by Ian Slater
“My dad told me, sir.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes, sir. He used to be the general’s 2IC.”
“Huh!” said Tibbet, wondering why the son of a G-2 hadn’t risen any higher than a driver. No shame in it, but not what you’d expect.
General Freeman’s stentorian voice coming on the Yorktown’s public address system sounded as if it was coming from on high, its tone brooking neither interruption nor contradiction.
“Shit,” opined one marine. “Sounds like Moses.”
This is no apology, Peter Norton told himself. This was an old blood ’n’ guts Georgie Patton speech. And what made it doubly impressive or eerie, depending on the audience of two thousand marines scattered throughout the ship, was Freeman’s likeness on the monitors to the controversial World War II general.
“Reincarnation,” said a machine gunner.
“Bullshit,” responded another. “What d’you think, Norton?”
Peter shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“It’s going around town,” boomed the general, “that I’m a ‘tired old horse’! Now, I take umbrage at that. I’ve been a horse’s ass, but I’ve never been ‘old’!” There was a smattering of laughter ’tween decks and on the Yorktown’s roof, where the flight crews in the preemptory ballet of war were busily parking the first five of the helo carrier’s fifteen big Super Stallions, the choppers in takeoff line, rotors still, folded like the wings of enormous, sleeping dragonflies. “What makes it worse,” continued Freeman, “is that the joker who said I’m a horse’s ass was a liberal Monday-morning quarterbacking son of a bitch who wouldn’t know a condom from a balloon.”
The marines roared their approval, getting into it now. Marine Commander Tibbet, high up on the island’s bridge, was shaking his head as he stared down at Freeman who, he saw, had climbed atop one of the big Super Stallion’s cockpits, even as its deck crew fit-tested the helo’s cargo hook and banana-shaped sling.
“That comment about liberals’ll be on CNN in about five minutes,” Tibbet complained to Yorktown’s diminutive Captain Crowley. “The man’s got no sense of — I don’t know—”
Why, Lord, why, Crowley petitioned Heaven, did he have to have George Patton reincarnated on his boat? A naval captain, like anyone else, abhorred controversy. Technically, Crowley mused, as long as Freeman’s on my boat, he’s under my command. Technically.
“Now,” continued Freeman, “I want to tell you men and women that if I were you, I’d be a mite teed off at suddenly being under the command of a horse’s ass!” A roar of laughter erupted ’tween decks, flowing up from the vehicle and hangar deck over the ramps, spilling out onto the flight deck. “But I’m here to tell you that I’ve seen my share of combat, and I’ve still got some ideas about how to deal with scumbags. And—” He was interrupted by another roar, this one of such anger that it startled Yorktown’s captain but turned Colonel Tibbet’s frown into a knowing smile: Their blood was up. “—And I want to tell you,” thundered the general, “that I and my team of veterans are here to work with you, not over you. This is from first to last Colonel Tibbet’s show. I’m here in an advisory capacity only, but you’ll see me around—” He paused. “—not sitting like a horse’s ass, but galloping in with your Super Stallions. And—”
There was clapping and cries of “Way to go, General!”
“And,” continued Freeman, arms akimbo, his camouflaged Fritz with its airborne strap cupping his chin, “I intend to shit all over those comrades who give our enemies the means to kill our children. Are you ready?”
“Hoo-ha!” came the guttural marine response.
“God bless you all,” Freeman told them, “and God bless America!”
The cheers of the marines were now interrupted by the coughing, spitting noise of the helicopter engines starting in unison, their collective roar amid the choking exhaust fumes drowning out the war cries of the first wave of 750 marines to embark on the mission which Freeman had suggested should be called Operation Bird Rescue. The president had thought it a brilliant choice, so politically astute that he had sent a short thank-you note.
The heavily laden marines filed up from the cavernous recesses of the Yorktown, moving antlike along the flight deck and disappearing into the bellies of the Super Stallions, whose giant rotors threw circles of dazzling, transparent sunlight, signaling that each of the choppers’ titanium-forged blades had now joined one of the earsplitting concerts of war.
