by Dale Brown
The boom operator handed the general a headset and motioned to the flight instructor’s seat between the two pilots. “I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, General,” the pilot said over the intercom, “but the seat was open and I thought you’d enjoy the view.”
“Of course,” Ozek responded simply, making a note to himself to have the pilot removed from the service when he got back to headquarters; there were plenty of men and women who knew how to follow orders waiting to fly tankers in the Turkish air force. “What is the security status at the airport?”
“Green, sir,” the pilot reported. “Unchanged for more than a month.”
“The last PKK activity in the area was only twenty-four days ago, Captain,” Ozek said irritably. The PKK, or Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, was an outlawed Marxist military organization that sought the formation of a separate state of Kurdistan, formed from parts of southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, northeast Syria, and northwest Iran, all of which had Kurdish ethnic majorities. The PKK used terrorism and violence, even against large military bases and well-defended places such as civilian airports, to try to keep itself in the public eye and pressure the individual states to work out a solution. “We must remain vigilant at all times.”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot acknowledged in a hushed voice.
“You are not performing a maximum-performance approach, Captain?”
“Uh…no, sir,” the pilot responded. “The security condition is green, the ceiling and visibility are low, and the tower advised that we are cleared for a normal-category approach.” He swallowed, then added, “And I did not want to upset you or the other passengers with a max-performance descent.”
Ozek would have berated this young idiot pilot, but they had already commenced the instrument approach, and things would get very busy here shortly. Maximum-performance takeoffs and approaches were designed to minimize time in the lethal envelope of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons. The PKK used Russian-made SA-7 and SA-14 missiles against Turkish government aircraft on occasion.
However, the probability of such an attack today was small. The ceiling and visibility were fairly low, which restricted the time available for a gunner to attack. Also, most attacks occurred against large helicopters or larger fixed-wing aircraft during takeoff phase of flight because the heat signature that the missiles locked onto was much brighter—during approach, the engines were running at lower power settings and were relatively cooler, which meant the missiles had a harder time locking on and could be jammed or decoyed easier.
The pilot was playing the odds, which Ozek disliked—especially because he was doing so just to try to impress a senior officer—but they were in the soup now, and breaking the approach off at such a moment, close to mountains in bad weather, was not an ideal choice. Ozek sat back and crossed his arms on his chest, making his anger apparent. “Continue, Captain,” he said simply.
“Yes, sir,” the pilot responded, relieved. “Copilot, before glideslope intercept checklist, please.” To the pilot’s credit, Ozek thought, he was a good aircraft commander; he would be a good addition to some airline’s crew complement, because he wasn’t going to be in the Turkish Air Force for very long.
This lackadaisical attitude was unfortunately more and more prevalent in the military these days as the conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurds continued to morph. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, had changed its name to PAG, or the Congress for Freedom and Democracy, and avoided using the term Kurdistan in its literature and speeches in an effort to appeal to a wider audience. These days, they held rallies and published papers advocating more human rights laws to ease the suffering of all oppressed persons in the world rather than advocating armed struggle solely for a separate Kurdish state.
But that was a ruse. The PKK was stronger, wealthier, and more aggressive than ever. Because of the U.S. invasion and destruction of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq, as well as the civil war in Iran, the Kurdish insurgents were fearlessly staging cross-border raids into Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria from numerous safe camps, hoping to capitalize on the chaos and confusion and establish a strong base in each nation. Every time Turkish forces responded, they would be accused of genocide, and the politicians in Ankara would order the military to stop pursuit.
This only emboldened the PKK. The latest travesty: the emergence of a female terrorist leader. No one knew her real name; she was known as Baz, or “The Hawk” in Arabic, because of her ability to strike quickly and unexpectedly but seemingly fly away and escape her pursuers so easily. Her emergence as a major rallying force for Kurdish independence, and the Turkish and Iraqi governments’ lackadaisical response to her call for bloody war, was disturbing to the Jandarma general.
