The Last Phoenix

by Richard Herman

  “Chicken Coop reads you five by,” Doc Ryan replied, his transmission loud and clear.

  “Rog,” Waldo transmitted. “Solid cloud deck below us at six thou. Can’t see a thing on the ground. We’ve got about thirty minutes of light before sunset. I’d like to send Ranch Three and Four down to take a look.”

  “Bossman says go for it,” Ryan radioed. “Stay above small-arms fire.”

  Waldo humphed. Pontowski was getting cautious. “Copy all.” Now he could get to work. “Bag, you and Duke are cleared in for a look. Shooter-cover.” The idea was for Bag to do the looking and Duke to fly cover for Bag and discourage anyone who might think it was a good idea to shoot at him.

  “We’re in,” Bag replied, his voice still bored and matter-of-fact. Waldo watched as the two aircraft broke out of orbit and descended through a small opening in the clouds. Bag was in the lead, with Duke a mile in trail and displaced to the right. Now Waldo had to wait, which he hated.

  The radio crackled. “Bag! Break right.” It was Duke, now quick and decisive. “Triple A at your deep seven.” A short pause. “You’re clear.”

  Waldo ground his teeth as he waited for what seemed an eternity. A Warthog popped out of the clouds. Waldo counted the seconds. A second Hog punched into the open, and Waldo breathed easier as the two joined up and climbed back into orbit with Ranch Two. “Four tanks and troops in the open moving into town along the main road to the south,” Bag reported.

  “What about the Triple A?” Waldo asked. Because of the A-10’s slow speed, antiaircraft artillery was always a big concern.

  “Coming from the airport on the south side of the city,” Duke radioed. “Some CBU might discourage them.” Besides carrying six Mark-82 Airs, five-hundred-pound bombs that were retarded by an inflatable balloon/parachute, Duke was also loaded with six canisters of CBU-58, a cluster-bomb unit that contained 650 baseball-size bomblets.

  “Might be friendlies at the airport,” Waldo cautioned. Waldo relayed the information to Chicken Coop and got the standard answer given by all command posts.

  “Stand by one,” Ryan radioed.

  “Shee-it,” Bag grumbled, dragging the obscenity out into two syllables. They orbited for twenty minutes as the sun set.

  “Ranch flight, Chicken Coop.”

  Waldo keyed his radio. “Go ahead, Chicken Coop.”

  Ryan’s voice was almost jubilant. “You are cleared in against the tanks and the troops on the south side of the city. Simpang Airport is reported to be in friendly hands.”

  “Then see if you can get them to stop shooting at us,” Waldo replied. “Got to hurry. The light’s almost gone. Okay, Bag. You got the lead. One pass, haul ass. Me and Lurch are right behind you.” Waldo rolled 135 degrees and peeled out of orbit, dropping like a rock to join up on his wingman, Ranch Two, while Bag and Duke disappeared through the clouds.

  “I’m in hot on the lead tank,” Bag radioed.

  “Press,” Duke replied. “You’re covered. I’ve got the end tank. Come off to the right and you’ll see me at your two o’clock.”

  Lurch fell in behind Waldo as they dodged through the clouds, descending like falling bricks. At twenty-five hundred feet they broke clear. “Jesus!” Waldo shouted to himself. Off to his far left a bright line of tracers reached out from the airport, cutting the sky behind Duke, who was rolling in on a tank. Waldo punched at his UHF radio and called up Guard, the emergency channel used by aircraft in distress. “Simpang Tower, cease fire! Cease fire! We’re friendlies going after the tanks advancing on you.” Three seconds later the deadly streak of high-explosive shells cut off. Orphaned, the tracers crossed the sky like a train steaming over a prairie horizon.

  Even though the Warthogs were moving across the ground at 560 feet per second, fast by normal human standards, it was way too slow for Waldo’s sense of survival. He quickly sorted the targets. Bag was clear of the lead tank, which was now a smoking hulk, and jinking hard. A line of flares popped out behind his A-10 to decoy any surface-to-air missile that might be coming his way. Duke had just launched a Maverick antitank missile at Tail End Charlie and had broken off to the south. That would trap the two middle tanks. “Lurch, take the tank on the right. I’ve got the one on the left.” The end tank disappeared in a satisfying puff of flame as the Maverick did its thing.

