Chopper Ops (22 page)
Over central Iraq
Considering what it had been through, Truck One was flying just fine.
The troop-carrying Halo stank of aviation fuel—the entire unit had smelled of gas since the mad rush to refuel the four choppers on the cliff. But the chopper was cruising along without a hint of trouble now, and for that Gene Smitz was grateful.
He was shoehorned into a seat at the back of the chopper jammed up with half of the Team 66 Marines, most of the air techs, and two of the SEAL doctors. Most of his fellow passengers were asleep; the others were crowded around the chopper's windows, looking out for any trouble that might be following them.
Meanwhile, Smitz was trying like crazy to get his NoteBook to work.
They'd been airborne for about a half hour now, and it had been aces since their daring escape from the mountain. No one was following them. They'd received no SAM warnings or any warnings of hostile intent from the ground or the air.
But Smitz knew this was definitely a temporary situation. Thus the wrestling match with his laptop.
Since the mission began, he'd been receiving his orders directly from his office via the NoteBook. That was one of the beauties of the highly advanced machine. It had a remote modem and could connect him with his office no matter where he was in the world.
Of course, he didn't know who was on the other end of the pipeline. He never received any direct replies to his situation reports—and that was slightly troubling. But his missives were always followed by more orders. That was why Smitz was so anxious to get through to his office now. He had to apprise them of the new situation, and ask for immediate orders in extracting the unit—something he just didn't have the authorization to do himself. He'd been waiting for a small green light to start blinking in the upper left-hand corner of his screen, telling him a line to Langley was secure and clear. Yet in nearly thirty minutes of trying, that little light was still solid red.
He was distracted for a moment when he looked out the window to see Norton's Hind pull up in a protective position next to the Halo. Though they'd only been in-country two days, Smitz thought the Hind looked somewhat battered, used, as if it too was getting tired of this game. He also knew that its guns were nearly empty of ammo—the same with Delaney's machine. What's more, both Hinds were running on only half fuel. The rushed refueling job back on the mountain had given each of the four remaining choppers barely enough gas to get airborne and out of the immediate area, but not much more. Certainly not enough to reach friendly environs.
That was another reason why Smitz had to get new orders very quickly. There would be no more fuel to be had for them—not with the Hook gone. And they couldn't just fly around Iraq forever. They needed an extraction plan now.
So Smitz closed his eyes and for the first time in years, actually whispered a small prayer.
And when he looked down at his laptop screen again, the little green light was blinking.
He began typing madly, nearly forgetting to hit the scramble-mode button first. He quickly gave the unit's present position, then briefly reviewed what had happened. The raid on the Ranch, the empty prison, the dead Americans. He covered the details of their escape from the mountain in a few succinct words, and made no mention of his suspicions that the entire operation had been compromised. He concluded by asking for further instructions as soon as possible.
Then he hit the Send button.
Then he sat back to wait.
*****
Smitz's message beamed up directly from his modem to a top-secret military satellite called the Red Door 3, some five hundred miles above the Earth. It was then bounced off no less than four other communications satellites, before being sent down to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
No human ever responded to Smitz's message, though. A computer had been awaiting a transmission—any transmission—from the unit, and now that it had arrived, the computer was sending back a response that had been entered into its hard drive several hours before.
The message told the unit to proceed to a point on the map known as
El-Saad Men. This was an abandoned Iraqi Air Force base located in what was possibly the most barren part of the very barren central Iraqi desert.
Once there, the unit was to hide the choppers inside the most intact hangar on-site, and remain inside themselves until egress transportation arrived. The designated hangar would be easy to spot, as a large arrow was said to be painted on its roof.
This message made the return route up from Langley, to the four military bounce satellites, over to Red Door 3, and down to Smitz's NoteBook in less than one minute.
The CIA man was stunned when he looked down sixty seconds later and saw his green light was blinking again. Nothing ever happened that fast. But when he read the message, he felt his heart lighten by a couple hundred pounds.
The words "egress transportation" were the most heartening part of the lone stark paragraph. It was official then. The unit was being pulled out of Iraq, a prospect that Smitz was sure would be greeted with much joy among the others. Had they accomplished their mission? No. Had they affected anything by coming deep into Iraq and raiding the Ranch? No. But would they be glad to get out of hostile territory after nearly forty-eight hours of pure nonstop anxiety?
Definitely.
Smitz shut down the laptop and began crawling through the sprawled Marines, telling them that things were looking up—unofficially, of course—and that they should get ready "for anything."
He finally made his way up to the cockpit and asked the Army pilots to pull close to Norton's Hind, now riding about 250 feet off the left nose.
The pilots nuzzled up to the chopper, and using a trouble light, Smitz sent a hasty Morse code message over to Norton. It took two attempts for the former fighter pilot to blink back that he understood. Then, in a burst of enthusiasm, he gunned the Hind and started wigwagging all over the sky. Obviously Norton was happy at the prospect of going home too.
