Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (18 page)
Now, Larry and I were coming in from London to link up with other task force officers flying in from the States. Larry, a Texan who spoke perfect Spanish, was a Navy SEAL officer who had served with a Swift Boat unit in Vietnam. He later went on to command the SEAL training school in Coronado, California, and also help save the nation from a John Kerry presidency. In 2004, angry over Kerry’s Vietnam-era congressional testimony that Swifties and other American soldiers had, with their superiors’ full knowledge, routinely razed villages, raping, killing, and dismembering as they went, Bailey would stand up with the Swifties and call Kerry to account.
But in 1983, Kerry was still just your basic left-wing irritant, a pebble in the shoe of the Reagan administration. The Camp David Accords, during which Jimmy Carter helped Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin hammer out an uneasy peace, were only a few years old. But now Sadat was dead, assassinated by Islamic radicals angry over his concessions to Israel. Still, U.S. relations with Egypt remained positive, and the Pentagon considered the country our key Arab ally. That made Sudan a strategic gem. Not only did the country protect Egypt’s southern flank, it could possibly serve as a base of operations should U.S. military intervention be required to protect Middle Eastern oil fields.
Those were America’s reasons for saying yes to Sudan’s requests for military training. The Sudanese had reasons of their own. In July 1976, two years before Camp David, Sudanese President Jaafer Mohammed al-Numeiry survived a coup attempt masterminded by both his former finance minister and former prime minister, who lashed out at him from exile. Two thousand heavily armed civilians ransacked Khartoum and Omdurman, but Numeiry, a tough and wily former army colonel, squashed the rebellion. The insurrection firmed up ties between Sudan and Egypt, and the two countries signed a mutual defense pact.
The backdrop to all this was renewed tension in Sudan between the Muslim-dominated north and the heavily Christian south. Years before, Numeiry fought a civil war against the Anya-Nya rebels in the south, many of whose ancestors converted to Christianity during the reign of Justinian. Now, the country was headed toward the implementation of Sharia, or Islamic law. We suspected Numeiry was bracing for more trouble from southern rebels. But within months, we would learn that a more immediate threat loomed farther south, in Ethiopia.
Larry and I landed in Sudan midmorning and linked up with the other task force officers. Then an embassy driver whisked us through Khartoum’s dusty, chaotic streets to President Numeiry’s office, where we met our two main contacts in the Sudanese military, Major Abu Bakr and Colonel Hassan. Our team would work closely with the two Sudanese army officers, both of whom were Muslims.
Abu Bakr was a large, round-faced African man with close-cropped hair and a broad smile. Over the next few weeks, I would come to regard him as the perfect soldier. He was fit, committed to his country, and dedicated to his soldiers. He wanted the best for them and he wanted them to
be
the best. But Abu Bakr faced high hurdles: “It is an enormous challenge,” he told me privately in his perfect English. “We are using an existing airborne unit and standard army equipment, but must learn to perform as well as our counterparts in Europe and America.”
As time went on, I learned that Abu Bakr preferred to communicate one-on-one. He despised large meetings, which he considered to whirl in endless circles and accomplish little. We had that in common, as well as a love for our families. In another conversation, he told me proudly that he was married and had a young son. By then, I had showed him pictures of my wife and three children back at Fort Bragg. Abu Bakr really understood and embraced the ideas of democracy. “I hope one day, we can see these freedoms in Sudan,” he said. A chain of these chats—about family, politics, and Sudanese culture—forged a friendship between us that would later stretch across the Atlantic.
ON OUR SECOND DAY IN SUDAN, Abu Bakr and Hassan hosted us at the airborne base in Khartoum. There, Abu Bakr’s airborne unit devoted the day to demonstrating what they could already do: Static line jumps, hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, and survival skills. The Sudanese were very serious about survival skills. As part of the demo, one man killed a rabbit, skinned it and parted it out to his fellow soldiers, who then ate it raw.
Next, a slim African with a dazzling smile brought out the biggest bullfrog I’d ever seen. It blinked against the blazing sun—until the soldier raised the frog high and brought its head down hard against the edge of the table. Then he took out a long slender knife and expertly ran it around the skin. When I was growing up, we ate frog legs all the time. My dad used to go frog-gigging in the rivers near our house. He would’ve been proud of this Sudanese fellow. He really knew what he was doing.
