Air Battle Force

by Dale Brown

  Zarazi and Turabi formulated a plan. They loaded two ZSU-23/2 [twenty-three millimeter] antiaircraft guns onto the backs of flatbed trucks, covered them with tarps braced with lumber, then covered the tarps with sand and dirt. From the air they looked—the two men hoped—like big piles of dirt or garbage. They drove them along with a couple of pickup trucks full of soldiers westbound down the Kizyl-arvat–Kerki highway on the south side of the Amu Darya River.

  It wasn’t long before a lone Mi-8 helicopter of the Turkmenistan army intercepted them, about seven kilometers east of Kerki. At first the helicopter stayed two kilometers away, scanning the convoy visually; Zarazi could see a door gunner with a 12.3-millimeter machine gun, but no rockets or other heavy attack weapons. Zarazi’s men carried rifles, but no other weapons were visible. Still cautious, the Mi-8 touched down a bit less than four kilometers away and dropped off about a dozen infantrymen up ahead, apparently to set up a roadblock. After a few more passes, the helicopter started to move in for a closer look, the port-side-door gunner at the ready.

  Zarazi could tell when they were in range, because the Turkmen door gunner cocked his own weapon and steadied up on the lead truck. “Now!” Zarazi shouted. “Attack!”

  A rope connected to a pickup truck trailing behind each flatbed truck pulled the tarps off, immediately revealing the antiaircraft guns. Before the helicopter pilot could react, they opened fire. Both ZSUs jammed after just a few seconds, but firing at a rate of one hundred rounds a second per barrel, it was enough. The helicopter’s engine section exploded, and it nosed over and dove straight into the desert. The crew and ten infantrymen died in the explosion and fire that followed seconds later.

  Half the Turkmen soldiers on the roadblock up ahead, mostly the conscripts and officers, ran when they saw the smoke and fire rising from the desert at the crash site; the rest, mostly the young professional soldiers, stayed to fight. Zarazi parked his armored personnel carrier about a kilometer down the highway from the roadblock, stood on top of the vehicle so they could see him and also see that he wasn’t afraid of snipers, and spoke into the APC’s loudspeaker: “This is General Wakil Mohammad Zarazi, servant of God and commander of the eastern division of the soldiers of Hezbollah. I am addressing the brave soldiers of the Islamic Republic of Turkmenistan who did as you were ordered to do—stay at your posts and defend your homeland like soldiers and like men. The others of you who turned and ran away are cowardly dogs, and you deserve to die like dogs.

  “To those of you who stayed, I tell you this: If you are true believers, if you want to serve God and protect your homes and your families above all else, I will not harm you. You have proven your valor and courage today. I give you a choice: You may withdraw now and return to your unit, and you can suffer whatever fate your cowardly superiors offer you. You may stay and fight and be destroyed. Or you may stay, swear allegiance to me and to Hezbollah, and join my army. You will be made welcome and allowed to fight the oppressors and cowards who dared to call you subordinates.

  “My mission is simple: to serve God by carving a home for his dedicated soldiers out of the desert where we may train and prepare for jihad. The Crusaders, the unbelievers, the infidels, and the traitors destroyed our previous camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But God has ordered me to take my army and build for him a new mosque and a new training center, and this is what I will do.

  “Many of you are worried about your families. I say this unto you: If you join me, I will protect your families from retribution. And if I cannot save them, I will avenge them. If the cowards touch the families of a true servant of God, the families of the righteous shall be taken into heaven, and the cowards shall be cast into the fire. I promise this will be so, as God is my witness. So choose. I will give you five minutes, and then I will remove your roadblock. May Allah protect you.”

  Turabi smiled at him when he sat back down in the cockpit. “You’re getting good at that praise-God stuff, Wakil—”

  “Shut up, Colonel,” Zarazi snapped. “Do not disgrace yourself by mocking God.”

