The fatigue of running all night, coupled with the trauma of the last hour and the incredible noise and vibration of the engine through the poorly insulated firewall of the Soviet-built aircraft, fuzzed up her thinking, amplifying her fears and muddling her judgment. She recognized the signs of fatigue, much like the cumulative fatigue of MAC aircrews flying nonstop Desert Shield—Desert Storm missions over the previous half-year.
A roughness seized the engine suddenly, drawing her attention, the sound suggesting carburetor ice—a near impossibility with the warm temperatures and low humidity of the desert climate. Sandra fumbled with what looked like the carburetor heat knob nevertheless, getting no response. There was another lever next to it that looked very much like a fuel-mixture control, and she pulled it now gently, feeling instantly better as the engine smoothed out.
Fifteen more minutes on this heading, she promised herself, then I turn southeast and look for a Coalition base.
The morning sun had just begun to heat the sands. By noon, any small airplane flying in the same place, she knew, would be bounced all over the sky by thermals—rising columns of heated air.
But this time of the morning it was smooth, which was a blessing for Bill. The last thing he needed was more jostling around.
She checked the gas gauge again. It was marked in liters, but if Doug had been right, she’d had about three hours of gasoline to start with. That should be enough—unless, of course, she flew right past Saudi civilization and right on into the Arabian desert.
An overwhelming thirst gripped her again. She knew she was becoming dehydrated. She was already hungry and filthy and scared, and very aware there was no time for errors. She had to find help as fast as possible.
Sandra looked at her watch and decided the border was just a few miles ahead. There was supposed to be a road of some sort running on the Saudi side parallel to the border, but she had yet to see it. If she could spot it, she could follow it to what she knew would be Coalition forces. Most of the supplies for the incredibly successful “Hail Mary” maneuver Schwarzkopf had pulled off had been trucked along that road.
The flash of silver to the extreme left margins of her peripheral vision didn’t register at first. Sandra’s eyes had been drawn to a needle advancing toward a red arc. She assumed it was an oil temperature gauge, but with everything labeled in Arabic, she could only guess. Whatever it was, the temperature it was measuring was going up.
She looked forward, sensing something new, something amiss, though the desert was bare before her. She looked to the right, letting her eyes run carefully over the horizon, finding nothing there.
She looked then to the left, and caught a small metallic glint to one side of the rising sun. The glint increased in size.
Something coming this way! Let it be one of ours!
The smoke trail angrily billowing from the back of the on-rushing fighter was a dark shadow against the intense brightness of the horizon. He was turning now, back to the north, probably trying to maneuver in on her, she concluded. She strained to see the outline of it, noting the fact that it seemed to be alone. U.S. fighters would be flying in two- or four-ship formations.
It had twin tails like an F-15, but …
The outline of something on the belly and the shape of the upper body in silhouette took shape just for a moment in a chilling form.
That’s a MiG-25!
She knew the Coalition controlled the skies. But she also knew that many Iraqi fighters had escaped destruction in hard shelters and by running to Iran.
Almost instinctively she pushed forward on the control stick, diving the tiny aircraft toward the desert floor, wondering if she’d been seen.
She had.
Sandra glanced at the altimeter, trying to interpret it. The rocks were getting larger as she kept the nose down, listening to the rising sounds of the wind in the face of the stubby little craft as it accelerated in the shallow dive. Her training as a flight engineer in C-141s came back now, all the things she’d heard the pilots say about how they’d been trained to make a last-ditch effort to evade a fighter if their lumbering transport was ever jumped on a low-altitude mission.
Fighters hate low and slow, and they hate tight, sudden turns!
The sound of the engine changed suddenly, the noise level rising. She wanted to look at the oil pressure, but there wasn’t time.
He was back at her eight-o’clock position now, streaking north. Sandra felt a hope rise in her middle that he didn’t consider her a worthwhile target. After all, she was just a little fluff of an airplane in the huge desert sky. Hardly worth the bullets.
