Force of Eagles

by Richard Herman

  “We need someone with more experience than a first lieutenant to head the team,” Gregory said. “Captain Trimler will have to be in command, Jamison his exec.”

  Stansell started to feel a little better.

  Pullman stuck his head in the door and motioned for Stansell to join him outside. “Damndest thing you’ve ever seen, Colonel. This Kamagami has got the camp almost up. When a platoon gets finished he’s having them do calisthenics, the old daily dozen, and finishes them off with a two-mile run.”

  “Quite a top kick?”

  “Colonel, he hardly says a word. Doesn’t need to.” Pullman then handed Stansell a message. “From General Mado. We’re getting three F- 11 Is in Monday, and Sundown has approved your request for F- 15s. We get one E model out of Luke and eight C models for escort. You get to choose the units and the pilots. Looking pretty good, Colonel.”

  Stansell had to agree, but then why was his right ear demanding a scratching?

  *

  The White House

  Admiral Scovill nodded at the naval officer sitting in an armchair outside the Oval Office reading a book. Scovill nodded in approval when he saw it was Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The “football,” the soft leather bag carrying the nuclear launch codes, was in the chair beside him and the wrist chain was long enough for him to get comfortable. A boring job, following the President around with nothing to do. But the military aides who rotated the duty did not complain—after all, it was a path to promotion, and when you thought about it, you could say you had the whole world in your hand.

  Andy Wollard, the President’s Chief of Staff, ushered the Chair-man of the Joint Chiefs into the office. Scovill was surprised to see Cyrus Piccard, Secretary of State, sitting on one of the couches next to the Secretary of Defense. Piccard had been at Geneva conducting the failing negotiations with the Iranians for the release of the POWs. The meeting late in the evening and the sudden appearance of Piccard could only mean one thing—something had gone very very wrong.

  “Please sit down,” the President said. Scovill sat next to Mike Cagliari, the National Security Advisor, directly across from Bobby Burke, the Director of Central Intelligence. Wollard found a chair in a corner and would take voluminous notes. “Okay, Cy, lay it all out for us.”

  “The talks are stalled. Hell, they’ve all but collapsed. The Libyans keep upping the bid for the hostages and I think the Iranians expect us to match it. It’s been coming apart ever since that press conference when Whiteside told the world what the Libyans were doing.”

  “You’re not talking directly to the Libyans?” the President said quickly.

  “Of course not, it’s all coming through a third party.”

  “Who?”

  “The Russians. Who else? The Libyans have the bid up to a mil-lion and a half dollars for each POW. The only good news is that the Iranians aren’t biting. At least not yet.”

  “Any ideas why?”

  “Internal politics, sir.” This from Burke, the Director of the CIA. “The Islamic Republican Party is trying to align with the IPRP to keep control of the Council of Guardians. But the IPRP wants half of the POWs as a sort of collateral. An Iranian show of good faith.”

  “So it’s a rescue or nothing,” the President said. Determination had replaced long-felt frustration. “Terry, when will Delta Force be ready to go?”

  “Fifteen to eighteen days,” Scovill answered.

  “Why so long?”

  “Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense put in, “that’s not a long time to get a mission like this ready. And there are problems. First, the Iranians are moving an armored regiment into place forty-two miles from the POWs. We’ve got to find a way to block them. Second, Soviet agents have been sighted around Fort Bragg, where Delta Force is training.”

  “What the hell is going on?” The President was looking at Burke. “I thought the Air Force was going to run cover for them?”

  “It’s glasnost, Mr. President,” Burke told him, tight-lipped. “We have to reciprocate as things loosen up in the Soviet Union and our people are allowed to move around inside Russia. All of which gives the Soviets more freedom to move around over here. While we’re getting dividends in other areas, we’re paying for it by allowing them increased freedom of movement. Those agents are pros and they know where to look. They haven’t bitten on the Air Force cover and probably see it as a Red Flag exercise. We’re fairly certain they don’t know what Delta is preparing for but they’re curious. If the FBI rolls the agents up, the Russians will get even more interested.”

