Purpose of Evasion (4 page)

“I’m involved in a project with the colonel that might have a connection,” Moncrieff replied, encouraged by the anxious tone he detected. “In brief, you invest little and receive a substantial and immediate return.”

Larkin’s brows went up. “My kind of game. What’s the ante?”

“Bombers,” Moncrieff replied evenly. “Bombers with Pave Tack.”

“Christ,” Larkin said, stunned. “What’s
his
ante?”

“The hostages.”

4

“WHY WOULD WE
give bombers to a madman?” Bill Kiley asked incredulously before Larkin could explain.

Now, stunned by the reply, the DCI stared at the Polaroid of Tom Fitzgerald that he kept amid the top-secret folders on his desk, then went to the window.

The director’s office was in the southeast corner atop the seven-story, 1-million-square-foot headquarters building that looked out over a forested campus.

Bill Kiley loved Mother K, as insiders affectionately called Langley. Every morning he strode through the lobby, pausing at the south wall to ponder the memorial stars engraved in the richly toned Georgia marble. Each honored a CIA operative who had died in the line of duty. Kiley had known them all, in spirit if not in person, starting in Europe during World War II with the OSS; and it was the hallowed presence of these dedicated men and women that sustained him at these times.

“The hostages,” Kiley whispered hoarsely.

“Yes, sir.”

Kiley removed his glasses and cleaned them methodically with a handkerchief, taking the time to compose himself. Hostages had brought down one president and now haunted another, a nagging reminder that CIA’s vast intelligence resources had been beaten by diverse groups of rag-tag zealots: Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Force 17, the Revolutionary Justice Organization, Cells-Omar Mouktar Forces, Lebanese Revolutionary Faction. Each had claimed to have kidnapped at least one hostage. “Bull,” Kiley finally growled. “Qaddafi doesn’t have them.”

“He will.”

“All of them?”

Larkin nodded.

“Fitzgerald too?”

“That’s the deal.”

Kiley’s jaw dropped.

“Moncrieffs already cleared it with Libya and the PLO. The bottom line is the Palestinians get a sanctuary in Libya in exchange for the hostages. Qaddafi turns the hostages over to us in exchange for the bombers.”

“Christ,” Kiley exclaimed, his eyes flashing. “You mean we’ve been chasing all these factions, and Arafat has had the hostages all along?”

“Nidal, sir,” Larkin corrected gently.

“Nidal? How does Moncrieff know that?”

“He mentioned a connection in Beirut, sir.”

The DCI seethed. “Fitzgerald’s people scoured every sewer and rat hole ...” He paused, then chortled, starting to savor the idea. “The Israelis will hate our guts for doing it without them. One problem—how do we know Qaddafi won’t screw us? How do we know he won’t take the bombers and welch on delivering the hostages?”

“Pave Tack is useless without ANITA,” Larkin replied. The acronym stood for alpha-numeric input for target acquisition, a transposition key used to program Pave Tack computers to find and identify targets. “You can’t enter target data into the computer without it. No hostages, no ANITA.”

“Sounds good,” Kiley mused, impressed. “But we’re not talking guns and bullets for the Ayatollah here. A couple of seventy million dollar bombers can’t get lost in OMB’s computer. This won’t mean a hill of beans until we figure out how to deliver and account for them.”

“An air strike is the only way I know, sir.”

The DCI nodded pensively. “Two planes downed over Libya —over the Mediterranean,” he said, quickly seeing the possibilities. “Sixth Fleet could handle the whole thing,” he went on, alluding to carrier-based bombers but a few hundred miles off Libya’s shores.

“At the risk of appearing self-serving, we already have air force personnel in place.”

“Good point. Who do you have in mind?”

“Paul Applegate,” Larkin replied, referring to a longtime air force and Special Forces colleague.

“Applegate,” the DCI echoed, recognizing the name. “Lebanon, three years ago.” Moncrieff had picked up some intelligence on the terrorist group that had bombed the marine barracks in Bei-
rut. Larkin and Applegate had flown an unconventional air strike on their training camps. “You stuck it to those Shiite bastards.”

