Scorpion Strike

by Nance, John J. ;

  Doug looked over at him with growing alarm, recognizing the set-jaw look Will had always worn when he was completely determined about something. And he was determined to leave! But it would be getting hot soon, and they were in the middle of a desert with no water or food. Leaving the accident site was exactly what they shouldn’t do.

  “I think we need to hunker down and stay put, Will. Our side will be back, perhaps in helicopters. We can make a lean-to out of some of this scrap and—”

  “Doug …”

  “What?”

  “Look at those tracks, man. Tell me the Iraqis didn’t go south.”

  “I don’t know whether they did or not.”

  “Exactly. Neither do I. But if they did, and they come back, which they will, they’ll find us. We need to scrounge whatever we can for survival use and get out of here. I’m not going to end up in an interrogation cell in Baghdad!”

  Doug looked at him with disbelief. Is he really going to insist on walking across this goddamned desert? Will read his expression, and fairly exploded.

  “Okay, what?”

  Doug raised both hands, palms up. “Hey, you’re in charge of this circus, okay? But I’m still gonna be the good copilot, Will. What the hell are we gonna do for water? You thought about that?”

  “We’ll search the wreckage.”

  “Fine. Right. And if there isn’t any, what then?”

  Will looked back at the wreckage rather than answering. He had come close, so damn close, to ending up captured and in the Hanoi Hilton once. It had scared him for years. Given him nightmares. He knew he was overreacting and scared and probably panicked, but the thought of chancing capture left his heart racing, which was something he simply couldn’t tell Doug. Especially not with Sergeant Murray along.

  “Okay.” He turned to Doug. “We’ll look around. If we can find enough stuff to sustain us, water included, we’ll go. If not, we’ll stay, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, Sandra?”

  Will turned toward her suddenly, finding her eyes on the horizon. She pulled at a cascade of hair blowing in her face and focused on him vacantly.

  “What?”

  “We’ll go only if we can find fluids to drink. Okay?”

  She nodded, and he noticed her shoulders were shaking slightly.

  “You cold?”

  That was a good excuse, and she took it gratefully. “Yes. It’s chilly. You suppose my bag’s down there? My jacket was in it.”

  They fanned out with a coordinated purpose, searching rapidly and efficiently, tracking the path of disintegration of their airplane like a team of accident investigators, trying to figure out where various things had been hurled by the explosion.

  The items that had not been blown away from the wreckage by the force of the explosion were burned or melted. The water jug at the head of the cargo compartment was crushed flat, partly melted, and empty. But two cases of Saudi Cokes had been blown out to the side, most of them surviving intact as they dug individual holes in the sand. The ends of each can showed up as small silver disks, but, one by one, the three crew members collected enough to last at least a few days.

  Food was another story. Six of the heavy-plastic-packaged MREs—meals ready to eat—were found. The rest had vanished.

  Their crew’s bags had been with the water jug, and were mostly shredded and burned. But somehow a few leather flight jackets had survived, and both Sandra and Doug outfitted themselves against what they knew would be chilly nights. Bit by bit the rest of the necessary items were stacked to one side as all three of them kept a cautious eye on the horizon.

  There were small but important victories. The first-aid kit near the ramp had survived, as had one of the life rafts in the tail section, and for a second Doug was ecstatic over the possibility of finding a survival radio in one of the rafts and simply calling in the rescue choppers. The accessory pack to the raft had been split open, however, and the radio was gone. He took the lightweight canopy for a tent and the remainder of the survival kit, and left the rest.

  Will was in the middle of the wreckage, fashioning a sled from a piece of plastic sidewall, when Bill Backus regained consciousness.

  “Will!” Doug’s summons from a hundred yards away was too sharp to ignore. Will came at a trot, fearing the worst, then flooded with relief, finding the injured man who had been under his command for four years sitting up at last, held gently by Doug and Sandra.

  “Bill! Thank God. How do you feel?” Will knelt and put his hand on Bill’s shoulder. “We thought we’d lost you, old boy.”

