Someone grabbed his right shoe and wiggled it, and he had to stop himself from sitting up too fast and hitting the oxygen bottle again. He peered down one side of his body and recognized the loadmaster standing at his feet on the cockpit ladder.
“We’re getting ready to start down. They want you up.”
“What?” The noise was masking the voice, but so were the earplugs. He worried one out of his ear and motioned to the man to try again, leaning around as far as he could.
“I said it’s time to get up, sir. We’re starting down.”
Doug Harris pushed in the button on the high-frequency radio known as HF-1, shutting off the irritating cascade of static. Like all MAC C-141 drivers, he had been listening to the same damned HF radios all the years he had flown the airplane—twenty years in his case. He shook his head and looked out the right window, his body language complaining to no one in particular. Here we are in an age of satellite communications, and we’re still dependent on Korean War technology!
Except for the night-vision devices, of course.
Doug looked at his partner in the left seat and triggered the interphone. “We’ve got the go-ahead signal. Hard to hear, but it came in from Croughton on one-one-two-one-five upper sideband.”
Will nodded. Every fifteen minutes for the past two days, most of the USAF aeronautical radio stations had broadcast a series of codes, most of them background gibberish until now. “Wallflower sequence Alpha Charlie Zulu” had virtually no meaning other than to confirm to Colonel Will Westerman and crew that they were “go” to penetrate Iraqi airspace—which they would do now in less than two minutes.
The DC-10 banked gently to the left, making a small course correction, with Will following it smoothly. So far the ruse was working. The communications between the pilots of Balair 5040 and the Lebanese controllers, the Syrian controllers, and now the weak signal of the Iraqi flight control authorities had all proceeded as planned. No one was supposed to know that Scorpion-1 was back here, and so far no one did.
So far.
Doug glanced at Will, gauging the intensity of his concentration as he worked to stay in tight beneath the DC-10 that had filled their cockpit windscreen for the past two hours, the lower rotating beacon flashing monotonously. They had both taped folded maps to the windscreen to block out the beacon, but as Doug watched his companion, the reflected bursts of reddish light illuminated Will’s face like some sort of bizarre disco strobe, highlighting lines and creases and sags in those familiar features that he hadn’t noticed before.
It had only been seven hours since he had stumbled into the ALCE and found himself face to face with his former best friend. Or perhaps Will still occupied that category, despite the long years of mutual silence. How could two friends as close as they had been drift apart so completely? Doug realized he had been evading that question for nearly seventeen years.
The night sky was still visible beneath the Douglas jumbo, the moon almost at its zenith and nearly full, the softness of the moonlight cascading in through the copilot’s window. The bright disk was starkly visible, hanging just forward of the dark mass of the DC-10’s right horizontal stabilizer over their heads. Without a cloud cover ahead, the moonlight would make it a dangerous night for a commando-style raid and an assault landing in enemy territory. But the weather forecasters had been reporting a solid undercast at around five thousand feet—solid enough to hide them, yet high enough to permit a visual approach to a darkened desert highway.
“We’re over the line, crew.” The voice was Will’s. Iraq was below them now.
At 2330 GMT—2:30 A.M. in Baghdad—an exhausted Iraqi military radar controller saw his screen bloom into useless lines and splotches of phosphorescent nonsense yet again. For days he had manned a temporary trailerful of radar screens and communication gear with eight other controllers and attempted to masquerade as an air traffic control facility. Their real mission was military radar intelligence, but the problem of how to watch the skies without drawing an American air strike had unnerved them all.
Most of his colleagues were dead now—all those who had been trained with him as radar operators. One by one the Americans had taken out the military radar sites, destroying Saddam’s expensive network and blinding his commanders. This last one was supposed to be left alone—supposed to be considered civilian—but he was almost resigned to dying at any moment from an unexpected Coalition bomb dropped by an invisible stealth aircraft without warning.
The scope was now useless. The Americans had been doing this all night at regular intervals. When the first episode had come in early evening, everyone had gotten excited, and in the absence of telephone communications, a messenger had been dispatched to military headquarters. The Americans were up to something, they were sure!
But each time the terrible burst of radar interference had ended, he had searched the skies again and found nothing there. His commanders had originally suspected the radar interference was a cover for some new Coalition assault, but he knew otherwise. There had been no fighting, no reports of bombed cities, no Scud sites attacked—nothing. After fifteen such episodes, it was obvious to all of them that the radar bursts were American harassment aimed at Saddam, and not a cover for some military operation.
Several hundred miles to the west and invisible in the “noise” of the radar picture, the commander of Scorpion-1 was counting on exactly that conclusion.
At long last, the image of the DC-10 began to move up in the windscreen as Will eased the 141 into a descent, accelerating toward the red-line airspeed of Mach .825 once again. The descent profile had been carefully computed to keep the 141 positioned directly under the Balair flight as Scorpion-1 dove at the desert.
Will’s hand had been resting on the spoiler lever. He armed it now and began pulling the lever back and down, everyone aboard feeling the spoiler panels extend into the airstream on the top and bottom of the wings, the aircraft beginning to shake and shudder as the spoilers acted as speed brakes, enabling the aircraft to descend at a far steeper angle without exceeding airspeed limits.
