“My secretary will be glad to arrange connections,” the first secretary offered.
“That won’t be necessary,” Sutherland replied, holding the door for Toni and Mather.
“What was that all about?” Toni said once they were safely outside.
“Two of the most unlikely players in this mess together with Beth. She’s been in this up to her lovely eyebrows for quite a while. Just how and why, I don’t know. It’s about time I found out.”
4:30
P.M.
, Thursday, July 29,
Bangui, Central African Republic
Capt. Lee Harold, Gillespie’s second in command, walked around the Pave Low as a swarm of mechanics raced to put it back together. The helicopter had rolled out the back of the C-17 seven hours earlier and Maintenance was busting its back to unfold the tail, mount the transmission, and bolt on the six rotor blades—no small task as each blade weighed 371 pounds and was attached by eight bolts that required 2,460 pounds of torque to tighten. Normally, it took fourteen to sixteen hours to do the job. Harold checked his watch. Two hours to launch. They weren’t going to make it.
The MH-53 was a superb machine but it was getting cranky in its old age. While the maintenance crews could keep it flying, its reliability was not what it once had been. Consequently, six helicopters were needed to ensure four would reach the target. Not only was the 20th Special Operations Squadron stretched thin, it needed new aircraft. The Air Force simply didn’t have enough to do what its political masters were demanding.
“Fuck,” Harold muttered under his breath. He would have to tell Gillespie the backup helicopter wouldn’t be ready.
Gillespie took the news stoically. “Let me see what Maintenance can do,” he said. He ambled off to build some fires.
“How does he do it?” Harold wondered.
“Do what?” his copilot asked.
Harold was talking about leadership, but like most in the Air Force, wouldn’t be caught dead calling it what it was. “The way he makes things happen. It’s pure ‘paddling duck.’ Calm on the surface, but kicking like hell underneath.”
“Yeah. He’s calm and we’re doing the kicking.”
“It works, doesn’t it?”
While the maintenance crews raced to ready the backup helicopter, Delta Force gathered with the aircrews under camouflage netting and briefed the mission one last time. With thirty minutes to go, the helicopter crews manned their aircraft. Because of their slower speed they would take off first. The two C-130Ps that would refuel the helicopters en route to the target would take off two hours later. The two Combat Talon MC-130Es that would airdrop Delta Force, and then refuel the helicopters on the way out, would take off almost five hours later.
It was as carefully orchestrated as any ballet, and eight hours after Gillespie launched, at exactly 3:20 in the morning, the wrath of U.S. special operations would descend on Wadi Rahad.
The engines of four Pave Lows whined as they spun up and one after another, the rotors started to turn. But the rotors on Lee Harold’s bird did not move. His radio transmission was a crisp, “I got an Engine Failure light.”
“Is the backup good to go?” Gillespie replied. His answer came in the form of six men evacuating Harold’s helicopter and running for the backup that was still surrounded by Maintenance. “Shut ’em down,” Gillespie ordered. Now they had to wait.
“Can we go with three?” Gillespie’s copilot asked.
Gillespie ran the numbers in his head. The hours of planning with Art Rios and Agnes had drilled the answer into his memory. “Negative,” he answered, hating every syllable of that word. Activity swirled around the helicopter as it was made ready for takeoff. Equipment was thrown on board while a fuel truck pumped gas into the empty tanks. They were out of time. He was about to key the SatCom radio and tell the NMCC they were aborting when Harold gave him a thumbs-up. Maintenance had performed a minor miracle. “Start engines,” Gillespie radioed, his voice calm and as relaxed as if it were just a routine training flight.
A few minutes later, the four Pave Lows lifted off and headed to the east. “We got to make up three minutes,” the copilot told Gillespie.
“Piece of cake,” he replied.
6:00
P.M.
