Scorpion Strike

by Nance, John J. ;

  Doug looked at the aircraft commander and shrugged. “They just said the magic words.”

  In a particular room in the middle of a nondescript building in downtown Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, known as Lighthouse, an agitated Lieutenant Colonel Jensen replaced the microphone and sighed. After eight months he was mentally and emotionally exhausted, and ready to go home. No one was supposed to know yet that there had been a major accident with a MAC aircraft at the classified staging base known as Sandy 101, and he couldn’t tell two-five-five anything about the destination.

  And he certainly couldn’t tell him that the real reason for snatching him out of the sky had nothing to do with evacuating the crash survivors.

  He didn’t blame the angry colonel in two-five-five for being upset. He was going to be even angrier when he discovered he’d been lied to, and that the real air evac would be handled by a C-130 now getting ready to leave Dhahran on the coast—just as the colonel had suggested. Screwing around with a full bull colonel could be hazardous to the health of your career.

  Jensen glanced over at Major Walker, who had been watching anxiously a few feet away. He’d have to have a few words with Walker about authentication codes, as well as about the distinct advantages to one’s career of taking the time to check the rank of those you intend to intimidate.

  Sandy 101

  Wednesday, March 6, 1991—7:10 P.M. (1610 GMT)

  Will had made the decision on the brief dash back to the ALCE. As he saw it, there was no other way. Sending in one of his highly trained SOLL aircrews was one thing, but diverting a C-141 crew on a routine mission and forcing them into a combat situation while he directed things from the rear was entirely another. He couldn’t stay behind. He would fly this one himself.

  Will Westerman blew into the ALCE unit with the sound of ticking clocks in his head. They had less than two hours to launch.

  “Any word?”

  “Yes sir.” Major Jerry Ronson was holding the satellite phone as Will crossed the floor in a heartbeat. “They’ve diverted a 141 headed from Jiddah to Dhahran. The crew spent the night in Jiddah, so they’re fresh if you need to use them. The mission is MAC Alpha seven-two-five-five, tail number six-oh-one-four-one. They had some trouble getting them to accept the divert, but they’re on their way.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Lighthouse blew the authentication codes twice.”

  “Wonderful example. How about the air evac?”

  There was a hesitation and Will read frustration in Ronson’s eyes.

  “He’s supposed to launch from Dhahran in forty-five minutes. That’ll put him in here in two hours, which is when you’re scheduled out, and about the same time the storm front is supposed to roll over us.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I begged for an earlier departure. By the way, two-fifty-five’s crew think they’re the air evac.”

  “I wish they were,” Will replied. “I also wish this were a MAC base with other crew members we could press into service, not to mention a backup airplane. We should have planned this mission to launch from Riyadh, dammit!”

  Ronson watched Will Westerman and said nothing, which was always the cautious response to rhetorical statements by senior officers.

  I wish the hell this mission was in Riyadh too! Ronson thought to himself, being careful to keep a poker face. From his point of view, the whole operation was an unwelcome intrusion into what had become a routine, if painful, exile. Before Will Westerman had breezed into town thirty hours ago, Ronson had been able to keep a low profile in what, for a MAC troop, was a backwater of the war. All he and the two sergeants had to do was take care of two or three MAC flights that dropped in each day to unload cargo, refuel, and leave. The rest of the time he could spend writing letters, sleeping, or just feeling generally miserable at being away from home and family.

  But now, with the special mission and the crash, the whole goddamned Air Force would be swarming all over the place for weeks, and he’d be in a fishbowl.

  Ronson raised an index finger to snag Westerman’s attention.

  “Sir, one more item. We’ve received word that the Balair DC-10 was airborne at four-five, the last hour. He’s twenty-two minutes ahead of schedule.”

  Will just stared at Ronson for a second as the other members of the ALCE crew—a chief master sergeant and a technical sergeant—wondered what DC-10 they were talking about. Only Major Ronson had been briefed fully.

  Will Westerman slapped the desk gently with his hand, looking back over his shoulder. “Chief Taylor? Sergeant … what was your name again? Richards? Sorry. You fellows come here a second.”

