by Greg Dinallo
TFR relied on two low altitude radar altimeters that scanned 1,000 feet ahead. Via a computerized link to the autopilot, the two LARA channels compared data, automatically commanding the aircraft to follow land contours. It emitted an aural tone, beeping on climb, booping on descent. How precisely it mirrored the rise and fall of the landscape was determined by setting a switch on the TFR panel to soft, medium, or hard.
Shepherd set the ride for hard, which meant the bomber would hug the ground, conforming to every rise, ripple, and dip, well below the scanning range of tower radar; then he slammed the throttles to the stops. The afterburners kicked in, belching blue-orange flame and the F-111 rocketed forward.
The Libyan emitted an excited yelp as the acceleration slammed him back into his seat.
“They call this a fighter-bomber,” Shepherd said, keeping up the friendly charade. “But just between us, I usually put the emphasis on fighter.”
In the tower at Okba ben Nafi, the radar operator straightened in his chair as the F-111’s blip vanished from his screen. Younis, Abdel-Hadi, and the East German were staring at it in amazement and concern when the phone rang.
One of the air traffic controllers answered it. “Phone, sir,” he said in Arabic, crossing to Abdel-Hadi.
“Who is it?”
“Your duty officer.”
“Not now,” Abdel-Hadi said, annoyed at the intrusion.
“He says it’s an emergency, sir.”
Abdel-Hadi scowled and snatched up the phone.
Shepherd had the F-111 in supersonic dash now: wings at maximum sweep, 72.5 degrees; speed Mach 1.75. The TFR began beeping as it detected a sudden rise in the desert floor and automatically, abruptly, increased altitude to compensate; the instant the ridge crested the TFR detected the slope and pitched the nose down sharply, hugging the backside of the mountain, the tone booping as it put the plane back down on the deck.
The sleek bomber was nearing the point where Shepherd planned to suddenly pull into a high-G climb. His hands were poised to move swiftly and precisely, from pistol to cabin pressure dump switch, to oxygen disconnect, to G-suit disconnect when the radio came alive with a sharp crackle.
Several phrases in Arabic followed.
Shepherd recognized General Younis’s voice.
“Naam yasidi,” the Libyan replied, pretending he’d received a routine instruction. He calmly made a notation on his kneeboard, then deftly reached to the ankle holster just below it, removed his pistol, and leveled the muzzle at Shepherd’s flight helmet.
“You will reduce speed, Major,” he said sharply.
“Why? What’s the problem?” Shepherd asked, hit by a rush of terror-charged adrenaline, his mind racing. He was tempted to carry out the high-G maneuver but realized the Libyan could easily put a bullet in his head before he could.
“The mission is over,” the Libyan replied coldly.
Shepherd’s heart sank as he nodded, eyeing the pistol, still evaluating, still deciding; then he eased back the throttles and leveled off, coming onto a heading for Okba ben Nafi.
43
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, a U.S. Navy supply plane took off from Naples and headed south over the eastern Mediterranean. Several hours later, it circled the 6th Fleet on station off the west coast of Malta and landed on the flight deck of the USS America.
An orange-vested traffic control officer directed the plane to an unloading area aft of the superstructure. Crewmen moved in with wheel chocks and cargo-handling gear and removed a large container. They wheeled it across the deck to a Sea King helicopter and loaded it aboard.
The molded plastic container measured 24 inches wide, 36 inches long, and 30 inches deep, and was devoid of markings, save for a bright red priority routing ticket that read:
ORIGIN: OTS Langley
ROUTING: 6th Fleet HQ, Naples/USS America
DESTINATION: USS Cavalla
As soon as the container had been secured, the gray and white helicopter rose at a slight angle from the carrier’s deck into the hazy sky and came onto a heading for the Aegean Sea.
THREE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE miles due east of the America’s position, the Cavalla was 80 feet below the surface proceeding through a shallow undersea valley in the Mediterranean Ridge between the islands of Andikithira and Crete at a speed of 12 knots.
After obtaining a fix on the Romeo’s position from the Viking, Duryea summoned Cooperman from the sonar room.
