Force of Eagles (33 page)

The words FLASH SECRET were stamped at the top and bottom of the message that Stansell read to the group.

THIS IS A DEPLOYMENT ORDER BY AUTHORITY

OF SECRETARY OF DEFENSE.

UNIT: TASK FORCE ALPHA

DEPLOY: IN ACCORDANCE WITH OPORD WARLORD

LAUNCH: WITHIN TWELVE (12) HOURS OF MSG DTG

OPTIONS: NONE

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: NONE.

“My God,” Pullman said, “we’re goin’ to do it. I knew it, dammit, I knew it…”

Stansell handed the message to Mado, who read it and shook his head. He checked the message’s date/time group printed under the list of addresses. “We’ve got to be out of here in just over eleven hours. Any problems?”

A ragged chorus of “no’s” and “none” went around the room. Gregory read the message twice, not believing his luck, before he handed it to Dewa. She read the message without comment. The room rapidly emptied, leaving Stansell, Pullman, and Dewa alone.

“Dewa, Chief, you both know…you won’t be going with us. I need you to stay behind and sweep up the place.”

Pullman went back to his trailer, looked around, made a quick decision, locked the door and headed for his quarters to pack. “Colonel,” he muttered under his breath, “I didn’t come to this party to be left behind when the music started.”

Dewa worked in her office, taking the wall maps down and going through the routine of preparing classified material for destruction. When she had finished she stood in the middle of a large pile of sealed burn bags surveying her handiwork. She crossed her arms and hugged herself. “Damn, damn,
damn
.” She walked over to a bookcase and pulled out an unclassified manual on the law of armed conflict. Sitting on the couch, she drew her feet up and searched through the section on POWs, finding what she wanted.

She stared at the blank wall across the room trying to decide what to do. The manual was very clear on the status of escaped POWs as opposed to a combatant who was trying to evade capture. Once a combatant was captured, he became a POW and could not kill anyone in an escape. That was murder and a POW could actually be tried and executed for it. No, she was no clubhouse lawyer, but Rupert Stansell was an escaped POW, not an evader, and two guards had been killed during his escape. She knew the Iranians too well—she
was
one. If they recaptured Rupe Stansell they would execute him…

The choice was hers. All she had to do was tell General Simon Mado and the man she had decided she wanted to marry would be left behind. Except, of course, he would never forgive her. Still…she reached for the phone, started to dial, then shook her head and slammed the phone down. She made no attempt to stop the damage to her makeup as she stared at the wall…

Chapter 34: D Minus 1

Maragheh, Iran

The Iranian radar operator settled into the still-warm chair as he relieved the sergeant going off duty. “Are the Americans doing anything different?” he asked. The reply was a muffled grunt as the sergeant hurried out the door of the radar shack to catch the truck before it left for the run down the mountain to the comfort of his quarters in the town of Maragheh.

The operator resigned himself to his twelve-hour shift and searched through the drawers for the detailed checklist the Americans had supplied with the radar site. The only one that still followed it, he finally found the thick notebook buried in a stack of newspapers in a corner of the room and thumbed through it until he found the changeover checklist. Carefully he went through each step, checking them off with a grease pencil. He adjusted the receiver-gain, surprised to find it turned to its lowest setting. “How long has it been that way?” he mumbled to himself. When he checked the interrogation circuits he gasped as he counted twelve targets orbiting close to the border. A quick double-check confirmed they were still in Turkey but all were in the buffer zone NATO had established in Turkey next to the Iranian border.

He scanned the log for the previous shift and saw only two entries—the sign-on and sign-off of the departed sergeant. He continued to run the checklist until he reached the communications check section, keyed his mike and called the control center of Maragheh. After several attempts a voice answered his call. “Sir, communications check. Also, I have an unusual number of targets in the tri-border region.”

“You have a very short memory,” the-officer told him, “that is the joint Turkish-American air defense exercise. Perhaps you recall I directed you to report only unusual activity? Only call me with important observations. Or will it take a forty-eight-hour tour-of-duty on the mountain to teach you to follow orders?”

“Sorry to disturb you, sir.”

The officer broke the connection, and the operator sighed in relief.

