by Tom Clancy
“Yeah, Ernie?” Holbrook reached for the TV controller and was about to unmute it.
“We got a constitutional crisis, right?”
It was Holbrook’s turn to look. “Yeah, that’s what all the talking heads say.”
“And it just got worse, right?”
“The Kealty thing? Sure looks that way.” Pete set the controller down. Ernie was having another idea attack.
“What if, um ...” Brown started and stopped, staring at the silent TV. It took time for his thoughts to form, Holbrook knew, though they were often worth waiting for.
THE 707 LANDED, finally, at Tehran-Mehrabad International Airport, well after midnight. The crew were zombies, having flown almost continuously for the past thirty-six hours, well over the cautious limits of civil aviation, abused all the more by the nature of their cargo, and in so foul a mood from it all that angry words had been traded during the long descent. But the aircraft touched down with a heavy thump, and with that came relief and embarrassment, which each of the three felt as they took a collective sigh. The pilot shook his head and rubbed his face with a tired hand, taxiing south, steering between the blue lights. This airport is also the site of Iranian military and air force headquarters. The aircraft completed its turn, reversing directions and heading for the spacious air force ramp area-though its markings were civil, the 707 actually belonged to the Iranian air force. Trucks were waiting there, the flight crew was glad to see. The aircraft stopped. The engineer switched off the engines. The pilot set the parking brakes. The three men turned inward.
“A long day, my friends,” the pilot said by way of apology.
“God willing, a long sleep to follow it,” the engineer—he’ d been the main target of his captain’s temper—replied, accepting it. They were all too weary to sustain an argument in any case, and after a proper rest they wouldn’t remember the reasons for it anyway.
They removed their oxygen masks, to be greeted by the thick fetid smell of their cargo, and it was everything they could do not to vomit as the cargo door was opened in the rear. They couldn’t leave just yet. The aircraft was well and truly stuffed with cages, and short of climbing out the windows—which was too undignified—they’d have to await their freedom, rather like passengers at any international terminal.
Soldiers did the unloading, a process made all the more difficult by the fact that no one had warned their commander to issue gloves, as the Africans had done. Every cage had a wire handle at the top, but the African greens were every bit as testy as the men up front, clawing and scratching at the hands trying to lift them. Reactions differed among the soldiers. Some slapped at the cages, hoping to cow the monkeys into passivity. The smart ones removed their field jackets and used them as a buffer when they handled the cages. Soon a chain of men was established, and the cages were transferred, one at a time, to a series of trucks.
The procedure was noisy. It was barely fifty degrees in Tehran that night, far below what the monkeys were accustomed to, and that didn’t help their collective mood any more than anything else that had happened to them over the past few days. They responded to the newest trauma with screeches and howls that echoed across the ramp. Even people who’d never heard monkeys before would not mistake it for anything else, but that could not be helped. Finally it was done. The cabin door opened, and the crew had a chance to look at what had become of their once-spotless aircraft. It would be weeks before they got the smell out, they were sure, and just scrubbing it down would be an onerous task best not considered at the moment. Together they walked aft, then down the stairs and off to where their cars were parked.
The monkeys headed north in what for them was their third or fourth-and last journey by truck. It was a short one, up a divided highway, over a cloverleaf interchange built under the reign of the Shah, then west to Hasanabad. Here there was a farm, long since set aside for the same purpose which had occasioned the transport of the monkeys from Africa to Asia. The farm was state-owned, used as an experimental station to test new crops and fertilizers, and it had been hoped that the produce grown here would feed the new arrivals, but it was still winter and nothing was growing at the moment. Instead, several truckloads of dates from the southeastern region of the country had just arrived. The monkeys smelled them as their transport pulled up to the new three-story concrete building that would be their final home. It only agitated them all the more, since they’d had neither food nor water since leaving the continent of their birth, but at least it gave them the hope of a meal, and a tasty one at that, as a last meal is supposed to be.
THE GULFSTREAM U-IV touched down at Benghazi exactly on its flight plan. It had actually been as pleasant a journey as was possible under the circumstances. Even the normally roiled air over the central Sahara had been calm, making for a smooth ride. Sister Jean Baptiste had remained unconscious for most of the flight, drifting into semi-awareness only a few times, and soon drifting back out again, actually more comfortable than the other four people aboard, whose protective garb prevented even a sip of water.
The doors never opened on the aircraft. Instead fuel trucks pulled up and their drivers dismounted to attach hoses to the caps in the long white wings. Dr. Moudi was still tensely awake. Sister Maria Magdalena was dozing. She was as old as the patient, and had scarcely slept in days, devoted as she was to her colleague. It was too bad, Moudi thought, frowning as he looked out the window. It was unjust. He didn’t have it in his heart to hate these people anymore. He’d felt that way once. He’d thought all Westerners were enemies of his country, but these two were not. Their home country was essentially neutral toward his. They were not the animistic pagans of Africa, ignorant and uncaring of the true God. They’d devoted their lives to service in His name, and both had surprised him by showing respect for his personal prayers and devotions. More than anything, he respected their belief that faith was a path to progress rather than acceptance of preordained destiny, an idea not totally congruent with his Islamic beliefs, but not exactly contrary to them either. Maria Magdalena had a rosary in her hands—disinfected—which she used to organize her prayers to Mary, mother of Jesus the prophet, venerated as thoroughly in the Koran as in her own abbreviated scriptures, and as fine a model for women to follow as any woman who had ever lived ...
