The Last Air Force One

by Jeff Kirkham

  available now on Amazon

  Prologue:

  Santa Catalina Island, California

  Near Avalon Bay

  Two Weeks Before the Black Autumn Collapse

  After four months of living with a nuclear bomb in the hold of their sailboat, even the Koran’s promise of seventy-two bare-breasted virgins wore a little thin. When they had left the Sulu Archipelago of the Philippines, dying in an atomic flash sounded like a small price to pay for even one virgin, much less six dozen. Now, with the end near at hand, the unspoken truth between the two Filipino villagers was that neither of them felt particularly eager to die.

  They had decided to wait for a sign from Allah before completing the last twenty-six miles of the voyage to America. The two villagers, far from home, anchored on the east side of Catalina Island, just a handful of hours from the bustling coast of Los Angeles, California.

  They had been loitering there for nearly two months and, amazingly, nobody had so much as spoken to them.

  Njay and Miguel had settled into a daily routine. Wake up. Defecate off the side of the boat. Make tea. Defecate off the side of the boat. Fish all morning. Nap. Fish all afternoon. Defecate. Eat fish. Sleep.

  The journey from the Philippines had gone exactly as planned, which amounted to a miracle in sailing. Nothing ever went exactly as planned. The well-provisioned sailboat had contributed to their successful journey. Neither of the men had ever sailed in a boat so well stocked. The boat even came with a desalinization filter sufficient for a couple months. With such a fine craft, they had been able to set a simple tack into the north-northeast trade winds directly at the coast of California. For fifty-eight days, they had kept the boat pointed on a steady course, barely having to trim the sails. It had been the easiest sailing of Njay’s life.

  But time was running out. Both men felt sick. They suspected the desalinization filter had worn out and was letting a small amount of salt into their drinking water. The other possibility was that the crate-sized nuclear bomb in their hold leaked radiation.

  Their village imam had given Miguel and Njay simple instructions, but Njay suspected the instructions had come from the light-haired, tall man who had been skulking around their village for months. Everyone seemed to know that gossiping about Tall Man would be a violation of obedience to the imam. Njay concluded that the man must be Middle Eastern or Russian, given the nature of their mission. No Pacific Rim nation would risk war with America.

  In truth, Njay knew little of the world outside his island chain, but he’d been taught much about America, with their Special Forces murderers and their weapons of unimaginable power. The United States lorded over the Pacific, threatening to blow their enemies back to the Stone Age. Like a disease consuming the hearts of man, America plagued the world, and Islam would cure it. Such a plague could be stopped by the tiniest of medicines: one small boat and two small men would vaporize the Hollywood movie stars and shake the Wall Street skyscrapers. In Allah’s wise path, giants were often felled by pebbles.

  The two Filipinos talked about sailing into Avalon Bay for another desalination filter, but the risk of being discovered, especially considering their almost non-existent English, was too great.

  Njay and Miguel spoke endlessly about God’s will while crossing the ocean and then fishing off the coast of Catalina. Would Allah really want them to sacrifice their lives if it wasn’t necessary?

  Based on their time in Catalina, it didn’t seem like Americans worried much about the coming and going of sailboats in their waters. After four months, the two men had received nothing more than hearty waves from other boaters. Perhaps they could sail into Long Beach Harbor, tie up their sailboat, set the bomb to explode, then walk into America. Surely there were other Filipino Muslims in America who would shelter them.

  They even discussed how to build a time delay for the bomb. They pulled the crate below decks apart, only to find that the bomb was a steel box with a single green button. The box had been welded shut, and the men hadn’t brought any tools capable of cutting steel. The button protruded through the metal box and through the slats in the crate. Their instructions had been simple: sail into Long Beach Harbor and press the button.

  A time delay device—the candle could burn through the rope and release the hammer to swing into the button. The contraption could give them a few minutes to get clear of the bomb. If they ran, they might make it.

  They didn’t know how big the explosion would be, nor did they know if a hammer strike would sufficiently depress the button without breaking it. Of course, it couldn’t be tested in advance.

