Force of Eagles

by Richard Herman

  “No, passing through on business. An uncle lives nearby and this is a chance to visit him.”

  The guard looked hard at Carroll. He wanted to be sure he did not sit next to a Kurd. He had killed enough of them, too many of these traitorous tribesmen lived around Rezaiyeh. Satisfied that Carroll did not look like a Kurd, he relaxed. “What is your business here?”

  Carroll turned and stared at the guard. “I’m here because the Council of Guardians sent me. What is your name?”

  The guard wanted nothing to do with the Council of Guardians. “I’m just a guard—”

  “Yes, I understand,” Carroll said, facing the window.

  “I can find you a room for the night…”

  “It is late. Thank you. What is your superior’s name? I’m not after loyal soldiers like yourself, only incompetent leaders.” Carroll was getting into it.

  Here was the guard’s chance to even matters with his sergeant. But then he thought about it, better not get involved. “Sergeant Afrakhteh…but he is honest and hard working.”

  “Good. Do not mention that I am here. It would make my work much more difficult and that would not be wise.”

  “Yes, of course.” Anyone from the Council of Guardians was dangerous.

  Carroll stared into the night. How much longer can I bluff like this? My luck can’t last, I’ve got to find help and get to Kermanshah.

  Chapter 10: D Minus 25

  Kermanshah, Iran

  Vahid Mokhtari was pleased with himself. The visit by the commanding general of the Peoples’ Soldiers of Islam was going well. The PSI was the military arm of the communist Tudeh Party and had recently been integrated into the Iranian armed forces, reviving and strengthening the Iranians with a massive infusion of Soviet arms, aircraft and supplies. The general had insisted on walking by himself, hobbling along on crutches, still not used to the loss of his right leg. His one eye blazed when he looked at the Americans, and he constantly adjusted the black eyepatch over his empty eye socket.

  “Their commander, a Colonel Waters, led his Phantoms in an attack on my headquarters,” he told Mokhtari. “His bombs did this to me. I killed him.”

  Mokhtari had escorted the old man through the main building, explaining the smell. “The Americans are willing to live in this filth. They will not wash or care for themselves.”

  He did not mention his rigidly enforced rule of not allowing the prisoners to bathe or wash their clothes. Eventually, filth and bad diet would have their effect, exactly as he planned. Then Colonel Leason would do as he was ordered or watch his men die like vermin. Mokhtari found the thought of Leason collaborating against the men he claimed to command very satisfying.

  Mokhtari concluded the tour by escorting the general into the small interrogation room in the basement of the administration building. “I am personally questioning the controller from the radar site at Ras Assanya who directed aircraft against your pilots. We are extracting information about the secret equipment she was using. Would you care to observe an interview?”

  The general nodded and sat down.

  A guard positioned a chair in the middle of the room facing a metal desk and left. Mokhtari leaned against the front edge of the desk and folded his arms. The door swung open and two guards shoved Mary Hauser into the room, her wrists manacled and the canvas bag over her head. One grabbed her arm and wrenched her around, forcing her into the chair.

  “Remove the bag and handcuffs,” Mokhtari ordered, then spoke In English. “Captain, we have been through this before. Salute your superior officers.” The general did not speak English and an aide interpreted for him.

  “Permission to speak, Commandant?” She was playing the game, studying the old man sitting slightly to her left. Somehow he reminded her of a peregrine falcon.

  “Granted.”

  “Military protocol says that I must be standing in order to salute. Permission to stand?”

  Mokhtari nodded. She stood, saluted. “Captain Mary Lynn Hauser reporting as ordered, sir.”

  The general’s one eye dissected her.

  Mokhtari nodded at the guard standing behind Hauser, who took hold of her shoulders and pushed her back into the chair.