  They assembled silently next to Jerry Ronson.

  “Here’s what we’ve got to do. I’m out of time, and I’m the interloper on this base. You guys have been here awhile—you know the ropes. Now, I’ve got two pilots hurt, two crewmen dead, and a fifth in severe emotional distress even if he’s not hurt. The A/C may have a broken neck—I’m not sure about the copilot. We’ve got to get them to a properly equipped hospital, and I need all your creative energies to get that done, sandstorms or no sandstorms. For my part, I’ve got to concentrate fully on launching this mission on time.” They all nodded solemnly.

  “Item one: We’ve got to bulldoze that wreckage off the runway within fifteen minutes. Try not to crumple it, but get it off, and if you can unload the one pallet of material—provided it didn’t burn—do it. Chief Taylor, can you manage that?”

  The chief master sergeant looked startled. “Uh, two problems, sir. One, MAC and Air Force regulations say we can’t move the wreckage, and in fact we may do far more damage to the fuselage if we push or pull her off without lifting her with a crane onto dollies and all the other procedures you’re supposed to—”

  “We have no time for that, Chief. It’s on my head if I’m second-guessed wrong, but at this point, even if it was a perfectly serviceable airplane, I wouldn’t care if we tore it up. We have to clear that runway.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We can discuss the legalities at my court-martial. What’s the second problem?”

  “The Saudi colonel who commands this base, sir, will want to follow regulations and shut everything down. He has already. The airfield is technically closed. You may need to talk to him.”

  Will looked the chief in the eye for a moment. “Set it up, and brief me on where the tripwires are before he gets here.”

  “Sir, you mean I should summon him over here? To a Saudi commander, that would be considered a deep insult, I—”

  “Invite him, beg him, bribe him, or trick him. I’m not kidding, I don’t have time to go to him. Do we have bulldozers?”

  “The Army guys do, sir.”

  “Call them. Get them out there right now. Don’t wait for permission.”

  “Colonel al Rashir will go berserk, sir!”

  “Let him. Second item: I need the K-loaders and forklifts standing by, manned, gassed, and running the second two-fifty-five parks. I need someone to meet the crew and escort them here—all of them. I don’t want anyone left out there to argue and slow us down. As soon as they’re away from the airplane, unload it and dump the pallets anywhere you can. Take their personal bags and put them in one of the pickups and bring them here. I’ll need one of their pilots and all of their enlisted to fly with me. I’ll kick that colonel loose, whoever he is.”

  Ronson looked startled. “Sir, you’re flying the mission?”

  “No choice, Jerry. Now, upload the mission vehicles just as quickly as you get her emptied, and put the planned fuel load on board. Start fueling her the second the crew is clear.”

  “In other words,” Taylor volunteered, “we steal the airplane.”

  “In so many words.” Will felt himself smile slightly. “Item three, call the British squadron and ask them to please launch a Jaguar or something out there to meet two-fifty-five at the holding point and escort her in. It’s stupid, but even though the war’s over, we still can’t talk about this base
in the clear. We can’t just call up two-fifty-five and tell him where we are. We can’t even turn on the navigation aids until he’s within twenty miles, and I guess we’ll have to violate the rules and give him the Tacan frequency on the air.

  “Item four, I need the Special Forces commander in here in forty-five minutes for a pre-boarding conference to coordinate things. Okay, that’s it for now. It’s nineteen-fifteen local. We have to have this mission off the ground by twenty-one-hundred local. Let’s get moving!”

  They all scattered as Will headed for the door, then turned back to Jerry Ronson, motioning him over to where only he could hear.

  “Jerry, make sure—make absolutely sure—that Lighthouse is launching the tanker and the surrogate thirty minutes ahead of planned schedule. They can orbit and wait for us if we’re slow. Make sure they’ve told the AWACS crew as well, and see if there’s any way they can screw up Balair’s clearance through Greek airspace and slow him down.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’m going over to that Army medical tent. I think I know where it is.” He raised the hand-held radio into view and waved it slightly. “I’ve got the radio.”

