Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 05 (31 page)

 
          
Wohl
had picked the men personally for this patrol, so he really was not looking
into each individual’s face as he went down the line just before boarding the
chopper—he could usually recognize each man by his build or choice of weapons
or voice or attitude. He came to the last and most senior man in his squad, the
“wheel,” who would coordinate the flight crew’s activities with the ground
team.
Monroe
had his balaclava on, shielding his face
against the freezerlike chill of the hangar. “Ready to do it tonight,
Monroe
?” he asked him. No response, just a
thumbs-up and a rather nervous shuffling of the feet. Wohl looked and saw the
mans right finger extended out of his mitten, covering the trigger guard of his
suppressed IAI Uzi .45 submachine gun—this bad boy, he thought, was ready to
go...

 
          
..
. but unfortunately, he wasn’t
going
to go! “You are one stupid son of a bitch, Briggs,” Gunnery Sergeant Chris Wohl
said in a low voice. “You are just too stupid for words. Did you really think I
wasn’t going to notice you on my aircraft?”

 
          
Hal
Briggs pulled off his balaclava. “How’d you know it was me, Gunny? You didn’t
even look at my face or my eyes.”

 
          
“You’re
the only one who always sticks his trigger finger outside your mitten and
covers the trigger guard when he gets nervous,” Wohl said. “I noticed it the
first mission we flew. Now, what the hell are you doing out here? I thought the
flight doc ordered another week of bed rest.”

 
          
“I’m
sick of bed rest,” Briggs said. “I’m fine. I’m ready to go.”

           
“The doc didn’t sign you off yet.”

           
“Fuck the flight surgeon, Gunny,”
Briggs said. “I’m ready to go on this patrol—hell, I’ve
got
to go on this patrol or I’ll go nuts.”

      
     
“You were ordered to stay in bed, sir,”
Wohl said. “The doc ordered it, and I ordered it. Sick or not, sir, I’m going
to kick your ass if you don’t start obeying orders.”

           
“You can do an operational
evaluation on me,” Briggs suggested. “Plenty of room in the Pave Hammer.
Besides,
Monroe
can’t fly tonight—he’s got a cold or a
sinus infection or something.”

 
          
“Bullshit,”
Wohl said. “Stop treating me like your senile old aunt baby-sitting you when
you want to sneak out to the drive-in, Briggs. You wanna override doctor’s
orders and go on a patrol, just come out and say it.”

 
          
“I’m
saying it already, Wohl,” Briggs said. “I want to go.”

           
“Disapproved,” Wohl said quickly.
“You look OK to me, but I did talk to the doc today—he said he found blood on a
towel in your room. You been hiding shit from the flight doc, Hal?”

           
“Dr. Sabin checks the towels in my
damned room?” Briggs exclaimed angrily. “I want him to stay the hell out of my
room.”

 
          
“Did
you or didn’t you?”

 
          
Briggs
didn’t reply. Instead, he asked, “How do
you
feel, Gunny?”

           
“I feel
fine.”       .

 
          
“You
sure?”

 
          
“Stick
your tongue up my ass and take my temperature if you really care,” the Marine
said irritably. “Otherwise, get out of my face.” “Why didn’t you get hit, Wohl?
We were standing side by side, less than an arm’s length away from each other.
Three guys went down when that antiaircraft artillery site opened up on us—two
guys on one side of you, then me on the other side of you. You’re sitting in
the middle and don’t get a scratch. Why the hell not?”

 
          
“Because
a Marine sucks in a triple-A and spits out fire, Briggs,” Wohl said with a
perfectly serious expression. “We eat barbed wire and piss napalm.”

 
          
“Yeah,
yeah, hoo-rah and all that jarhead shit.”

 
          
“It
ain’t jarhead shit, Briggs,” Wohl said earnestly. “I don’t know why I didn’t
get hit, Briggs. Maybe I’ll get it on this trip—would that make you happy,
Briggs?”

 
          
“C’mon,
Gunny, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just bored and ready to get my ass in the
air again, and I can’t believe I got hit by the golden BB. I’m too young and
too good-looking to get nailed by a triple-A site older than my uncle. ...”

 
          
“I’ll
tell you what I believe, Briggs: I truly believe I won’t get hit because I’m a
U.S. Marine. I truly believe I’m too tough and too strong and too dumb to get
hit by a little Iranian Zeus-23/4.”

 
          
“Give
me a break, Chris ...”

 
          
“I’m
serious as a stock market crash, Hal,” Wohl said. “You see, you’re smart, a
real
college boy, not a
correspondence-course college boy like me. You knew it was a ZSU-23/4, knew
about how deadly it is to low-flying aircraft that stray within lethal range.
.. hell, you probably know its rate of fire, its reliability, its crew
complement, its maintenance procedures.”

           
“Yeah, I do. So?”

 
          
“So
I’m not being critical, Briggs, but maybe you got tagged because you
believed
you’d get tagged. You thought
it was perfectly logical and understandable and proper that if we come across a
Zeus-23 that’s not supposed to be there, you’d get hit by a ricochet. I, on the
other hand, believe that only lily-livered pussy-whipped, pudd-pounding,
tired-ass, numb-nut legs—or any
officer
—are
weak enough to be put down by something as low-tech as a Zeus-23.”

           
“What about Barnes and Halmar?”

