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

by Chester D. Campbell

  Roddy awoke on Christmas morning in a particularly surly mood. His head hurt. His leg ached. He had just doubled the pillow behind his back to prop himself up when Lila came bouncing into his bedroom all smiles, a cushion stuffed beneath her red sweater, a long white cotton beard dangling from her chin. She promptly "ho, ho, ho'd" him into a fit of laughter. It was a sound seldom heard the past few months.

  "You look ridiculous in that get-up," he said.

  "No more ridiculous than you look in that bed." She grabbed his arm and began tugging him into the wheelchair. "Let's go, Daddy Claus. It's Christmas!"

  Renee had been born just before Roddy left on an overseas tour where families were not allowed and did not meet her father until she was a year old. When Lila came along, he tried to make up for what he had missed before. The result was a confirmed daddy's girl. During the holidays, Karen dropped a few hints to Renee about her problems with Roddy but didn't dare say anything to Lila.

  The new year brought a return to his bouts of depression, marked by a brooding silence, stimulated by a sense that he had lost control over his destiny. He got a hint of what lay ahead during a curious visit in late January by a man he knew only as "Greg." Roddy sat propped up in bed, two pillows cushioning his back, trying to make up his mind whether it was worth the effort to get up, when Karen appeared at the bedroom door. Towering over her was a familiar face topped by thick sandy brown hair, rumpled from the gray tweed Scottish cap now gripped in one hand.

  "You have a visitor," his wife said soberly. "Do you want me to help you up?"

  Roddy frowned dismally. He knew she meant well, but he despised hints in front of outsiders that he couldn't take care of himself.

  "Don't bother to get up, Colonel," said the visitor. "I can't stay long."

  "Come on in, Greg," Roddy beckoned, waving an arm at a rocker near the door. "Pull up a chair and sit down. This is a surprise."

  That brought a barely noticeable softening of the man's features, which were notable only in their lack of distinction. "I'll have to agree with you there. I'm not much on social calls. But, then, you were never just an ordinary pilot."

  Roddy shook his head with a grim smile. "I'm afraid I'm not any kind of a pilot now." He noticed his wife still standing in the doorway. "Would you fix us some coffee, Karen? As I recall, this fellow could put it away about as well as me."

  Greg looked around at her. "Don't go to any trouble—"

  "No trouble," she said, turning away. "I have a fresh pot brewing in the kitchen."

  Roddy remembered the tall, husky man as a passenger on several flights in places that were decidedly unfriendly. He had both dropped him off and picked him up. It was obvious to Roddy that he was CIA, though Greg never said more than he was employed by a "federal agency." On one occasion, he had been dressed as a Navy commander. The last time he flew on Roddy's Pave Low, he commended the aircraft commander on being there at the right time and "running a tight ship."

  "I'm sure you know the story on what happened in Iran," Roddy said sullenly.

  "Probably a little more than you do."

  Roddy perked up at that. "I haven't been able to get anything out of the Pentagon. I can understand how somebody over there might have tipped the mullahs to our operation, but with all our sources..." He shrugged as his voice trailed off.

  "Some friends of mine were involved in setting the thing up," said Greg, slowly rocking back and forth in the chair.

  "I suspected as much."

  "They tell me that NSA picked up on the movement of the Iranian troops at least half an hour before you got there."

  "No shit!"

  Greg nodded. "The question is, why didn't somebody warn you?"

  "We monitored the damned satellite all the way in after the commit. Never heard a peep out of the White House." The realization that the ambush could have been avoided outraged him.

  Both men fell silent as Karen brought in two cups of coffee, then left. Greg leaned forward sympathetically. "Sorry to be the bearer of such disturbing news, but I thought you ought to know."

  "I appreciate it," Roddy said, letting the hot coffee soothe his churning emotions. "Some bastard at NSA must have screwed up royally and passed the word on too late. I wonder why it hasn't come out yet?"

