by Robert Gandt
It was the fighter pilot’s nightmare scenario. Someone shooting at them from behind. It had to be another Foxbat. A wingman. After his leader was killed, he had merged with Anvil Flight and performed what was called a stern conversion—sweeping past the oncoming Hornets, then reversing course to put himself at their six o’clock.
Aimed at their tails.
Two thousand feet beneath the other three Hornets of Anvil flight, Maxwell scanned the black sky where he had seen the missile flash.
Nothing.
He hauled the nose of his Hornet to the left, probing with his radar. Still nothing. Where was the Foxbat?
< >
Missile in the air. The most dreaded words a fighter pilot could hear.
As if triggered by his own adrenaline, Rasmussen’s RWR was warbling at a high, urgent pitch.
He was targeted.
Rasmussen’s years of training kicked in. He rolled the Hornet into a hard break turn, dumping the nose and hauling back on the stick. His left hand found the chaff dispenser. Pull. Turn into the missile. Make it overshoot.
Grunting against the Gs, trying not to gray out, he peered over his shoulder. He saw it. A flicker of light, a faint zigzag motion behind him.
With a grim certainty, he knew what would happen next. He tensed himself and waited.
As he expected, the impact came from behind. Rasmussen was dimly aware of the explosion, a blinding wave of flame that engulfed the Hornet and turned the darkness into a scarlet hell. He knew his life had ended and his remains would be scattered over the ancient dirt of Iraq.
< >
Captain Jabbar watched the fireball of the Hornet plummet like a meteor toward the floor of the desert. Al-Rashid had been avenged.
It was enough. Jabbar knew that he could stay here and maybe kill another enemy Hornet, perhaps two. It would also mean his own certain death. At any moment now, one of them would find him on his radar. The enemy fighters would pounce like dogs on a rat.
He shoved the nose of the MiG-25 down and eased the throttles back. He would stay under the enemy formation, let them continue on their mission toward Baghdad. He would live to fight another day. Martyrdom was for fanatics.
As he descended, he glanced again at the burning hulk arcing downward in the night. He wondered about the pilot. Was he a frightened young man on his first mission? Or was he a veteran, one who had seen combat before? Jabbar guessed that he was probably a man like himself—willing to die for his country, not willing to throw his life away for nothing. He had dreams, hopes for the future, a family who would miss him.
Jabbar pushed the thought from his mind. This was war. It wasn’t wise to have such thoughts about the man you had just killed.
< >
Rasmussen’s numbed brain accepted the finality of his death, but his body did not.
Following a script he had rehearsed a hundred times in training, his hands reached for the ejection lanyard between his legs. His head slammed back against the headrest. With both hands, he yanked the lanyard upward.
The ejection seat fired. Rasmussen catapulted like a cannon shell from the roiling fireball of the Hornet. A nearly supersonic wall of air slammed into his body.
Downward he tumbled through the thin air of the stratosphere, the automatic features of the SJU/5A Martin-Baker ejection seat performing as advertised. Its occupant hung slumped and unconscious in his straps.
At ten thousand feet, precisely on schedule, the main parachute canopy deployed. Borne on a twenty-five knot wind, the inert body of Raz Rasmussen drifted toward the floor of the desert. He was not aware of the descent, nor did he feel the thunk of the landing.
Still in the parachute harness, he was dragged by the wind for another two hundred meters until the canopy wrapped itself around a pair of jagged boulders.
When he regained consciousness, Rasmussen thought he was blind. Then he realized that his eyes were swollen shut. He was lying against a rocky slope, still wrapped in the canopy and shroud lines of the parachute. When he tried to move, waves of pain shot like jolts of electricity through his limbs.
For several minutes he lay where he was, assessing the damage. Though every bone in his body ached, nothing seemed to be fractured. He wasn’t blind, but he could peer only through a pair of crusty slits.
He released the Koch fasteners on his torso harness, freeing himself from the chute. He rose creakily to his feet, taking a few small steps, testing each limb. Everything still worked. It just hurt like hell.
