An-Numan smiled again, told the man he had just been promoted to sergeant and he should check the troops for any casualties.
The man stared at him a moment, then saw the bars on his shoulders and saluted. “Yes sir, Lieutenant, sir.” He grinned and ran to check on the men.
An-Numan looked over the battlefield. He’d have two lookouts tonight. One on the crest of the hill in front of them and one toward the far end of the small valley. There were no friendly troops at all on their right flank. He smiled. He was starting to think like a soldier.
25
Twenty Miles from Syria
Northern Saudi Arabia
The Air Force calls it a forward logistical temporary base, or FLTB. This one was the pits, decided First Lieutenant Pete “Gotrocks” Van Dyke. He was one of the lucky pilots assigned here with his Cobra gunship helicopter. There were six of the potent birds primed and ready for action sitting outside the tent in the early-morning darkness. They had seen considerable action already, and now he waited for the sun to come up so he would be able to find his target.
The little base was as temporary as they get. It consisted of six twelve-man tents with stakes pounded deep into the subsoil and sand heaped around the roll-down sides to prevent the insides of them from becoming sand dunes.
They were situated ten miles from the Iraqi border in the middle of what he could only describe as a desolate desert. There were no settlements within a hundred and fifty miles of them. The six Cobras and two search and rescue choppers would be rotated every six days to get the sand pumped out of their vitals.
They didn’t need a landing field. There was nothing but shifting sand and a few hardy shrubs and grasses for as far as anyone could see. The entire base had been flown in by choppers, dropped, erected, and maintained by more birds. The kitchen was the most important tent on the tiny base. The whole place had only forty men. Half of those were pilots, gunners, and aviation maintenance men. The rest were cooks and missile handlers and some headquarters guys.
Lieutenant Van Dyke came to the small ready room section of the ad tent and checked the assignment sheet. Not a formal situation. They received radio orders during the night for the next morning. At least that’s what happened the first and only two days of their existence on this desert wonderland.
He grunted when he saw that he and Jimmy pulled the supply line from Syria back into Iraq itself. Yes, lots of trucks, but no tanks. He called his munitions handlers and ordered a double load of 20mm rounds for the three-barrel Gatling gun in the nose turret, and a full helping of nineteen of the 2.75-inch rockets in the pods.
He hit the chow tent. Everyone ate together here. Rank meant little in this outpost. He had breakfast, then picked up Jimmy, his front-seat gunner, and they found their baby armed, fueled, and ready to rumble.
It was almost daylight when they lifted off with two other Cobras and flew together in a loose formation north into Syria, then slanted a little west to find the fighting.
Iraqi forces were still moving ahead, but slower now. Two of the gunships pulled the supply line assignment. There were only two good routes from Iraq into this part of Syria. Van Dyke took one and Lieutenant Platamone the other, and they raced along a hundred feet over the desert, aiming for the well-used roads.
Van Dyke’s showed first. They were still fifteen miles inside of Syria when the chopper pilot found three trucks heading down the road toward the front. He used the Gatling gun on them. Jimmy triggered the three barrels and blasted the first truck in line. That stopped the other two. Drivers hit the ditch and ran into the desert. The Cobra hovered, and Jimmy hit the middle truck with a 2.75-inch rocket, setting off the gas tank in a surging explosion that engulfed the other two rigs at once.
“Let’s find some more,” Jimmy said.
Three miles up the road, they ran into a line of troops marching to the front. “Saddam is getting short on trucks,” Van Dyke said. He came in low and stopped, hovering a hundred yards away, to let Jimmy have hunting time with the Gatling. The troops tried to disperse, but they didn’t have time. Jimmy poured a hundred rounds of 20mm into the troops, then the Cobra moved on without taking even one rifle shot in return.
Five miles on up the road, they came to the Syrian border. A lone stone building marked the spot. It was now vacant and used only as a landmark. Ahead, Van Dyke saw the sun glint off windshields. More trucks.
