Shadows of War

by Robert Gandt

  “A little over a hundred. Bird Dog says he only has about fifty in Chicago.”

  Gritti frowned. It wasn’t enough. It meant they’d killed nearly a thousand Sherji. Or else several hundred were still on the loose, running somewhere.

  Where?

  Gritti was getting a bad feeling. The assault had gone too well. There had been too little resistance. The exodus of Sherji from their positions around Mashmashiyeh was supposed to come up the river, into the—

  “Grits, this is Foxhound Twenty-one.” Foxhound was the call sign of one of the Whisky Cobras sweeping the river between Gritti and Mashmashiyeh. “I’ve got some kind of small vehicle with a gunner coming up the river road, headed your way. Am I cleared to interdict him?”

  Gritti thought for a second. Something in his gut was sending him a message. “Negative, Foxhound. Keep him tagged. I’m on my way.”

  < >

  Al-Fasr jammed down hard on the accelerator, no longer concerned about sliding off the road. He had a good look at the helicopter through a break in the tree line. It had the slim, menacing profile of a gunship. A Cobra, which meant it was equipped with a rotary cannon and Hellfire missiles.

  The Land Rover burst into an open space, a gap of several vehicle lengths between sheltering trees. Al-Fasr saw the helicopter swivel and point its nose toward them. It had a clear shot at them.

  It didn’t fire.

  He could see the two crewmen—the pilot in the elevated back cockpit, the gunner in front. They were watching him.

  The Sherji atop the Land Rover was swinging the machine gun toward the helicopter. The other was setting up an RPG—rocket propelled grenade launcher.

  “Don’t fire,” said Al-Fasr. “Not yet.”

  The helicopter wasn’t shooting, just keeping them in their sights. If the Sherji tried to fire an RPG or used the puny little 7.62 machine gun on the Land Rover, the Cobra would turn them into shredded meat.

  They were toying with them. Playing some kind of cat and mouse game, not shooting, not letting him go.

  If he could reach the village ahead, he would find cover. It was no more than a kilometer or two. He could meld into the warren of huts and ancient houses, find a path through the reeds, disappear in the trackless marshes.

  The river made a bend to the right. For several hundred yards the Land Rover crashed through the canopy of low trees. Al-Fasr got only glimpses of the helicopter as it trailed them.

  His internal alert system was shouting a steady warning. The danger level was swelling like a gathering storm. Why was the helicopter shadowing them? It was as if they were herding them, like a dog driving cattle.

  To where?

  Then he saw it.

  Another helicopter. Al-Fasr recognized it—a UH-1W, the modernized Huey flown by the U.S. Marines. It sat in a clearing, it blades still turning. Deployed in a semi-circle in front of it were a dozen troops.

  Waiting for him.

  Al-Fasr wrenched the Land Rover to the right, up the bank of the river. The front wheels dug into the soft earth, stalled with the wheels churning mud. Abruptly the four-wheel drive found traction and motored up and over the embankment. He crashed through a thicket of reeds and vines, into a shallow ditch and up the opposite side.

  The Land Rover burst into the clear. Ahead lay a brush-covered expanse of a hundred meters, then another stand of trees, more reeds and brush. Beyond the trees Al-Fasr could see the brown stucco of huts and scruffy buildings.

  The village. Safety. All he had to do was—

  Brrrrraaaaap! The earth erupted in a geyser of dirt twenty meters ahead of the Land Rover. Even with his impaired hearing, Al-Fasr recognized the unmistakable deep-throated burp of the Gatling gun.

  The Cobra again. It could have killed them a single burst, he realized. It was a warning shot. They wanted him to surrender.

  They wanted him alive.

  Al-Fasr yanked the steering wheel hard over, throwing the Land Rover into a skid. A shower of dirt and rocks flew up from the wheels.

  “Shoot!” he yelled at the Sherji. “Shoot the helicopter.”

  He launched himself from the vehicle, hitting the ground on his shoulder and hip, rolling over and jumping to his feet. As he ran for the thicket, he heard the chatter of the 7.62 machine gun on the Land Rover. The Sherji were firing on the helicopter.

  The burst lasted less than three seconds before it was drowned out by the hellish din of the Cobra’s rotary cannon.