 
          
“They
got it because they were sitting next to
you”

 
          
“Gimme
a break, Gunny.”

 
          
“The
point is, Briggs, I did not
allow
myself to die. I’d allow myself to die rescuing our shipmates, die with one or
two fellow buddies on my shoulders, but not die by a lousy piece-of-shit
Iranian ack-ack gun. And if it doesn’t kill me, it makes me stronger.” Wohl
paused, shrugged, then added with a faint smile, “Or it could’ve been the
nonstop praying I’d been doing, and the extra thin-line Kevlar jacket I was
wearing that night.

 
          
“Now,
stop screwing around and go get
Monroe
out here so we can get this show on the
road. You want to help, go monitor the situation display in the command center.
Just don’t let the flight doc see you.”

 
          
Monroe
wasn’t too far away—he’d told Briggs that it would never work, so he’d been
standing by, ready to go—and soon he was aboard the CV-22 Pave Hammer
tilt-rotor and the rescue mission was under way. Again, Briggs was left behind.

 
          
Dammit,
he thought, it wasn’t fair! Just because he didn’t snarl and growl like a bitch
in heat like all these other borrowed Marines, he had to sit on his ass and get
his room searched by the flight surgeon without his knowledge!

 
          
After
returning his prized Uzi and its spare magazines to the armory, Briggs checked
in with the command center. Nothing would be happening for at least twenty-five
minutes until the CV-22 went feet-dry. Last mission, they hadn’t made it that
far—an antiaircraft artillery site on Tumb as Sughrd, or Lesser Tumb Island,
had opened fire on them as they passed nearby, and they’d been hit by a
halfsecond burst. The CV-22 had sustained minor damage; three crewmen had been
wounded by flying shrapnel, including Briggs.

 
          
This
time, with a little luck, Madcap Magician was going all the way into the claws
of the beast: Bandar Abbas, the largest military complex in
Iran
and one of the largest in the
Middle East
. Intelligence had suggested that the
survivors of the
Valley Mistress
might have been taken to Suru prison. They were going to check out the prison’s
security and try to find any weaknesses, in case they decided they had to break
in; then they would check the safe areas.

 
          
Like
all areas of every country in which they operated, Madcap Magician had a series
of safe areas and escape-and-evasion plans formulated that every crewman was
required to memorize before each mission. During the infiltration, every crew
member was kept apprised of the team’s present position, their heading, and
speed, so in case the aircraft was forced down, every man knew where he was and
which way to proceed to the nearest safe area. At specific times for each area,
a survivor would make his way as carefully as he could to a contact point,
where—with a little luck—a rescuer would be there to find him.

 
          
But
every day that went by lessened the chance of a successful rescue. The Iranian
army, the Revolutionary Guards, reserves, and Basij militias were everywhere,
near every city, town, highway, road, railroad, bridge, and river, looking for
infiltrators. A guy on the run couldn’t hold up for very long even if his
health was perfect—if he was injured, as a result of an escape or fight, he’d
be in bad shape.

 
          
He’d
lost Colonel Paul White and ten of his best men, and he hadn’t even gotten a
chance to lead them yet. . . .

1 Lafayette square,
Washington
,
D.C.

THAT SAME TIME

 
          
The
gentleman being escorted by the tuxedo-dressed bellman through the
cherry-paneled corridors of the luxurious Hay-Adams Hotel in
Washington
already had his jolly, glad-handed face on
when he entered the small, secluded dining room. His contact and another man,
probably an assistant or aide, were already waiting for him. The double doors
were closed behind him; the warm room enveloped him like a calfskin glove.
Nothing like this in
Tehran
these days, he thought. “Ah, my friend Robert, it is good to be here
with ...” But his politically practiced visage changed abruptly when the man in
the room turned to him.

 
          
“Mr.
Sahin, please come in,” Philip Freeman, the President’s National Security
Advisor, said. It was obvious that his presence was a complete shock to Sahin.
He extended a hand in greeting, but Philip Freeman did not accept it. Then
Sahin looked for a chair and did not find one. It was obvious this was not
going to be a civil sociable meeting.

 
          
Businessman
and professor Tahir Sahin was one of a rare and unusual breed, vital to
governments all over the world—a well-spoken, well-traveled, educated man
welcomed and employed by all sides of a dispute. A son of a wealthy landowner
in eastern Turkey, Sahin’s Muslim family had escorted and guarded the Ayatollah
Khomeini during his exile to
Iraq
via Turkey in 1963. A young Tahir Sahin had
then accompanied Khomeini to the holy Shi’ite city of
Najaf
in
Iraq
and spent several years with him, acting as
interpreter and bodyguard.

 
          
Sahin
had seen firsthand the transformation of Khomeini and his vision of a worldwide
Islamic revolution, and in time Sahin had become infused with much of the same
burning passion as Khomeini. When Khomeini had been deported from
Iraq
and moved to
France
in 1978, Sahin had returned to his native
land and become instrumental in spreading the word about Khomeinis impending
revolution to
Turkey
and everywhere else he traveled in his business. When Khomeini had made
his triumphant return to
Iran
and established his Islamic republic, Sahin
had been an honored guest many times. With his Turkish passport and Iranian
identity papers, signed by Khomeini himself, Sahin could travel anywhere in the
world with complete safety and security.