As they came within range of the trucks, they saw that the two lead rigs had .50-caliber machine guns mounted on the cabs. Van Dyke jerked the chopper down and away as tracers from the .50-caliber raced through the airspace where they had been. They pulled back farther to be out of effective range of the fifty and used the minigun with the 20mm to rake the first two trucks. One slewed to the side and wound up in the desert off the road. The rest of the convoy of more than thirty trucks kept moving down the road.
“We better slide in closer and get some of the rockets on him,” Lieutenant Van Dyke said on the IC. Jimmy agreed, even as he tried for more hits on the first truck with the machine gun. They swung left and came up from the side. The first two 70mm rockets missed the lead truck. It had been speeding ahead, slowing, then racing ahead again. The third rocket rammed into the engine compartment and splattered it across the dirt road.
“Now we can get in closer,” Van Dyke said. He gunned the chopper into a better position for Jimmy to use the Gatling gun. Jimmy washed down six trucks with the deadly 20mm rounds when he saw flashes from the first wounded truck that had slipped off the road.
“Lieutenant, that first truck ain’t dead. Shooting at us. He’s coming damn close, too, and…”
Jimmy didn’t finish the sentence. Van Dyke felt the rounds hitting his chopper. Saw part of the nose of the craft in front of him break away from the effect of the .50-caliber rounds. Then the controls went mushy in his hands and he tried to swing away, to drop down near the ground and avoid any more hits.
The Cobra wouldn’t respond. He had trouble holding any altitude. He could see Jimmy thrown against the side of the cockpit, his helmet blown off, a bloody mass of tissue and bone where his head should be.
The Cobra shuddered again as more of the heavy .50- caliber rounds hit it. Distance. He knew he was going down. He wanted to be as far from the trucks as he could get. He dove toward the ground and saw the tracers fly past him. He was as low as he could get, about fifteen feet off the deck, and still racing forward at 175 miles an hour. He had to get away from the men in those trucks.
The controls felt wrong. Then he realized that he had no way to move right or left. Some more of the controls had been hit by the rounds. He looked for a place to land. Almost anyplace would do. Gradually, he eased off on the power forward and the ship slowed. He hit the radio.
“Flea Bag, this is Flea One. I’m hit. Jimmy is KIA. Having hard time controlling. I’m going in. Get that S&R bird in the air now.”
“Read you, Flea One. Search and rescue on its way in two. Any coordinates?”
“Just north into Iraq a few miles from the south main road. Only two roads. I’ll have the transponder on. Can’t talk. Going in.”
He had slowed the Cobra to forty miles an hour forward. He remembered the rockets. He fired the rest of them into the desert. At least they wouldn’t explode when he hit the ground.
Then the desert floor leaped up at him. Something else snapped in the controls, and he lost it all. He was twenty feet off the ground and moving ahead at no more than twenty miles an hour when he hit. The top rotor kept spinning, and it torqued the small craft around on the skids, breaking off both of them and smashing the Cobra on its side. The top rotor broke off both blades and then the noise stopped and all he could hear was dripping fluid and the desert wind.
“Fuel,” he said to the wind. He hung against his straps, almost on the left side of the cockpit. He punched the cockpit release, but it didn’t work. In a small panic, he loosened his seat belt and shoulder harness and kicked hard at the Plexiglas cover. The whole damn choppe
r could blast into hell from the vaporized jet fuel at any second.
It took him six hard kicks with his boot to budge the canopy. Then it eased open, and he pushed it hard and dropped six feet to the desert. He lifted up and ran.
First Lieutenant Pete Van Dyke made it thirty yards before the Cobra’s fuel ignited in a huge fireball and seared the ground around it for twenty yards. He was slammed forward and singed but not really burned.
Van Dyke rolled in the dirt, but his flight suit wasn’t burning. The first thing he did was make sure the portable transponder he carried was turned on. Then he reached in the leg pocket and took out the trusty .45 automatic that he hadn’t fired in six months. He pulled back the slide and rammed a round into the chamber and pushed on the safety. Locked and loaded. He began walking away from the road with its trucks full of furious Iraqi soldiers. The farther he could get from the burning hulk, the better.
