Force of Eagles

by Richard Herman

  Then he called for a status report on the Iranian air defense. All was quiet. He keyed up the close-in display and watched the two F-111s break out of orbit and move through the mountains. Again he rolled the cursor over the returns and called for identification. They were Mover 21 and 22, F-111F, 480 knots, altitude 7,600 feet. A little high, he calculated, they must have their terrain-following radar set at seven hundred fifty feet. That’s going to be a problem if the Iranians are awake.

  The crackle of a UHF radio transmission came through Nelson’s headset. “Mover Two-Two. Aborting.”

  “Mover Two-Two,” Von Drexler’s voice came over the UHF, “this is Mover Two-One. Say emergency.”

  That’s a dumb call from Mover 21, Nelson thought, there’s nothing he can do about it. He should simply call for the backup F-111 in orbit to head his way and clear Mover 22 off. What the hell is Mover Two-One hesitating for?

  “Yaw Channel light,” came the tight reply from Mover 22. “RTB at this time.” A telelight was on, warning the crew that one of the triple redundant flight-control channels had failed. But the crew didn’t need a light to tell them that. The trim had run full left and they both fought to hold the stick centered and the aircraft under control until the pilot could hit the trim-control switch. They would have their hands full flying the jet at high altitude and the landing was going to be dicey.

  Nelson watched the two blips on his screen turn back toward the west. What the hell, they’re both aborting…

  *

  “Ramon, my lad. I think duty calls.” Torch Doucette had copied the same radio transmissions. They were hooked up on a tanker and topping off their fuel. Doucette called for a disconnect, and in one graceful maneuver broke out of orbit by rolling the F-111 into a 135 degree bank and pulled the nose over into a 45-degree dive. He reversed and headed for the border. “We got some time to make up if we’re going to catch up.”

  Contreraz’s hands flew over his keyboard feeding the backup route into their navigation computer. “We’re going to have to take the scenic route, more direct, saves us three minutes over Von Drexler’s route. We’ve still got to go like a stripe-assed ape at five-forty knots to hit the jail house on time.”

  “Rog, can do.” Doucette set the terrain-following altitude at four hundred feet and the ride-control at hard. “I’ll squeak it lower in the valleys,” he apologized. “Ah, duty is a terrible burden.”

  “Better tell Delray our intentions,” Contreraz said.

  Doucette agreed and keyed his radio. “Delray Five-One, Mover Two-Three is inbound at this time.”

  Von Drexler’s voice answered. “Mover Two-Three, this is Mover Two-One, return to orbit, we are aborting.”

  “You are aborting, asshole,” Doucette grumbled over the intercom. He controlled his anger before he hit the radio transmit button. “Roger, Mover Two-One, understand we are to continue single ship.” He broke the transmission. “I hope that puckers his asshole, otherwise it’s going to be a mess in his cockpit. Ramon, you got a checklist for shit in the cockpit? But maybe I’m being too hard on the boy when all he needs is a little motivation.” He keyed the radio. “Ah, Mover Two-One? This is Mover Two-Three.” The sarcasm in his voice was clear aboard the listening AWACS. “We’re going to be on time. How ’bout you?” The sarcasm had turned to steel.

  *

  A ragged cheer broke out among the AWACS controllers when the radar blip that was Mover 21 turned back to the east. Nelson jotted down some notes in his log before he keyed his interphone. “Did we tape those last radio calls from Mover flight?”

  The reply was comforting. “Roger, Colonel. We got it all.”

  Chapter 46: H Plus 10

  The Pentagon

  The President had returned to the Command and Authority Room and was looking out over the National Military Command Center. Cunningham glanced over his shoulder and saw the apprehensive look on his commander’s face. “I’m worried too,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Pardon, sir?” his aide Dick Stevens said.

  “Nothing. Dick, if Miss Rahimi is still here, ask her if she’d care to join me.”

  “I saw her about twenty minutes ago. I’ll find her.” Stevens left, knowing full well that the general had something in mind and wasn’t just being polite asking for her.