“Coming up on glideslope intercept,” the copilot said.
“Gear down,” the pilot said.
“Here it comes,” the copilot responded, and he reached over to just above the pilot’s right knee and moved the round landing gear actuator switch to the “down” position. “Gear in transit…three green, no yellow, press-to-test pump light checks, gear is down and locked.”
The pilot took his eyes off the horizontal situation indicator just long enough to check the gear lights and push to press-to-test “gear hyd” light. “Checks, gear is down and locked.”
“On course, on glideslope,” the copilot said. “Two thousand feet to decision height.” The copilot reached across and discreetly tapped his airspeed indicator, a silent warning for the pilot that his airspeed had dropped a bit—with a general in the cockpit, he didn’t want to highlight even the tiniest mistake. Their speed had dropped only five knots, but tiny errors seemed to snowball on an instrument approach, and it was better to catch and correct them right away than let them create bigger problems later.
“Tesekkur ederim,” the pilot responded, acknowledging the catch. A simple “roger” meant the pilot had found his own mistake, but a thank-you meant the copilot had made a good call. “One thousand to go.”
Filtered sunlight began to stream into the cockpit windows, followed moments later by sunlight filtered through widely scattered clouds. Ozek looked out and saw they were dead centered on the runway, and the visual approach lights indicated they were on glideslope. “Runway in sight,” the copilot announced. The ILS needles began to dance a bit, which meant the pilot was peeking out the window at the runway instead of watching his horizontal situation indicator. “Continue the approach.”
“Thank you.” Another good catch. “Five hundred to decision height. Stand by on the ‘before landing’ checklist and…”
Ozek, focusing out the window and not on the gauges, saw it first: a white curling line of smoke coming from a street intersection ahead and off to the left, inside the airport perimeter fence, heading straight for them! “Strela!” Ozek shouted, using the Russian nickname, “Star,” for the SA-7 shoulder-fired missile. “Break right, now!”
To his credit, the pilot did exactly as Ozek ordered: he immediately jammed the control wheel hard right and shoved all four throttles up to full military power. But he was far, far too late. Ozek knew they had just one chance now: that it was indeed an SA-7 missile and not the newer SA-14, because the older missile needed a bright hot “dot” to home in on, while the SA-14 could track any source of heat, even sunlight reflecting off a canopy.
In the blink of an eye, the missile was gone—it had missed the left wing by scant meters. But there was something else wrong. A horn blared in the cockpit; the pilot was trying desperately to turn the KC-135 to the left to straighten it out and perhaps even line up on the runway again, but the plane was not responding—the left wing was still high in the sky and there was not enough aileron authority to lower it. Even with the engines at full throttle, they were in a full stall, threatening to turn into a spin at any moment.
“What are you doing, Captain?” Ozek shouted. “Get the nose down and level the wings!”
“I can’t get turned around!” th
e pilot cried.
“We can’t make the runway—level the wings and find a place to crash-land!” Ozek said. He looked out the copilot’s window and saw the soccer field. “There! The football field! That’s your landing spot!”
“I can fly it out! I can do it…!”
“No you can’t—it’s too late!” Ozek shouted. “Get the nose down and make for the football field or we’re all going to die!”
The rest happened in less than five seconds, but Ozek watched it as if in slow motion. Instead of trying to wrestle the stalled tanker back up into the sky, the pilot released back pressure on the controls. As soon as he did, and with the engines at full military power, the ailerons immediately responded, and the pilot was able to bring the plane wings-level. With the nose low, airspeed built up rapidly, and the pilot had enough smash to raise the nose almost into a landing attitude. He pulled the throttles to idle, then to “cutoff,” moments before the big tanker hit the ground.