Then Smitz blinked over the coordinates to the abandoned base at El Saad Men. A quick check of the aviation chart showed it was about twenty minutes of flying time away from their present location. Getting there would be a breeze compared to what they'd been through. Smitz asked Norton to fly ahead and scout out the location first.
Norton blinked back his reply, gunned the Hind's engines again, and was off like a shot.
Then Smitz returned to his cramped seat in the cargo bay, and for the first time in forty-eight hours, actually fell asleep.
El-Saad Men was an air base—or it used to be—located in the Tajji section of the central Iraqi desert, near the edge of Tharthar wadi.
Built a few months before the start of the Gulf War, it was little more than a pair of runways, a dozen support buildings, and three hangars. It had been designed for use as an alternative base for Iraqi fighters to transit to— a haven after a day of battle. But the base was knocked out the first night of the war by French fighters dropping Chaparral runway-busting bombs. Several times thereafter it was the target of follow-up Coalition air strikes.
Now El-Saad Men was a ghost town, literally. The runways were still cratered, and indeed only one hangar remained intact. The rest were just piles of rubble, victims of precision bombs dropped nearly a decade before.
This was the desolate scene Norton came upon when he reached the coordinates given to him by Smitz. At once he knew the base was the perfect place for the egress pickup. They could easily hide the choppers inside the last hangar standing—the one with the big arrow on top of it—and no one would know they were there unless they came up and knocked on the front door.
Still, he swept over the abandoned base several times, making sure there was no unfriendlies around; making sure there were no hidden weapons painting him. Once he was certain of this, he turned back and met the rest of the unit about fifteen miles east of the abandoned base. He pulled up alongside Truck One and delivered a nav light Morse code message.
"Looks good," he blinked. "Suggest we put down ASAP."
*****
Inside of fifteen minutes, they had done just that.
They landed with no problems, and the huge choppers were pushed inside the last remaining hangar. It was a tight fit, but with some creative angling, all four finally squeezed in.
Now all they had to do was wait. And pray.
Ricco and Gillis were still in bad shape. The SEAL doctors had treated them throughout the escape flight, giving them oxygen and bandaging the multitude of wounds both men had sustained in the crash landing on the mountain. They had been taken out of their fuel-drenched flight suits and put into spares rounded up from others in the unit. Both pilots were now lying on makeshift stretchers, clad in Army T-shirts, Marine pants, and Air Force underwear.
Only now were they able to tell their tale to Smitz, Norton, Delaney, and Chou.
Though the Hook had developed engines problems en route, their refueling went well, they said. But then the ArcLight gunship showed up and blew the
C-130 refueler out of the sky, taking the Hook down with it—or so it must have appeared. The chopper was mortally wounded and going down fast. But that was when Ricco did a very strange thing: He
turned off
the Hook's one good engine about five thousand feet from impact. Killing the engine allowed the rotor's kinetic motion to level them out—an old chopper trick Ricco had somehow picked up. It saved their lives. Once the chopper was stable, he was able to restart the engine, and it gave them enough power to stay airborne—but just barely. It was all they could do to keep the chopper at two hundred feet altitude.
They made the dash back to the Bat Cave, flying perilously low over villages, highways, army encampments. Thus their rather spectacular arrival back at the not-so-hidden mountain base. Everything was rather foggy after that.
This tale took about twenty minutes to tell. Neither man could get out a complete sentence without requiring a fix from the SEALs' emergency oxygen tank. Ricco was especially woozy.
After hearing the story, Norton pulled Delaney away from the rest of the group.
"Well, what do you think?" he asked his partner.
"I think they're delirious," Delaney told him. "Do you really believe those two have all that in them?"
Norton shrugged and looked back at the two ailing pilots.
"They came down to the deck when we needed them that night during Desert Storm," he said. "And it would have been damn easy for them to have just plunked down someplace close to Kuwait and walked across the border."
Delaney took another look back at the pilots. They'd inhaled a lot of fumes and their skin had been drenched with aviation gas, not exactly a healthy situation.
"God, you mean I'm going to have to start admiring these guys now?" he asked.
"Someone has to be a hero in this big fat waste of time," Norton said, his tone turning bitter. "At least they might have a chance to keep flying. As for you and me, we'll be lucky if they let us shovel shit somewhere."
"I can handle that," Delaney replied.
But one aspect of the tanker pilots' story raised a very disturbing question. Norton and Delaney were now joined by Chou and Smitz in the most isolated corner of the abandoned hangar to discuss it.
"Do you think these guys are hallucinating and just imagined the ArcLight killed their tanker?" Smitz asked under his breath. "Gas fumes can do that to you, I hear. Make you see things."