  “Can we use the Air Force and Rangers at Nellis?”

  “Doubtful, sir,” Scovill said. “They’re really a second team.”

  “Okay, continue. Don’t leak anything as we originally planned. I want a tight security lid on this whole operation. Find a way to sneak Delta Force into position and keep the Air Force and Rangers at it. Cy, get back to Geneva and stall. If you have to, make it look like I’m seriously considering outbidding the Libyans. It will help give the Iranians a reason to keep the POWs together. Gentlemen, we’re fast running out of time on this one.”

  Chapter 15: D Minus 20

  Kermanshah, Iran

  Mokhtari stomped up the steps to the third floor, two guards behind him. He wanted the POWs to hear his hard leather heels ringing, to let the fear of anticipation work for him. He moved down the wide corridor, stopping occasionally and having the guards throw open one of the twenty-six cell doors so he could see inside. He could have slipped the small shutter back that covered the barred window set into each door but that would have been too quiet. He wanted them to think he was picking someone at random.

  “No, not that one,” he shouted in English, slamming a door shut. The tension and fear could be felt as he worked his way down the cell block. When Mokhtari tired of the game, he pointed to a cell. The guards threw the cell door back. The four men in the cell were sitting at attention on the edge of their bunks, as Mokhtari dictated they must be during the day. The two men on the top bunks were lucky because they did not have to keep their bare feet on the cold cement floor. To be caught talking to each other or not sitting at attention was worth a stay in the Box or a beating.

  “Him.” Mokhtari pointed at Master Sergeant John Nesbit. The guards wrenched him to his feet. One hit him in the stomach. Then they dragged him out of the cell and down the stairs to the basement.

  The men appointed as lookouts were already on the floor of their cells, peering through the gaps under their doors, monitoring the movement of the guards. Feet were off the floor and blankets un-folded as the men sought warmth. A warning tap by a lookout would send the entire floor back into position as Mokhtari’s regu-lations dictated. It was a carefully rehearsed routine and most of the men could fold a blanket quicker than a guard could unlock a door.

  By the time Mokhtari had Nesbit in the basement a message was on its way to Leason’s cell. “What the hell…” Leason mumbled to himself as the tap code came through. His cellmate, Doc Landis, was still locked up in the administration building in the cell next to Mary Hauser. The reports reaching the colonel indicated the doc was okay but that Hauser had been raped.

  Nesbit was a command post controller and an expert on communications equipment, codes and procedures. Mokhtari would either break the sergeant and make him talk or kill him. Leason considered if there would be a vital compromise of U.S. security if Nesbit told what he knew. “Vital, but not fatal,” he decided. He wanted to keep Nesbit alive, but he needed a way to pass that message to the sergeant. He tapped out a code asking for a volunteer to go into the box. Maybe one volunteer could do it if the guards threw the man into the right box—the one with a water pipe running up the back wall that made for an effective transmission line into the prison.

  Within minutes he had his reply when he heard a voice shouting for the “muthafuckin’ guard.” It was Macon Jefferson, the skinny black kid from Cleveland who had pretzellike qualities and a street-bred contempt
for authority.

  “Jefferson, I’ll make it right when we get out of here,” Leason promised himself.

  The guards quickly threw Jefferson headfirst into the Box. He held his body rigid, making them think it was a tight fit. Finally they got his feet in and slammed the door. His head was resting against the water pipe, and within minutes his two-word message, IN OK, had been relayed to Leason. Jefferson drew his legs up and started to squirm, twisting around. When he had his head against the door he felt for the nail that covered the peephole that had been bored out by previous occupants of the Box. Finally he had the nail out and a view of the basement.

  The guards, he saw, had Nesbit sitting on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, ankles bound together, his hands behind his back. Jefferson could see the legs of a third man—Mokhtari, judging by the highly polished brown boots. For a few moments Jefferson could not tell what the guard at Nesbit’s back was doing. Actually the guard was retying the rope around the sergeant’s wrists. He took another length of rope and looped it around Nesbit’s elbows, then pulled the rope, drawing Nesbit’s elbows together behind his back. When the sergeant screamed the guard pulled the rope again, drawing Nesbit’s elbows closer together. And the sergeant screamed again.

