by Clay Martin
The sleeper was wide awake now, looking at the object he had just ejected from his throat, and glancing furtively to try and figure out its origin. I could feel the tension coming off of Scott and Willie. If they hadn’t been so intent on spotting the enemy no doubt coming to kill us, I’m sure their eyes would’ve been boring holes in me. In for a penny, in for a pound. I tossed a last bullet at the prisoner, hoping when it landed in front of him he would connect the dots with the window. He glanced up as the motion caught his eye, proving himself not to be a paint chip eater. So far, so good. He walked to the spot that allowed him to see up and out the best, and stared into the night.
“Right now, I need you to tell the other monkey’s to act normal. Go back to what they were doing, and ignore us. Or else you are going to get us all killed. Do that. Right fucking now,” I hissed, trying to put some venom in my words. This was not the time for high fives and assurances of mutual adoration. Hopefully that would come later, but no guarantees.
He looked at me dumbfounded for an eternity, and then went to the task. All the other prisoners were on the edge of their seats, or edge of their bars, however that works. He whispered some orders, and everyone started trying entirely too hard to act natural. In between stolen glances toward his window at least. Good enough. Satisfied, he came back to his spot on the floor below me.
“Any of you guys a pilot?” I asked, getting right to the heart of it. He seemed to consider that for a moment.
“Actually, we are a medical unit. We are all technicians or medics, sent here to....”
The rest I tuned out. Fuck. I really needed an airplane driver, badly. This whole shebang depended on it. And I was now going to be saddled with a gaggle of male nurses. We still had to rescue these guys, which was going to cut deeply into our logistics. And they had skills that were worthless in the present situation. The sleeper turned spokesman was continuing his boring assed story when it occurred to me I had heard it before. Literally. Word for word. Back in SERE school, the class on how you might not want to confess to being a barrel chested freedom fighter should you find yourself in enemy hands. This son of a bitch was wasting my time with the recitation of a story designed to not get you immediately shot.
“Hey jackass, I’m not the world’s best Caliphate linguist. This isn’t a set up. I’m an American. And I know the capital of Texas is Houston.” If he hadn’t seen Red Dawn, I might not rescue him anyway.
I saw relief wash over his face. There is a whole manual on authenticating procedures and what not with rescuing forces, but we didn’t have time for a dick dance. Obscure movie trivia usually worked with military dudes, we had all seen the classics a million times in faraway shitholes. It was as safe a bet as asking sailors if they played spades.
“Holy fuck man, you gotta get us out of here.” He said, trying to climb the wall to get closer.
“No shit. But you gotta listen. We don’t have a lot of time....” He interrupted me again, joy getting the better part of sense.
“Are you guys Delta Force or SEAL Team Six?” He wanted to know. Christ on crutches, I didn’t have time for this. Or to explain that things exist besides those two. Movies. This was also the fault of movies.
“Neither. We were contractors, stuck here just like you. But we were Green Berets before that. Now shut the fuck up and listen. Do you have a pilot in your group? Yes or no?”
He was grinning like the cat that ate the canary now. “Captain Nick Fuentes, best pilot in the Air Force. At your service.”
Score! And on the first try. I was definitely buying a lottery ticket when we got home. Alternatively, I guess I could have just waited at the window for five minutes. What is the difference between God and a Fighter Pilot? God doesn’t wish he was a fighter pilot.
“What airframes are you trained on? Can you fly a C-130?” I had no idea how piloting worked. Just so long as he didn’t fly whirly birds, he was still the best option in the house.
My new best mate Nick seemed a little confused by the line of questioning. He must’ve thought we were there to rescue a specific pilot. And obviously didn’t understand why we needed one. “I flew A-10s. Why does that matter?”
“Because we need you to fly us out of here. We are all knuckle draggers, that skill set at present escapes us,” I said back.
He wrinkled his brow. “Don’t you have a bird waiting? What kind of rescue mission is this?”