Ozek was thrown forward almost into the center console, but his shoulder and lap belts held, and he ruefully thought that he had felt harder landings before…and then the nose gear slammed down, and the Turkish general felt as if he had been snapped completely in half. The nose gear collapsed, and mud and turf smashed through the windscreen like a tidal wave. They plowed through a soccer goalpost, then crashed through a fence and a few garages and storage buildings before coming to a stop against the base gymnasium.
CHAPTER ONE
WHITE SANDS MISSILE TEST RANGE, NEW MEXICO
THE NEXT MORNING
“Masters Two-Two, this is White Sands.” The portable radio squawked to life, splitting the still, early-morning air. “You are cleared for takeoff, runway one-zero, winds calm, altimeter two-niner-niner-seven. Threat condition red, repeat, red, read back.”
“Roger, Masters Two-Two copies, cleared for takeoff, runway one-zero, threat condition red.”
A large, rather strange-looking aircraft spooled up its engines and prepared to take the active runway. It somewhat resembled a B-2 Spirit “flying-wing” stealth bomber, but it was vastly more bulbous than the intercontinental bomber, suggesting a far larger payload capacity. Instead of the engines embedded inside the fuselage, the aircraft had three engines mounted atop the rear of the fuselage on short pylons.
As the weird “winged guppy” aircraft taxied across the hold line onto the active runway, about a mile to the west a man wearing a cloth cap, balaclava, a thick protective green jacket, and heavy gloves lifted a MANPADS, or Man-Portable Air Defense System, launcher onto his right shoulder. He first inserted a vegetable-can-size device into the bottom of the launcher, which provided argon gas coolant for the infrared seeker and battery power for the device.
“Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar,” the man intoned in a quiet voice. He then got to his feet and aimed the weapon east toward the gradually increasing sound of the aircraft’s engines spooling up for takeoff. It was not yet light enough to see the plane from that distance, so the missileer lowered a pair of night-vision goggles over his eyes, carefully adjusting his head position so he could still aim the MANPADS through its mechanical sights. He activated the weapon by pressing and releasing the integrated safety and actuator lever. He could hear the gyros spinning up in the missile’s guidance section even over the noise of the airliner rumbling across the desert.
As soon as he centered the sights on the green-and-white image of the retreating jetliner, he heard a low growling sound in his headphones, indicating that the MANPADS’ infrared sensor had just locked onto the jetliner’s engine exhausts. He then pressed and held the “uncage” lever, and the acquisition tone got louder, telling him that the missile was tracking a good target.
He waited until the aircraft was airborne, since if he hit it while it was still on the ground, the crew could probably stop the plane safely on the runway and put the fire out quickly, minimizing loss. The most vulnerable time was five seconds after liftoff, because the plane was accelerating slowly and its landing gear were in transit; if it lost an engine, the crew would have to react swiftly and precisely to avoid a catastrophe.
Now it was time. He whispered another Allah Akbar, super-elevated the launcher so that the target was on the lower left corner of the mechanical sights, held his breath to avoid inhaling any missile exhaust, then squeezed the trigger.
The small ejection motor fired the missile out of the barrel about thirty feet into the air. Just as the missile began to fall, its first-stage solid rocket motor fired, and the missile headed for its target, with the sensor solidly locked on. Then the missileer lowered the MAN-PADS and watched the engagement with glee through his night-vision goggles as an instant later he saw the missile explode in a cloud of fire. “Allah friggin’ Akbar,” he muttered. “That was cool.”
But the counterattack wasn’t over yet. As soon as the sound of the explosion reached him a second later, the missileer suddenly felt an intense burning sensation all throughout his body. He threw the spent launcher onto the ground, confused and disoriented. It felt as if his entire body had suddenly burst into flames. He dropped to the ground, hoping to extinguish the flames by rolling around, but the heat got more intense by the second. He could do nothing but curl into a protective ball and cover his eyes, hoping to avoid being blinded or burned alive. He screamed as the flames spread, engulfing him…
“Whoa, boss, what happened?” he heard a voice say in his headphones. “Are you okay? We’re on the way. Hold on!”
