculate their owners fled as governance began to crumble.

A series of obstacles confronts us. The first is a fifty meter gap between the wood line and the airfield perimeter. Beyond that, a coil of concertina wire rests at the base of a barbed wire fence. I guess it to be eight feet tall. And beyond the fence is nothing but open ground and tarmac. The air traffic control tower looms over the whole thing. The good news is that I don't see any patrols and the runway is clear of obstacles. The bad news? I check my watch. 0256 hours. We're running late. We move through the forest, parallel to the flight line, until we can stake out a spot facing the terminal. The situation is no better at this end. We're still looking at forty or fifty meters of open ground to cross. The northern tip of the perimeter has a guard shack and a vehicle gate.

A pair of Cobra Troopers are on duty. You can always tell the difference between the 'blue-shirts' and the actual Vipers. These are usually local thugs or wannabe military types that Cobra hires on an as-needed basis. They give them a little blue k-pot and a face mask and call it a day. Cobra Troopers are like a box of chocolates, but in general they are poorly armed and have less training than the Vipers. I hoped they'd be smoking and joking, but no such luck. The west side, facing the road, includes a sandbag machine gun nest complete with PKM. The east side has a green truck parked. I can't recognize the make from here. Must be some East European Soviet-era thing. It's got a four-seat cab with an olive drab canvas troop carrier tacked on back.

Time for a quick halt. We take up firing positions on the ground. Low-Light sites his over-sized rifle on the tower. Outback makes sure he can traverse his weapon up and down the flight line when the time comes. Flint stays with them to provide security. They will act as our support-by-fire element. Behind them, Bombstrike whispers into her hand mike.

"How are we looking?" I ask.

"0305. C-130s are twenty minutes out. They can circle for a little bit, but not forever. F-16s were late getting off the ground. We're expecting them no earlier than 0320."

At this point, we can only spare fifteen minutes for recon. Stalker keys the mike.

I look to the left and see headlights. A convoy of Land Rovers moves down the road towards the guard shack. There's no time to think and no time to plan. Stalker whistles at the team and then takes off at a run. It is an insane risk, but this is probably the only distraction we are going to get. It takes about seven seconds for a good runner to sprint fifty meters. That is an eternity when you're exposed on open ground. My uniform already feels like sandpaper on my skin. I am already dripping with sweat. Everything hurts. Junkyard is running close beside me. The only way we'll come out of this alive is if the guards all pay attention to the vehicles and the headlights kill their night vision. I leap over the concertina wire and roll. I don't stop moving until I'm resting against the base of the fence.

Junkyard is crouched beside me, panting hot dog breath in my ear. Stalker is just ahead. Bombstrike follow close behind and Dial-Tone is the last of all. He didn't have time to doff his commo backpack. It's rigid and awkward and at that moment I wonder if he shouldn't have been left with the gunslingers. But there's no time for regret. All we can do now is tuck ourselves against the fence, hold our breath, and pray.

"Are we dead yet?" Bombstrike whispers.

The guards lift the gate. The trucks drive on.

"We're good," I say. "We're good. Cutting the fence now."

4

Well, that's FRAGO number one.

I take a minute to study the fence. It's a simple chain-link deal with metal posts. I don't see any rubber insulators that would suggest electrified wires. I start cutting with a pair of shears. The fence is old and rusty. It only takes a few snips to cut a piece large enough to peel back The team low-crawls through.

I hear Flint coming in over my MBITR. "Alpha, this is Bravo, over."

"Alpha," Dial-Tone whispers.

"We've got eyes on a Viper. Building one. Second floor window. The trucks pulled up in front of the terminal. Break." The fence scratches my head and tears at my pants as I worm my way through. "Lots of activity. Stay low. Trucks are coming back. Over."

I signal the team to stop. Everyone eats some grass while the Land Rovers turn around and exit back the way they came. We're not dead yet, so I can only assume nobody has noticed us.

"Alpha," Flint calls again. "I count three trucks in, three trucks out. Also, four personnel in the tower. They look bored. Over."