Moudi snapped his head away from them to look outside. He couldn’t allow such thoughts. He had a task, and here were the instruments of that task, one’s fate assigned by Allah, and the other’s chosen by herself—and that was that. The task was without, not within, not one of his making, a fact made clear when the fuel trucks pulled away and the engines started up again. The flight crew was in a hurry, and so was he, the better to get the troublesome part of his mission behind, and the mechanical part begun. There was reason to rejoice. All those years among pagans, living in tropical heat, not a mosque within miles of his abode. Miserable, often tainted food, always wondering if it was clean or unclean, and never really being sure. That was behind him. What lay before was service to his God and his country.
Two aircraft, not one, taxied off to the main north-south runway, jostling as they did so on concrete slabs made uneven by the murderous desert heat of summer and the surprising cold of winter nights. The first of them was not Moudi’s. That G-IV, outwardly identical in every way but a single digit’s difference on the tail code, streaked down the runway and lifted off due north. His aircraft duplicated the takeoff roll, but as soon as the wheels were up, this G-IV turned right for a southeasterly heading toward Sudan, a lonely aircraft in a lonely desert night.
The first turned slightly west, and entered the normal international air corridor for the French coast. In due course, it would pass near the island of Malta, where a radar station existed to serve the needs of the airport at Valetta and also to perform traffic-control duties for the central Mediterranean. The crew of this aircraft were all air force types who customarily flew political and business luminaries from point to point, which was safe, well paid, and boring. Tonig
ht would be different. The co-pilot had his eyes fixed jointly on his knee chart and the GPS navigation system. Two hundred miles short of Malta, at a cruising altitude of 39,000 feet, he took the nod from the pilot and flipped the radar transponder setting to 7711.
“VALETTA APPROACH. VALETTA Approach, this is November-Juliet-Alpha, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
The controller at Valetta immediately noted the triple-bogie signature on his scope. It was a quiet watch at the traffic-control center, the normally sparse air traffic to monitor, and this night was as routine as any other-he keyed his microphone at once as his other hand waved for his supervisor.
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, are you declaring an emergency, sir?”
“Valetta, Juliet-Alpha, affirmative. We are medical evacuation flight inbound Paris from Zaire. We just lost number-two engine and we have electrical problems, stand by—”
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, standing by, sir.” The scope showed the aircraft’s altitude as 390, then 380, then 370. “Juliet-Alpha, Valetta, I show you losing altitude.”
The voice in his headphones changed. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Both engines out, both engines out. Attempting restart. This is Juliet-Alpha.”
“Your direct penetration course Valetta is three-four-three, say again, direct vector Valetta three-four-three. We are standing by, sir.”
A terse, clipped “Roger” was all the controller got back. The altitude readout was 330 now.
“What’s happening?” the supervisor asked.
“He says both engines out, he’s dropping rapidly.” A computer screen showed the aircraft to be a Gulfstream, and the flight plan was confirmed.
“It glides well,” the supervisor offered optimistically; 310, they both saw. The G-IV didn’t glide all that well, however.
“Juliet-Alpha, Valetta.”
Nothing.
“Juliet-Alpha, this is Valetta Approach.”
“What else is—” The supervisor checked the screen himself. No other aircraft in the area, and all one could do was watch anyway.
THE BETTER TO simulate the in-flight emergency, the pilot throttled his engines back to idle. The tendency was to ham things up, but they wouldn’t. In fact, they’d say nothing else at all. He pushed the yoke farther forward to increase his rate of descent, then turned to port as though angling toward Malta. That should make the tower people feel good, he thought, passing through 25,000 feet. It actually felt good. He’d been a fighter pilot for his country once, and missed the delightful feelings you got from yanking and banking an airplane around the sky. A descent of this speed would have his passengers white-faced and panicking. For the pilot it just felt like what flying was supposed to be.
“HE MUST BE very heavy,” the supervisor said.
“Cleared into Paris De Gaulle.” The controller shrugged and grimaced. “Just topped off in Benghazi.”
“Bad fuel?” The answer was merely another shrug.
It was like watching death on television, all the more horrible that the alpha-numeric blip’s altitude digits were clicking down like the symbols on a slot machine.
The supervisor lifted a phone. “Call the Libyans. Ask if they can get a rescue aircraft up. We have an aircraft about to go down in the Gulf of Sidra.”
“Valetta Approach, this is USS Radford, do you copy, over.”
“Radford, Valetta.”