  “Tell us about the equipment you were using at your radar post. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  Mary Hauser steeled herself. The interrogation sessions followed a set pattern, beatings came next. Mokhtari used such anticipation as a way to break her. “I’ve explained it before, there was nothing special or new, it was a standard radar, the same type we used in Vietnam…”

  Actually she had been using the latest model of the ANPFPS 59, a state of the art 3-D air surveillance phased array radar. By using high-speed computers it could handle five hundred targets on every ten second scan of its rotating planar array antenna—a powerful and sophisticated command-and-control radar system.

  Before she had abandoned the radar post perched on a low hill nine miles inland from the base at Ras Assanya her crew had blown the site apart with high-explosive charges, and she had poked through the wreckage to insure nothing important could be recognized or salvaged.

  Mokhtari nodded at the same guard who slapped her with his left hand, the force of the blow twisting her face to the left.

  “Again.”

  The guard slapped her the second time.

  “Again.”

  The general leaned forward. “We are not fools. Our technicians did not find a parabolic radar antenna in the wreckage.” The aide translated the general’s words into English for Hauser. At least it gave her a bit of time to think.

  “Permission to speak?”

  “Again,” Mokhtari snapped. The guard hit her, harder, matching the blow to the volume of Mokhtari’s voice.

  She fell to the floor, exaggerating the effect of the blow, staggering part-way back into the chair but fell again to the floor, willing herself to control the pain.

  The guard picked her up and dropped her into the chair. She rested her elbows on her knees and dropped her head, not wanting the men to see her face. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m telling you the truth. I was using the radar out of the old SAGE system we had in Vietnam. That’s semi-automatic ground environment. I did not have the command-guidance computer that interfaced the system with airborne aircraft—”

  “Why not,” the general asked after his aide had translated.

  “Too old, too unreliable. We rely on airborne equipment now. I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You’re lying.”

  She looked up, forcing tears. The men would expect her to cry at this point. “Sir, I’m not lying.” The pleading in her voice sounded about right. “Must I lie to answer your questions? I’m only a woman.” And she knew her last four words were a mistake the moment she said them.

  The general was silent, sensing that the woman was holding her own, trying to manipulate the interrogation. “She’s a lying bitch. Work on her.”

  Mokhtari was pleased to oblige. “Strip her.”

  “Not again, Commandant,” she said, standing up. This always came after the beatings. The fear of being raped while in captivity had eaten at her resistance, wearing her down. She fought it by telling herself that rape was another form of torture and that the anticipation of torture was as destructive as the physical pain and degradation. It didn’t really work. She was scared to death.

  One of the guards reached for her shirt and pulled it off her. The rough hands of the two guards stripped her other clothes away. Finally she stood there wearing only her boots.

  “Proceed.” Mokhtari pointed at one of the guards.

  “She’s unclean,” he protested, staring at her blood-stained legs.

  She could feel the heavy silence come down on the men. Islamic prohibitions, it seemed, were protecting her. Then it came to her…act ashamed…exploit their deep-seated beliefs about women. She hung her head and strangled a sob, just loud enough for the men to hear.

  “Remove her,” Mokhtari ordered.


  The two guards rushed Hauser to her cell, and one threw her clothes on the floor at her feet.

  You won’t win the next one, she told herself, breathing deeply.

  *

  Tours, France

  The Saturday night reception for the pilots assembled for Sunday’s air show had reached the dying stage. The generals had all left with great amounts of rigorous French protocol and most of the civilian high rollers had departed. The F-111 pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Garret “Torch” Doucette, wandered into the bar, finding it more to his liking than the formality of the main ballroom in the French officers’ club. He found his Weapon Systems Officer, Captain Ramon Contreraz, sitting at the bar, the coat buttons of his Class A Blues undone and tie pulled loose, having a beer. They were the only Americans at the air show.

  “Beats the hell out of that pissy champagne they’ve been serving in there,” Contreraz told him, motioning to the seat beside him.

  Torch Doucette heaved his bulk onto the stool. Middle age had not been kind to him and his waistline was expanding as rapidly as his hairline retreated. Contreraz had been paired with Doucette in F-11ls long enough to know that the flabby image was misleading, the pilot had the personality and muscles of a bulldozer. “Well,” the lieutenant colonel said, “how do you like French air shows?”