  Jerry Ronson shook his head as Westerman pushed out the door. There was no way, no way, they were going to make it in time.

  Colonel Tariq al Rashir felt a rush of power as the lights of his base flashed by, his driver under instructions to floorboard the expensive black Mercedes to get over to the side the Americans were being allowed to use. Unconsciously he pulled at his mustache and patted his uniform to make sure everything was in place. He almost wished he had a scimitar—he was certainly going to kick some American ass for presuming to order American bulldozers to push American wreckage off his Saudi runway without his permission. Perhaps he should use that exact phrase—“kick some ass.” He knew Americans paid more attention to you when you spoke profanely in a loud voice. Americans in general seemed so obnoxiously direct. They were incapable of understanding the use of civilized nuance and careful hints. Especially these Air Force people.

  Rashir fingered the button for the electric window and felt the cool desert night air rush past his ear with a soothing roar. How well he knew the Americans! He admired them and he hated them as a people at the same time, and saw no contradiction in that. They had taught him to fly at an American Air Force training base in the sixties, and treated him like some backward country cousin. Tariq al Rashir, the oldest son of a first cousin to the crown prince of the House of Saud, had learned much profanity that year, as well as the offensive American habit of simply telling you to your face that you were wrong.

  Colonel Rashir’s driver purposefully skidded the car to a halt outside the small expandable box they called an ALCE, so as to throw up a cloud of dust and dirt in front of the window. Rashir waited for his door to be opened before charging toward the entrance of the ALCE with the meanest expression he could manage.

  Chief Taylor and Major Ronson were already on their feet as Colonel Rashir burst in, Taylor holding out a satellite phone receiver.

  “It’s for you, Colonel Rashir.”

  Will Westerman pushed past the loose flap of the medical tent and walked a few steps into the night, feeling very depressed and ill. He glanced up. Stars were everywhere, and even the Milky Way was starkly visible above the tent city the allied forces had constructed almost overnight eight months ago. He wished he could take some pleasure from the celestial canopy. The desert could be beautiful in its stark simplicity, and the phrase “smell the roses” echoed again in his head. Janice had tossed—no, lobbed—that phrase at him a dozen times in the past few years, whenever work won out over her desires to do “something fun.”

  “You’re too damn serious, Westerman,” she was fond of saying. “I don’t marry overly serious sticks-in-the-mud. You want me? Lighten up.” For ten years they had shared a house and sparred about marriage, yet neither would ask the other. Neither would commit to the other.

  What a crazy damn time to be thinking about Janice!

  Will looked down at his watch, which read 11:35 A.M. She’d be at work now—at a hospital, which was where these kids needed to be.

  He hadn’t taken time to change the time zones on his watch since leaving Charleston, which was eight hours earlier than Saudi. Local time would then be 7:35 P.M., or 1935. One hour and twenty-five minutes left.

  Ronson had warned him by radio that Colonel Rashir was headed his way, a somewhat kinder and gentler host now than he’d been ten minutes before. He would have to find out what Chief Taylor had done to defuse the man. It was well known that chief master sergeants ran the Air Force. At least they thought so, and few officers were brave enough to argue the point with them.

  Got to focus. Got to think.

  Will spun around suddenly to look to the west, straining to see whether the storm front, bearing a ten-thousand-foot-high wall of dust and sand, was visible. It wasn’t. Not yet.

  The C-130 simply had to get in. How could he leave, otherwise? How could he fly away with the only other aircraft large enough to do an air evacuation of Rice and Collinwood? He couldn’t even drop them off in Riyadh without canceling the mission that he’d worked so hard to piece together. The Balair DC-10 was already airborne, and its steady, ominous progress now governed all his decisions.

  Maybe he should call Lighthouse and abort the mission. Maybe that should be the backstop option in case the air-evac C-130 couldn’t land. Weren’t the lives of his two pilots more important than some nameless, faceless Arabs who had let themselves be led by a butcher?