“See that?” the captain prompted as they studied the track he had plotted on the electronic chart table. “If I’m right, Romeo’s going to be proceeding through here about sixteen hundred.” He marked a point between two islands on the Romeo’s course. “Now, if we’re here when he is ...” He marked the Cavalla’s course and drew a line between the two marks that was uninterrupted by islands or undersea terrain.
“We have a sonar window,” Cooperman said, smiling at the chance to determine if the target was their Romeo.
That was hours ago.
Now the Cavalla was in position.
Cooperman had the BQS-6 bow array in passive mode listening for cavitation. The sound was made by air bubbles collapsing as they spiraled off the tips of propeller blades and radiated mainly at right angles from the source. Though the submarines were far apart, the Cavalla was proceeding at 90 degrees to the Romeo’s course, which put the spherical transducer in her bow directly abeam of the target’s propellers. Cooperman’s ears soon perked at the distinctive hiss; it intensified as the Romeo moved into the window between the two islands. He patched the contact into the oscilloscope, comparing it to the one he had recorded en route to Tripoli weeks before. When identical patterns began tracing across the screen, he called the control room.
“I got him, skipper,” Cooperman reported. “It’s our boy.”
“Good going,” Duryea replied. He stepped to his chart table and went about predicting the Romeo’s course. Working back from its need to be in Beirut by the start of Ramadan, he calculated when the submarine would have to leave the cover of the Aegean for the Mediterranean and plotted an intercept point. “Even at a prudent fifteen knots we’ll be at the IP more than eight hours before lover boy arrives,” he said to McBride. “Get Lieutenant Reyes up here, will you?”
“Way to go, skipper,” the Chicano enthused when told the contact had been confirmed as the Romeo. “When do we take him?”
“Twenty-one hundred tomorrow; right there,” Duryea replied, circling a mark on the chart table centered in the basin cradled by Crete, Karpathos, and Rhodes. “That’s our intercept point.”
Reyes’s brow furrowed with concern. “That’s open water, sir; he’s going to be moving pretty damn fast.”
“Big problem, huh?” Duryea asked, deadpan.
Reyes nodded. “He’s too powerful to stop and there’s no way my guys could stay with him.”
Duryea pretended to wrestle with it. “In other words, it would be easier if he was dead in the water putting up a mast.”
“Sure, then we could—”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Reyes grinned, getting the message. “A dead stop.”
“Every day, at twenty-one hundred, Lieutenant,” Duryea explained, breaking into a cagey smile. “Like clockwork.”
Half an hour later, he was still smiling when McBride took a call from the communications officer. “Chopper from the America coming in,” he announced.
“Periscope-antenna depth,” Duryea ordered.
The Sea King was circling the rendezvous area when the pilot spotted the wake from the periscope. Soon the Cavalla punched through the surface, water cascading from her sail in torrents. Several miles to the south, the island of Crete cut a pale triangle out of the sky.
The deck was still awash when an aft hatch, located between the sail and dry deck shelter, which housed the SEALs underwater assault vehicle, swung open. Lieutenant Reyes and several members of his team climbed out and guided the helicopter into position.
While the Sea King h
overed, the plastic shipping container was lowered to the submarine by a winched cable. Within minutes, the container was on deck and being wrestled through a cargo hatch into the Cavalla’s hold.
Duryea ordered the boat to periscope depth.
The planesmen went to work and the submarine began slipping beneath the surface. It had just leveled off when the phone buzzed.
McBride answered it. “Sonar has a contact on the towed array. Says he’s pretty sure it’s a Redfleet boat.”
Duryea responded with a thoughtful scowl, then crossed to the sonar room forward of the navigation console and stuck his head in the door.
Cooperman was sitting there, head cradled by thick headphone cushions, staring at the frequency pattern tracing across the oscilloscope.
“Twin screws,” Duryea observed on seeing it.
“Yes, sir,” Cooperman replied, putting the contact through the speakers so the captain could hear the rhythmic hiss. “Coming real fast.”
“How fast?”
“Forty-plus knots.”
Duryea’s lips tightened. “I’ve got a nasty hunch.”
“Me too, sir.”
