by Robert Gandt
“Anyone recognize this guy?” Boyce said.
A murmur went through the assembled officers. “That sonofabitch,” said Gus Gritti in a low growl.
“For those of you who weren’t with us in Yemen,” said Boyce, “may I present Col. Jamal Al-Fasr, commander of the Bu Hasa Brigade and terrorist extraordinaire.”
Seeing the face on the screen, Maxwell felt a chill run through him. Al-Fasr. Another ghost.
“Since getting kicked out of Yemen,” Boyce continued, “Al-Fasr has set up camp somewhere in Iraq or Iran, in the marsh country. He wants to suck us into a shooting war with Iran so he can take control of a piece of the country.”
“Just like he sucked us into Yemen,” said Gritti.
“Yeah,” said Boyce. “Except this time we’re going to hit this guy with maximum force. That means a Marine Expeditionary Unit, plus every asset of the battle group.”
“What about Iran?” asked Cmdr. Butch Kissick from VF-31, the Tomcat squadron. “How are they gonna feel about being invaded by the U.S.?”
Boyce glanced at Admiral Hightree, who just nodded. “Teheran is already denying that they had anything to do with the attacks on the tanker and in Kuwait. At the same time they’re beating their chest and saying they will repel any invasion by foreign forces. That’s more bravado than fact. The truth is, Iran couldn’t repel the Salvation Army.
“The bottom line is this. Iran is hosting a terrorist group that has attacked Americans, and according to our Commander-in-chief, that makes them fair game. The Rules of Engagement will specify that Iranian military assets will not be attacked—unless they show hostile intent. If they do they’re dead meat.”
Boyce switched the image on the screen back to a map of Iran. “Until the MEU is on the ground and has a command post secured, the airborne strike leader will be Commander Maxwell of VFA-36.”
Maxwell felt all the eyes in the room on him. Here we go again, he thought. That was Boyce. He never bothered giving a warning before assigning you the mission from hell.
“When Colonel Gritti has his LZ and perimeter secured, he becomes the on-site commander. The MEU will be tasked with securing the area, destroying all Bu Hasa equipment, seizing any and all intelligence material, and delivering prisoners to the Saipan for interrogation and processing. We intend to be in and out of country in the same day. No assets, no personnel left behind.”
Boyce flicked off the screen and looked at his watch. “That’s it, gentlemen. There’ll be a detailed strike briefing three hours before T-time. Commander Maxwell’s strike planning team should muster in CVIC ASAP. I want all COs to provide my Ops Officer with the line ups.”
Maxwell was on his way out the door when he saw Bronson coming toward him. “Wait a minute,” said Bronson. “I want to talk to you.”
Maxwell continued toward the door. He wasn’t a stickler for military etiquette—except when it was flouted by a jerk like Bronson.
Bronson caught up with him. “Hang on a second, Maxwell.”
“This is a U.S. Navy warship, Mr. Bronson. It’s ‘Commander Maxwell’ to you.”
“Okay, Commander. Weren’t you asking me back in Bahrain whether I knew anything about an American POW that might still be in Iraq?”
Maxwell stopped. “Do you?”
“I did some checking. Called in some markers in Baghdad—human intel sources from Saddam’s old prison system—and had them check the story out.”
Maxwell waited for the rest. He knew that spooks loved to tantalize by withholding information. It made them feel needed, he supposed. “Okay. What did they find out?”
“Exactly what I told you in Bahrain. It’s a myth. They just confirmed it. There is no such prisoner in Iraq.”
“If he’s not in Iraq, where is he then? Iran, or Syria?”
“He’s not anywhere. He doesn’t exist.”
“You mean he was never a prisoner? Or he was, but now he isn’t?”
“Don’t read anything into this, Maxwell. I’m passing along a simple fact. No American prisoner. None. Now that I’ve done you a favor, leave it alone.”
Maxwell wasn’t satisfied, but he could tell by Bronson’s dead-eyed expression that he wasn’t getting anything more.
He turned again for the door. “Thanks for the information.”