  “Your attention, please,” a woman’s voice came over the loud-speaker. The professional-sounding voice demanded attention. “We have established contact with the command-and-control element aboard the AC-130 gunship, call sign Spectre Zero-One, via satellite communications. You may monitor communications or speak with Roundup on channel one.” Roundup, they knew, was Mado’s personal call sign as the joint task force commander. Every hand in the room toggled the switch for channel one to the on position.

  “…we are encountering scattered clouds, bases five hundred to a thousand feet.” Cunningham recognized Thunder Bryant’s voice. “Forward visibility is ten miles and improving—”

  Leachmeyer interrupted. “Let me speak to Roundup.”

  “This is Roundup, go ahead.” Mado’s voice sounded strained.

  “Current status?” Leachmeyer asked.

  That wasn’t very cool, Cunningham thought, for sure no way to impress the President.

  “We are on time. However, we have deviated from the mission as planned…Mover Two-Two aborted and was replaced by Mover Two-Three, which is ingressing on a different route in order to make up time.” Cunningham was more worried about the sound of Mado than any slight change in the plan. “Please standby, we have just established contact with Romeo Team.” The command center was absolutely silent. “Romeo Team reports they are in place but two men have become separated and have not reestablished contact.”

  “Who are the men?” It was the President’s voice.

  “Lieutenant Jamison and a sergeant.”

  “Name, damnit.”

  Well, Cunningham thought, the Pres isn’t too cool himself. I hope to hell he doesn’t start trying to run the show just because he can talk to someone there.

  “A Sergeant Kamigami,” Mado answered.

  Cunningham heard a gasp behind him. It was Dewa. He looked to the President, who was now on his feet, as though he were standing at attention.

  *

  Kermanshah, Iran

  “Quiet. Don’t move.” It was Kamigami’s voice next to his ear. Jamison felt the massive weight roll off him and the hand pull away from his mouth. He could breathe again. The two men lay side-by-side and watched the man disappear around the corner of the building in front of them.

  “What happened?” Jamison asked, his voice pitched low, not quite a whisper. Kamigami shook his head and the two did not move. The loud wail of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayers came over a loudspeaker in the town below them.

  “Morning prayers,” Kamigami said. “Move.” He pointed to the left, across an open space. The two men came smoothly to their feet and Jamison followed the sergeant, surprised at how soundlessly the big man could move. The cover of darkness they had relied on was giving way to the soft hues of morning twilight, and Jamison could see the town stretched out off to their right. “There.” Kamigami dropped down into a dry stream bed that had down-cut a channel around a boulder. “We wait here.”

  Jamison dropped down beside the boulder and cautiously looked around. They were near the bottom of a low hill and he could see the small city of Kermanshah to the south of their hiding place. On the far side of the city, perhaps two miles away, he could make out the prison. “We’re on the wrong side of town,” he told Kamigami, and pulled back into the shadows. Kamigami took his place and grunted when he saw the prison.

  “Sarge, what in the hell happened back there?”

  “Stirred up a rat against the wall…it ran into the house…I moved on when I heard all the commotion inside…Then you tried to shoot the poor bastard. He was just trying to figure out where the rat came from. Couldn’t really discuss it at the time so I just took your weapon.” The serge
ant handed him the Browning. “If we’d made any noise I would’ve had to kill him and I didn’t want to do that.”

  “It’s going to be hard for us to move during daylight. How do we get from here to the prison?”

  “People are going to keep their heads down when the bombs start falling and the gunship works the prison over. We move right through the town, maybe borrow a car—something’s coming.” Kamigami raised his head above the gully, keeping his head in the shadow cast by the rock. It was almost sunrise. “Not good.”

  A twelve-year-old boy was guiding a small herd of goats across the hillside. He was using a long stick to prod the goats along, humming some tuneless song. Kamigami unsheathed the big black anodized Bowie knife he chose to carry as he watched the boy come straight at them.