*

Incirlik Air Base, Turkey

Chief Pullman heaved his bulk out of the red canvas parachute seat stretched along the side of the C-141 and peered out one of the small round windows above the seat rail. “Can’t see much,” he yelled at Kamigami, who was sitting next to him. The loadmaster keyed his mike, acknowledged a call from the pilot and walked back to the two men, telling them to strap in for the approach and landing at Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey. “Ever been to Turkey?” he asked Kamigami. The Army sergeant shook his head. “Interesting place,” Pullman told him.

The passenger-services sergeant meeting the big cargo plane was surprised to learn that it was not the “Turkey Trot,” the normal shuttle C-141 that landed every Tuesday. “Chief,” he explained, “you haven’t got an in-country clearance to be here. That’s a biggy, I can’t let you off the airplane.” Pullman took him aside, spoke a few quiet words. The sergeant jumped into his pickup and sped away.

“We should have transportation and an officer out here in a few minutes,” Pullman told Kamigami. While they waited Pullman put the cargo handlers to work and off-loaded the C-141 as he checked off the cargo strapped to six pallets. As predicted a harried-looking lieutenant colonel appeared and demanded to see their orders. Pullman reached into his briefcase and handed him the deployment order from the Secretary of Defense. He pointed out that Incirlik was one of the addresses on the message.

“I’ve never heard of OPORD WARLORD—”

“And you won’t, sir, unless you’ve got one hell of a need to know. Your wing commander and his plans officer should know about it. I’d suggest you talk to them. Meantime I need your gym and a hangar for a few days. A little transportation would be appreciated. All in accordance with OPORD WARLORD, of course.” The L.C. reread the message, noted the date/time group and drove away, determined to find out why the men were on his base. Two pickup trucks heading for the cargo plane passed the officer before he had driven thirty yards.

“Those are for us,” Pullman told Kamigami.

“I didn’t know the OPORD said we got trucks,” Kamigami said.

“It doesn’t. I don’t know about you but I’m not about to walk. Hell, we’ll be long gone before the motor pool figures it out. Let the officers walk.” Kamigami threw his gear into the back of one truck and took the keys from the driver. “If you’ll get this squared away in a hangar”—Pullman swept the six pallets with a gesture—“I’ll check with munitions. We’ll be ready to bed ’em down when the birds arrive.”

Six hours later a nervous Pullman paced the ramp in front of the hangar they had been given to use, waiting for the first C-130 to taxi in. Stansell glared at the big sergeant when he climbed down the crew-entry steps. “Chief, I told you to stay—”

Pullman threw him a hasty salute. “Big problems, sir. No GBU-12s on base. All that got shipped were GBU-15s, two-thousand pounders.” The chief knew how to switch the colonel’s attention away from his insubordination.

Stansell clamped a tight control on his anger. “Somebody screwed up big time. Let’s find General Mado and try to sort this out. What else?”

“Under control, sir. We’re using the gym to billet most of the Rangers, got the officers in the VOQ, and the mess hall will set up a chow line in the hangar there. We can keep the troops under cover inside.”

They found the general at the back of the C-130 talking to Incirlik’s wing commander. “General,” Stansell began, “
we’ve
got a problem. No GBU-12s…only GBU-15s were shipped—”

“Someone really screwed up.” Mado turned to the wing commander. “We need an emergency shipment of twelve GBU-12s in here ASAP—twelve hours max.”

“I can’t make that happen, General. The Turks are real touchy about munitions coming in-country, and an emergency shipment like that is too public, too easily monitored—”

“Colonel, we didn’t come here to be grounded by some snafu and bullshit regs. Now make it happen and quick.”

“Sir,” the wing commander persisted, “I know what you’re up against but I can’t do it that quick without getting us kicked out of Turkey.”

Mado glared at him. Angry, yes, but also, it came as something of a shock to him, that he felt a degree of relief. And then he realized why. He wanted the POWs rescued, would do whatever he could to make it happen. Sure, of course…But he was, after all, an expert in special operations, and in his firm opinion he had a lot more confidence in Delta Force than in Stansell’s less organized, pick-up Task Force Alpha. Besides, there was Leachmeyer breathing down his back. He shunted aside such crass considerations as where his own career was best-served in this Delta-Alpha tug of war…Well, whatever, he wasn’t going to roll over and play dead because the wrong bombs had been shipped. “Let’s go with the GBU-15s—”

“No way,” Pullman cut in. “Too much collateral damage. We’d nail at least some of the POWs when we blow the walls if we use those bigger bombs.”

