Against All Enemies

by Richard Herman

  “Go for it.”

  The computer confirmed Terrant’s analysis and, satisfied that an ingress altitude of 4,500 feet, which was 1,000 feet above the ground, would keep them in the shadow of the mountain range and still hold them above most small-arms ground fire, he punched in that number. He hit another button and two seconds later, the navigation and weapons delivery computers were updated. Still on autopilot, the B-2 nosed over, dropping toward the desert floor over 40,000 feet below them. “We’ll have to toss the weapon to get a decent standoff range,” Terrant said.

  “No biggy,” Holloway replied. They had practiced that maneuver many times in the simulator.

  4:46 A.M., Monday, April 26,

  The Sudan

  “Captain! I hear something!” the boy shouted over the field telephone linking al Gimlas to the underground echo chamber. “But it is very weak.”

  “Keep your back against the wall,” al Gimlas ordered. He stood in the cool night air, stared at the starry heavens above him, and strained to hear. There! Now he too could hear it. It was very faint, little more than a buzz. He spoke into the phone. “Move around the wall to keep the noise the loudest.” He cautioned everyone aboveground to be silent. “Always keep your back to the wall.”

  “It’s loudest here,” the boy said.

  “Which way are you looking?” al Gimlas asked.

  “To the south.”

  The south! al Gimlas thought. They’re coming from the wrong direction. How clever. Now he could definitely make out the sound—a jet aircraft. He wanted to shout with joy. While at Sandhurst, he had studied the way the Vietnamese had used their main resource, people, to defeat the Americans. His tutor had thought it a waste of time but had humored him. Personally, al Gimlas doubted that a cone-shaped hole could serve as an audio direction finder for locating aircraft. But maybe, just maybe, the rest would also work. Had the S-12 radar forced the plane to a lower altitude and into the range of the Shilka? He could hear it, couldn’t he? All of them could hear it.

  “It’s a little louder,” the boy said over the telephone.

  “Tell me when it is very loud.”

  “Captain! The wall! It’s caving in! Drop the ladder!”

  “Wait!” al Gimlas shouted. He could see the ground ripple around the opening in the ground. “Just a few more seconds.”

  “I can’t wait! I can’t!”

  “The noise, what is it doing?”

  “Please! The ladder!”

  “We’ll get you out. Don’t panic.”

  “There!” the boy shouted. “It’s very loud.”

  “Fire!” al Gimlas shouted at the top of his lungs. Twenty feet away, the four barrels of the Shilka roared to life. The Shilka, or ZSU-23-4, was a Soviet-built antiaircraft cannon mounted on a tank chassis. The four barrels sent a stream of high-explosive 23-millimeter ammunition into the air. Every tenth round was a tracer and at the Shilka’s high rate of fire, it etched the night with a solid red ribbon. The gunner traversed the barrels back and forth through fifteen degrees of arc, snaking the line of red tracers back and forth across the sky directly above him.

  The ground underneath al Gimlas shook from the recoil and he could feel the dirt moving under his feet. The boy’s voice screamed in panic over his headset.

  The moving map on the MFD showed them over the initial point when a bright red line swept past the nose of the B-2. Holloway’s reactions were rattlesnake quick, and he grabbed the control stick, flicked off the autopilot, and stood the B-2 on its left wing like a fighter, and turned away from the stream of tracers. “What the fuck!” he yelled. He pushed the stick forward and rolled out. It was a violent maneuver that touched the G limit the aircraft could sustain.

  The red line snaked back across the sky at them. Again, Holloway stood the B-2 on a wing, this time the right one, as they cut a knife edge in the night, presenting the smallest possible target to the cannon fire. The two men saw the red line wave past them. “Shit-oh-dear!” Holloway shouted. The jet was on the very edge of control.

  “Roll out!” Terrant shouted, feeling the slight buffet that indicated the loss of controlled flight. Holloway also felt it and raised the right wing. They saw the red line pass behind them and to the left. The aircraft shuddered as one round hit the underside of the left wing and exploded. They had flown through a curtain of unaimed barrage fire and the “golden BB,” the lucky shot, the one-in-ten-million chance, had found them. It was pure luck, the one factor no amount of technology, planning, and training could counter.