Chapter 11 — Strike
Mashmashiyeh, Iran
1310, Wednesday, 17 March
“Game of chess, Navy?”
Rasmussen looked up from his notebook as the visitor walked into the room. He saw that the limp was more pronounced today. The leg must be acting up again.
That was one of the things they had in common—an ejection from a destroyed jet fighter. He had been luckier than Al-Fasr. His ejection seat worked perfectly. He hadn’t broken anything.
As it turned out, of course, it hadn’t been good luck at all. Better for him if the seat hadn’t worked.
“Sure, Colonel. If you feel like being trounced again.” That was the protocol they observed. He addressed his captor as “Colonel,” and he in turn was called “Navy.” His own rank no longer mattered. Deceased officers didn’t have rank.
Al-Fasr lowered himself into the empty chair, keeping his right leg outstretched. He began arranging the chess pieces. “I trust that room service was satisfactory today?”
“Not bad. The champagne was a bit off, rather thin in body, but the caviar was superb.”
This produced the usual subdued smile from Al-Fasr. It was a little game they played, pretending that Rasmussen was not a prisoner but a guest in the Colonel’s sumptuous hotel. The fact was, he ate the same fare as the Sherji—rice, fruit, sometimes fresh fish from the river. Compared to the gruel back in Abu Graib prison, it was haute cuisine.
“Whose turn to open?” asked Al-Fasr.
“Yours. I won the last game.”
“A fluke. I was distracted or I would have beaten you easily.”
They played in silence for a while, each giving up a pair of pawns, neither gaining an advantage. They were closely matched, Al-Fasr being the more aggressive player, but sometimes reckless. Rasmussen preferred the long, slow battles of attrition. He had learned that if Al-Fasr became impatient, which he often did, he would make a mistake.
He wondered why Al-Fasr spent his time this way. He hadn’t revealed much about himself, only that he had attended university in the United States and had taken advanced flight training from the U.S. Air Force. He had been an F-16 pilot in one of the emirate air forces. So how did a man like that become an international fugitive? Why was he living like a goat herder in this mud caked village?
Rasmussen knew better than to ask these questions. That was part of the protocol. Al-Fasr controlled the conversation. If he felt like talking about military matters, or aeronautical subjects, or some abstract philosophical idea, he would ask the questions.
Which suited Rasmussen. At least he wasn’t being interrogated. He’d been through all that during the early days in Baghdad and paid the price of trying to uphold the POW code of conduct. Give them nothing of value. Make them break you.
In the end he had broken, just as they knew he would.
It no longer troubled him as it had in the early days. He had given them no information of military value. Now, even if he could remember classified data, which he couldn’t, it would be useless history. Expired and defunct, like himself.
Al-Fasr seemed distracted. He attacked with his bishop, failing to anticipate the threat from Rasmussen ’s knight. Two moves later, his bishop was gone and so was another pawn.
“You set me up for that.”
“You did it yourself.” Rasmussen removed the pawn.
Al-Fasr shook his head and looked away from the chess board, losing interest in the game. He stared for a moment out the dirt-streaked window of the hut, in the direction of the reed-covered river bank. “Do you have any idea where you are?”
“Not exactly. In the south of Iraq, or maybe it’s Iran.”
“Iraq is an arti
ficial place, constructed by the British and French after World War I. So is Iran, at least down here in the delta. This country is only a quilt work made from an ancient land that belongs to neither of them.”
“What land is that?” Rasmussen tried to conceal his growing curiosity. He kept his eyes on the chess board.
“Do you know about Babylonia? It was here, the land surrounding the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. They called it the cradle of civilization.” At this he let out a dry snicker. He pointed out the window, at the chipped-stucco hut next door. “Hard to believe, no?”
Rasmussen nodded in agreement. He was an engineer, not a scholar of history. Babylonia? He had only a vague idea of what Al-Fasr was talking about.