, Thursday, July 29,
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon
Grudgingly, Durant gave the big computer-driven wall map high marks: the system was tracking the mission with speed and accuracy. Over the Mediterranean, the B-2 had finished refueling and was heading for the coast of Africa, two hours away from its first target. In central Africa, the four helicopters were approaching their second refueling point where the two C-130Ps would rendezvous for a low-level refueling. The two MC-130 Combat Talons carrying Delta Force would pass the helicopters about the time they hooked up for their last drink of fuel before ingressing to the target.
Art Rios joined Durant and the general. He handed his employer a cup of coffee before turning to the map. He frowned. “It’s an endurance contest for the helicopters, isn’t it?”
“That’s the penalty for going low and slow,” the general replied. “We need new machines. But the crews will make it happen. They always do.”
The communications net in the NMCC picked up the final transmission between Blue Chip, the airborne command post, and the B-2. Even over the encrypted circuits, Jim West’s voice sounded more bored than anything else as he called for the final clearance to proceed with the mission. The general listened to the radio call. “Since we’re in contact,” he explained, “silence on our end construes consent and the controller onboard Blue Chip makes the decision.”
“Striker One,” the controller in the orbiting command post radioed, “no change to your target. Cleared to go. Repeat, you are cleared to go.”
“Copy all,” West replied on a different frequency. “Striker One is cleared onto the target.”
“What happens now?” Durant asked.
“The B-Two stealths up,” the general explained, “retracts its antennas, radar in standby, that sort of thing. It’s a problem because we lose radio contact. We won’t hear from him again until they’re off the target and clear of any threat. So, we wait.”
Two hours later, they monitored the first distress call from Gillespie to the airborne command post.
2:47
A.M.
, Friday, July 30,
Over The Sudan
“As advertised,” West muttered when his electronic threat display came alive. The beam of an S-12 early-warning radar had swept past them. His fingers flew over the data entry panel and he called up their first weapon, a JASSM, a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile with a fifty-mile range. “A nice way to announce we’re in the area, don’t you think?” He hit the enter button and the system took over. Their tactics were totally different from Terrant’s and Holloway’s. Rather than sneaking in unobserved at low level, they were going to stay at altitude and open a corridor to Assam’s underground laboratories. At forty miles, the bomb bay doors snapped open and the missile was launched. Immediately, the doors banged closed. The missile fell away before its rocket motor ignited. As programmed, the B-2 turned away while the missile streaked toward the radar.
The threat display chirped at them. The S-12 had gone into a sector sweep to focus its beam on their section of the sky. “The radar must have gotten a hit on the doors,” Larry Battle, the pilot, complained.
“Probably,” West replied. “But right now, they should have a radar paint on the missile.” He called up the second weapon, a standard 2,000-pound bomb with a tail kit and a guidance head using GPS, or the Global Positioning System based on navigation satellites. Now they had to wait to see if their missile took out the early warning radar. The threat display indicated the S-12 radar was tracking the missile. West slewed his infrared in the direction of the radar site, but the distance was too great to detect anything. “Now,” West-said, as the time-to-go counter for the missile ran down to zero. The infrared screen flared with a bright strobe and the electronic threat display went quiet. “I do believe they had a religious experience,” he muttered.
Then he turned his attention to his next target, the airstrip where four fighters were sitting alert as a point defense for the laboratories. With the S-12 radar and its sophisticated radar detection equipment off the air, he could use the B-2’s synthetic aperture radar. His fingers commanded the targeting system to synchronize the aircraft’s radar and GPS navigation system to the GPS in the guidance head of the bomb. He drove the radar’s cross hairs out to where the target should be and pulled the trigger on his hand controller to the first stop. The radar came alive for less than two seconds and painted the hardened bunker where the fighters were parked. The picture froze on the screen as, the radar returned to standby. West nudged the radar cross hairs directly over the bunker and mashed the trigger to full stop.