  Deciding that Duke had the right idea, Waldo called up the Maverick on station nine. His GAU-8 cannon, the seven-barreled, thirty-millimeter Gatling gun, was designed for tank plinking, but he opted for the Maverick on the premise that it was better to launch and leave rather than get up close and personal with an unknown opponent who might have a few nasty surprises of his own. He rechecked the master arm switch, making sure it was in the up position. No switchology errors today, he told himself. He mashed the mike switch. “Bag, clear my six when I come off.” He dropped down to the deck and firewalled the throttles, his airspeed pushing 340 knots.

  When the tank was at two o’clock and three and a half miles away, he popped to a thousand feet and rolled in. What happened next was the product of years of training and fifteen hundred hours’ experience flying the Hog. Automatically, his left forefinger played the slew/track-control button on the throttle quadrant and drove the symbol for the Maverick’s seeker head in the heads-up display over the tank. His finger mashed the button to lock on, and when the symbol pulsed, his right thumb mashed the pickle button on the stick, sending the Maverick on its way. He hit the transmit switch. “Waldo, rifle.” All the while he was jinking hard, making constant, random heading changes to break any tracking solution, and never looked inside the cockpit. Once the Maverick was launched, he turned away and slammed his Warthog down onto the deck. All this took less than eight seconds—which later he would claim was way too long.

  “I’m in,” Bag radioed.

  Clear of the tanks, Waldo looked back and saw Bag’s Hog in a low-level pass at six hundred feet. Six canisters of CBU-58s came off cleanly as two lines of tracers reached for the A-10, clearly visible in the fading light. The ground twinkled with flashes as the bomblets exploded. Now Bag was clear, racing for safety on the deck. “RTB,” Waldo radioed. “Stick a fork in ’em. They’re done.”

  “Smokin’ holes in the ground,” Bag replied as the four jets headed for home plate.

  Camp Alpha

  Sunday, October 3

  The voice was bodiless and at a distance, yet it was still close. “General, you’re needed in the command post.” Slowly Pontowski came awake as sleep yielded to the voice. Doc Ryan was hovering over his bed. “Sorry, sir. But the NMCC is on the secure line.” The voice was bodiless and at a distance, yet it was still close. “General, you’re needed in the command post.” Slowly Pontowski came awake as sleep yielded to the voice. Doc Ryan was hovering over his bed. “Sorry, sir. But the NMCC is on the secure line.”

  Pontowski pulled himself to a sitting position and glanced at the clock beside his bed. It was 0130 Sunday morning. “Don’t you ever sleep?” he asked Ryan.

  “They need help in the command post,” Ryan replied, as if that explained everything.

  Pontowski pulled on his fatigues and boots. “They better have coffee,” he warned.

  “Your reputation has preceded you,” Ryan replied. He led the way to Clark’s minivan, which was waiting outside with her driver, and they rode in silence to the command post. This time there were two guards at the barricade sealing off the bunker. “My medics,” Ryan told him. “They hate being security police augmentees, but we haven’t got much to do right now. I figure we can help until the rest of Chief Rockne’s cops arrive.” Pontowski wondered if the doctor was pushing his people too hard. He made a mental note to discuss it with Clark.

  Inside the command post, Maggot and Waldo were huddled with Clark in the communications cab. A sergeant he had never seen before stood at the big Plexiglas status board and grease-penciled an ETA on two inbound helicopters. In the notes column he wrote PC: 37.

  PC, Pontowski thought. Precious cargo
. Kamigami and the First SOS had snatched a few more innocent villagers out of harm’s way. Then he saw the other number at the bottom of the board: AC: 20. Twenty aircraft. How many will I lose before this is over? But for every aircraft lost, there was a human price. How many pilots? Because he was half awake and his mental defenses down, the fear buried deep in his subconscious burst free. How many? All the numbers were there, beating at him. Maggot and his 30 pilots. The chief of Maintenance with his 309 wrench benders and gun plumbers who kept the aircraft flying and armed. Clark and her support group of 108 personnel who made the base work. Rockne with his 102 cops, most of them too young and inexperienced. Doc Ryan with his 8 medics.

