A Question of Time

by James Stejskal

  Kaiser kept rotating the officer’s arm and then threw him down to the ground face first. He completed his takedown with a knee drop to the back of the man’s neck that was punctuated with a loud crack. The man was dead.

  “Christ, I fucked that up,” Kaiser said.

  “How? If you hadn’t put him down he would have shot me.”

  Kaiser looked up at his partner with the face of a man about to go into shock. Mann saw that he was holding his inner thigh.

  “Yeah, but he shot me.”

  “Damn. Sit down.”

  “At least he didn’t shoot the medic,” Kaiser said, suddenly glad to have a school-trained Special Forces medic as his partner.

  Mann pulled the medical kit he had insisted on carrying from the car and went to work. He cut away Kaiser’s pants and inspected the entrance and exit wounds closely with a flashlight. The injury was bleeding slowly. Mann saw dark red and knew it was venous not arterial. The femoral had not been hit. He washed it with sterile water and watched it closely for a bit.

  “You’re good, brother. It’s clean through and through and it didn’t hit anything major,” he said, as he began to staunch the flow with a gauze bandage.

  “It stings a bit. Got anything for me?”

  Kaiser laid his head back on the ground and closed his eyes.

  “I’ll give you something in a bit. Don’t fall asleep on me, I think we need you awake right now.”

  “How is he?” Becker asked. He had climbed out of the car and was kneeling next to Kaiser.

  “It’s not too serious. The femoral is intact and there’s some bleeding but I’ve stopped it with combat dressings for now. But, most importantly, he can’t drive.”

  Becker’s philosophy of “first, my men” jumped into action. Later he would say that he wasn’t even aware that he made a decision.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you, Nick. You won’t be going back with Mann tonight,” Becker said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Kaiser said. He was wondering if he was going to be put down like a dog.

  “You are going to take my place on the exfil tonight. You’ll be in good hands in a couple of hours. I’ll get out of here with Mann.”

  Becker stood up. Fischer looked at him questioningly.

  “He’ll be okay. But it means I won’t be going out with you; we have the capability to get two men out quickly and only two. His safety is more important.”

  Mann continued to patch his comrade up, while Becker searched the ground with his flashlight. He caught a flash of brass and picked up the spent cartridge case. He switched the magazine from Nick’s pistol with Weber’s so the pistol appeared not to have been fired. Taking out a cloth, he wiped the pistol clean and put it back into the owner’s holster.

  They loaded Kaiser into the car. He was half in Fischer’s lap when all was done, but his leg needed elevation. Then they took Weber’s body and put it in the front seat of his Lada.

  “Follow me,” Becker said as he put on his gloves and climbed into the driver seat of Weber’s car.

  He took off down the road with Mann and the others following behind in the Wartburg. About 2 kilometers down the road they saw the Lada’s brake lights flash. They came up behind the car as Becker stepped out and pulled the body over to the driver’s side. The car was pointed off the road at an angle into the forest.

  “Not elegant, but is there anyone out here who actually witnessed this unfortunate accident and can speak against the evidence?”

  “That sounds like you’ve been reading too much Agatha Christie, Boss.”

  The engine was still running and Becker stuffed Weber’s limp foot onto the gas pedal and stepped back.

  “Help push it when I back out the door.”

  Mann and Fischer were behind the car as Becker reached in and shoved the gear shift forward into third gear. They gave it an extra push and the little car lurched down the embankment and slammed into a tree. The driver’s door was still open and Weber slumped halfway out of the car.

  “I’m convinced. He must have been a lousy driver,” Mann said.

  “He was also an Arschloch,” Fischer noted. They piled into the Wartburg.

  “Kaiser, you are stacking the bodies up like cordwood,” Mann said.

  “I’ll plead that it was all in self-defense. That Weber guy went off half-cocked and didn’t even give us time to explain anything,” Kaiser said. He was still in pain and fully awake.

  “Not to worry, gentlemen. I think you just sped up the inevitable,” Fischer told them.