Duryea mulled it over, then contacted ASW on the America. “Captain Duryea, Cavalla,” he said. “I need a contact verification.” He reported the target’s coordinates, concluding, “Request that be a MAD flyover.”
The acronym stood for magnetic anomaly detector, a device used to measure disturbances in the earth’s magnetic field. In a nonmetallic sea, a large metal object such as a submarine created a significant anomaly. MAD was normally used to locate a target precisely prior to ASW attack, but Duryea had another reason.
Within minutes of his call, an S-3A Viking was launched from the America’s starboard catapult. Dusk was falling as it soared over the Mediterranean, closing on the contact. A long tubular probe telescoped from beneath its empennage, like the stinger of a blue tail fly, as it made a low pass over the choppy sea.
“I’ve got dead needles back here,” the Tacco said. “You sure we’re on the mark? Hold it,” he corrected as the needles began moving off the pins. “I got him now. Barely a wrinkle, though; must be an Alpha.”
The extremely low reading left no doubt. Unlike any other submarine afloat, the Alpha’s titanium hull and structure left only ferrous fittings and propulsion machinery to create a magnetic disturbance.
In the Soviet boat’s control room, Captain Aleksandr Solomatin took a long, satisfied drag on his pipe. His long hunt was over.
The wily Russian hated being bested, hated being fooled by Duryea’s false radio transmission and had backtracked through Gibraltar, combing the Mediterranean for the Cavalla. He knew he could find it; knew his target’s special outfitting sacrificed a degree of stealth; indeed, his sonar technicians were hunting for a unique acoustic signature—a rhythmic whoosh made by the bulbous dry deck shelter atop the Cavalla’s hull—that distinguished it from every other submarine afloat.
“Damn,” Duryea growled when the Viking’s pilot radioed the news. “It’s an Alpha—the Alpha.”
“Man’s got an axe to grind,” McBride said. “Could cost us the intercept.”
Duryea nodded grimly. He loved challenges; loved playing underwater hide and seek; but it was the last thing he needed now. He had the Romeo set up; had the personnel and the technical means aboard to carry out the hostage rescue mission; but there was no way it could commence until he lost the Alpha; no way he could chance Redfleet surveillance or the possibility that the Russian captain might directly interfere with the operation or alert the Romeo. He glanced at the chart table. The clock in the upper right-hand corner of the screen read:
02:DAYS
01:HOURS
18:MINUTES
37:SECONDS
—to Ramadan and counting.
44
A COOL DESERT BREEZE blew through the streets of downtown Tripoli. The time was 9:17 P.M. when three empty buses rolled into the plaza in front of the Al Kabir Hotel on Al Fat’h Street.
The doors hissed open and a Libyan Army officer stepped from the lead bus and strode toward the hotel. He hurried beneath the curved sunscreens and arched window openings that gave the facade the look of a huge pipe organ, and through the angular concrete lobby, where a banner displaying a slogan taken from Qaddafi’s infamous Green Book proclaimed: THE PARTY SYSTEM ABORTS DEMOCRACY.
The slogan was one of many that adorned everything from the cellophane wrapper on rolls of toilet paper to the coffee lounge, renowned for its gloomy decor, salty cappuccino, and the crowd of reporters and camera crews who gathered there each night.
The din forced the officer to unleash several blasts on his whistle to get their attention. “Brother leader summons you,” he announced.
This was standard procedure; and as they had many times before, the reporters rounded up colleagues and equipment and filed into the bright yellow buses. They had no idea where they were going, what Qaddafi wanted, or if, as was his habit, he would fail to appear.
The convoy wound through the city, leaving a trail of blue diesel smoke in the darkened streets, which were empty of pedestrian and vehicular traffic due to a government-imposed curfew. In less than 20 minutes, the buses turned into As-Sarim Street and were lumbering past the T-55 battle tank and squad of infantry deployed at the entrance to the Bab al Azziziya Barracks. They continued across the grounds, stopping opposite Qaddafi’s tent, where squads of soldiers herded the reporters to a podium that had been set up in front of the colonel’s sway-backed domicile.