  The men eventually set their time delay idea aside and put the decision in the hands of Allah. They listened to American radio as they fished, talking into the evening about how a sign from Allah might appear.

  The sickness had them both concerned. Their daily defecations into the ocean were audible from everywhere on the boat, and they agreed the sickness was worsening, compelling them to relieve themselves more often.

  Time grew short.

  Mongratay Province, Afghanistan

  Two Weeks Ago

  Jeff Kirkham’s adrenaline spiked before he even knew why, his subconscious recognizing the blue-white trail of a rocket propelled grenade as it whistled into his column of trucks. The low growl of a PKM machine gun and a swarm of AK-47s joined the chorus as the battlefield roared to life.

  This had been the wrong place to drop overwatch, and it had been Jeff’s bad call. He rocked forward, squinting through the filthy windshield, hoping he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing. Some of his best men were in the Corolla, still the lead vehicle, and they were hanging way out in the wind.

  Jeff rode in the passenger seat of the command truck toward the back of the column with his shorty AK wedged between his butt and the door. Only the medical truck lagged behind them.

  Endless hours of experience and training kicked in, and Jeff launched from his seat, slamming the passenger door forward, pinning it with his boot to keep it from bouncing back. He cleared his rifle and rolled out of the truck, scrambling for cover behind the rear axle. None of their vehicles offered much in the way of cover, and their best play was to fight through the ambush. Getting everyone turned around and moving back the way they had come wasn’t an option.

  As soon as Jeff reached the rear of the column, he ran into Wakiel, a tall, sinewy Afghan from the Panshir Valley. They had worked together for years. In broken Dari, Jeff ordered Wakiel to gather his squad for a flanking maneuver. Wakiel chattered into his radio and, within a few moments, the assault squad piled up behind the medical truck, ready to roll.

  Jeff didn’t remember the Dari word for “flank;” he just stabbed a knife hand up and to the left. His Afghani assaulters knew what to do and they were hot to fight.

  The twelve of them, including Jeff, sprinted up the closest ravine, working to gain altitude so they could drop down on the Taliban-infested ridge line. As he pounded up the hill, Jeff could see the Corolla getting mauled in the middle of the bowl. One glance at the car told Jeff he would have men to mourn when the dust settled.

  At forty-three years of age, it almost didn’t matter how fit Jeff was. Running straight up a mountain in body armor at seven thousand feet made him feel like a lung was going to pop out of his mouth. He had been born with the furthest thing from a “runner’s physique.” Between his Irish genes and a thousand hours on the weight bench, Jeff could fight eyeball to eyeball with a silverback gorilla. He had no neck, a foot-thick chest, huge arms, and thighs the size of tree trunks. Like most of the Special Forces operators getting on in age, Jeff didn’t mind a bit of a belly bulge sticking over his waistband. His enormous upper body mass and the belly bulge added up to dead weight, though, when running up a mountain in Afghanistan in the middle of a fire fight.

  He wasn’t about to let Wakiel and his guys get away from him, so Jeff drove harder up the sand and moon dust, his boots filling with gravel and debris, his throat burning like he was suck
ing on a blow torch. They had been pushing far up a ravine and, as they crested the hill, Jeff could see they were now above the Taliban force.

  “Shift fire. Shift fire.” Jeff coughed into the radio as his assault team reached the top. Jeff knew his men would plow straight into the Taliban positions without considering that their truck column below, with more than a dozen crew-served machine guns, was pounding that area with everything they had.

  “Shift fire, copy?” Jeff heaved for air, trying to gulp down oxygen and listen intently at the same time.

  “Roger. Shifting fire up and right,” one of the other Green Berets with the column replied, no doubt running up and down the string of trucks trying to get control of sixty adrenaline-crazed Afghani commandos and their belt-fed machine guns.

  With his command job done, Jeff launched into the fight himself, hammering rounds from his AK and catching up to his men. They leapfrogged from one piece of cover to the next, driving down on the Taliban positions.