  The number 562 beat at him. But it was more than a number. It was 562 faces—each one a living, vibrant individual. How many will I lose? None today, he promised himself. Slowly he forced the numbers back into the shadows, promising to deal with them later. But he had forgotten to include himself in the grand total.

  “Am I the only person getting any sleep around here?” he asked. The answer was an obvious yes. He sat down at the console.

  “General Butler is on the secure line,” Clark told him.

  Pontowski punched at the monitor button so they could all hear. “Pontowski here. Go ahead, Bernie.”

  The voice was tinny and crackly, the result of scrambling, a multisatellite relay, and unscrambling. A slight delay was noticeable, but it was not too distracting. “The shit has hit the diplomatic fan,” Butler said. “Some human-rights group we’ve never heard of is claiming you used a secret terror weapon at Kuala Lumpur.”

  “We launched three Mavericks,” Pontowski replied, “expended four hundred fifty-eight rounds of thirty-millimeter ammo, and dropped six canisters of CBU-58.” He waited.

  “Can you confirm that?”

  “We know what we uploaded and what the jets recovered with. The math is pretty simple.”

  “Did you confirm your BDA?” Butler asked. BDA was bomb-damage assessment, which was always controversial.

  “Come on, Bernie. You know how it works with an unknown threat. The jocks were too busy getting the hell out of Dodge. The flight lead, Lieutenant Colonel George Walderman, did a quick visual as he pulled off. He thinks they got four tanks, but didn’t hang around to check out the BDA from the CBU.”

  There was a short break as the system did its magic. “Apparently CBU is now a terror weapon.”

  “It’s the shotgun approach to bombing,” Pontowski told him. “It chews up soft targets something fierce, and it’s fairly awesome if you’re on the receiving end.”

  Again the pause. “I’ll tell Wilding and brief the president.”

  “We’re all loaded out for the morning and waiting on an ATO,” Pontowski told him.

  A short break. “Don’t launch without an ATO. It might be best if you downloaded any CBU.”

  “What the hell’s going on there, Bernie? CBU’s damn good area-denial ordnance. It beats the hell out of napalm, which was squirrelly to deliver and only made for good TV coverage. This is no time to start playing politics.” He drummed the console with his fingers, waiting for a reply.

  Another voice came on the line. “Kennett here. The videos we’re seeing are very gruesome. The Chinese have involved the UN, and Senator Leland is calling for a congressional inquiry. You can expect a visit from the GAO.” The GAO was the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress headed by the comptroller general, with over five thousand employees.

  Pontowski almost lost it. “What the hell is the matter with you people? You’re treating us like some peacekeeping mission. We’re not here to stand around wearing a blue beret and watch a massacre.”

  Maggot made a waving motion to Ryan. “Get him some coffee. Quick. The stronger the better.”

  It was enough to calm him down. “I apologize, sir. I just don’t like hanging my people out to dry.”

  The pause was longer than normal. “No apology necessary,” Kennett said. “I feel the same way. Coordinate with SEAC and do what you can.”

  Butler came back on the line. “The situation in Saudi has gone critical. The UIF has broken out, and it’s touch and go. The president doesn’t need any more distractions right now.”

  “Understand all,” Pontowski replied. He broke the connection. He looked at his small staff. “Does anybody have any idea what the hell is going on?”

  “You’re getting your ass kicked,” a soft voice said from the doorway. As one, they all turned. Victor Kamigami was standing there with Tel and Colonel Sun.

  Clark bristled. “What are you doing here?”

  “I called when they landed,” Doc Ryan said, “and asked them to come over. They’ve got good intelligence, and we don’t.”

  Pontowski studied the flight surgeon for a moment, not sure whom he was dealing with. An inner voice told him to use the man. “What are you suggesting?”

  “We work together,” Ryan said. “We’ve got all this room here, good communications, and not enough people.” He gave a helpless shrug. “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Colonel Sun looked around the room, liking what he saw. “We should work together.”