"Roger that." We start moving again, inching our way along the base of the fence towards the guard post. Stalker and Bombstrike take turns advancing. One takes aim at the guard shack while the other crawls forward. I keep glancing at the terminal. I can see a man silhouetted in against the upper story window, but can't make him out. It might be two hundred meters from here. Too far to run, even if an opportunity presented itself. We're getting closer to the lights now. Every inch we creep forward brings us closer to being spotted. This is the part of the plan that takes the most planning, and between the constraints of time and lack of intel we gave it the least. All that is left is to improvise and hope for the best - Which is not a sound strategy under any circumstances.

"We need to take out the guards," Stalker whispers. "Front gate."

I don't know that this will improve our situation. But it's something. Action is almost always better than inaction. At the very least he has given us a goal that we can work towards. Flint comes over the mike again.

"Alpha, this is Bravo. Viper in terminal is pacing. No activity in tower. Guards are going inside. Go, go, go!"

"Go!" I hiss, and scramble to my feet. I sprint fifty meters along the fence-line until I reach the guard shack. As a rule of thumb, a man can only stand guard for about an hour before he gets bored and his attention starts to wander. I can't see how the situation would get any better than this. It's almost ridiculous what you can get away with when someone is facing the wrong direction.

Junkyard hits them first. He takes off like a missile, leaping onto the Trooper's back and digging into his shoulder. The man is caught by surprise. He falls face-first onto the pavement and starts panicking. Doesn't even know what hit him. In another moment he will start screaming, and we can't have that. I move up and deliver a burst of gunfire to the back of his head. The suppressor does its job. There really no such thing as 'silenced' gunfire. The best we can hope for is still a popping sound that somebody might mistake for a hammer driving a nail. It's all about playing the margins. That second of doubt could be the difference between life and death

Stalker moves in, throws open the guard shack door, and finds himself face-to-face with two more Troopers. The first is holding a cup of coffee to his lips. The second is playing with his phone. For a split second they just stare at us in wide-eyed amazement. Then it gets real. Stalker kicks the first one in the shins and lets him splash himself with hot coffee. The second gets a butt-stroke to the face. He stumbles back against a desk with blood squirting out his nose. I'm second in the room. I strike him again with the butt of my rifle, and I don't stop until I see pieces of teeth hitting the floor. Stalker drops Coffee Guy to the ground and presses the barrel of his rifle right between the shoulder blades.

"Bravo, this is Alpha. Three down in here. How do we look?" I am breathing hard. My fingers shake from the adrenaline. "Over?"

"Looks good," Flint says.

Coffee Guy tries to mumble something. Junkyard snarls and bares his titanium teeth. Coffee Guy decides whatever he was going to say wasn't that important, after all.

I glance at my watch. 0309. "Bombstrike?"

"C-130 lands in ten," she says. "We're looking good."

"No, we're not," Stalker replies. "We're supposed to sit here for ten minutes? We're sitting ducks. How long before someone does a radio check on these losers?"

He's right. We're ahead of schedule. We can't count on being able to sit tight in the guard shack with our prisoners for the next ten minutes. Toothless starts mumbling something. I smash his head against the table and he drops. We quickly apply flex-cuffs and gags. I make sure to bind their hands around an exposed piece of pipe. The last thing we need is for them to start hopping around attracting attention. Dial-Tone goes around the room smashing every radio, telephone, and TV screen he can find. But this is just a temporary solution. We still have no way of making it two hundred meters across the flight line without attracting unwanted attention.

"Alright," Stalker says, keying the mike "Here's the plan. We're going to take their truck, push east, across the flight line and take the terminal. Dial-Tone drops the strobe as we drive. We'll pull up on the base on the tower and take the north side of the terminal. Bravo, I need you to cover the tower and the second floor of the terminal. Got it? Over?"

"Roger that," Flint says.

"Snap your IR chems. We're going to have CAS on station in nine mikes. Out."

Everyone takes a second to break their chemlights. The soft plastic tubes contain a crush-able ampule. Bend them just a little bit, and the chemicals mix and start to glow. These lights in particular don't glow so much. They might put out a faint violet light that you can just barely see in the darkness. But look at them through night vision and they're lit up like a Christmas tree.