  Bill smiled a shallow, painful shadow of a smile, and winced at the effort. His voice was almost inaudible. “I’m … um … not feeling so good, Colonel.”

  “I filled him in on what’s happened, what we’re planning, and why,” Doug reported. “His chest hurts, and it sounds like broken ribs.”

  “You rest, Bill. We’re gonna fix up a sled and let you ride out of here in style.”

  They stood up, and Sandra stood where Bill couldn’t see her and motioned Will over.

  “I’m not a nurse, but I’ve had a lot of first aid, sir. I remember pulling him off a rock when we were struggling to get out. I think he fell on it, full force.”

  “You think there’s more than broken ribs?”

  She nodded gravely. “Collapsed lung, internal injuries, possibly internal bleeding. I’m not sure.”

  “Well …” Will began.

  “What I am sure about is this. If we don’t get him to a hospital soon, we could lose him.”

  Will looked off into the distance at the sunrise, estimates and probabilities all telling him discouraging things. A sigh told Sandra he understood the urgency.

  “Let’s get moving.” There was nothing else he could say.

  By 8:00 A.M. they were ready, Bill strapped to the makeshift sled amid the stack of supplies gleaned from the wreckage, the whole affair attached to a crude harness for the three of them.

  “There’s nothing but desert to the south,” Will said. “We’ll head southeast. Ten miles or so, then we hole up until night. Okay?”

  “Ten miles?” Sandra looked shocked.

  “We can probably pull this thing at three miles per hour, and I figure we can walk for three hours before it gets too hot, and that’s nine miles.”

  “How far to friendly forces, sir?” Sandra asked.

  Doug and Will exchanged glances. Sandra hadn’t heard their previous discussion, but there was no reason to deceive her.

  “One hundred fifty miles or more to the Coalition lines, but …” As he feared, she looked crestfallen, defeated, and he hurried to continue. “But the border’s only fifty or sixty miles south, and we’re likely to find a road.”

  Sandra’s face betrayed despair as she worked to keep her voice steady. “That’s … fifteen to twenty-five hours of walking, provided we can keep up a good pace and nothing’s in the way. Bill’s …” Her voice trailed off. “There are minefields out here, too, you know.”

  “What do you suggest, Sandra?” Will felt suddenly very tired and very unsure of himself. He wasn’t angry with her, but he wished they could just start walking and to hell with the consequences. His back hurt, his head was still pounding, and there was nothing to be gained by arguing.

  “I …” Sandra began, reading Will’s eyes as she tried to hold the enormity of what they’d been through, and where they were, at bay.

  “You’re right,” she said at last. “Let’s go.”

  As Sandra made some final adjustments, Doug put his hand on Will’s shoulder and studied his face.

  “If our choppers come, this will have been a big mistake. You know that, right? You’ve considered that?”

  Will nodded.

  “All right,” Doug said. There was neither rancor nor resignation in his voice, and for that Will was glad.

  The three of them adjusted their shoulders to the jury-rigged harness with Sandra in the middle, and stepped off together in a loose
cadence, the makeshift sled with Backus and the supplies offering surprisingly little resistance through the sand.

  10

  Central Iraq, Ar Rutbah-to-Baghdad highway

  Thursday, March 7, 1991—8:30 A.M. (0530 GMT)

  Shakir Abbas jerked the steering wheel back to the left to regain the highway, cursing himself for falling asleep again, his heart pounding suddenly and his system awash in adrenaline. He had drifted off the ravaged road twice before, fatigue transforming the endless image of featureless concrete on featureless desert from mesmerizing monotony into the undulating, dreamlike shapes that had whispered to his subconscious from somewhere to the right. They were specters singing siren songs, evaporating each time the wheels of the speeding van rolled off the edge of the washboard highway surface and onto the far more serious washboard of the hard-packed shoulder, the sudden, seismic vibrations all but loosening his teeth and bringing him back to consciousness.

  Wake up! Wake up! This is ridiculous!