In Yorktown’s landing force operations center, deep within the O2 deck, Freeman, like Tibbet, loaded for bear, was going over their joint plan of attack. Like all good plans in life and in battle, it was simple in concept. Of course the devil, as always, was in the details. First, Yorktown’s Cobra gunships would ride shotgun on both the northern and southern flanks of Yorktown’s helo stream. Second, the Cobras, fed SATPIX intel, would soften up all of the rebel AA defenses, leaving Tibbet’s first wave of infantry to go in and gut the ABC complex. HUMINT assets believed the two two-story structures, connected at their midpoints by a two-story ferro cement walkway and surrounded by a virtually treeless one-square-mile perimeter, comprised the central cog in ABC’s operation. The complex was believed to be the place where the manufacture of terrorist weapons had made what the Pentagon’s practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics referred to as a “quantum leap in economies of scale.” All of which was pretentious Pentagon jargon for the fact that terrorist weapons manufactured in the ABC complex had shifted from the garages of the Middle East to high-efficiency American-style assembly lines.
Moscow, Freeman understood, had still not given official permission for the American helos to enter Russian airspace, it being accepted by Washington that on advice from the United Nations there would be an outraged denunciation of the U.S. choppers’ presence, led by the Russian delegate Petrov and supported by the French. This was also accepted by the White House as necessary to make the Russian president look tough even while it offered him a chance to be rid of the rebel ABC without having to commit regular Russian troops to fight Russians. What the Russian president had not clarified, however, was whether American fighters or bombers would be permitted to enter Russian airspace. But he had reiterated to Washington that he would be able to restrain regular Russian air force and naval units from becoming embroiled with the MEU for only a maximum of twenty-four hours. Douglas Freeman assured Colonel Tibbet and Yorktown’s Crowley that as titular head of the MEU’s operation, he would take full responsibility for releasing Yorktown’s Harriers and McCain’s Joint Strike Fighters against the ABC complex at Lake Khanka should a Russian air attack threaten American lives.
“Fleet won’t go for this,” Yorktown’s Captain Crowley warned Freeman and Tibbet.
Freeman’s jaws tightened. “Let’s get one thing straight, gentlemen. I’ve been personally tapped by the president of the United States to be the senior-ranking officer to command the operation. As such, it’s not my intention to go running around the damn fleet getting permission slips so I can leave the room and go to the toilet. Is that understood?”
Tibbet was noncommittal. The Yorktown’s skipper, however, was not so sanguine about Freeman’s willingness to act independently of him as admiral of the fleet.
“General,” the Yorktown skipper informed him, “a quick, enciphered e-mail to the White House could clear this up.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Freeman replied, “by the time they fart around in that situation room down in that Washington basement — hell, I mean half of those jokers down there don’t know where Baltimore is, let alone this damned lake — it’ll be hours before we get the green light. That time lost could cost us marine lives — a lot of lives. And now that our chief source of real-time intel, CNN, has blabbed it all over that we’re about to go in after this ABC complex, the enemy’ll be dug in even more than usual, securing their defensive perimeter like there’s no tomorrow. And let’s hope there’s no goddamned armor about,” Freeman added. “I say
let’s quit pig-frigging around with e-mails to the White House. Release your Harriers upon request by either the colonel or me. I told you I’ll take the rap.”
“You can afford to,” retorted Crowley, “you’re retired.” He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. Tibbet was watching the general and he saw Freeman’s face redden in controlled anger.
“Retired or not,” retorted Freeman, “I have the little matter of my reputation at stake. You gentlemen know how it goes. In our business you’re as good as your last op. Like a damn movie star: one big flop and you’re in the doghouse. Priest Lake’s my doghouse, and I want out. Badly. But I’m not going into this just because I want to save my ass or get my picture on the cover of Time. I’m doing this for those poor bastards, law-abiding Americans, who were just sitting there working one moment and were blown to smithereens the next by those scumbags.”
Tibbet had no difficulty in imagining fire coming from the general’s nostrils. “Anyway,” the general continued, “if our helos don’t take at least one round from Russian ground defenses, I’ll eat my hat. And if they do, that’ll justify release of the Harriers.”