  Maggot stood up, shedding his fatigue like a worn coat. “We need forward air controllers on the ground. Can you do that for us?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Kamigami replied. He looked at Tel. “Would you like to give it a try?”

  “What’s a forward air controller?” Tel answered.

  “Ah, shit,” Maggot moaned, sorry that he had brought it up.

  Pontowski made a decision. “Let’s do it. Victor, get a liaison officer over here as soon as possible. Doc, you seem to have a clue, so work out the coordination. Maggot, cock the jets for launch at first light. And get some rest. You’re no good to me dead on your feet. Janice, see if you can get the rest of Rockne’s people here ASAP.” He stood up. “We came here to make a difference, folks.”

  Twenty-two

  Washington, D.C.

  Saturday, October 2

  The sure knowledge that the war had made her a prisoner of the White House grated on Madeline Turner like a rasping hot file, and she saw the election slipping away. But there wasn’t a choice, for the demands of handling a two-front war had to take priority. Still, it was a prison she loved, and she certainly had unrestricted visiting privileges. That was another problem, because the growing terrorist threat had forced the Secret Service to sharply curtail the daily tours. Across the street in Lafayette Park, a drummer had taken up a vigil and slowly beat a bass drum in protest over the war. Its dull, rhythmic cadence reached into the residence on the second floor, and when her chief of security suggested that the drummer could be made to disappear, Turner had immediately vetoed it. She would endure.

  “It is annoying,” she told Parrish as they made their way to the Situation Room for the afternoon briefing. “But that drummer’s almost become a tradition.” She allowed a tight smile. “And we mustn’t disturb tradition.” The Marine guard held the door open for her, and Parrish announced her presence. Besides the ExCom, the chief of Naval Operations was waiting for her. She sat down. “Mazie, gentlemen,” she said, “before we begin, I would like to announce that General Butler will be the acting DCI until we can identify a replacement. General Butler will be part of the selection process, but he’s declined to be the permanent director.” To tell from the nodding heads and looks around the table, it was a good decision. “Well, shall we get started?”

  The briefing had developed into a set pattern, with a heavy reliance on the monitors and a direct feed from the NMCC. The communications experts in the Pentagon had turned it into a slick and professional presentation geared solely for her consumption and available on demand. The president’s face was a frozen mask when the casualty lists flashed on the screen. They were eighteen hours into the renewed fighting, and twenty-six soldiers and airmen had been killed. The numbers beat at her with an intensity beyond anything in her experience, demand
ing a price. She was not an overtly religious person, but when she stood in front of her Creator, how could she justify so many deaths of the people she was sworn to protect? And the enemy? she thought. Have I no obligation to them? Yet this war was not of her making and had been thrust upon her by the very people she must kill. She would not shrink from it, but she prayed that there was such a thing as a just war.

  The screens with their messages of death and destruction shifted to the closing logos. General Wilding sensed what was troubling his president, and like her, he knew that there was no escape from what he had to do. “We’re still in a tactical retreat,” he said, “and falling back on prepared positions. It’s a tactical strategy that’s working well, and the UIF is advancing at a high cost in men and matériel. So far the Saudis have taken the brunt of the fighting and experienced most of the casualties, but we will go on the offensive.”

  “When?” was all Turner asked.

  “As soon as possible,” Wilding answered. “But logistics are a problem.” He turned to the CNO. “Admiral.”

  The man that stood up was a throwback to an earlier age, with his weather-beaten face and ruddy complexion. “Madam President, two convoys from Diego Garcia are en route to Saudi Arabia; one to Ad Dammām in the Persian Gulf, the other to the port at Jidda in the Red Sea.”

  Turner’s brow knitted. “I’m worried about those new mines we encountered and any submarines that might be a threat.”

  “Those mines,” the admiral said, “operate on a mass-sensing principle, and we’ve developed a countermeasure that’s almost too simple to believe. But it does appear to be effective. There are still three known submarines operating in the area. However, two Los Angeles–class attack submarines are escorting each of our convoys. If any of those unidentified submarines come within fifty miles of a convoy, those subs will experience a very short but exciting life.”

  “How soon before they dock?” she asked.

  “In six days,” came the answer. “On Friday.”