  He was appreciative of the clouds. If the sun had been out, it would have been worse. He knew that well from experience. All his life, whenever he was tired, sunshine had been as irresistible to him as a warm, fuzzy blanket to an exhausted baby—an instant narcotic.

  But the gray, endless overcast had held the sun at bay as he raced eastward, pressing the gas pedal as hard as he dared while hoping that somehow he could catch up with Mahmed Ansallah.

  Hopeless. Why even try? If I can’t find him, then I collect Saliah and the children and try to get back to Saudi.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it filled the apprehension with some form and substance, directing the intensity of purpose that had propelled him through the dawn.

  Ansallah was a fool. A sullen, distant young idealist with an aptitude for biochemistry, but the most miserable of researchers because he was not patient. Shakir did not dislike him. He simply didn’t trust his lack of discipline. Time after time his assigned experiments had had to be rerun because Ansallah had let frustration lead him to try a shortcut, compromising his results. He couldn’t really know what he was carrying in that van somewhere ahead. In clinical terms he did, of course. But there was something human missing in anyone who could confront the horrible threat to life contained in that canister and still contemplate handing it over to the military—any military.

  Thank God the Americans did not ask me to preserve a sample for them.

  He would have refused, of course. At least he was sure of that. The horrible culture he had created must be completely, utterly destroyed. Every last viral molecule of it.

  Shakir’s thoughts drifted back to the frantic dash away from the commando team. He had heard the departing C-141 transport as he raced away from the lab, but had made no effort to watch the takeoff. They should be safe now, both the big colonel who disliked him and the more friendly one who had seemed genuinely interested in, as well as frightened by, what Shakir had to say.

  Now, of course, they would be cursing him, those Americans. They would assume that he had been some sort of double agent all along, though what such a “mission” would have accomplished for Saddam would be a puzzlement. Yet the fact that he had escaped would damn him in their estimation, and it hurt inside to wonder if there was anyone left who respected him—including he himself.

  But his self-respect was not at stake. Shakir brought himself up short, sitting up a little straighter in the dusty seat of the van and setting his jaw.

  Maybe I have acted late, but at least I have acted.

  Bombed-out and burned-out hulks of vehicles and tank trucks had been flashing by at intervals since he had joined the main highway, which ran from Jordan to Baghdad. The Coalition had made a mess of it, but the traffic was still moving, and he’d had to pass several slow-moving, Baghdad-bound trucks coming in from the Jordanian border, filled, he was sure, with the very things the Jordanians were not supposed to be sending because of the embargo.

  He had also passed a line of mobile Scud missile launchers headed west, and wondered what other acts of desperation Saddam was planning in his fog of criminal madness.

  Shakir glanced at the speedometer, which now registered 110 kilometers per hour. The road was finally clear ahead again, and he saw nothing but flat desert on both sides with occasional lost hulks of various broken-down and abandoned vehicles alongside.

  What was that?

  Hitting the brakes at 110 kph was not the best of plans, but as the van lurched and protested, Shakir’s right foot held the pedal hard, his hands steering the weaving vehicle as it slowed rapidly, the image that his eyes had seen but his mind had been slow to process having suddenly coalesced.

  A half-mile behind, off to the right of the road and missing a wheel, had been a white Toyota van, with two men sitting to one side!

  There could not be this much luck in the world, he thought as he wheeled around and sped back. It could turn out to be someone else. There were, after all, at least hundreds of white vans in his country.

  He crossed the road once again and pulled up behind the van. It was obvious it had hit one of the ubiquitous potholes in the highway and shattered the right wheel assembly, and from the deep gouge marks in the desert, whoever had been driving had been faced with a genuine struggle to keep from turning over.

  The two men did not get up as he approached, but the elation Shakir had felt began to turn to a knot of apprehension as he shifted to park and studied the face of the figure nearest to him.

  It was indeed Mahmed Ansallah, the man who had probably already concluded that Shakir Abbas was a traitor.

