Woods hated the idea of walking across the floor of a valley with no trees, no rocks to speak of, and some unknown number of people looking for them. But Wink was right. If they stayed where they were, they would certainly be caught. His desire for self-destruction had faded as quickly as it had come.
They headed across the small valley floor to the hill north of them. Their intention was less to ease their chance of getting picked up than to find a place to hide. Elevation seemed to indicate safety for some reason.
Woods thought back to his SERE school days. They had thrown him out into the California desert at Warner Springs in northern San Diego County, and made him — and forty or fifty others — survive with nothing. No food, no shelter, and no chance of being rescued. They taught you to eat prickly pear cacti, and live in the desert, and where to find water in dried-up riverbeds. They taught you to move at night and stay hidden during the day. They taught you to be able to resist torture and how to be an effective prisoner of war. He had really hoped never to have to use that part of his training.
Woods whispered to Wink over his shoulder. “Didn’t the parachutes blow this way?”
“Yeah,” Wink said quietly, looking around. “But they won’t expect us to go in the same direction.”
They walked as quickly as they could, Wink wincing on every other step, and crossed the dusty valley floor to the distant hill where they hoped to find a place to hide out until whenever they were supposed to be picked up. Woods didn’t like not knowing the plan. As impulsive as he could be, he always operated on a plan, even if it had been his plan only for a few minutes.
They reached the base of the hill and Woods stopped to look at it. His eyes ran over the entire visible face of the hill, checking for anything unusual, or any signs of life. He saw nothing. He took off his helmet and breathed the cool air deeply. “You think the ZSU was here all the time?” he asked Wink. “Think the intel people just missed it?”
“They weren’t on the satellite photos. We looked at them ourselves.”
“They may have just been camouflaged.”
“No way. They weren’t there.”
“That means they were brought in last night.”
“Right.”
Woods put his skull cap in his survival vest to keep from dropping it. “That means they knew we were coming.”
“How would they know that?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“What about the SA-6?”
“We never saw an SA-6, did we? Just the radar.”
That had never even occurred to Wink. “A radar but no SAMs? Why?”
“Cheaper. And to drive us down. We’d have been above the ZSU’s range otherwise. If we see a SAM radar, we stay low and fly right into the heart of the ZSU envelope.”
“That’s pretty shitty,” Wink said, grimacing. His right knee was swelling up from the impact with the ground.
“Come on,” Woods urged. They started up the hill. It was steeper than they had expected and there were large boulders over the entire face that made an assent in the dark very tricky. Woods pulled himself through a crevice between two rocks and stood up straight on the uphill side.
They both glanced over their shoulders toward Alamut, which remained silhouetted against the night sky. “Looks intact.” Woods said, disheartened. He continued to climb the rocks heading for the top. The hill turned out to be more of a mountain than a hill. It was twice as high as Woods had thought when he’d seen it from across the valley floor. He looked back down from where they had come. Where they had been standing, Woods saw flashlights. He squinted. He could see several men standing around examining the ground for tracks. “They’re onto us.”
“Shit,” Wink said.
“We gotta find us a hiding place right now,” Woods said, surveying the surrounding area quickly. There were hundreds of boulders, but not one tree or large bush. Just hard ground, and harder rocks.
“At least they don’t have dogs,” Wink said. “At least I hope they don’t.”
Woods stood looking at a rock formation above them. He stepped toward it tentatively. “This way,” he directed.
Wink limped along behind him. They knew if they didn’t find some place to hide in the next five minutes they’d be dead in ten.
39
Big tossed his helmet bag in the ready room chair and searched the room quickly for Bark. He saw him standing by the SDO desk on the phone.
“Big!” Bark said, covering the receiver with his hand, still listening to the telephone. “What happened?”
“ZSUs were waiting for us.”
“E-2 says Trey and Wink got out.”
“Yes, sir. Two good chutes. I talked to them on the ground.”
“Admiral wants to see you. Sedge, you come too.”
Sedge threw his helmet bag onto the chair next to Big’s. They both had sweat running down their chests and their hair was matted and sweat-filled. They had never been through anything like what they had just experienced, the best and worst of flying. Bark finished his phone call and motioned them to follow him out the back door of the ready room, turning left to walk up the starboard side of the carrier to the blue tile — Admiral’s country.
Bark banged hard on the steel-reinforced door into SUPPLOT — Supplemental Plot — where the Admiral operated and monitored what was going on. A Petty Officer opened the door and ushered them in. The three Jolly Rogers stood next to each other behind Admiral Sweat, who was watching his three large projection screens showing the entire Middle East and every airplane, ship, and submarine in the area. The Air Wing Commander was next to him.
The Admiral had dark circles under his eyes and had clearly been up all night. He had gotten as little sleep as anyone on the ship over the last three days. The entire operation and all the implications were on his shoulders. He turned around in his high-backed leather chair and studied the three of them. He was in no mood for small talk. What was supposed to be an easy mission had turned into a possible POW problem, the worst possible result. “What the hell happened?” he demanded.
“The low level and the approach to the target were no problem,” Big said. “No hostile forces, no AAA, and no SAMs. The airplanes were sweet, although there was more drag with the GBU-28 than we—”
“Tell me about the shoot-down.”
“Yes, sir. When we broke across the Iranian border everything was fine. We were going through the valleys. As we got closer, and pulled up over a hill, we started getting tickled by an SA-6 radar—”
“I didn’t think Iran had SA-6s.”
“We didn’t either. Woods was in the lead, and did what I would have done. We were to do a gradual climb to a high-altitude drop — above any ground fire threat. But if we had pulled up high and cruised in, we’d have been in the heart of the SA-6 envelope. So we stayed low and did a pop-up mid-altitude attack. We looked for the laser designator from the ground, but he wasn’t there. We did it ourselves.” Sedge picked up the story.
“And just kind of did the best we could at aiming, did our own laser,” Sedge said awkwardly.
Big continued. “The SA-6 radar was on us, but no missile. We were releasing our bomb, heading back down to get out of the SAM radar. All of a sudden we got lit up by a ZSU radar. They tore into Trey. His wing folded over and his tail came off. Burst into flames and headed down to the desert floor. They jumped. The ZSU then tried for us and got three feet of our left wing, but we made it out. We raised Trey and Wink on the radio when they were on the ground. They’re okay, Admiral.”
“How come we didn’t know they had ZSUs protecting this fortress?” he asked of no one in particular. “Did the satellite imagery show anything?”