The silence was overwhelming. The sounds of turbines and pumps winding down to complete stillness let the now-distant roar of the strike team’s engines rumble through the cockpit momentarily. And then they, too, were gone. After more than six hours of nonstop noise, it was disorienting to find that the squeak of a seat cushion and the scraping of a metal log book on the darkened flight engineer’s table were the loudest sounds in their ears.
The presence of someone new on the flight deck startled Will, an offered hand almost invisible in the gloom, until the owner turned on a dim red pencil flashlight and shone it on his face momentarily before turning the beam toward the floor.
“Welcome to Iraq, Colonel!”
The man pulled off his black watch cap, revealing a perfectly bald head, and Doug concluded he looked like Mr. Clean of household detergent fame.
“Sergeant Dale Johnson, combat support, sir. Glad you could join us.”
Will felt himself relaxing. “Everything quiet and secure out there, Sergeant?”
Johnson grinned a toothy grin under a Gordon Liddy mustache. The effect made him look older than he was, which by Doug’s estimate fell in the range of the early thirties. His accent was definitely Oklahoma.
“A small truck rambled by from the direction of the target about an hour back, as we were setting up the markers. About a half-mile east of here there’s a side road from the south that intersects this east-west road you’ve landed on. Whoever was driving didn’t see a thing, and we didn’t mess with him. Since then, we’ve shut down the road about four miles farther to the east by blowing a hellacious trench through it with plastic explosives. Any fool could drive around it, but the trench will slow them down, and two of my men are guarding that approach. Behind us about ten miles to the west, by the way, the road ends in a sand dune, so we shouldn’t be bothered from that direction either.”
Will nodded, his face dimly visible in the illumination of Sergeant Johnson’s pencil light. There was a strained silence for a moment as the sergeant struggled to decide what the two pilots wanted to hear.
“Uh, I … can also tell you there’s no activity from the target, and my guys took out the four guards a half hour ago very quietly. They’re waiting near the bunker now for the attack team to arrive. I just talked to them by radio. The Delta guys should have no resistance outside.”
Doug, who had swiveled around in the copilot’s seat to face the center console with his arm resting on the glare shield, slapped the plastic surface and grinned.
“Speaking as a United Airlines pilot, I think I resent hauling around passengers I have to describe as ‘a bunch of Delta guys.’”
Johnson didn’t reply, and Will stepped in, arcing his left thumb in Doug’s direction. “Colonel Harris, here, is a reserve pilot, Sarge. He flies for United and makes an obscene amount of money.”
“When I’m not trolling for triple-A in enemy territory in a Goodyear blimp, that is,” Doug added.
“Oh,” was Johnson’s puzzled response.
Will began maneuvering out of the pilot’s seat, forcing Johnson to move back. Doug followed, swinging his leg over the jump seat.
“Is it safe to talk outside?” Will asked.
“Sure,” Johnson replied.
The three men emerged into the desert night, the smell of cool air mixing with the familiar aroma of partly burned kerosene as a gentle breeze blew through the tailpipes of the jet engines.
Will zipped his leather flight jacket against the chill and tried to find a comfortable way to stuff his hands in the awkward horizontal pockets. The overcast was solid, with just a hint of moonlight glowing through the cloud layers. On the ground it was almost pitch dark, the facial expressions of Doug and the sergeant all but invisible. He could hear the loadmaster moving tie-down chains across the floor of the aircraft, the sound of flight boots crunching on the hard-packed desert floor as Doug shifted his weight, and the metallic pinging of hot engine parts cooling down—but he could see nothing, and indiscriminate use of flashlights seemed rather unwise.
“You came in yesterday?” Doug asked Johnson.
“Yes sir. A HA-HO—high-altitude, high-open—drop. They pushed four of our four-wheel motorcycles out of a C-130, and we stepped out of the other 130 at eighteen thousand about sixty miles from here, opened, and glided the rest of the way in, homing on the beacon in one of the Humvees. Worked perfectly, except the opening shock hurts like hell when you jump that high. You’re goin’ awfully fast, y’know.”
