by Mack Maloney
Bata looked at the man, then at the airplane, and then at the briefcase full of money.
“But I can’t sell that airplane,” he stuttered. “Certainly not for two million.”
The man just smiled and said, “But you see, you have no choice in the matter. My employer wants the plane. Now. Tonight. And he always gets what he wants.”
Bata was sweating now. His superiors would never go for this. No matter who was making the offer.
He told the man as much.
“But you misunderstand,” the man replied. “This is not a payment from my employer to your government for the airplane. This is a personal payment. To you. To do with what you wish.”
The man looked at the case full of thousand-dollar bills. “And with money like this, I think my first instinct would be to resign my commission.”
With that, the man stood up, made a courteous, heel-clicking bow, and went out the door.
Bata sat for a long time looking at the money. Then finally, he took out a pen and paper and wrote out a very hasty letter of resignation. There would be no time to collect his family, of course. They would have to stay behind. But if he could get a car service tonight to carry him to Alwar, he could be anywhere—the Bahamas, South America, Monaco—by morning.
He took a handful of valuables from his desk, threw them in the briefcase, and then closed it and grabbed his hat. He looked out the window again to see that the airplane he’d essentially just been bribed for had a team of mechanics already swarming over it. He took a closer look. What were they doing?
It seemed like they were attaching some kind of elongated snout to the airplane, hastily riveting it in place. They were also painting it in an odd charcoal-gray color. One man was busy painting numbers on the underside of the fuselage. Another was standing up on the tail wing, doing the same thing.
What was this about? Bata wondered. Maybe Zim’s people were preparing the plane for an arms shipment, or for a drug run. Or maybe for a pickup of young girls for the white slavery market.
But in the next instant, Bata knew that it didn’t make a whit of difference to him what they were doing to the airplane. He took one last look around his office, sighed, shut off the lights, and left, the briefcase full of money tucked safely under his arm.
Yes, they could fly the airplane to the North Pole for all he cared.
Though he had heard that C-130’s were good for that sort of thing too.
Chapter 19
Considering everything involved, the takeoff from Heaven 2 went well.
The platform was just long enough to fulfill the need for a running start for all five helicopters. The Halos went up first, followed by the Hinds, and then finally, the gas-laden Hook. Once airborne, they formed up at one thousand feet and headed west.
During the day, Heaven 2 had inched its way up the Persian Gulf so that by launch time, it had positioned itself just off of Bubiyan Island, a lonely spit of land near the coast of northeast Kuwait. From there, it was only a matter of thirty-five miles to Iraq. The flight plan called for them to pass over land north of Basra, in a sector known as Khorra-sul-el. It was rugged, mountainous country, with few radar sites and known to be a slice of airspace rarely traveled by Iraqi aircraft because of its proximity to the very hostile border of Iran.
Once over this region, the five choppers turned north. They stayed in the same formation they’d practiced endlessly back over the Florida Straits. The two Hinds out front, the Halos next in line, with the Hook bringing up the rear. If all went well, they would reach the mountain hiding place just before midnight.
Both Hinds were equipped with a medium-range air-threat-warning radar. They were crude setups, but enough to tell Norton and Delaney if there were any other aircraft up there with them. There wasn’t—and that was not unexpected. First of all, the Iraqi Air Force didn’t fly very much, mostly because they had so very few airplanes to fly. Secondly, nearly two thirds of the country was covered by two U.S. patrolled No-Fly zones. Only helicopters could fly in these zones, so if they were to meet anyone up here, it would most likely be another chopper. But thirdly, the Iraqis rarely flew anything—choppers or warplanes—at night. Too superstitious, was how this was once explained to Norton.
Either way, the combination of these three factors gave the small helicopter force an open sky through which to infiltrate.
Norton just couldn’t help wondering during the flight, though, if the Iraqis knew something about flying at night that he didn’t.
* * *
The unit flew for exactly ninety-three minutes, over flooded marshes, rugged hillsides, vast desert.
At 2340 hours, Norton’s GPS scope began beeping. They were nearing their landing zone. He flipped down his NightScope eyepiece and sure enough, he could see the huge mountain of Ka-el looming in the distance.
But there was a problem.
A big problem.
On the other side of the mountain was a cloud of sand so large, it looked like a tidal wave rolling in on a beach.
Norton began blinking his navigation lights madly—and soon saw Delaney flying right beside him start blinking his in return. Now the other three choppers were signaling as well. They all saw the gigantic sandstorm. The question was, what to do now?
But this really wasn’t a question at all. There were no other options. They didn’t have enough gas to turn around and go back—not without a risky nighttime air-to-air refueling.
So they had no choice.
They had to keep going.
* * *
Norton was the first one to descend through the sandstorm.
His heart was beating right out of his chest. The love affair with the Hind was on hold for the moment. High winds were buffeting the Russian chopper all the way down. It sounded like he was being hit with a million rocks, especially around the canopy. He hoped the much-ballyhooed protection for the Hind’s power plants would prove true. Just one gust of sand sucked up into the copter’s engines, and it would be lights out forever.
