Shadows of War

by Robert Gandt

  “Something’s wrong here,” Maxwell said. “We should never have to cannibalize our own jets. Why isn’t the supply chain working for us?”

  Manson looked at him and shrugged. “It’s a system problem. You were never a maintenance officer, so I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  They both knew it was a calculated insult. Manson still openly referred to Maxwell as a carpetbagger. Instead of working his way up through a sequence of squadron jobs, Maxwell had gone off to test pilot school and then to NASA as an astronaut. He returned to the fleet already wearing the rank of commander, bypassing the lower-ranking assignments.

  Alexander’s eyes flashed and he slammed his hand down on the table. “Listen, Mister, you don’t talk to the skipper like—”

  “It’s okay,” said Maxwell. “Craze is right, neither of us has ever been a maintenance officer. But we’ve been around the air and space business nearly twenty years, and we both know enough to depend on a good maintenance officer. I have to trust you to run the department as efficiently as possible, Craze. That’s why I have you in the job.”

  For the moment, Manson was disarmed by the flattery.

  Alexander was still glowering at him. “What I’m hearing is a lot of butt-covering about why our numbers are bad. The bottom line is we’ve got more birds down for maintenance than any other outfit.”

  “We’ve also had more combat losses than anyone else,” said Manson, looking at Alexander. “Yours in Kuwait, plus four we lost in Iraq and Yemen. The replacement birds for those lost jets all came from the same place. They’re all maintenance nightmares.”

  Maxwell nodded. He had to admit Manson was right. The replacement jets came from a squadron returning from an extended deployment. The squadron’s aircraft had all flunked a post-cruise corrosion inspection. Worse, the inspectors found evidence of bogus inspections while the squadron was deployed in the Middle East. The inquest resulted in the XO being dismissed and the maintenance officer being discharged from the Navy. A taint of scandal still wafted over the strike fighter wing’s maintenance structure.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” said Maxwell. “Here’s the bottom line. We want to win the Battle E again, but it’s more important that we do our real job. We’re a strike fighter squadron, and we’re going to be combat ready. Ready to fight anytime, anywhere.” He turned to Craze. “That means no more cannibalizing our jets. If the supply system isn’t working for you, we’ll fix it, but don’t rob parts off our own airplanes.”

  Manson bristled. “Listen, sometimes that’s the only way to—”

  “You just received an order, Commander.”

  Manson’s face reddened. He nodded acknowledgement.

  “I expect you to schedule your people better,” Maxwell went on. “We’ve got to get more airplanes flyable.”

  “You’re saying you want me to work them harder than they’re already working?”

  “Not harder. Smarter.”

  Manson showed by his tight expression that he didn’t agree. He shoved himself back from the table and rose to leave. “I have the message. Will that be all?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  He gave both officers one last glowering look, then turned on his heel and left.

  Alexander waited until he was gone. “Whaddya think, Skipper?”

  “About what?”

  “Craze. Would it change his attitude if I punched his lights out?”

  “That’s not the textbook method for dealing with a subordinate officer.”

  “I seem to remember your telling me that you did it once.”

  Maxwell smiled. It was true. Back when he was the new squadron XO, Manson walked out of a department head meeting, deliberately flaunting Maxwell’s authority. Maxwell followed him into a deserted passageway where he rapped Manson’s head against a steel bulkhead hard enough to make his eyes glaze over. Before Manson could protest, he banged his head again, then once more for effect.

  “It didn’t work,” said Maxwell. “Trust me, Craze will never change.”

  < >

  Carpetbaggers, thought Craze Manson as he descended the ladder to the second deck where the VFA-36 maintenance spaces were located.

  Manson’s stomach was still churning. Alexander and Maxwell. Carpet bagging, showboating, political suck ups. Their total fleet experience didn’t add up to as much time as Manson alone had in the fleet. In the real Navy, not the celebrity service.

