“WOOOHH… WOOOOHH… SHEEWWWWW!” he breathed and squeezed as another Thud and then Spang sounded through the aircraft. The fighter was already bucking from the air compression around it but these were solid hits. It sounded and felt like he was taking flak. Hell, he could be hitting treetops, he didn’t know. He pulled up a bit to try to get out of the ground buffet and there was another, hard, Spang!

“Bull, I’m hit, I’m hit. Ejecting!” Rene screamed over the net.

Ridley rolled his head slightly to the right and saw his wingman’s fighter fly into thousands of pieces just as his ejection seat fired. Almost at the same time he saw his own right wing fly apart and the ship immediately begin to go into “out of control” condition.

Still not completely out of his tunnel vision and his mind hazy, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew “Bull” Ridley instinctively reached between his knees and pulled the eject handle. The process had been drilled into him and it had served him well once during the first Gulf War. The training would save him this time. Thwack, bang!

Ridley was flung out of the fighter jet into the evening air at several hundred miles per hour just as the jet came apart below him. Fortunately, the fuel load didn’t detonate. The g load and the spin were worse than any roller coaster. To Ridley’s bemused astonishment and distaste, it seemed a lot worse than it did a decade and a half ago. Of course, that time he hadn’t been at damned near Mach One and below Angels Seven.

Then his chute popped and things slowed down for a second. Ridley could see the chute from several of the twelve remaining NATO squadron pilots already deployed. He had made it much closer to the tree line than the others and most of them were a thousand or more feet above him. And then one by one their chutes began to fail. Ridley tracked the closest chute to him; he thought it was Rene. Then he realized why the chutes were failing.

The boomerangs swarmed the chute and the dangling payload and almost as soon as the swarm surrounded the downed pilot, his chute collapsed and he began a plummet toward the ground. The plummet appeared to Ridley to be more of a controlled dragging and tossing, like a dog shaking a chew toy in its mouth.

Ridley strained hard to pull his right leg upward so he could reach his pistol. Just as he grabbed for it something invisible jerked it right out of his hands. The carabiner on his right shoulder ripped away from the harness. Then his clothes seemed to explode and be pulled away from him. The invisible force that grabbed him flung him sideways, slamming him into two shiny boomerangs that ripped the buttons and hasps from his flightsuit, again tossing him upward.

Ridley’s helmet thwacked hard into something. And then he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left shoulder as he was spun face first into the top of a tree and into another alien probe. The faceshield of his helmet cracked and flew off as the buttons and other metal fasteners were ripped from it. The probe tossed him up and outward into another one and this one yanked the shoes right off his feet, breaking three bones in his left foot and dislocating all his toes on his right. With all the metal gone from his body, the probes left him plummeting downward.

Fortunately, he was at damned near tree height. A final plummet through several thick tree limbs spinning and smacking him around ended with a skipping, scraping, bouncing, and rolling stop on the ground at the base of a tree. Ridley lay there on the edge of consciousness in pain from head to toe staring up at the sky.

“So much for making colonel,” he muttered, then passed out.

Chapter 14

Roger had been as good as his word. In less than fourteen hours Gries and Cady had been flown over to France on one of the C-17s that was supporting the Stryker brigade out of Stewart. Only one battalion had been off-loaded and mated up with their vehicles but there was another already queued up to land.

Shane had stopped by the local French “unified defense” headquarters, which was located in a small industrial building on the outskirts of Le Havre. Even in the worst conditions in Iraq, headquarters units had always been pretty button down and operational. When he went to the headquarters to try to get some intel on the situation, he’d found utter chaos. Nobody recognized his priority, or cared. Nobody seemed to have any idea what was happening or what to do about it if they did. He’d seen one three star French general wandering around the operations room asking everyone if they had a pencil sharpener; he seemed to have forgotten why he needed a pencil sharpened and was simply concentrating on a task he could perform.