“Jimmy, God, Jimmy, you’re still in there.” He shook his head. It didn’t matter a lot. Dead is dead. Nobody can hurt or help you then. He was sure that Jimmy’s parents would have liked to have a body to bury, but it was far too late now. The fifty caliber had caught him in the head. Then his body was cremated in the fire.
He heard gunfire. Slowly he realized it was probably the 20mm ammunition going off in the fire. The rounds would heat up and explode, with the casing going one way and the lead slug the other way, both at the same velocity. None of it came in his direction.
Lieutenant Van Dyke walked. He couldn’t see the road. He couldn’t hear the trucks. He guessed he was only a mile or so from the road when he crashed. At least he had walked away from the bird.
“Damn it, Jimmy, I didn’t want you to die.” He realized he had shouted the words at the desert. It was true. Jimmy was a good kid, almost twenty-one. He’d never make it now.
Water. Did he have any water? They told the flyers to carry a pint of water in a flat flask in one of the leg pouches. He didn’t know any of the pilots or gunners who did. Yeah, no flask where it was supposed to be. So he’d have a dry morning. At once he was thirsty. Damn psychology. He held the .45 in his right hand and kept walking.
Twice he heard jets screaming over, high above him. Once a chopper sounded, but that was followed by gunfire, so that wouldn’t be the S&R. He didn’t even remember if the rescue birds were armed. He figured it was bad luck to know too much about the rescue guys and their helo. Now he’d find out.
Van Dyke heard a motor. He dropped into the sand and dirt and waited. It came closer, then the sound drifted farther away. Before he moved, the sound came toward him again. A truck of some kind searching for him on a grid pattern?
Then he saw it. On a slight rise to his right he spotted the top of an open jeep-type rig with a whip antenna. What was it they learned in survival school? Stay still and there was a good chance a searcher wouldn’t see you. Move and you were as good as dead. Van Dyke lay totally still. He didn’t even move his eyes. The rig stopped and he could see the sun glinting off binoculars. He should have spread sand over himself. Why didn’t he when he had the chance?
Then the man on the jeep lowered the glasses and the rig moved out of sight. How far away was it? Three hundred yards? Maybe. At least his flight suit was made in cammie colors to help it blend with the desert. He was damn glad of that. Should he move or stay still?
He could hear the jeep engine again, straining when it must have hit loose sand, then growling as it moved away.
He decided to stay put. The chopper should find him. He wasn’t more than a half hour from the field. Had it been a half hour yet? He hadn’t started his stopwatch when he got away from the ship. Should have.
Time? His watch showed 0814.
It would be getting hot soon. Then he’d wish he had brought along that water.
“Damnit, Jimmy, I didn’t want you to die.” He shouted the words at the sky this time. Van Dyke shook his head where he lay in the sand. He now pulled hands full of sand over his flight suit. He had lost his flight helmet when he got out of the ship. Good thing. It would have been a beacon to the man with the binoculars.
Then he heard the jeep again. It came closer, then moved away. On the next pass it was no more than a hundred yards away. He had pulled a floppy hat from another pants pocket and put it over his head when he first left the ship. Now he ducked his head under it and turned his face away from the jeep. If the man used the glasses this time, he’d almost certainly be found.
Damn, found, caught, captured, maybe shot. A .45 against an AK-47 was no contest. The Iraqis would never be in range of his pistol.
He had to know. Lieutenant Van Dyke turned his head slowly, a half inch at a time, until he could see in the direction where he had heard the engine. The jeep had stopped and now he could see two men. One a driver, the other one standing in his seat and searching with the binoculars.
They wanted his scalp bad. Yeah, but they weren’t going to get it. He’d heard about prisoners the Iraqi captured. No fun. Not nice at all.
Again, the man in the jeep sat down and the rig rolled away. If their search pattern was working this way, he had to do something. Move, get away. He stood and ran away from the jeep, on farther away from the burning plane as well. They had used that as the center of the search. There might be three or four jeeps out there looking for him. What a prize he would be for their propaganda machine.