After skinning the frog, I thought the Sudanese soldier would part it out to the others as he had the rabbit. Instead, he sliced off the frog’s choicest leg and handed it directly to me.
The Sudanese all smiled and looked at me expectantly. One of them made a motion to his mouth:
Eat. Eat
.
For a moment, I hesitated. Was this a rite of passage? In Special Forces we talk about building rapport. Well, here was a chance for me to build some.
Time to take one for the team
, I thought.
I opened my mouth and took a big, slick bite of raw frog leg. And about the time I’d choked down the second mouthful, the Sudanese—and Larry Bailey—fell out laughing. Around the frog flesh stuck in my teeth, I laughed, too.
Okay, you got me
.
I’ll tell you one thing: that was the last frog leg I ever ate.
We spent the next seventy-two hours in military tours and briefings. Larry and I began to sketch the outlines of a training plan for Abu Bakr’s new hostage rescue force, and agreed to return in January with certain equipment. The rest, the Sudanese would have to purchase through the Pentagon’s foreign military sales office, we explained. Abu Bakr saw a long road ahead to get his men trained up. Still, he told me, he was encouraged.
When we returned to Khartoum the next day, Abu Bakr asked, “Would you like to see more of our culture?” The five of us immediately agreed.
At sunset, he and Hassan took us to a mosque, a kind I hadn’t seen before. Instead of towers and minarets, this place was more like an open pavilion. High walls of tan stucco secluded the worship area from Khartoum’s teeming streets. In the center of the open space on an ornate marble floor, large pillars of polished stone supported a tiled roof, creating a covered area that was open on all four sides. The amber sunset hung near the horizon, casting gold light over at least two hundred men kneeling on tiny
sajadas
, prayer rugs. An imam, his voice like music, sang out prayers in Arabic and the worshippers bowed forward as one, then rose again.
We stood on the periphery and watched. It never dawned on me to wonder why the Muslim officers brought us to a mosque during worship. According to Islamic doctrine, we were infidels. But never was there any sense from Abu Bakr and Hassan that they thought anything odd about inviting us there. They did not treat us like infidels, but seemed to feel they were simply sharing more with us about their way of life.
As the prayer ended, several of the worshippers moved to a corner of the pavilion and, to the rhythm of drums, began a dance that reminded me of whirling dervishes. I was fascinated.
I turned to Abu Bakr. “Thank you for bringing us here.”
He smiled. “Now would you like to go to a wedding?”
As it turned out, we went to two Muslim weddings that night—even danced with the brides and, according to custom, stuck paper money to their foreheads. A couple of days later, satisfied that Abu Bakr and his new hostage rescue team were on course for success, I left with Bailey and the others, and returned to the States. None of us knew that within five months, Abu Bakr and his men would be put to their first real-world test.
IN JULY 1984, a band of at least twenty guerillas slipped across the Ethiopian border into Sudan, kidnapped eleven Westerners, and held them hostage at a missionary compound at the summit of the Boma Hills, near Juba. From a global perspective, the kidnapping was an obscure third-world incident, scantly reported in the Western press. The guerilla group, the Liberation Front for Southern Sudan (LFSS), quickly released six of their captives, but kept five, including a West German who ran a wildlife tracking project at the foot of the mountain. The other four were Presbyterian missionaries with African Christian Relief of Southern Sudan (ACROSS). Among the remaining hostages were mission leader John Haspels, 36, of Kansas, and missionary pilot Ron Pontier, 29, of Florida.
The LFSS, this delegation at least, was really just a ragtag batch of bullies armed with AK-47s. But Sudanese officials and their allies had no way of knowing that. The head of Sudanese national intelligence asked for American help, so I took a couple of Delta NCOs and went to Washington to link up with a foreign service officer from the State Department. Together, we boarded a C-141 for Khartoum.
Ten hours later, a Chevy van whisked us through hot narrow streets teeming with vendors and beeping taxis to the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. We arrived on the Fourth of July. In a spartan government office, we met with the American ambassador and CIA deputy station chief, the head spook already having choppered down to Juba. The deputy chief laid out the guerillas’ demands, which seem quaint by today’s standards: The LFSS wanted $95,000 in return for the hostages’ lives. It was actually quite a bargain. But governments that negotiate with terrorists only encourage copycats. So the Sudanese decided to take them out instead.