As Sandra struggled at the engineer’s panel to keep up with the changing cabin pressurization, Doug frowned and craned his neck to look directly above them, verifying that the diminishing form of the DC-10 was still in the right place as his hand held on to the ungainly combination of his flight helmet and the night-vision goggles. They had already taped the sheets of colored gel over the instrument panel. Otherwise the flight instruments could overpower the goggles.
Eight thousand feet per minute, nose down now and screaming through thirty thousand feet, Will held the speed at red line, metering the extension of the spoilers to maintain the right combination of descent rate and speed, the throttles now fully retarded.
“Twenty-five thousand.” The voice was Doug’s. The hundreds column of the altimeter’s vertical tape was almost an unreadable blur.
In the jump seat, Bill Backus reached to the middle of the center console and changed the electronic “page” on the FSAS flight computer screen, checking the latitude and longitude of the target highway once again. The computer projected a white line on the radar screen from their present position to the destination, and Will had switched it to the 150-mile range minutes before. They were less than fifty miles out now.
“Okay, jump seat, this is the pilot. You have the hand-held?”
Bill Backus raised the small portable FM transceiver into Will’s view and nodded. Somewhere ahead and below, a member of the combat support team who had dropped in by parachute the night before should be waiting.
“Go ahead and call them,” he ordered.
Backus nodded and pressed the transmit button with a short, coded sequence of words. A steady voice came back instantly with the proper reply, and then a quick stream of information, which Backus relayed to Will:
“They’re standing by, sir. The markers are set, no road traffic in sight, and both ends are covered.”
“Thanks.”
“Fi
fteen thousand,” Doug reported.
Scorpion-1 slid into the undercast, which replaced the star field with dark gray for several thousand feet, then descended out of the bottom of the clouds at 4,500 feet. The steep descent rate continued through two thousand feet as they came up on the turn point, which was planned to be five miles north of the highway and fifteen miles northeast of the underground lab the strike team members were getting ready to visit.
Will leveled the 141 at five hundred feet above the ground and pulled in the spoilers, the engines now at idle, the airspeed still around three hundred knots and slowing rapidly.
“There’s your turn, pilot.” Doug called the fix and looked right into a vast blackness. A few lights were visible in the distance, but nothing to provide a reference or a differentiation between roadways, desert floor, or buildings. It was a “black hole” approach they would be attempting, and for every minute it took to find the highway and land, their risk of exposure rose.
“Get the helmet and goggles on, Doug. Come on.” Will gestured impatiently at the ensemble in Doug’s lap. Doug began pulling it on, flipping the NVG-6 binocular night-vision device in place, and looking in Backus’s opinion like a fugitive from a grade-B science-fiction movie. Doug adjusted the controls as the enhanced images flared like daylight in front of his eyes, somewhat fuzzy whites against darker backgrounds, but every available photon of light utilized and amplified. They had practiced this briefly at altitude an hour back, but actually tracking the ground on these things was going to be an entirely different experience.
There was a road out there somewhere, running roughly east and west as they headed south. Even without the direct moonlight, even with an overcast, there was enough light to see it clearly with the goggles when they finally located it. That, at least, was the theory.
But the road wasn’t there.
Doug toggled the interphone. “Nothing yet. How far are we supposed to be from it?”
“Three miles. You should see it now, even at five hundred feet.”
“Nothing. I see some … lines … and what looks like maybe a building to the right, but no roads. This is a highway we’re looking for, right? That’s what it looked like on the maps.”
“It’s more of a rural highway, but paved,” Will said. “We should be almost on top of it.”
“You better put the bug-eyes on too, Will. I don’t see anything out here that looks even remotely like a road.”
“Your airplane.” Will began fumbling with his helmet and the goggles as Doug acknowledged and automatically tightened his grip on the yoke, looking down to check airspeed and power. They were coming down through two hundred knots now, ready to extend the landing gear and flaps the second they spotted the road.
Doug let his thoughts race back over the possibilities. If they weren’t in the right place, then either they had the wrong co-ordinates punched in, or the inertial navigation systems had drifted off.
Will’s voice filled the crew’s headsets again. “Turn back a hundred eighty degrees and head north. We’ve probably gone too far south.”
Doug peered hard at the white images and tried to imagine what a road would look like. Instinct told him it was still ahead. “Maybe we should continue on a bit longer,” he said.
The response from the left seat was abrupt.
“No. We’ve overflown it. Let’s turn.”
Doug hesitated. “How can you be sure? Let’s give it a few more miles, just in case.”
“Do you see anything out there in front of us?” Will asked, irritated.
“No, but—”
“Then turn the damn airplane!”
Doug bit his lip and toggled the interphone.
“Give me three more miles, pilot.”
There was silence from the left seat for a second. Then, “Roger.”
