Overture to Disaster (Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy Book 3)

by Chester D. Campbell

  "Guns are hot, Colonel," Nickens reported. "The Major has his troops ready."

  "Roger, Barry. Heads up, everybody. Hopefully this will turn out just another milk run. Two minutes to touchdown."

  Roddy pushed up on the throttles as they scoured the horizon for chemlites.

  "There she is. One o'clock." Captain Schuler's excited voice broke the silence. Chemlites. A nice, neat square. Plus an IR strobe in the center."

  "ECM's quiet," Roddy advised. "Keep a sharp eye out, guys." He circled the area at about two hundred and fifty feet.

  "Can't make out anybody close by, Colonel," said Schuler. "Guess they're keeping back out of the way."

  The FLIR showed a few vehicles at the far end, including a large one that was probably the stolen tanker truck.

  "Okay. We're going in," Roddy said.

  That undefined sense of apprehension returned suddenly as he pushed the nose down and the MH-53J dropped straight in toward the center of the cleared area. And as the chopper approached the ground, his worst fears became reality. The muzzle flash of rifles suddenly flickered in the darkness around the perimeter of the LZ, appearing like super-bright fireflies swarming on a summer night. Bullets immediately peppered the sides of the chopper.

  "Ambush!" Captain Schuler screamed over the intercom.

  "Return fire!" Roddy called, but the electrically operated miniguns had already begun to pour a torrent of ammunition into the area.

  The aircraft was equipped with titanium armor plating, which kept down the automatic rifle damage. But as Roddy reached for the throttles to put on full power in preparation for a quick retreat, the fruits of Iran-Contra suddenly came to haunt him. A wire-guided TOW anti-tank missile slammed into the Pave Low amidships. Since the TOW was steered by sight, the high-tech electronic countermeasures system was powerless against it. Because the chopper was descending, the gunner's aim had been high. In fact, another few inches and it would have sailed harmlessly over the fuselage. Most of the force of the explosion was dissipated upward and outward, but part of the missile knocked out one engine and, more fatally, shredded a rotor blade.

  Immediately after the impact, Roddy saw the port engine fire warning light flash on. He called, "Bold Face...engine fire!"

  The emergency action signal would normally have alerted the flight engineer and copilot to give the good engine full throttle, shut off the malfunctioning engine, activate the fire extinguisher and take other steps to cope with the life-threatening situation. But before they could act, the heavy chopper dropped like a wingless bird. The imbalances caused by destruction of the rotor blade made it a lifeless albatross.

  Dutch Schuler shouted "Mayday!" into his microphone, unaware that he was transmitting to a deaf bird in the blackness of space.

  Roddy had been aiming for the cleared center of the LZ, but the impact of the missile, the disintegrating main rotor and the still spinning tail rotor deflected the helicopter to one side. It plunged onto an outcropping of rock, striking a wedge-shaped formation that acted as a blunt but formidable blade, shearing off the cockpit from the rest of the airframe. The bulbous nose, with the two pilots still strapped, tumbled forward on the rocky ground, coming to rest with its armor-plated bottom facing aft. That was the only thing providential about the mission's untimely end. The commander's last utterance before the crash was a fragmentary prayer for his crew and passengers.

  As the rear portion of the Pave Low was slammed backward from the rock formation, parts of the blazing engine plunged into an auxiliary fuel tank, creating a giant Molotov cocktail. To those crouched around the LZ, it looked like a large bomb exploding. The cabin appeared to pulverize. The aircrew members and the Delta Force team died instantly in a ball of flame and a hail of fragments.

  Wiesbaden, Germany

  8

  He opened his eyes, blinked groggily, and looked out. His first impression was of flying over fields of snow, precise white rectangles set in a regular patchwork pattern. Then a particularly bright one sent shock waves to his dilated eyes, like a massive reflection of the sun off the shimmering surface of a lake. It touched off unspeakable jolts of pain in his head. As he slammed his lids shut, he heard voices nearby and the click-clicking of wheels. Slowly he came to realize that he wasn't flying at all. He was rolling. When he peeked out again, he saw that the snowy fields were in reality white ceiling tiles, the mirror-bright lake merely the glass surface of a light fixture. He was lying on his backside staring straight up. When he tried to turn his head to look around, he got another sharp stab of pain for his trouble.