Where are our guys when I need them? They should have seen this bandit! AWACS should have seen him!
Perhaps whoever was at those controls was more interested in running to safety than in shooting down a single-engine airplane. Or perhaps he was one of the few remaining Iraqi fighter pilots who hadn’t gotten the word it was all over.
Jesus! He’s turning!
There was no doubt now. The fighter had gone into a tight left turn behind her and was rolling in on the tiny single-engine. One burst of his guns and she and Bill would simply disintegrate in midair.
She was down to fifty feet above the desert now, but pushed the nose even lower as she searched quickly for the oil gauge. She remembered an F-15 pilot telling her once he could “lock up” trucks on a German autobahn with his fire-control radar. Even sitting on the ground she wasn’t safe, but she wasn’t going to make it easy for the bastard.
Turn! Got to out-turn him!
She looked over her left shoulder again, following the smoke and realizing he was almost directly behind her now, perhaps five miles in trail, and undoubtedly locking up a “firing solution.”
It was anger now that guided the sudden violent right bank as she kicked the right rudder for good measure and almost pirouetted the single-engine aircraft around to the right, coming about almost 180 degrees before rolling out to face the oncoming jet.
Okay, Abdul, I’m gonna screw up your shot!
But it hadn’t fazed him. As his target, Sandra realized, she had simply moved a click to the right, and he could easily correct for that! She would have to wait until he was almost on her to turn again.
The position of the needles on the gauges she had looked at a minute before finally registered, and she looked back, startled to find the needle for what she assumed was oil temperature pegged in the red, and the one she assumed was oil pressure reading very low. If those were right, they were going to be coming out of the sky soon, one way or another.
The ground was within thirty feet now, and so low she dared not bank very steeply without climbing. The engine was getting louder, and she assumed it would continue to rise in volume until it seized. She was losing oil somewhere, and would have to make a forced landing.
The fighter was less than two miles away now, his speed seeming to slow, his form growing larger in her windscreen, and with the full expectation that she would see his guns spitting fire and bullets at any second, she watched him approach, amazed to see that he was aiming to her right as if not interested in blowing her apart, and even more amazed as he came nearly abreast. What had been a Russian-built MiG-25 Foxbat to her mind a few seconds before coalesced into a similar-looking American-built F-15!
He flashed by safely to the right then, trying to slow as much as he dared, the passage incredibly fast even though the pilot was barely hanging in the sky at the slowest possible airspeed of around 180 knots.
Sandra was breathing hard, her heart pounding. I was so damn sure he was hostile, I never even stopped to think he might be one of ours!
She banked right again, the engine still turning, but the oil pressure gauge moved even lower as she turned back to the south. The Eagle driver kicked up his power and pulled several G’s around to the left, setting up for another low-speed pass, this time with Sandra going in the same direction.
She pushed the throttle in now and brought the little airplane to the
highest speed it could manage, close to 120 knots, surprised when the engine complied, expecting a smile and a wave from the F-15 pilot as he came by again with flaps down at an airspeed only sixty knots faster than hers.
But the chatter of the Eagle’s powerful guns reached her ears instead, at the exact moment her mind registered the fact that live tracer rounds were snaking south over the desert.
He’s FIRING at me! He’s WARNING me! He thinks I’M hostile!
Again the Eagle accelerated and began a left turn as his wingman, who’d stayed high and out of sight until now, slowed in trail for a low-speed pass.
There was no radio in the little airplane. She hadn’t considered the fact that she was flying an Iraqi military aircraft into Saudi and Coalition airspace without a clearance and at low altitude. She had to signal the guy she was a GI.
How?
He’s closing again back there. No, that one’s still maneuvering out to the left. This must be his wingman.