  “You have lied,” Mokharti said. “You were a command post controller at Ras Assanya, not a security policeman.” The guard worked the rope, drawing Nesbit’s elbows still closer. “I guarantee you will tell us what we want but only after you’ve been punished for your lying.” The commandant then left the basement, leaving the guards to their work.

  One guard held Nesbit’s head down while the other cinched the rope up, working it until the elbows were almost touching. Then he tied the rope off, making sure the knot would not slip. The other guard let go of the sergeant’s head and threw a rope over a hook in the ceiling. They tied one end of the rope to Nesbit’s wrists and pulled on the other end, lifting his arms up behind him, his screams ricocheting off the walls, filling the room with his pain. Jefferson saw Nesbit’s shoulders dislocate. When Nesbit’s buttocks were barely touching the floor, they tied the rope to a ring in the wall and walked out, leaving the sergeant sitting on the floor in his agony.

  Jefferson fought to control his urge to beat against the door. In-stead he threw himself against the walls of the box, twisting and turning around. He laid his check against the pipe and tapped out what he had seen, all the while listening to Nesbit, whose sounds had been reduced to a whimper.

  *

  Texas Lake, Nevada

  “I hear you’ve never been on a drop before, Colonel?” Dunkin said, leading Stansell, Locke and Bryant around the C-130s as the Rangers marshaled for the airdrop. “You oughtta’ go along and watch them go out the back. Quite a show. We’ll drop a stick of twenty on each pass—ten out’a each door—then come around and drop the second stick.”

  “You going to come as close as you did last time?” Locke said, thinking about the dummy load Dunkin had almost dropped on the helicopter.

  “Naw, I only do that with canister drops. Never for the real thing.”

  “How’s this drop shaping up?” Stansell asked.

  “No problems. Looks like it’s gonna be a Hollywood jump.” No combat equipment, he meant.

  Stansell scanned the ramp, annoyed he hadn’t noted it sooner…The Rangers were going about the loading routine with measured precision, but he didn’t see a single Ranger waddling around with a rucksack slung in front under his reserve chute, bouncing against his knees as he walked, or a weapons case strapped to his side. “They’re only wearing K-Pots,” he said, referring to the Kevlar helmet the Army used. He looked for the battalion C.O., Lieutenant Colonel Ham Gregory. “We’re not on a picnic here.”

  “Too late to do anything about it now,” Dunkin said, checking his watch. “We crank engines in nine minutes.”

  Stansell headed for the flight deck of Dunkin’s Hercules, his right ear itching for real.

  *

  The Pentagon

  Now it was coming together, Cunningham could feel it. Hoskins, the brigadier general running the OSI, had just left after assuring him that no foreign agents were watching Task Force Alpha at Nellis. Mado had taken Stansell’s operations plan and added to it, working in an AWACS for command and control, and had a bureaucratic polish on it, thereby providing Stansell with what he needed to create an alternate for Delta Force. Cunningham had told Mado to give the ops plan a name—OPORD WARLORD—Operation Order WARLORD. Let everyone think we’re playing some goddamn shogunate epic out at Red Flag, Cunningham thought. It all added to Stansell’s cover as a Red Flag warlord.

  The intercom buzzed and Cunningham’s secretary told him that Colonel Ben Yuriden, the Israeli air attaché, had arrived. Cunningham had first met Yuriden when the Israelis were getting their F-16s. Even then the general could sense the commitment in the man, and Yuriden had proved it in the raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad in June of 1981, as well as in the air battles over the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon in ’82 where the Israeli Air Force had downed over thirty MiGs, without a single loss. Cunningham made a mental promise to ask someday if there was any truth to the rumor that after the F-16 raid on the PLOs’ headquarters in Tunisia, the PLO had directly threatened Yuriden’s family. According to the legend that surrounded Yuriden, his reply had been to fly a lone F-16 against the group that had issued the threat and put a single bomb in the backyard of the PLO commander—when no one was home. The PLO got the message about Israeli intelligence, bombing accuracy—and Ben Yuriden.