Bombstrike is staring at me like she's seen a ghost.

"What?"

"We're doing this?" she asks.

"Yes, we're doing this."

"Because this is insane."

"This is GI Joe," I say. "Insane is what we do."

There's no way we can approach the trucks without being spotted. I can't see a driver, but there are a lot of dark shadows in the cab and the bed is facing away from us. This is exactly the kind of situation we need Junkyard for. I dispatch him to scout the truck, and observe what he sees through the mast-mounted camera. When I confirm it is all clear, we move out.

I've never seen a military vehicle that needed a set of keys. Nobody wants to wake up in the middle of a war and realize they can't start their tank because some doofus lost them. I crawl into the cab of the guard's truck and see that it has a flip-switch ignition installed. Fire her up. The rest of the team hops in the back. It is entirely likely, even probable, that Toothless and Coffee Guy will escape at some point in the near future. That is a risk we'll just have to take. I expect the madness to break loose in less than five minutes anyway. Junkyard jumps in the passenger seat next to me.

"Nice and easy," I tell him. Then I key the mike: "We're in the truck moving east. Hold your fire. Over."

Flint: "Truck moving east. Copy that. Over."

We drive across the flight line as slow as we possibly can. When we reach the halfway point, Dial-Tone drops an IR strobe. This will designate the landing point for the incoming aircraft.

Flint again: "You're spotted. Tower guards are on radio. Trying to raise you, probably. Over."

"Copy that, over," I say. Junkyard looks at me and whines. I have no idea how much of this he really understands. My best guess is that he's somehow aware of how stressed out I am. We circle around the north end of the tower and come around on the east side of the terminal building. I leaves the truck running when we debark. The engine noise will work to our advantage. Likewise, the headlights. Anyone facing the front of the truck will see silhouettes, but hopefully they won't be able to recognize us.

The terminal is brand new. Clean. Small, but nonetheless hyper-modern. Undoubtedly the work of the Thai government investing in southern Thailand, as part of their campaign to appease the rebellious Malay population. The west side looks like a single sheet of glass and stainless steel, to give the impression of a single giant mirror. It is too open. We are exposed, and forced to veer around the north edge of the building. I can't see anyone from here. Three hundred meters south, we spot the Learjet and some kind of Soviet-era cargo plane.

"Alpha, Alpha," Flint says over the radio. "Tower guards are on the phone. They know something's up."

"Got it," I reply. At this point we are perhaps twenty meters from the terminal's north entrance. There is nothing I can do. We are going to see the plan through to the end or die trying. Alea iacta est. Caesar was my homie.

"We're going to breach here," Stalker whispers. "Stack up."

The breach is the single most dangerous moment of the entire operation. It's one of those things that is simple in concept but all to easy to botch in execution. And in this particular instance, 'botching' the breach means lots people die. The fundamental idea is that the four-man team approaches a door and stands in a row. The first two men through the door immediately face left and right. They take aim at the corners of the room and then sweep their guns towards the center. The last two men split the center, and sweep their guns towards the corners. When it's done right, every man takes responsibility for a sector in such a way that it minimizes the chance anyone will be surprised, while at the same time maximizing the speed and aggression required to clear the doorway (which naturally becomes a magnet for enemy gunfire). There are a dozen possible variations of the drill, based on things like whether the doors open inwards or outwards, whether the door is centered on the room or placed in a corner. The devil is in the details.

Add to this the challenges inherent in any hostage-rescue operation. We are about to walk into a room with perhaps fifty civilian hostages and maybe three or four targets. The breach team has to very quickly identify the targets and drop them before they can return fire. Not only that, but we have to minimize the chance that they might kill hostages. It is entirely possible to shoot a man dead and still have him squeeze off a few shots, even if it is just an involuntary muscle spasm. The solution to this is to place your gunfire in such a way that it will strike the brain stem.