  Ansallah watched with emotionless curiosity as the stranger parked the familiar green van. Somehow it made sense that someone from the lab would come to rescue them. The fact that no one back there could have known about the broken wheel was immaterial and lost immediately in the shock of recognition as the face of his superior suddenly approached.

  “Shakir? Is that you?” Ansallah scrambled to his feet, his eyes wide, the military guardsman doing the same beside him out of caution. “We thought you were dead!”

  Shakir greeted Ansallah in a traditional embrace, then nodded to the guardsman, a Neanderthal he knew well from the lab. The man had the mind of a doorknob, which made him all the more lethal. Shakir was well aware of the pistol the soldier had pulled out, and was relieved when he saw the man stuff it back into his holster as they sat down cross-legged in the sand next to the crippled van. The traffic on the highway was sparse, the occasional passage of a truck or car making the setting even more desolate.

  “We have no tea to offer, nor much of anything else,” Ansallah began. “We were going to rest awhile, then try to flag down a military vehicle, but now that you’re here …” He let his voice trail off, waiting for confirmation from Shakir that they were rescued. Shakir merely nodded, acutely aware of Ansallah’s cold, suspicious stare.

  “Mahmed, I have been on a very important, very secret mission for the government.”

  Ansallah looked at him without changing expression.

  Shakir averted his eyes and continued.

  “I know you and the others thought I had been killed. That was a purposeful deception.”

  “Where were you?” Ansallah asked with his typical, non-Arabic impatience.

  “The nature of my mission and the locations involved are still state secrets I am not allowed to discuss. I would naturally like to, but …”

  “Shakir, forgive my directness, but I am very familiar with how you felt about our last order to deliver the virus. You say we must never do this, then you disappear, and a burned body is found that is supposed to be you.”

  “And,” Shakir broke in, throwing caution to the winds, “you assumed I had defected to the enemy.”

  Ansallah began to protest, but Shakir held up a hand. “Sandar told me this. He told me you were not convinced I was dead. Well, you were right, I was not dead. But you were wrong in thinking I was a traitor to Saddam. This is still my country.”

  �
��Why the trickery, then? Whom were you trying to fool? Our government thought you were dead, and Baghdad was frantic. Only you knew the formula. We searched your notes night and day and could find no clue, and you had refused to tell us.”

  “I have been your director for how long, Mahmed?”

  Too long, old man, Ansallah thought, keeping his face impassive. Shakir was only twenty years older, but that seemed an eternity. He took a deep breath and answered Shakir at last.

  “Two years.”

  “Two years. That’s right. As director, have I told you about everything that goes on in our lab?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right, because while you have family political friends, I report to people even higher up. It was those people who determined that there was a spy in our midst. We even suspected you at one time.”

  As Shakir expected, Ansallah’s eyes grew wide with shock. The consequences of being identified as a spy in Iraq were beyond the unspeakable.

  Shakir raised a hand hurriedly to calm him down. “I quickly put a stop to that. My disappearance, though, was to see who did what when the lion was away. You acted properly. Others didn’t.”

  The balance had shifted in a heartbeat, and a startled, frightened Ansallah was suddenly eager to please. Shakir ached to ask where the canisters were stashed, and to grab them and run. Fully half of his mental capacity was devoted to forcing himself to stay still and calm—to play out the scene—as he slowly coaxed Ansallah to talk about his colleagues in the lab and listened as a panoply of imagined intrigue and suspicions tumbled out of the young scientist’s brain, enough to constitute a verbal dossier on just about everyone. Ansallah had indeed imagined himself as Saddam’s personal representative in the facility. No wonder he had been such a poor scientist. He seemed to have spent all his time making notes on what everyone else was doing or saying.

  Shakir had noticed the guard yawning earlier. Now he had slithered over beside the crippled white van and propped his back against it, and had gone to sleep, his snoring becoming increasingly audible.

  “Ansallah,” Shakir said at last, “who gave you the orders to deliver the two canisters you have before the main shipment?”