  The B-2’s magic had also worked against it. Because of the bomber’s precise navigation capability, it had flown directly over its planned initial point and into the unaimed artillery barrage.

  Al Gimlas looked skyward, his eyes following the stream of tracers. In the flash of a single explosion, he saw the batlike shape of a wing. Then it was gone. He stared at the stars in wonder. Was it real? Had they really hit a B-2? It had to be. He ran toward the communications tent. “Start digging!” he yelled over his shoulder. “I want him out. Alive.” He skidded into the tent and grabbed a handset, calling the Stinger teams. “It’s coming toward you! A B-Two.”

  “What do we shoot at?” one of the teams answered.

  Frustrated, al Gimlas banged his fist on the table. They didn’t have an echo chamber to tell them when the aircraft was passing overhead. But he had to tell them something. “Shoot at the sound when you hear it.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Holloway breathed. “I think we’re okay.” The unbelievable strength of the B-2’s construction and the multiple redundancy of over two hundred onboard computers had saved it from what should have been a lethal hit. The explosion had damaged the left wing, ruptured the left outboard fuel tank, and destroyed or damaged four control surfaces. But the computers had automatically sealed off the ruptured tank, rerouted the fuel flow, and the quad-redundant fly-by-wire flight control system compensated for the damage to the control surfaces. Now the hours the two pilots had spent in the cockpit procedures trainers practicing emergencies exactly like this one paid results. They had to react to the warning messages the computers were sending and reconfigure the aircraft.

  They were flying straight and level at eight hundred feet above the ground, the B-2 was responding to control inputs and not doing anything it shouldn’t. An engine fire light flickered. Holloway confirmed with Terrant that it was the number one, the left outboard, before he retarded the throttle. The light went out. “Shut it down?” Holloway asked.

  Terrant continued to run his emergency procedures checklist. “I think it’s okay. Probably a damaged circuit.” He punched buttons, rerouting the system. “Add some power.” Holloway inched up the throttle and the light stayed out. The computers reported the engine as clean and undamaged. But they were running out of time and the weapons release point was on their nose, thirty-one seconds away.

  Computers possess infinite courage and it fell to the pilots to make the critical decision. “Go for it?” Holloway asked.

  “What else is out there?” Terrant asked. His mind raced with the implications as his hands went about other assigned tasks. The bird was looking more healthy all the time. They were good-to-go and the threat display was quiet. If there are more defenses, they’ll be clustered around the target, he reasoned. Which means we need more standoff distance. He made the decision. “Climb two hundred feet.” Terrant punched in the new delivery parameters for the weapon. The numbers the computer spat back confirmed his thinking. A toss delivery for the deep penetrator bomb at that altitude gave them a four-mile standoff distance. More than enough.

  The sergeant in command of the Stinger team halfway down the valley leading to the research laboratory stood in the open, scanned the night sky, and strained to hear. Nothing. But Murphy’s law was on his side and he was looking in the right direction when the fuel cutoff valve in the B-2’s left outboard fuel tank failed. Normally, a downstream shutoff valve would have backed up the primary valve. But owing to battle dam
age, it also failed and fuel gushed into the left engine bay before a third shutoff valve could function. The number one engine flared, sending a streak of flame out the exhaust for a few seconds.

  The sergeant directed the Stinger onto the torch and fired. The missile worked perfectly and he was astounded by its speed. But the bright torch streaming out behind the B-2 winked out before the Stinger reached its target. The missile’s seeker head lost the heat signature it was homing on and went ballistic, arcing through the B-2’s altitude. But the area over the wing was still hot and the missile’s heat-seeking guidance head homed on that. It ripped into the left wing and exploded, relighting the fuel. A second missile slammed into the big jet inboard of the left engine bay.