Larkin nodded, eyes ablaze with the memory.

“What’s Major Applegate up to these days?”

“Military intelligence with Third Air.”

“U.K.?”

Larkin nodded. “I touched base with him before coming over and took the liberty of bringing him up to speed. The major sends his regards and asked me to tell you he’d be more than tickled to take on Qaddafi.”

“Tripoli’s a long haul from Piccadilly.”

“That’s what the air force does, sir,” Larkin said with a little smile. “I realize it’ll be a bitch cutting the navy out of this.”

“We’ll give them their own target,” the DCI said, undaunted. “Air force gets Tripoli; navy gets Benghazi. The place is overrun with terrorist training camps. It’ll take the focus off Tripoli and reinforce the idea that this is nothing more than an antiterrorist strike.”

“A
night
strike,” Larkin quickly added. “We can’t deliver bombers to Qaddafi in broad daylight.”

“No problem. Defense has put billions into night-mission avionics and has never used them. They’ll jump at the chance to show off their hardware.” The DCI paused, his face taut with concern. “You know the president’s attitude toward an air strike.”

Larkin nodded solemnly. “Well, sir, I’m sure he’d approve the raid if he knew the hostages would be—”

“You bet he would,” Kiley interrupted. “But he can’t sign a finding on this one. Arms for hostages doesn’t bend the law, it breaks it in half.”

“How do we explain their release?”

“We claim,” Kiley began, assembling the pieces as he went, “that they had been shrewdly hidden in Tripoli—CIA found and rescued them. The air strike was a diversion to get them out.”

“That’d work,” Larkin said, smiling at his mentor’s facile mind. “Maybe we can take that to the president?”

“And State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, everybody’ll have an opinion,” Kiley grumbled. “Before you know it, Congress and the media will be into it. We get these hostages out, Colonel, nobody will give a damn how we did it. Let’s keep it simple. CIA needs an air strike, CIA provides the president with the incentive to approve it.”

“I understand, sir,” Larkin said dutifully, reading between the lines.

“Considering the attitude of the Chiefs, we better come up with something that’ll get their attention too.”

“I’ll take care of it personally.”

Larkin was on his way to the door when Kiley called out, “Dick?” The colonel turned to see the DCI walking toward him.

“The Company needs this one—
badly
,”
he said.

Larkin nodded grimly.

“They’re torturing him,” the DCI went on, referring to Fitzgerald. An emotional timbre, unusual for Kiley, was reflected in his voice. “God knows what they’re doing to him. I don’t care what it takes.”

“I’ve been proceeding on that basis, sir.”

Larkin left the office, went to an adjacent anteroom, and made three phone calls: the first two—to Major Applegate at 3rd Air Force Headquarters on Mildenhall RAFB in England, and to Moncrieff at Arafat’s villa in Tunis—confirmed that the project had the DCI’s blessing and was operational; the third, to the CIA station chief at the U.S. Consulate in Berlin, laid the groundwork for a plan Larkin had devised to obtain presidential approval for the air strike.

The colonel then drove into the District to a high-rise on Virginia across from George Washington University. He had leased an apartment here years ago after his marriage broke up, and had since lived alone. It was a small, low-maintenance unit that suited his spartan life-style and the transient nature of his work. Among the furnishings were his collection of handguns, a word processor, secure communications equipment, and an exercycle with 9,361 miles on the odometer.

After showering and changing into civilian clothes, he restocked his two-suiter, which was always packed, then drove to Andrews Air Force Base in neighboring Maryland, where he boarded a flight to Germany.

5

THE F-111
was descending over the Suffolk countryside 10 miles north of London shrouded in darkness when Shepherd thumbed the microphone button.

“Four-eight TAC, this is Viper-Two. This is Viper-Two with in-flight emergency. Request immediate CTL.”