Nothing made sense.
His brain was processing information at about one-tenth its usual rate, but that was to be expected. He was in no hurry. He was alive, and they’d come to get him. He’d get out of this place. The thought gave him comfort, and he clung to it. He’d get out.
How will they know where I am?
Simple. He’d tell them. Which was why he had the survival radio. The PRC-112 survival radio was his ticket home. He could communicate with other aircraft, give his location, call in the SAR helo. It was the new model they’d just issued, which he’d taken the trouble to put in a Ziploc bag and stuff right here in the vest pocket of his. . .
His hand felt inside the pocket. The flap was already open. The pocket was empty.
No radio. In the violence of the ejection, the damned thing must have flown out of his pocket and whirled off into space. The pocket was designed for the older PRC-90. The PRC-112 was taller and thinner, and didn’t quite fit in the standard vest pocket. The survival experts didn’t think it would make any difference in an ejection.
So much for the experts.
Rasmussen fought off the sense of desolation that settled over him. Okay, think. They know where you went down. They’ll be searching for you.
Then another thought. Wasn’t there an emergency locator beacon in the seat? He tried to remember, then it came to him. Yes, an ELT was installed in the seat, but the air wing brass had ordered the things disabled on the eve of the strike. They’d gotten intelligence that the Iraqis had their own homing devices and would track the signals from a downed American jet.
Of course, he could go looking for the seat and activate the ELT. He discarded the idea. The seat separated from him in the descent at ten thousand feet. It could be anywhere in a twenty-mile radius.
The cold night was coming to an end. A pale light had begun to illuminate the bleakness of the desert. Through his slitted eyes Rasmussen could make out the irregular shapes of boulders and low ridges.
He was gathering his equipment, stuffing the chute and life raft out of sight behind an outcropping, when he sensed movement behind him.
He turned and saw them. They had approached without his hearing them. They were no more than twenty feet away, a dozen of them, and each had his rifle aimed at Rasmussen.
Chapter 2 — Dreams of a Distant Land
Virginia Beach, Virginia
1435, Wednesday, 10 March
The Present
She was having a nightmare.
That had to be it. One of those terrible dreams she used to have. She thought she’d finally gotten over them, but it was happening again.
Maria lowered the phone and looked around. Through the twelve-foot living room window she could see across the sloping green lawn. Her lawn. She saw a car drive past. Someone—her neighbor’s son—was riding a bicycle on the opposite sidewalk. All very normal. Nothing at all nightmarish.
Oh, dear God, I’m not dreaming.
She spoke into the telephone again. “Who are you?”
“It’s necessary that I remain anonymous,” said the caller. He had some kind of accent that she couldn’t place. “I’m sorry if this upsets you,” he said.
“Upsets me?” She was losing control of her voice. It sounded shrill and tinny. “A stranger who won’t identify himself calls to tell me my deceased husband might still be alive. Why would a thing like that upset me?” She knew she was becoming hysterical.
A moment of silence. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Rasmussen.”
“I have a source. It is very reliable.”
“If it’s true, why doesn’t our government know about it?”
Several more seconds of silence. “I can’t answer that.”
She could feel her heart pounding in her chest. She realized she was hyperventilating. Oh, sweet Christ, get control of yourself. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. An act of compassion, I suppose. You are a wife, and you deserve to know the truth.”
You are a wife. That much was true. Maybe twice true.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“You may believe whatever you choose. I’m just delivering—”
She slammed the phone down, then stared at it as if it were a snake. She had heard enough. It was a crank call. Had to be. There was someone out there with a sick mind. It couldn’t be true.
After a minute had passed, it occurred to her to check the caller ID log. The call was tagged as UNKNOWN. No surprise there. Of course it would be unknown. Could it be traced? She didn’t know.
She stood in the kitchen with her arms clasped around her. Any minute now the kids would be home. She had to think. Joey had lacrosse practice at five. Lisa would want to talk about school. Frank would roll into the driveway in another hour. He always came home before six.