  34

  Jamie Wheeler and Team 5’s Paul Stavros and Fred Lindt had all arrived at Tempelhof Airport separately that day but were presently waiting together in the flight center for their hop down to RheinMain Airbase. An Air Force T-39 Sabreliner sat on the tarmac waiting for them while the crew filed whatever paperwork was required to get off the ground. The three men, the only passengers, clustered around an ancient Air Force coffee dispenser that had cooked the beverage into a dense brown sludge that refused to be either diluted by hot water or flavored by the industrial-grade powdered cream offered as a condiment.

  “Look, my spoon stands up in this slime.”

  The pilot walked over and watched them. “You guys aren’t actually trying to drink that crap are you?”

  “It’s the only thing around, isn’t it?”

  “Heavens no, we have real coffee on board, that’s the beauty of flying VIP aircraft. They outfit them for the generals not us normal people.”

  Hours later they made the flight to Rhein-Main and waited. After all, waiting was what military personnel do best. They made their introductions and reviewed the pick-up plans. A day earlier, the 7th Special Operation Squadron crew had been given a classified pre-mission order which let them determine their flight plan into and out of the area and, most importantly, how exactly they would conduct the pick-up itself. Once everyone was satisfied with the plans, they retreated to their respective waiting points to make peace with their own gods and to prepare themselves for the night to come.

  At 2130 hours, Aircraft 0561’s crew had finished their pre-flight ritual and were still waiting. Now, two hours later, waiting for the final okay that would “green light” the mission and permit them to launch, they were sitting in the squadron briefing room adjacent to the hangar. They were drinking more coffee and trying not to get anxious.

  US Air Force Colonel Frank Cantwell was the lead pilot and aircraft commander. His co-pilot, Major Steve Bannerman, and navigator, Major Ron Tuck, would fill the remainder of the seats in the cockpit. It was a high-ranking crew for a high-priority mission, Cantwell just happened to be the squadron commander.

  In addition to the three guys driving the plane, there were six other Air Force personnel on the aircraft: an electronic warfare officer or EWO, a safety officer, a flight engineer, a radio operator, and two loadmasters. Then came the straphangers—the guys who had no specific role on the aircraft but were part of the operation nevertheless.

  One of them was sitting with the A/C commander listening to the flight engineer explain a detail.

  “Our transponder is spoofed to send the ID of another C-130,” Senior Master Sergeant Lucas Hernandez said.

  “So that our signal will show up on radar as a different aircraft? Why?” Jamie Wheeler asked.

  “We don’t want the Soviets to know what kind of 130 we really are, so we use the ID of a conventional airframe, one that often transits the Berlin corridor,” Hernandez explained.

  “Unless they see our plane in broad daylight, they won’t be able to tell the difference,” Cantwell added.

  “Why do we have to ID ourselves at all?”

  “Because the flight must be coordinated with the Berlin Air Safety Center before we enter East German airspace if we don’t want to get shot down. We’re pretending to be a regular Airlift Command mission; by the time they figure out something isn’t kosher, we’ll be back over the fence and in West Germany.”

&nbs
p; The squadron operations officer came into the room and looked around for a moment. He saw Cantwell just as the commander waved to him.

  “Over here, Skip.”

  Captain “Skip” Gordon walked over to the table and handed his commander a message print-out. The group had been joined by Stavros and Lindt. Along with Wheeler, the three would be the straphangers on board to monitor the mission and validate any of the ground-to-air communications.

  Cantwell looked at the message and announced, “We launch in one hour. Saddle up!”

  “Let’s go pilgrims, we’re burning daylight,” Lindt said.

  “Who was that supposed to be?” Stavros asked.

  “John Wayne, you know, the ‘Duke.’ I was building off the colonel’s Western theme, couldn’t you tell?”

  “No, you really need to find another hobby. And, by the way, it is nighttime.”

  The crew and their passengers pushed the squeaking, GSAapproved folding chairs out of the way and made for the door. It was dark outside, but their aircraft was bathed in the light of ten high-intensity sodium lamps from the edge of the airfield apron.

