Within minutes he had his reply when he heard a voice shouting for the “muthafuckin’ guard.” It was Macon Jefferson, the skinny black kid from Cleveland who had pretzellike qualities and a street-bred contempt for authority.
“Jefferson, I’ll make it right when we get out of here,” Leason promised himself.
The guards quickly threw Jefferson headfirst into the Box. He held his body rigid, making them think it was a tight fit. Finally they got his feet in and slammed the door. His head was resting against thewater pipe, and within minutes his two-word message, IN OK, had been relayed to Leason. Jefferson drew his legs up and started to squirm, twisting around. When he had his head against the door he felt for the nail that covered the peephole that had been bored out by previous occupants of the Box. Finally he had the nail out and a view of the basement.
The guards, he saw, had Nesbit sitting on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, ankles bound together, his hands behind his back. Jefferson could see the legs of a third man — Mokhtari, judging by the highly polished brown boots. For a few moments Jefferson could not tell what the guard at Nesbit’s back was doing. Actually the guard was retying the rope around the sergeant’s wrists. He took another length of rope and looped it around Nesbit’s elbows, then pulled the rope, drawing Nesbit’s elbows together behind his back. When the sergeant screamed the guard pulled the rope again, drawing Nesbit’s elbows closer together. And the sergeant screamed again.
“You have lied,” Mokharti said. “You were a command post controller at Ras Assanya, not a security policeman.” The guard worked the rope, drawing Nesbit’s elbows still closer. “I guarantee you will tell us what we want but only after you’ve been punished for your lying.” The commandant then left the basement, leaving the guards to their work.
One guard held Nesbit’s head down while the other cinched the rope up, working it until the elbows were almost touching. Then he tied the rope off, making sure the knot would not slip. The other guard let go of the sergeant’s head and threw a rope over a hook in the ceiling. They tied one end of the rope to Nesbit’s wrists and pulled on the other end, lifting his arms up behind him, his screams ricocheting off the walls, filling the room with his pain. Jefferson saw Nesbit’s shoulders dislocate. When Nesbit’s buttocks were barely touching the floor, they tied the rope to a ring in the wall and walked out, leaving the sergeant sitting on the floor in his agony.
Jefferson fought to control his urge to beat against the door. Instead he threw himself against the walls of the box, twisting and turning around. He laid his cheek against the pipe and tapped out what he had seen, all the while listening to Nesbit, whose sounds had been reduced to a whimper.
“I hear you’ve never been on a drop before, Colonel?” Dunkin said, leading Stansell, Locke and Bryant around the C-130s as the Rangers marshaled for the airdrop. “You oughtta’ go along and watch them go out the back. Quite a show. We’ll drop a stick of twenty on each pass — ten out’a each door — then come around and drop the second stick.”
“You going to come as close as you did last time?” Locke said, thinking about the dummy load Dunkin had almost dropped on the helicopter.
“Naw, I only do that with canister drops. Never for the real thing.” “How’s this drop shaping up?” Stansell asked.
“No problems. Looks like it’s gonna be a Hollywood jump.” No combat equipment, he meant.
Stansell scanned the ramp, annoyed he hadn’t noted it sooner … The Rangers were going about the loading routine with measured precision, but he didn’t see a single Ranger waddling around with a rucksack slung in front under his reserve chute, bouncing against his knees as he walked, or a weapons case strapped to his side. “They’re only wearing K-Pots,” he said, referring to the Kevlar helmet the Army used. He looked for the battalion C.O., Lieutenant Colonel Ham Gregory. “We’re not on a picnic here.”
“Too late to do anything about it now,” Dunkin said, checking his watch. “We crank engines in nine minutes.”
Stansell headed for the flight deck of Dunkin’s Hercules, his right ear itching for real.
Now it was coming together, Cunningham could feel it. Hoskins, the brigadier general running the OSI, had just left after assuring him that no foreign agents were watching Task Force Alpha at Nellis. Mado had taken Stansell’s operations plan and added to it, working in an AWACS for command and control, and had a bureaucratic polish on it, thereby providing Stansell with what he needed to create an alternate for Delta Force. Cunningham had told Mado to give the ops plan a name — OPORD WARLORD — Operation Order WARLORD. Let everyone think we’re playing some goddamn shogunate epic out at Red Flag, Cunningham thought. It all added to Stansell’s cover as a Red Flag warlord.
The intercom buzzed and Cunningham’s secretary told him that Colonel Ben Yuriden, the Israeli air attaché, had arrived. Cunningham had first met Yuriden when the Israelis were getting their F-16s. Even then the general could sense the commitment in the man, and Yuriden had proved it in the raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad in June of 1981, as well as in the air battles over the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon in ‘82 where the Israeli Air Force had downed over thirty MiGs, without a single loss. Cunningham made a mental promise to ask someday if there was any truth to the rumor that after the F-16 raid on the PLOs’ headquarters in Tunisia, the PLO had directly threatened Yuriden’s family. According to the legend that surrounded Yuriden, his reply had been to fly a lone F-16 against the group that had issued the threat and put a single bomb in the backyard of the PLO commander — when no one was home. The PLO got the message about Israeli intelligence, bombing accuracy — and Ben Yuriden.
“Ben, thanks for coming.” Cunningham stuck his hand out, welcoming the middle-aged man that entered his office. Average looking in the extreme, only his intense brown eyes marked him.
“General, why do I think you’re calling in … what do your people say? … a marker?” Yuriden had a knack for cutting to the quick.
So did Cunningham. “I need a favor — a very unofficial one. It’s something I’ll probably never be able to repay.” The colonel said nothing, gave no indication. Cunningham thought, I’d hate to play poker with you. “One of my officers is loose in Iran and I need to get a message to him. Can your people do that for me?” Cunningham calculated that WARLORD’S best chance for success hinged on having trucks or buses in position to move the POWs to the airfield. Task Force Alpha could do everything else, even fly in their own transportation, but vehicles in place were their best option. The CIA had told him they wouldn’t do it, so maybe Bill Carroll could, providing he could contact him.
“Captain William Carroll,” Yuriden said. “He’s not in Iran right now but, I hear, with the Kurds in Iraq — Jalali tribe. Yes, we can do that. Perhaps we can do something else to help?”
Cunningham kept a straight face. An opportunity he hadn’t counted on had just presented itself … The Israelis had the best secret intelligence service in the Middle East, and he had just been offered their help. He knew that making an unauthorized contact with the Mossad could stir up a hornet’s nest, but he’d take the chance. “I need about ten trucks or buses—”