Frank. She could imagine the look on his face when she told him. It wasn’t fair. He was a good man, a loving husband, a surrogate father to her two children. Frank didn’t deserve this. No one did.
Ten years they had been married. It was hard to believe. Frank Gallagher had come into her life at the time when she most needed him. He was a successful Virginia Beach businessman, fifteen years older than she, with grown children of his own. Frank was good-looking, intelligent, and compassionate. Best of all, he was not a fighter pilot.
Losing Raz was like losing a piece of her own life. Like most young married couples in Navy fighter squadrons, they had discussed the unthinkable. The “just in case” scenario. Neither expected anything bad to happen, but in the dangerous world of naval aviation, bad things sometimes happened. They were realists.
Two weeks after he was reported missing in action, she received a letter. “If you’re reading this,” Raz wrote in his barely legible left-handed scrawl, “then it means you already know that I’m not coming back. You know I love you beyond what words can express. And please remember that you must be strong and build a new life, not just for yourself but for Joey and Lisa.”
It had taken nearly a year for the Navy Department to change “Missing in Action” to “Killed in Action.” Every piece of evidence corroborated the report. Raz’s Hornet was shot down by an Iraqi fighter. He did not survive the explosion.
It was official, she told herself, pacing the kitchen floor. She had the paperwork from the Navy to prove it. She was a widow, and she had already gone through the torment of hoping otherwise. Raz was dead. He’d been dead since 1991, and that was that.
Or was it? She stopped pacing the floor as another wave of anxiety swept over her. Oh dear God, what if the caller was telling the truth? What if. . .
She had to talk to someone. Who? Not Frank, at least not yet. She couldn’t bear it. Who, then? The anxiety was pressing on her heart like a heavy weight.
She resumed pacing the kitchen, trying to think. She needed to speak with someone who could do something. Someone who knew Raz, a friend she could trust.
It came to her. Yes, if only she knew how to find him. It had been several years, but she thought he might still be in the Navy. If she could find Brick Maxwell, he would know what to do.
< >
Mashmashiyeh, Iran
Gunfire.
Colonel Jamal Al-Fasr flinched at the rattle of the automatic weapon. What was happening? The shots came from somewhere inside the village. He heard it just as his Land Rover crossed the bridge over the river, entering Mashmashiyeh. The village was supposed to be secure, pacified and controlled by the Sherji—the guerrilla troops of his Bu Hasa Brigade.
He had just returned from Tabruz, where his Sherji had seized two SA-2 anti-aircraft sites from the inept Iranian Revolutionary Army troops who manned them.
They had been lucky. With their new equipment, they were able to target a flight of British Tornados patrolling the border between Iraq and Iran. He doubted that they’d done any damage, but they accomplished the desired effect.
Now a punitive mission would come, probably Americans from one of the carriers in the Gulf. They would be convinced that Iran was targeting allied jets. The Iranians would receive the wrath of the mighty United States.
Since the humiliating defeat of Saddam Hussein, the Americans and British had occupied most of Iraq. Most of the freedom fighters—terrorists, as the westerners insisted on labeling them—that Saddam supported had mostly fled eastward toward Iran.
Now there were too many for the Iranian government to control. The western third of Iran had become, for the most part, a lawless hodgepodge of private fiefdoms. While the government in Teheran still pretended to be in control, it had already ceded authority to the bands of fedayeen and mujahedeen operating along the Iraqi border.
It was a fertile place for Jamal Al-Fasr to reconstitute his Bu Hasa Brigade. He had staked a claim to the strategic village of Mashmashiyeh, along a navigable stretch of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, yet far enough inside Iran to be out of the reach of the American occupation force in Iraq.
“Stop here,” he snapped to Shakeeb. He jumped from the Land Rover and trotted to the shelter of the first stucco hut, ignoring the pain in his right leg. Shakeeb joined him, carrying the AK-74 from the Land Rover.