"That part of their story really doesn't make much sense," Chou said in a whisper. "I mean, how would the ArcLight know that the Hook was refueling and where to go to find it?"
The four men just stared at each other. Not liking what they were thinking.
"Turn it around, though," Smitz said. "Say it
was
true—why would the
ArcLight go after the tanker?"
"Unless they were going after both the tanker
and
the Hook," Norton said grimly.
"Which means they really know what we've been up to," Chou said.
A dreadful silence fell among them.
Finally Delaney broke it.
"Listen, I've been trying to hold this in," he began. "But I think now is the time to speak my piece ... any objections?"
Norton eyed him sternly.
Don’t tell them about Angel
, he was trying to say.
"Go ahead, do it," Smitz told him.
"OK," Delaney began. "Let's look at the forest instead of the trees for a moment. I have a theory this program has been screwed up from the start. Anyone else thinking along those lines?"
"I thought you were going to tell us something we
don't
know," Chou said snidely.
"No—I mean screwed up
from the start
," Delaney said. "From day one."
Smitz wiped his tired eyes. Chou leaned back against a partially shattered wall. They knew this might take a while.
"OK," Smitz said. "Let's hear it."
Delaney took a deep breath and collected his thoughts.
"From the start," he repeated. "You got me and Jazz. We're fighter pilots—why have us come in, learn how to fly the choppers?"
"Because you scored high on the PS2," Smitz replied. "Your profiles said you could both adapt."
"Oh, that's bullshit!" Delaney shot back. "You're telling me that they couldn't find any
real-life
chopper pilots who could do the job as well as us?"
It was a good question.
"Apparently not," Smitz replied.
Delaney nodded over to the other side of the hangar, where the Army Aviation guys were sitting.
"Then what the hell are those guys doing here?"
The others just stared and let it sink in.
Delaney was on a roll.
''Point two," he began again, gathering steam. "We're in choppers here—but we've got a pack of Marines. Marines are usually good—and these Team 66 guys are great. But correct me if I'm wrong, don't Marines usually jump out of boats? Army guys are better at jumping out of choppers, right?"
The three others nodded. Again Delaney was making sense.
"Point three," he went on. "And no offense to Mutt and Jeff. But really, if you had a mission that was supposed to be this important, would you pick two National Guard guys to be your fill-up men? Two weekenders who have never flown choppers before?"
More nods.
"And SEAL doctors?" Delaney said. "I mean, don't you jarheads have your own corpsmen?"
Chou nodded. "We do," he said.
Delaney looked them all in the eye.
"Don't you get it?" he was imploring them. "This thing was fucked up from the start because it was
meant
to be fucked up. All these things we thought had some deep dark meaning behind them were actually roadblocks put in our path, so we wouldn't succeed. They probably thought we'd be at each others' throats more than actually drilling for the mission. That we were able to overcome everything they threw at us—well, I mean, what does that say about us?"
"That we should all get medals," Chou said.
"At the very least," Delaney said with disgust. "We've been set up, I'm convinced of it, but not just on the raid. From the first moment of this plan's existence. Someone knew this gunship was flying around and knew it had to be stopped. But for whatever reason, they didn't want it to be stopped. Yet they had to turn some wheel, had to push some button, to make it
look like
something was going to be done. So what do they do? They put together an underservice
F-Troop—never in a million years thinking that we'd get as far as we have."
"Jesus Christ," Smitz swore softly. "I'm starting to believe him."
"I mean, let's really get back to ground zero," Delaney concluded. "If they really wanted this thing to go down, they would have done what we were all saying at the first briefing. Just send in some fighters and shoot the fucking thing out of the sky."
Now the silence was so thick it was like a veil had come down around them. Norton and Delaney looked at each other. Both were thinking the same thing: Was it time to come clean on Angel?
Delaney had one more thing to add, though. "I think now we have to go on the assumption that everything they've sent us has been skewered intentionally."
He paused.
"And if that is true, what was the last order they gave us?"
Now a wave of high anxiety washed through them. If every order had been compromised from the beginning, what did that say about their latest instructions?
But before anyone could say another word, something very strange happened: A knock came at the door.
It was such a surprise, Norton actually mouthed the words: "Someone is knocking? At the door?"
It came again. Everyone tensed. Marines grabbed their weapons.
"Who the fuck is this?" Delaney asked. "The Mad Hatter?"
Chou barked a silent order, and in a snap the six Marines closest to the small access door had it covered, their rifles up and ready.
"Open it," Chou told them.
They did—and standing on the other side was a face familiar to all of them—most especially Norton and Delaney.
It was Angel.
"You've got to be kidding me," Smitz exclaimed. "How the
fuck
did you get here?"
"Never mind that," Angel said worriedly. "We've got to talk."