Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (37 page)

           
“What in hell does
that
mean?” Jamieson asked.

           
“It means he’s going in somewhere,
probably into
Iran
,” McLanahan said. “Give me a one-eighty—I’ll see if I can pick him up
on radar.”

 
          
“A
one-eightyl
You mean, fly
hack
to where we just creamed an Iranian
aircraft carrier?” Jamieson retorted. “Are you insane?”

           
“C’mon, Colonel, where’s your spirit
of adventure?” McLanahan asked. “We’ve got the gas, and we’re outside
Iran
’s radar coverage.” “Hey, my butt thinks my
legs have been cut off,” Jamieson said. “We’ve still got twelve more hours’
flying time to go.” But he quickly relented, took control of the Spirit, and
turned westbound toward the
Strait of Hormuz
again.

           
“What’s your altitude, Redman?”

           
“Shoshone,” came the reply.

           
“You two are just too fuckin’ cute,”
Jamieson said. “Another code word from your days in Dreamland?”

           
“Exactly,” McLanahan said. “Shoshone
Peak, in restricted area 4202A, sixty-five hundred feet above sea level. SAR
coming on.”

           
McLanahan configured the B-2A’s
radar, then shot a one-second sweep of the sky. The choice was fairly
easy—there was only one aircraft near that altitude. “Level off at Brawley for
confirmation.”

 
          
“Roger,”
came the reply. A few moments later, McLanahan took another SAR shot and zeroed
in on the same return—sure enough, it had leveled off at 9,500 feet above sea
level—the same height as Brawley Peak in southwestern Nevada near Hawthorne.

 
          
“Radar
contact, Redman,” McLanahan said. “Continue on course. We can keep an eye on
you for a while, and if we see red lights, we’ll try to turn them green for
you.”

Aboard the OV-IOD-NOS Bronco
attack plane

 
          
“Thanks,
Genesis. See you when I see you. Out.”

 
          
“Can
they help us, Leopard?” Behrouzi asked.

 
          
“I
think so,” Briggs said with a smile big enough to be seen in the dim light of
the Bronco’s cargo bay. “Whatever happened over Bandar Abbas and over the
Khomeini
carrier group tonight, I got a
feeling these guys are gonna make it happen over Chah Bahar.”

Baluchistan
va Sistan Provincial Naval Base, Chah Bahar,
Iran

23 APRIL 1997
,
0408 HRS. LOCAL TIME

 
          
A
flash of intense light like a billion-watt lightbulb instantly destroyed his
night vision; followed by an earth-shattering explosion, louder than any sound
he had ever heard in his life; then an incredible shudder that felt like ten
earthquakes rolled into one. The normally unshakable deck heeled over to starboard
as if a giant child’s hand had tossed them against the toy box, then the deck
rolled hard to port, and the port rail was awash. Men were screaming, their
faces yellowed by the fires, their voices as loud, maybe even louder—if that
was possible—than the sounds of explosions and tearing metal.

           
For the second time since being
transferred to the prison facility, Carl Knowlton was replaying the death of
the
S.S.
Valley
Mistress
in his tortured
minds eye. It had been the most horrifying experience of his life. He had seen
the aftermath of the Iraqi Scud missile hit on the barracks at Khobar during
the Gulf War, where 117 American soldiers had been killed or wounded; he
remembered the thousands of square miles of burning oil fields of Kuwait, when
he thought that he was seeing a bit of hell right here on earth. But the air
attack against the
Valley Mistress
had been the worst by far. The ship had felt so small, so helpless, as the sea
rushed in to claim it. As the sea had poured into the crippled ship, the old
bitch had literally screamed—its oil-fired engines first grinding to a painful
halt, then tearing themselves apart, then exploding from the stress and rapid
cooling. The scream had been like a loud siren, like a wild animal caught in a
trap. . . .

 
          
This
time, though, Knowlton had not been awakened by his nightmare, but by the
sounds of real sirens—air raid sirens. He rolled painfully to his feet, his
pants creaking from caked-on sweat, oil, and salt. The oil-fire burns on his
arms, shoulders, and neck were wrapped in someone’s T-shirt, the pus and sweat
making the cloth stick painfully to the burns.

 
          
“You
all right, sir?” a young Marine lance corporal, J. D. McKay, asked. “You cried
out.”

 
          
“Sorry,
Corporal,” Knowlton said. “Real bad dream.”

 
          
“The
guards might come back if they heard you—we gotta be careful,” McKay said.
McKay had a right to lecture a superior officer: the Iranian Pasdaran soldiers
had obviously recognized who McKay was right after his capture, because they
had separated him and beaten him senseless, bludgeoning his face, breaking in
teeth, ripping out hair, and breaking fingers. He definitely did not want to
attract any more attention to himself.

 
          
“Right.
Sorry.” Embarrassed, Knowlton stepped over to the one window in the room he and
the Marine soldier occupied. The window was too high; Knowlton couldn’t see
anything, and he was too weak to pull himself up onto the sill.

 
          
“Hop
up, sir,” McKay said. Knowlton turned. McKay was crawling on his hands and
knees toward the sound of the siren coming through the window.

 
          
“No,
McKay, I can’t...”

 
          
“Get
up, sir, and see what’s goin’ on,” McKay said, and the young Marine offered his
back—probably the only part of his body not broken—as a footstool. Knowlton
clapped the young soldier on the back, then painfully climbed up to peer out
the window, pulling himself up onto the wall by the bars on the window to avoid
putting his full weight on the kid’s back.