Another short burst. It came from the center of the village, and now Al-Fasr recognized the weapon by the distinctive crackle. Another Russian-made Kalashnikov AK-74, an advanced derivative of the classic AK-74. Ours, he realized. At least, it better be.
Then he saw the sentries, a pair at the far end of the bridge, two more watching him from a hut at the perimeter of the village. One of the sentries waved, apparently not interested in the nearby gunshots. It meant that the village wasn’t under siege. It was safe to enter.
He gave Shakeeb the nod to go ahead. With his SIG Sauer semi-automatic in his right hand, he followed the sergeant along the brick-lined path to the clearing in the center of the village. They passed two more sentries—Sherji with their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. They gave him the palm-upward Sherji salute, showing no sense of alarm.
The pathway led to the large open area in the village center. As Al-Fasr approached the edge of the clearing, he could see the bodies. There were half a dozen, sprawled like bundles of laundry. A dark pool of blood oozed over the worn courtyard.
Another group of a dozen or more—Al-Fasr could see by the coarse brown gellebiahs that they were local villagers—huddled against a far wall. Their hands were bound behind them, and they were tethered to a rusty-wheeled cart.
Al-Fasr stepped into the courtyard. Twenty meters from the tethered prisoners was a cluster of Sherji, at least twenty, smiling and watching him as he stormed across the courtyard.
Abu saw him coming. He lowered the muzzle of his AK-74.
“What the hell is happening here?” demanded Al-Fasr.
“It is a local matter,” said Abu. He, too, was smiling.
“Why were those men killed?”
“To teach the others a lesson. They were resisting our occupation of Mashmashiyeh.”
“Resisting? In what way?”
Abu pointed to one of the bodies sprawled on the cobblestones. “That one refused to turn over his boat to us for transporting supplies up from Hawr Umr Sawan. He deliberately sank it.”
“So you executed him?”
“And his family. Those are his four brothers and his father lying beside him.”
“The others, those tied to the cart? Do you intend to execute them also?”
“
Of course. They were all supporting—”
“Enough!” Al-Fasr felt the fury boiling up in him in like hot lava. He snatched the weapon from Abu’s hands. In a single furious gesture, he yanked the magazine out of the automatic rifle and sent it clattering it across the courtyard. “We did not come to this country to execute the population. There will be no more killing of civilians. Is that understood?” He glowered at the silent Sherji. None were smiling now. They stared back at him with sullen expressions.
Al-Fasr felt like using the Kalashnikov on Abu. The arrogant, murderous imbecile! By slaughtering the local villagers, he was contaminating the very ground they needed to build a new base. A new Babylon.
He had chosen Abu Mahmed to be his second-in-command because he needed the loyalty of the mujahedeen who had fought with Abu in Afghanistan. Since Al-Fasr’s own defeat and rout from Yemen, his Bu Hasa Brigade had been decimated and reduced to a band of ragtag guerrillas. He needed Abu’s veteran fighters, even though most were illiterate and vicious as wild dogs. They were also Islamic fanatics, which made them even more dangerous.
Abu was a fanatic, but he was not an illiterate peasant like the others. The son of a prominent Cairo physician, he had attended medical school before joining the jihad a dozen years ago. He was ambitious and just as vicious as the mujahedeen. In the name of Allah, Abu was willing to execute the population of an entire village.
It wasn’t the killing that infuriated Al-Fasr. He had no sentimental scruples about executions. In his life he had slain hundreds of his enemies, some for tactical reasons and some for the pure pleasure of watching them die.
But this was different. This was Babylon. He could not afford to turn it into a killing ground.
The smile was gone from Abu’s face. He was watching him with dark, accusing eyes. “Jamal, you have no right to—”
“Do not presume to give me orders.” Al-Fasr threw the empty Kalashnikov on the ground at Abu’s feet. “I am still in command of this Brigade.” He glowered at the sullen Sherji, fixing his gaze for a moment on each leathered face. “Is that clear to all of you?”
