The Mingrelian

by Ed Baldwin

  The press corps stands. The president emerges from the hall from the Oval Office and strides purposefully to the microphone.

  “Good morning. We are in the 10th day of nuclear war in the Middle East. There have been no nuclear detonations for one week, but conflict has continued all around the Persian Gulf. Today, we have received word from the government of Iran that hostilities are at an end and that they are suing for peace. This comes after the Ayatollah and Supreme Leader was killed yesterday in a border skirmish at the Sulaymaniyah border crossing into Iraq, and confirmation that the president of Iraq was executed last week. Insurgents have been battling the Revolutionary Guards since the beginning of the conflict, and they have taken control of the Presidential Palace and the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting headquarters in Tehran, from which they’ve been broadcasting the cease fire message. The Iranian army and navy are returning to their barracks, remaining air force aircraft not destroyed in the fighting have been grounded, and Iranian missile and antiaircraft facilities have been rendered inactive.”

  The president pauses to let the press corps digest his words, turns a page and continues.

  “Casualty reports from attacks on our base at Al Udeid, Qatar, this past week are updated to 55 killed and 400 wounded. Though heavily damaged by medium- and long-range missiles fired from inside Iran, the base continues in its command-and-control role for all of our forces in the Middle East. Evacuations of the wounded are underway with most flying directly into Germany for care at our medical center at Landstuhl.”

  He pauses to let the print reporters catch up, then turns the page and continues.

  “We have casualty figures from Israel of 55,000 killed and 200,000 injured. More than a half a million are homeless there. We have delivered 20,000 tons of relief supplies with more on the way. I am told by the Israeli ambassador that the people of Israel send a message of thanks to their friends in the United States and assure us that they remain in control of their homeland and are caring for their wounded and homeless.”

  He pauses again, and turns another page.

  “The government of Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud, the royal family, confirm that the king of Saudi Arabia was killed in the assault on the Presidential Palace on the first day of hostilities with Iran. In addition, his brothers, the remaining sons of Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia, perished with him. A successor will be chosen by the remaining family members.”

  The president scans the audience, turns a page and continues.

  “As this crisis has developed, I have been in constant contact with our allies in the region and around the world. We have depended on the leadership of the United Nations and other world bodies to bring an end to the suffering and destruction of this war. I have tried to mold a consensus within our government to provide a unified solution to this world crisis, but certain elements within our Congress have obstructed my efforts, even during these difficult times. Hopefully, the future will restore the sense of cooperation across political parties as our administration addresses the issues of a rapidly changing world environment.”

  He turns the page and pauses to let his words sink in.

  “Sensors from our ships in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, satellites, scientific aircraft flying in the area and around the world, have detected increased radiation in the atmosphere. The plume from the nuclear detonations has already circled the Earth, and increased radiation will be falling in rain and snow for the foreseeable future. Health experts tell us to filter our drinking water if it derives from surface water, such as rivers and reservoirs. They advise keeping children indoors during rain and snow events, and to wash all fruits and vegetables before eating. The Department of Agriculture is working diligently to monitor our food sources and will quarantine any material found to contain unsafe levels of radiation.”

  He pauses again and looks benignly at the reporters, now fidgeting to get their questions in first.

  “I’ll take questions now.”

  As the room erupts with a hundred questions at once, he nods to a preselected reporter.

  “Is it true that an American diplomat was killed with the Ayatollah in the battle at Sulaymaniyah, and that she was instrumental in negotiating this cease fire?”

  The answer to that question has been carefully crafted beforehand and is written on the top sheet of paper before the president. He answers it from memory, not looking at the paper.

  “Dabney St. Clair, the deputy chief of mission in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, was involved in high level discussions with the Ayatollah and his staff in Tehran before and during the nuclear conflict. Her bravery and sacrifice will serve as an example to diplomats serving around the world. Next question.”

