The general’s restless mind also poked and stirred through impressions from earlier in the day. What he had seen before the football game indicated that Stansell was making Task Force Alpha a reality. The beer bust after the game was proof that morale was now high and Alpha was a close-knit team. Leachmeyer wouldn’t much like hearing any of that. And then a thought snapped into place, developed and complete, like so much of what he did: He could use Rahimi to scatter a hint of suspicion. Hadn’t he told Stansell to get rid of her? And she was a civilian of Iranian descent — a built-in potential compromise of Task Force Alpha …
But play this one carefully, he warned himself. Cunningham was definitely watching him. Well, if anyone asked why Stansell had kept her on, he would just point out the obvious — they were attracted to each other. Even Barbara had mentioned it to him. Barbara, definite possibilities there — but not for the little colonel.
“Wine in the spa?” Barbara was asking.
His pleasure was interrupted by Gillian Locke coming through the gate, bundled against the cool night air, her pregnancy barely showing. “Jack just called,” she said. “He’s still at the office and was wondering if Dewa was available. He said something about needing her magic fingers on the computer.”
“Duty calls,” Dewa sighed but welcomed the chance to leave Barbara and Mado alone. “Colonel, I hate to ask, but my car is acting up …” There was nothing wrong with her car.
“Sure,” Stansell said, “I’ll drive.”
“And I’ll get another bottle of wine,” Barbara said, leaving with Stansell and Dewa. The wait before she came back seemed endless for Mado. Finally she came through the gate, locking it behind her. Mado had trouble controlling his breathing when she reappeared in a robe and promptly shed it.
“The only way to use a spa,” she announced, and stepped into the hot water. “Strip, general, and join me. I love massages,” she said, as he joined her. “Most of all, I love to give them …”
Dewa gasped when she saw her office. Jack had tacked a new map to the wall and the floor was littered with books and crumpled paper. Cabinet drawers were pulled out and her Top Secret safe was wide open, obviously riffled through at will. She took her responsibility for safeguarding classified information very seriously. Trimler was asleep on the couch, and Jack looked haggard and needed a shave. The two had been cooped up in the office since Friday night.
“I think we got it,” Jack mumbled, heading for the coffee pot. “Bob”—he gestured at the sleeping Trimler—“says his people need to be inserted before the attack. We plan to parachute them in early—”
“Mado considered that when he originally laid the plan out,” Stansell interrupted. “He tossed it because a paradrop is too easily observed and would warn the Iranians and blow the whole operation. We need another way to get them in.”
“Not if we do it right. Bob tells me the Rangers train using MT-1X parachutes. That’s the rectangular mattresslike chute that’s really a non-rigid airfoil. Colonel, the chute has a forward speed of twenty-five miles an hour and if we drop them high enough with a good tail wind, they can stay airborne for an hour and cover some territory. If we drop ‘em at night, nobody will see them and people make piss-poor radar returns.”
“Okay, so we drop them far away from the prison. But how do we get them inside Iranian airspace at altitude and undetected in the first place?”
“We piggyback on an airliner.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Easier to show you. Dewa, we’ve got all the Iranian airways plotted on that chart. Can you tap some data-base that give us their domestic flight schedules? We need a flight that takes off out of Rezaiyeh at night—” he tapped the airport that Carroll had landed at seventeen days before—“and heads south or southeast.”
Dewa went to work and twenty minutes later had the information they wanted. “There’s an F-27 that takes off for Bandar Abbas in the late evening out of Rezaiyeh every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.”
“Okay. We intercept that F-27 when it climbs out of Rezaiyeh and piggyback on him. When we’re about here”—Jack pointed to a spot on the airway between Rezaiyeh and Bandar Abbas—“our team bails out. A C-130 will have no trouble matching the speed and altitude of an F-27 and then we drop off when the F-27 descends to land and low level it out of Iran. No way the Iranian radar net will be able to break us out from the airliner.”
He measured distances off the map. “Except the closest that airway comes to Kermanshah is seventy-six nautical miles to the northeast.” He woke Trimler. “Bob, take a look at this.”
The sleepy captain studied the map for a moment. “All you need is a fifty-knot wind out of the northeast.” He went back to sleep.
“Jack, the prevailing winds at altitude over Iran this time of year are mostly out of the west,” Stansell said. “Dewa, can you access the computer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research?”
“Where’s it located and what kind of computer?”
“On a mesa overlooking Boulder. They’ve got a Cray.”
She shot him a look. “The general I work for at the Special Activities Center is going to have fits when he gets the bill for this. I mean, someone has to pay for all this computer time, and I’m using the Center’s user code. Do you have any idea what it costs to use a Cray for one second? Never mind, don’t ask.
“Okay, I’m in,” she said, “I’m talking to an IBM that talks to the Cray. What do you need?”
“The NCAR models weather patterns, and their predictions are remarkably accurate, especially within twenty-four hours. See what winds they’re predicting over Iran at the five hundred millibar level, that’s roughly eighteen thousand feet, for, say, ten days from now.”
Dewa’s fingers played over the keyboard. Then they waited. Less than a minute later a map flashed on her screen. Stansell and Locke looked over her shoulders. A high-pressure area was predicted to move over the eastern Mediterranean and the jet stream would bend south over Iran. A steep pressure gradient was predicted to build with it and cause a strong flow of winds out of the north for about seventy-two hours.
“Close enough” Jack said. “Print that puppy out. Northerly winds put us in the ball park.”
“Okay, now how do we get our plane hooked up with the Iran airliner?” Stansell said.
“Hold on,” Dewa said. “I saw some message traffic the other day about a joint Turkish-American air-defense exercise starting next week using AWACS and EC-130s.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “I’m going to talk to someone in the Watch Center in the Pentagon.” Five minutes later she had an answer. “Cunningham moved a scheduled exercise up two weeks and it kicks off Monday. They’ll be operating in the tri-border area of Turkey, Iran and Iraq.”
“That cagey son of a bitch,” Stansell said.
“You figure he did that deliberately?” Dewa asked, and saw the answer vivid and clear on Stansell’s face.
CHAPTER 25
Mary Hauser was standing in front of Mokhtari’s desk, focusing on him. He was not looking at her but toward the corner of the room, behind her. Her eyes followed his gaze and she could feel the bile in her stomach rise. The man was sitting in the corner, clothes in a pile at his feet, staring at the floor. He did not look up when he heard her gasp.
The commandant asked his first question, the start of the routine she knew too well — questions, beatings, strippings … “What equipment did you use at Ras Assanya to kill our pilots?”
For a moment her spirit blazed and she almost said, The equipment that killed your pilots were the checklists they used to preflight their own aircraft. That gave them the confidence to think they were ready for a fight … She knew the consequences of saying that was sitting there in the corner … “I used an AN slash TPS dash fifty-nine system—”