EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!
Praise for the Writing of John J. Nance
“King of the modern-day aviation thriller.” —Publishers Weekly
“Nance is a wonderful storyteller.” —Chicago Tribune
Final Approach
“A taut high-tech mystery that could have been written only by an airline industry insider.” —New York Times–bestselling author Stephen Coonts
Scorpion Strike
“Gripping.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Phoenix Rising
“Harrowing … Nance delivers suspense and smooth writing. A classy job.” —The New York Times Book Review
Pandora’s Clock
“A ticking time bomb of suspense.” —Chicago Tribune
“A combination of The Hot Zone and Speed.” —USA Today
Medusa’s Child
“So compelling it’s tough to look away.” —People
The Last Hostage
“A thrilling ride … [Will] keep even the most experienced thriller addicts strapped into their seats for the whole flight.” —People
Blackout
“A high tension, white knuckle thriller … Joltingly scary.” —New York Post
Turbulence
“Mesmerizing in-flight details [and] a compelling cast of realistic characters … once again prove John J. Nance ‘the king of the modern-day aviation thriller’.” —Publishers Weekly
Skyhook
“Readers are in for death-defying plane rides, lively dialogue, and realistic characters who survive crises with courage and humor.” —Associated Press
On Shaky Ground: America’s Earthquake Alert
“Gripping! Breathlessly unrolls a succession of disasters.… If you want a literary equivalent of the quake experience, On Shaky Ground is the book for you.” —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Scorpion Strike
John J. Nance
This work is dedicated with heartfelt respect and friendship to my compatriots, the men and women of the 97th Military Airlift Squadron and the 446th Military Airlift Wing at McChord AFB, Washington—my military “home” for the past sixteen years.
It is also dedicated to my fellow Reservists and Guardsmen from all branches of the service who, like me, instantly put civilian lives and careers on hold in the fall of 1990 to serve in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
And finally, it is dedicated to the active duty members of the U.S. Military who accepted and integrated their Reserve and Guardsmen brethren into a unified team of unprecedented effectiveness which, in one stroke, proved the brilliance of what someone years ago dubbed the “Total Force Concept.”
JOHN J. NANCE
Tacoma, Washington
December, 1991
PROLOGUE
The last few drops of water left the goatskin reluctantly, trickling onto the man’s tongue and disappearing, doing nothing to relieve the thirst that was rapidly becoming a chasm of fear threatening to engulf him. With the other goatskin lost, there was no more water. He had miscalculated—again.
The man braced himself as he stood on shaky legs, leaning slightly toward the west—or what he hoped was the west—as the howling might of the wind blasted horizontal columns of sand and grit at him with a guttural moan that seemed to echo from the depths of hell. The sandstorm had overtaken him hours ago, or was it days ago? It seemed interminable.
As the wall of swirling, sickly yellow clouds had tumbled toward him the previous late afternoon and swallowed the setting sun, he had felt a sudden, naïve flash of Arab pride, expecting to be tested in the tradition of his desert heritage, and found worthy despite his earlier mistakes.
That conceit had lasted all of ten minutes—the time it took to realize he was in deep trouble.
The storm had enveloped him then, his mouth suddenly filling with sand and grit, as he tripped for the first of many times, sprawling facedown on the hard, gravel-strewn desert floor. He had struggled to his feet, gasping for breath, the ancient rationale of the linen cloth that swathed his head and face—the howli—all too obvious. He had fashioned the howli when he abandoned the car, leaving only a slit for his eyes, and feeling somewhat silly with clear air and temperatures only in the upper sixties Fahrenheit. Now he desperately needed its protection. His breathing came hard, the heavy air drawing in particles of dust and sand so tiny that even the cloth couldn’t filter them out completely. He could taste the desert, even if he couldn’t see it—an alkali taste of bitter grit.