  "They rarely give public acknowledgement of NSA intercepts. It's called protecting intelligence sources. Also protects people who don't like to admit their failures. Particularly when it involves the White House."

  "But the Air Force has investigated for months. Why didn't they turn it up?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't involve more than we know," said Greg in a warning tone. "Be careful, Colonel. You're in a dangerous position."

  "You really think so?"

  Greg nodded. "You've been hurt enough. I wouldn't want to see anything else happen."

  "Thanks for the concern."

  "You probably aren't aware of it, but you saved my ass a couple of times. I owe you. Let me know if I can ever be of help."

  As it developed, Roddy found out what he meant hardly a week later, on a chill, gray morning at the first of February. When he answered the doorbell on crutches, having graduated from the wheelchair after his last round of therapy, he found two men dressed in business suits. One carried a briefcase. From their appearance, they might have been life insurance salesmen, but Roddy knew better. They produced identification cards from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and asked if they could come in.

  It was Karen's day for bridge at the officers club, and Roddy led them back to the den. He switched on a reading lamp to brighten the room, which was bleak and shadowed in the morning gloom.

  The agents appeared to have been paired for their dissimilarity. One was tall and lanky, with a dour face, the other short and heavyset. He had a small black mustache. The lanky one introduced himself as Evanston.

  "The Inspector General has renewed the investigation into just what went wrong in Operation Easy Street," he explained in a bored voice, draping his long, thin frame at an angle across one end of the sofa. He had an annoying habit of squinting his eyes frequently as he blinked.

  "Lots of luck," Roddy said offhandedly. "I'd sure as hell like to know myself. Nobody has talked to me about it since the debriefing I had over in Germany."

  "I believe the earlier inquiry was inconclusive," Evanston acknowledged. "Some new facts recently came to light."

  At the agents' prodding, Roddy recounted the mission from its inception to the fateful plunge into the Zagros Mountains.

  "One thing puzzles me," said the squat man, who had identified himself as Godwin. "When we talked to Captain Schuler, he said you never mentioned changing to the new satellite and frequency. You know, the one for the alternate national command channel." His mustache was twisted by a puzzled look that silently demanded why?

  Roddy folded his arms deliberately, his forehead rumpled, the frown pulling at a spot recently occupied by several stitches. Were they talking about the same mission? He had never heard anything about a new satellite. "Why, for God's sake, should I have mentioned anything like that?"

  "Major Bolivar briefed you on the change just before takeoff," Evanston said, squinting even more than usual. "But according to Schuler, you had him using the originally planned alternate. Which, of course, was out of service."

  At that, Roddy pushed himself straight up in his chair and stared at the investigator. "What the hell are you talking about? Major Bolivar never told me any damn thing about any change in channels. If he—"

  "Did Bolivar call you aside before you left the briefing room?" cut in Godwin.

  Rodman thought back to that September night in Kuwait. He had been able to recall only bits and pieces when they had first interrogated him at the hospital in Wiesbaden. But in the long, dismal months since, most of it had come back painfully clear. "Yeah." He nodded, remembering. "Bolivar said General Patton wanted to remind me that our first priority was to get the passengers safely out of there." />
  Evanston glanced at his notebook. "And then he told you there was trouble on the originally planned FLTSATCOM satellite, so they were changing the alternate."

  "The hell he did!" Roddy blurted. Then the possible import of the agent's words slowly seeped into his mind. "Just what the devil are you implying?"

  "We're not implying anything," said Evanston. "We're just trying to establish the facts. It was originally assumed that you didn't receive the recall message because of equipment failure. With the physical evidence all destroyed, it was a logical conclusion. But somebody reviewing the file recently noted neither pilot had mentioned the alternate national command channel change. Captain Schuler reported receiving the commit signal on only the primary. That raised some questions."

  Roddy's frown had changed to a scowl as he listened. "Let's back up a minute. What the hell is this about a recall message?"