  Jeff dove behind a huge boulder and flopped to one side, crabbing around the rock and catching a full view of the battlefield. By climbing high up the hillside, he and his assault team had side-doored the Taliban force and he could see lengthwise into several foxholes filled with enemy. Jeff pushed his AK around the edge of the boulder and dumped rounds into one open foxhole after another, dropping some men to the ground and forcing others to leap out of their trenches and flee into the open. When they did, the truck column in the valley below cut them to pieces.

  There was no stopping the carnage now that the smell of blood was in the air. Jeff leapt from behind the boulder, ran forward and fell hard into a hole, stomping a dead man’s open guts. The mushy footing caused Jeff to tip and slam into the wall of the ditch. The stench of the man’s open bowel hit his face like a slap, making him grimace and turn his head.

  The gunfire slowed. Jeff could see four or five surviving Taliban running away over the ridge. The hillside and ridge were littered with bodies. Jeff crawled out of his foxhole and maneuvered over to Wakiel.

  “How are the men?” Jeff asked in Dari.

  “Is good,” Wakiel panted in broken English, coming down from the rush of the last murderous drive.

  “Katar. Danger,” Jeff reminded him. Wakiel nodded.

  Jeff had been in hundreds of gunfights and he knew that winning the fight was only the beginning of the work. Policing up the bodies, and figuring out which of them were dead and which were waiting to blow the victors up with a hand grenade, would take hours. There was nothing glamorous about policing a battlefield.

  It took three hours for Jeff and his guys to clear the field, and they lined up ten dead Taliban in a row, their AKs, PKMs and RPGs piled beside them. A couple of Jeff’s indigenous “Indij” guys started taking pictures with their trashy cell phones, holding dead guys up by their hair. They needed the pictures for evidence and to match against the “most wanted” list. Still, the specter made Jeff turn away.

  He looked back at his column of trucks. He could see three black body bags lying outside the lead Corolla—the car that had contained his Amniat scouts, some of his best friends and finest warriors. The medics were smoking cigarettes instead of working on his men, which meant Jeff had lost more friends.

  Jeff’s body felt drained, like a fist unclenching. He would complete this last mission, and then he would leave Afghanistan and warfighting behind forever.

  He had been in command of the column of fifteen trucks for three days, and road dust coated his face and the inside of his nose, dragging on every breath. For hours on end, for the last three days, his binoculars had come up and down searching for an ambush, like genuflecting to the gods of war.

  Lift the binos. Scan the horizon. Scan big rocks. Scan all potential hiding places. Lower the binos. Check the position of his trucks. Repeat every ninety seconds, forty-five times an hour, five hundred times a day.

  From the center of his head to the marrow of his bones, fatigue dogged him. A fighter could only stay hard for so long. For him, it had been twenty-eight years.

  Driving for days had worn him down to a nub. The rocking motion of the truck and the chemical body odor from the men commingled with exhaust fumes, kicking his motion sickness into overdrive. Even so, seventy lives depended on him staying rock solid, and now men had died on his watch.

  The distance to the Forward Operating Base wasn’t the problem. They could have made the drive in ninety minutes going balls out, but the province crawled with Taliban and Jeff’s column was anything but low profile: fifteen Toyota Tacomas, painted desert tan, each one of them with a Russian-made belt-fed machine gun bolted to the truck bed.

  Jeff had ordered his Amniat scouts in the beat-up Corolla to range out every ten kilometers to reconnoiter the road ahead. Since the scout vehicle looked just like every other piece of junk in this desert, he had hoped the Taliban wouldn’t waste bullets on it. Three of Jeff’s best Indij fighters had been crammed into that little car.

  For eight hours, the column had run with two overwatch trucks fanning out to the left and the right, up on the ridge tops, covering the column with their big fifty-caliber belt-fed machine guns. That meant a lot of stop-and-wait inaction as the overwatch trucks maneuvered into new positions. The column would drive a kilometer, wait fifteen minutes for overwatch to set up, then drive a kilometer more. The process yanked on the column like a ball and chain, but it had to be done. Without covering fire, they could find themselves on the death-eating side of an ambush.