The man found his chest heaving and his heart pounding with the sudden surge of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream, and he found it hard to speak for several moments…but the severe burning sensation had suddenly stopped. Finally, he got up and dusted himself off. There was no evidence whatsoever that anything had happened to him except for the awful memory of that intense pain. “No…well, maybe…well, yes,” the missileer, Dr. Jonathan Colin Masters, replied shakily. “Maybe a little.”
Jon Masters had just turned fifty years of age, but he still looked and probably would forever look like a teenager with his thin features, big ears, gangly body movements, crooked grin, and naturally tousled brown hair under his headset. He was the chief operations officer of Sky Masters Inc., a small defense research and development company he’d founded that for the past twenty years had been developing absolute cutting-edge aviation, satellite, weapons, sensors, and advanced materials technology for the United States.
Although he no longer owned the company that still bore his name—a board of directors, led by his ex-wife and business partner Helen Kaddiri, and the company’s young president, Dr. Kelsey Duffield, ran company affairs now—and was rich enough to travel the world for the rest of his life if he chose, Jon enjoyed spending time either in the lab designing new gadgets or out in the field testing them. No one really knew if the board of directors allowed him to do things like fire live MANPADS missiles or stay out on the missile range during a test just to humor him…or because they were hoping he’d get dusted by his own inventions, something that had nearly happened many times over the years.
Several Humvees and support vehicles—including an ambulance, just in case—rolled up, illuminating Jon with headlights and spotlights. A man jumped out of the first Humvee on the scene and ran over to him. “You okay, Jon?” asked Hunter “Boomer” Noble. Boomer was the twenty-five year-old vice president in charge of air weapon development for Sky Masters Inc. Formerly a U.S. Air Force test pilot, engineer, and astronaut, Boomer once had the enviable job of designing exotic aircraft spacecraft systems and then being able to fly the finished product himself. Flying the revolutionary XR-A9 Black Stallion single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane, Boomer had been in orbit more times in the past two years than the rest of the American astronaut corps combined had been in the past ten years. “Jeez, you gave us a scare back there!”
“I told you, I’m fine,” Jon said, grateful that his voice didn’t sound as shaky as it had a few minutes earlier. “I guess we dialed the emitter power up a
little too high, eh, Boomer?”
“I set it to the lowest power setting, boss, and I checked and double-checked it,” Boomer said. “You were probably too close. The laser has a fifty-mile range—you were less than two when you got hit. Probably not a good idea to star in your own tests, boss.”
“Thanks for the advice, Boomer,” Jon replied weakly, hoping no one would notice his shaking hands. “Great going, Boomer. I’d say the Slingshot automatic countermissile weapon test was a complete success.”
“So would I, Boomer,” another voice behind him said. Two men approached from another Humvee, wearing business suits, long dark coats, and gloves to ward off the early-morning chill. They were followed by two more men, similarly dressed, but their coats were open…which made it easier for them to get at the automatic weapons slung on harnesses underneath. The man with the longish salt-and-pepper hair and goatee shook his finger at Jon and continued: “You almost succeeded in killing yourself, Jon…again.”
“Nah…it went exactly as planned, Mr. President,” Jon responded.
The man, former president of the United States Kevin Martindale, rolled his eyes in disbelief. A Washington establishment figure for decades, Martindale served six terms in Congress, two terms as vice president, and one term as president before being voted out of office; he then became only the second man in the history of the United States to be voted back in again.
He also had the distinction of being the first vice president ever to be divorced while in office, and he was still a confirmed bachelor who was often seen in the company of young female actors and athletes. Although over sixty years old, Martindale was still ruggedly handsome, self-confident, and almost devilish with his goatee and long, wavy hair, featuring the famous “photographer’s dream” twin curling silvery locks that automatically appeared across his forehead whenever he was angry or emotional.