Moments later Qaddafi came through the tent flaps and strode to the podium. His white officer’s uniform, bedecked with campaign ribbons, gold braid, and red piping, glowed luminously in the flash of strobes and halogens.
General Younis, SHK Chief Abdel-Hadi, and the Akita followed and stood next to him.
“Once again,” Qaddafi began in a self-righteous tone, “the People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has beaten the insidious shetans of America. Yes, yes, barely an hour ago, our brave and vigilant forces captured one of the world’s most wanted criminals. After deceitfully claiming he had refused to take part in an illegal attack on the Jamahiriya, after deceitfully asking for political asylum and accepting the goodwill and hospitality of the Libyan people, this vile emissary of Satan was caught, red-handed, conspiring to commit murder, larceny, and espionage against them and their leaders.” He paused, then nodded to Abdel-Hadi, who snapped his fingers twice in response.
The tent flaps behind Qaddafi parted again.
Shepherd shuffled into view, flanked by Libyan secret police officers. He was gagged and blindfolded; shackles bound his ankles and wrists. He recoiled as Abdel-Hadi brusquely removed the blindfold and the cameras and lights bore in on him.
“Now you will tell the world,” Qaddafi addressed the media, “that the People’s Jamahiriya has the notorious deserter and murderer, United States Air Force Major Walter Shepherd in custody.”
A barrage of questions erupted: “Exactly what did Major Shepherd do to cause your government to file these charges against him?” one of the reporters called out, “Can you be more specific?” another asked.
“No. It is a highly classified matter and not for media consumption,” Qaddafi replied with finality, dismissing further queries with a wave of his hand.
Abdel-Hadi and the Akita began walking toward the reporters, who parted as the fierce animal approached. The SHK officers followed, marching Shepherd through the middle of the crowd toward the prison on the other side of the compound. The reporters surged after them but were held back by the soldiers, who forced them to return to the podium where Qaddafi droned on.
The underground prison was ablaze with light when the group arrived with Shepherd. The obese guard was waiting for them. Abdel-Hadi briefed him in Arabic, then headed down into the prison with the Akita. The SHK officers removed Shepherd’s shackles and left him in the huge guard’s custody. He marched Shepherd down the staircase, through the security doors, and into the netwo
rk of foul-smelling corridors to the cell he had occupied previously. It was unlocked. The guard grabbed Shepherd by the back of the neck like a puppet and propelled him into it.
Shepherd maintained his balance and turned as the guard kicked the door closed. It slammed in his face with a deafening clang. The guard stabbed his key into the tumbler and locked it. Shepherd caught sight of the Palestinian peering through the bars of the cell across the corridor. He was standing in a cocky slouch, sporting a broad grin. It vanished when, instead of leaving, the guard turned toward his cell, unlocked it, and went in after him.
The Palestinian resisted, assuming he faced another round of torture. He didn’t know that Shepherd had given the Libyans ANITA; that they didn’t need the hostages anymore; didn’t need him.
But Shepherd knew; he also knew that it wasn’t torture the Palestinian faced but execution; and that he had signed the death warrant.
“You want to know where the hostages are?” the Palestinian taunted in Arabic as the repulsive Libyan dragged him from the cell. “Fucking your mother.”
The guard sneered, grabbed a handful of the Palestinian’s hair, slammed him up against the bars, and drove a fist into his stomach.
The Palestinian doubled over and wretched.
The big man recoiled, shuffling backwards across the corridor to get out of the way. Nonetheless, the vomit splattered over his trousers and boots. He became enraged, shouting a stream of expletives in Arabic. The Palestinian had been devastated by the blow and was on his knees, clutching his midsection. Just as the guard went for him again, Shepherd impulsively shoved an arm between the bars of his cell and got hold of the Libyan’s collar, putting an abrupt stop to his charge; then he yanked back with all his might.
The guard’s feet went out from under him. His massive head was much too large to fit between the bars of Shepherd’s cell. It smashed into them with a loud crack and bounced off. Shepherd still had hold of his collar and yanked him back again, this time with more calculated intent. The guard unleashed a primal bellow, then his eyes rolled up behind his lids and he crashed to the floor and lay there, unmoving.
