Scorpion Strike

by Nance, John J. ;

  One hundred yards left.

  Hold it … hold it … steady … NOW!

  Rounds snapped the A-10 into a left roll in a preplanned sequence, stopping the bank angle at fifty degrees just as the truck flashed by on his left, its roof fully visible. He brought in full military power then and pulled hard, holding the bank angle at the same fifty degrees to the left, the back-pressure causing the Warthog to climb smartly back to the left, reversing course, as he watched the truck for signs of hostility and keyed his radio.

  “Airboss, Sandy eight. I think the mark is there, but I’m not sure.”

  It had amazed Rounds how rapidly they had sent the recon photo of the truck’s roof mark to his squadron on a battlefield fax machine.

  “Wait! The truck’s stopping. I’m gonna circle here a second.”

  Aboard the AWACS, Margaret Ellis noted the position of Sandy 8 some thirty miles from the primary target, and did some quick math in her head. It was well within range of an army truck since the recon photo had been taken. Which meant it could be them!

  She felt her heart rate increase slightly with hope and excitement, her mind’s eye picturing what was going on down there a hundred fifty miles to the north, and wondering whether the captured flyers would be able to overpower their captors when the time came, or if the captors would try to resist. It could be a dangerous standoff.

  At the same moment, another A-10 flight checked in with a visual on their assigned targets also being tracked by Joint-Stars.

  “Airboss, Sandy twelve. I’ve got three trucks fitting the description eastbound in sector November Delta. Going down for a look.”

  The first A-10 driver’s voice—Sandy 8—cut through again.

  “Airboss, Sandy eight lead. We’ve got two figures emerging from the vehicle. They’re waving, and they don’t seem to be carrying guns.”

  “What’re they doing, Sandy eight?” Airboss asked.

  “Waving frantically at me. Bring on the Apaches and the Pave Lows. I’ll bet these are our people!”

  Airboss relayed the orders, the Army pilots acknowledging first as they shoved their cyclic sticks forward and accelerated their lethal gunships toward Sandy’s position a few miles distant. With preplanned precision they raced in from the rear at less than a hundred feet, stopping one on each side at a range of a half-mile, then turned to bring their gatling guns and missiles to bear on the truck as they moved in. The two gunships slowed to a hover then, their huge rotor blades letting them hang ominously in the sky as they approached from either side at forty-five-degree angles.

  “Airboss, Ops five. We confirm two figures out of the truck, hands in the air and waving. They appear to be male, both wearing uniforms of some sort—could be flight suits—and one of them is going around to the rear.”

  The pilot flying the lead Apache nodded to his wingman, who began swinging around to watch one of the men approach the rear of the truck.

  Whoever these people are, Ops 5’s pilot thought, there’s no fight in them. Thank God for that. The weakest part of the rescue plan had been figuring how to deal with armed Iraqis who didn’t want to let their hostages go once the Apaches had them cut off and surrounded.

  They probably know what we could do with one burst of these guns.

  His wingman was watching the rear now, his rotors kicking up a hurricane of wind and sand below, as the man at the front of the truck held his hands as far in the air as he could get them and began edging and motioning to the rear as well, toward his partner. Ops 5 lead followed, trying to see the faces clearly, watching with amazement as the rear flap was pulled back and another figure emerged, very obviously female.

  “Airboss, there’s a woman coming out of the rear of the truck …”

  Major Kost slapped his knee and turned to one of the PJs. “That’s one of our people! That’s the flight engineer.”

  Aboard the E-3 AWACS, Captain Ellis looked up at two of her fellow crew members and flashed a smile and a thumbs-up.

  In Riyadh, monitoring the radios, General Bullock quietly crossed his fingers and shot a quiet little prayer skyward.

  And the pilots of Jolly 13, who were now streaking north of the border, nodded at each other as they increased their airspeed.

  But the transmission from Ops 5 wasn’t over.

  “… and now several others are getting out … looks like three children … and one, no, two men, one of them elderly, all in civilian clothes.”

  There was silence for a few seconds as the Apache pilot let up on his microphone button, then pressed it again.