Here's a game you can play when you're bored: Find a friend and a magic marker. Draw a line down the middle of the face. You can start between the eyes, follow the bridge of the nose, continue down to the lips, and stop somewhere on the chin. The line you just drew marks the region you have place your shots if you expect an instant kill. Get it right, and he will 'drop like water.'

As you can imagine, this takes quite a bit of practice. Every member of the team has to drill it over and over again until they can anticipate each others' moves. In an ideal situation, I will be able to predict the location of each team member without looking. Needless to say, this is not an ideal situation. Nothing about this situation has been ideal, and nothing will be.

And now we have FRAGO number two: We begin to collapse into our stack, in anticipation of the breach. I'm fourth man. My job is to open the door while the other three rush in. But just as I go to reach for it, Junkyard signals. I hesitate. A Viper opens the door, steps out, and looks right at me. To this day, I cannot comprehend why he decided to go outside at just that moment. I like to think that he wanted a smoke break, and the other terrorists were so considerate that they made him take it outside. Probably not. Probably the tower told him to go out and see what was going on with the truck. But it's a nice thought. Now we get to see who dies first.

5

Junk's warning gives me a split-second head start. I shoot him right in his shiny chrome face.

SNAP-SNAP! Done.

Stalker, Bombstrike, and Dial-Tone breach the room. There are three more Vipers waiting for them. The guns start chattering. I don't see it go down, but it takes less than a second. Two of them drop immediately. One Viper takes a round in the neck. He falls to his knees and sprays gunfire into the air. Bombstrike stands over him and finishes the job.

It's not a big room, but it is big enough to host an upper-story mezzanine. The second-floor lookout stands at the top of the stairs, in front of a window. He takes aim. Two hundred yards away, Low-Light sees this and puts a 50-cal round through the man's shoulder. Please understand, the 50-cal is bullet the size of your middle finger. It is the largest caliber rifle a single man can operate. The round doesn't puncture; It obliterates. Low-Light's shot completely severs the Viper's left arm and turns his shoulder into a kind of sauce. Marksmen have used the 107 to claim kills past 2,000 meters. Right now, Low-Light might as well be shooting the broad side of a barn.

The Joes check in one by one: "Clear! Clear! Clear!"

I immediately hear the sound of Outback opening up with the 240. Tracer rounds race from his firing position to impact against the top of the control tower. That is undoubtedly the most dangerous point on the battlefield. We got lucky sneaking past them in the truck, but now there is no possible way we can exfiltrate as long as there are troopers firing from the tower vantage point. I open the leaf sight for my M320. It makes a dull thumping sound and then a 40mm grenade explodes against the outside of the tower. I have no idea if I actually hit anybody. I just like to think I'm helping.

Time check: 0315. Five minutes to go.

"Anybody see hostages?" Stalker asks. And then, louder: "Doctor Burke? Anyone here?"

"Junk," I say. "Search." The team spreads out to the corner of the room, covering the entrances and hallways in case the enemy decides to counterattack. They kick the weapons away from the fallen Vipers, just in case any of them decide they aren't quite dead yet. I have to guide Junkyard away from the bodies, to keep him from alerting on them. Instead, he focuses on the doors and hallways. It only takes a few seconds before he stops and points at a door. I motion for Stalker to cover it. Just like before, I'll be the one to pull open the door and Stalker will immediately move in.

This time it goes as planned. The door opens, and we see the room on the other side is no larger than a closet. The people inside are already laying face-down on the floor, which is exactly what they are supposed to be doing. The worst possible outcome is for a hostage to panic and stand up in the middle of the shooting. I'm sure the flight crew have hostage-rescue training, and if Burke is as valuable as I think he is, his family might have been trained too. They peek up at us from the floor. Judging from their clothes, it looks like we have found two pilots, a flight attendant, and Mrs. Burke.

"Four," Stalker says into his mike. "I count four hostages. Anybody else?" One of them starts to stand up, and he shouts at them to stay down. It may sound cruel, but we don't actually know that these are the hostages. I direct Junk to search them for explosives. Then we pull security together while Stalker searches them for weapons. One by one, he confirms their names against the roster on his wrist computer.