  Turabi wiped the smile off his face fast. He had noticed the change in his friend over the past several days. Zarazi truly believed that God had saved him from death, and he believed he’d been called upon to build this army and fight this war. He was turning into a zealot—and zealots, Turabi knew well, made fearsome leaders and sometimes powerful fighters, but rarely did they make good soldiers.

  Whatever Zarazi really believed, his speech had worked. All but two men who stayed behind at the roadblock surrendered and swore loyalty to Hezbollah. The last two refused to join Zarazi and were shot on the spot. “Damn it, Wakil,” Turabi said after Zarazi had executed both men. “You said you would let them go if they surrendered. Those new recruits just saw you break your word.”

  “I said if they withdrew, they could live,” Zarazi said. “Those two were not true believers.”

  “They surrendered. You took their weapons. They were kneeling in front of you. They didn’t want to join you, and they didn’t want to fight. All they wanted was to live.”

  “Colonel, what they wanted was to prove to their superiors that they weren’t cowards by not running, but they didn’t fight because they were afraid to die,” Zarazi said angrily. “What do such men believe in? Are they soldiers or are they mice?”

  “Wakil—” But Turabi stopped short when he saw that warning glare. “I mean, General . . . all I’m asking is this: Do you want to lead these men by fear or by the goals of your mission and your leadership skills?”

  “I don’t care if they love me or hate me, Colonel,” Zarazi responded. “If they follow me, I will lead them into battle. If they oppose me, they will die. It’s as simple as that.”

  “That’s fine for those of us who are members of your tribe, General,” Turabi said. “You are our leader by birth and by proclamation of the elders, and that has been good enough for our people for a thousand years. But now you have recruits to your cause, men who are professional soldiers, many now from other countries. They expect certain things from their leaders, things like trust, strength, courage—”

  “I have all those things.”

  “You don’t show trust or leadership when you execute someone who surrenders to you, no matter what the reason,” Turabi said. “Hold them as prisoners, release them, ransom them, try to convert them—but don’t kill an unarmed man.”

  “Colonel, that’s enough,” Zarazi said. “I am leader because God wills it. There is nothing more to be said. We will return to the regiment and plan our attack against Kerki. We strike tonight.”

  Turabi could do nothing else but comply. Arguing wasn’t doing any good.

  Whatever Zarazi’s style, Jalaluddin Turabi couldn’t argue with his effectiveness. It was easy to blame the lax border security on Turkmenistan’s eastern frontier, or the element of surprise, or Zarazi’s sheer audacity, for his initial successes, but the siege of Kerki was different. The base there had plenty of time to prepare; they had already lost a helicopter and its crew to enemy action. They must have believed that the loss of the helicopter was either an accident or a fluke, because the base at Kerki was completely unprepared for an attack.

  Zarazi sent out probes to the air base as soon as it was dark; they returned three hours later. “The Turkmen are obviously preparing for an offensive,” the squad leader reported. “There are at least eight Mi-8 troop transport helicopters on the aircraft parking ramp, clearly being prepared for a mission. They have extra fuel tanks and target-marking rocket pods loaded.”

  “That’s at least one hundred and ninety-two infantrymen, General,” Turabi said. He cautiously chose to address Zarazi by his purloined rank whenever anyone else was around—and most times when they were alone, too. “About half the size of our own force.”

  “And these are not border guards or light infantry scouts—they are regular infantry, sir,” the squad leader went on. “We saw heliborne fast-patrol vehicles, heavy machine guns, mortars—they are coming
in force and getting ready for a major engagement.”

  “When do you think they’ll launch?”

  “Possibly dawn or shortly thereafter,” the squad leader said. “Weather report talks of a small storm, possibly a sandstorm, tomorrow morning.”

  “What about other aircraft?”

  “We could not get near the other helicopters,” the squad leader went on. “But they are there, inside hangars and well guarded: four Mi-24 attack helicopters. We saw antitank missiles, bombs, machine guns—they are being very heavily armed.”