  “Airboss, these aren’t our folks. What we’ve got here is an Iraqi family riding around in an army truck.”

  “Shit!” Kent Kost banged his fist on the small portable command desk so hard it hurt, reflecting the disappointment which, from the AWACS down to each member of the rescue group, was palpable.

  But there was still hope.

  Kost pressed his mike button. “Okay, people, back to work. Sandy eight and Ops five, wave ’em good-bye and get on with it.”

  Sandy 8 and his wingman resumed their search of the road as the two Apaches pulled away from the puzzled Iraqis, leaving them unharmed.

  More Joint-Stars targets were tracked and passed, and one by one checked out by the A-10s. None of them matched the description.

  Jolly 5, carrying Major Kost, continued to orbit about thirty miles north of the building the missing flight crew had occupied as each participant in the search checked in, the feeling growing in all of their minds that they had been too late. If the captors of the missing airmen had headed north at top speed, they could have been over a hundred miles away before the rescue attempt had even begun. That was probably it. As the minutes wore on, the gloomy assumption seemed all but conclusive.

  At least some of the crew were alive. But they were headed to Baghdad now, for certain.

  At the very moment when Sandy 8 was corralling the Iraqi truck, Will, Doug, and Sandra were scrambling to the top of a small embankment ten miles away and some four miles west of the main road, their “borrowed” Iraqi truck safely parked in the shadows of the twenty-foot-high south wall of a wadi they had crossed on foot in the moonlight less than twelve hours before.

  “It was over there. An A-10, I’m almost certain.” Sandra was shielding her eyes with her hand as she stood at the top and peered to the northeast, Will and Doug brushing off the sand and joining her as fast as they could.

  “Which way was he … There!” Doug pointed farther to the north as the distinctive shape of a Warthog flashed into view perhaps ten miles distant, heading east.

  The sound of a helicopter reached their ears within a minute, a sound coming not from the northeast, but from the direction of the road to the east. There was a small rise blocking their view at first, but the chopper suddenly emerged, moving northbound and following the road at a very low altitude—coming from the direction of the building they had just left.

  “Oh Jesus, no!” Will’s voice was anguished.

  “What? What is it?” Doug asked in alarm, noting the look of distress on Will’s face as his eyes followed the helicopter north, watching it recede to little more than a small dot hanging against the northeastern sky.

  “That,” Will began quietly, “was a Pave Low. An MH-53J Special Operations chopper. The type you’d send into Iraq if you wanted to mount a rescue operation for downed flyers”—he hesitated, gritting his teeth, sighing loudly—“seen in a goddamn reconnaissance photograph.”

  Sandra was studying both of them. “Are you saying they did see us? That F-4 spotted us? And this is a rescue operation to pick us up?”

  Will nodded with resignation as Doug pointed north suddenly.

  “He’s orbiting! The chopper’s orbiting! Let’s get that truck going and get the hell up there.”

  The three of them broke at once, half-sliding, half-running down the embankment to the truck, Will firing off the engine, which didn’t hesitate. He put it in gear and let out the clutch gently,
mindful of the sandy areas beneath their wheels and ahead. Slowly, gingerly, they accelerated, bouncing down the length of the wadi until they regained the road, their view of the orbiting helicopter blocked by the north embankment, each of them praying that it would still be there when they reached the highway.

  It was!

  Will turned northbound again, accelerating as fast as he could.

  “How far ahead do you think he is?” Doug asked.

  “Hard to say,” Will replied. “Ten, twelve miles when he’s on this end of his holding pattern.”

  “Turn on your lights. If we can get close enough, Sandra …”

  She was sitting between them, leaving Bill in the back for the moment. She understood Doug’s idea in an instant.

  “Not many Iraqis have long blond hair, right?”

  “Right,” Doug agreed, as she scrambled past him, sitting by the window, ready to lean out and wave.

  They were closing with agonizing slowness. There was no question now that it was an MH-53 U.S. Air Force helicopter, but there was also no question that something had changed ahead. Instead of continuing his left orbit, the chopper suddenly started moving north, matching the speed of their truck, becoming a stationary dot in the windscreen. They were close enough to see it, yet without a radio, they might as well have been a world away.