  In front of them was a Hercules MC-130E painted a sinister flat black and dark green. Even its insignia were in black which made it very difficult to read them close up, let alone at a distance. Only the number “0561” next to the forward entry door was visible. Its nose was bulbous, larger than on a standard Hercules; it housed all sorts of navigational gear that permitted it to fly “nap of the Earth” or NOE at 250 feet above the ground without plowing into a hillside or the ground unintentionally. There were also two 30-foot-long, steel boom arms folded back against the side of the fuselage. It was an apparition.

  “It’s a Combat Talon,” Stavros said to Wheeler. “Ever flown on one before?”

  “Never. I flew on Spooky but this one looks pretty cool too.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately it doesn’t have guns like Spooky. This thing is all about getting in and out without being caught. You’re going to love the ‘NOE’ part at the end. It’s like Mister Toad’s Wild Ride.”

  “I hope they have barf bags on board.”

  “Those be standard equipment on this scow, Mister Wheeler,” Colonel Cantwell said.

  Cantwell reached the aircraft, grabbed the handrail of the stairwell, swung himself effortlessly up the metal steps in a well-practiced move and disappeared into the airplane.

  “Usually they tell me to go to the back entrance,” Wheeler said with a mischievous glint in his eye and followed the colonel through the doorway.

  Stavros was too busy trying to remember if he had taken his Dramamine or not and almost missed the stairs until Lindt grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “Get your head out your bag. If the prop had been turning you’d be chopped liver.”

  “If the prop had been turning, I would have been paying attention, now wouldn’t I?” Stavros said as some sort of explanation. He looked at the blades and tried to regain his momentarily lost pride before he followed everyone else into the belly of the big metal bird.

  The crew continued its equipment checks. The navigator plotted coordinates into his computers that would get the plane to the correct address, while the EWO prepared his equipment that would be turned on to confuse and jam any hostile tracking radars if necessary. The EWO was using “Raven” as his intercom codename.

  Colonel Cantwell climbed down out of the flight deck and moved aft to where the crew were assembled. He spoke with the loadmasters and safety officer to make sure they were happy and came forward to talk with his passengers.

  “You all ready for this?”

  “We’re just straphangers, sir. The navigator knows where to go, so if he gets us there, we’re happy.”

  “I guarantee that. Our navsystem will put us there to within plus or minus 10 meters. I think I can steer us those last meters in either direction,” Cantwell said. He was supremely confident in his aircraft and proud of its crew, not to mention his own abilities. “We did a similar mission about three months ago that went perfect. We’re going to do that again tonight.”

  Shortly after Cantwell returned to the cockpit, the loadmasters began to secure the aircraft. The doors slid into their locked position while one man stood at the rear control station. He manipulated a lever and the high-pitched squeal of the hydraulic system filled the cabin. The tailgate began to lift off the ground. As its support disappeared, the tail settled slightly and the tarmac lights slowly disappeared from view until the gate thumped shut. The loadmaster locked it in place and reported the aircraft ready.

  Four Allison engines began their start routine one by one. A whining noise signaled each turboprop was starting up and then the propellers began to turn. Soon the cabin was filled with their roar. Each engine was producing 4,200 horsepower and it sounded like being inside a giant howling wind tunnel. The engines settled into a constant harmonious thrumming, as the pilots ran through their checklists. The fuselage seemed alive, pulsating, almost imperceptibly rocking from side to side as it sat on the tarmac.

  “Ten thousand nuts and bolts flying in close formation,” Lindt said.

  “You’re always the pessimist. Me, I love the air force,” Stavros replied. He leaned back in the web seats, closed his eyes, and tried to get comfortable.

  “That’s what you always say at the beginning of a flight.”

  “It’s worked for me so far.”

  With a slight lurch, the brakes released and the aircraft began to roll forward. The plane bumped along as it ran over the expansion cracks on the tarmac. Everyone was silent, listening to the exchanges between the pilot and the tower in their headphones. For the duration of this mission at least, aircraft 0561 became Number 1805, a standard vanilla C-130E with call-sign “Hurky 05.”

