by Robert Gandt
Two hundred yards to the runway.
Descending again. The main wheels bit into the earth, sending up two geysers of sand behind the Hornet. The jet pitched upward again.
Maxwell watched helplessly from his own cockpit. You’re losing it. He saw the jet’s nose pitch down again. Punch out, Bullet. Eject.
Alexander was still in the cockpit. Maxwell was flying ahead of the stricken Hornet now, watching over his shoulder.
The Hornet caromed once again off the ground, kicking up a cloud of brown dirt, then it pitched upward in a sickening, nose-high roll to the left.
Maxwell tensed himself, knowing with absolute certainty what would happen next.
A mushroom of flame and dirt and metallic debris erupted from the threshold of the Al Jaber runway. Even through the insulated capsule of his own cockpit, Maxwell could feel the impact of the twenty-ton fighter hitting the floor of the desert.
He pulled up in a tight climbing turn, circling back to the runway. He forced himself not to look at the billowing black mushroom cloud as he swept back over the end of the runway and landed on the long concrete runway.
Damn you, Bullet. Why didn’t you eject?
Chapter 4 — A Place Called Babylon
Kifri, Iraq
1305, Thursday, 11 March
Maybe they weren’t going to execute him.
The thought passed through his mind as they led him into the open yard behind the prison. Rasmussen peered around. No firing squad, no troops with ready weapons, no grim-faced executioner. Just the Iraqi officer and a pair of bored guards who didn’t bother to unshoulder their carbines.
They were taking him somewhere. At the far end of the courtyard, near the gated entrance, he saw a tarpaulin-covered truck. The back flap was open, and several ragtag troops stood around the truck watching him. Three battered Land Rovers were parked in random order around the enclosure.
On all four sides he could see the cell blocks with rows of barred windows. He hadn’t had such a view of the compound since the day they brought him here.
He had had the distinction of being the first combat loss POW, shot down the opening night of Desert Storm and captured the following morning. During the next few weeks, as the war sped to its inevitable conclusion, he became aware of other prisoners in the Abu Graib Prison where he was being held. Sometimes he could hear their voices across the courtyard—Americans, Brits, even voices speaking French.
One day he heard a newly captured pilot arguing in the courtyard as they hauled him in, telling a Republican Guardsman to go fuck himself, getting a rifle butt in the head for his trouble. The other prisoners cheered and whistled, giving the newcomer a round of applause.
For reasons never explained to him, he wasn’t allowed to mix with the other POWs, not even to exchange snippets of information about who was there, why they were shot down, how the war was going. All the while he could hear the sirens outside, the boom of the anti-aircraft guns, the exhilarating whump of incoming bombs and Tomahawk missiles. Baghdad was taking a pounding.
It would be a short war. They were going home soon.
One day the sirens were quiet. The whump of the bombs stopped. A silence like the inside of a tomb settled over the prison compound. It took him a while to realize that he was no longer hearing the voices of other prisoners.
Because they weren’t there.
Why? What happened? His interrogators wouldn’t tell him. He ordered himself to stay calm. If the war was over and prisoners were being exchanged, his turn would come. It had to come. He would go home.
Weeks passed. His turn didn’t come. With a growing sense of dread, he sensed the truth. He wasn’t going home. He had been left behind.
Months passed, then years. He lost track of how many, but somehow he held on to his sanity. He was moved to another prison outside Baghdad, and then he was moved again, the last time to this godforsaken place called Kifri, in the east of Iraq.
One day about five years into his captivity, his handler, an Iraqi officer named Hakim, brought him an English language newspaper. It was the Norfolk Courier, a month old, and in the social section was a photograph that leaped off the page and pierced his heart like a dagger.
A pretty, black-haired woman, wearing a long white gown, was on the arm of a man he didn’t recognize. He was tall with wavy gray hair, handsome in a dark cutaway and vest. The happy couple was exiting a chapel while smiling friends showered them with rice. According to the caption, the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Frank Gallagher had just exchanged vows in the Virginia Beach Episcopal Church.