"Maria Burke?" he asks the woman.

"Yes," she says. Her eyes are red and puffy. "Where's Sarah? Where did they take her?"

"Stay down until we tell you to move. We're going to find her."

"Still two short," I say into the mike. I order Junk to search again, and follow him through the building. Bombstrike and Dial Tone take up positions in the corners of the room, so that they can cover the opposite entrances. We search the back offices and behind the ticket counters. Junk even runs through the conveyor belts to the loading area behind the terminal. He comes up with nothing. Time is running out.

There is noise and static on the comm. Outback is still chattering away with the 240. Every few seconds we hear the howitzer-boom from Low-Light's 50-cal rifle. I can only imagine they are still chipping away at the control tower. At least, I hope so. If not, we have a real problem.

"Alpha!" Flint shouts over the mike. "Alpha! Enemy armor moving! Two hundred meters south of your position. Two HISS tanks moving north. Over."

Oh, boy. Stalker promised it would get ugly. The HISS may be a light-armor troop carrier, but that doesn't change the fact that they are bigger than us, badder than us, and nobody brought anti-armor rockets.

"Get back!" I scream. "Everyone back!"

I run up the stairs to the second story windows. It's not possible to fight the tanks and protect the hostages at the same time. Anything I do will attract their fire into the terminal. I've got to make the best of a bad situation, and attract that fire away from the hostages. All I can do is open my leaf sight and place a 40mm grenade on the lead HISS.

The grenade makes a hollow thump sound. It strikes the target canopy and detonates. TV gives people the idea that every explosion should be a burst of orange flame. Not so. There's a flash, for sure, and a cloud of smoke and dust and shrapnel explodes in every direction. The HISS is gray and hazy for a moment, but it doesn't stop. In fact, I'm pretty sure all I did was make it mad. When the tank returns fire, the glass and concrete just disintegrate around me. I seek cover behind a pillar and flinch as chunks of concrete turn to powder inches in front of my face. The gunner sweeps right, blowing out every window in the second story.

"Mutt?" Stalker calls. "You okay?"

I drop another grenade into my launcher. "I'm good! Hit it!" We return fire. Two grenades explode against the HISS without effect. Junkyard takes cover on the far side of the room.

At this moment, Outback turns the 240 on the lead tank. I watch a hail of tracer fire spray against the sides. It might look like a useless gesture, but its really not. Not entirely. A good barrage of small arms fire can make a tank crew button up, which makes it twice as hard to navigate. In the case of the HISS, that means suppressing the turret gunner and turning the forward canopy into a web of broken glass. Finally we get a kill shot. Low-Light places a 50-cal round through the damaged canopy. The tank stops moving. I can only assume he killed the driver.

But that's just a mobility kill. The gunner is still alive. He rotates to the left and starts spraying thirty-mike-mike in Outback's direction. Now the second HISS takes the lead. It circles around the right of its wounded partner, and fires long bursts into the terminal. I can only hope he is paying attention to me, and not just spraying the lower level.

Then I hear a very welcome sound. Bombstrike is crouching behind a staircase, talking into her radio: "I need you to come in north to south on runway one. Disregard altitude restriction. Two enemy armor... Roger, two enemy armor. Keep your fire west of the terminal. West of the terminal! This is danger close."

"Flint?" I ask, pissing all over radio discipline. "Where are you?"

"South of the cargo plane," he replies.

"Bombstrike!" I shout at the top of my lungs. I have to wave at her until she pays attention. "Keep it north of the cargo plane."

"You're cleared hot," she says into the radio. "Cleared hot."

It only takes a second. The first HISS takes a 105mm from above and completely ceases to exist. The sound is simply astonishing. My ears will be ringing for the rest of the week. Every bone in my body wants to peek out and watch the gunship rain down lead. I can hear it pounding the second HISS with auto-cannon until the 105 reloads and strikes again. Shrapnel, asphalt, and broken pieces of HISS glance off the concrete pillar.