Something approaching magic happened. The radar fed the navigation computer a wealth of information about the target, which the computer matched to what the GPS was telling it. The computer then told the bomb’s navigation system where it was, where the target was—according to the radar, how much the bomb’s GPS was in error, and what the bomb’s GPS should read when it reached the target. Just to be sure, Bartle changed course forty degrees and West repeated the process with a second snapshot, refining the target solution down to a few inches.
When they were in range, the bomb bay doors automatically popped open and the second bomb was on its way. They headed for the third target, the air defense command bunker. A bright flash lit the ground 43,000 feet below them. West chanced a look with the infrared. The aircraft bunker had a neat hole in its roof and smoke and flames were belching from its doors. “I’ll be damned,” West muttered. A single aircraft was taking the runway. “We missed one.” The radar site had gotten off a warning before it was destroyed and one fighter had managed to escape.
He concentrated on the command bunker, which was on their nose. The threat display was alive as the defenders brought up every surface-to-air missile system they had. For a moment, he considered launching one or two of their HARMs, short for high speed anti-radiation homing missile. The HARM’S only purpose was to destroy the guidance radar of surface-to-air missiles. He discarded the thought. The HARM’S rocket plume would be visible for miles in the clear desert night. He wasn’t about to take a chance on some gunner or missileer getting lucky with barrage fire and the golden B-B being there for them. Back to the plan. He called up his next set of bombs, 4,800 pound BLU-113s with deep penetrating warheads.
West was into the routine of it and whatever fatigue he felt from the long mission was displaced by pumping adrenaline. He repeated the process and dropped another bomb. Thirty seconds later the command bunker was history and the threat screen went quiet. They had convinced the defenders on the ground that turning off their radars was a very good idea that did wonders for their projected life-spans. With the corridor wide open, they headed for Assam’s laboratories.
While West concentrated on the target, Bartle looked for the one fighter that had gotten airborne. He split his attention between the threat display in front of him and scanning the night sky. “Oh, shit!” he roared. The fighter had flashed by less than fifty feet overhead; “I don’t think he even saw us.”
West concentrated on the radar and laid the cross hairs directly on the main ventilation air shaft. He took a snapshot with the radar, they altered course forty degrees, he took another snapshot, and the next bomb was gone. Then they altered course again and West took a third snapshot of the same target before launching a second bomb.
The first bomb glided toward the air shaft, the guidance head sending commands to the control surfaces on the tail. The bomb made little jerking motions as it corrected its glide path. Finally, it was on the “wire” and headed directly for the GPS coordinates the B-2’s targeting system had fed into the guidance head. It missed its desired impact point by three feet. But that didn’t matter. The bomb punched its own hole through the reinforced concrete, down the side of the air shaft, and penetrated sixty feet before it exploded. The blast ripped open the shaft like a funnel with the basket open to the sky. The next bomb flew down the widened hole and into the laboratory.
The blast effects of a 4,800-pound bomb in an enclosed area are horrific as the explosion bounces back and forth, collapsing support structures, vaporizing anything as soft as human flesh, and sucking up oxygen. What the bomb didn’t destroy, the cave-in buried forever. “Piece of cake,” West announced. “Now where’s that mutha that almost hit us?”
“I don’t think he’s using his radar,” Bartle said.
“It wouldn’t matter if he did,” West said. His fingers flew over the data entry panel, and they headed for Wadi Rahad.
“There’s fuckin’ hydraulic fluid all over the deck,” the flight engineer told Gillespie. “The fuckin’ reservoir feeding the fuckin’ control system has got one hell of a leak.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Not without shutting down and depressurizing the system.”
“How long can we stay airborne?” Gillespie asked.
“About another five minutes at best. Then we ain’t got no more fluid to feed the system.”
It was an easy decision. Without hydraulic fluid, the control systems failed. “Advise Blue Chip we’re landing for repairs,” Gillespie told his copilot. The captain keyed the SatCom radio and relayed the message.
“Can you continue with three?” Blue Chip replied.