“There’s something here I don’t understand,” Doug said. “If you could use C-130s yesterday, why are we using a C-141 tonight?”
“Sir, all I know is what they told us, which is that U.S. aircraft can fly anywhere we want to over Iraq, but the UN won’t let us land anything but rescue missions. A couple of C-130s descending and landing out here would be very visible, especially coming in from the south the way we did yesterday.”
“But 130s can fly in low.”
“Not that low, sir. You’re thinking of the Pave Low helicopters. They can fly in at fifty feet at night. They’ve got the equipment.”
“So why not use them?”
“Not big enough to carry all the vehicles they needed for this strike.”
Doug nodded and looked off in the distance, a gesture unseen by Sergeant Johnson.
Doug turned back to him. “What’d you guys do during the day?”
“We camouflaged the motorcycles, dug ourselves a large hole, put netting over that, and just kept out of sight. We set up our little satellite communications antenna and hunkered down. We had a good view of the entrance to that bunker, though. We watched ’em all day long from about two miles away and waited for the AWACS to confirm you were coming and when.”
“A HA-HO jump, huh? I’ve never understood, Sergeant Johnson,” Doug began, shaking his head in mock wonder, “why any sane person would jump out of a perfectly good airplane.”
“’Cause we don’t trust your landings, sir.” Johnson chuckled. He’d heard the same barb and answered it the same way a hundred times with pilots, but it was still fun. Like friends from different schools poking each other over a football rivalry.
Johnson was suddenly tired of the small talk. “Colonel, I’ll be monitoring my people and the Delta team. I’ll call you on the hand-held the second they start back.”
“Okay, Sergeant. We’ll be out here or in the cockpit. How long do you figure?” Will cocked his head for the answer, which was a few seconds in coming.
“Could be forty minutes. More likely an hour and ten—unless things go wrong. You best be ready to crank up within five minutes of my calling you.”
“Understood.” They had rehearsed that as well. Either Sandra or Bill Backus would remain at the engineer’s panel, ready to turn on the battery switch, fire off the hydraulic accumulators to start the APU, and then start the engines as the team rolled on board. They’d close the doors as they taxied toward takeoff. It was all set—but something was still worrying Doug. Something not worth mentioning. Just a vague uneasiness. He pushed it aside, picked up two soft drinks from the loadmaster’s stash in the galley, and followed Will out to the end of the left wing, which hung over the hard surface of the Iraqi western desert.
“Buy you a drink?”
“What’ve you got?” Will asked, fumbling with the proffered can in the dark and sitting down cross-legged by the edge of the road.
“It’s a naïve little cola without much breeding …”
Will laughed through the last line, “… but you knew I’d be amused at its presumption. Good Lord, Doug, in pilot training you used that old line at least once a day.”
“James Thurber never gets old.”
“Yeah. Doug, look, I’m … ah … sorry about snapping at you back there. If you hadn’t insisted we keep going south … well, I would have screwed it up, and you saved it.”
“That’s what your faithful copilot is for, Will. To kibitz, suggest, point to, niggle, and otherwise respectfully
second-guess the esteemed aircraft commander.”
“Who should have had the good graces to be more civil.”
“Well … I didn’t take any offense. We got here, didn’t we?”
Will was silent for a second. “This is unreal, Doug. I’m tired, so maybe that’s why, but does this all strike you as … weird?”
“What?”
“Sitting here, I mean, under the wing of a huge fifteen-million-dollar airplane by an Iraqi highway in the middle of the night, sipping a Diet Coke and listening to what I swear sounds like crickets, while that team of gung-ho commandos are off in the distance saving the world. You remember a certain evening at Tak Li in, what was it, ’72?”