  "When they discovered the operation had been compromised in Iran, General Patton sent a recall message on the new alternate frequency. That was an hour and forty-five minutes into the flight. Since the satellite with the original channels had gone out, it was transmitted on the new alternate. Schuler said you were monitoring the wrong satellite and never received it."

  Roddy stared in disbelief, brows knitted. That was confirmation of Greg's story about the National Security Agency learning the mission had been compromised, but a recall message? An hour and forty-five minutes into the flight? He would have turned back instantly and hightailed it out of Iran. Barry and the other guys would still be alive and he and Dutch would be somewhere playing tennis.

  They had changed the alternate channel. Could Major Bolivar really have given him that information and he neglected to pass it on to Dutch Schuler? Was his memory playing tricks now and suppressing a terrible gaffe?

  No. It wasn't possible. Anything that important he would have written immediately on his note pad and passed on to Dutch when they did the "comm" check during preflight. Somebody had their facts all screwed up.

  "When did you talk to Dutch...Captain Schuler?" he asked. Except for a Christmas card, they had not been in touch since he had left Germany.

  "Last week," Evanston said.

  "In California?"

  "Yeah. At the hospital in California."

  "How was he? Did his shoulder get well?"

  Evanston shrugged and squinted. "We didn't inquire about his health. He seemed pretty nervous—"

  "Shaky." Godwin smoothed his mustache absently.

  "Yeah, shaky. He seemed to have a problem talking about some of the details, particularly about the ambush."

  After the agents had left, Roddy poured himself a glass of Scotch and sat bent forward like a hermit hunched over a fireplace. His mind was a jumble of confusion, a beehive of questions buzzing about blindly in search of answers. He picked apart everything the two men had told him, pondering it like pieces he was trying to place in a giant jigsaw puzzle. It made absolutely no sense. He was positive there had been no mention of a frequency change. Why had Major Bolivar made such a statement? He winced at the thought of that recall message they had never received.

  He was glassy-eyed and incoherent, an empty whiskey bottle in the floor at his feet, when Karen returned from playing bridge.

  The following day, he called the hospital in California and was told that Captain Schuler had been released. After a few more attempts, he reached Dutch's parents. What he learned from the copilot's father was disconcerting.

  "The Air Force said he needed total rest," reported the elder Schuler, a high school coach who had been inordinately proud of his son's tennis accomplishments. "They sent him to a place in Idaho. I guess you'd call it a resort. It's back in the mountains with no telephones, no radio, no TV."

  Roddy knew exactly the sort of place. Like the hunting lodge he had visited with his father back in his boyhood days. Good food, fresh air and total isolation. Evidently Dutch had been plagued by more than an occasional nightmare. He wondered if Schuler had been close to losing it altogether. Surely he hadn't believed that story about his aircraft commander forgetting or disregarding instructions to monitor a different alternate channel. It was absurd. Idiotic.

  But a few weeks after the interview with the investigators, he learned to his complete dismay that others, much higher up, had indeed believed. First was a news story that indicated the plumbing in the Pentagon's storehouse of secrets had sprung one of its famous leaks. According to an unnamed source, someone's dereliction of duty had caused the tragic loss of the helicopter in Iran. Finally, after demands from Congress and editorial flights of fancy in the press, the Air Force identified the culprit as the senior pilot, Colonel Warren P. Rodman.

  Roddy's life had been on a roller coaster ever since he opened his eyes that morning at the hospital in Wiesbaden. It had been mostly downs, but there were a few ups–notably the restoration of his face to a near normal appearance and the first timid movement in his leg after extensive therapy. But this news seemed to shove him onto the final downhill slope.

  The disagreements with Karen intensified, mostly over his drinking. In the past he had always been calm, composed, undaunted. It was devastating to Karen to watch helplessly as he seemed to come completely unglued. One afternoon when he complained that she had hidden the Scotch, she blurted, "Damn it, Roddy!"

  That got his attention. She seldom used four-letter words.