Crowley hoped the Russians wouldn’t violate the twenty-four-hour agreement with Washington, but if they did, the fighter-bombers would certainly come in handy.
“Admiral?” It was his duty officer. A few minutes later Crowley informed Freeman, “My D.O. tells me there’s been a leak. We’re being inundated with e-mail requests about Bird Rescue. Some correspondents, including a gal from Newsweek, are saying the name the Pentagon gave to this mission is a cynical ploy to win over the environmentalist lobby in support of yet another unilateral U.S. invasion. Would you comment?”
“Invasion!” Freeman said angrily. “This is an operation to chase down a bunch of goddamn murderers. You can tell them from me that—”
“Wait a second, General,” said Crowley, who instructed one of his computer operators to take down Freeman’s comment verbatim.
“Tell them,” said Freeman, “that the list of endangered species on Lake Khanka is as long as your goddamned arm. The one to give to the media is the Grus japonensus. Half those liberal bastards might even be able to spell it. It’s a very rare, endangered species of red-crowned crane, and there’s a critter called the sheathfish endemic to the region.” Freeman turned to Colonel Tibbet. “I like giving the bastards that one, Jack. Just watch and wait for one of the TV anchors to keep a straight face with ‘sheath.’”
“Ah,” Crowley told the computer operator, “I suggest you clean that up a little before you send it. Okay with you, Douglas?”
Colonel Tibbet grinned, welcoming a flash of levity to the occasion, and Freeman readily agreed. There was no point in deliberately riling them up. It reminded him of Marte Price and his deal with her to give her first crack at an exclusive in return for her having come clean about the government’s initial and futile attempt to keep the attack on DARPA ALPHA under wraps.
They could all hear the mounting thunder on the roof, and the appearance of Tibbet’s S-2, the marines’ intel chief, confirmed the MEU was ready to “rock’n’roll.”
“Look,” Freeman told Tibbet and Crowley. “If we can knock these bastards out at Khanka, it won’t be just them and the terrorists’ stockpile we’ll be taking out, gentlemen. It’ll be a lesson to any other ragtag damn terrorists that no matter what it takes, when you kill Americans, we’ll come after you — in your own damn country, if need be. So that Captain Crowley here might even release his Harriers.”
“I’ll put the Harriers on standby,” said Crowley. “That’s as far as I’ll go for now.”
Freeman shook his hand.
“Maybe,” cut in Tibbet, trying to help his old naval colleague Crowley stand his ground against Douglas Freeman’s well-intentioned but relentless charge, “you tried to reach Washington to get ‘weapons-free’ for the Harriers, but your encrypting program temporarily crashed?”
Freeman winked at Tibbet. “I like it!”
Crowley kept a straight face. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
John Cuso, the executive officer who had been seconded from McCain to Yorktown to assist Crowley, had seen his share of helo assaults launched from the ship, but it was always a new and exciting experience for him. From Vultures’ Row, high in the control island, Cuso looked down at the frantic, yet endlessly rehearsed, preparations for combat. He could see the fifteen Super Stallions and Tibbet and Freeman crouching low as each was hurried aboard his respective chopper, a lead Super Stallion for Freeman, his six-man SpecOp team, mortar squad, and other marines aboard, a command Huey for Tibbet. Cuso wondered how many would return. What had Hitler said? Making war was like grabbing a gun and walking into a pitch-black room — anything could happen.
Each of the fifteen Super Stallions in Yorktown’s thirty-two-helo force would be carrying fifty fully loaded marines, which meant putting 750 marines in the target zone in the first assault wave — providing there was no interference en route. Each of the big Stallions had three.50-caliber machine guns, one located in the forward starboard crew door and two on pivot mounts for open-ramp firing, all three weapons fed by linked-belt.50-caliber ammunition. As the air armada rose above a blue, choppy sea, two-thirds of the total marine MEU combat force was en route toward the rugged coast of Russia’s far east, which was already in sight as a dark squiggle on the horizon.