  Amazingly, the aircraft held together and was still flyable, a tribute to Northrop’s engineers and workers. A third missile flashed by underneath. The proximity fuse sensed a shift in mass and it exploded, shredding the underside of the wing. Structurally, the plane was still intact. But with all of the control surfaces on the left wing destroyed, no amount of computer redundancy could save the bomber.

  “Eject! Eject! Eject!” Terrant shouted.

  7

  5:50 A.M., Monday, April 26,

  Washington, D.C.

  Nelson Durant was awake early, dressed, and drinking his second cup of coffee when the White House called with the message. “They’re reacting much faster these days,” he told Art Rios.

  “The National Security Council?” Rios asked.

  “The President just called an emergency meeting,” Durant replied. “I imagine Serick will be in fine form.” The National Security Advisor had a well-earned reputation for working himself into a lather during a crisis.

  The two men rode in silence to the White House as Durant read the latest message traffic coming in on the car’s computer. Rios drove up to the west entrance where Durant was escorted to the Situation Room in the basement. “Ah, Nelson,” Stephan Serick boomed, “so glad you could join us—finally.” Durant ignored the jibe and sat down. “I take it you’ve heard the news on TV,” Serick continued.

  The door opened and the President entered with the Vice President, his senior policy adviser, and the director of Central Intelligence. The DCI quickly outlined the situation. The facts were simple: the Sudanese had shot down the B-2 Stealth bomber and captured the crew. So far, they had only publicly announced that two pilots were in captivity. The news had driven Meredith and the San Francisco bombing off the front page. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the way they had planned. “Mr. Durant, considering your earlier discoveries, can the Project be used to monitor the situation in the Sudan?” the DCI asked.

  “I’ll see what the whiz kids can do,” Durant replied. “Do we have coverage of the wreckage?” He knew the answer but hadn’t seen the photos. An aide spoke into a phone and a series of scenes flashed on one of the TV monitors. An unidentifiable mass of wreckage was strewn over the desert floor. Durant breathed a sigh of relief. Because the B-2 was in a combat mode of operation, the aircraft’s ejection sequence had worked as designed and the computers had opened the fuel valves and armed the weapons for detonation when the aircraft had hit the ground.

  “It must have been one hell of an explosion and fire,” the Vice President said. “Will they have enough to convince the world it was a B-Two?”

  “Once they analyze the wreckage,” the DCI said, “they will. Unfortunately, they also have the pilots, who are very much alive.”

  “Mr. President,” Serick said, agreeing with the DCI’s brutal assessment, “you still have plausible denial here. Simply announce that two pilots were on a routine airlift mission hauling cargo and got lost. You are demanding their immediate release.”

  “They got lost and ended up a thousand miles over the Sahara?” Durant asked. “In this day and age? Not likely.” Serick glared at him. It was the old clash of personalities and they could never stay on the same side for long. “Perhaps,” Durant counseled, “a simple announcement acknowledging the two Air Force pilots have been ‘detained’ by the Sudanese and you have no other comment at this time would be best. You need time to work the problem.” He fell silent and listened while the men discussed the situation. Durant understood how the President worked and this meeting was only one in a series as he settled on a response to the latest problem. But Serick’s arguments were swaying the President.

  Durant was surprised when the door opened and the director of the FBI entered. He stood at the foot of the table and cleared his throat, not liking what he had to say. “I think we know how they did it,” he announced. “Our agents have been trailing an Egyptian national, Osmana Khalid. Khalid is an Imam, an Islamic cleric, who has been operating out of Warrensburg, Missouri, for the last month. Warrensburg is ten miles from Whiteman Air Force Base. He was observed talking to an Air Force captain who was involved in planning the attack. After that conversation, Khalid phoned a student from Egypt who was attending Central Missouri State University located in town. The student then made a phone call to the home of a clerk who just happens to work in the Sudanese Embassy. We’re still working on it.”

  “Were they using a code?” Durant asked.

  “Please, Mr. Durant,” the DCI answered, “we’re not that stupid. It was a code within a language, Nubian, we think.”

  “So what are you saying?” the President asked.

