This story is dedicated to the memory Robert Dean Stethem 17 November 1961 -15 June 1985 Navy Diver Brother in Arms Victim of terrorism.
The author wishes to thank the many people who gave this work critical readings, and who provided support during the difficult process of getting it published. Deserving of special thanks are Jim and Marian Adams, John Ehrlichman, Carole Hall, Adele Horwitz, Bob Kane, Lee Matthias, and Carl and Patricia Morton. Special acknowledgment to Major Stewart Brown, Armor, United States Army, for his invaluable assistance as to Armor weapons and tactics.
Special thanks to Major Mike Nason, Public Affairs Officer of the 82nd Airborne Division, and to Colonel Franklin Hartline and the officers and men of the 3rd Battalion, (Airborne) 73rd Armor, who welcomed me to Fort Bragg and gave generously of their time and expertise to show me how it is really done.
Over the western Mediterranean, 15 February, 0010 GMT
The chartered World Airways DC-8 passenger aircraft climbed out of the pattern at Torrejon Air Force Base in Spain on the final leg of its flight 41a from Norfolk, Virginia, to the NATO base at Catania, in Sicily. The night was fine and clear, and the flight crew talked softly and drank coffee as the plane settled into her cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, flying on autopilot along the path dictated by the on-board computer. In the passenger cabin, sixty-one people dozed or slept in the narrow seats. They were sailors bound for the carrier America, and a few dependents out to visit their men on the carrier and supporting ships. The America and her battle group had been deployed in the Med for nearly seven months.
The cockpit radio on the DC-8 beeped. The copilot, Peter Jackson, picked up the red handset. “Worldair 41Alfa, roger.”
“Worldair, this is Touchdown. We have a problem.”
Jackson pulled his clipboard onto his lap. Touchdown was the day code for the controllers at Catania. “Go ahead, Touchdown.”
“Worldair, we have a threat, unconfirmed, that there’s a bomb aboard your aircraft. It’s supposed to be in the forward cargo bay, right below you. The callers identified themselves as the Abu Salaam faction, over.”
Holy shit, thought Jackson. He tapped the dozing aircraft commander, Robert Maldonado, who woke up quickly. Jackson handed Maldonado the handset.
“This is the AC, Touchdown. What is it?” Jackson was out of his harness and unbolting the narrow access hatch to the cargo bay. “OK, OK. What did they tell you?”
“This is Touchdown. They say the bomb was loaded at Torrejon. It will go off when you descend below 5,000 feet, unless they shut it down by radio signal from the ground.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, thought Maldonado. Jackson stood by the open access hatch and pointed downward. Maldonado nodded assent, and the copilot disappeared into the cargo bay. “OK, Touchdown, my copilot is going down to take a look. What are you doing?”
“You will have escort from us in three minutes. You have to tell us what you find, over.”
“Roger.” Maldonado checked the instrument panel; everything normal. He twisted around in the seat and stared at the open hatch, willing Jackson to return. He unzipped the collar of his flight suit and felt the slickness of sweat in the cool cockpit.
Jackson emerged through the hatch just as the four F-14 Tomcat fighters formed up, two on either side of the DC-8, flashing their landing lights in the black sky. Jackson regained his seat on the right side of the aircraft. Jackson looked scared, his black face shiny in the red lights of the instrument panel. “Bob, there is a case down there, right up front. Looks like a Samsonite briefcase. There are copper wires around the locks, leading into the case. I put my ear against it, and it’s humming, man.”
“You sure? Not the hum of the engines?”
“No, Bob, it’s high-pitched. Shit, man, I think it could be a bomb.”
Maldonado swallowed, but the bitter taste stayed in his throat. “Touchdown, Worldair. Copilot thinks he has a bomb in the forward bay.” Maldonado reached forward and touched the photo of his wife and infant son, which he had taped to the panel.
“Roger, Worldair, stand by.”
“Standing by,” said Maldonado bleakly. Jackson shrugged back into his harness.
“Worldair, Touchdown, over.”
“Worldair.”
“Can you defuse or jettison the bomb?”