  It started when Maxwell, hot shot test pilot and astronaut reject, checked in to the squadron with zero qualification and in less than a year moved from ops officer to XO to CO. He made it for no reason except that his old man was an admiral and—something that Manson never understood—the Air Wing Commander thought he shit gold bricks.

  Even worse was Alexander, who knew how to play the minority card and was where he was for no reason except that he was one of the few senior black officers in the air wing. Instead of working his way up the hierarchy as a squadron officer and then a department head, he lived a pampered life in grad school and then a tour on the Blue Angel showboat circuit.

  It wasn’t goddamn fair. By all rights, Manson thought, he should have been the one assigned as executive officer of the Roadrunners, not a poster boy for the NAACP like Alexander.

  It was insulting enough that as a newly promoted commander he still had the job of maintenance officer. Bat Masters, who was junior in rank to Manson, had been assigned as operations officer, the number three slot in the squadron. Maxwell’s reasoning was that Craze had the most experience in maintenance and he didn’t want to change things in the middle of a deployment.

  Which was bullshit, of course. Manson knew the real story. Maxwell hated his guts and wanted to sabotage his career. Keeping him out of the most senior department head job would make him look bad when the command screening board met next month. Unless the board included Manson in their list for upcoming squadron command, he could kiss his career goodbye. He would retire in some obscure staff job at some suckhole air station in the lower Midwest.

  Fuck that.

  One of the truisms about Navy politics was that your career could get trashed by a commanding officer who didn’t like you, but such an action could be negated if it turned out that the skipper was an incompetent who was out to get you. Well, Maxwell was definitely incompetent, and he was being propped up by an even more incompetent executive officer. It was just a matter of time before both Maxwell and Alexander showed their true colors and got their butts shipped out. Manson would be vindicated and receive his own command.

  He reached the second deck, beneath the sprawling hangar bay, where most of the squadron shop spaces were cloistered. Manson’s office was a tiny adjunct of the avionics shop.

  As he entered the compartment, he saw the Maintenance Master Chief Petty Officer, Master Chief Piltz, in a huddled conversation with Lt. Splat DiLorenzo, the Maintenance Material Control Officer. On a stand in the corner stood the ubiquitous coffee pot, half-filled with thick Navy brew.

  “How’d it go, Boss?” said DiLorenzo. “They try to give you a ration of shit?”

  DiLorenzo was older than Manson by a couple of years. He was a “mustang,” meaning he had risen through the enlisted ranks before being commissioned as an officer. His duty specialty was aircraft maintenance.

  “Just like we thought,” said Manson. “They want more airplanes available so they can fly them more so they can make themselves look better.”

  “Did you tell ‘em where to stuff it?” DiLorenzo liked to disparage senior officers in Manson’s presence to impress Master Chief Piltz. Manson found his manner irritating, but he let it go. DiLorenzo was one of his few allies in the squadron..

  “I told them we’d tighten up the work shifts in order to get the corrosion inspections done and still have enough ready aircraft.”

  “No way, Boss,” said DiLorenzo. “Not if we do those inspections according to the tech order. Each single jet stays grounded for at least a week. We’re out of manpower.”
>
  “They want us to work the crews smarter, not harder.” He said it with enough sarcasm that the two men understood his disdain for the order.

  “Yeah, right.” DiLorenzo looked at Master Chief Piltz. “Who gets to tell the troops they gotta work smarter?”

  “Not me,” said Piltz. Piltz had been in the Navy longer than either Manson or DiLorenzo. One of his sons, a second-class petty officer based in San Diego, was as old as some of the squadron pilots.

  “Listen, you two,” said Manson, putting an edge to his voice. “It doesn’t matter how you or I or the troops feel about it. Somehow this department is going to produce better results, or all our careers go down the crapper. I don’t care how you do it, but you’re going to put more airplanes on the schedule.”

  Piltz nodded sullenly. DiLorenzo went to the coffee pot and refilled his mug.

  A silence fell over the space. Manson took a seat at the desk he shared with DiLorenzo.

