And within an hour they were back on the streets of Baghdad just south of the old city, feeling like a cornered fox run at the hounds’ pleasure back to the hounds’ lair.
Yet there were still options, and one of them appeared ahead suddenly in the form of a black van parked along a deserted street. Even though they had shed the license plates miles back, a green Toyota van dashing around after midnight would have no trouble attracting attention, especially if half of Saddam’s security forces were looking for it.
As Shakir pulled to the curb, Will spotted a line of headlights at an intersection several blocks ahead, turning in their direction.
“Stop! Kill the lights and get down!” Will’s voice was an impassioned whisper.
Shakir quickly killed the engine and all three of them dived for the floorboards.
“They’re military, I think,” Shakir said. “Their running lights looked like military.”
The sound of automotive engines rose to a crescendo, marking the passage of a small convoy, the sound falling steadily behind them with no hint of applied brakes.
They remained still for nearly four minutes before Will cautiously peered over the dashboard.
“We’re alone, and the black van’s still there.”
“I assume,” Doug whispered, “that you’re as good a van thief as you are a truck thief.”
Will crept to the other van and opened the door, relieved that the ceiling light didn’t work. Using matches for illumination, he found the wires he was looking for under the dash and made the necessary connections, and within minutes they were pulling quietly away from the curb, the deadly canister carefully stowed in the new van’s spare-tire compartment.
Shakir cut back to the west then, finding at last a quiet side street that took them under the main freeway. They watched the rearview mirror constantly for signs of anyone chasing them, but saw nothing.
Shakir drove west and occasionally north to make sure they hadn’t been followed, turning south at last to follow featureless desert roads toward his home, the subdued lights of Baghdad serving as a compass on his left.
Slowly they closed on the village, all three of them knowing now that daylight would overtake them long before they could reach the border—and knowing as well that with roadblocks everywhere, their chances of getting out of the country undetected were almost nil.
It was nearly 3:00 A.M. when the lights of Shakir’s village grew bright in their windshield and Doug’s eyes began to make out two distinctly familiar shapes to the left of the road ahead.
“Are those helicopters?” Doug sounded incredulous.
“Yes,” Shakir answered matter-of-factly. “But I don’t know why the army started keeping them here.”
“Was this some sort of barracks?” Will asked.
Shakir nodded. “Many of the conscripted young men from our village were based here, but they were all sent to Kuwait.”
Doug’s eyes were glued to the two helicopters.
“Those are Soviet Mi-24 Hind gunships, Will! Two of them.”
Will was on full alert now, worried that where there were sophisticated military aircraft, there would be military guards.
Shakir killed the headlights and rolled to the shoulder of the road while Doug and Will talked it over. He let the engine idle, trying to ignore a small curl of exhaust fumes that wafted around and through his open window.
“Nothing’s moving up there,” Will said at last. “You see anything?”
Doug was nodding. “I sure do.”
“What?” Will’s voice was low and cautious, his eyes searching for whatever Doug was seeing.
“What I see, old buddy, is our getaway car.”
There was silence for a second as Will thought through any other possible meaning to Doug’s words.
There were none.
“Our getaway … You’re not seriously thinking of … of flying one of those out of here, are you?”
“If either of those birds has fuel and a good battery, it’s the answer to our prayers,” Doug said, his voice low and excited.
“Doug—”
“They’re looking for us everywhere, right? We either dig a hole and pull it in over us for days, or we risk going back to a worse version of … of …” The images of what he had gone through earlier flooded back, and words failed him.
“Or we fly out.”
“You’ve made your point,” Will said quietly. “But can you fly something like that?”
“If it can be started, it can be flown.”
“They’re Russian, for God’s sake, with placards probably written in Arabic.”
Doug shook his head and raised the palm of his hand to quiet the torrent of objections.
“You get speed to the turbines, you initiate a fuel source and a spark, you vary the throttle setting until you get adequate RPM on the blades, and the rest is standard helicopter. No sweat.”
Will just stared at him, the van’s engine sounding like a roar in the silence between them. Shakir nervously watched both men, his eyes darting back and forth.
“You’re crazy, Doug, but—” Will said in a mixture of fright and awe.
“Do we have a choice? A good choice? Come on, Will. We don’t.”
Will was nodding. “I know it.”
“It’s this or nothing, man.”
Shakir could stand it no longer. “You are discussing flying one of those helicopters to Saudi Arabia?”
“I think so, Shakir,” Will affirmed.
“Won’t the fighters shoot it down?”
“No,” Doug said. “Saddam can’t fly any fighters. He’s been warned that any fighter he puts in the air will be destroyed. But helicopters are okay. Our side won’t shoot them down.”
Doug paused, then continued, “Shakir, are those helicopters guarded?”
Shakir nodded.
“Would they take note of a van like this as it passed at three in the morning?”
“I doubt it,” was the quiet reply. “There is routine traffic on this road all night.”