It was pitch dark now and past midnight, the relentless, shrieking sandstorm more ominous than before. The man sat down suddenly to think, pulling his knees up instinctively, his head down, his back turned to the onslaught of the wind, eyes closed tightly beneath the white linen. His feet were numb and his back ached, but there was soft sand beneath his buttocks, a relief from the small rocks and hardpan surface that alternated with sand and gravel in the Al Hajarah, the northern reaches of the Arabian Desert.
His mind racing, weakened by fear, he struggled to examine his situation in the abstract, willing himself to use the practiced discipline of his scientific mind: define the elements of the problem, probe for a hypothesis, test the hypothesis …
When the sun came again, the temperatures would top thirty-eight Celsius, or one hundred degrees Fahrenheit to the Americans occupying one-third of his country. He could last a week without food, but how long without water? If he was truly off course, he could wander for days without finding the tiny Saudi outpost he had so carefully targeted on his map of the southern Iraqi desert.
He had abandoned his car hours ago in order to stay undetected. A car could be seen kicking up dust plumes for miles. A solitary nomad would be all but invisible.
The man tried to peer at his hands, which were shaking, but the cloth of the howli got in the way. He was hardly a nomad, of course, and he knew it. The desert in the mild temperatures of springtime had not scared him as it would an experienced man. One hundred kilometers or so on foot—some sixty miles—had seemed easy. He had never figured on a sandstorm, or on losing his only compass and his spare water bag in a terrifying fall down the side of a wadi—a dry streambed.
He knew he must focus his mind, and when he did so, the proposition seemed simple, although the words echoing in his head were Oxfordian English instead of his native Arabic, and that disturbed him, as if his survival depended on thinking in Arabic.
Either I’m within twenty degrees of my original course, he concluded, or I’m doomed.
He tugged at a corner of the howli, opening a slit for his left eye as he held his digital watch inches away and pressed the button activating a tiny light. The irony made him chuckle through the gnawing fear: a tiny vestige of western technology obediently serving a western-educated Arab now in real danger of dying because he’d never learned to be an Arab.
It read 1:43 A.M.
He got to his feet just as suddenly and positioned the wind on his right sleeve as a physical compass, resuming the same steady pace as before, a renewed confidence pushing him on. There was no legitimate cause for panic. He could not possibly be off course more than twenty degrees, and there was an east-west pipeline south of the border he couldn’t miss.
The monotonous impacts of his footfalls in the blackness, accompanied by the numbing shriek of the wind, was a form of sensory deprivation, blocking out all other inputs, leaving his conscious mind free to wander, painting vivid mental images before him. The bedroom of his house in the southern suburbs of Baghdad loomed before him, with Saliah, his wife, and their two sons and one daughter huddled together there. The pain of missing them was jus
t below the surface, but he suppressed it.
There had been no electricity for weeks in Baghdad, and less water, and he had been able to visit them just once since the American attack began. His initial terror at reports that the capital was under siege had given way rapidly to a sort of confidence. Whatever horrors the Americans had planned for Hussein, wiping out the Iraqi population was not among them. By the time he had disobeyed orders and struggled over shattered concrete and clogged highways from Ar Rutbah to be with them for a while, Saliah and the children had settled down to a routine of basic existence. He was proud of them. He knew they could survive.
But now there was a terrible lie out there somewhere in the night that Saliah would eventually confront, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Your husband of eighteen years, she would be told, was found burned to a cinder beside the road from Ar Rutbah to Baghdad. Must have been American bombs, they would say. He probably died instantly.
The man stumbled suddenly, righted himself, checked his direction, and trudged on.
Day came in the form of a yellowish glow, stronger to his left, and still his feet obediently plopped one in front of the other, sometimes treading over a dune of shifting sand that slid and slithered under his weight, sometimes crashing onto a desert floor as hard as concrete. Thirst was an enemy struggling to consume him. The hours trudged by with depressing monotony as the light brightened and faded to darkness once again.