Aboard his Huey, Colonel Tibbet was double-checking the landing area selected from the SATPIX where two Super Stallions were to deposit their sling-carried fifteen-thousand-pound bladders of aviation fuel for both helos and Harriers, should it become necessary to call for the Harriers to provide close air support and enough loiter time over the target. During the vital refueling, squads of marines would rush to form a defensive perimeter screen, though it was not anticipated that much ground fire at all would be encountered, given the absence of troops on SIGINT and SATPIX intel.
Though clouds appeared to be thickening and were clustering ominously along the coast, forming a line of ragged gray ahead of them, the rising of the thirty-two-aircraft armada made an impressive sight. An able force, if ever he’d seen one, thought Tibbet, whose high morale had been duly noted by Peter Norton who, in an attempt to contain his rising fear before the mission, had closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the happiest, most relaxing times of his youth — picnicking and swimming in the James River to beat the awful, humid heat of August.
As the low-flying MEU approached the coast, a Russian fisherman-cum-coastwatcher, Alexander Rostovich, whose great grandfather had been killed as an adviser to Ho Chi Minh’s legions against the Americans in Vietnam, was awakened to the choppers’ sound. Grabbing his binoculars, he glimpsed a white U.S. star with a white bar either side of it on one of the incoming helos of the U.S. air armada. Racing into his fishing hut, where he kept an old but reliable 8 mm Mauser that was always loaded for the sharks that bothered his nets when he was fishing off Timpevay Bay or for bears that could wipe out a year’s carefully tended vegetable patch in a few seconds, Rostovich raised the weapon and let fly a round at the armada, pulled back the bolt, swearing as he did so, rammed another round home, and fired again. By sheer dumb luck, this round hit the cockpit of a Stallion, spiderwebbing the copilot’s window screen and narrowly missing his head.
“Ground fire!” the copilot reported. “Three o’clock, from that hut down by that garden. Anyone see it? Along the cliff edge.”
“I’ve got it, Stallion. He’s mine,” came a voice, the violation of radio silence no serious thing, given the number of helos that were airborne and clearly visible to isolated settlements along the coast. In addition, the ABC, thanks to CNN, Al Jazeera, and all the others, clearly knew that the strike was imminent. One of the SuperCobras, feared by and known to Saddam’s soldiers as the “Skinny Birds,” peeled off into a steep, 180 m.p.h. dive, the helo firing its three-barrel rotary chin-mounted chain gun, the one-in-five red tracers dancing crazily about the hut. The hut collapsed, as di
d Rostovich. There was no fire or explosion, nothing more than a cloud of dust rising above the imploded hut, the coastwatcher lying spread-eagled in a garden of collapsed trellises. Little chance he was still alive. In any event, the target had been “neutralized.” Even so, Jack Tibbet did a one-eighty and called for the six Harriers. There was no way he could know how much ground fire was about to open up, and, with Crowley’s blessing, decided that he’d rather be called overcautious than unnecessarily risk his marines on the coast before they reached the target.
“Blackbirds go!” ordered Crowley, and within minutes the Harriers, electing to make their short takeoff over the vertical lift to conserve fuel, were aloft, Freeman simultaneously requesting McCain’s vertical takeoff Joint Strike Fighters to assist in suppression of hostile ground fire, “should it become necessary,” the latter phrase a qualifier indicating that the American aircraft would not fire unless fired upon, a political fiction that might qualify as an acceptable order in the Byzantine business of the military’s post-op inquiries. All that was known in the fleet was that a Super Stallion had taken a hit, and “no,” the copilot rudely informed Tibbet’s G-2, “it was not a fucking bird. It was a fucking round, a fucking 7.62 mm rolling around in the damn cabin.” For all anyone, including Freeman and Tibbet, whose lead helos had already passed well beyond the fisherman’s hut, knew, the entire helo armada might be coming under ground fire. All everyone had heard for certain was that radio silence had been broken because a Super Stallion had come under ground fire. The Stallion had taken a “direct hit.” Soon the rumor amongst the fully laden combat troops, wedged uncomfortably between their web-seats and the fuselage, was that a Stallion had gone down.