  The director of the FBI answered in a monotone, his face impassive. “Based on what we currently know, we are ninety-nine percent certain the captain passed critical information to Khalid who, in turn, passed it on to the Sudanese. It looks like they were waiting and the B-Two flew into a flak trap.”

  “I knew it!” Serick thundered. “We have spent billions of dollars on a weapon system that doesn’t work. Mr. President, you need to send a message to the Air Force that the days of lavish spending on foolish programs are over.”

  Durant shook his head. One of his companies had developed part of the B-2’s electronic defenses and he knew what the bomber could do. “You’re misreading this, Stephan.”

  “How so?” Serick shot back. His jowly face was livid.

  “Until an investigation is completed, we don’t know what happened. The bomber has its faults, all aircraft do, but believe me, it would be best to assume the B-Two can perform as designed.”

  Serick snorted in disagreement.

  Part of Art Rios’s job was to know when to shut up and this was one of those times. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove back to Georgetown after picking Durant up at the White House. “Call the helicopter,” Durant finally said. “We’re going to The Farm. I’m sick of this place.”

  Rios decided it was time to talk. “Meeting went bad?”

  “Terrible. I think Serick must be senile. His thinking hasn’t changed in twenty years.” He shook his head in disgust. “He wants to stonewall it. Plausible denial. Deny that a B-Two was shot down. The trouble is, Jim is listening to him.”

  “That can change in a heartbeat,” Rios said.

  Durant thought about the problem. “I need to talk to Agnes.” He was going to add the Egyptian cleric, Osmana Khalid, to the watch list. Again, they rode in silence. Finally, Rios had to ask the question that demanded an answer. “How in the hell did they manage to shoot down a B-Two?” he asked.

  Durant stifled a smile. Rios had been reading his message traffic again. “A traitor,” he answered.

  “I hope they nail the bastard.”

  “They know who he is.” A long pause. “At least they know after the fact.” Silence. Then, “Check on the status of Hank Sutherland.”

  Rios cocked an eyebrow. “Are you looking for anything specific?” There was no answer.

  8:30 A.M., Wednesday, April 28,

  El Fasher, Sudan

  The convoy had barely left the army barracks in the center of town when a crowd of men and boys swarmed around the vehicles and prevented them from moving. Al Gimlas climbed out of the lead Range Rover that he used as his staff car. H
e stood in the hot, dusty main square as a shout of “Death to the American pigs!” echoed overhead. Before he could shove his way back to the third truck in line, an open flatbed, more people took up the chant and started to throw rocks.

  The two Americans in the cage lashed to the flatbed were cowering against the floor, their arms wrapped around their heads as the stones pummeled them. Al Gimlas swore loudly, a fine Arabic phrase that lost its true meaning in English but roughly translated to “fucking idiots!” The captives had been in his care for three days and he had grown to respect them, especially the more reserved and dignified Major Terrant. There was no doubt that the same fools who had ordered the Americans to be caged like animals for transportation to the barracks at El Obeid had also organized this demonstration, rousing the people to a frenzy of hate. He couldn’t change his orders, but he could ensure his charges arrived in good health.

  “No!” he shouted. “Have you forgotten who you are! We are civilized men!”

  A fat, dark-complected man pushed his way in front of al Gimlas. He sneered at the tall captain, establishing his dominance. “They are infidels, American swine who love Jews!” He hacked up a wad of phlegm and spat on al Gimlas’s boots. It was a mistake. Al Gimlas knocked off the man’s kaffiyeh, a red-checkered headdress, grabbed a handful of hair, spun him around while lifting him off the ground, and launched him into the crowd.

  A loud roar of anger washed over him in retaliation. The crowd was becoming a mob. The sharp rattle of an AK-47 split the air. The boy who had been buried in the cave-in was standing on the hood of the next truck in line, firing his weapon over the heads of the crowd. “Captain!” the boy shouted, throwing his AK-47 to him. Another weapon was passed up from the cab of the truck and the teenager chambered a round. Over fifty of al Gimlas’s soldiers ran from the barracks and shouldered their way into view. Loud clicks of magazines and bolts slamming home quieted the shouts.