The memory came back to Doug in living color. As a newly minted aircraft commander he had flown a load of cargo to Will’s F-4 base in Thailand for a twenty-four-hour crew rest. They hadn’t seen each other in six months, and when Doug burst into Will’s hootch, they decided on the spot to have a two-man party and catch up on each other’s war stories. Lugging sandwiches and a case of San Miguel beer out to the flight line, they sat most of the night beneath the wing of Doug’s C-141 getting generally smashed and taking bets on whether a passing cobra would be more likely to bite a transport pilot or a fighter jock.
“I spent that whole evening,” Doug began, “tryin’ to talk you into transferring to 141s at McChord.”
“Yeah. And I did, didn’t I?” Will countered.
“For a couple of years.” They fell silent again, Will’s sudden departure from McChord playing in both minds.
Doug turned to him finally. “What the hell happened, Will? Why did you leave McChord so suddenly? I mean, we get back from the honeymoon and you’re in Charleston! Wendy never understood, and I know I didn’t.”
“How is she?” Will asked at last.
“Who?”
“Wendy. Your wife, remember?”
There was no answer, and Will searched the dark form next to him for a clue as to why. Finally Doug spoke. “You didn’t know? You don’t know?”
“I don’t like games, Doug. Know what? Don’t tell me you two aren’t together anymore?”
“In … in a manner of speaking.”
He hadn’t written Will about it. He hadn’t called. He had just assumed the news had made its way to Charleston. After all, they really hadn’t been in touch for well over a decade.
Will heard a long sigh before Doug’s voice broke the silence.
“She’s dead, Will. Eight years now.” There was a small gasp in response. “I’ve remarried … have two little boys, ages two and five …”
“What? How … I mean, what … happened?”
“It was, ah, an accident, okay?”
“A car accident? What kind of accident?”
Images of her danced across Will’s mind instantly, transporting him back, the night suddenly filled with the primal beauty of her honey blond hair blowing in a Puget Sound sea breeze, and the memory of her emerald green eyes flirting with him on the Seattle waterfront one very special evening that had turned into day. Memories of sensations and emotions he had thought were dead washed over him like a warm wave: the sensual peace of her silky body in his arms at sunrise, the contentment of waking up in a rented cottage on an Oregon beach with sounds of the sea in his ears and the scent of Wendy in the air, and the way she purred like a kitten at his touch. How could she be gone? He had lost her to Doug, and somehow that had been bearable. But … dead?
“Just … just an accident,” Doug was saying slowly, unconvincingly.
Will’s head spun with conflicting emotions of disbelief mixed with memories of long-suppressed desires—memories he assumed Doug Harris had never known about.
Doug turned toward him and took a long, somewhat labored breath. “It’s … a pretty painful memory.”
Will’s response bubbled up from a reservoir of hurt he had sealed years before, forming into words that left Doug puzzled.
“Painful for me, too.”
7
Southeast of Ar Rutbah, western central Iraq
Thursday, March 7, 1991—3:05 A.M. (0005 GMT)
A beefy hand reached out without warning and grabbed his shoulder, causing Shakir Abbas to look up much too rapidly. The nauseating pitching and bouncing of the armored personnel carrier’s windowless interior had already tied his stomach in a knot. The sudden movement of his head was almost too much.
The master sergeant tapped his radio headset and pointed in the direction of the lead vehicle. “Doctor, the boss wants me to brief you on what’s about to happen, okay?”
The sergeant was obviously pumped up with anticipation and adrenaline, his face covered with dark charcoallike makeup, his impatience showing. He loomed unreal and menacing in the gyrating darkness of the vehicle’s windowless interior. The voice, however, was not unkind.
“I have already been briefed, Sergeant.”
“Yes sir. But we need to do it again.”