By 9:00 P.M. the storm had calmed. The clouds suddenly cleared overhead and stars popped out above him, changing his mood to brief elation. He pulled open his howli and scanned the sky, finding the Big Dipper, Orion, and the North Star, and fixing the compass rose around him in his mind.
Look at the horizon, you idiot! he roared at himself. There should be lights, fires, or something ahead. He was surely on Saudi soil by now.
But pitch darkness was all that beckoned, and the wind was rising once again.
By 2:00 A.M. the storm was in full force again, and it was obvious to the man that he was lost in every way.
I will meet death walking at full speed, he decided. His pace accelerated to almost a trot as he plunged with renewed purpose into the throat of the sand-laden winds.
He could tell that he was dangerously dehydrated now, his emotions floating on the calm seas of a detached mental state, his conscious thoughts occupied with speed and course as if those were the only reality. He counted his steps diligently, keeping his pace steady and rapid, moving at almost exactly 1.5 meters per second at the moment his weary body crashed headlong into the metal side of a parked truck.
The Saudi sergeant sat bolt upright, cobwebs clearing from his head instantly, aware that something had disturbed the steady moan of the wind and the intermittent clanking of the rusted metal door to the broken-down masonry outpost. His two companions, a lieutenant and a private, still slept. They were from the city. He was a Bedouin who preferred a tent to a cold stone floor.
He heard nothing more, but that noise had not come from his dream. The sergeant got to his feet and slipped on his sandals, picked up his American M-16 rifle, and padded outside cautiously, taking the sandblast full in his face before stumbling across the collapsed body of a man on the other side of the truck.
Shakir Abbas regained consciousness in a chair, the foul breath of a Saudi soldier assaulting his face, his explanation disbelieved. He heard the Arabic word for spy before being handcuffed and driven into Badanah, where he was given a small cup of water and thrown in a filthy cell that reeked of human waste.
It seemed endless hours before a higher-ranking Saudi appeared, only slightly more interested in his explanation. This one, too, disappeared, and his frustration grew enormous as he felt the time crawl by, knowing what had to be happening nearly three hundred miles to the north. That schedule would not wait, and neither could he.
When at last yet another Saudi officer came down the hall, Abbas summoned his strength, stuck his face through the bars, and, with as much rage as he could muster, yelled at the man.
“You idiot! I have information vital to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia about Saddam Hussein! If you don’t take me to military intelligence immediately, your life will soon be worth nothing!”
The Saudi gave him the sort of impassive look one gives to a screaming hyena in a zoo.
“At least tell them I’m here!” He tried again.
The Saudi moved closer, his eyes impassive.
“Tell whom?” He asked in Arabic.
The man felt his shirt. The pen was still there, and perhaps he still had paper.
Yes, there it was. He pulled it out and knelt down suddenly, using his knee as a writing board, his hand hastily sketching the design of a particular molecule along with its chemical description.
“Please come quickly,” he wrote in English. “I have important information.”
He signed it, stood, and pushed the scrap of paper at the Saudi, who had remained impassive but somehow clinically interested in the prisoner’s odd behavior. The Saudi took it, looked at it, and raised a bushy eyebrow in question.
“The Americans will understand this,” Abbas said in Arabic. “Please, give it to them quickly and tell them where I am.” He realized his voice was little more than a pleading whine that echoed slightly against the unyielding stone walls. The expression of the Saudi reflected those rock walls as he turned away, and Abbas watched with sinking heart as the Saudi folded the paper and made a movement as though tossing it into a distant corner as he left.
Abbas slept then, the sleep of one who can do no more. How long the confusing dreams and nightmares played, he wasn’t sure—the guards at the outpost had taken his wristwatch. It was dark outside, however, when the sounds of a helicopter vibrated through the building, followed by the clank of a heavy steel door and hurried footsteps echoing through the stone corridors. He was too weak to leap to his feet, but his eyes opened in time to see the guard swing his cell door wide, admitting an American army officer and a civilian.
“Are you …” The officer looked down at a piece of paper. “Dr. Shakir Abbas?” He looked up again, his steel blue eyes locking onto Abbas’s.