She assumed he wanted her to land. She was going to have to do so momentarily, anyway. The other pilot had made some sort of gesture on his last pass, but he was too far over for Sandra to make it out. This time the F-15 seemed only inches away as he approached, pulling abeam with a sixty-knot closing rate again as Sandra reached up and clawed at one of her Velcro patches, the American flag on her left shoulder. She opened the window on her left, then, and held the patch out as far as she could, waving it vigorously up and down as she leaned her head in the same direction, letting her blond hair trail outside the window as obviously as possible.
Sandra had no way of hearing the radioed comment of the Eagle pilot to his flight lead somewhere above. As he accelerated and pulled in his flaps, Rover 21 punched his mike button and said, “You’re not gonna believe this. There’s a blond broad in a flight suit at the controls of that Iraqi crate, and she’s shaking a U.S. flag at me!”
The reaction from his controller aboard Crown was almost instantaneous.
“Watch the sexist remarks, Rover two-one. That’s a female of the GI persuasion to you.”
The AWACS controller reached for the tie-line phone to scramble a rescue helicopter for the intercept at the same moment the engine in front of Sandra Murray gave a last sound of screeching protest and stopped.
Pick a suitable field, set up a glide …
She reran the single-engine-aircraft forced-landing procedure through her head at the same time she realized that half of Saudi Arabia constituted a suitable emergency landing field, and from a hundred feet she had little time to glide.
She sideslipped just a bit to avoid a small depression and held the little aircraft off until it stalled, then touched down. Braking sharply to a safe stop, she got out immediately to wave at the two F-15s as they made one last flyby.
She looked in at Bill then, relieved his chest was still rising and falling.
There was still a chance.
CENTCOM, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Saturday, March 9, 1991—8:30 A.M. (0530 GMT)
“Sergeant Phillips, come here and look at this.”
Colonel Richard Kerr looked haggard and alarmed after poring over aerial surveillance shots since an hour before dawn. Officers usually didn’t do the grunt work of photo analysis, but Kerr was an acknowledged expert, and he was determined to find Will and Doug, if they were findable.
“Sir?”
Phillips took the photo, spotting the telltale mark on the roof of what was clearly a truck of some sort as it sat tucked away in a ravine north of the abandoned masonry building the missing 141 crew had used.
“Okay,” Kerr began, “check my logic. I’ve got four shots of the same spot in a ravine not too far from that highway they were searching. One was taken just before the RF-4 took the picture of the building and caught two of our crew members, one as the rescue mission was beginning, one ninety minutes later, after the mission ended unsuccessfully, and the last in midafternoon. The truck’s not in the first shot, it is in the second shot, gone again in the third shot, and back in the last one. And we’ve found no infrared returns on the satellite orbit after midnight, meaning the truck was gone again after dark. At last I’ve got a blowup of the same spot that shows the truck in the ravine is the same one that was at the building with Westerman. What do you make of all that?”
Phillips studied the colonel’s face, recognizing a rhetorical question.
“What do you make of it, sir?”
Kerr nodded, the key to the puzzle in his hands.
“They’re not captured! I don’t know how they got an Iraqi truck, but if they’d been captured, their captors wouldn’t be hiding in the desert, they’d be heading for Baghdad or somewhere else. If you were Westerman and Harris, though, and you’d captured a truck, would you want to drive in daylight with pale faces and a female engineer?”
“Hardly. I’d wait for darkness.”
Kerr thumped the picture again. “Exactly what they did!”
Will hadn’t disappointed him. He knew his old friend would find a way to wiggle out of the net.
But now the Iraqis knew as well.
Kerr collected the photos and supporting materials and charged upstairs, finding General Bullock in the central command post.
“Sir,” he explained carefully, “this means our people were not captive as of yesterday morning.”
“They are now.”
Kerr was confused. “I don’t understand. What’s happened?”
Bullock filled him in on the flash message from Search and Rescue. Sergeant Sandra Murray and a seriously injured Sergeant Bill Backus had just flown out of Iraq and were en route to a U.S. field hospital at Dhahran.