  Al-Fasr didn’t look back. The sound of cannon fire abruptly stopped, and he knew how the one-sided exchange had gone. His Sherji had been chopped to pieces by the Cobra’s gun, but it bought him time. Maybe in the debris and chaos of the battle, the helo crew hadn’t seen him.

  He kept running. Twenty meters away lay the edge of the thicket. He would find cover, hide, make his way to the village. Escape to the marshes.

  He was almost to the edge of the thicket when a blast of downward air kicked up the dirt and rocks around him, almost blowing him over. He heard the beat of helicopter blades directly over him.

  He was still running when something heavy—he thought it was the helicopter—hit him from above, driving him headfirst into the dirt.

  Al-Fasr lay face down, stunned, the breath driven from his lungs. He wheezed, gasped for breath. Something—whatever had fallen on him—was still on him.

  He felt the weight lift from him. He was aware of boots crunching the dirt next to his face.

  He rolled to his side and gazed up at a soldier in camouflage battle dress—the one who had dropped from the helicopter. A few meters away, the helicopter was touching down, kicking up more eddies of dirt and dry brush. More soldiers were scrambling out.

  The soldier knelt and removed Al-Fasr’s SIG Sauer pistol. He gave him a quick pat down, taking the double-edged Denckler fighting knife from its scabbard.

  The soldiers from the helicopter walked up to them. A man with wire-rimmed glasses said, “Hell of a jump, Corporal. That gomer thought he was home free until you fell on him like a ton of cowshit.”

  Al-Fasr wheezed and sat up. Thirty meters away, wisps of smoke wafted up from the shattered Land Rover. He could see the shredded bodies of the two Sherji sprawled over the top. Steam was wafting from their riddled corpses.

  The man in the wire-rimmed glasses wore small black eagles on his collar. A colonel, probably the commanding officer of the assault unit. He had the lined face of a man who had spent much of his career in the field. Standing next to him was the sergeant who had jumped from the helicopter. He was a heavy-set young man with a soft, angelic face.

  The colonel seized Al-Fasr’s collar in both hands and yanked him to his feet. For a long moment he fixed him with his penetrating brown eyes. “You look just like your picture, except for the dirty face.”

  “Who are you?” said Al-Fasr.

  “The name is Gritti. Colonel Gus Gritti. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m the guy you surrounded for three days in Yemen. You killed a dozen of my Marines.”

  Al-Fasr nodded. “It was your fault. You should have surrendered.”

  “I’m a Marine. Surrendering isn’t one of the things we’re good at.”

  “You should thank me for not killing you when I had the chance.”

  Gritti’s face remained frozen. Al-Fasr sensed what was coming, but he was too late.

  “Here’s your thanks, asshole.”

  The blow came from behind Gritti’s shoulder, gathering energy as he unleashed all the fury inside him. Gritti’s fist caught him on the cheek bone, snapping his head back like a pendulum.

  Al-Fasr toppled backwards, landing spread-eagled at the feet of the sergeant who had captured him.

  Gritti was standing over him, massaging his right fist, his chest heaving as if he’d just run a hundred yards.

  “Are you okay, Colonel?” said the sergeant.

  “Me? Never felt better in my life, son.”

 
Chapter 17 — The Prize

  Western Iran, 28,000 feet

  0920, Thursday, 18 March

  Right on time.

  Maxwell saw the relief CAP sliding toward him from the southwest. In the distance they looked like ephemeral objects, the two Hornets slim and short-winged, gnats against the hazy Middle Eastern sky. The Tomcats stood out in contrast, massive and formidable, their folded-back delta shapes making them look like objects from space.

  “Gipper One-one, Gipper Two-one and company are on station. You’re off duty, Skipper.”

  Maxwell recognized the voice of Bullet Alexander, his XO. “Gipper One-one has you in sight. It’s your show now.”

  The ground battle was almost over. Alexander’s CAP fighters were there to discourage any more Iranian attempts to intercept the strike package as it mopped up the targets on the ground. A remote possibility, thought Maxwell. Even if the Iranians could get any more of their decrepit Tomcats airborne, they probably weren’t dumb enough to challenge the American fighters.