“Are you really sure, Chief?” Mado asked.

“I built the damn walls just like the Iranians did. I saw what five-hundred pounders did. I’m sure, General.”

“I’ll get a message off to the command center in the Pentagon and let them sort it out,” Mado said as he turned and walked toward a waiting car, cutting off any further discussion.

“No way, General,” Stansell growled. “Chief, you’re about to earn your pay this month. Let’s talk to Doucette and find out where we can find GBU-12s in Europe. You’re going to do some unauthorized requisitioning.”

“Now, how in the hell am I going to do that?”

“Let’s find Doucette first.” They walked into the hangar where most of the aircrews were gathering and found Doucette and Contreraz talking to a maintenance sergeant about their jet. After hearing Stansell, Doucette told them that his unit at RAF Lakenheath had GBU-12s in their ammo dump but that he doubted the 48th’s DO, Colonel Billy Joe Barker, would release them since OPORD WARLORD only required the 48th to provide F-111s and aircrews. It would take a special, coordinated authorization from higher headquarters to budge Barker since he had dealt with the Turks before, and that would take days to arrange.

“Would he even know if the bombs were sent to RAF Stonewood for a practice exercise, like an emergency munitions buildup?” Pullman asked. Doucette conceded that sounded like normal maintenance training that Barker wouldn’t be too concerned with. Pullman found a telephone and placed a long distance phone call to a friend at Headquarters United States Air Force Europe in Germany who owed him a favor. Pullman collected favors like a gambler took in markers. “The GBU-12s will be built up and waiting for us at Stonewood. Okay, Colonel,” Pullman said, “now how in hell do we get them
here?
” You just don’t walk in and shanghai twelve GBUs. Munitions are tightly controlled—”

“Why don’t I go get ’em?” Doucette asked.

“You’ve just ferried your jet in from Nellis,” Stansell said. “You’re almost out of crew duty, you should go into crew rest—”

“The only people here who know that are you and me, Colonel. Von Drexler hasn’t landed yet. Hell, Colonel, flyin’ straight and level is no big deal. I’m fine and slept most of the way over here while Ramon flew the jet. Ramon”—he turned to his WSO—“file a flight plan and let’s go a’fliegening.” Contreraz ran for a pickup truck.

“What?” Pullman said. It was moving too fast even for him.

“A’flyin’,” Doucette translated…it’s supposed to be what the Air Force is all about. Another thought occurred: “Chief, we can one-hop it without refueling going to Stonewood but we’re going to need to hit a tanker coming back if we’re hauling bombs. Can you arrange a KC-135 for us?” Pullman nodded, pleased to still have something to do, and headed for the telephone to arrange it, muttering about freewheeling jet jockeys. But he was impressed.

“I’ll get a message off to Cunningham and have the GBUs released to you by the time you get to Stonewood,” Stansell said. “Just get them here ASAP.” As he watched Doucette walk out to his F-111 he decided he wasn’t going to tell Mado about his midnight requisitioning of GBU-12s until they arrived at Incirlik. He found a pickup truck and headed for the communications shack to send out his own message to Cunningham. We’re still players, General, he said to himself.

*

Maragheh, Iran

A power surge activated the protective circuits of the AN/FPS-8 radar, and the slowly rotating sweep disappeared from the radar scope as the set shut off. The operator caught it immediately and grabbed the checklist, turning to the appropriate page. “Let it cool down first,” the maintenance technician grumbled, not caring if the set was working or not. The operator ignored him and worked his way through the checklist, noting all the voltages. The radar was back on line in three minutes.

“Now what are the Americans up to?” the operator sighed as he played the receiver-gain and antenna-tilt for the best return. He could count four skin-paints—returns off a target—that did not correlate with an IFF squawk. When they disappeared off his scope he dropped the antenna tilt and recaptured the returns as they started a westbound penetration run into Turkey at a lower altitude than before. He almost stomped on the pedal under his right foot to call his superior to in the control center but thought better of it. Twelve minutes later he picked up four eastbound skin-paints at low altitude inside Turkey heading straight for Iran. Again, there was no IFF squawk from the fast-moving returns. The operator watched as the returns disappeared from his scope, a good indication the aircraft were descending lower. Still, he only monitored the scope, though he was now worried about a border penetration.