I was getting impatient, but tried to keep in mind he probably didn’t know what we knew. “An extremely half assed one. Look, the cavalry isn’t coming. Any sound of horses you heard on the horizon was more Indians coming to finish the job. As far as we know, the US presence in Iraq has been wiped out. To the last man. The only chance we have is the ten of us, and you to fly a bird that we are going to steal. So I need to know, Captain Nick, can you fly a fucking C-130. Because a lot is riding on it.”
Things got a little emotional for a minute, Nick looked like what was left of his world was crumbling. I had come off a little harsh, but it was the message not the messenger. As an Airman, his faith in the military was probably the only thing that had kept him going through whatever Hells he had endured since Tallil had fallen. “What do you mean, wiped out? That is impossible.”
I ignored his question for the moment. Something else important had just occurred to me. “How the fuck are you still here anyway? Right before the haboob, there was a mass evacuation called from CENTCOM. They put everything with wings in the air, including the kitchen sink. And aren’t you a little old to be a captain?”
“I was in the hospital with the flu, almost in a coma. The other guys here did tell me later that there was a massive movement of airframes to Qatar, due to the sand storm and some emergency in Africa. When I woke up, it was two jihadis kicking in the door to my room. We got over run as I was coming out of a fever apparently. I’m old because I’m in the National Guard. My real job is at an airline. I had so many flight hours, they gave me an age waiver. I signed up after my kids left home.”
Ouch. He was just unlucky. The other troops here must’ve been deemed non-essential, cannon fodder to cover the last bird out of Saigon. Somebody high up did the math, and decided who had to hold the line. The Air Force was a lot different than the Army. Without a legion of borderline suicidal paratroopers hopped up on mythos and testosterone to lean on, they went with the next best thing. Don’t tell the peasants, and quietly slip out the back. Everybody here except Captain Nick was too low on the totem pole to know the truth, and he picked a bad day to get sick.
I gave him an abbreviated version of what we knew, just to keep the questions from interrupting the rest of our conversation. “So can you fly the plane? If not, we might as well start passing out the cyanide pills.”
He was still a little wobbly with the crash of information I had dropped on him, but he was recovering. “I think so. Hell, if the cargo monkeys can do it, sure. You don’t end up flying plane loads of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong by being top of the class at flight school. I can make it work. I’ve flown 727s for years, we just have to get it going first. “
His confidence was less than inspiring. “So you mean you haven’t done it before? You guys don’t like, learn on them or something?”
“Correct.”
Well, we had that going for us. “Second thing, will a C-130 reach all the way back to the States? We have no idea the status of other bases, and I don’t want to find out when we get stranded in Turkey.”
He thought for a moment, accessing a memory bank he likely rarely used. “It will not. Without inflight refueling, not even close. Have we ruled out inflight refueling?”
“That is the assumption we are going on.” Not what I wanted to hear. The mid-Atlantic and a life raft did beat our current location though. But not by much.
“Then we steal the tanker. They have longer legs.” He said triumphantly. He was thinking now, and the spark of h
ope was lit.
“How much longer? Will it make that distance?”
“Closer, but not quiet. It is about 6000 miles from here to the US mainland, and the KC-130 goes 4500. Unless it can feed off its own payload. Which I’m not sure it can do.”
“It can,” piped up a voice from the next cell over. Eavesdroppers I see. I would give him a written demerit later.
“How do you know that? You a crew member?” I asked the newcomer.
“Ordinance tech. But my roommate in Okinawa was a fueler. He told me they flew all the way from Naples to Okinawa in one go, using the onboard fuel.”
Good enough for me. We would have to figure out exactly how, but it could be done.
Nick started tossing turds in my punchbowl immediately. “As long as it is holding transport fuel. They use a different fuel than fighters, so whatever is on board has to be JP-4.”
“So if it’s not, I also now need to dump 50,000 gallons of fuel out, and fill it with unleaded?” I asked incredulously.
“Actually 60,000. And yes. If you want to get further than the Mediterranean.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Nick finally resorted to using the collective knowledge of the Airmen with him, since they had a lot of the answers. And the resulting conversation made my recce list three times longer than it had been. Even with the brain trust we had on tap, a lot of the solutions were guesses, but at least educated ones. If you count barracks lore and half remembered drunk stories as educated.