  “Boring,” Contreraz told him. The two officers had flown an F-111F from their base in England, RAF Lakenheath, into the air base outside Tours for an air show being staged by the French Air Force. They were not part of the demonstration-flying, their jet lined up only for static display. “How’d we luck into this, anyway?” the captain asked.

  “My good looks and your Latin charm,” Doucette told him. “Be nice to the natives.”

  Contreraz grunted into his beer. “I’m here ’cause you’re here, and you’re here ’cause you speak frog and have a froggy last name.” The WSO looked around the room, focusing on a pretty brunette who had come in with a group of French pilots they had met earlier. “Ah, la belle demoiselles.”

  Doucette shook his head. Contreraz was slightly drunk. “It’s les belles, pronounced lay, not la.”

  “Right on—lay.” Contreraz stood and buttoned his coat, still looking at the girl. He checked himself in the mirror behind the bar, straightening his tie. He was just over six feet, and the way he moved reminded Doucette of a matador. Being dark-complected, slender, muscular and good-looking added to the image.

  “Remember Franco-American relations,” Doucette said, deciding the captain was about to notch up another conquest.

  “That’s what I’ve got in mind.”

  Doucette watched him approach the French pilots before turning back to the bar. The boy’s a credit to the image, he thought. He swirled his beer and stared into the glass, thinking about hanging it all up and retiring. The Air Force had turned into a drag, he needed to escape the humdrum routine he’d slipped into. He was amazed that he’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel, had no hope of a higher promotion. Still, civilian life held little more prospects than some paper-pushing desk job at a headquarters. He was definitely getting antsy. All right, he’d hang tough for a while longer—as long as he was still assigned to the cockpit. Who knew, maybe something would come along, like the Libyan raid in ’86—

  Loud voices from the other end of the bar. “No good relations there,” he said to himself, and headed for the group, intending to take his WSO back to their rooms before things boiled over.

  “Ah, Colonel,” one of the French pilots said when Doucette reached Contreraz, “your navigator is a fraud. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot and then tells us he flies, what do you call it, the Aardvark? Not a fighter at all, nothing like our Mirages.” A chorus of rude remarks about the F-111 broke out among the pilots.

  “Tell Qaddafi that,” Doucette said. He couldn’t tell them that he and Contreraz had led the attack on Libya in April of ’86 and they were the crew that had walked a stick of five-hundred-pounders across a Libyan air base.

  “But you missed him,” the pilot replied. More rude comments from the pilots.

  “How did we know it was the camel’s turn to be on top?” Doucette shot back. “Got the camel, though. Qadaffi’s been heartbroken ever since.”

  “Is it true,” the same pilot said, “that flying the F-111 is like beating off—it’s fun while you do it but you’re ashamed afterward?”

  “Old, old joke, my friend,” Doucette said as he took Contreraz by the arm and hauled him out of the bar.

  “Sorry, Ramon. That was getting out of hand.”

  Yes, he thought, he definitely needed some real action.

  Chapter 11: D Minus 24

  Nellis AFB, Nevada

  Chief Master Sergeant Mortimer M. Pullman had made the coffee and was waiting for the officers in Rahimi’s office Sunday morning. He had been up most of the night and pleased with himself—the trailers were ready.

  After a second walk-through Friday he had trashed any idea of renovation. Instead he had grabbed a base telephone directory and run through names looking for anyone he might know. A familiar name surfaced in the Directorate of Resource Management, a sergeant he had saved from a dead-end assignment when he was working in the NCO-assignments section at headquarters. He called the sergeant and collected on the favor. Late Saturday night three trailers complete with office equipment and air conditioners were delivered to building 201’s parking lot and the three old ones hauled away.

  Dewa Rahirni arrived with a carton of donuts and pastries. “Nice trailers, Chief,” she said, working to keep a straight face. She understood that the chief had been out dog-robbing.