  The Mi-24 was the old Soviet Union’s deadliest attack helicopter: fast, heavily armored, and extremely accurate. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Mi-24s were called krazhas—“undertakers”—by the Pashtuns, because they could both kill you and then create a hole big enough to bury you in. “If they launch those choppers, General,” Turabi said seriously, “we’re dead. It’s simple as that.”

  The men looked at Zarazi with genuine fear in their eyes. Eastern Turkmenistan was flat and wide open—they had no chance against an Mi-24 attack helicopter out in the open. They had survived attacks in the past because, if they could escape into mountainous terrain where the chopper couldn’t chase them, the Mi-24 had to either land and dismount its infantry or go home. Out here, marching on Kerki, it would be suicide. Their twenty-three-millimeter antiaircraft weapons were no match for the Mi-24’s longer-range missiles, rockets, and equally powerful machine guns.

  “It appears we have only one option left to us—surrender,” Zarazi said. Turabi looked at him in horror, but then he could see that his old friend’s mind was racing ahead with a plan. “Colonel, disperse your men and unload the trucks. We have business to attend to in Kerki. But first there is something you need to do for me. . . .”

  BATTLE MOUNTAIN AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

  Later that morning

  Daren Mace was up at dawn and on his way back to the base from the little motel room he’d found near the truck stop. It was still early, but Daren decided to find the squadron building. He opened the little plastic case and found a device that rested behind an ear—a tiny wireless, hands-free earpiece. There were no instructions on how to use it. He wasn’t sure if it was working, so he said experimentally, “Duty Officer?”

  “This is the duty officer, Colonel Mace,” a woman’s voice responded immediately. “Welcome to Battle Mountain Air Force Base.”

  “Thank you,” he said. This entire reservation, Mace decided, must be buzzing with data flowing wirelessly in all directions—he’d never heard of a base so connected before. “How do I get to the Fifty-first Squadron building?”

  “Proceed straight ahead, turn right at Powell Street, left on Ormack Street, and right again on Seaver Circle,” the voice, pleasant if somewhat toneless, responded. “You will find your designated parking spot.”

  “Thank you. I’ll be there shortly.”

  Seaver Circle was the main road that paralleled the aircraft-parking ramp. What he’d thought from a distance along the road were aircraft hangars were actually aircraft alert shelters—huge structures big enough for a large aircraft to taxi through, open at both ends. There were eight KC-135R Stratotanker aerial-refueling tankers lined up inside their shelters. He was a little disappointed—the Fifty-first was apparently an air-refueling squadron. Although Daren had worked on several aircraft in his career, he mostly loved the strike aircraft, especially the fast-movers. Tankers were great and a vital part of the Air Force, but it would definitely be a change of pace for him. So where were the B-1 bombers McLanahan was working on?

  The only sign of life he saw was a sweeping crew, using a large truck-mounted vacuum to suck up debris—called FOD, or foreign object damage, in the military—from the taxiways and runways. FOD caused more damage to military aircraft than enemy action did, he knew, so it was important they keep up with the FOD patrols, but that was the only activity he could see anywhere. Where in hell were the maintenance crews?

  Outside the tall fence surrounding the flight line was a small building, and it was there that he found his parking spot. The door to the squat brick and concrete-block building was unguarded, but the door was securely locked. Mace found a metal box and opened it, expecting a telephone, but instead he found only what appeared to be a camera lens and a small glass panel roughly two inches square. He was about to close the door to the box and try another door—or call for the duty officer again—but then he remembered the device the Security Forces sergeant used and decided to touch the glass square with his thumb. Sure enough, as soon as he touched it, he heard the lock release, and he pulled the door open. He was inside a small room, an entrapment area, big enough for only one person and some gear. As soon as the outer door closed and locked behind him, he heard a faint humming sound that reminded him of an X-ray machine, which it probably was. When the humming stopped, the inner door opened.

  The place looked like any other welcome area of a squadron headquarters building, neat and orderly, except this was even more so. In fact, it looked as if it had hardly been used. There were two trophy cases on either side of the welcome area, both empty. It had the new-paint and new-carpet smell of an office freshly finished or remodeled.