We had to dump the fuel away from the KC-130, or the engines might set it aflame. Therefore we had to located enough hose to get it away from the plane. Fuel trucks would be stored behind the hangers, but what they contained would be on manifest inside the cab. As long as we could count on the 19 year old Airman keeping up with his paper work. It was that or a fuel testing kit, and that sounded less than ideal. Did the plane have enough juice to start the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit, kind of a small engine to start the big engines), if not we would need a power truck. How much fuel did we need in the plane? Somebody said it would take off with 60,000 pounds in it. Was it an F or a J model? How many pounds in a gallon. Nick started into some nonsense about the fuel temperature and elevation, and I had to cut him off. Guesstimate. And did the fuel trucks read pounds or gallons? Nobody knew. Fuck it, we would fill it up then. Grunt logic. If fuel runs out the top, it is full. We needed to get every book we could find from inside the aircraft, so Nick could start learning how to run it. I passed in water bottles, and made sure I got all of them back. Be my luck to have an anal retentive jihadi with a counting autism on duty later.
We had already burned a lot of time, so I closed with a promise to be back the next night. We had a mountain of tasks to accomplish, and breaking prisoners out right now just wasn’t in the cards. I felt terrible doing it, but taking them now would put the whole province on high alert. The look Nick gave me as I stepped away from the window was sad enough to make a whipped puppy seem like fat kid loose at the ice cream factory.
Back on the ground, I scooped up the rest of the team and led them towards the line of aircraft on the apron. We eventually figured out how to get inside a C-130, through much trial and error. Every one of us had spent most of our life walking up the ramp or jumping off of it, it never occurred to me how you might open the doors. On our third try, we located a tanker model. Stupid things looked identical on the outside, at least to the untrained eye. Inside, I assumed the plane would absorb quiet talking, so I was finally able to brief the new set of priorities.
With much bumping in the night, we were able to locate several on board manuals and the pre-flight checklists. They might be the latest guidance on sexual harassment policy or the study guide for some Airman’s college class, but we swiped them anyway. Time to find out later. Unable to locate a fuel gauge, and not quite stupid enough to start flipping switches, we finally did decide the internal tanks were full by banging on them. We would have to check the wings later, none of us had a clue how to start. Done with the aircraft, we exited and checked the hangers. No jihadis were using them as a camping spot, so at least we had that going for us. A quick look behind the hangers confirmed that there were several fuel trucks, and the hoses on board could get us far enough away from the tanker to empty it without a massive runway fire. In my professional opinion at least. The amateur in my head disagreed, but I never listen to him. Satisfied with our knowledge gained so far, we moved down the perimeter wall towards the ordinance bunkers.
The gate that had once separated this section from the rest of the base was ripped down, but fortunately not guarded. The IC had probably concluded that F-18 missiles were useless at the moment, and only a crazy person would try and steal from them anyway. I couldn’t agree more. One look at the row of bunkers though, and I knew we didn’t have time to check them all. The clock was ticking, it was time for a desperate gamble. Violating any left-over principles of recce I hadn’t committed sacrilege against, I ordered a split up to cover more ground. Running around alone behind enemy lines is well past the border of stupid, but we were low on options. Off we went, hoping to find a treasure trove of go bang stuff the pirates hadn’t looted yet. The Air Force isn’t known for using mortars, but a pallet load of 81mm HE would make me a very happy boy.
Most every bunker I saw already had the lock broken off. The doors are secured with some heavy duty locking mechanisms, but nothing is brute force proof. Not a bank vault, not a nuclear missile silo. With enough time, even hand tools can eventually defeat anything. It was actually very much in our favor that the IC had already opened the doors for us. Walking through the huge steel barn doors made me feel small, like a Hobbit entering Mordor. The concrete temples built to house airplane armament are big on a scale that defies the grunt brain. It makes sense. They have to be big enough to drive in, it’s not like you can hand load a 2000 pound bomb. But when the biggest gun in your arsenal is a 50 caliber, you tend to forget the size of things that can be dropped from the sky. Taking my first steps into the door past the moon light felt like entering a huge, unnatural cave. I clicked my infrared aiming laser on, without it I would have been unable to see well, even with night vision goggles. The bunkers have no windows, for obvious reasons. The bit of moon light shining in stopped ten feet past the doors, the rest was an inky blackness.