  Chapter 54: Mount Damavand

  T

  he MV-22 Osprey does a low, slow approach to check out the landing zone. Boyd and his band of warriors, wounded and evacuees stand huddling by the side. The snowmobiles are parked in a line.

  “That is one weird aircraft,” Boyd says to Ekaterina, watching it circle as the engines rotate from horizontal to vertical overhead. The Osprey slows its forward motion and slowly descends into the landing area. Snow flies in all directions as it settles onto the nearly level landing site.

  Within minutes they are loaded into the aircraft, along with their PJ rescuers and their four snowmobiles. As the mission commander, Boyd is escorted to the front to meet the pilots and take congratulation on pulling off the “mission of the century.” They have been fully briefed on Boyd’s team accomplishments and the privations they’ve endured.

  The Caspian Sea, green and calm on a cloudy day, spreads out before them as they circle for altitude to get over the coastal mountains. Mount Damavand rises bleak and isolated into the low clouds behind them. Another storm is just now coming across southern Russia. The Osprey turns east to skirt the coast of Iran into Turkmenistan. As the cabin warms up and the weary travelers enjoy a normal ambient temperature for the first time in a week, an odor permeates the cabin. No way to bathe and a makeshift portable toilet have left the group with a ripe human scent.

  “That’s how we get gas,” Boyd explains to the Ayatollah and Ekaterina an hour later as they look out a side window. The Osprey has flown up behind a C-130 equipped with a probe and drogue refueling hose trailing from a fuel tank outboard of the outboard engine. The Osprey approaches and inserts its fuel probe into a basket at the end of the hose, a connection is established and the Osprey receives enough fuel to complete the journey from Mount Damavand to Kandahar, Afghanistan, a distance of well over a thousand miles as they skirt the perimeter of Iran.

  “Which is Major Chailland?” the base public-relations officer, an officious Air Force captain with a clipboard, asks as he bounds aboard the aircraft as soon as the steps are lowered in Kandahar. Outside the window there are several news cameras and a half-dozen reporters, even on this combat base deep in the hinterlands of a nation at war.

  Boyd raises his hand.

  “Stay inside,” he is told. “Clive, Goodman, Boyle, where are you?”

  “Clive is dead, Goodman and Boyle are there,” Boyd says, pointing at his associates.

  “OK, you guys stay inside until the cameras are gone. This show is for the Ayatollah Mashadi and Mrs. Dadiani.”

  He frowns when he sees what sad shape they are in. He must have had visions of a press conference with interviews and photo ops. The Ayatollah, gaunt, worn and dirty from a year in prison, is barely able to stand, and Ekaterina is wearing men’s long underwear under a dirty hospital gown under an arctic parka. They are helped down the three steps to the ground by the band of security policemen surrounding the aircraft and are followed by the Air Force PJs who rescued them, as the reporters converge. Boyd, Davann and Emmet stay inside with the crew.

  Chapter 55: Two Months Later

  E

  ight Ball sits attentively, fascinated by the device on the table. His tail wags with enthusiasm after his ears
have been rubbed and his coat massaged by all of his new best friends.

  “The drogue chute deploys like this,” Emmet Boyle says, holding a parachute made out of a handkerchief in his hand, the suspension lines attached to risers being held by Davann Goodman, seated at the table.

  There are beer bottles on the kitchen table in Boyd’s apartment, vacant for eight months but now the scene of much activity.

  “Then it pulls the top off like this.”

  He picks up a cylindrical bag made from pieces of grocery bags taped together.

  “I don’t know,” Boyd says, finishing a longneck and chucking it into an open waste can in the corner. “Seems like we could find something better looking than a grocery bag.”

  “It’s a one-time use item,” Emmet says in defense of his contraption.

  Bud Weidman, sipping a Scotch in the corner, says, “There’s a Filipino lady at the mall who makes lanterns out of some kind of thin paper. She could put something together that would look better than that. She works with paper in all sorts of colors.”

  “Can she get it by tomorrow?” Boyd asks. “We do have a deadline here.”

  "No.”

