Z: The Final Countdown

by Bob Mayer

  “Key One, this is Dragon Leader. Target is down. Over.”

  “Any survivors? Over.”

  “You’re going to have to pick the bodies up with an ice cream scoop. No survivors. Over.”

  The commander nodded. “Let’s go in and confirm,” he ordered the pilots of the Black Hawks.

  The three helicopters continued on course and soon the circling A-10s came into sight, like two circling buzzards. The helicopters set down near the wreckage. The fire was out and the smoldering remains of the MI-8 littered the ground amid the charred grass.

  While his men secured the perimeter, the assault leader walked over to the main compartment. Or what he assumed was the main compartment—it was hard to tell what was what amid the twisted and blackened metal.

  There were bodies in among the wreckage; more accurately, pieces of bodies. The commander tried to determine exactly how many there were, but the number of legs, arms, torsos, and heads scattered about didn’t quite make the math easy. At least ten dead, he estimated. A positive ID here was going to be impossible.

  “Let’s bag these!” he called out. They were going to have to haul all this back and let the forensics people check dental charts.

  Men grabbed body bags and began the grisly task of collecting pieces and parts.

  West of Saurimo, Angola, 14 June

  This mission had gone as smoothly as the first. Conner was satisfied with the results. Seeger had six minutes of air force fighters strafing MPLA trucks desperately trying to escape to the east. They’d choppered in ahead of the trucks, set down on a hill overlooking the road, then checked out the vehicles as they drove into view a few minutes later.

  Captain Dorrick had confirmed the target and the next thing they knew death had descended from the sky, blasting the vehicles. The choppers showed up, and they were back on board. Conner’s head was spinning from the speed of it all.

  Seated next to her, Riley was tired. He knew they all were. The air force could have just taken out those trucks, but everyone seemed to be playing this whole operation very carefully, making sure that all targets were double-checked and confirmed. He knew that Conner was part of the reason for that. In the modern world a minor event could have consequences far exceeding its actual impact if the media seized upon it. Public relations had become as important as—if not more important than—the actual conduct of the mission.

  Riley noticed that the pilots were engaged in an extensive conversation and gestured for one of the crewmen to give him a headset. He settled the cups over his head. The pilots were talking to an AWACS, getting flight path instructions. The skies were crowded and a midair collision would make you just as dead as getting shot.

  One of the door gunners called out an aircraft sighting to the pilots and Riley looked in the indicated direction. Three Black Hawks were off to their left, about four hundred yards away, also flying low. Riley squinted. The aircraft had refueling probes under their noses. That identified them to Riley as specially modified MH-60s from Task Force 160, the army’s elite helicopter unit. The doors were open and Riley could make out some men dressed in black in the rear.

  He noticed that Seeger was filming the aircraft. Riley leaned forward and tapped him. “Might as well stop. They’re going to cut that.”

  Even as Riley spoke, the three aircraft turned away to the south and disappeared.

  On the other side of the helicopter, Sergeant Ku struggled to keep down his breakfast. Sweat was running down his back and he could feel the blood pounding in his forehead, behind his eyes.

  A crew member noticed his distress and handed him a couple of barf bags. Ku bent over and vomited, filling the bag. He looked up, full bag in hand, embarrassed in spite of the way he felt. The American crewman pointed out the door and Ku chucked it out. By the time they got back to Cacolo, he had gone through three bags.

  Pentagon, 14 June

  In the War Room, deep underneath the Pentagon, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Lowell Cummings, watched the tape of the satellite feed that had come out of one of SNN’s crews—SNN-El. He nodded approvingly at the sight of the trucks getting obliterated by bombs and cannon fire.

  There was a brief pause, then another scene came on. The three Special Operations Black Hawks came into view. “We’ve deleted that from what we allowed to go forward to Atlanta,” the public affairs colonel informed Cummings.

  Cummings watched several other shots, mostly from Luanda, showing the arrival of the troops and equipment, and footage from the military’s own cameras showing smart bombs destroying targets in Angola.

  All in all, the morning had worked out almost exactly according to plan, and Cummings was a good enough general to understand how unique that was. The operation was going well, but that didn’t mean Cummings was happy. He looked at the entire Angolan mission on two levels. The first was operational—the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the task the military was assigned by the president and Congress. Cummings’s dissatisfaction came from a different level—the task itself. He saw little purpose to it when viewed through the prism of national security, which was the basic principle he’d been trained on since he’d stood on the Plain at West Point as a seventeen-year-old plebe, thirty-two years ago.

  What security interest did the United States have in Angola? It was a question Cummings had raised with the president and never received an answer to. In fact, he’d been told the question was the wrong one. This application of military force had little to do with security interests. It had to do with humanitarian and political interests.

  The army had even coined a term for this kind of mission in the early nineties: OOTW. Operations other than war. For the past several years, the military had slid along the scale from preparing to fight World War III to performing more and more OOTW. And Cummings was caught in a bind. He didn’t like OOTW, but he also had to milk the OOTW cow in front of Congress to get funds to keep the force at a strength to be able to fight the real thing—war—if need be. And, ultimately, Cummings was a soldier. He would do what his commander in chief ordered.