  With fingers crossed and hopes high, they plowed ahead for interminable minutes, gratified that the MH-53’s speed was no greater than theirs, but praying he would turn back on his course. They blinked their lights and Sandra leaned far out the window and waved frantically. Doug looked for the right angle to use the rearview mirror he’d already ripped from its mountings to reflect the sun in the pilot’s eyes, a tried-and-true survival technique. Anything to attract their attention!

  Ten minutes passed, but the ratios of the chase remained the same.

  Then, without warning, the MH-53 stopped in a hover and began to grow larger in the windscreen. Will’s foot was already to the floor, the army truck now bouncing along at nearly seventy miles per hour.

  “Which way is he facing? Jeez!” Will’s eyes were glued on the helicopter. If he was facing south, the pilots would surely see the oncoming truck, especially if a truck was what they were searching for.

  But if he was facing north …

  “Blink the lights! Quick!” Doug barked, as Sandra took it as a cue and leaned out the window, waving frantically, even though she knew deep down they were still too far away.

  “He’s turning! Come on, baby! Turn that mother around!” Doug yelled. But the turn stopped with the MH-53 facing east, not south. And as they watched with sinking hearts, it began to move in that direction.

  “An A-10, to the right!” Sandra’s voice rang out suddenly as a Warthog flashed across the horizon to their right and perhaps ten miles away, then banking back to the northeast. As they watched in disbelief, the MH-53 altered course to the northeast, in the same direction, and began moving away even faster.

  The MH-53 had become nothing but an indistinguishable speck on the eastern horizon before Will realized he still had the accelerator to the floor, as if there were a purpose for the speed any longer.

  They slowed then and stopped, letting the engine idle as they sat in stunned silence, willing their rescuers to come back.

  But the horizon was now empty.

  “That’s it, people. Keep your eyes open coming back in.” Airboss—Major Kost—spoke the orders with resignation as eyes turned away from the Joint-Stars scope at the moment its radar and computers noticed that the northbound movement of a new target in the south end of the search area had ceased. As it was programmed to do, it dropped the newly stationary target from the display. It did so at the same moment Margaret Ellis leaned over for a final check.

  Five minutes elapsed with nothing but the sound of the truck engine in their ears before anyone spoke. And then it was Sandra:

  “We’d better get this truck back under cover. That dry gulch worked before. I’d recommend we turn around. Or find another one.”

  No response. Will looked thunderstruck, and Doug seemed on the verge of tears. So close, they were all thinking, so damn close!

  Again, Doug thought, we’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

  Will drew a ragged breath at last and nodded, biting his lower lip before glancing at Doug and Sandra and gesturing behind them.

  Doug merely nodded in reply as Will let out the clutch his foot had been jamming down since the chopper disappeared. His leg muscles were protesting, his foot bouncing on the pedal, but he didn’t notice. They would have to revert to Plan A now, and wait until nightfall.

  14

  Samarra, Iraq, eighty miles north of Baghdad

  Friday, March 8, 1991—12:05 P.M. (0905 GMT)

  Shakir Abbas awoke with the sudden rumble of a car engine shattering an unplanned nap, the incongruity of bright sunlight disorienting him. The sunlight was streaming through the curtained window of an ornate parlor.

  Where am I? Oh, yes.

  The memory returned, and he came out of the rocking chair with a fluid motion to kneel at the window, relieved to see the owner of the house heading up the walkway toward a small stone gate, a package in his hands.

  Muayad Damerji’s name had entered Shakir’s mind the moment he had decided to go after the missing canister. Longtime friend, roommate at Oxford, Muayad was more of a brother than a friend, and one of the few people on the planet he could trust with his life.

  Which is exactly what I’m doing, Shakir reminded himself. As well as endangering Muayad and his family.

  The door closed behind Dr. Muayad Damerji as he spotted Shakir standing by the window. He pointed to the package and smiled, a toothy smile framed by a scraggly mustache and Vandyke beard.