Al-Fasr went on. “In the second millennium B.C., Babylonia was ruled by Hammurabi. He was an enlightened despot who, among other things, gave his people a code—a legal system that is still reflected in the laws of most advanced countries. But the region fell into chaos, besieged and sacked by other empires. Then came Nebuchadnezzar II, who was not only a military genius but a great builder and restorer. He rebuilt the capitol city of Babylon and restored all the temples and monuments of the land. He ruled for forty-three years, and during that time Babylonia was the flower of the civilized world. But after Nebuchadnezzar’s passing, it happened again. Babylonia was conquered by the Persians. It never regained its independence or its prosperity.”
Rasmussen knew that Al-Fasr was using him as a sounding board. He had been through this more than once. It was Al-Fasr’s way of thinking out loud. “You’ve studied the history of this place.”
Al-Fasr nodded. “In another time, another life, I might have come here as an archeologist and not as a warrior. It would have been a suitable calling for me. Sifting through the detritus of a lost civilization, piecing together what went wrong. Learning how the world’s most advanced culture became one of the most regressive.”
For a while Al-Fasr seemed lost in thought, gazing out the window at the gathering darkness. The shabby huts of Mashmashiyeh looked like gravestones in the twilight. The village was quiet except for the squawking of the night birds down by the river.
He turned to Rasmussen. “So tell me, Navy. What do you think? Why did the Babylonian empire fail?”
Rasmussen didn’t know, but he had learned that such a question required an answer. “Sounds like a leadership problem,” he said. “This guy Nebuchadnezzar, he was a take-charge type of leader, but no one came along after him to carry on. That happens with countries. Babylonia became a country without a leader.”
It was the right answer. Al-Fasr was nodding his head. “For twenty-five hundred years this land was divided, ignored, used by different factions as a hiding place during their stupid religious wars. Then the idiots in Baghdad and Teheran fought over the border for no reason except their own glorious egos.”
A spark was glowing now in Al-Fasr’s eyes. “But I tell you this. No matter what they call it, this will always be Babylon. This is a land of destiny. You can feel it in the ground. Babylon can rise again from this festering swamp into a land of greatness.” As he spoke, Al-Fasr’s voice raised to a feverish pitch. Abruptly he rose to his feet and went to the window. He stood there, gazing into the darkness.
“And how will that happen, Colonel? How will it rise to greatness?”
Al-Fasr continued looking outside. “As you said. It is a matter of leadership.”
“Another Nebuchadnezzar?”
He saw Al-Fasr’s head nod. “Perhaps.”
Rasmussen looked at the chess board again. They would not finish the game, but he didn’t care. He had just gleaned two useful items of information. He knew where they were, give or take a hundred miles. And now he knew why Al-Fasr was there.
One important piece of the puzzle was still missing. Why was he there?
< >
Quebec Station, Persian Gulf
She had been through this—how many times? At least a dozen, but it never got any better. There was something undignified about arriving aboard a ship this way, seated backwards, strapped into a nearly windowless compartment like a hunk of produce, dropping out of the sky onto the hard steel flight deck.
The others in the crew—Tony, the lead cameraman, Jeb and Carl, the audio/visual guys—hated it even more than she did. Tony was hunched forward in a Zen-like trance, muttering some kind of mantra, trying for an out-of-body experience.
She felt the wings of the C-2A Greyhound COD—Carrier Onboard Delivery—rocking in a series of quick corrections. Then the drone of the two turbine engines tapered back to a dull whine. The bottom fell from beneath the COD and—Thunk! —the wheels slammed down on the steel deck. She felt the hook snag a wire and in the next second-and-a-half the big cargo plane lurched to a stop. Tony’s head snapped back with the deceleration, ponytail flailing beneath his baseball cap.
The rest was easy. As the COD taxied to a stop beside the carrier’s island structure, the clamshell doors in the aft fuselage swung open. The cabin filled with the din of turbine noise, the reek of jet fumes.
A man wearing a Mickey Mouse cranial protector and a survival vest stuck his head through the open door. He peered around the cabin. “Miss Phillips? I’m Captain Walsh, the ship’s executive officer. Welcome aboard USS Reagan.”