The major was in the first vehicle—the Bradley—and Shakir was in the second of the two M-113 APCs. According to the plan, they would come up behind the small blockhouse that protected the stairway down to the bunker complex. The Bradley—which was armed to the teeth with a stabilized 25-mm turret-mounted cannon and a couple of TOW antitank missiles—would be the first vehicle in to clear the way. The two lightly defended APCs would then follow, the strike team dashing from the rear ramps to establish a safe perimeter. At the radioed signal that all was ready, Shakir would be hustled out and rushed to the entrance, where the first squad would be waiting to descend the first flight of stairs. If they were pinned down by gunfire at any point, Shakir would be expected to describe the areas beyond in great detail, including side doors, escape routes, windows, and any other place someone with a gun could hide in waiting. As soon as each segment was “safe,” his “keepers” would pull him along to the next staging point. Every member of the team had memorized the detailed makeshift blueprint Shakir had drawn. They all knew that the living quarters were on the third level down, the lab itself on the fourth, the virus in the lab’s isolation chamber. The squad members carried a frightening array of killing machines, from standard assault M-16s to what resembled tiny Uzi machine pistols with silencers, as well as knives and several varieties of stun weapons—one of them a military version of the Taser. The group included demolition experts who would set the charges to pulverize the facility after Shakir had destroyed the batches of virus below.
They were an impressive and chilling bunch, these young men, Shakir thought. He was already scared to death of the situation, but knowing these men were trained to end his or any other life in a heartbeat made them something other than human, and all the more threatening. They smiled, they joked, they talked among themselves like any soldiers, but there was a keen edge about them that was unnerving.
Hours before, while in flight, Shakir had carefully approached the major who led them. “Many of the people in that laboratory,” he had begun, “I have worked with for years. They will not fight you.”
“If anyone down there so much as raises a gun,” the major had replied, “he’s dead. I’m not going to risk my men.”
“Yes, but please remember, most of these people would have left the country too, if they could have. Please don’t kill them automatically.”
The man had looked at Shakir long and hard.
“Is that what you think of us?” he had asked at last.
“I just—”
“Doctor, we don’t automatically kill anyone.”
“Okay, Doctor. Now.” Two of the team members guided Shakir out through the small oval door in the back of the vehicle and into the cool night air, which felt wonderful. They were inside the familiar entrance all at once, without resistance, and down the flight of steps to the first corridor, the sound of steel doors being opened, again without resistance, clanging below. The next level was the same, and a cold apprehension began to creep unspoken into his gut. Could they have already moved everyone a
nd abandoned the facility? The thought that the Pandora’s box he had filled might already be open and empty was chilling.
Another loud clang and the sound of angry, shouting voices, all in English, followed by another urgent cordon of American hands pushing him into the living quarters where, to his relief, a half-dozen familiar Iraqi faces waited. They stood wide-eyed and frightened, but alive—their hands on their heads.
Sandar Almeany was in the middle, his eyes flaring even wider when he saw Shakir, his jaw dropping open as he searched for the words in Arabic. “Shakir! We thought you were dead! You were captured, then?”
With an Arabic-speaking American corporal standing to his right, Shakir was acutely aware of the consequences of any misunderstood phrase. He ran the words over in his mind in an instant, inspecting them for trouble before finding his voice, his hands gripping his assistant’s shoulders.
“There is no time, my friend. I will explain later. All the prepared canisters are below, correct?”
Sandar’s eyes shot from Shakir to one of the soldiers and back again several times.
“Sandar! This is important! Is it all there? They have not … no one has moved the canisters yet, have they?”
“I …” Sandar’s head jerked toward the door, where more members of the research team were being marched in at gunpoint, their hands being quickly bound with plastic tie strips, their bodies rapidly searched for weapons.
Shakir gripped his shoulders and shook hard. “Sandar, answer me! Is everything still here?”
That same cold fear which had gripped him before for a split second grabbed him again as his research assistant’s head began to nod, then changed direction, moving slowly from side to side in a universal negative.
“Where? How many are gone? When?”
His voice recovered at last, the Arabic words tumbled out rapidly. All but two canisters were there.
“Where are they, Sandar?”
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