  “Ben, thanks for coming.” Cunningham stuck his hand out, welcoming the middle-aged man that entered his office. Average looking in the extreme, only his intense brown eyes marked him.

  “General, why do I think you’re calling in…what do your people say?…a marker?” Yuriden had a knack for cutting to the quick.

  So did Cunningham. “I need a favor—a very unofficial one. It’s something I’ll probably never be able to repay.” The colonel said nothing, gave no indication. Cunningham thought, I’d hate to play poker with you. “One of my officers is loose in Iran and I need to get a message to him. Can your people do that for me?” Cunningham calculated that WARLORD’S best chance for success hinged on having trucks or buses in position to move the POWs to the airfield. Task Force Alpha could do everything else, even fly in their own transportation, but vehicles in place were their best option. The CIA had told him they wouldn’t do it, so maybe Bill Carroll could, providing he could contact him.

  “Captain William Carroll,” Yuriden said. “He’s not in Iran right now but, I hear, with the Kurds in Iraq—Jalali tribe. Yes, we can do that. Perhaps we can do something else to help?”

  Cunningham kept a straight face. An opportunity he hadn’t counted on had just presented itself…The Israelis had the best secret intelligence service in the Middle East, and he had just been offered their help. He knew that making an unauthorized contact with the Mossad could stir up a hornet’s nest, but he’d take the chance. “I need about ten trucks or buses—”

  “At Kermanshah.”

  Cunningham’s mouth almost dropped open. Although he trusted Yuriden, he did not want to tell him why he wanted the vehicles. Did Yuriden understand all that? The position he was in? Were the Israelis onto Task Force Alpha?

  “No doubt for Delta Force,” Yuriden added, also with a straight face. It was a game of poker between two allies who liked and trusted each other, but neither could ever turn over all his cards.

  Cunningham said nothing, relieved that Task Force Alpha was still apparently secure, even from Yuriden.

  Smart for a goy, Yuriden thought, understanding the delicate position Cunningham was in. “Why don’t you have Carroll work with the Kurds to get the vehicles you need? There are many Kurds around Kermanshah. They only need some money.”

  “Then you’ll play postman for me and deliver a message to Carroll?”

  Yuriden nodded, calculating how Israel could use the rescue op
eration to its advantage and weaken its Arab enemies.

  After the colonel had left, Cunningham asked for OPORD WARLORD to be brought in from the safe. He thumbed through the plan, mentally checking off what had been accomplished so far. He briefly wondered if he was making a mistake by not telling Mado what he was setting up. No, he decided, better Mado think Alpha was still a cover operation. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his rotund stomach, thinking about his next move. His eyes snapped open when Stevens knocked at the door, waiting to be acknowledged before entering.

  “Dick,” Cunningham said, “tell General Leachmeyer that I’ll be glad to send him some AC-130 gunships to support Delta—if he wants them. And send one out to Nellis for WARLORD. Also have Operations coordinate with the Turks and move up our annual air defense exercise with them two weeks, and use AWACs and EC-130s this time.” The “exercise” would be a good cover for the rescue activity…Am I getting too involved with nuts and bolts again? he wondered briefly. Trying to do too much myself on this one? I’ve got a bagful of two- and three-star generals…

  Stevens turned to leave. He had not taken a single note. Sundown Cunningham didn’t favor note-takers, just doers.

  Chapter 16: D Minus 19

  Nellis AFB, Nevada

  Red Flag’s building was deserted except for Dewa’s back office in the Intelligence section. The sergeant responsible for locking up had checked the building and asked Stansell if he would be sure the front door was secure when he left. Stansell watched the sergeant disappear out the door, anxious to get to the NCO Club for a Friday night.

  The colonel kept working on the sketch he was making of the prison at Kermanshah. By recapturing it on paper he committed every detail to memory. When he had finished he compared his sketch with polaroid pictures Pullman had taken of the mock-up in Tikaboo Valley that was nearing completion.