For the rest of the day he sat in his cell, holding the photograph, staring at the chipped plaster wall, unable to focus his thoughts. He felt as if he were peering through a veil into another world. The world of the living.
Widowhood hadn’t suited Maria. She needed a man in her life. The anchor of a good husband. Their children—a daughter and a son—were rushing into adolescence and they needed a father.
It made sense, he thought with a numb acceptance. They were alive. He was dead.
Sometime after his last move, another war had come. He heard the distant thud of bombs, the high dull rumble of jets. With his gradually-increasing knowledge of Arabic, he overheard from his guards’ conversation that the Americans had invaded Iraq. Saddam was gone. The Iraqi army had been defeated.
For a brief while he allowed himself to hope. The Americans were coming. He would be free.
But they didn’t come. No one came to this abysmal hole on the frontier. He was still a prisoner.
His new captors were former Republican Guard officers and Baath Party members—old Saddam loyalists—who, he gathered, were waiting for an opportunity to seize power again in Iraq.
Why were they still holding him captive?
After a few months, he stopped speculating about such things. It was too painful. Better for him to remain dead.
The man who didn’t exist.
Now he was leaving. He stopped in the middle of the courtyard and tilted his head back. He peered straight up. Darkness had descended on eastern Iraq, and stars were twinkling in the hazy night sky. When was the last time he had seen stars? He couldn’t remember.
“What are you waiting for?” said the Iraqi in the officer’s uniform. He nudged the prisoner. “Keep moving.”
As they approached the truck, a man stepped out of the darkness. He wore a dark, shirt-like gellebiah over camouflage trousers and army boots. A blackened semi-automatic pistol hung from his hip. He didn’t look like an Iraqi.
“My name is Abu,” said the stranger. “I am taking you away from here.”
The prisoner didn’t reply. He had expected a firing squad. Instead, they were taking him somewhere. They had done this once before, moving him from Baghdad to this remote place in the northeast of Iraq. It was more than he could comprehend.
“Where are we going?”
“To a new place. You will be treated well.”
He felt another wave of gloom sweep over him. A new place. He was right. They were taking him into the desert to kill him.
No, it didn’t make sense. Not the Iraqis. They were too lazy. They’d just shoot him here on the spot and be done with it.
“What new place?”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
He didn’t ask any more questions. He climbed into the back of the truck where he was joined by half a dozen unsmiling men in gellebiahs. They didn’t look like soldiers. Each wore a beard and a kaffiyeh, the ubiquitous Arab headdress. Each lugged a Kalashnikov assault rifle over his shoulder.
Abu got in front with the driver. The truck chugged off into the night, followed by a pair of Land Rovers filled with more armed and bearded men.
The procession wound through the darkened streets of Kifri, an impoverished village near the Iranian border, then departed the village southward, into the desert night. The prisoner didn’t care where they were going. It didn’t matter. He leaned against the back of the bench seat and fe
ll asleep.
While the truck lurched through the night, he dreamed that he was in a distant green country with no guards, no prison cells, no brown-hued desert around him. He dreamed that he was with a raven-haired woman named Maria and their two freckled children.
< >
Al Jaber Air Base, Kuwait
“We have to keep this stuff hidden because it’s not allowed in Kuwait,” said the tech sergeant. “Not the real stuff, anyway.”
They were inside one of the tents the U.S. Air Force contingent at Al Jaber called their “hoochs.” The front flap was closed, and the portable air conditioner at the far end was straining to keep the inside temperature under eighty Fahrenheit.
The sergeant wore desert fatigues, and his blue name tag identified him as “Chalmers.” He reached outside the rear tent flap and pulled back a tarpaulin on the ground, exposing the top of a buried garbage can. He stuffed his arm inside the can, through a layer of floating ice and Cokes and Seven-Ups, and fished around the bottom until he came up with a glistening green can.