“Roger, Viper-Two. Cleared to land on six left,” the supervisor of flying in Lakenheath tower replied. The SOF was always a pilot, the duty rotating daily through the wing roster. “Repeat, six left; straight in; winds are two-four-zero at fifteen knots.”

“That’s a copy, Lakenheath.”

“Update your condition, Viper-Two.”

“Left engine is shut down; utility pump is down; I’ve still got my primary; hydraulic system indicators read seven-six-five and falling.”

“Roger that,” the SOF replied, thinking they might as well have read zero. “Emergency personnel are standing by. I’ll take you through the boldface for BAK-12 when you’re on short final,” he went on, referring to procedures for landing without braking capability.

BAK-12 arresting systems were part of every military runway. They were installed at the approach and departure end overruns; both had to be operating for a runway to be declared open. Like aircraft carriers, the BAK-12 used a cable stretched just above the tarmac to engage an arrester hook and bring the aircraft to a stop.

The F-111 was three miles northeast of Lakenheath when it dropped below the clouds. Shepherd smiled at the sight of the runway lights winking in the mist.

“Coming onto short final, Al,” he said to Brancato, who was slumped in his couch, his head against the canopy. “Al? Al, how many
E
’s
in Beethoven?”

Brancato grunted unintelligibly.

“Come on, Alfredo, don’t die on me now.”

“Viper-Two, we have you on short,” the SOF said over the radio. “Let’s cover the boldface.”

“Roger,” Shepherd replied, coolly.

“Blow in doors closed.”

“Affirm.”

“Wing sweep at sixteen.”

“Sixteen.”

“Emergency extension on gear.”

Shepherd pulled the release. Compressed air from an emergency reservoir charged the system at 3,000 psi, blowing down the nose and main landing gear. His eyes darted to the position indicator lamps, which had just come on, informing him both were down and locked.

“Two greens,” he reported with relief.

“Verify green,” the SOF echoed. “Slats down.”

“Affirm.”

“Flaps down at twenty-five.”

“Flaps down; two-five.”

“Tail hook down.”

Shepherd reached to the yellow and black striped handle in the corner of the instrument panel and pulled hard. The arrester hook blew down at an angle from a fairing beneath the tail, the trailing end hanging several feet lower than the landing gear. Like many military fighters, not only those deployed on carriers, all F-111s had an arrester hook for emergency landings.

His eyes were riveted to the instrumentation now, monitoring angle of attack, sink rate, and air speed, which he kept at 160 knots—30 ks faster than landing with both engines—as the bomber came in at an angle against the blustery crosswinds. The tail hook touched down first; it dragged along the concrete, sending a rooster tail of blue-purple titanium sparks shooting into the darkness from below the F-111’s empennage.

Shepherd set the main gear of the 50,000-pound bomber on the ground with featherlike delicacy, then dropped the nose. The plane began rocketing brakeless down the 10,000-foot runway at 160 knots. It had traveled about 1,000 feet when in an eyeblink—bump-bump-wham!—the tires rolled over the inch-thick, braided steel cable and the arrester hook snagged it. A screaming whine rose from pits on either side of the runway as the cable
unspooled from immense reels connected to a centrifugal clutch that absorbed the kinetic energy and brought the plane to a stop.

Ambulances and emergency fire fighting equipment were already racing toward it, their roof flashers sending splashes of colored light across the runway, their headlights serving to illuminate the area as they encircled the bomber.

A flight surgeon and several nurses clambered aboard a hydraulic platform with their equipment. It reached cockpit level just as Shepherd popped the canopies and released Brancato’s flight harness; he was pale and unconscious.

The surgeon dove beneath the blood-spattered Plexiglas, and cut away the shoulder of his flight suit, exposing the wound. “Prepare a bag of LRs and give me two grams of Monocid,” he said; then, taking the syringe, he shot the antibiotic into Brancato’s thigh.

Shepherd assisted in lifting him from the flight couch onto a gurney on the platform. It began descending immediately. One of the nurses wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Brancato’s bicep. The other hung a 1,000 cc bag of Lactated Ringers on the gurney, uncapped the IV needle, and slipped it into a vein in his forearm.

