As long as the two Libyans remained alive in the test chamber, Vasilev knew the Libyan madman Alqahiray would leave them to their work. He turned and stared at the missiles below them and thanked the lax security that left them alone. When everyone had poured a small shot of the fiery liquid, he proposed a toast and then began to outline his plan.
FIVE
Duncan grabbed his carbine as he threw his small combat pack across his shoulder. “Let’s go!” he shouted over the engine and propeller noise of the CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter waiting on the flight deck of the USS Stennis, Eight hours ago, he had been sipping beer at the military airport in Naples. Now he was leading two teams of SEALs back into Algeria because his friend, Bashir, refused to tell anyone else the location of the American hostages. He waited a couple of seconds before joining the other seven members of the team as they ran toward the helicopter.
General Lewis, the commander, Joint Task Force, had all but accused Duncan of being the reason that Bashir wouldn’t tell Bulldog Stewart where the hostages were being held. What the hell was an Army general doing in charge of a Navy-Marine Corps mission? They could carry this jointness shit too far.
If he didn’t shoot the fat Bedouin smuggler. Beau might. Duncan tossed his pack into the back of the helicopter and leaped aboard. He did a quick calculation. If they had made that freedom bird at Naples, he, Beau, and HJ would have been somewhere over the eastern Atlantic right now, sipping free airline drinks and watching some nondescript movie as they dozed off. Yeah, he might just have to beat Beau to the Bedouin.
Beau, HJ, and Bud Helliwell rolled in after him. Bud had his cast off, fracture instead of broken arm, he argued. Duncan was glad to see the mustang Navy SEAL, even though he doubted the fracture story. HJ and Bud had been talking nonstop since the two had linked up again after the rest of the SEAL team arrived on the carrier two hours earlier. Strange how a little over a month ago, he had to separate the two when they first met on the USS Nassau. Bud had been adamantly opposed to a woman SEAL, and HJ offered to rip his lips off.
The two were wounded, fighting back-to-back, at the death village. Death village was how Duncan and the others referred to a small inland Algerian agricultural village where they had stopped to refuel Bashir’s rusty truck. None of them could pronounce the Arabic name for the village. Dead bodies had swayed from streetlights, and stacks of others executed by the rebels lay on top of each other along white plaster walls streaked with dried blood. Halfway through refueling, the rebels discovered them. The SEALs, the Algerian palace guard, along with Bashir and his smugglers, found themselves fighting for their lives. HJ and Bud had fought a covering action only to be overrun and wounded. HJ had been captured. She was within minutes of being raped when Duncan and the other SEAL members had rushed the room and freed her. Duncan could only guess how the event traumatized her. She had refused evacuation to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda.
HJ elbowed Bud in the side lightly, pointing to Beau leaning his head against the bulkhead of the helicopter, his eyes shut. The two laughed, with HJ mumbling something to Bud. Duncan thought her lips formed the words
“Moroccan Watoosie,” a bar near the hotel, which Beau enjoyed for its mature floor show.
You couldn’t separate HJ and Bud. Nothing bonded like combat and surviving death together. Every time you crossed paths — four weeks or four years later — it became a family reunion.
The crew chief of the helicopter stood in the open doorway, pointing and pushing the SEALs toward their seats. Duncan threw himself into the nearest webbed seat and shoved his pack beneath it. He rubbed his right knee. The cartilage grating against the bone had caused it to swell again. One of these days, some doctor was going to notice, and that would be it. What was he talking about? Here it was the second week of August. Before the world had gone to shit in a hand basket, he would have been forcibly retired by now. Probably when this mess was over, they would send him packing, but until then, he would work his butt off.