They were laying down one hell of a noise footprint, and even without running lights, any military units in the vicinity who heard the whine of the C-141’s jet engines would instantly suspect something was up. Will knew they mustn’t get within ten miles of the lab, but if they were mispositioned …
Will searched the fuzzy images before his eyes, praying for something resembling a road. There was nothing but flat white desert with clumps of bushes here and there. That was far enough.
Bracing for Doug’s objection, Will made the decision to turn back north, and was surprised when Doug complied without a word, the 141 beginning the turn to the right, the nose passing through southwest at the moment Doug’s voice cut through the rising tension.
“There! Right ahead, pilot. See that? It’s a road.”
Will squinted and saw the same thing.
Doug banked hard right then, aligning the 141 with the road, rolling wings level as Backus’s voice came on the interphone.
“The ground team is hearing jet sounds to the east now, sir. That’s got to be us!”
Bright points of light on each side of the road up ahead began to come into view, tiny fluorescent light sticks almost invisible in flight to the naked eye, but as bright as normal runway lights in the enhanced-light world of the NVG-6. The markers extended off into the distance, outlining the landing strip beautifully.
“Flaps approach, gear down, before-landing check.” Doug gave the requisite command, his left hand pulling the flap lever to the approach position and then snapping the landing-gear lever to the down position as Will acknowledged, the sounds of the flap motors and the rush of the slipstream through the nose landing-gear door beneath their feet filling the cockpit. The throttles were back to idle now, the ground coming up fast.
“Flaps landing.” Doug called the setting as he brought the flap handle the remaining distance to full extension. “Your airplane, pilot.”
“Roger, flaps landing,” Will repeated. “Keep flying, copilot, I’m monitoring.” There was no reason to change control.
“Roger. In that case, I’ve got it.” Doug’s voice was steady and calm, in sharp contrast to the tension he was feeling. “Jump seat, start your callouts. What’s my airspeed?”
“One hundred forty,” Backus replied. With no night-vision devices to distort his eyesight, Backus had been assigned to keep his eyes glued to the airspeed and altitude gauges to back up the pilots. Will kept his eyes ahead, his hands following Doug’s on the controls, checking the alignment, which was dead on.
“One hundred thirty-five, and your marker speed is one-thirty, sir. Three hundred feet above the surface, sink twelve hundred.”
Doug nodded, but no one saw the gesture. They were too close now. The first set of light-stick markers slid past the cockpit.
“Jesus, Will. Are you sure this is wide enough for our main wheels?”
“It’s forty feet wide. The wheels need twenty, and the shoulder is hard-packed sand.”
“One hundred thirty-two knots, almost on marker, two hundred feet above, sink rate thirteen hundred feet. Sink one thousand now, you’re one hundred feet above, sink eight hundred, on marker speed, sink eight hundred, fifty feet, thirty, twenty …”
Doug flared the aircraft slightly and let it settle hard and firm.
“Spoilers!” On Doug’s call-out, Will grabbed the T-handle lever that deployed the large panels on the wing known as spoilers and pulled it to the full down position as Doug pushed hard on the yoke to keep the tail from dragging, and brought the throttles to idle. They would not use reverse power to stop. Too much noise.
Doug worked hard to hold the airplane to the center of the two-lane concrete road, amazed the landing gear was still within its borders.
“Jeez, this is narrow! I don’t know, pilot. Speed?”
“One hundred and five.”
Doug pressed his toes into the top of the rudder pedals to apply the brakes hard, and they pitched forward in the seats as the Starlifter slowed.
“I’m killing one and four,” Will said, his hand snapping off the engine fuel and ignition switches for the two outboard engines as they had rehearsed. “Doors armed, Load, cleared
to open. Watch your step. And, copilot, you’re eighty knots.”
One hundred forty feet to the rear of the cockpit, the loadmaster, who had pre-positioned himself at the folding cargo-loading ramp, struggled against the deceleration to stand against the left side of the cabin and toggle the switch that opened the clamshell cargo doors. The pressure door had been retracted into the ceiling while they were on approach. Now, as the clamshells came into position, he began lowering the ramp. In the cockpit, Will took control to taxi, cranking the nosewheel around to the left, taking the nose gear off the roadway and onto the hard-packed ground alongside the road as he reversed course to park back on the road facing east. Four of the strike team members were standing by to put the two portable ramps in place as soon as they stopped, and almost immediately the engines of the armored personnel carriers and the Bradley fired up, the troops already in place inside—including Dr. Abbas, who was in the third vehicle.
There were no lights outside as Will brought the aircraft to a complete stop and set the parking brake, killing engines two and three. Within two minutes the first of the APCs raced by the cockpit toward its objective. The speed of the attack force’s departure was amazing. It had gone like clockwork.
Will removed his helmet and the goggles as Doug was shedding his, both of them fumbling through the final checklist. The cockpit was pitch dark now, with the engines stopped and the battery switch off. The auxiliary power unit—the small jet engine in the left wheel well that normally provided power and pressurized pneumatic air on the ground—would be left off as well, since it could be heard for some distance.
Doug scanned the panel again, as much in his mind as visually. They had done the shutdown checks and turned everything off, but something was nagging him—something left undone—and he found himself feeling off balance.
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