The platform bottomed out with a gentle thump.

In one continuous motion, they rolled the gurney off the edge, across the tarmac, and into an ambulance.

Shepherd watched it speed off into the darkness; then he glanced apprehensively at the technicians swarming over his plane.

“Major Shepherd?” a voice called out.

He turned to see two men approaching; one was a master sergeant he correctly assumed was a crew chief; the other, a broad-shouldered fellow with a friendly face and lumbering stride, was an officer.

“We’ll have her patched and on the flight line ASAP, sir,” the crew chief offered. “Long as you’re okay . . .”

“I’m fine. Thanks. I’d like to call my wife.”

“There’s no need for concern, Major,” the officer replied, taking charge. “Andrews has been notified of your status. I’m sure she’s been informed,” he went on in a high-pitched voice that was poorly matched to his big frame and gregarious demeanor; then he shook
Shepherd’s hand and introduced himself. “Major Applegate, military intelligence. I’ll be debriefing you.”

THAT SAME AFTERNOON
in Washington, D.C., Stephanie Shepherd hurried across Independence Avenue toward the Rayburn Office Building, a banal, gargantuan edifice opposite the Capitol. She had trouble finding a parking place and was late.

Representative James Gutherie’s office was on the third floor. A nine-term congressman and ranking member of the House Intelligence and Oversight committees, he made two stops on his way to the Hill every morning: the first at Georgetown Rehabilitation Center to see his wife; the second at Holy Trinity R.C. Church on 35th Street to pray for her recovery.

Both avid skiers, the Gutheries first met on a chairlift at Killington. Twenty-five years later, the sport that had brought them together tore them apart. It was a low-speed fall, and there wasn’t a scratch on her, but his wife had been in a coma ever since.

The congressman had been a failed Catholic for years. The day the doctors said her recovery was in God’s hands, Gutherie went back to church; the day the polls revealed he had fallen behind his opponent, he began praying for
two
miracles.

Stephanie hurried from the elevator and down the endless corridors, long auburn hair flying behind her, turning several male heads in the process, which pleased her.

The congressman’s suite was a beehive. Phones rang incessantly. Harried staffers crisscrossed the reception area. The door to Gutherie’s office opened and a towering, ruggedly handsome man came toward her.

“Stephanie,” Jim Gutherie said, smiling. He hugged her as if they’d been close friends for years, letting his head fill with her perfume.

“Mr. Congressman, good to see you,” she replied stiffly as she disengaged. “Sorry I’m late.”

“That’s what you said the last time,” he teased.

“That’s not what I hoped you’d remember about me.” She had interviewed him during his reelection campaign two years ago, and was feeling more surprised that he had remembered than embarrassed.

“What’s somebody who can’t make deadlines doing as a reporter, anyway?”

“Beats me. The pay’s an insult, the pressure ages you, and congressmen only remember your faults.”

Gutherie broke into a hearty chuckle and showed her into his office. His opponent had been using his work on the Oversight Committee to imply he was antidefense and the congressman wanted to remind his 20,000-plus constituents who lived and worked at Andrews of his votes for military pay hikes and defense appropriations. They were halfway through the interview when his secretary reminded him of an appointment. “VFW luncheon,” he said to Stephanie with a facetious scowl. “Wouldn’t want to miss one of those.”

“It’s going to take a lot more than that this time, isn’t it?” Stephanie declared, suddenly serious, detecting he had lost his taste for battle.

“Tough one,” Gutherie admitted, lowering his guard. “I’ll have my secretary get in touch to reschedule.” He placed a hand on Stephanie’s shoulder and guided her to the door. “Maybe we can do it over lunch?” he suggested, his palm sliding to the small of her back, remaining longer than she thought appropriate.

“I’d love to, Mr. Congressman,” she said diplomatically. “But this girl hasn’t had lunch since she turned thirty and started splitting her jeans.”

Twenty minutes later Stephanie was in her brown Dodge station wagon, heading back to Andrews on I-95, when the WPTZ disc jockey interrupted Bruce Springsteen in midlyric for a news bulletin.