  “OK, let’s rethink this thing,” Boyd says, stepping to the table.

  “You guys have assumed it has to be paper. Why not just attach the parachute to the bottom of the urn? When it opens, it pulls the urn upright and Raybon goes home,” he says, fluttering his right hand in the air while holding the urn containing Raybon Clive’s ashes.

  “What if that urn hits someone on the ground?” Bud asks.

  “Pretty unlikely in western Oklahoma,” Emmet says.

  They sit there for a minute and then take a vote. The urn wins. They attach the small parachute to the bottom of the brass urn, clear the empty beer bottles and Boyd brings out a new, unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. They each take a shot glass and fill it up.

  “I’ll go first,” Weidman says. “I didn’t get to meet Raybon, but I can tell you his crash at Camp Bastion is legendary in the Air Force, especially among C-130 pilots. And, when he showed up wearing his wooden leg at the appeal hearing contesting his medical retirement? Classic. To a friend I wish I’d had: Raybon Clive!”

  They all downed their shots. Weidman filled in some details he’d heard about the exploits, and they talked for a few minutes, savoring Raybon’s favorite drink.

  Boyd took the bottle and filled the glasses.

  “When I first met him in Mombasa, I could tell he didn’t want to talk to me. He’d had some bad experiences with the CIA.”

  They all laughed.

  “He got over that, apparently,” Boyd says as Davann nods emphatically.

  “Then he takes me to the bar, and we drink beer all afternoon while I tell him about the mission out to that island in the Seychelles and ask him to contract with us to use that old Grumman Albatross you guys were flying. And I think I have a deal. Then he starts ordering shots of Jack. By the end of the night, we had an agreement and I had committed the government of the United States to be responsible for any eventuality.”

  Everyone laughed in agreemen. Raybon was a known party man.

  “But, the big thing I’ll remember about Raybon Clive was over Tehran,” Boyd says turning to Bud, the only member of this group who wasn’t over Tehran with Raybon. “We’re in the clouds, in a snowstorm, climbing up the side of an 18,000-foot mountain with an Iranian F-4 chasing behind us, and Emmet tells him there’s a ridge up ahead and we should go over it and down the into the valley to evade the F-4’s air-to-air missile.”

  Boyd turns back to the group, holding his right hand in front of him in the classic fighter pilot’s gesture demonstrating a flying situation.

  “You guys know, you can’t make an airplane just point its nose down – negative G’s. It can stall a big aircraft or tear the wings off. When we cross a ridgeline in a fighter, we roll inverted, go over the ridge and pull the nose down, then roll back. Fighters are made to do that.”

  Boyd raises his glass.

  “To Raybon Clive, the only man I know with the balls to roll a C-130!”

  They down their drinks.

  “And, it saved our ass.”

  Emmet steps forward and pours some shots. He holds his and looks at it for a moment.

  “I’ve been in the C-130 my whole adult life,” he says. “I treasure the aircraft and all it has accomplished in its storied history. I’ve known some pilots, guys who took the ‘Herc’ to some places people still talk about. But flying a hundred feet over that prison in Tehran and blowing the front gate open with a burst of 20 mm cannon shells from a Vulcan cannon on the ramp tops them all! To Raybon Clive, the best C-130 pilot I’ve known!”

  The group mills around for another 10 minutes, dipping tortilla chips into a mixture of Ro-tel and Velveeta and telling other Raybon Clive stories, waiting for Davann to be ready for his toast. Finally he stands, pours the shots and raises his.

  “After we got shot in Afghanistan, we were in the plane coming back to the States. We’d been in Germany for a week, both of us had had more surgery. He’d lost his leg, I was afraid I’d never walk again. It was dark. And cold. And we were bouncing along in the middle of the night. We were on those canvas litters stacked three high in the back of a C-17.