Four hundred feet from landing and he was fighting the controls mightily. The Hind was great at going forward, but hovering was not one of its fortes. He was doing his best to keep the chopper level, but his biggest problem now was not the fiercely blowing sands, but something more devious: disorientation.
Keeping an airplane steady in relation to the ground was a hard enough job. Holding a chopper level in zero visibility was a real chore. It was really a mind-over-matter thing. The eyes won’t believe what the instruments are telling them, and the pilot puts the aircraft in a position he thinks is level. Trouble is, the instruments are almost always right—and the pilot’s instincts almost always wrong. There were recorded instances of chopper pilots running into sandstorms or heavy rain and actually turning themselves upside down—until they tried to land or went into a mountain. Disorientation was like breathing. If you thought too much about it, you got all fucked up.
At that moment Norton was trying his best not to think about either.
The chatter from his radio was not helping. All attention to security gone, the Army Aviation pilots were calling out numbers and positions to one another in breathlessly clipped fashion, a sure sign the pilots were getting stressed. Even Delaney was sounding a little nervous, yelling out his altitude readings as if the very sound of his voice was enough to will his chopper to the ground in one piece.
But finally, just like that, Norton broke through the bottom of the storm. He caught a quick, glimpse of the cliff face, and knew that he was much lower than he’d thought and going way too fast. He immediately gave the stick a yank and increased power. The front of the chopper bucked upwards, slamming his helmet against the top of canopy.
A second later, there was a mighty bump, a bounce, and a large crashing sound. And then nothing.
He was down.
Norton began frantically shutting down all the crucial systems aboard the Hind, lowering his electrical exposure as quickly as he could. His headphones were filled with
the stern relief of the other pilots as they too broke free of the sandstorm and came down on the deck— hard, but at least in one piece.
“Truck One down!”
“Truck Two down… copy.”
“Pumper down… and breathing…”
“Damn! Ouch … Hound Dog Two here …”
Norton smiled a moment. The last report was from Delaney. His chopper bounced in not a hundred feet from Norton’s own. His partner was just barely visible through the continuing swirl of sand.
Then the radios went silent again.
The wind got louder; the sandstorm was descending on top of them now. All sight of Delaney and the other choppers was quickly gone. Norton rechecked his control panel; everything that had to be shut down was off. Only the bare minimum of instruments were still lit.
He did a quick GPS check and confirmed that they had come down in the middle of the grid they had planned for. They were on the vast cliff halfway down the high mountain. The satellite systems never lied.
He killed the GPS screen, and found himself suddenly surrounded by complete darkness. The sand swirling, the wind screaming the aircraft rocking back and forth. Darkness…
He hated it.
But then an idea hit him. He turned on his NightScope and sure enough, he could see the Marines, pouring out of the choppers, some of them going into their defensive ring despite the howling winds. Others he could see running up to the waterfall of vines and pulling them aside. Thank goodness, there was a cave behind them.
“Hot damn!” Norton heard himself say for the first time in his life.
The next thing he knew, he was moving. He pressed his face against the cockpit window and saw two ghostly faces staring back in at him. They were air techs, two of the dozen who were part of the mission. All twelve were all around his chopper now. They were pushing it toward the cave opening. Just as they were supposed to.
Once inside the cavern, Norton could finally see again. He just stared out at the place. It was enormous, as big as if not bigger than Hangar 2 back at Seven Ghosts Key. The Marines already had a generator hooked up, and now some very dim bulbs were burning within. It gave everything, and everyone, a very ghostly appearance. And true enough, he could see bats fluttering around on the ceiling of the place.
Norton could hear voices and lots of banging. Finally he reached over and undid the clasp on his cockpit window. Someone on the other side flipped the glass door upwards. It was Delaney.
“Welcome to Bat Cave,” he said.
Chapter 20
The sun rose hot and burning over the hard desert.
The night had passed without incident in the cave. The Marines had dispensed a battery of motion detectors all over the flattened cliff as well as hanging many over the side of the mountain itself. Two squads of Marines had spent the night out on the ledge. Well hidden in their unmarked, Iraqi-style camouflage uniforms, they had set up powerful NightScopes, one pointing in just about every direction possible from the cliff’s location. The combination of the motion detectors and the NightScopes gave them eyes and ears that extended out for miles.
About a half mile from the base of the mountain, there was a highway that ran east to west. It was known to be little traveled, and true to form, not a single vehicle was seen on the roadway all night. In fact the unit’s electronic picket line had detected no movements—other than nocturnal animals—anywhere near the hiding spot.
By 0500, Norton and Delaney were ready to go.
The air techs had worked all night getting the Hinds in shape to do the first recon flight. Most of the long hours were spent extracting sand from critical systems. Norton and Delaney did their own extensive preflight inspection as well. Their weapons check went well, as did a communications test. Everything seemed to be in order aboard the tough Russian gunships.
They could only pray it would stay that way.
* * *
The Hinds were finally pushed out of the cave and into the dim sunlight at 0530 hours.