  But it wasn’t only for national policy reasons that Cummings disliked OOTW. He was very concerned about the effect these types of missions had on the morale and training of the armed forces. Troops deployed on peacekeeping operations weren’t training for war during the duration of the deployment. Those same troops had also joined the military for reasons other than acting as world policeman, feeder of the poor, and health-care provider. Especially most of the troops that were constantly being deployed on these missions: men who had volunteered for airborne or Special Forces duty did not exactly enjoy playing the role of peacekeeper.

  Neither did these soldiers enjoy being gone from home months at a time on the numerous deployments these missions entailed. The toll on families and morale was very high. Cummings had sworn the same oath all the men and women in the service had—to defend the Country and the Constitution—and many OOTW missions didn’t seem to have much to do with that oath.

  Cummings looked at the current status report of the Angolan deployment. The 82d was doing well. On schedule, maybe even ahead of schedule. But that didn’t thrill Cummings. His first line of defense to any world crisis—the army’s only airborne division—was being sucked into this mission, and he didn’t have another one to fill the gap if there was trouble somewhere else in the world. His only hope was that this would be over quickly with as little bloodshed as possible.

  Luanda, Angola, 14 June

  The 82d Airborne was the army’s most mobile division, priding itself on its ability to deploy rapidly anywhere in the world. It was outdoing itself in its effort to get to Angola. The first wave of troops had boarded C-141 Starlifters at Pope Air Force Base, adjacent to the Fort Bragg reservation, within two hours of the alert notification.

  In-flight refueling had cut transport time down to pure flight time between North Carolina and Angola. The lead C-141 touched down at the capital city’s airfield ahead of schedule, a fact th
at the division commander—General Scott—made sure to mention to the press representatives who dutifully filmed the first red-bereted paratroopers as they walked off the ramp of the aircraft.

  Behind that first load of one hundred and fifty troops was an aerial line stretching across the Atlantic back to the States carrying two full brigades of the division—over ten thousand men. Their heavy equipment had been loaded onto ships three weeks ago and was already in port. Within seventy-two hours, General Scott promised the press and the world, the 82d would be here in full force, ready to fight.

  Angola-Namibia Border, 14 June

  General Nystroom was satisfied as he reviewed after-action reports transmitted to his headquarters. The morning’s air attacks had gone very well indeed. The American plan had worked as promised. In fact, even better than promised.

  The UNITA Air Force didn’t exist anymore. Over 80 percent of what they had estimated UNITA’s armor strength to have been was confirmed destroyed. The Americans’ 82d Airborne Division’s first elements were on the ground to the north in Luanda.

  Nystroom knew it would take the Americans a few days to get their infantry forces organized and begin combat operations. His own main elements were ready. He was just waiting for further intelligence from the scouts he had sent across the border.

  He had two main questions right now. Would UNITA give up the fight or would it slip away into the bush and continue the war? And where was Savimbi? The answer to the first, no one knew and only time would tell. For the second, the American intelligence officers were being very coy. He knew they had plastered Huambo.

  So with all the good news, Nystroom thought, he would have to look very hard to find something to worry about, but that was his job. He grabbed another batch of intelligence reports and began poring through them.

  National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, 14 June

  A busy morning, Waker noted as he watched all the activity in the air and on the ground in Angola. The devices he was tied into were so sophisticated that they picked up much more information than any single person—or even a staff of people—could possibly ingest, never mind digest. So far, Waker’s job had been simply to make sure that the devices were working and the information was recorded. No one had yet made any requests for information from the NSA. The commanders on the ground over in Africa seemed to be satisfied with the information fed to them directly from their own intelligence sources within the Pentagon and on the ground and sky over Angola.

  Waker and the NSA computer were also supposed to look for patterns in the information, but the only pattern that was discernible so far was that things were going according to plan for the U.S. and Pan-African forces.

  As part of his responsibilities, Waker was also checking out the countries bordering Angola. He had several different displays of the Pan-African forces massing along the Angola-Namibia border, but that was in the operations plan. The waters off the coast were empty except for the Abraham Lincoln task force. Zaire to the north and Zambia to the east were quiet. No unexpected troop movements in either country, not that there had been any fear that there might be.

  Waker hadn’t forgotten the transmission out of the Lunda Norte region, but according to the computer, there had been nothing further happening there. With time on his hands, Waker decided to play around a little. He keyed in on the transmissions going to and from the headquarters of the PAF forces to their ground commander in Namibia and began giving the computer various attack angles to work on them. It couldn’t hurt to break the South Africans’ code system. It would give Waker something to put on his next evaluation support form.

  One thing Waker found interesting after a cursory evaluation of the South African code and a comparison of it to the one that had come out of Lunda Norte the previous day was the difference between the two—the latter had been much more sophisticated. The question then was: who in Angola was using a more secure code than the South African Army?