“Harassment of a United States Air Force F-111 bomber by Soviet interceptors resulted in a midair collision over the North Atlantic this morning,” the newsreader said. “Fortunately, both planes remained airworthy, and the F-111, on a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Lakenheath, England, safely reached its destination. However, one member of the two-man crew was seriously injured. Their names are being withheld pending notification of next of kin.”

Stephanie’s heart raced. The media was always more efficient than the military in these matters and thoughtfully withheld the names of those involved; but the next of kin always knew. Now there were two families ridden with anxiety, instead of one. She
rolled down the window, inhaled the cold air, and stepped on the gas.

SHEPHERD
and Major Applegate drove the five miles from Lakenheath to 3rd Air Force Headquarters on Mildenhall RAFB, where the latter’s office was located.

“You did a hell of a job, Major,” Applegate said, after Shepherd finished briefing him on the encounter with the Soviet Forgers. “One question. How’re you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” Shepherd grunted, reflecting sadly on Brancato. “I wish I could’ve splashed the bastard.”

“Long time since combat—”

“
Too
long,” Shepherd replied, thinking he was one of the lucky ones; he’d seen combat, used his skills. How many highly trained and eager warriors never had? How many feared their careers would pass without a war to fight? Sure, he was proud to serve his country, to preserve peace and deter aggression; but down deep, it was far more satisfying to tackle it head on.

“The point is, the Forty-eighth’s been on alert for the last week,” Applegate said.

Shepherd looked at him, curiosity building.

“Rumor control says it’s Libya.”

“Qaddafi’s got it coming.”

“You’re on the mission roster, Major,” Applegate said. Then, testing him, because he had to know, he prompted, “Of course, after this, no one would fault you for wanting out.”

“All I want is a chance to do my job, sir,” Shepherd declared, his tone sharpening.

“Thought you might say that,” Applegate mused, concealing that he had his own reasons for wanting Shepherd to remain on the mission roster.

“Hard to do without a wizzo.”

“Maybe I can help,” Applegate offered, feigning compassion. “Turns out you and Captain Foster are in the same boat. His right-seater bit the dust a couple of days ago—literally. Broke an ankle sliding into home against the Eighty-first TAC. Hell of a game.”

“Well, if you need a good first baseman . . .” Shepherd offered, matching his grin.

“We need pilots,” Applegate replied, getting back to business. “We’re cutting orders to get Foster a new wizzo. We can cut yours at the same time. Be a hell of a lot easier to do now. Once you report to a new CO and his crew chief gets his paws on your one-eleven . . . Think about it. Okay?”

“I have, sir,” Shepherd said. “Count me in.”

“Good,” Applegate enthused, shaking Shepherd’s hand. He waited until he had left the office and was well down the corridor before lifting the phone.

THE MILITARY TRANSPORT
that had left Andrews that afternoon for Berlin was in a commercial air corridor high over the North Atlantic when Larkin was summoned to the cockpit.

“Call for you, sir,” the flight engineer said, handing him the receiver.

“Colonel Larkin speaking.”

“Colonel?” his secretary said. “I have Major Applegate on satellite relay.”

“Dick? It’s A.G.,” Applegate said when the connection was made. “I got us a couple of one-elevens.”

“Way to go,” Larkin enthused.

“All we need is an order to deliver them.”

“I’m placing it tonight,” Larkin said, ending the call. “You still there?” he prompted his secretary.

“Yes. I have him on the other line,” she replied, having anticipated the colonel’s request.

Bill Kiley was in his limousine on his way to a meeting in the Pentagon, when Larkin’s secretary put the call through to his mobile phone; a fully secured cellular terminal, the STU-III/Dynasec was impervious to eavesdropping or intercept.

“Good work,” the DCI said when briefed on the bombers. “You talk to Moncrieff about payment?”

“Yes, sir,” Larkin replied, pleased by the praise. “He’s making the arrangements as we speak.”