He touched the short message received when he arrived aboard the carrier and before he had spoken with General Lewis. His wife had returned and moved back into their house in Reston. She blamed Duncan for their troubles, but the affair with the Safeway boy toy seemed to be over. The Virginia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had a civil warrant waiting for Duncan, accusing him of animal cruelty. He felt bad about the dog. He should have shown more remorse and buried the dog in the front yard when he discovered it. Then he could have put a gigantic tombstone directly over the mutt’s grave, and his wife could slap flowers on it every day, for all he cared. He should have known that drowning one’s sorrows in alcohol only made things worse. It definitely did for him. Unfortunately, he still cared for her.
He watched as the members of the team piled aboard. Everyone, with the exception of the new chief petty officer, had been with them when they rescued President Hawaii Alneuf, the last freely elected president of Algeria. It was amazing how resilient the human body is, especially when you’re younger. Every one of them had suffered a battle wound of some sort during the week they evaded the Algerian rebels to rescue President Alneuf.
Monkey and Mcdonald crawled aboard, their heavy M-60 machine guns hefted across their shoulders. Monkey had suffered minor legs wounds from wood splinters caused by a rebel grenade exploding on the old pier from where they were making their escape out to sea. His large refrigerator-like frame blocked the door, causing Mcdonald to step back, hurling friendly insults, until Monkey crawled aboard. Everyone called him Monkey because of the thick dark hair covering him from his head to the tops of his feet. A thick mass covered the muscular arms of the giant.
“He’s got hands that would make a proctologist envious,” Beau had remarked about Monkey. He did have huge hands, Duncan thought, wondering briefly how such a large finger could insert itself inside a trigger guard.
He recalled the scene at the village when they had stopped to gas Bashir’s Volvo truck and found themselves under attack by rebels. He and Beau had been racing down the hill after rescuing HJ to see Monkey fighting two of the attackers. The huge Navy SEAL held one by the throat with his left hand, about a foot off the ground, as a second attacker charged. Duncan recalled the effortless way Monkey had backhanded the charging rebel, knocking him to the ground, as he broke the neck of the one he held and, in a smooth motion, pulled his knife to dispatch the one scrambling up from the ground. For such a large man, Monkey moved gracefully in dealing death.
Mcdonald was the handsome one of the group and the shy one. Gibbons enjoyed ribbing Mcdonald about being one of many long-lost grandsons of Errol Flynn. Mcdonald seldom talked, but he was a demon with the heavy machine gun. His thick black hair and thin mustache gave him the Errol Flynn look that earned him Gibbons’s attention. He had been the only one to come out of the rescue mission with just minor scratches and a couple of relatively shallow shrapnel wounds. His time in the Stennis hospital had been limited to a couple of hours, before they released him.
Gibbons had had a rough ride. The Afro-American had been blown off the boat during the sea battle with the Algerian Kebir patrol boat. It had been Monkey who leaned over the side and pulled the drowned man back on board and administered the lifesaving CPR that brought Gibbons back to this world. One more example, Duncan was sure, that sealed the special friendship these two men from Newark had for each other. He knew Gibbons wouldn’t be far from Monkey. The two were inseparable.
Bud Helliwell, the mustang ensign, had broken his arm during the battle at death village. At the time, his arm had been covered in blood, and Duncan thought the wound was worse than it was. Only later did they discover the blood had come from minor but numerous shrapnel wounds caused when a grenade blew up near him. Bud seemed fully recovered.
Duncan doubted the mustang was telling the whole truth about it being a hairline fracture, but he felt better having a SEAL with Helliwell’s combat experience along, even with a broken arm.
The ne
w senior enlisted sailor, Gunners Mate Chief Alonzo Wilcox, stood on the other side of the open door of the helicopter, waiting until everyone was aboard. Satisfied, the thin, wiry Afro-American chief crawled inside and gave Duncan a thumbs-up. Duncan nodded. Chief Wilcox slapped the crew chief on the shoulder and took one of the canvas sling seats across from Lieutenant Commander Beau Pettigrew, accidentally bumping Beau’s combat boot with his as he sat down.