I left one of my NCOs in the embassy to monitor radio traffic, and instructed the other, Sergeant First Class Don Feaney, to jump on the next flying object going south and join me as soon as he could. Armed with the detailed drawing of the ACROSS compound provided by a deep-cover CIA agent who had recently visited the facility, I headed for the Sudanese airbase. I hopped on a rickety November model Huey piloted by a pair of Sudanese civilians, and strapped in for the 800-mile trip down to Juba.
The pilot, a small chipper man, introduced himself with a grin. “I am Fuzzy-Wuzzy from Port Sudan!”
He looked pretty pleased about that, and I was sure “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” was supposed to mean something to me. But since I had no idea what he was talking about, I just grinned back. In an hour, we were airborne, skimming south over the straight brown ribbon of the Nile.
We hadn’t flown far when, looking down, I was shocked to see a Boeing 707 parked, half-submerged, in the river.
“Air Sudan,” Fuzzy-Wuzzy explained cheerfully. “The pilot line up on the Nile instead of the runway.”
The crash had happened months before, but no one had thought it important to pull the airliner out of the river. My experience with Sudanese aviation did not improve. During a harrowing refueling stop at a collection of mud huts called Kosti, the copilot nearly lit a cigarette while standing next to an open barrel of aviation fuel. If Fuzzy-Wuzzy hadn’t reached out and physically stopped him, it would have been the biggest July Fourth fireworks show the village of Kosti had ever seen.
We survived that, barely, but hadn’t been in the air long when a cockpit alarm began a frantic buzzing. As a panel light flashed, I could hear through the headset as Fuzzy and the co-pilot argued frantically in Arabic. Fuzzy reached out and depressed the alarm light, which silenced it. But a couple of miles later, the alarm began shrieking again.
Again Fuzzy and the copilot argued in Arabic, and as Fuzzy reached for the button a second time, I could understand only one snatch of what they were saying: “
Ensh’ Allah
”—“God willing.”
This scene replayed itself again and again: The alarm sounded, the pilots spoke worriedly in Arabic, Fuzzy pushed the button, and the copilot said, “
Ensh’ Allah
.” Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I snatched off my headset, laid it down on the seat beside me, and sent up a flare to heaven:
Lord, let this bucket of bolts stay in the air
.
For a miraculous 650 miles, it did: I prayed to God, the copilot prayed to Allah, and Fuzzy kept pushing the button, as we buzzed south over the arrow-straight contours of the Nile. Gradually, the northern desert gave way to a flat flood plain, a vast grassy savannah stretching for hundreds of miles before wrinkling itself into more undulating terrain. As we approached Juba, just north of the Ethiopean border, I could see the Boma plateau rising to 3,300 feet. Above that, the Boma Hills reached even higher, their thick evergreen forests dusky blue in the distant haze. At the summit, I knew, five hostages waited in fear for their lives.
IN JUBA, THE CIA STATION CHIEF had already set up a command post in a
tugal
, a tiny adobe house with a thatched roof. A parched plains wind buffeted the little hut, spinning up clouds of dust. The head of Sudanese intel was there, along with Abu Bakr and a contingent of the men he’d put through the training plan we’d developed earlier in the year. In addition, Ron Pontier, the missionary pilot, was there, having managed to escape his LFSS captors, and fly his six-seat STOL (short take off and landing) plane off the mountain.
Via HF radio, Ron was able to talk with the remaining hostages. But with AK-47s at their heads, the hostages were limited to reinforcing the terrorists’ demands. My main role was to help formulate a rescue plan and provide intelligence. In the
tugal
, I attached a crude fax machine to my satellite radio and began to receive reports that Captain Rick Zahner and his analysts transmitted from Bragg.
From the map provided by the deep-cover spook, I knew there were two airstrips, one atop Boma at the ACROSS compound and another at the base of the mountain, where the German wildlife project operated. Using satellite imagery, Bragg confirmed that and also delivered a valuable update: The terrorists, apparently amateurs, hadn’t thought to block either one.