  The thought of the Iraqi scientist who had started all this made him sick. Suddenly the little bastard becomes morally conscious and wants the allies to set it right for him, while two GIs die and two more fight for their lives. At least in Jeff Rice’s case. The report of the beleaguered doctor trying to save the copilot had not been hopeful.

  General Rice would have to be called. Will was dreading that. How do you tell a man his only son may be dying ten thousand miles from home without ripping his heart out? There was no time right now, and no way the man could do anything from back in Washington that wasn’t already being done. The 130 was just getting airborne from Dhahran, according to Jerry Ronson.

  “Dammit to hell!” Will kicked a Styrofoam cup on the ground as hard as he could, watching it bounce off the rubberized canvas of an adjacent tent—a useless, futile gesture of frustration. The copilot’s yoke had injured young Rice internally when his seat broke away in the crash and hit the front panel. But all his noble efforts to pull his aircraft commander from the wreckage were done under the anesthesia of shock, and he had made things infinitely worse for himself, doing massive internal damage with shattered ribs. His internal bleeding now was critical, and the doctor—Will couldn’t remember his name—had already performed emergency surgery. Rice was stabilized for the moment, but he needed a sophisticated hospital—fast.

  Jim Collinwood wasn’t much better. The poor guy’s neck was broken without question, but somehow, thank God, the struggle to get him out hadn’t seemed to damage his spinal cord. So far, there was no paralysis. He, too, needed the type of care you don’t get in the middle of the Arabian desert.

  When the Saudi commander had been gone from the ALCE for a full two minutes, Jerry Ronson turned to Chief Master Sergeant Taylor and offered him a high five, which the chief met.

  “Brilliant, Chief. Absolutely brilliant. How’d you know you could ignore the chain of command, risk a diplomatic incident, and call a Saudi general without getting us court-martialed? When I heard who you were asking for on that phone, I seriously considered shooting you.”

  Taylor let himself look smug for a few seconds. “You know I’m a ham radio operator, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you remember I spent a week working at CENTCOM in December?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There was this one high-ranking Saudi officer there who’s also a ham operator and has been for years. Turns out we’v
e exchanged QSL cards before. He treated me like a friend, and I happened to overhear him chewing up one of his base commanders for not cooperating with a Coalition commander at King Fahd. I figured he might want to offer a few words of guidance to Colonel Rashir before Rashir unloaded on us.”

  Ronson paused, a puzzled look on his face. “You’re not talking about General Akhmed? Rashir’s commander?” he asked at last.

  “None other.”

  The sound of footsteps approaching rapidly over the hard-packed sand reached Will Westerman’s ears before the image of the Saudi colonel loomed out of the darkness. Will waited until Tariq al Rashir was within a few feet before turning and trying to manage a smile as he extended his hand.

  Rashir spoke first.

  “Colonel West …”

  “Westerman.”

  “Of course. Westerman. I am Colonel Tariq al Rashir of the Royal Saudi Air Force, the base commander here.”

  Will pumped his hand warmly, remembering his briefings on Saudi customs: stand close, look them in the eye, shake hands firmly.

  “Colonel Rashir, I appreciate more than I can tell you your kindness in coming over here tonight to speak with me and help us out. I’m sorry I was not able to pay a formal visit to you before. I only arrived yesterday.”

  Rashir’s face changed from puzzlement to a smile. Perhaps the American major back at the command unit had not had time to tell this senior officer of the embarrassment he had caused Rashir. “It is my pleasure, Colonel. My commander in Riyadh has asked me to personally help you in every way.”

  “We lost two of my crew members in the crash. Two others—the pilots—are in critical condition, with internal injuries and a broken neck. Very serious. We have a C-130 coming in from Dhahran to evacuate them, and I’m sweating out which gets here first—the sandstorm or the 130.”

  The Saudi brightened slightly. “You may not be aware that we have a very fine hospital at Al ’Ubaylah with excellent Saudi doctors. It is only one hundred eighty kilometers or so by road. We could begin at once.”