“Yes. Yes, I am.” He got to his feet, hopeful.
“Did you draw this, Doctor?”
The American officer held out the scrap of paper with the molecular notation, but as soon as Abbas nodded, the officer yanked it away.
“Yes!” Abbas confirmed. “I wrote that. I knew someone would—”
“Reproduce it for us. Now.” The officer, a lieutenant colonel, was holding out a notebook and pen, and Abbas understood instantly. He knelt down as before and quickly reproduced the same biochemical molecule with its full chemical description, a notation only someone schooled in the most sophisticated forms of biochemistry would understand.
The man in civilian clothes took the notebook and studied it carefully for no more than half a minute before looking up with a thin smile.
“Dr. Abbas?” His hand was outstretched in a halfhearted handshake, and Abbas took it gratefully in both of his.
“Please come with us.”
1
Keflavik Air Base, Iceland
Wednesday, March 6, 1991—3:30 P.M. (1530 GMT)
Jan Bae of the International Red Cross returned the small, conservative wave of the captain of the Balair DC-10 as the pilot closed his cockpit window. The portable stairs had already been moved back from the essentially empty passenger plane, and the American Air Force ground crewmen were moving into position for engine start. Bae smoothed his thinning blond hair with his right hand and glanced at the leaden skies overhead, and then at his watch. Thirty minutes early. That was typical of charter operations. He wished they could have talked Swissair into using one of their 747s directly from Geneva, but the Swiss were so zealous about guarding their neutrality that involving the nation’s flag carrier was impossible. Even with the sudden, mystifying change of heart of the American government, the Swiss perceived a postwar International Red Cross h
umanitarian rescue mission to Baghdad as somehow potentially partisan. So they had offered their charter subsidiary’s aircraft instead—Balair—at a substantial price, of course, and then only if they departed from some country other than Switzerland.
The delegation had chosen to meet in Iceland for reasons that were known only to the Americans. From here, the flight to Baghdad would take just under eight hours.
Bae turned and walked briskly toward the terminal, enjoying the cool air of what had turned out to be a balmy day with temperatures in the forties. At home in Oslo a snowstorm was in progress. There he would need a heavy coat.
He reached the entrance to the old wooden breezeway and walked to the main military terminal waiting area, long habit forcing him automatically to the large glass windows, where the quiet approach of another man completely escaped his notice.
A familiar voice suddenly reached his ear.
“You couldn’t slow them down, then?” the man asked quietly.
Bae turned suddenly and recognized Colonel Richard Kerr of the American Defense Intelligence Agency, who had set up the charter and flown in with the DC-10 crew the night before. Bae smiled at the big pilot, whom he knew from his days in Washington as a wicked chess partner and an intimidating golfer. At well over six feet, Kerr towered over him; he was like a grownup kid who still loved to play with airplanes, but he had a first-class mind. Just the sort to be an effective air attaché—if he’d ever accept such a position.
“No, Richard, I tried, but the captain wanted to leave as soon as possible, and you never gave me a sufficient reason to protest.”
“I couldn’t. It wasn’t anything sneaky, though.”
“Of course it wasn’t.” Bae tried hard to look like a disapproving schoolmaster faced with a ridiculous lie. The effort was not in vain. Colonel Kerr was suddenly very uncomfortable and searching for a response.
Bae, with practiced timing, beat him to it, raising a hand as if to dismiss the need for a defense, a sly smile on his face. “Well, you will, no doubt, report this flight’s early departure to some command post around here with that portable radio you’re hiding in your right hand”—Bae noted with satisfaction the look of mild alarm that now flashed across Kerr’s face—“and I suppose they’ll simply have to adjust their thoroughly innocent plans.” Bae turned further toward the Air Force colonel, looking him in the eye. Kerr was always great fun to toy with. “You wouldn’t want to tell me what’s going on, would you?”
Scorpion Strike Page 1