Row after row of huge metal tubes filled the space, set down like bricks in a grid pattern. There were large center walkways, with smaller perpendicular walkways to the sides. The setup was no doubt to make it easy to count the arsenal, and rotate the stock. Whatever was in here was no help to us, I confirmed by visually checking every aisle for smaller pallets. In the one closest to the door, I had to step over a mattress some clown had dragged in here. It would be nice and cool during the day, some lazy Airman had a set up to grab a nap when he was supposed to be doing inventory. There is something fundamentally wrong with a service that lets it Officers do most of the fighting.
I was heading back towards the front door when I heard whispered voices in Arabic. I froze. They must have a night watch patrolling the area. Shit! I held my breath as I waited on a flashlight beam. It was darker than a bowling ball covered in stealth panels lobbed into a black hole in here, I was fine as long as they didn’t have a light. Probably a cursory inspection, I would be amazed if they even stepped past the door.
I took a few more steps toward the end of the row, so that I could see what was happening. Against the moonlit door, two goons with rifles, holding hands in that weird Arab fashion. I had no idea what they were talking about, as the conversation went back and forth. Then they started walking directly towards me. Mystified, I slowly shuffled my feet backwards, willing my steps to be quiet like wolf paws on wet grass. There was no way they saw me, or else I would already be shot. But there is some truth to the human ability to sense the presence of another human. Maybe it was all instincts, but they were coming my way. As I stepped back into the offset row, I pr
ayed they kept walking down the main aisle. I unsheathed my knife, hoping it didn’t come to that.
I was carrying a Randall #14, a razor sharp bowie inspired blade famous in Special Forces circles since Vietnam. Mine had been a gift from my late mentor, a Veteran of that war. It was fast and deadly, but potentially dropping two people without a shot fired is a tall order. But it was my only option. Shooting them would sound the alarm, even in the bunker. Even if I got away with knifing them quiet, they were going to be missed in a matter of hours. The whole plan might go up in smoke over my decision to pick this building to search. To my amazement and disbelief, they turned the corner right into my row, but didn’t change pace. No way they saw me, but why were they following me?
I backed slowly down the corridor, trying to match their footsteps, knowing that when I hit the wall I would have a decision to make. I keyed my mic with the other hand, hoping my crew picked up the Arabic voices, and realized I was in trouble. I was running out of space fast, and I mentally braced myself for the fury of violence I was going to have to unleash to have any chance of keeping this quiet. Then, as I almost tripped over the mattress in the floor, the true horror hit me like a ton of bricks. Curse my Sherlockian mind. My eyes almost bugged out of my head as my nightmare took shape right in front of me. I was close enough to smell their breath. But I couldn’t have, as the two bearded figures locked lips, hands already fumbling to shed clothes.
I stepped past the mattress, correctly guessing they were too busy with each other to hear my boots hit the springs anyway. My back touched the wall, and I knew I was stuck. Standing there with nothing but perfectly honed steel and fear, there was no way out. This was happening, and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, they could make me be here, but they couldn’t make me watch. I reached up and switched my goggles off.
Like a blind man, my other senses went into over drive. I would have to thank them for that later. Coupled with the electronic ears, I got every detail in perfect high definition. The bunker was the spot for these two exactly because it was abandoned at night, and far enough away to drown out the degenerate porno unfolding three feet in front of me. This was no lover’s first time, they were old pros. And apparently they had been doing their cardio. For several eternities, my brain made up detail that might have actually been worse than seeing. There was enough moaning and slapping to provide the soundtrack to an orgy. Suddenly, a hand slapped the wall next to me. I snapped my goggles back on, as date night found some creativity in positioning. They were close enough to be dripping sweat on me, and I slid out to the side, praying to all the old gods I didn’t bump them with my chest rig as I passed. I stepped carefully over the mattress, and shuffled away like Dante escaping Hell.