“Real Heineken,” he said. “Not that near beer crap they sell in town. Got this from the loadmaster on the C-17 out of Ramstein yesterday.”
Bullet Alexander popped the tab on the can and slurped down half the beer in one long swallow.
Chalmers and his tent mate, another tech sergeant named Soileau, watched appreciatively. “Yeah, we figured you could use a cold beer,” said Chalmers. “Considering how you got out of that jet.”
Alexander nodded as he drained the can. He handed the empty to Chalmers, who promptly resupplied him.
Chalmers and Soileau had been in the armada of crash trucks that came rumbling across the sand toward the burning jet. One of the trucks had nearly run over Alexander while he was lying in his parachute, still too stunned to move.
He tried to recall the sequence of events. The final minute of the flight was like one of those nightmares every fighter pilot had. He was trying to control a jet that was over-responding to his inputs. Everything he did produced an exaggerated effect. And then he had no option except to leave.
The Super Hornet’s flight control system had degraded when he began having electrical problems. From normal computerized control, the system reverted to DEL—direct electrical link—where every stick movement was an input to a control surface, without computer refinement. Sometime during the final approach, it degraded further to MECH—mechanical operation. It meant that he could only move the two angled stabilators on the tail. There was a fair amount of lag in the flight control response, and when the response did come, it was a big one. Too big.
It was a precarious way to control the jet. To the best of his knowledge no one had ever actually landed a Super Hornet using MECH. Alexander had just proved that it was a lousy way to fly.
The truth was, he reflected, he’d stayed with the jet too damned long. But the runway was right there, so close he could almost feel the concrete under him. Another ten seconds and he would have made it. The Super Hornet would be parked here on the ramp, still worth most of the sixty million bucks the taxpayers paid for it.
He had never ejected before. He knew that in an airborne emergency the pilot went through a critical phase of denial, then analysis, then decision. He had denied too long, decided too late. It had almost cost him his life.
Thank you, God, he thought to himself. Then another thought. Thank you, Martin-Baker, wherever you are. Martin-Baker ejection seats had been saving U.S. Navy fighter pilots’ lives for half a century.
“I don’t suppose you have any more of these?” he asked, holding up another empty can.
“As many as you want, Commander,” said Sergeant Chalmers. He was fetching another beer when the front tent flap burst open.
A man in a sweat-stained, desert-colored flight suit appeared in the open entrance. A leather-holstered Colt .45 hung around his shoulder, and the lines of an oxygen mask were still imprinted on his face.
He stared at Alexander as if he were seeing a ghost.
Alexander gave him a broad grin. “Hey, Skipper, welcome to Kuwait. How about a beer?”
< >
USS Ronald Reagan
The Air Wing Commander was waiting in the passageway when Maxwell came down from the flight deck. Capt. Red Boyce was wearing his battered leather flight jacket. A much-gnawed cigar, unlit, protruded from the corner of his mouth.
Though Boyce’s official title was Air Wing Commander, he went by the traditional but extinct label of “CAG”—Commander, Air Group.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” said Boyce.
Maxwell pulled off his helmet and shook hands with his boss. “I already know the bad news. The general is going to court-martial me.”
“Of course,” said Boyce. “What do you expect when a Navy jock tells a three-star blue suiter to go get stuffed?”
“What’s the good news?”
“Admiral Dinelli, who also has three stars and runs the Fifth Fleet, sends a well done. He says you did the right thing going to Al Jaber.”
“So? Do I get court-martialed or not?”
“You know how the game’s played. One attaboy cancels one oh-shit. It’s a wash.”
They descended the ladder to the O-3 level where the Roadrunner ready room was located. Boyce stopped outside. “How’s Bullet?”
“A little beat up, but okay. He’s coming back on the COD on the next recovery.”
“Does he know what happened to his jet?”
“Only that the electrical system started unraveling about the time he engaged the SA-2s.”