  “ ‘Hey,’ he said. He pulled at my arm. ‘Hey. Hey.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. I was irritated, he woke me up. ‘You got anybody, back home? Anybody meetin’ you when the plane gets in?’ ‘Shit,’ I said, ‘nobody meetin’ me.’ ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he said again, pulling on my arm. ‘Hey, let’s me and you stay together. You Marines, you go to Bethesda. Think they’d take me there?’ ”

  Davann’s eyes were welling with tears. He raised his glass higher, and the others did the same.

  “So, we stay together through the whole rehab thing and one day he says to me, ‘Hey, whatcha gonna do when we get outta here?’ I said I didn’t know, probably go back to Memphis and get a job in a liquor store. He said, ‘No, stick with me. I’ll teach you to fly.’ I said, ‘Shit, I can’t fly no airplane.’ He says, ‘If I teach you, you can fly an airplane.’ ”

  Davann’s face is wet with tears as he chokes back a sob. Others are wiping tears from their eyes.

  “So, I get my private pilot’s license, Instruments, multicrew, and commercial licenses. He’s there the whole way, teaching, pushing encouraging,” Davann sobs. “I never had a friend like that. He knew I could be a better man than I was. He made me a better man than I was. And now, I’ve got a wife and a son on the way, and a job, and … and, a life.”

  Crying openly now, he raises his glass even higher. “Hey, Raybon, Hey.”

  *****

  Davann Goodman sits in the left seat. He is the chief pilot of the South Sudan air force, though they have no aircraft. With his dual citizenship and his connections within the government of South Sudan, he has come to Little Rock at the invitation and with the full support of the government of the United States to learn to fly the C-130. It is a routine training mission. Bud Weidman sits in the right seat, instructing. Boyd Chailland has completed his C-130 training and is along as an additional crew member. Emmet Boyle is on the manifest as an observer. Though there is no navigator on the C-130 H-model they are flying, he sits at the console behind the co-pilot, which has most of the same instruments the old model navigator’s consoles had. Another student pilot lounges on the bunk in the back.

  “Clinton, Oklahoma, just ahead,” Emmet says, eyes on his map. “The Canadian River is 40 miles north. Surface winds up there are 10 knots from the west.”

  Davann turns to the north and begins a descent. Boyd and Emmet climb down the steps to the cargo bay, carrying the small package.

  The aircraft descends to 500 feet as the Canadian River, muddy and wide with water from melting snow in Colorado and New Mexico, flows through the hilly ranch land of western Oklahoma. Davann gets up, and the other student pilot takes the left seat. D
avann hurries down the ladder. Boyd and Emmet have already opened the jump door just in front of the tail. Wind rushes by. They hand the package to Davann. He unwraps the package, holds the parachute-wrapped urn in his right hand, grabs a hand-hold on the left side of the door and peers out. The river is just below.

  “Bye, old friend,” he says, and pitches the package out the door.

  The little parachute catches the wind and yanks the urn upright. Raybon Clive’s ashes disperse across the Oklahoma hills where he was born.

  Chapter 56: The Kremlin

  S

  miling with robust good humor, the Russian president strides to the microphone. The large theater-like press room is many times the size of the White House press room, and it is filled to capacity with the world’s media. A sophisticated common feed with a dozen cameras controlled from the control room at the back is ensuring any record of this event will feature perfect lighting, camera angle and sound. He smiles out at the reporters; dapper, confident, in control.

  “The world has had its second nuclear war.”

  He pauses to let that sink in. Print reporters are frantically typing away, some writing on legal pads.

  “Like all war, the origins of this one are open to interpretation.”

  He pauses again.

  “To the dead and the injured and the homeless, it makes no difference. The cataclysm in the Middle East has swept away old alliances, old power structures and old differences.”

  He pauses again, scanning the crowd, savoring their attention to his every nuance.

  “A new wind blows there. The wind of cooperation, of tolerance, of recognition of the needs of the long suffering oppressed people of that region, a region of vast wealth and hopeless poverty.”

  The Russian president looks back at the only other person seated on the stage. It is the newly elected president of Iran, selected only the week before by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the parliament in exile, now in control in that nation.