  Pullman shrugged and sank back in a chair, watching her go to work. He liked the graceful way she moved, and wished he had a daughter like her. “What’s the Colonel got planned for today?”

  “We’re putting the mission together.” She opened the safes and pulled out maps and photos, tacking them up on the walls.

  Jack Locke and Thunder Bryant came in, followed by Stansell who looked to Rahimi. “Have at it.”

  “Okay. Here’s the nut we have to crack,” she began, pointing at a large mosaic photograph—“the prison at Kermanshah. It’s located on the southern edge of town next to some old Persian army barracks. The barracks appear to be mostly deserted. All of the POWs, 282 of them, are inside the prison compound. Their exact locations in the buildings are unknown.” She pointed to a large three-story flat-topped building inside the walls of the prison. “I suspect they’re all in the main cell block. The smaller building in the front corner is the administration building and guards’ quarters. There’s only one entrance,” and she pointed to a thirty-foot-long above-ground tunnel with a dome-shaped roof. It looked like a concrete quonset hut stuck against the outside center of the northwest wall. “There are heavy gates at each end. It’s probably booby-trapped inside. Obviously you can’t go in through there. These little black circles peppered over the compound are telephone poles the Iranians have planted to discourage helicopter assaults.”

  “Could they be setting us up? We try a rescue mission and they bushwhack us?”

  “Possible, Colonel,” Rahimi said. “They would make political hay out of a failed rescue mission, just like Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 in Tehran. And the more casualties the better.”

  “The Army’s got to get into the prison fast,” Stansell said. “Dewa, you got anything on the prison walls?”

  She flipped through her notes. “The DIA sent us some stereoscopic coverage that’s less than a week old. Here we are…eighteen feet high, five feet wide at the base tapering to three feet at the top. Reinforced concrete. The guard towers at each corner have unrestricted fields of fire.” She paused. “Colonel, I don’t think you can go over the walls. And I found more telephone poles in the compound than are on the mosaic.” She gestured to the photos on the wall. “They’ve also jerryrigged steel towers on top of the buildings. A helicopter or parachute assault into the prison looks suicidal.”

&n
bsp; Stansell sat back in his chair, closing his eyes, recalling the previous Sunday night when he had sat alone in his VOQ room in Washington. Had it only been a week?…and he thought again of February 1944, the Gestapo holding those French Resistance fighters in Amiens jail, the Maquis getting word that the Gestapo was getting ready to execute most of them. There was no way they could take the prison so they asked the RAF to bomb it, making a jail break possible. The RAF sent fighter bombers against it, and over 250 prisoners escaped…He told some of this to the chief and Rahimi.

  “So what are you saying, Colonel?” the chief asked. “We bomb the prison and maybe kill the people we’re trying to save?”

  “No. We bomb the walls and blow holes in ’em and put a couple of five-hundred pound Snakeyes into the guards’ building. While the dust is settling the rescue team parachutes in, lands outside the walls and goes through the holes we’ve made.”

  “Colonel,” Pullman said, “who the hell can do that type of precision bombing?”

  “F-111s or F-15Es,” Locke said.

  Pullman looked at him. “Could be…well, I’m going to build a mock-up of the prison—”

  “Chief,” Dewa cut in, “you haven’t got time to build a full-scale mock-up.”

  Pullman turned and walked out the door. He loved a challenge. And without it this rescue wouldn’t ever come off.

  *

  Tours, France

  By noon the ramp at the air base was packed with French kids who had discovered Doucette and were crowding around him under a wing of the F-111. Contreraz had a seemingly endless supply of F-111 shoulder patches that he passed out to teenagers. Doucette noticed the brunette from the bar was acting as an impromptu translator and constantly whispering in the WSO’s ear. Neither of the Americans were surprised when the French Mirage pilot appeared in his flight suit to reclaim the girl.

  “So like the Americans,” the Frenchman said, glancing at the F-111 and then at Doucette. “Bigger, not better. Can this really fly or does it just sit on the ground looking like an old overfed ant-eater?”