  “I gotta get the second shift organized,” said Piltz, grabbing his hat from the hook on the bulkhead. On his way out he added, almost under his breath, “I’ll be sure to tell ‘em the part about working smarter.”

  DiLorenzo waited until the master chief was gone. “You know, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, Boss.”

  “Yeah? What are you suggesting?”

  He peered into his coffee mug, deliberately avoiding Manson’s eyes. “I know a way to get those inspections done faster.”

  < >

  Mashmashiyeh, Iran

  Rasmussen blinked his eyes, surfacing from a fitful sleep. He sat up and gazed around the room.

  Nothing was familiar. For a moment, he felt a sense of panic. Where am I? Why am I here? His comfortable reality had been destroyed like a bulldozed ant hill.

  The room contained the cot on which he sat and an ancient wooden table with two chairs. In the corner was a primitive latrine and a tall bucket filled with water.

  It didn’t look like a prison cell. At least it didn’t look like the kind where he’d lived for most of a decade.

  Shafts of pale sunlight streamed through the high, barred window. Through the top of the window he could see the tiled roofs of adjacent buildings. From somewhere nearby came the wheezing sound of an underpowered vehicle—a motorbike or ancient automobile.

  In a corner of the room were his possessions—a change of clothes, eating utensils, a packet of writing materials.

  And his notebook.

  He felt the anxiety subside in him. He was in no immediate danger. Since they’d removed him from the cell in Kifri, nothing bad had happened. No beatings, no maltreatment, no interrogation. They had even fed him. It was some kind of unidentifiable porridge, but it was the same that Abu and his guerrillas—they called themselves Sherji—had eaten. He had been treated humanely.

  He walked across the hard-packed floor and tried the door. It was locked, which was no surprise, but it didn’t look all that substantial. He guessed that a hard kick would probably break the hinges.

  He looked up at the window. The crisscrossed bars were wooden. They didn’t look substantial either.

  He retrieved his notebook and opened it. The last entry was two days ago, while he was still in the Kifri prison. How far had they traveled? In the darkness he hadn’t gotten a good look at the terrain, but he knew it was flat and covered with vegetation, not the parched desertscape of northern Iraq. They were in the south somewhere, probably the Tigris-Euphrates delta.

  Near the Persian Gulf.

  Rasmussen was wide awake now, his mind whirring with new energy. Thoughts were inserting themselves in his mind without his bidding.

  He was not in a prison. That was obvious. No maximum security complex with iron doors and guards watching his every move. Nor was he in the interior of Iraq with a thousand miles of desert separating him from the outside world.

  Somewhere out there, not too many miles distant, were people like him. Westerners.

  Americans.

  He looked again at the wooden bars over the window. An idea was germinating in his mind. He had not had such a thought since the first weeks of his captivity. Not since he’d accepted the fact that he was a dead man.

  He could escape.

  The idea terrified him. And exhilarated him also. It was so alien to his usual thinking that he tried to push it away, but it kept returning to his consciousness.

  Freedom.

  If I see an opportunity, he told himself, I will seize it. The thought made him almost sick with fear, but he reminded himself of another truth. Why not? You’re already a dead man. What have you got to lose?

  Nothing, of course. All he had to fear was—

  The door opened behind him.

  He whirled, his heart pounding, terrified that he had been caught in the act of thinking forbidden thoughts.

  One of the guerrillas, a dark-skinned Bedouin whom he hadn’t seen before, came through the door. He was followed by a man in creased fatigues, a leather-holstered semi-automatic pistol at his hip. He had lean, handsome features, his slicked-back hair and mustache revealing traces of gray. Rasmussen noticed that he walked with a slight limp.

  For a long moment, the man regarded Rasmussen with an intent, curious gaze. Finally he said, “You are a military officer?”

  “I was.”

  “A U.S. Navy commander?”

  “Lieutenant commander.”

  “A fighter pilot, correct?”

  Rasmussen nodded. He should have expected it. The interrogations were beginning again.

  “Very good,” said the man. He smiled, displaying a row of perfect white teeth. “We have something in common. My name is Al-Fasr. Col. Jamal Al-Fasr.”