  *

  Western Iran

  “Turn point in thirty seconds,” Von Drexler’s WSO announced. “We’re five minutes out of the Initial Point.” The WSO could hear the lieutenant colonel breathing over the intercom, his breath coming in ragged pants. “We’ll be flying down a mountain valley and we’ve got enough light to squeak it down a couple hundred feet.”

  Von Drexler didn’t answer. He was trying to concentrate on the routine of flying but his restless mind kept jerking him back to one overwhelming fact—they were flying over hostile territory—a land owned by a people who hated Americans and would kill him if he was captured. He berated himself for trying to develop Mado as a sponsor, someone to back him for promotion. Von Drexler remembered all too well the first private conversation with the general at Nellis…Mado had promised him that Task Force Alpha was nothing but a cover for the real mission.

  “Turning now,” the WSO said, the flight computer and autopilot did the work. Von Drexler should have dropped down to four hundred feet and threaded their way down the valley well below the mountain peaks. It would only take a few tweaks on the autopilot, overriding the flight-computer with slight heading changes. And it would have dropped them underneath a hawk that was soaring high above the valley in search of early morning prey.

  The hawk sensed the approaching jet before she saw it, folded her wings back and swooped for the ground. She had only dropped twenty feet when they collided. The hawk was a small female and weighed slightly more than a pound, but the impact forces were horrendous. The bird disintegrated when it struck the left-hand glove, the shrouding that streamlined the air flow where the leading edge of the wing pivoted next to the fuselage. Most of the hawk was sucked into the intake of Von Drexler’s number-one engine.

  Both men felt the impact and saw a slight RPM fluctuation on the left engine, little more than a hiccup. “Bird strike,” the WSO said, relieved to see everything normal.

  Von Drexler scanned his instruments, took a breath, and made a decision. He keyed the radio and transmitted in the blind. “Mover Two-One aborting, repeat aborting.”

  Doucette’s voice: “Say emergency.”

  “Bird strike. Left engine.” Von Drexler had hit the panic-button.

  “Roger,” Doucette replied, “run your emergency checklist and if the RPM and oil pressure are within limits, press ahead.” He was trying to calm the man, but Von Drexler had already reversed course and was climbing.

  “Get back down in the weeds,” Von Drexler’s WSO shouted, nudging on the stick to get his attention. But the pilot did nothing, and the F-111 continued to climb out well above the mountain peaks. The radar-warning gear started to chirp, telling them they were in the beam of a search radar. Von Dander sat motionless. “Oh, shitksy,” the WSO groaned, and took control of the jet, nosed it over and headed for the deck…

  “You fucking turkey,” Doucette raged in the confines of his cockpit. It was all he could do not to transmit his anger over the UHF for the world to hear.

  Some luck, though, was still with them—the radar operator at Maragheh was awake but still in bed, thinking about a certain double-jointed woman he knew in town.

  But luck was a fickle lady.

  *

  Kermanshah, Iran

  “Roundup, this is Romeo One.” Trimler was holding the headset of a PRC-77 FM radio against one ear so he could hear what else was going on around him. The Ranger team had moved into position but were still in the trucks parked along a road paralleling the front of the prison. They had stopped so the left sides of the trucks were facing the guard towers and the right sides were shielded from view.

  Carroll had reassured him that the Kurds would keep any unwanted traffic off the road and that the other trucks were ready to move in once the prison was secured. The two Rangers with the mules were perched beside him, ready to move. The mules in this case were Laser-Target Designators, short bulky-looking rifles that only shot a laser beam at a target. A laser-guided bomb would catch the reflected energy off the target and home on the spot the Ranger aimed at, hitting within inches of the aim point.