They formulated a plan before moving. Shakir would drive slowly and steadily past the helicopters on the road into town. Several hundred feet on the other side—provided there was no activity around the choppers—Doug and Will would leap from the open sliding door of the van with Shakir’s gun and make their way back to overpower whatever guards might be there.
Shakir would go to his home, wake his wife and children, and try to bundle them into the van without attracting the neighbors’ attention.
“How long do you think, Shakir?” Will asked.
“It is hard to say. If my wife isn’t slow …”
“They took our watches,” Doug said. “What time is it?”
Shakir consulted his digital watch. “Three-twenty. I have another watch at home. You take mine”—he struggled to get the clip open and handed it to Will—“and let us say that I will be back at exactly four-ten. You start the helicopter at four exactly. If anyone starts firing at you, or if I do not show up, you go on.”
Will shook his head. “Even if you’re late, keep coming. We’ll wait as long as we possibly can, and then some.”
Doug opened the sliding door then, positioning the two of them for the jump as Shakir turned on the headlights and began rolling south past the makeshift desert heliport. At the appointed spot he slowed to fifteen and looked over his shoulder.
“Now!”
Even at slow speed, Doug was too bruised and stiff to keep his balance. He rolled on the ground as soon as his feet touched, bruising himself even more on the small rocks along the road.
Will’s long legs served him well, however, and he landed upright and running. Within seconds they were creeping together toward the nearest Hind, their night vision improving with each passing minute.
Both helicopters were facing the road, their large, sliding side doors on the north as Will and Doug approached from the south. Distant sounds of car engines miles away melded with the engine sounds of a high-flyin
g jet in the night. The only light ahead was a single incandescent bulb hanging from a small building on the other side of the helicopters.
Slowly, carefully motioning to Will to kneel down and keep a watch beneath the huge Soviet gunships, Doug moved toward the side of the first one and pressed his face to the window.
The sliding door on the other side was open, the light filtering in and clearly illuminating the interior—which was empty.
They slipped quietly under the tail then, staying in the shadow cast by the muscular housing of the twin turbine engines on top of the second helicopter, and moved closer to peer in one of the windows.
A scorpion as big as a child’s fist suddenly scurried out of the way as Will knelt down to look beneath the belly of the Hind. The movement startled him, the scuffling of his feet sounding horrendously loud to Doug as he looked back at Will in near panic, waving his index finger in front of his lips for quiet. Will sidestepped a few more inches to put some healthy distance between his feet and the fleeing scorpion and resumed his lookout, giving a thumbs-up to Doug, who raised his head slowly and looked through the window.
What greeted Doug through the window of the helicopter was too good to be true. Two guards—little more than young boys, it appeared—lay snoring their heads off in the sidewall seats, their guns neatly placed on the floor out of arm’s reach.
Doug pulled Will to the window to see for himself, whispering the strategy.
They crept around the stub wings and under the tail then, satisfied there were no other guards. Slowly they approached the open sliding troop door, Doug covering Will as he slipped into the helicopter and silently lifted one of the Iraqi rifles, handing it back to Doug, who laid it on the ground.
Now Doug eased himself inside as well, amused at the volume of the snoring, momentarily unsure what to do next.
Will produced the handcuffs Shakir had removed from their wrists earlier and placed one of the manacles around the recumbent wrist of the nearest soldier, slowly closing the other one around a metal tie-down loop on the floor.
Still neither of them stirred.
Slowly working his way to the aft end of the compartment, Will repeated the maneuver with the second young soldier, threading the other end of the cuffs into another tie-down loop and locking it with a sudden click.
The soldier came awake without warning, giving a cry of surprise that woke his companion at the same moment.
Will jumped back, scrambling to get his hands on the rifle while Doug leveled his at the head of the first soldier, who had just discovered his hand was attached to the floor and couldn’t quite figure out why.
“Hold it! Don’t move!” Doug barked. The words were indecipherable to the young Iraqis, but the meaning was clear—reinforced as it was by the barrel of a Kalashnikov, which both clearly recognized.
“I’ll cover them. You take a look at the cockpit.” Will’s voice was still a loud whisper.
Doug climbed to the single pilot’s seat and pulled a book of matches from his pocket. As Will had predicted, the placards were all in Russian and Arabic, and the arrangement of switches and indicators was foreign as well.
But somewhere there had to be a master switch that could route ground power and battery power to some basic electrical buses—and at least one cockpit light. There was a ground power cord leading from each Hind to a small shed. Doug had nearly tripped over it in the darkness.
Doug lit a match, the light flaring brightly and startling him, the flame dying before his eyes had focused on the panel. He lit the second one then, working to keep it burning before looking back to the panel.
There were switches everywhere, and a flight engineer’s panel behind him in the cargo compartment with more switches, but several had metal guards around them to prevent accidental operation.
A master switch would look like that.
The second match died, but Doug reached into the darkness from memory, feeling for the switch he had just spotted that might just do it …
He flipped up the switch guard and moved the switch.
Electrical cooling fans and gyros began spinning up as a set of red overhead lights and the instrument lights came on.