  War is work, Jeff had been telling himself, manual labor. It wasn’t just physically exhausting. It was the waiting that ground the soul down —constant stress and usually nothing to show for it. He knew he was an excellent warfighter, a manual laborer of death and destruction with an iron will. He could control the chaos like few men on earth, and it was this unwavering faith in his own competency that powered Jeff through long and tedious missions like this one.

  Now, with the ambush sprung, the battle finished and several of his men dead, Jeff was no longer feeling that same bullet-proof self-confidence.

  Wakiel walked over to Jeff, smoking a cigarette.

  “I guess that was a bad place to get ahead of our security element,” Jeff said in English.

  Wakiel knew Jeff well enough to understand and replied, “Khalash, Jeff.” It was Dari for “finished,” but today it meant “farewell.”

  After this mission, Jeff headed home forever, back to the other world — the world that didn’t smell like the inside of an Afghani’s lower intestines, the world where he could stay clean, sleep in on a Sunday with his wife, and take in the fresh smell of his sons’ hair first thing in the morning.

  The sweet-sour smell of shit wafted past his face, and Jeff searched for the offending stench, noticing a green, chunky glob on his boot. With nowhere to wipe it off, Jeff’s aggravation peaked, his only solace that he was leaving this endless parade of rot and ruin.

  Jeff vowed to never again smell the guts of a man, to never again face the buzz of angry bullets, and to never again watch friends die violent deaths. Back in the real world of America, Jeff would put a net around his family and would tie it down tight. The demons of chaos and destruction would forever infest Afghanistan, but they would not follow him home. Whatever affection he had once had for the life of a soldier, it was over. Now he would make damned sure his family lived in peace.

  “I am so sick of fighting death every day,” Jeff said, looking at his Afghani friend for the last time.

  The Afghani barely understood his English, which was the only reason Jeff allowed himself to put words to his fatigue.

  Wakiel nodded and returned to smoking his cigarette.

  Bandar Sharak

  Hormozgan Province, Iran

  Present Day

  In the end, Afshin Asadi would explode a dirty bomb over Saudi Arabian soil, not because of his religion or his politics, but because he couldn’t stand to leave a project unfinished.

  Somewhere in the back of hi
s mind, the same place where he kept information on how to operate his microwave oven, Afshin knew he would go to paradise by sacrificing his life, if it came to that. He accepted the information without any particular interest.

  Some might look at Afshin’s story and draw the conclusion he had been imprisoned by a cruel government, a regime that would enslave a mentally challenged, but genius young man to an ignorant religion. In their rush to repudiate Islam, they would miss the point.

  Truth was, Afshin already lived in paradise, and his government was doing him a favor by confining him to a workshop with a prototype nuclear device. Every morning he awoke with a burning desire to move the project one step closer to completion, and every night he lay down deeply satisfied by the work he had completed. On any given day, he might have tested a candidate polystyrene as a suspension material, or machined a new trial shield panel. Each small step toward completion scratched an itch deep in his soul, and he went to sleep happy as a man could be—at least as a happy as an autistic man could be.

  Five years previously, as Afshin studied at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, one of his professors had asked him to visit during office hours. When Afshin arrived at the meeting in his professor’s office—more a cubbyhole than an office—another man was wedged into a seat in the corner between piles of papers. The strange man wore a crumpled suit coat and a yellowing dress shirt. He was balding and peered over a pair of thick-framed glasses.

  The stranger introduced himself, and Afshin failed to note his name, more interested in the big Western-made calculator poking out of the man’s shirt pocket. Calculator Man peppered Afshin with engineering and physics questions, beginning with simple ones and moving toward the more complex. Afshin answered plainly, without wondering for a single second about the purpose of the meeting.

  More than a month later, the same man interrupted a Thermal Engineering lecture. The teacher’s aide pulled Afshin from class and Calculator Man showed him out the front door of the university to a waiting taxi. Afshin never saw the school, nor his family, again.