“Hell, no, Touchdown!” Maldonado felt the fear in his tight throat and forced himself to be calm. “We have no idea how it works, and no way to get it out.” Jackson had tuned his headset to the navy frequency and smiled slightly at the aircraft commander. “What do these terrorists want from us, anyway?”
“Stand by.”
Maldonado looked across at Jackson, who shrugged and began to fiddle with the instruments in front of him. The aircraft flew on, computer-guided, unmindful of the problem.
“Worldair, Touchdown, over.” Maldonado gripped the handset. “The Abu Salaam say in their message that they can shut the thing down by high-frequency radio signal, but you have to be near them.”
“So where the hell are they?” Maldonado broke in.
“They are at an airfield they call Uqba ben Nafi. It is the old Wheelus Air Force Base, near Tripoli, Libya.”
Oh, God, thought Maldonado, again touching the picture of his wife and child. “What are we going to do?”
“Command says we have to go with it. We have been in touch with the Libyan government, through the Italians. They want you to land. The terrorists will shut the bomb down after you are overhead.”
Maldonado looked out the window at the F-14s. They must be kidding. “You want us to set down in Libya?”
“We have to go with it. The Libyan government says it has no knowledge or involvement in the plot, but it will allow you to land and will protect your passengers. The airfield will be lighted, and ringed with Libyan tanks.”
Maldonado felt his guts loosen and fought it back. “We have to do this? You can’t get us out?”
“Negative. We can’t protect you over Libyan territory. Your fighters will break away at the coast. Steer one-seven-zero. That should bring you over the Libyan coast in about eighteen minutes. Tripoli will be on your right. Once you cross the coast, you’ll be overhead Wheelus. Circle once, counterclockwise, with your landing lights on, remaining above 5,000 feet, then land on runway 29 - that’s the long one.”
“What happens to us then?”
“I have no idea, Worldair. We just have to keep you alive.”
Maldonado nodded to Jackson, who broke out of autopilot and made the course change. The Libyan coast was lit at intervals, beckoning. The fighters broke off as the DC-8 descended. They circled the huge, brightly lighted air base, both pilots watching the altimeter, dipping no lower than 6,000 feet. They lined the aircraft up with the long runway and began their final approach. The pilots held their breath as the plane dropped through 5,000, feeling for the explosion, but it did not come. Minutes later they touched down, flashing past the huge black tanks that stood beside the runway.
London 230 GMT
William Stuart lay in the warm darkness of his flat on Cadogan Square in the Knightsbridge section of London. Alison reached across his chest and hugged him, and he turned and kissed her fine, slightly perfumed hair. Alison made small mewing sounds into his chest, as she always did after they made love. Little Aliba is becoming a bit of a fixture, thought William absently. He stretched a bit and dozed. Pretty, sweet, boring Alison.
He was awakened suddenly by the harsh ring of the bedside telephone. Alison pushed herself away from his chest with a grunt of annoyance and rolled away as he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“William, it’s John. Sorry to wake you so early.”
William recognized the voice instantly. John was Capt. John Harris, United States Navy, t
he Defense Intelligence Officer at the U.S. Embassy. John was a good friend, but not someone you wanted to hear from in the middle of the night. Stuart swung his legs out of bed and stood, then picked the phone up and carried it into the living room, trailing the long cord. He sat in his easy chair and placed the phone on the low table in front of him, found his cigarettes, and lit one. “John, it’s 2:30 a.m., I just dragged in from Annabelle’s, and I’m slightly drunk and very sleepy. I suppose it’s too much to hope for that you’re waxing melancholy in some club and need a friend to talk to.”
“Sorry, old man. I need a friend, all right, but at the office.” The office meant the quiet room at the embassy though no one ever said that on the phone. “There is a fire.”
Oh, shit, thought Stuart, stubbing out the cigarette and rubbing his temples. That awful, melodramatic phrase every officer long away from active service hoped he would never hear. “There is a fire” meant something dreadful had happened, and somehow the government was going to drag him into whatever operation was necessary to clean up the mess. “Can’t you tell me any more than that, John?” Stuart knew the answer and wondered why he had asked, except perhaps to delay the inevitable.
