“I goddamn heard you! Right at the end of our last conversation. Roy saying, ‘Well done, Drake.’ ” Lizzy did her best to lower her voice like President Cole’s.
Drake burst out laughing.
She’d have hung up on him if she could have unclenched her hand enough to do so.
“He was congratulating me on falling for a woman with enough balls to go out and get things done, and damn the consequences because it was the right thing to do.”
“…Oh.”
“That’s all you have to say? ‘Oh.’?” Drake’s chuckle was low and sexy.
“Um…yes.” Not what she’d expected.
“Are you going to keep the ring?” Now he was teasing her.
“Yes,” was all she could manage. She clenched her left fist tightly and held it up against her heart.
“Okay. You know that the point of being a general is that you no longer need to go out in the field yourself.”
“Tell that to Patton.”
“That’s a little different. You’re the Director of the NRO, not the commander of the Third Army.”
“Or General JJ Martinez.”
Again that silence stretched before Drake spoke again, “Yeah, about that. Be damned careful. He’s an exceptionally tough man to kill. Many people have tried, both metaphorically and a few literally. He’s the kind of guy who makes Patton look like a pussycat.”
“I’m not out to kill him.”
“General Gray, please take this as advice from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: you’d better start preparing yourself for that eventuality. You’ve made yourself the commanding officer on the scene, and it’s an order you may have to give.”
She couldn’t breathe past the sudden tightness in her chest.
Drake waited several long beats before speaking again. “You need anything?”
“A miracle.”
“I’ll get to work on that. I love you, Lizzy. Come back safe.”
“I love you too, Drake.”
Lizzy hung up the phone and just held on to it as she tried to make sense of everything that was going on.
“You okay, General Gray?” Jon leaned close enough to rest a hand on her arm.
“I have no idea.”
“Did Uncle Drake, the guy who can’t even hug my mother, his sister, when he visits, actually say, ‘I love you’?”
She glanced over at him. “He did.”
“In as many words?”
Lizzy could only nod.
“I’ll be damned.” Jon leaned back and whistled in surprise. “I think you just got your miracle, General Gray.”
58
“They’re aloft.” At Lizzy’s request, Holly was handling the phone calls after Miranda’s long talk with the copilot.
He and Miranda had talked about tactics, specifically the implications of design capabilities versus real-world limitations.
The pilots had been deeply trained in air-to-ground combat and air-to-air scenarios, but never against another AC-130J Ghostrider. It simply hadn’t been a consideration.
She and the copilot had taken most of the Ghostrider’s flight between El Paso, Texas, and Nogales, Sonora, to work out the essential considerations. They’d signed off as her flight began its descent into Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington.
He had asked if they could meet later to work through more of the permutations.
She’d agreed.
Neither of them had mentioned that there might not be a later.
Miranda knew it was out of her hands. She’d done everything she could think of.
“Don’t think about it,” Holly anticipated her thoughts.
She stared at Holly. “How?”
She shrugged. “Don’t ask me; I don’t know Christmas from Bourke Street. Just…don’t.”
“I have Mike and Jeremy on one plane and Jon with Lizzy on the other. Their present closing speed is seven hundred knots—eight hundred miles an hour. There is no scenario that I can simulate where this ends well.”
Holly looked grim, then listened to the phone for a moment.
“First contact will be in about thirty minutes, just after we land.”
59
“Coming up on the first target. We’re just southeast of Mexicali. The compound of Hector Vasquez,” the pilot announced over the Ghostrider’s intercom.
It was a mission near and dear to Taz’s heart.
Vasquez was the one who’d taken their money and chosen the coyote man to take them safely over the border. How many women, who hadn’t had the premium for the legitimate papers, had simply been sold into the sex trade after he’d enjoyed a bit of rape?
Jeremy had showed her how and she had the night-vision image up on the targeting monitor.
“The armory is here and the garage is here,” she showed Jeremy his targets. She set a cursor on the screen between their stations that showed an infrared view of Vasquez’s compound. Then she shifted to the second location.
“Got them. You ready?” Jeremy had drilled her diligently on aiming and firing the M102 howitzer from the moment they were aboard. Mike had even helped when Jeremy became too technical and she’d needed a translation.
“As ready as you can make me.” She slewed the targeting for the howitzer to Vasquez’s private compound and hoped the circular balcony marked the master bedroom.
She glanced at JJ, “I’d still like the order to proceed, sir.”
“Granted, Colonel Cortez. Weapons free. Fire at will.”
To Jeremy’s credit, he didn’t hesitate. He lit the armory. The beam would be invisible from the ground, but their instruments displayed a brilliant green-white blaze on the roof of the armory.
She fired the howitzer at the same moment. The big round traveled at twice the speed of sound—four seconds from their current altitude.
Their gun crew required ten seconds to reload the howitzer, so all she could do was wait and watch.
The corner of the hacienda disappeared in a ball of white. She moved her cursor to highlight the next corner of the hacienda. Her indicator turned green but she didn’t fire.
The computer will compensate for most scenarios, Jeremy had told her. Windage, air speed, and so on. But if you can wait until the target remains steady in your crosshairs for at least two or three seconds, then the chances of the projectile flying true increase drastically.
Just as she hit the Fire button, Jeremy’s laser must have finally burned through the armory roof.
The entire compound disappeared beneath the blinding glare on their screens.
“What just happened?” It looked as if everything had blown up.
“Screen overload. It will compensate in a few moments, but right now the CCD and the computer are simply overwhelmed with photon impact which is—”
“Did it blow up the whole compound?” JJ was leaning in over her shoulder.
“No, see.” Jeremy pointed. “The bloom is going away. So…now we can see what happened when the armory exploded. Though the brightness of the fire is continuing to mask the extent of the actual damage.”
A second flash of brightness, even bigger than the first, smeared across the screen so suddenly that she slammed back into her seat and JJ stumbled back.