  Thirty-one thousand feet below, Maxwell could see the veil of smoke drifting over the marshes and villages. Silhouetted against the smoke were the dark shadows of the CH-53Es lifting Gritti’s Marines out of Iran.

  He wondered how the assault went. Did they really wipe out the Bu Hasa Brigade? Did they get the key leadership?

  Did they get Al-Fasr?

  It was too much to hope for. In the war on terrorism, the U.S. military had been efficient in destroying the enemy’s bases and training camps, but the most wanted enemies—Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Jamal Al-Fasr—managed to slip through their fingers. They were hard to catch, harder to kill.

  Before returning to the Reagan, Maxwell led his flight to the tanker, a KC-10 on station over the northern edge of the Persian Gulf. After taking on two thousand pounds of fuel each, they made a long descent to the marshal point—the holding station at twenty thousand feet, fifty miles from the Reagan.

  They spent less than ten minutes at marshal before CATCC—Carrier Air Traffic Control—called. “Your signal Charlie, Gipper One-one.”

  A classic clear weather recovery. Maxwell led his flight of four around the back side of the left-hand holding pattern and started his descent. He leveled off at eight hundred feet and continued his left turn behind the ship. His flight of four Roadrunners sizzled past the starboard side of the USS Reagan in a smart right echelon.

  Passing the bow, Maxwell broke hard to the left, grunting against the four-G pull, slowing the Hornet to pattern speed. Abeam the LSO platform he turned, extending the gear and flaps. Descending, turning across the white wake of the USS Reagan as he rolled onto final, he picked up the shimmering yellow “ball,” the yellow optical glide slope indicator mounted on a lens at the left edge of the landing deck.

  “Three-oh-one, Rhino ball, four-point-four,” he called, telling the LSO—Landing Signal Officer—that he had the ball in sight and that his fuel remaining totaled 4400 pounds. “Rhino” was the call to distinguish the Super Hornet from its smaller Hornet ancestor.

  “Roger, ball,” came the voice of Pearly Gates, the VFA-36 squadron LSO.

  Landing a jet fighter aboard an aircraft carrier—an act Maxwell had performed over five hundred times—was never routine. It was a delicately balanced maneuver requiring minute applications of stick and throttle, backed up by the watchful eye of the LSO.

  “A lii—iitle pow-werrr,” called Pearly in his most soothing LSO’s sugar talk.

  Maxwell squeaked on a tiny increment of throttle, steadying the Hornet’s descent toward the deck. The yellow ball stayed fixed between the two rows of green datum lights—precisely on glide path. The gray mass of the USS Reagan swelled in his windscreen.

  While he kept his eyes fixed on the lens at the left edge of the deck, he saw in his peripheral vision the landing deck center line, the jutting island structure to the right, the tiny stick figures of the LSOs on the port deck watching him. The blunt, unforgiving ramp—the aft end of the flight deck—skimmed fourteen feet beneath his wheels.

  The deck swelled to meet him.

  Whump. He shoved the throttles up, just in case the hook missed a wire. Then he felt the familiar lurch into the straps. A number three wire, he knew. The target.

  As the Hornet lurched to a stop on the deck, he pulled the throttles back. Following the Yellowshirt’s signals, he raised the tailhook, then powered forward out of the wires and clear of the landing deck. Another Hornet—his wingman, B.J. Johnson—was in the groove right behind him. He taxied to his parking spot forward of the island, then shut down the engines on signal from Martinez, the nineteen-year-old enlisted plane captain. Martinez climbed up the boarding ladder to help Maxwell unstrap.

  “Message from CAG, Skipper,” said Martinez over the whine of jet noise from the flight deck.

  He handed Martinez his helmet and canvas navigation bag. “What message?”

  “He wants you in the Air Wing office ASAP, sir. He says don’t stop to drink, talk, or pee.”

  Maxwell nodded. No surprise. Boyce had been on the hot seat while Maxwell was leading the strike. He wanted to get even.

  < >

  “Why didn’t you shoot the sonofabitch?”

  Boyce had a cigar clenched in his teeth. They were alone in the air wing office.

  “There was no need to,” said Maxwell. “We had the Iranian Tomcats neutralized. The trick was to make sure they understood it.”

  Boyce gave him that squint-eyed look Maxwell had learned to recognize. “Even though the admiral gave you a direct order to splash him?”