“Got it!” he whispered to himself.
Now to figure out the starting system—and sequence.
To the left side of the panel was a lighted gauge which caught his eye. Two gauges, to be exact, both of them measuring fuel quantity.
On both, the needles indicated near empty.
Doug scanned the panel again, looking for some other explanation.
There was none. Those were the gas gauges, and there wasn’t any gas to speak of.
Doug killed the master switch and scrambled out of the pilot’s seat, briefing Will as he hopped out the door and headed with pounding heart to the adjacent Hind. Familiar now with the cockpit setup, he slid into the pilot’s seat and flipped on the master switch, his eyes going to the gas gauges as the red lights came on and the same galaxy of gyros and fans came to life.
The needles hesitated at the far left side of each fuel gauge, then began moving to the right, every millimeter an indication of more fuel.
Doug was back at Will’s side in half a minute.
“That one’s full! Both tanks. I have no idea how many pounds, but I’ll gamble it’ll get us across the border.”
Will laughed at that, a short, truncated snort. “We’re beginning to sound like desperadoes. ‘Get across the border,’ indeed.”
“We are desperadoes.” Doug motioned to the two soldiers. “What about them? Leave ’em or take ’em?”
Two sets of wide eyes were fixed on them from the back of the helicopter.
Will thought a moment. “We’d better take them. If we leave them behind, they can provide descriptions, time, method, everything. Otherwise they’ll have to guess who took the chopper.”
“They’ll figure it out, Will,” Doug said.
“Yeah, but why make it easy?”
They transferred the soldiers one at a time to the other Hind, Will handcuffing them to the tie-down loops as before, while Doug climbed into the cockpit.
Switch by switch, gauge by gauge, Doug probed the instrument panel and control switches, finding what appeared to be the critical controls to start the two turboshaft engines. He killed the master switch then to conserve power as Will moved into the open space between the single pilot’s seat and the large Plexiglas bubble that covered the cockpit area. Both of them fell silent.
Doug looked at the watch Shakir had loaned him. Slightly more than ten minutes left before the agreed engine-start time.
The sound of boot leather moving on the aluminum flooring below reached their ears as one of the soldiers shifted position slightly, and Doug double-checked to see that all the guns were in the cockpit with them.
Then all was quiet again.
The blanket of silence surrounded them totally, amplifying the call of a distant night bird and the whir of some flying insect through the open cockpit window as they sat in the midst of what in other circumstances would have been a peaceful scene.
Doug stared through the Plexiglas at the canopy of stars overhead and tried to hold on to the reality of where they were, but it was too frightening. The utter terror of what he had been through in the detention cell had to be suppressed.
Think about flying. Think about home. Think about anything but that!
Doug glanced over at Will, who was also deep in thought, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes focused many miles away. Doug followed Will’s gaze off to the west before speaking, his voice catching Will by surprise and causing him to jump slightly.
“We can do this.”
“What?” Will seemed distracted.
“We can do this, Will. We’re going to get out of here.”
Will nodded slowly. “We have to.” Doug saw him look away to the left and out the side of the bubble canopy.
There was silence between them for a few seconds as the memories of a few hours befor
e flooded back with frightening clarity.
Will’s thumb gestured back over his shoulder. “Back there—in that prison—they had me believing they’d taken a chain saw to you.” Will’s right hand waved in frustration, a gesture of dismissal. “They said they were coming back in a few hours to do the same to me. It terrified me, Doug.”
Doug was nodding. “Me too, old friend. They made me think exactly the same about you. The noises and screaming—all an act, I guess.”
“A damned effective one.”
Will’s voice became stronger with anger and emotion as he told Doug of the plastic tub and its contents, and he was surprised to hear that the same scam had unnerved Doug as well.
Will turned suddenly, his face starkly visible in the subdued light. “When they made me think they had … killed you, I sat there … thinking about all those wasted years of no contact between us. I …”
Doug was nodding. “I know.”
Will was looking away again, but his words reverberated clearly from the plastic canopy. “I’ve never been so terrified. They never even slugged me, and I feel like a rape victim must feel.”
Doug was nodding silently, his fists clenched, but Will was looking outside as he continued, “I’ve always had a phobia about being captured, Doug. I guess I’ve been a bit of a coward about it, especially since ’Nam.”
“Bullshit! You were never a coward about anything, Will Westerman. You survived back there, didn’t you?”
“Inside I didn’t, Doug. Inside I died a thousand deaths.”
“Look, with what your dad went through in the war, of course you’d be fearful.”
Will turned to face Doug. “No, it’s more than that. You never wanted to see it, or you’ve been kind enough not to rub my nose in it, but I’ve always been a bit of a coward about a lot of things. I’ve always been afraid, deep down. Afraid of being captured, afraid of taking a chance with the airlines and leaving the service like you, afraid to have fun and be content with lousy grades like yours.”
Doug laughed a shallow laugh. “I’ll have you know I was a very good high-C student.”
Scorpion Strike Page 32