  "Where am I?" he mumbled, dazed, to no one in particular. His voice sounded shaky and unnatural. And his mouth, God how dry it was. He must have gone a week without water. He tried to move his right arm but something seemed to be restraining it.

  The rolling stopped suddenly and the smiling face of a black-haired young airman in a white coat loomed above him.

  "You're in the Air Force hospital at Wiesbaden, Colonel. Welcome back."

  Wiesbaden? That wasn't far from his base at Rhein-Main. What was he...slowly he began to experience vague snatches of memory, like old black and white photos pulled at random from a box long hidden in a closet. There had been a crash. But where? When? It was all much too vague. His mind seemed encased in fog.

  And then he realized what held his arm. It was connected to an IV tube that snaked out from under the sheet toward a glucose bag hanging out of sight.

  "Glad to be back," he said shakily. "I think."

  The airman laughed, an odd chuckle. "I'm sure your wife'll be happy, sir. I'll have you back in your room in a jiffy. God knows how long you've been in X-ray."

  How long had he been unconscious, he wondered? Then a muffled "tat-tat-tat" sound reached his ears. It sounded arguably like machinegun fire. A fleeting picture stole across the screen of his mental monitor. Guns firing and an explosion that rocked the chopper. It was gone as quickly as it had come, but it left him breathing hard, a chore that seemed to tear at his insides. He felt sweat trickle down his neck despite the coolness of the hospital corridor. As he concentrated on the gunfire-like sound, he realized it was a compressed air drill somewhere outside the building.

  "He's conscious, Mrs. Rodman," said the airman excitedly as he pushed the gurney into the room.

  And then Karen was looking down at him. He had never seen a lovelier sight, despite the tears in her eyes. She reached out to take his trembling hand and leaned down to plant a gentle kiss on his swollen lips, about the only feature, other than his eyes, that had escaped the yards of gauze that swathed his head. He looked like a mummy, and he wasn't sure just how far removed he was from the ranks of the dead.

  "Hi, Babe," he said wearily. "I don't know where I've been, but I'm back."

  The airman maneuvered him into his bed, then left to inform the nurses that their patient had rejoined the rational world, if that term could be properly applied to the current international climate. Karen sat beside him and related what she had managed to learn about events of the past two weeks, which were lost completely among the damaged synapses of his memory banks.

  Two Iranian medics had been attached to the army unit that shot down the helicopter. After doing what they could to stop the bleeding, the Iranians had transported the two critically injured pilots to the nearest town large enough to support a hospital. There the doctors accomplished some further patching up but gave the men only a slight chance for survival. Both were comatose, with multiple fractures and other life-threatening injuries.

  The government in Tehran was having a field day pillorying Uncle Sam over the failed rescue effort. The Iranian president had been hoping for improved relations with the West, but this was the next best thing, a chance to put the Great Satan on the defensive. Upon learning that the pilots were beyond interrogation and likely to die, he consulted with his parliamentary leaders and decided on a new course of action. Rather than send the Americans two more corpses, they would return the men while they were st
ill alive, seizing a unique opportunity to improve Iran's badly tarnished image as a humanitarian, law-abiding member of the community of nations. Arrangements were made quickly to transport the men to nearby Turkey, where an Air Force medevac plane picked them up and flew them to Germany. The American doctors had worked feverishly to stabilize their conditions, then began the slow process of nursing them back to health.

  Rodman stared at his wife, wanting to avoid the obvious question, but knowing he couldn't. Forcing a deep breath that made him wince, he said haltingly, "You mentioned Dutch...and me. What about Barry...what about the others?"

  Karen held a hand to her mouth as though attempting to seal her lips. Slowly she shook her head. "They didn't make it, Roddy. I'm sorry. Look, it wasn't your fault. Really, you had no way of knowing."