Beau leaned forward and uncrossed his arms. He bent over and shoved his pack under the canvas seat. Duncan slapped him on the shoulder and grinned. He depended on the brown — now blond — haired, blue-eyed Adonis from Newnan, Georgia. They both knew that Beau’s chances for making full commander had improved significantly with the war in Korea and this crisis in North Africa. Admiral Hodges, the head SEAL at the Pentagon, expected the Navy to pass over Beau Pettigrew, but Admiral Hodges was gone, a victim of Pentagon intrigue. Being politically astute was important for a military officer assigned duties in Washington, but most were less than qualified for the political intrigue common among the professional cannibals who inhabited the jungles of the Potomac.
Duncan believed but could hardly prove that Beau had been targeted to be passed over for promotion because of misplaced personal jealousy the admiral carried for him. Whatever Duncan had done to earn the admiral’s are, had been sufficient that during last year’s Selected Early Retirement Board, the admiral had reached out and touched Duncan’s name.
The January letter ordering Duncan to retire by August — this same month as he sat here in this vibrating piece of military hardware put together by the lowest bidder — had arrived at his house with no prior warning or expectation. He believed the problems between him and his wife started about then. The letter had hit him hard and, down deep. It took a couple of months for him to come to terms with the letter, and during that time, the angry depression he suffered probably drove her into another man’s arms. Duncan shut his eyes for several seconds. If only he could change the past.
HJ reached out, touched Beau’s knee, and gave him a thumbs-up. The noise of the helicopter vibrating through the open door made normal conversation impossible. HJ had been the biggest surprise when Hodges had called Duncan and Beau to the Pentagon to order them to the Nassau Amphibious Task Force. HJ was the first woman to complete Basic Underwater Demolition, BUDs, training at Coronado. The admiral had ordered Duncan to give her a good report when they returned from what was supposed to have been a bilateral training exercise with Spanish Special Forces at Gibraltar. It had been today at Naples when he realized the admiral had really expected him to sink her, if not because of her performance, then because of the animosity between him and the admiral. As it was, his report had validated the presence of qualified women in the Navy SEAL program, but only if they were qualified physically and mentally, and that meant not lowering standards one iota. He imagined the groans and curses echoing through the halls of the Pentagon when his letter hit the desk of William Tecumseh Hodges. Captain Ray Jordan, the acting head of the SEAL community, would do the right thing. He would add his own comments and forward it to the chief of Naval Operations who would make a decision — usually a fair, equitable, and right decision for the Navy.
The big challenge would be political, because most of the women who would apply would fail, and then you would get the PC do-gooders involved. He didn’t want to think about it.
Duncan recalled HJ’s capture. She had only been a prisoner for about thirty minutes before Duncan, Beau, Chief Judiah, and Gibbons had overrun the rebels, but in those minutes, he could only imagine the horror of what she went through. He recalled how on the water carrier they stole to escape out to sea, before the rebel Kebir patrol craft caught up and began shelling them, how he had tried to talk with her about the short captivity. She had lost her temper. She told him that every woman in the military knew something like this could happen, and it was up to her to handle it. He presumed she shoved the incident to some deep recess in her mind to never discuss or visit again, but if she had, then she had done something he knew he could never do. On the other hand, he worried too much about her.
Chief Judiah had died on the mission. He and the Algerian palace guard commanding officer, Colonel Daoud Yosef, had stayed behind on the pier to blow it so Duncan and the others could get the slow-moving water carrier away with President Alneuf. It had been a loose plan, calling for the two men to set the explosives, run to the end of the pier, and jump, whereupon Duncan and the others would reach into the water and pull them aboard.
The explosion had happened, but when the smoke cleared, the two men were gone.
Duncan had no way of knowing that both Chief Judiah and Colonel Yosef had been Israeli Mossad agents. When the two men had activated smoke grenades at the pier, Israeli frogmen had appeared and helped the two destroy the wooden pier before escaping to an Israeli Gal submarine loitering offshore.
The sound of repeated bongs broke over the noise of the vibrating props.
“General quarters, general quarters. All hands, man your battle stations. This is not a drill. This is not a drill.”