  Vicinity Luia River, Angola, 14 June

  Quinn pulled the earplug out and carefully coiled the headset, placing it in its special compartment on the radio backpack.

  “What’s the word?” Trent asked.

  “The American Eighty-second Airborne is landing in Luanda. The American headquarters says they destroyed most of UNITA’s planes and armor this morning.”

  Quinn thought one of the greatest intelligence breakthroughs in the last decade out in the bush was the AM broadcast out of Kinshasa of SNN’s audio feed. Here in the middle of the African veldt, he could get the same words that the president of the United States and other heads of state watched on their TVs.

  “Those two fellows aren’t feeling any better,” Trent said. “And now a couple more aren’t feeling too good.”

  “What’s wrong with them?” Quinn asked.

  “Fever, sick to their stomach. Headaches.”

  “Malaria flare-up?” Quinn suggested.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can they move?”

  Trent smiled. “You bloody well know they’ll move. No one wants to get left.”

  “They’d better stay close.” Quinn looked at his worn map in its case. “We’ll make the linkup in plenty of time.”

  “I hope this fellow we meet can do his job quick,” Trent said. “Or we’re going to be up to our necks in American paratroopers.”

  Chapter 8

  Abraham Lincoln Task Force, 15 June

  The catapult fired and the F-18 Hornet accelerated down the deck. It was up and into the air, streaking to the east. Inside the cockpit, Lieutenant Theresa Vickers studied her CRT cockpit display. This was her second mission in support of Operation Restore Life. The first had gone like clockwork—a strike against the main rebel airfield outside Huambo.

  This time she was simply going to be drilling a hole in the sky, flying overhead on-call cover in the northeast quadrant until she was needed. Her wingman, Lieutenant Chandler, had launched right after her and his F-18 slipped in off her right wing. At forty thousand feet they flew east.

  After twenty minutes they were on station. Just in time to receive a call from the guardian AWACS to the southwest.

  “Cruiser One, this is Eagle. Over.”

  Vickers acknowledged the call. “This is Cruiser One. Over.”

  “We’re picking up FM radio activity on the ground in your sector. We’ve confirmed that it is not friendly forces. We need you to check it out. We’re locking in to your computer and we’ll put you on target. Over.”

  Lieutenant Vickers flipped up a switch on her control panel. “Roger that, Eagle. Ready for your control. Over.” Her F-18 was now on a sophisticated form of autopilot—basically being flown by a controller on board the AWACS. She could override at any time and regain control, but it was a good way of efficiently getting the aircraft to the desired position, given that the AWACS controllers had a better view of the sky than she did in her cockpit. After glancing out to make sure her wingman was still with her, Vickers sat back and relaxed, letting the plane fly her.

  Cacolo, Angola, 15 June

  Conner walked next to Sergeants Comsky and Brewster as they strolled through the town. Seeger followed, camera on them. Both had mikes clipped to their combat vests. They’d managed to get a couple of hours of sleep over the day and night, despite going out on one more mission to the edge of Saurimo to target several barracks buildings that had escaped the first wave.

  She’d filmed footage a half hour earlier as the first CH-47 Chinook had come in, carrying paratroopers from the 82d Airborne. This was the beginning of the buildup of forces in the Lunda Norte area. The first few platoons had secured a designated area on the edge of town and, using supplies sling-loaded in, were beginning to build their base camp. There would be plenty of time to make it over there and get some stories. For now, Conner was doing what she had promised Riley.

  After talking to him, Conner had decided on a rather unusual approach to this story. She was going to let the medic and the engineer talk fr
eely. It was something she could edit when she got back to the States and make a story out of. Right now, she just wanted it straight.

  And straight she got it. Brewster pointed down a street. “I checked with some of the local officials earlier this morning. That’s the powerhouse down there. It uses oil, which they got plenty of here in Angola. The power grids are not interlocked in this country. What that means is that if a station goes down, the power stays down until that station goes back up. There’s no way to switch power from somewhere else.” They went down the street.

  “As you can see,” Brewster said, “this station has been out of commission for a while.” Through large holes in the brick wall, they could see plants growing inside the building. Brewster kicked down a board that had been placed across the door, and they stepped into the dim twilight inside.

  Brewster gestured. “Those are the generators.” He shook his head. “From what I understand, the rebels were first to start taking down the power grid by blowing substations and the transmission lines. Then, when they captured this town four years ago, they tried to get the power back on line. So then the government, when it counterattacked, took out the powerhouse here.” Two of the four generators were totally wrecked.

  Brewster turned and looked at the camera. “Most people don’t understand what happens when you lose your electric power source. Just think of all the things we take for granted. And not just luxuries but essentials. Without power you can’t freeze anything, so food will rot. Medicines will go bad. You won’t have electric light. Which means you can’t even work inside during the day if you don’t have windows. Sounds like no big deal until you have to live it.

  “You also lose most of your manufacturing capability. No heavy machinery can be run in factories if you don’t have power. Your water system is also down because you don’t have power for pumping. Same for your sewage system.”