Bullock pushed his right hand under his glasses and rubbed his eyes briefly before continuing. “Colonels Westerman and Harris were taken at gunpoint by Iraqi soldiers as she and Backus got away. She’s not even sure they weren’t shot.”
Kerr threw the satellite transparencies down on the console. “Shit!”
“Tell me about it,” Bullock said, looking up. “You remember I was insisting we tell Iraq we knew they had our people? That was done at ten P.M.” Bullock heaved himself out of the chair and instinctively straightened his uniform. “So at dawn this morning, guess what? Thanks to the fact that we told them all about the American crew they were supposed to have captured but hadn’t, the Iraqis went right out and captured them.”
“General”—Kerr was shaking his head—“that’s probably just a coincidence. There wouldn’t have been enough time to mount a search, especially with the civil war and the lack of command communications.”
Bullock nodded slowly. “I hope you’re right.”
“Well, sir, it’s a moot point now, apparently.”
Bullock sighed again. “We’ll know more in an hour. We’re sending a new rescue package in to find that hangar and look it over, just in case.”
Provisional Regional Military Command Headquarters, Kirkuk, Iraq
Saturday, March 9, 1991—8:30 A.M. (0530 GMT)
“Doctor Damerji, can you hear me? Doctor?”
The words were Arabic, but for some reason Shakir’s mind transposed them into English. He was sitting naked in the middle of a huge bed in what had to be a whorehouse in the middle of Arizona, or maybe Montana. It was the Old West, and beside him, asleep in the bed, was an extremely sexy woman, and someone was calling his name. Only it wasn’t his name, it was the name of his classmate, who didn’t have his doctorate yet. That was what puzzled him, why the owner of the voice would ask for Doctor Damerji before Damerji was a doctor. Most unusual!
“Doctor, are you okay?”
His eyes finally focused as the dream—and the girl—evaporated. He felt himself mentally grasping for the memory as it slipped like sand through his fingers, and was gone.
He was back in Iraq, sitting on the floor in the corner of the commandeered room of a Kirkuk house taken over by General Hashamadi and his staff, one of whom was leaning over him with a worried expression.
“I’m … I’m fine,” Shakir croaked, his mouth as dry as powder, his voice protesting the call to duty.
“Would you like some tea, Doctor? Or some water?”
Don’t forget who you are! You are Muayad Damerji! Remember that!
Shakir looked up and smiled as much as he could, sitting up and readjusting his back, which was hurting. “Thank you, yes, I’d like some water.”
The aide nodded and turned. He looked more like an Iranian, Shakir thought. Drooping mustache, jet black hair and eyes. But it was the stocking hat and the oversized army fatigue jacket that made him look Iranian. That and the fact that he couldn’t be much more than twenty years old.
Shakir rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch, trying to ignore the wave of body odor the aide had left in his wake.
Eight-thirty. I’ve been asleep about five hours.
General Hashamadi was still away, but expected back by mid-morning. The fighting to the north was serious, the Kurdish rebels having gained the upper hand in ways that were unclear. Shakir overheard a few sketchy conversations while waiting, but nothing reliable.
The aide returned with a ceramic cup of water of questionable origin, but he drank it down rather than examine it.
The secret police officer who had rescued him was nowhere to be seen, but Shakir couldn’t help but imagine him around the corner, listening carefully for Shakir’s slightest slip or mistake. The man had escorted him right to the military post and inside, then frightened Shakir even more by insisting on waiting with him. Around midnight he had tired of the wait and taken his leave, or so he had said.
Shakir had never hidden behind an alias before, and it unnerved him profoundly.
Muayad—the real Muayad—had agreed to lie low at home for several days to prevent being seen at two places at the same time. The greatest danger, both of them knew, was Shakir running into someone who knew Muayad—or him. Or someone who had seen pictures—someone like the secret police officer, perhaps.
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