  Cantwell rolled Hurky 05 down the taxiway towards the active runway, which for this evening was 07C. He brought the plane to a stop at its hold position. He then released the brakes and allowed the plane to roll forward a short way before he set them again firmly. The plane shuddered as it jerked to a stop. The pilot ran up the engines to around three-quarter power while he and Major Bannerman did a final quick check of the instruments. Then the propellers’ noise dropped in pitch as Bannerman powered down again. Cantwell asked the tower for release.

  The tower answered, “Hurky 05, you’re cleared for takeoff, runway Zero-Seven Charlie.”

  “Roger, Zero-Seven Charlie.”

  Cantwell repeated the clearance back to the tower and rolled into position. He tapped the brakes and the plane came to a protesting standstill. Then he and the co-pilot grasped the power levers and pushed them to the firewall and the plane rolled forward, quickly picking up speed. The engines’ combined 17,000-shaft horsepower moved the lightly laden aircraft down the asphalt like a cheetah in full stride. Minimum speed for transition was 125 knots, but Cantwell held it on the ground for a while longer before he pulled back on the stick. The plane leapt into the air and did a high-pitch climb out—Cantwell was showing off and wanted his passengers to get acclimatized to his style of flying quickly.

  In the back, Wheeler found the air sickness bags and made sure he had one at the ready.

  The plane leveled out at 15,000 feet and turned to the northwest, heading to a point that would allow them to turn east into the central air corridor. There was a southern corridor through East Germany into Berlin but using it would put them too far away from the LZ to execute their planned maneuver in the sky over East Germany without being unduly noticed by the Soviets. It was to be “in and out”—no one wanted the company of a Soviet fighter plane on this mission.

  35

  Mann nosed the car through the gate in the perimeter fence and stopped a few meters inside. Becker and Fischer got out of the car and walked down the track a few meters to make sure the field was empty of animals and farmers, then returned. Mann was occupied with lifting a couple of canvas bags out of the trunk. He unzipped both, pulled two flight suits from the bag and laid them on the ground. Then h
e poked his head inside the car and looked Kaiser over. The wound had slowed its bleeding and his chest was moving rhythmically, his breathing even.

  “How’s he doing?” Becker said.

  “I think he’s snoozing. His leg is okay, the bleeding looks like it has almost stopped.”

  Becker spread his arms wide and turned to Fischer.

  “This is our LZ,” he said.

  Fischer looked the open space over once again. Although it was dark, he could see enough by the moonlight to estimate its size at no more than 75 meters from side to side in any one direction. He knew at once that it was not suitable for an airplane.

  “LZ means Landing Zone does it not?” Fischer said. “Is your aircraft a helicopter? No plane can land here.”

  Mann paused to listen. This will be interesting.

  “No, it’s not a helicopter. It’s s a big transport called a Hercules and it will not land.”

  “I know what a Hercules is, I’ve seen them in Africa. To get on and off one, it had to land at an airport. So tell me, by what magic we will get on the aircraft?”

  “We’ve been calling it a LZ, it should be ‘PZ’ for Pick-up Zone. Anyway, it’s not magic. It is a very good bit of kit we’ve used many times before. It’s called the Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System.”

  “I’m listening,” said Fischer.

  “It’s also called Skyhook,” Becker continued. “You are going to put on a special flight suit with a built-in harness. Then we will snap you and Nick onto a line that is attached to a helium balloon. The balloon will go up and the airplane will grab it and winch you up into the belly.”

  “You are not serious.”

  “I am very serious. You two will be in the air for all of about four minutes. It is our best and safest way out of the GDR.”

  “How many times has this been done?”

  “Over 160 times. Probably the best mission I’ve heard of was called Operation Coldfeet. In 1961, the Agency airdropped two men onto an abandoned Russian ice station in the Arctic to collect intelligence. When they finished their work a couple of days later, they were picked up with the Skyhook system.” “Successfully?”