“At the office, William. We’re starting to brief in fifteen minutes.”
“OK. I’ll throw some clothes on and call a cab.”
“You won’t need a cab. Sergeant Hudson is waiting downstairs.”
“Now?” This was beginning to sound important, and Stuart felt a kernel of excitement growing within his feeling of dread.
“Now,” said Harris, and hung up.
Stuart sat in the left front seat of the small car as Sergeant Hudson, impeccable even at three in the morning in marine dress blues, drove the short distance to the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Alison hadn’t stirred as Stuart slipped through the bedroom into the bath and took a brief, very cold shower. No soap, just icy water over his face, neck, chest, and crotch. He toweled himself vigorously, shivering, then dressed rapidly in an old crew-neck sweater and jeans and struggled into socks and loafers. He grabbed his old leather flight jacket from the end of the closet and shrugged into it. He kissed the back of Alison’s perfumed head, but she slept on. Stuart’s business was oil; he ran the engineering services department of the London office of Western Petroleum, and middle-of-the-night calls were frequent, with Stuart being roused to deal with a rig that had gone down or a key part that had to be found to repair one.
Hudson pulled into the alley behind the main embassy building and stopped. Stuart got out, pulling together his light leather jacket against the early morning chill, and followed the tall marine into the building. Stuart presented his red inactive-reserve identity card to an armed corporal, who checked it against a list and handed Stuart a clip-on badge, red again, with the words “Code 1 Access” on it. Hudson led him to the quiet room and left him at the door. Stuart entered and saw John Harris, two other men in uniform, and two apparent civilians seated around a table littered with coffee cups and full ashtrays. Stuart closed the door behind him.
The quiet room was in the central core of the embassy building. It had no windows. Outside the room, on all sides and over the ceiling and under the floor, there were baffles, both physical and electronic, designed to make sure that words spoken within stayed within. Even if somehow a transmitter could be smuggled in, its signal would be contained, lost in the lead and the concrete, or turned to muted static by the electronic traps.
Stuart was offered coffee and introduced to the others. He had met Harris’s assistant, Navy Lieutenant Bill Forrest, at embassy parties. The others were a marine captain, Joe Panos, head of embassy security, a Doctor Masad, from American University in Washington but currently doing unspecified research in London, and Fred Maniero, the deputy cultural attaché. Stuart smiled and sat. He pegged Maniero for CIA and thought anybody would. Harris stood and turned to a large map of the Mediterranean pinned to the cork wall. There was a blue line made of string on the map from Torrejon in Spain to a point just west of Sicily, which then bent sharply south and ended slightly to the east of Tripoli. At the end of the string was a tiny toy airplane.
“Hijacking,” said William to himself but loud enough to be heard.
“Right, William, a bad one,” said Captain Harris. “It’s one of ours.”
“TWA again?” said William. Poor TWA had the routes in southern Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece that seemed to attract the most attention of terrorists.
“Worse, William, much worse. The aircraft is a World Airways DC-8, under charter to the Navy.”
William sat bolt upright in his chair and stared at the toy airplane stuck to the map. Fred Maniero got up and ran down the facts that were known, and then Bill Forrest described the available U.S. forces in the immediate area. The major force was the carrier America with her battle group, which had sailed from Sicily at 0200. Dr. Masad identified himself as a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, then talked at some length about the Abu Salaam faction, its aims, and its demands, and about the Libyan Revolution and its charismatic and some said crazy leader, Col. Hassan al-Baruni. When the doctor sat down, everybody looked at Stuart.
Stuart took a sip of cold coffee. “So, it’s a bad one, but why am I here, John?”
“Because, my friend, in 1971 and 1972, in your third tour in Vietnam, you went into Laos once, to a place called Lak Sao, and into North Vietnam once, to a place called Vu Liet, and both times you cracked enemy prison camps and brought out American aviators, alive.”
Stuart felt his eyes narrow as the image rose in his brain of wet, sharp-edged leaves cutting his cheeks, and the strong, rotting odor of the jungle floor as his search team had crawled into those camps, and the stronger smells of human feces and of death they had found. More than ten years ago, he thought, but fresh and foul as yesterday. “I’m surprised you know that, John. The records of those operations are sealed, top secret.”