“WE HAVE YOUR contact on radar. Looks like he’s coming down hard.” The voice was that of a junior-grade lieutenant who had the CIC duty this night. Radford was an aging Spruance-class destroyer heading for Naples after an exercise with the Egyptian navy. Along the way she had orders to enter the Gulf of Sidra to proclaim freedom-of-navigation rights, an exercise which was almost as old as the ship herself. Once the source of considerable excitement, and two pitched air-sea battles in the 1980s, it was now boringly routine, else Radford wouldn’t be going it alone. Boring enough that the CIC crewmen were monitoring civilian radio freqs to relieve their torpor. “Contact is eight-zero miles west of us. We are tracking.”
“Can you respond to a rescue request?”
“Valetta, I just woke the captain up. Give us a few to get organized here, but we can make a try for it, over.”
“Dropping like a rock,” the petty officer on the main scope reported. “Better pull out soon, fella.”
“Target is a Gulf-Four business jet. We show him one-six-thousand and descending rapidly,” Valetta advised.
“Thank you, that’s about what we have. We are standing by.”
“What gives?” the captain asked, dressed in khaki pants and a T-shirt. The report didn’t take long. “Okay, get the rotor heads woke up.” Next the commander lifted a growler phone. “Bridge, CIC, captain speaking. All ahead full, come right to new course—”
“Two-seven-five, sir,” the radar man advised. “Target is two-seven-five and eighty-three miles.”
“New course two-seven-five.”
“Aye, sir. Coming right to two-seven-five, all ahead full, aye,” the officer of the deck acknowledged. On the bridge the quartermaster of the watch pushed down the direct engine-control handles, dumping additional fuel into the big GE jet-turbines. Radford shuddered a bit, then settled at the stern as she began to accelerate up from eighteen knots. The captain looked around the capacious combat information center. The crewmen were alert, a few shaking their heads to come fully awake. The radarmen were adjusting their instruments. On the main scope, the display changed, the better to lock in the descending aircraft.
“Let’s go to general quarters,” the skipper said next. Might as well get some good training time out of this. In thirty seconds, everyone aboard was startled into consciousness and running to stations.
YOU HAVE TO be careful descending to the ocean surface at night. The pilot of the G-IV kept a close eye on his altitude and rate of descent. The lack of good visual references made it all too easy to slam into the surface, and while that might have made their evening’s mission perfect, it wasn’t supposed to be that perfect. In another few seconds they’d drop off the Valetta radar scope, and then they could start pulling out of the dive. The only thing that concerned him now was the possible presence of a ship down there, but no wakes were visible before him in the light of a quarter moon.
“I have it,” he announced when the aircraft dropped through five thousand feet. He eased back on the yoke. Valetta might note the change in descent rate from his transponder, if they were still getting a signal, but even if they did, they’d assume that after diving to get airflow into his engines, the better to achieve a restart, he was now trying to level out for a controlled landing on the calm sea.
“LOSING HIM,” THE controller said. The display on the screen blinked a few times, came back, then went dark.
The supervisor nodded and keyed his microphone. “Radford, this is Valetta. Juliet-Alpha has dropped off our screen. Last altitude reading was six thousand and descending, course three-four-three.”
“VALETTA, ROGER, WE still have him, now at four thousand, five hundred, rate of descent has slowed down some, course three-four-three,” the CIC officer replied. Just six feet away from him, the captain was talking with the commander of Radford’s air detachment. It would take more than twenty minutes to get the destroyer’s single SH-60B Seahawk helicopter launched. The aircraft was now being pre-flighted prior to being pulled out onto the flight deck. The helicopter pilot turned to look at the radar display.
“Calm seas. If he has half a brain, somebody might just walk away from this. You try to splash down parallel to the ground swells and ride it out. Okay, we’re on it, sir.” With that, he left the CIC and headed aft.
“Losing him under the horizon,” the radar man reported. “Just passed through fifteen hundred. Looks like he’s going in.”
“Tell Valetta,” the captain ordered.
THE G-IV LEVELED out at five hundred feet by the radar altimeter. It was as low as the pilot cared to risk. With that done, he powered the engines back up to cruising powe
r and turned left, south, back toward Libya. He was fully alert now. Flying low was demanding under the best circumstances, and far more so over water at night, but his orders were clear, though their purpose was not. It went rapidly in any case. At just over three hundred knots, he had forty minutes to the military airfield, at which he’d refuel one more time for a flight out of the area.
RADFORD WENT TO flight quarters five minutes later, altering course slightly to put the wind over the deck from the proper direction. The Seahawk’s tactical navigation system copied the needed data from the ship’s CIC. It would search a circle of water fifteen miles in diameter in a procedure that would be tedious, time-consuming, and frantic. There were people in the water, and rendering assistance to those in need was the first and oldest law of the sea. As soon as the helicopter lifted off, the destroyer came back left and raced off with all four main engines turning full power, driving the ship at thirty-four knots. By this time the captain had radioed his situation to Naples, requesting additional assistance from any nearby fleet units—there were no American ships in the immediate vicinity, but an Italian frigate was heading south for their area, and even the Libyan air force asked for information.