After unloading and stashing the camera gear, she and her crew found their staterooms. The three guys bunked in a junior officer’s stateroom, while she had her own space in the female officers’ section. Then she found her way to the Public Affairs Office for the compulsory security brief with Lt. Cmdr. Butch Fleur, the ship’s PAO.
She knew the drill. No sightseeing in restricted spaces. No filming of anything unless it was specifically approved. No interviews without a PAO staffer present. No transmission of anything until it had been screened by the PAO.
Orwellian censorship for sure, but she knew better than to bitch about it. This was the Navy and it was their ship. She considered herself lucky. The only other reporters on board the Reagan were a crew from CNN and a couple of syndicated print journalists. Their little clique would have an exclusive on America’s police action in Iran.
Next stop, the officers’ wardroom on the 0-3 level. By now she knew her way around the Reagan pretty well. This was her third assignment during a military operation, plus she’d been aboard the carrier on several occasions as Sam Maxwell’s guest. She even managed to avoid bashing her shins on the knee knockers—the hard steel enclosures positioned at every bulkhead along the passageways.
She looked around the wardroom, didn’t see anyone she recognized, then helped herself to a coffee. At a corner table was a telephone. She took a seat and dialed a number she still remembered.
He answered on the second ring. “I’ll be damned,” said Sam Maxwell. “Claire? Is it really you? How did you. . .”
She laughed. He was always shocked when she showed up like this, without warning, while his ship was at sea. Women weren’t supposed to be that clever.
“Remember our old meeting place?” she said.
“The viewing deck behind the island?
“Vulture’s Row, they call it? Meet me in fifteen minutes?”
“Make it ten.”
< >
It took him five.
The Reagan was plowing into a northerly breeze, leaving in its wake a mile-long ribbon of foam. On either flank cruised the ships of the battle group—the Aegis cruiser Arkansas to the port side, led by a pair of destroyers. To the starboard, two more destroyers preceded the amphibious helicopter carrier Saipan. Behind the Reagan sailed a tanker and a resupply ship. Somewhere ahead, beneath the surface, prowled the attack submarine Santa Monica.
“Hello, Sam.”
A smile spread over his face.
She was wearing the same blue jumpsuit that almost but not quite concealed the curves of her slender shape. Around her throat was the beige silk scarf. Her chestnut hair ruffled in the breeze that billowed around the island superstructure.
He k
new crew members were probably watching from the windowed air ops spaces above them. Let them, he decided. Later he’d remind himself that this was a ship of the line and he was a senior officer and a squadron skipper. Had to set examples and all that.
To hell with examples. He opened his arms and she came to him, pressing herself against him. He kissed her, sensing again the lack of privacy on a carrier at sea. Even though they were shielded from most prying eyes out here on the aft viewing deck, he felt as if they were on display. He still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of seeing the girl he loved on board while he sailed off to war.
“You’re amazing,” he said. “How did you pull this off?”
“I’m a broadcast journalist. This is my job.”
“You fluttered your eyelashes at some Fifth Fleet staff weenie and he gave you the clearance.”
“Not a staff weenie. The Admiral.”
“I rest my case.”
“Aren’t you glad I’m here?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’m very glad you’re here.”
Which was true. He was glad she was there despite the openness of the windy viewing deck and the sailors peering down at them from the glassed compartments in the aft island. The azure Persian sky seemed to cast a spell over them.
She put her arms around him and pressed her head to his chest. “I felt awful when you left me back in Bahrain, Sam. What kind of life is this? Is this the way it’s always going to be?”
“No. Someday I’ll be too old for this job. They’ll give me a desk job on the beach and I won’t be getting yanked out of restaurants to sail off on a carrier.”
“You’ll hate it.”
“Maybe.” And maybe not, he thought. There were times, like back in Bahrain, when he wanted out of the Navy. The separations and hardship and loneliness were cumulative. You could take only so much of it, and then you’d had enough. Sooner or later it would be time to pack it in and stay ashore.