“I received a précis of your closed record when you first came to London, William.” Harris reached back and tapped the map just under the toy airplane. “We need to crack that camp and bring those men and women out alive, William, and we need you to help us do it.”
“Jesus, man, that was fifteen years ago, and in the jungle!”
“You got people out then. Few others ever found anyone alive.”
William frowned, remembering why the records remained sealed, and the indifference received in place of honors. The men who had fought in Nam at the end of the American involvement had it the worst, and no one had wanted to know. “Well, maybe I can help a little with method.”
Harris stood, as did the others, except Forrest. “That’s all we have now, except Maniero’s pictures. Start thinking about the problem, William, while I organize some breakfast.”
William nodded, Maniero handed him a thick folder and departed. Inside the folder were aerial and satellite photos of the Uqba ben Nafi Air Base, once Wheelus Air Force Base. Stuart spread them out and began to look for he knew not what.
Uqba ben Nafi, Libya, 0445 GMT (0545 Local)
Seaman Barbara Cummins, USN, looked out the window of the World Airways DC-8 through a long tear in the plastic window curtain. After the aircraft had landed more than four hours ago, she had seen what appeared to be a confrontation between a small group of men in jeans and red and white checked head scarves over their faces and a larger group of men in dark fatigue uniforms. The soldiers had parked next to the plane in a large, faintly boat-shaped vehicle, which had eight huge rubber tires, and a machine gun on the top. After a lot of shouting and arm-waving, a stairway had been pushed against the side of the plane and the pilot had opened the door. Two men entered - one of the ones with the scarf over his face and a man in uniform. Both carried assault rifles. Barbara recognized the soldier’s weapon as an AK-47. The terrorist - Barbara assumed the man with his face covered must be a terrorist - carried a similar weapon but without the wooden stock. An AKS, she thought.
The soldier spoke into the intercom
handset next to the forward hatch of the aircraft. His first command was for all passengers seated next to windows to lower their window shades. Barbara thought his voice was soft, almost musical, as he seemed to sing in English very slowly. He said he was Lieutenant Rahman of the Libyan Army. He identified the other man as Walid and said he led the freedom fighters who had commandeered their aircraft. He apologized and said that they would have to wait to disembark until a senior official from the government arrived from Tripoli. Food and water would come soon; everyone was please to remain seated. The terrorist, Walid, remained silent and scowling as the lieutenant spoke. Barbara supposed he spoke no English.
Barbara Cummins had been in the Navy only six months, and her assignment to Fleet Support Activity, Naples, was her first real job. She was a cryptography and communications specialist who had joined the Navy fresh out of high school in Zanesville, Ohio. She was a pretty, dark-haired woman, with creamy pale skin and large brown eyes, tall at five-seven, and slender. She had been popular in high school, and her friends had been surprised when she had joined the Navy. She didn’t tell them, or her parents, that she had been thinking about it for years. There was no money for college, and Barbara desperately wanted to leave Zanesville and her family’s small and unprofitable dairy farm. She was thrilled to be ordered to Naples right out of Crypto School.
Barbara thought about the other passengers. She had spoken to many of them during the long flight and the many layovers. About half were sailors of various ratings, most of them in the Navy no longer than she, going out to the fleet for the first time, and three marines, all headed for the detachment on New Jersey. There was another woman sailor, a personnel yeoman, going to Naples. In the front of the plane were two mothers, one of whom had a small boy and the other, two little girls. Both women were married to officers stationed in Naples. The rest were dependent wives, out for a visit to their men with the fleet.
Barbara had felt more detached than scared when the pilot announced that they were being forced down in Libya. It just seemed like another of the many delays in the long flight from Norfolk. The men with guns around the plane were more comic than threatening; even the soldiers couldn’t seem to stand up straight, and several on top of the vehicle grinned and waved to Barbara before the lieutenant had told them to close the shades. Barbara was glad the Libyan officer was on the plane; he seemed a figure of legitimacy, of authority. Even the terrorist with his stockless rifle seemed no more than a boy, trying hard to look fierce.
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