Boyce gnawed thoughtfully for a moment on his cigar. “It makes a big difference to your squadron whether it gets written off as combat damage or an aircraft mishap. I don’t have to remind you that you guys are having enough trouble keeping jets in the air without one of them self-destructing from an internal problem.”
Maxwell knew where Boyce was going with this. His squadron, the VFA-36 Roadrunners, had won the Battle “E” last year as the most combat ready Super Hornet squadron in the fleet. But this year the Roadrunners’ record was dismal. They were having trouble keeping the jets in the squadron airworthy and ready to fly.
“We’ll know something soon,” said Boyce. “I’m convening a mishap board right away, and a team will go to Al Jaber to examine the wreckage. In the meantime, you’re wanted in the flag conference room. Someone named Maria wants to talk to you.”
Chapter 5 — Rumors
USS Ronald Reagan
Northern Persian Gulf
1915, Thursday, 11 March
She hadn’t changed. Same raven-black hair, same large brown eyes with the oversized lashes that she knew how to use with devastating effect. She still had the high cheek bones and fine chiseled nose of her French Canadian ancestors.
“How have you been, Brick?”
“Fine. I’m doing just fine, Maria.”
Maxwell hadn’t seen Maria Rasmussen’s face for—how long? Something over seven years. It was at a reunion back at Oceana when they laid a wreath in Raz’s memory. Raz had been the only casualty the squadron suffered in the First Gulf War, and now a plaque with his name on it hung in the Strike Fighter Wing headquarters.
“You look wonderful,” she said. “Congratulations on getting command of your own squadron.”
Your own squadron. They both knew that was something Raz always talked about. It was the only thing he said he wanted out of the Navy. Command of his own squadron. If circumstances had been different, Maxwell thought, he would have already gotten it. By now he might be an Air Wing Commander like Boyce.
He was alone in the Reagan’s flag conference room. The live video conference had been set up by Captain Gracie Allen, who had been Raz’s flight lead the night he was shot down, and who now commanded the Atlantic Strike Fighter Wing back in Oceana. Chief Lester, the flag staff yeoman, showed Maxwell how to run the console and how to position himself for the video monitor. Then he exited the compartment and closed the door behind
him.
Video conferencing was spooky, he thought. It was almost—but not quite—like being face to face with the other person, except there was this half second delay in response. The image on the screen moved with a jerkiness like an old silent movie.
Maxwell could see only her face and slender neck in the video screen, but he was sure that she still had that slim-waisted, willowy shape that made all the heads turn at the officers’ club swimming pool. Maria had a knockout figure. Raz loved showing her off at parties, strutting in with her on his arm, making the single guys eat their hearts out.
She told him about an anonymous phone call. She was almost through before she broke down. Her voice caught, and she dabbed at her tear-filled eyes.
Maxwell nodded, trying not to show his own tangled feelings. He remembered the day back in 1991 when Iraq released the prisoners they had captured during the Gulf War. At Maria’s request, he had gone to Kuwait City to see the POWs deplane from the C-130. They were the last, according to the Iraqis. Six Americans had been released the day before, fifteen more on this flight. Twenty-one captured, twenty-one released.
Maxwell recognized some of them. Three guys were from the Saratoga. They looked pale and undernourished. Some had noticeable bruises, arms in slings. One walked with a limp. All wore huge grins, happy to be alive and free.
He waited until the last had exchanged salutes with the senior officers and then boarded the bus to the hospital ship Mercy where they would be examined and treated.
Raz Rasmussen was not among them.
Maxwell was not surprised. Raz’s name had not appeared on the Red Cross list of prisoners. The Iraqis declared they had never heard of him. No body had been found, and no evidence turned up to change the KIA—killed in action—to MIA—missing in action.
That night Maxwell called Maria and told her that Raz wasn’t on the airplane. Her husband wasn’t coming home. Every bit of evidence indicated that he had died in the cockpit of his Hornet in the predawn hours of 17 January. Maria should get on with her life.