  Chapter 7 — Bahrain

  Northern Persian Gulf

  1935, Tuesday, 16 March

  Abu Mahmed watched in silence as the boat sliced through the black water. The thirty-knot wind over the streamlined bow snatched at his hair, whipping the sleeves of his padded jacket. The deep-throated rumble of the two diesel engines reverberated off the water like the growl of an angry beast.

  The hull of the boat was slapping the crests of the three-foot swells, making Abu’s stomach churn and his knees weaken from the repetitive bumps. He wished now that he had refused Al-Fasr’s order that he command this operation. He was a land warrior, not a seaman. In daylight the sea made him uneasy. At night it terrified him. He wasn’t a good swimmer, and he had been told that there were venomous sea snakes in this part of the Gulf.

  In the darkness he could barely make out the silhouette of the second boat, running on a parallel course with them thirty meters away. They were now nearly twenty kilometers into the gulf, keeping radio silence, radars off, emitting no electronic signals.

  Akhmed Fayez, the lead boat’s captain, was peering into the green-lighted radar scope, nodding his head in satisfaction. “Another ten degrees to starboard,” he barked at the helmsman. He looked across the cockpit at Abu and pointed to the scope. “There it is, eight kilometers away, just as we expected.”

  Hanging on to the brass rail on the bulkhead, Abu wobbled over to the cockpit and peered into the scope. Akhmed was right. The single large, yellowish blip on the screen was unmistakable.

  Akhmed flicked the radar off again. “No more radar. We’ll have visual contact in a couple of minutes. No need to alert him that he’s being targeted.”

  Both craft, old Teryer naval speed boats built by the Zelenodolsk Bureau in Russia, had been seized in a commando raid from the Iranian Navy’s river base at Abadan. Even though the two boats were constructed of fiberglass, Abu had no doubt that they were already visible on radar.

  He still marveled that a giant vessel like the Bayou Queen would be unprotected. Could it be possible that such a ship would have no escort, no anti-ship weapons? The idiot leaders of the western countries never learned. Not since the Iraqi-Iranian war had oil tankers in the Persian Gulf been escorted by naval warships. Not until one of their precious assets—an airliner or an energy
plant or one of their monolithic high-rise buildings—was actually destroyed in a surprise attack did they bother to take defensive action. Then they would leave something else exposed.

  Like an oil tanker.

  “I see it, dead ahead,” called the sentry in the bow station.

  Abu peered into the darkness, squinting against the wind. Yes, there it was, the hulking shape of the Bayou Queen. She was a modern 200,000-ton, double-hulled supertanker, built three years ago in New Orleans. Like many such tankers, she operated under a Marshall Islands flag, but she was owned by the Sanders Oil Company of Houston, Texas. Her captain and most of the crew were American.

  He could see the white-lighted superstructure and red running lights on the starboard side. The giant ship was steaming southward from Kuwait, toward the strait of Hormuz, delivering oil to the corrupt infidels of America.

  As he watched the big tanker swell in the night, Abu saw a white beam of light flash down from the bridge of the big vessel. They had picked up the incoming boats with their own radar and were probing with a searchlight.

  “Left ninety degrees,” Akhmed ordered. “We parallel their course for half a kilometer. Let them think we are staying clear.”

  Akhmed waited until the shape of the tanker began to drop behind their starboard beam, then barked another order. “Right ninety degrees. Signal the attack boat.”

  The crewman on the port deck sent a series of quick flashes with his signaling lamp. From the second speedboat came an answering pattern of flashes.

  The second speedboat—the attack boat—surged ahead. Abu could hear the big diesel bellowing at full throttle. Akhmed let his own boat drop behind while the first boat bored through the night on a direct course for the Bayou Queen.

  This was the critical moment. The two men in the attack boat—the only crewmembers aboard—must be certain their boat was locked onto an intercept course with the tanker. Then they would set the autopilot to hold a steady heading. When everything was precisely correct, they would abandon ship.