You must let me hear from you NOW so I’ll know you’re safe.
All my love,
C.
P.S. Yemen sucks.
When she was finished, she picked up the phone and asked the switchboard operator to connect her to the reservations office of Yemenia, the state-owned airline.
The agent spoke excellent English. She asked which flight Claire had in mind.
“San‘a, the next available.”
The voices crackled over the speaker.
“I hear you, Leroi. I’m alive. Please don’t go away.”
“B.J.! I can’t believe it. You’re down there. Are you okay?”
“I’m hungry, thirsty, tired, and I think I’ve got a broken rib. Maybe diarrhea. Other than that, I’m just fine.”
“Sit tight, kid. We’re gonna get you out of there.”
Al-Fasr pushed the STOP button on the digital recorder. He advanced the recording to the next radio exchange. He listened again while the woman pilot authenticated her identity, then reported the grid coordinates of her hiding place.
Hearing the recorded voices, Al-Fasr found himself thinking about the woman pilot. What did she look like? Was she truly a female, with the softness and scent of a woman? Or was she one of those sinewy unisex creatures, like those in the American television shows?
Even with his background — his education and westernized attitudes — such a thing was anathema to Al-Fasr’s Arab soul. Women! They had no place on the field of battle. It ran against the laws of nature. Tomorrow, when they had captured the woman, he would make an example of her.
For a moment he allowed himself to fantasize about the female pilot. The thought gave him an instant arousal. Yes, it would be appropriate to use her for his own pleasure. He would make her whimper and beg for mercy like the whore that she was.
When he was finished, he would throw her to his troops. The spoils of war.
He would transmit an image of the violated woman warrior back to the Americans. They would learn in the most basic fashion what it meant when they sent their daughters to war.
He forced himself to return his thoughts to the recorded radio exchange. Time was growing short. As he listened, he studied the captured grid map on his desk. It was still a puzzle. Instead of using the actual latitude and longitude of her position, the pilot seemed to be referencing the coordinates to the grid map. But the letters of the grid were based on some sort of key, which could be changed daily and which the pilots must have committed to memory.
It had been good fortune that they captured the handheld radios and the grid maps from the F-14 crew. But it was incredibly stupid, Al-Fasr thought as the anger rose in him, that the goat-brained platoon commander had allowed his gunner to kill the pilots. It was typical of these unthinking primitives. Not only could the captured pilots have revealed the key to the grid map, they could have been pumped for other secrets. Ultimately they could be used as bargaining tools.
Or bait.
Al-Fasr had ordered the platoon commander — a Yemeni named Arif, who came from the north country — and his gunner to be shot in full view of the assembled garrison. Not so much as punishment but as an example.
It had made the correct impression. An hour later the search squad in the Dauphin helicopter located the downed Hornet pilot. Instead of shooting to kill, they had pursued the pilot. Then they lost her in the darkness.
Which was just as well for now. So long as the Americans believed the woman pilot was alive and free on Yemeni soil, they would come for her.
Al-Fasr picked up one of the captured survival radios, turning it over in his hands, examining it from all sides. A useful piece of equipment, even more advanced than the older models he had carried when he flew F-16s in the emirate air force. And the handheld GPS. Such exotic technology in the hands of the Navy pilots. It had done them no good.
His MiG pilots, of course, didn’t have such things. There was no need. Search and rescue was not a clause in their contract. He thought again of Novotny and Rittmann, his own downed airmen. Witnesses had observed Novotny’s low-flying jet taking an air-to-air missile strike. It had gone instantly into the ground. There was no chance that Novotny had survived.
Rittmann was another matter. It would be convenient if he were also dead. The impertinent German had outlived his usefulness. The troops who found the wreckage of his MiG reported that the ejection seat was missing. Perhaps he had survived.
Too bad, mused Al-Fasr. If he turned up alive, he would have to be dealt with.
Boyce was the last to come into the briefing room. He slammed the door behind him, then barked an order. “Everyone sit down.”
The air wing briefing compartment was only half the size of the flag intel space. Gritti squeezed into the end chair, while Maxwell, Guido Vitale, Spook Morse, and Gritti’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hewlitt, assembled themselves in a semicircle around the illuminated map table.
Boyce looked grim and haggard. He perched on the edge of the steel admin desk and said, “We just got some bad news. About an hour ago the CAP leader had another radio exchange with Yankee Two. She reported that she had witnessed our two Tomcat crewmen being shot and killed.”
A heavy silence fell over the room.
Maxwell could see that Boyce was taking it hard. Burner Crump, skipper of the Tomcatters and a much-decorated fighter pilot, was an old buddy of Boyce’s. Crump’s backseater was Willie Martinez, a wisecracking flight officer from southern California, one of the best RIOs in the business.
“What happened?” asked Maxwell. “Were they evading?”
“No details,” said Boyce. “She verified it when he asked her again, and then the CAP lead told her to shut down and save her battery. She’s going to need it for the SAR.”
“How do we know she’s for real?” asked Gritti. “Maybe they’ve got her radio.”
“The first guy to talk to her, Leroi Jones on the CAP station, authenticated. She had the right password for the day. Leroi knows her pretty well, and he asked her some personal stuff, hometown, academy class, stuff like that. She’s the real thing.”
“Maybe she’s being coerced,” said Colonel Hewlitt. “What if it’s a trap?”
“Low probability. It’s part of our training that if you’re being manipulated, you give bogus authentication. Leroi was convinced that she was in the clear.”
“What’s her condition? Is she injured?”
“Nothing serious. Scared shitless, but she says she can run and hide.”
Gritti said, “That’s a tough one about your pilots, gentlemen. I’m sorry. But that simplifies our recovery problem. I understand she has a GPS and a grid map?”
“She gave her coordinates, which are X-Y coded off the grid map,” said Boyce. He leaned over the table and slid his finger in a circle over the illuminated map. “She’s right in here. High, rugged terrain. We gave instructions for her to find a decent landing zone for the pickup. When we contact her again at oh-six-hundred tomorrow, she’s supposed to pass the exact LZ location. If we can’t communicate, we go to the original grid coordinates and look for her.”
“What kind of team are we sending in?” asked Maxwell.
Gritti answered. “It’s what the marines call a TRAP team — Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel. After you guys have your air defense suppression package on station, my team launches from the Saipan in a pair of CH-53 Super Stallions.”
“How many marines are we talking about?”
“I’m planning a Delta-size TRAP package. Fifty, plus four corpsmen.”