There was still an hour before sunrise. A sweep of the area proved their position had still not been compromised. The picket line of Marines on the cliff’s edge reported no activity in evidence, no traffic on the road to their south. Nothing flying anywhere overhead.
Norton and Delaney started their engines. The Russian choppers responded with the usual bang and storm of fire and smoke. But within seconds, the big rotors began turning, and soon were whirring with unbridled Russian efficiency.
They took off cleanly. Using extra power and the hard sand in front of the cave as their runway, they were up and away in less than 250 feet. The pair of Hinds immediately climbed up to five hundred feet and turned northwest. The first of what would probably be many recon flights was under way at last.
The desert now spread before them like a vast, golden vista. Norton had seen it before, of course. Nearly ten years ago, during Desert Storm, he’d flown over some of this same landscape. It was flat hard terrain in this region mostly, interspersed with rugged low hills. Moonlike. Desolate. Beautiful in the oddest way.
They flew northeast, following a course suggested to them by Smitz’s CIA bosses. They passed over a few scattered villages, some goat herds, some wheat fields, the occasional roadway. It was still very early in the morning, and very few people could be seen about. Those that did see the choppers had no noticeable reaction, even though flying as low as they were, the racket they were making must have been unbearable. Maybe this was what the people had come to expect from the Iraqi military. Waking up early to the sound of helicopter gunships was the least of their problems.
The open spaces and the sparseness of the land aided Norton and Delaney greatly in preserving their cover. And again, their disguise was simple. The sight of two Hinds roaring through the sky at sunrise was nothing new to anyone who spotted them from the ground.
Just as long as they acted like they were Iraqis, they would stay out of trouble.
* * *
They flew for forty minutes. Hugging the contours of the earth, following the flight plan, Delaney was leading the way, Norton off his wing.
Over the lowest of the Bala Ruz Mountains, between the Tariq-sum Hills, up and along the A1 Vzayn River, skirting the edge of Baghdad’s suburbs, and then moving northeast towards the Divala River basin.
It was odd, because it would have seemed that in a combat-imminent situation, one’s mind would be focused to the max. But this morning, for whatever reason, Norton’s thoughts began to wander.
What would happen if he and Delaney returned to the cave after this recon to find their position had been compromised and everyone butchered? A grisly thought, Norton told himself. Almost too grisly to enter his mind. Besides, if they had been compromised, wouldn’t they have been intercepted by now? Or would they find Fulcrums waiting for them when they returned to the hiding spot?
How about the gunship’s original crew? What were the chances that they’d all survived ten years of captivity? Would they be like Buchenwald prisoners when they were finally freed? Would they be insane? Brainwashed? Would their families still be waiting for them? Would they be heroes once they got home? Would they be hounded by the press? Asked to write books? Do the talk show circuit? Make movie deals?
Norton blinked, and suddenly he was inside the accursed Tin Can simulator again. In all those hours of training he never did figure out a way to nail the T-72 tank before the Fulcrums—or the SAMs or the AAA guns—nailed him. Maybe that was the reasoning behind the simulator training after all. Maybe that was a problem that just couldn’t be solved. Maybe he was actually on a suicide mission here, just another piece of fodder given up so the U.S. military could get back something it should never have lost in the first place.
Maybe, he was just a damn…
“Jazz! Jazz? You awake, man?”
Norton’s headphones were suddenly filled with the sound of Delaney’s very excited voice. He hit his silent-scramble-mode key and responded.
“I’m here… what’s
up?”
“What’s up?” Delaney came back. “Open your eyes, man. Dead ahead.”
Norton shook the last of his morbid thoughts away and took Delaney’s advice. His jaw dropped.
“Damn. Will you look at that…”
About five miles straight ahead was exactly what they were looking for. The shadow-filled valley. The prison building. The smoke-belching factory. The high, sharp-peaked mountains. Everything. It was the Ranch, just as it had been presented to them.
And sitting out on the highway that doubled as the runway was the ArcLight gunship. It was partially covered in tarpaulin, but Norton could see its elongated nose and its extra-wide fuselage poking out of the covering. Figures could be seen moving around the airplane and at various points on the base itself. The suspected AA guns and SAM sites were in evidence. There was even a T-72 battle tank sitting alongside the asphalt roadway.
“We just hit a home run,” Delaney was telling him through his headphones. “On our first at bat!”
Norton was so surprised by their sudden luck, he yanked back the throttles and slowed down a bit to take a better look. It had been almost too easy, but there was no denying that the CIA’s directions had brought them precisely to where they wanted to be. All the pieces fit. The buildings. The runway. The mountains. The billows of black from the factory smokestacks. And best of all, there was the gunship, sitting so fat and pretty, Norton felt he could reach out and touch it.
“Damn,” he said again. “This must be the place.”
* * *
Smitz was checking his NoteBook when he got word that the Hinds were returning.
He alerted Chou, and quickly a dozen Marines began clearing the opening to the cave. It was now 0830 hours, and the sun was up and visibility extremely clear. Getting the Hinds out of sight would be their number-one priority.
The two gunships came in for bumpy landings. No sooner had they stopped rolling when the air techs flooded out of the cave and began pushing them towards the opening.