The helicopter blasted skyward off the flight deck of the USS Stennis, throwing the crew chief toward the open door. Duncan leaned forward against the seat belt restraints and grabbed the petty officer’s arm. At the same time, Chief Wilcox caught the man’s leg in the crook of his arm.
The crew chief nodded at Duncan and the chief, bracing himself against the sides of the helicopter. Chief Wilcox released the man. The crew chief weaved his way forward as the aircraft bounced through the air, changing altitude and direction to increase the distance from the huge aircraft carrier.
Beau leaned over to Duncan, putting his mouth near Duncan’s ear. The two bounced against each other as the helicopter weaved and jumped through the air. “What in the hell is going on?” he shouted.
“I don’t know!” Duncan shouted over the noise of the weaving CH-53.
The helicopter dropped, causing everyone to feel a moment of weightlessness as their bodies fought to catch up with the machine. They were slammed forward as the helicopter jerked sharply to the right. The heavy CH-53E reversed direction and began a steep, rapid climb. G forces jerked them back against the canvas straps. The passengers’ bodies pressed down on the web seats. The unlucky ones with the crossbar between their legs had the metal forced up into their crotches. Monkey and Mcdonald wrapped their legs around the M-60s, keeping the heavy weapons from knocking them senseless as the g forces tried to rip them from their hands.
“Damn, that hurt!” Beau shouted, shoving himself up slightly off the metal bar.
The helicopter jerked left, throwing everyone against the bulkhead. Then it leveled out, increased speed, and began a rapid move forward.
The young crew chief, Duncan figured early twenties, staggered back, holding onto the overhead metal railing until he stood in front of Duncan. A long wire trailed along the floor, running from a socket behind the cockpit to the earphones he wore. He held a push-to-talk mechanism in his hand.
“What’s going on?” Duncan asked the man, speaking slowly and forming each word with his lips deliberately.
“Captain, they have gone to general quarters in the battle group.”
“I heard the call to general quarters. Now, tell me why.”
“Two bogies inbound toward the battle group.”
“Bogies?”
“Yes, sir. Algerian warplanes, but this is the third general quarters we’ve had in two days. I think it’s another bust for those in combat,” the crew chief said, referring to the officers and sailors manning the aircraft carrier’s Combat Information Center.”
“What does that do to us?”
“Captain, the bogies are between us and Algiers. We are bingoing west and will cross the coast farther down and approach Algiers from that direction.”
“Okay, keep me up to date,” Duncan said, recalling that the coastal area to the west belonged to the rebels, and like most non-aviators,
he believed that one well-placed bullet could send a helicopter down. The Sea Stallions were the best for this mission, and the extra armor added to the floor stopped all but the heaviest of hand-carried weapons.
TWO MARINE CORPS F/A-18 HORNETS FROM THE MOONlighter Squadron turned together to the right, completing another figure-eight pattern to the east of the carrier battle group — one of three Combat Air Patrols conducting twenty four-hour-a-day coverage. Chris Miller and Panope Lassiter had been on their CAP station thirty minutes when the Stennis Battle Group sounded general quarters.
“Alfa Papa Leader, this is November Bravo,” came the call over Chris and Panope’s headset as the Stennis’s air intercept controller called Chris.
“November Bravo, Alfa Papa,” Chris replied.
“Two bogies inbound battle group. Full power, come left to two zero zero, descend to one two zero. Bogies bear one niner zero on course three three zero. Speed three five zero knots. Altitude one zero zero,” the AIC broadcasted, telling the two hornets, known as Alfa Papa formation, that the two unidentified enemy aircraft were on a course of three three zero at ten thousand feet, heading toward the Stennis battle group. The two unidents were traveling at 350 knots.
“Alfa Papa two, let’s go. Left turn, afterburner on. Weapon systems on!” shouted Chris to Panope.
The two F/A-18s turned in unison, and as Chris descended, Panope increased speed to take position on the left, slightly to the rear, as he followed the formation leader down.
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