  During the next two weeks, Roddy experienced enough aches and pains to make him wonder if death might not have been the easier out. The severe concussion that had obliterated two weeks of his life left him with a continuous headache, dizziness, spells of nausea. In addition, he suffered a total of five broken ribs, which guaranteed maximum discomfort, and several deep facial lacerations that would require more than one round of plastic surgery. His other major injury involved multiple fractures of his left leg. He faced the prospect of several operations involving pins and grafts to restore the leg to a semblance of its former condition. The chief orthopedic surgeon would joke later that he had enough metal in his leg to trigger a major alert should he dare to pass through an airport security scanner.

  Dutch Schuler had suffered a compound fracture of his right shoulder and serious internal injuries that kept him on the critical list for several weeks. When they decided to fly Roddy back to the hospital at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, located on the same sprawling installation as Special Operations Command Headquarters at Hurlburt Field, he asked to see Captain Schuler before his departure.

  It was an emotional encounter, their first meeting since the crash. Both knew it was likely their last for a long while. Roddy's wheelchair was pushed into the room where Dutch lay like a human Hi-Fi system, wires and tubes protruding everywhere.

  Roddy grasped the thin, cold hand that reached out toward him. He smiled as best he could. God, the man looked like death warmed over.

  "Damn, it's good to see you, Dutch."

  Schuler's expression didn't change, but his eyes seemed to light up. "I hear you're going home, Colonel."

  "Yeah. Back to Florida. That's as much home as any place, I suppose. When are they going to let you out of here?"

  "Wish I knew. They say I'll probably go to a hospital near my folks' place. They live in California now, y'know."

  "The sunshine should do both of us good," Roddy said, shifting around in the chair, trying to find a comfortable position for that damnable leg. It felt like it was encased in concrete.

  "Right. Good place to get out on the tennis court," Dutch said without thinking. Then, as the import of what he had said struck him, he added in a somber voice, "Probably a suntan is all I'll accomplish on a tennis court now."

  Roddy winced. The pain was mental, not physical. Dutch loved tennis almost as much as he loved flying. Whether he would do either again loomed as a huge question mark.

  It wasn't your fault, Karen had kept insisting. True, the Pentagon had signaled a positive commit. He'd had no warning. Not in the normal sense. He'd had that bad feeling beforehand, but you couldn't abort a mission based on some nebulous premonition. The plain fact was that he had sat in the right seat that night. That was where the buck stopped.

  "How's the head, Colonel? You must have gotten quite a lick."

  "Yeah. My helmet apparently came off or got crushed somehow. I've got a headache I wouldn't wish on anybody but Saddam Hussein."

  One result of the head injury was that most of the details concerning the ill-fated mission still remained clouded in his mind. But he had been troubled by a recurring nightmare in which the muzzle flash fireflies metamorphosed into large missiles that exploded all around him with a deafening roar. This had led to several sessions with a psychiatrist who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder. The physician was one who had worked with hostages coming through Wiesbaden on their way back to freedom.

  "Damned shame about Barry and the other guys," Schuler said sadly.

  Roddy nodded and averted his eyes, blinking back the tears. His thoughts were a confused mixture of guilt and hurt and anger and, more than anything, uncertainty. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Dutch. I wish there was some way I could—"

  "Hey, Colonel. You did everything you could. Apparently Washington thought everything was fine or they would have alerted us. Somebody on the ground must have screwed up. We got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  As the days grew shorter and the nights cooler toward the end of autumn, Roddy was thankful to be back in Florida instead of heading into the cold of a German winter. He had been assigned quarters on base, which made it convenient for Karen as he was alternately shunted in and out of the hospital for surgery and therapy. There was little to do otherwise but read or watch TV, which he viewed as mostly a waste, except for the football games on weekends. He couldn't watch for very long at a time, anyway. One of the aftereffects of the head injury was a difficulty in concentration. An old friend would occasionally drop by for a drink and a chat, but Roddy found himself becoming more and more at a loss for words. The talk would invariably turn to flying, and all he could think of was the flight surgeon's cautioning him not to hold out much hope for a return to flying status.