  As he stepped inside, the same woman’s voice said in his earpiece, “Welcome, Colonel Mace. Please meet your party in your office. I will notify them that you have arrived.”

  Mace looked around. There was no one but himself in the lobby. “Where are you?” Mace asked aloud. “Duty Officer, what’s your name? Why aren’t you out here?”

  “I am an electronic duty officer, sir,” the voice replied. “If you need assistance at any time, please just make your request on your commlink prefaced with my name: Duty Officer.”

  It was a damned machine? he asked himself incredulously. He was being polite to a machine? “There’s no one on duty here?” There was no response, so he rephrased his question: “Duty Officer, there’s no one on duty here?”

  “I am on duty at all times, Colonel Mace. You may reach me anytime, anywhere, by commlink, by using the base tactical VHF or UHF frequencies or by telephoning the squadron number.”

  He cruised the hallways of the squadron building, finding little. There were a few administrative offices, all locked; a briefing room that also looked unused; a TV lounge—the first room in this place, he observed, that had windows. The large plasma HDTV was tuned to an all-news channel. There were cafeteria-style tables and chairs, some sofas along the wall.

  Mace felt ridiculous talking to no one but addressing it as “Duty Officer.” “Where’s my office?” he asked impatiently. When the system didn’t respond, he shouted, “Duty Officer, where’s my fucking office?”

  “To the right, down the hallway, fourth door on the right, Colonel Mace,” the voice replied.

  “Bite me,” he said. As he approached the door, he heard it unlock. There was an outer office, which had a desk, a computer, and shelves but appeared unoccupied, and then the door to his office; it, too, unlocked as he approached it. Pretty amazing, he thought. It appeared as if he was being continuously tracked and monitored. The computerized duty officer knew where he was, anticipated his needs, like unlocking his doors, and did it for him. He couldn’t wait to try it elsewhere and see.

  And then he saw that his office was not empty. Inside, sitting at his desk, was Rebecca Furness.

  He watched her rise to her feet, her lips parting as if she were going to say something, but then she decided against it, so he took that moment to let his eyes roam.

  She was older, of course—so was he. She was tall and still athletic-looking, with plenty of curves that no baggy flight suit—rumpled and well worn, like McLanahan’s—could hide. She was cutting her brown hair shorter now—she’d always kept it long, below-shoulder length, when he knew her before—and it was darker than he remembered, with wisps of gray visible, but her almond-shaped eyes still had that sparkle, that energy.

  “Hello, Colonel,” she said simply. Even with such
a brief sentence, her voice was still clipped, impersonal. Rebecca Furness had always been, and probably would always be, all business. “I hope you don’t mind my using your office. We’re not exactly set up around here.”

  “Hello, Rebecca. What a surprise.” He held out his hand to greet her. She took his hand and shook it firmly. Yep, all business, as usual. She’d once been nicknamed “the Iron Maiden”—maybe she still was; he didn’t know—because of her no-nonsense, businesslike attitude toward most everybody and everything. Still, they did know each other, and, yes, they had a history. But he remembered only one or two tender moments in the short time they’d had together.

  He surprised himself by pulling her carefully toward him and turning the handshake into a friendly hug. There was a helmet bag or something on the floor between them—he had to reach out awkwardly to her. He thought it was only going to be a casual hug, one that old buddies might give to one another, so it didn’t matter that they couldn’t get close . . .

  . . . but that thought faded fast when, before he knew it, the hug turned into an embrace, and the embrace morphed into a full-scale liplock of the kind that Daren hadn’t had much of an opportunity to do in a long time.

  But just as quickly as it began, it ended. Daren felt her body and her lips tense, and he knew their personal little reunion was over. He backed away and searched her face. It was back to her businesslike facade, but he looked carefully and didn’t see any hint of anger—there was a little confusion, certainly no joy, but no rejection either. She seemed to accept the pure spontaneity of the act, allowed herself to enjoy it just for a moment, then pushed it out of her consciousness.