  "You may need a crutch for your leg, but you don't need one for your mind. That booze will land you in the gutter, and I'm not getting down there with you."

  He gave her a caustic look and said in an equally bitter voice, "This damned leg is going to keep me from flying. So what good is my lousy mind, as fuzzy as it's been anyway?"

  She shook her head vigorously. "Flying isn't the beginning and the end of the world, Roddy."

  "Maybe not your world."

  10

  The motto of the Air Force Special Operations Command was "Air Commandos–Quiet Professionals," but the final chapter of Operation Easy Street proved anything but quiet. The mission's spectacular failure had been loudly chortled by Iran and mercilessly hashed and rehashed by the American media. A court-martial growing out of the operation would normally have been held in secret, but the editorial writers and TV commentators had demanded that whoever was responsible for the loss of nearly a dozen soldiers and airmen should be held publicly accountable.

  The large room at Hurlburt Field set aside for the military court activities looked almost pristine in its lack of decor, not a single picture of a flyer or an aircraft, neither a map nor a poster, nothing to relieve the boredom of solid white walls. It was not by accident. The Secretary of the Air Force had decreed that nothing should be done that might contribute to the "media circus" everyone feared. Nevertheless, the room was crowded with a large contingent of news people, plus a variety of uniformed attendants and functionaries. The trial opened on an unusually hot day in May with the air conditioning system toiling overtime to maintain everyone's cool.

  Colonel Rodman, in dress uniform with all his ribbons arrayed colorfully beneath the silver wings on his chest, walked hesitantly into the room with the aid of a cane, heavily favoring his left leg. He took his seat at the defense table while his wife, a solemn but striking figure in a simple pink dress, moved into the first row of chairs behind him. She sat rigidly, her face like a porcelain mask that might shatter at any moment. Things were at the breaking point between them, but to abandon him now would have been unforgivable. Though the girls had wanted to come, it was exam week in college, and Roddy had insisted they remain at school.

  The ten members of the court-martial filed in, led by Brig. Gen. Elliott Wintergarden, a prematurely gray officer with the confident stride of a man who had long since carved his niche in the pantheon of fighter jocks. He looked about the room with eyes as cold and blue as the skies in which he had earned his reputation.

  The charges were read, accusing Colonel Rodman of "gross negligence" in monitoring a communica
tions channel he had been ordered to change, resulting in the loss of his aircraft, the death of four aircrew members and six passengers, and of "recklessly disregarding his duty as aircraft commander" by failure to advise his copilot of the change in communications procedures.

  Roddy faced the court and pleaded "not guilty" to both charges.

  The prosecution was represented by a smooth-talking colonel named Ralph Finch, a military lawyer who prided himself on his convictions. He had been hand-picked by the Air Force Judge Advocate General. A short, balding man who looked as though a cigar belonged in the corner of his broad slash of a mouth, Finch called General Philip Patton as his first witness.

  The Chief of Staff had the guarded look of a beleaguered cavalryman riding into an Indian camp. He was highly suspicious of the press and knew he could not afford the slightest slip. They would have his scalp in an instant. Beginning with a self-serving explanation that much about the operation was still classified, he briefly described the Easy Street mission. He was then asked by Colonel Finch about the purpose of the primary and alternate communications channels.

  "Command and control are among the most vital elements of any military operation," Wing said in a pedantic tone. "Since a mission of this type required the aircraft to maintain total radio silence, command was necessarily a one-way street. The aircraft commander, Colonel Rodman, had the responsibility to carry out the mission according to the Air Tasking Order, unless instructed over the secure channel to deviate from it. He was given both a primary channel and an alternate, should problems develop with the primary."

  "And did you give Colonel Rodman instructions to deviate from the mission as planned?" Finch asked.

  "I did. When I had reason to believe the mission had been compromised, the President was informed. He ordered the mission terminated immediately. I made the radio call myself, three times, instructing Colonel Rodman to abort the mission."