 
          
The
window was open but covered with metal louvers, so he could see only a few
slivers of open sky outside. Still, it was enough: “I see searchlights,”
Knowlton reported. “Jesus, hard to believe anyone on this planet uses
antiaircraft searchlights anymore ... I see a SAM lifting off north, looks like
a Hawk, missile flying southwest... there goes a second Hawk... no secondaries,
no flashes .. . third Hawk lifting off. . . still nothing.” He climbed down off
the Marine’s back. “Somebody’s out there, dammit. I think ... I
hope
it’s one of ours....” He pulled off
his T-shirt, painfully ripping off the scabs and loose flesh from his burns. He
tore a long strip of white cloth from the bottom of the T-shirt, then removed
his trousers, tore a long strip off each pant leg, and began knotting the three
pieces of cloth together.

 
          
“What
are you doing, sir?”

 
          
“Trying
to create a flag for whoever’s out there,” Knowlton said. “If they see it,
they’ll know where to look for us.” He ripped a piece of reinforced trim from
the T-shirt’s collar, tore it into thin strips, and tied that to the louvers so
it could not be seen from the cell; then he stuffed the trousers and T-shirt
pieces out the window through the louvers. It was hard to tell from inside the
cell that anything was hanging outside. Knowlton stepped off the Marine’s back.
“Thanks, McK—”

 
          
Just
then the cell door burst open, and two guards entered. They jabbered excitedly
in Farsi, and pulled Knowlton across the room and up against a wall. They then
kicked McKay in the rib cage, sending him writhing in pain into the corner.
They yelled at both of them for a few moments. Knowlton held up his burned
hands to defend himself as best he could, but they saw his burns and decided
they had seen enough and departed. They did not even think to look up at the
window.

 
          
“Jesus
Christ, those motherfuckers,” Knowlton cursed as he rushed over to the young
Marine. He looked bad, but no worse than he had with Knowlton standing on his
back looking out the window. He lifted the Marine up and propped him up in the
corner so he could breathe easier. “You okay, McKay?”

 
          
“The
name’s J. D., sir,” the Marine said, with a weak smile. “I’m not feelin’ very
military right now.”

 
          
“I
hear ya,” Knowlton said. “Me neither. You breathing okay, J.D.?”

 
          
J.
D. clasped his broken ribs with his bent, twisted fingers. “For now,” he said.
“I just hope the beatin’ was worth it. . . . ”

Aboard the OV-IOD-NOS Bronco
attack plane

 
          
“Down
to twenty bundles of chaff, Major,” the weapons officer reported in Arabic on
interphone. “Twenty-five kilometers until we reach the shore.”

 
          
Riza
Behrouzi swore to herself, then replied in Arabic, “I won’t argue with the
results, Lieutenant Junayd—we’re still dive. Just make sure it stays that way.
”

 
          
“Yes,
Major,” Junayd replied. “Eighteen kilometers to go.” As bad as it was up in the
cockpit, the young gunnery officer thought, it would be even worse for the five
poor souls back there.

           
The Bronco’s threat warning receiver
was beeping well before they crossed into Iran’s territorial waters; the first
long-range radar at Chah Bahar picked up the Bronco 100 miles into the Gulf of
Oman, and they started their descent to get under radar coverage then. At fifty
miles, even though they were flying less than 600 feet above the dark waters of
the
Gulf
of
Oman
, the radar had picked them up once again;
at forty kilometers, the first L-band Hawk acquisition radar was detected, and
a few miles later they detected the Hawk’s X-band target illuminators. That’s
when they decided to go down to fifty feet, using the AN/AAS-36 Forward-Looking
Infrared (FLIR) camera and the radar altimeter, which measured the altitude
between the belly of the plane and the surface directly below, to keep from
crashing.

 
          
When
the first Hawk launched at twenty-five miles, it was like a nightmare come
alive. The cockpit crew could actually
see
the missile lift off, its bright rocket-motor plume clearly visible on the
horizon. They could see the bright yellow arc as it described a powered,
semi-ballistic flight path through the sky. The pilot punched out chaff, racked
the Bronco into a tight right turn using max back pressure on the control stick
to get the tightest turn—but the Hawk followed. A second Hawk went up, followed
by a third. The Iranian missile crews knew that the attacker might evade the
first missile, but doing so greatly reduced the attacker’s speed, which made it
likely that a second or third missile could claim a kill. The pilot set the
radar altimeter warning bug to thirty feet; Briggs, Behrouzi, and the three UAE
commandos in the cargo bay heard almost constant warning tones as the pilot edged
lower and lower, trying to evade the missiles. When the pilot banked hard, the
radar altimeter completely broke lock, the warning horn sounded constantly, and
the commandos all feared that it would be the last sound they’d hear before
crashing into the sea.

 
          
“All
chaff expended,” the gunner reported. They would be going in completely
unprotected now.

 
          
Every
hard bank threw the cargo bay occupants harder and harder against their
harnesses, but each jarring move made Behrouzi smile. “They are working well,”
she said to Briggs, motioning toward the cockpit. The noise level was very high
in the Bronco’s cargo bay because they had removed the small rear door before
takeoff—it would make it easier to do what they needed to do once they got over
the Iranian naval base. “I think they do better than I.”

 
          
Hal
Briggs was smiling, too, but his smile was just a facade—inside, his guts were
twisting with worry, doubt, and downright fear. Had he made the right decision?
He hadn’t expected to involve the lives of six other soldiers on this
mission—and he certainly didn’t expect to involve Riza Behrouzi. In his
fantasy, he envisioned doing a HALO (High-Altitude, Low-Opening) parachute
jump, solo of course, his trusty Uzi his only companion; he’d land on the
rooftop of wherever the prisoners were being kept, blast his way inside, rescue
the hostages, steal a cargo plane, dodge enemy fighters on the way out, bring
them all back alive, be the hero, and fall blissfully into Riza’s waiting arms.