  “I startled you, Shakir?” Muayad asked.

  “I had fallen asleep,” he said, rubbing his eyes like a small child. “Ghadah was gracious to let me do so.”

  Muayad smiled at the mention of his wife. She did not know the reason for her husband’s sudden midnight mission to Baghdad, and had been trying to wheedle it out of Shakir all morning, giving up only when she noticed him snoring softly.

  “I think I have everything.” He shook the package for emphasis. “And no, I did not have trouble.”

  “I should not have let you—”

  Muayad raised his index finger to his lips and shook his head.

  “You came where you should have come, Shakir. You need some money, some gas, some food, but you can do nothing without information. That I have for you now.”

  Shakir looked around the warm, richly paneled room, making certain Ghadah was out of earshot before speaking. He had told Muayad too much—everything, in fact—but neither of them wanted the circle to widen.

  They sat in Muayad’s plush wing chairs centered on a magnificent Tabriz rug from northern Iran, facing each other across a small teak coffee table as Muayad patted the package in his lap.

  “When you told me all this last night, Shakir, I did not tell you something. I did not say how much I admire you for what you have tried to do.”

  Shakir shook his head in amazement. “Admire me? I’m a traitor, a murderer.”

  “And Saddam is not? You have done nothing compared with his crimes. He has raped our country, and you and I, all the people I worked with in the nuclear program, all the people you worked with, none of us wanted to admit it. Look what he has done!” Muayad’s right arm swept backwards toward the front of his house, his eyebrows flaring. “He built a new Iraq. We grew to like it. Now he has destroyed it! I had not”—his voice broke for a second, then recovered—“I had not seen all the rubble.”

  He leaned forward suddenly. “Oh, Shakir! Baghdad is in ruins! It will take ten years to replace just the utilities we have lost, but how can we replace an entire generation of young men? I heard the BBC say last week that the number of our soldiers he left to be slaughtered in Kuwait may exceed three hundred thousand!”

  �
��I know. I know.”

  “Shakir, we both have sons. Allah be praised, they were too young to be taken, but nearly everyone here knows a family who has at least one son missing. And most will never know what happened to them. The graves, Shakir! Mass graves in the desert …”

  Muayad looked down, working to contain his agitation for a few seconds before his head snapped up and his eyes locked onto Shakir’s once again.

  “We both lived so well, you and I, serving this animal and his criminals. I’m not brave enough to do anything but say ‘yes, master, no, master.’ I once was a research physicist, remember? For the last three years all I do with all that training is conduct scavenger hunts for forbidden materials and play stupid cat-and-mouse games with the CIA and Mossad.”

  He paused a moment, almost staring at Shakir, trying to decide how much to say. “Until you came to me last night, I did not know I could trust you, Shakir. I did not know that you, too, were sick of this dictator. I should … I should have been brave enough, like you, to walk out and tell the West what Saddam’s really doing with the nuclear program.

  “Perhaps you still can.”

  By 1:00 P.M. Shakir was on the road northbound, a carefully marked map by his side with a package of safe-passage letters written by several military directorates in Baghdad to Dr. Muayad Damerji. There was only one with a picture attached, and it was Shakir’s picture—an old snapshot Muayad had kept in a desk drawer. Shakir had protested mightily against using Muayad’s name. The dangers were obvious if his mission to Kirkuk ended in capture or discovery.

  But Muayad would hear no dissent.

  Shakir reached for a plastic bottle from the ample supply of bottled water in the backseat, munching on some pastries as he dodged potholes and military trucks, feeling much too relaxed.

  Or am I just numb? he wondered.

  The miles seemed to melt away, despite the deplorable condition of the highway. The desert on either side was the most depressing stretch he knew of in all Iraq. After leaving the fertile, irrigated greenery of the shores of the Tigris River, there was nothing but featureless, barren flatness and heat on either side. No sand, no hills, no rocks broke the flat expanse; it was only a geological purgatory of nothingness, with not even a hint that there were mountains somewhere to the east. Like a sickly yellow curtain, the heat haze and dust hung over the monotonous horizon.