“Not unless you want to leave someone behind,” the copilot answered.
“Say time on ground,” Blue Chip asked.
The question was for the flight engineer. Like so many critical things in life, the answer hinged on the capability of a single person, “Thirty minutes, max,” the tech sergeant answered.
The crew was a well-trained team and within thirty seconds, they had called the other helicopters, identified a landing site on their forward looking infrared, and were ready to land. Gillespie circled the landing zone and studied it through his night vision goggles. Then, satisfied it was clear, set the big machine down while Harold circled the area in his Pave Low, sweeping the ground for any possible threat. The other two helicopters settled to earth near Gillespie. Harold counted four shacks as he circled but didn’t see any signs of life. Satisfied they were safe, he landed. His flight engineer scooped up an armful of hydraulic fluid cans and ran for Gillespie’s Pave Low.
Gillespie sat in the cockpit, ready to start the engines at a moment’s notice. “How far out are we?” he asked.
The copilot punched at the navigation computer. “Thirty-four minutes.”
“Do you think anyone heard us?”
“I doubt it.”
But the copilot was wrong. The Sudan’s air defense system may have been in shambles and the people on the ground cowering in fear, but for all its problems, the phone system was still working.
8:01
P.M.
, Thursday, July 29,
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon
The general studied the status boards and the big wall map as they listened to Blue Chip react to Gillespie’s emergency. The status boards flashed with an update: the helicopters were on the ground, thirty-four minutes flying time from the compound. The two Combat Talons were retreating at low level to a safe area where they could hold until a decision was made to continue or abort, and the B-2 was nineteen minutes away from its next target. But the B-2 was still stealthed up as it worked its way through the Sudan’s radar net and into the heart of the country. There was no way they could delay it.
“Not good,” the general muttered. “Damn the Chinese. I’ll never figure out why they upgraded the Sudan’s military. They got some credible SAMs out there.”
“They want the Sudanese angry at the Western powers,” Durant said, “not them. Given China’s population density, an Ebola type weapon would devastate China.”
“This is turning to shit,” the general muttered. “Time to abort.”
“Not yet,” Rios said. “Give it some time.”
The general shook his head. “We can’t delay the B-Two. That means Delta Force loses the element of surprise.”
“But,” Rios persisted, “there’s going to be a lot of confusion on the ground. Maybe we can exploit that.” The general seemed willing to listen and Rios pressed ahead. “You’ve got flexibility out there. Use it.”
“There is no way I’m going to chance losing another B-Two,” the general replied. “He’s hitting his targets as planned and going home.”
Rios wouldn’t let it go. “The B-Two still has two bombs and can loiter for three hours.”
“I’m aborting the rescue,” the general said. He picked up the microphone to radio Blue Chip and issue the command.
3:09
A.M.
, Friday, July 30,
Wadi Rahad, The Sudan
The first telephone call drove a spike of fear into Jamil bin Assam. His laboratories and all the defenses around them had been destroyed. The caller claimed it was a massive attack with intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, weapons of mass destruction, and over a hundred aircraft. The gallant defenders had been totally overwhelmed. The second phone call drove Assam over the edge. Four helicopters were reported to have landed seventy miles to the southwest.
“They are coming after me!” Assam shouted. He ripped off his uniform and pulled on a dirty robe and sandals as a disguise. He gathered up his bodyguard and left for the airstrip a half mile away. Outside, the compound was surrounded by a growing crowd of people waiting for the coming festivities. Assam’s small convoy barreled through the crowd, running over six unfortunates who could not scamper out of the way.
Kamigami shut the compound’s gates as Assam disappeared into the night. He walked calmly across the fresh sand that had been spread to absorb blood and stopped by the iron cage holding Terrant and Holloway. He unclipped the cellular phone from his belt and extended the antenna. He punched in a six-digit code without turning it on and pushed it onto the flat roof of the cage. The homing beacon was on. “What’s happening?” Terrant asked.