  One bright, chilly morning toward the middle of December, Roddy sat in his wheelchair beside a window in the den, actually a spare bedroom that Karen had given a homey, informal look. The house was located just off the Gulf of Mexico in a convenient spot for visiting seagulls. Roddy watched two well-fed birds waddle across the lawn like a couple of fat slobs with beer-bellies. Then suddenly they lifted their wings and took off. Those slobs can fly, but I can't. He slumped deeper into the chair.

  "That was Mary Jane Marks on the phone," Karen said as she walked into the room. She wore a white sweat shirt emblazoned with red poinsettias and a Santa-style red and white cap, its peak flopped to one side.

  He hadn't even noticed the phone ring. Nobody called him much anymore. "What did she want?"

  "She and Dan want us to join them at the club Friday night."

  Colonel Daniel Marks was commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt, the outfit Roddy had flown with in Operation Desert Storm. Marks' wife and Karen were close friends.

  "I'm not going over there in this damned wheelchair," he said irritably. He couldn't stand any more patronizing from guys with two good legs and faces that bore scars from nothing worse than a razor nick suffered during the morning's shave. Anyway, the thought of dinner turned him off. He seemed to have little appetite except for liquid refreshment. Thank God they had taken him off the medication that had kept him away from Scotch.

  "If you don't come out of hiberation soon," she said, "you're going to drive both of us nutty."

  "You think I'm crazy?"

  She grinned. "I'm not quite ready to sign the commitment papers."

  "If Dan Marks wanted me to go, why didn't he call me?"

  "Don't be silly," she said, trying to humor him. "Mary Jane is his social secretary."

  "Well, tell her my calendar is already full for Friday night." He wheeled his chair around to face the TV, grabbed the remote off a table and switched the channel to CNN. The picture showed a former Beirut hostage smiling and waving from a balcony at the painfully familiar hospital in Wiesbaden. "Enjoy yourself," he mumbled caustically at the picture. "To try and get your ass out of there, Barry Nickens and a bunch of damned nice guys died for nothing."

  "Roddy!" Karen gasped, shocked. "That man had nothing to do with your accident."

  Accident, hell! It was a damned ambush. Of course, she was right about the hostage. Negotiations had finally brought the ca
ptives' release in Lebanon, but that dull ache inside him, a nameless pain that would never quite let go, demanded a pound of flesh for what had happened in the abortive effort to obtain their freedom. And he still had no idea who or what to blame.

  Seeing his hang-dog look, she shook her head. "I'm going to the Commissary. Can I bring you anything?"

  "You can stop at the package store and get another bottle of Scotch."

  Legs spread in a defiant stance, she jammed her fists against her hips. "You'll have to go get it yourself. I don't intend to contribute any further to your downfall."

  Karen could not believe what was happening to him. He seemed so far removed from the man she had fallen in love with the day of their explosive introduction. It happened on the sidelines at a football game while Roddy was playing wide receiver for the Air Force Academy and she was a cheerleader for the University of Tennessee. In the fourth quarter, Roddy had caught a pass just inbounds, his off-balance momentum propelling him into a gaggle of cheerleaders. He sent Karen sprawling. He jumped up, helped her to her feet and gasped, "Are you okay?" After the game, he had sought her out to be sure she was not injured. The rest, as they say, was history. She still loved him, but he no longer seemed the same man she had met and married. That crash had not only broken his bones, it had broken his spirit.

  9

  Roddy made inquiries through Special Operations Command Headquarters, to which he was assigned for administrative purposes, but had managed to learn no additional details about how the Easy Street mission had been compromised. "The matter is still under investigation," was the only comment he could get out of the Pentagon. It was an embarrassment Washington would as soon forget.

  Unable to focus his growing bitterness on anything else, Roddy directed it at the most convenient target, his wife. The strain between them experienced a welcome reprieve during the holidays, thanks to the arrival of Renee and Lila on Christmas break. The lively pair kept the household in such turmoil there was hardly time for the usual arguments.