He ran harder until he began to wheeze. He wasn’t in the best shape for this kind of workout. The jeep sounded again, but now it was farther away. He dropped into the sand and rocks, glad for the breather.
He lay there five minutes, couldn’t hear the engine, so he stood and began walking away from the crash site.
He topped a small rise, and fifty feet away he saw the jeep with two Iraqi soldiers standing in it and aiming rifles at him.
“Well, Lieutenant. We have been looking for you. Time you had a ride out of the desert. Just keep walking this way. My English? I learned it at San Diego State on a student visa. Yes, my English is as good as yours, perhaps better. I was a straight-A student at State.”
Van Dyke had no place to run. He lowered the .45 to his side but didn’t move.
“Come, come, Lieutenant. You have no chance. Either you surrender, or we kill you. Now, is that an offer you can refuse?”
A second later, he heard a roar and clack of a chopper as a search and rescue helo with USAF markings lifted up behind the jeep. A gunner in the open door of the rescue bird chopped up the two Iraqis with twenty rounds from a door-mounted machine gun. The soldiers slammed out of the jeep and sprawled on the ground.
The S&R chopper settled slowly to the ground.
First Lieutenant Pete Van Dyke ran up to the jeep and checked the two Arabs. Both were dead. He grabbed one of the AK-47s and ran for the chopper.
He jumped in the door, and the bird took wing at once.
“Just one of you?” a sergeant asked. He handed Van Dyke an ice-cold can of Coke.
“Yeah, just one. My gunner…”
“That’s all right sir, we understand. Need to report in to base. We’ll have you in a nice cold shower in thirty-five minutes.”
First Lieutenant Van Dyke leaned back against the side of the chopper and closed his eyes. He said it to himself this time.
“Damnit to hell, Jimmy. I didn’t want you to die.”
26
US Enterprise CVN 65
Southern Persian Gulf
Don Stroh came back and found Murdock just as he finished his meal, and they went to his compartment. Murdock sat on his bunk and Stroh tried to pace, but there wasn’t room.
“Like I said, we know where Saddam has his poison gas, we know what it is, and we know how to destroy it with as few deaths in the entire area as possible.”
“Sure, meaning a dozen or so SEALs.”
“You will not be in serious danger if you do the work the way the NBC boys say it should be done.”
“How long do we have to train for this job?”
&nbs
p; “Roughly twelve hours.”
“I’ll have all the men write suicide letters before we leave. Make it easier on you when you have to write our next of kin.”
“Stop that, Murdock.” Stroh said, his impatience tingeing his words. That caused Murdock to look up.
“You’re serious about this mission?”
“Damn serious, and so is the President. He says it must be done, and done quickly and done right. He suggested you and your platoon.”
“He didn’t know how shot up we are.”
“This isn’t going to be a hundred-mile marathon. You’ll have all the support we can give you, and that’s a hell of a lot.”
“Chopper in?”
“Absolutely, with four to six Cobra gunships for protection.”
“Chopper out?”
“Yes, it’s too far to walk.”
Murdock eased up from the bunk. He felt the twinges again, the little hurts that bothered him sometimes from the shrapnel still in his ass from several missions back. “Just what the hell can we do with nerve gas? There’s no easy way to destroy the stuff without spreading it around the whole damn globe. We going to do that?”
“Absolutely not. We have a proved way to do the job.”
“Nerve gas doesn’t deteriorate quickly. It won’t burn. It can’t be broken down chemically without a whole fucking cracking plant. So how the hell can twelve of us do the job?”
“This gas is called ectoprocy. Don’t ask me what it means or how to spell it. It’s a known nerve gas but hasn’t been used much. It is generally considered too unstable to qualify for production or installation on weapons. Saddam didn’t agree. He’s done it. He has it. A whiff of a minute quantity of ectoprocy will shut down the nervous system of any animal on earth. It happens in a shorter time than I can tell you about it.”
“How would Saddam deliver it?” Murdock asked.
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