  “Come on, answer, damn you,” Trimler muttered. He didn’t know that Mado was busy talking to the President of the United States on the SatCom. He checked his watch and unable to wait any longer, motioned the Rangers to deploy. The men rolled out of the right side of the trucks into a ditch at the side of the road. Trimler followed the radio-telephone operator with the PRC-77 into the ditch. The trucks drove away, leaving a clear view across the road toward the prison that was three hundred yards directly in front of them. All heads were down…with the trucks gone, only the long shadows cast by the rising sun and the ditch offered them cover from the guard’s positions in the towers.

  Trimler radioed again. This time another voice answered—Thunder Bryant “Read you five by, Romeo One. Your company is one minute out.”

  Trimler pointed at his watch and held up one finger. One minute to go. He pointed at his eyes with two forked fingers and then pointed to their objective—the command for spotters. Two men stuck their heads above the ditch, and one trained his binoculars on the guard towers, watching for any sign of detection, while the other searched for the inbound F-111s.

  “A guard’s looking right at me,” the spotter watching the towers said. “Hold on…negative. He’s watching something on the horizon.” The men could now hear the rumble of a distant jet coming their way.

  *

  “Spectre Zero-One, Mover Two-Three,” Doucette radioed. “IP now.” The F-111 was moving at over 560 knots as it streaked over the Initial Point and turned inbound to the target. Doucette had the jet down at two hundred feet as they made the run. They were right on time and the Pave Tack pod was deployed below the weapons bay as Contreraz refined on the target

  “Rog, Mover,” Beasely replied, “cleared in hot.”

  “Spectre, Mover Two-One has aborted for a bird strike,” Doucette told the AC-130. “I’m single ship, going for right wall and admin building on first pass.” Doucette scanned his weapons panel, double checking the switches. He didn’t want to reattack because of a switch error. But he did plan to reattack and punch a hole in the left side of the wall—Von Drexler’s target.

  Contreraz confirmed that the video tape recorder was on and buried his head in the scope, still working the radar, about ready to transition to the Pave Tack pod. His left hand was by the scope, flicking a switch, changing the scope’s picture from radar to the video picture coming from the Pave Tack pod. He kept refining his cursor placement, then switched to infrared, moved the cursors again and activated the system.

  *

  On board the AC-130 Bryant and Mado were engaged in a furious argument “They should hit the left side first,” Mado shouted.

  “Negative. Too late to change now. Mover Two-Three has got to ripple two bombs off into the admin building to get the guards. Call Jack in. He can punch a hole in the left wall.”

  But Mado had made his decision. He twisted his intercom wafer switch to UHF and hit the transmit button. “Mover Two-Three, hit the left side of the wall.”

  “Torch, hit the admin building.” It was Stansell He had been monitoring the UHF radio. “Jack, fall in behind M
over and take out the left side.”

  “Roger,” Doucette answered.

  “Rog, copy all,” Jack said. It was his first transmission, he had been maintaining radio silence. He broke out of the low orbit he was in and turned toward Kermanshah, now seeing Doucette’s F-111 In front of him.

  Mado’s voice crackled over the UHF. “Use your call signs and authenticate. Repeat, authenticate your last transmissions.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Contreraz grumbled. He had recognized Stansell’s voice. He bumped his target cursors a hair to the right—a final refinement. “Ready, Ready…” Contreraz watched the range counter on his scope roll down to 23,000 feet as the Time To Go counter ran out. “PULL” Doucette brought the nose of the F-111 up into a forty-five degree climb, smoothly following the command steering from the Weapons-Nay Computer.

  The F-111 twitched as two bombs rippled off. “Bombs gone,” Doucette called over the UHF. He banked 110 degrees away to the right and began bringing the nose to the horizon. Contreraz continued to track the target through the Pave Tack pod. The bombs would fly for almost thirty seconds before hitting the target…

  *

  “Romeo One,” Bryant’s voice came over Trimler’s FM radio, “lase the right side first. Repeat, lase the right side of the wall first.”

  “Romeo One copies,” Trimler said, “Right side first.” He pointed at the closest Ranger holding a mule. “Laser up, right side,” he commanded. The man raised his head above the ditch and leveled the mule at the wall.