"We're good," Bombstrike yells. She goes back to speaking to her mike: "Circle on station. We're moving hostages in fifteen seconds. I say again, moving hostages in fifteen seconds. Lift fire."

The runway lights shut down. It took them long enough... But at this point it is too little, too late. We've already got strobes marking both ends of the runway. The C-130 the tarmac and immediately brakes. And then it hits me: The tanks are in the runway. Oh, they're broken and torn up and on fire, but they're in the middle of the stupid runway. All I can do is watch in horror as Wild Bill comes right at them. The wing clears the wrecks by inches. If he was just a few feet to the east, one of the props would have struck a burning HISS and turned into shrapnel. It's a heart-stopping, unbelievable moment. For a full four seconds all I can do is stare. I'll always wonder if Bill has any idea how close we came to total catastrophe.

It takes Dial-Tone's yelling to snap me out of it. He is calling for the hostages to follow him onto the tarmac. We're actually very lucky. The group is small enough to be manageable, even if Maria Burke is in a state of borderline panic. They follow him out of the terminal and onto the flight line. Wild Bill's crew chief has already dropped the rear ramp by the time the hostages arrive. I hurry to join them. This is not a flight I want to miss.

There is more confusion on the inside. The seats are made of canvas straps. Everything is new and strange to them. The plane is lit with dim red lights. Bombstrike is trying to get them strapped in for takeoff, but Maria isn't having it. As soon as she realizes we are about to take off without her family, she loses her mind. Dial-Tone has to physically restrain her, to stop her from running back into the terminal. I honestly can't blame her. I haven't seen my kids in years. But at the same time, the only thing I want in the whole entire world is to be in the air and out of this place.

Flint, Outback, and Low-Light come running towards the ramp. We hear gunfire, and Flint pauses to empty his AA-12 in a northerly direction.

"Are we good?" he asks, swapping the drum. I can barely hear him. The engines are tremendously loud. The smell of exhaust threatens to choke us out. I gesture for him to come up the ramp so we can talk face-to-face. The only way we can speak is to lean in and shout directly into my ear. "They've got hostiles in the treeline on the north edge." He gestures with a karate-chop motion in the general direction of the gunfire.

I have to pass this information to Bombstrike and the crew chief. The chief shakes his head. Every few seconds I hear a burst of gunfire rattle against the skin of the plane. It starts to taxi, reorienting to the south so that it can take off. This is even worse. The rear ramp is still open, and we'll expose the passengers to enemy fire. Bombstrike is struggling to make herself heard over the comm. Eventually she just gives up and patches herself directly into the aircraft's internal net. It takes about ten seconds to relay new instructions to the gunship overhead: Place fire and gravity-vectored ordnance on the north treeline.

"Is that it?" Flint yells into my ear.

"We are missing two!" I reply.

Another burst of gunfire hits the fuselage. A bullet actually penetrates and strikes one of the flight crew hostages. They start screaming and bleeding all over the place. Dial-Tone has to dig into his own first aid pouch to apply a bandage. I force myself to ignore it. There is nothing I can do to help, one way or the other, and I've got bigger problems. I look to Bombstrike and start yelling. I know she can't hear me. All she does is raise a finger: 'Give it a second.'

Two seconds later, the ordnance hits. I don't even need to hear it. I can feel the explosion. It's a concussion that shakes the entire plane and rattles inside your chest. At that moment everyone shuts up. This is the end of the world, for all they know. An instant later I hear cannon fire raining down. I imagine a forest being blown to splinters along with everyone in it. I don't even know what hit them, and the poor jokers probably don't know, either.

The plane is already moving. It feels like it's barely started rolling, before it suddenly lurches into the sky. That would be the JATO bottles. In a feat of inspired madness, somebody realized that a C-130 could take off faster if they strapped expendable rockets to the wings. It doesn't just lift off, it leaps into the air at a 45-degree angle. I'm thrown off my feet, and Junkyard goes skidding across the floor to the rear of the plane. At least two passengers vomit.

But we're alive. We're alive, and we've made it.

Mrs. Burke cries all the way to Bangkok.