  Maxwell felt a flash of irritation. He was still wearing his torso harness, sweat-stained from the four-hour mission. He was tired, thirsty, and in no mood for this. “You said you assigned me to the strike lead job because you trusted me to make judgment calls. Well, damn it, CAG, I made one. In my judgment, the mission was better served by not killing the Iranians. If you think I was wrong, then you can fire me.”

  A grin spread over Boyce’s face. “Hey, that’s good. That’s exactly what I want you to say when the admiral gets around to reaming your ass out.” He removed the cigar and studied it for a second. “For the record, you handled the intercept exactly the way I expected you to. You may consider yourself summarily disciplined for disobeying orders, and commended for doing a shit hot job. Go get a coffee and talk to the intel debriefers. Then you and I are going for a ride.”

  Boyce never stopped surprising him. “I just had a ride.”

  “A helicopter ride. You can sit back and enjoy the view. We’re going to the Saipan.”

  < >

  USS Saipan

  From a cabin window in the HH-60, Maxwell watched the helicopter make its approach to the Saipan’s deck. Like all fighter pilots, Maxwell distrusted the conglomeration of components that kept a helicopter aloft. There was something unnatural about the whirling, thumping dynamics of rotary-wing aircraft.

  USS Saipan looked like a classic straight-deck WWII carrier. The Tarawa class LHA assault ship had an 820 foot flight deck with nine helicopter landing spots and two aircraft elevators to the hangar deck. Saipan could haul an entire MEU—over 1500 Marines—plus nearly a thousand crew. Its air group included twenty-four assault helicopters, half a dozen Cobra gunships, four Iroquois “Super Hueys,” and a detachment of six AV-8B Harrier jets.

  The Seahawk thumped down on the Saipan’s deck. Boyce and Maxwell clambered out and were greeted by a young Marine in flight deck gear who led them to an open door in the island. Maxwell instinctively ducked under the still-rotating blades of the helo even though they were a good ten feet above his head.

  Inside the passageway, they stopped and removed their cranial protectors and float coats. Maxwell was still in his sweaty flight suit, while Boyce wore his usual attire of service khakis and beat up leather flight jacket.

  “Colonel Gritti is waiting for you in the SCIF, sir,” said the Marine, a first lieutenant. SCIF was the acronym for Special Compartmentalized Informat
ion Facility—a tightly guarded compartment on the warship where the most classified business was conducted.

  They wound through a series of passageways and ladders, into the bowels of the ship, to the end of a passageway. They came to a door with two sentries posted outside.

  A voice from an invisible speaker said, “Put your ID cards in the tray.”

  They did. Half a minute passed while a video camera observed them. Boyce shuffled his feet and glowered at the unblinking eye of the camera.

  Finally a buzzer sounded and they heard the sound of the electronic latches releasing. The door swung open.

  Gus Gritti stood in the open doorway. “Welcome to the Saipan, gentlemen. You should feel honored. Not many squids get invited out here to Marine Corps country.”

  Boyce was gazing around at the array of consoles and monitors. “What do you guys do down here? Some kind of secret Marine rituals? Orgies, human sacrifices, stuff like that?”

  “You’ll see. Follow me.”

  He led them through another door, to a smaller space guarded by two more Marines armed with M16A2 combat rifles.

  One of the guards opened the door. Maxwell stepped into the room, blinking in the glare of the overhead fluorescent lights.

  Then he saw the man seated in the steel chair. Maxwell felt a current run through him. In a hundred bad dreams he had seen that face.

  “Gentlemen,” said Gritti, “allow me to introduce our guest, Col. Jamal Al-Fasr.”

  Boyce removed the cigar from his mouth. “Well, I’ll be damned. You got the sonofabitch.”

  Al-Fasr gazed back at them with a sober, defiant expression.

  He hadn’t changed much, thought Maxwell. His hair was streaked gray, and his face had a more gaunt appearance. But the bearing was the same—the look of the supremely confident fighter pilot.

  One wrist was cuffed to the steel chair. His face had a dark-colored abrasion on one cheek. He wore tailored battle dress utilities with a patch of dried blood on one sleeve.

  “We’ve already met,” said Maxwell.

  “Have we?” said Al-Fasr. “Where?”