“A bad mistake, Rupe.” Dewa wanted to touch his hand. “That curse doesn’t mean anything to us, but to an Iranian …”
“Yeah. They went crazy. One threw me down and sat on my chest, the other grabbed a bayonet and started to saw on my right ear. I was bleeding and screaming like a stuck pig. Anyway, Byers and Wehr were hiding in a shelled-out bunker about thirty feet away, no one else around. They came and beat hell out of the two guys doing the number on my ear, then dragged me to a boat we’d used for laying mines around the base, and Byers managed to sneak us out, heading up north instead of south. It worked.”
“Why did they take such a big chance to save you?” Dewa had read the debrief of Byers and Wehr and knew the answer.
“I asked Byers the same question. He mumbled something about it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Real original.”
“Listen carefully now.” She started the tape. They stood in front of the TV and watched the scene play out again.
Mallard’s voice could barely be heard as Locke’s F-4 surged into the picture and the Hercules turned twenty degrees to the left. “Rog. Check turns only. Don’t do anything stupid. Seven minutes out.” Dewa stopped the tape.
“Did Mallard do the right thing?” Stansell nodded yes. “And Jack?” Again, Stansell nodded, this time understanding the point. Puff One-Four had crashed because the pilot, under the pressure of the moment, had made a bad decision and did the wrong thing. It was simple enough to understand, but until Dewa had led him to the truth through his own emotional wreckage, he had not seen it.
“Rupe, you’ve got to put this, like some other things, behind you and do what seems the right thing at the time. No guarantees in this business. We get rewards later, we pay the consequences now.” She forced a smile. “End of lecture, Colonel.” And tried not to look at the scar where his ear used to be.
CHAPTER 31
Stansell stood outside the door leading into the main briefing room in building 201, fists clenched. Dewa was sitting in the front row against the wall with Locke and Bryant, and Stansell kept glancing at her back. Task Force Alpha entered in groups, finding seats in clumps, sitting in silence. The C-130 crews came in first, led by Duck Mallard and his ungainly navigator Drunkin Dunkin. They were followed by Gregory and his officers and platoon sergeants. Then the three F-111 crews straggled in and found seats away from Von Drexler. Finally, the F-15 pilots came in and sat near the C-130 crews. Stansell nodded at Pullman, who was standing with Kamigami just inside the door. “Let’s do it.”
“Room, ten-hut.”
Everyone stood as Stansell marched down the aisle and climbed the steps to the stage. “Seats, please.” He waited while they shuffled back into their seats. For an instant he stopped breathing when the rear doors opened and Cunningham and Mado slipped into the room. Pullman was about to call the room to attention again but Cunningham cut him off with a short chopping motion as he sat down in a seat at the rear, across the aisle from Pullman and Kamigami.
“Yesterday we took our first loss,” Stansell began. The lights went dim and a slide of the burning wreckage of the C-130 flashed on the left-hand screen. “We need to know what went wrong so we can continue and not repeat our mistakes … This happened because we were not acting as a team and not doing what we trained to do. The F-15s were suckered into leaving the C-130s unprotected, allowing a lone F-4 to jump the 130s. Listen to this.” He played the tape, letting them hear his comments and the radio transmissions of Snake and the pilot who was leading the F-4s before he hit the pause button. “The F-4 lead’s concern about the ROE marks him as a disciplined pro.” He restarted the VCR. Most of the audience could not clearly see the TV screen but they could all hear the audio. Stansell stopped the tape right after Mallard’s comments about not doing anything stupid and replayed it.
“Puff One-Four crashed because the pilot tried to take evasive maneuvers too low to the ground. The Accident Board will probably find pilot error the primary cause, but this is not any one person’s fault. The blame belongs to a lot of us, and it starts with me.” Heavy silence in the auditorium.
Snake Houserman was slumped in his seat and refused to look at the screen. “All for a damn training exercise,” he said in a voice loud enough to carry over the silence.
Cunningham heard Snake’s comment and stood up, pointing at Pullman. He only said one word.
“Now.”
Most of the room heard it and turned to its source. The general had filled that simple single word with the presence of command. Pullman and Kamigami shot to their feet and Pullman bellowed for the room to come to attention.
All but Snake Houserman snapped to their feet. He slumped lower in his seat, still stung by Stansell’s words. “Stand up, asshole,” Lydia Kowalski said. He stood while Cunningham took the stage.
“This is not routine training,” he began, keeping them at attention. “Task Force Alpha was created at the direction of the President as part of the effort to rescue the POWs being held in Iran. Originally your purpose was to serve as a cover operation for the actual rescue team. But events have a way of taking unpredictable turns — you are now being considered by the President to mount the rescue. You are scheduled for an exercise tomorrow. The President will be here to watch you and find out for himself if you are, as someone has told him, the second team. Or”—again he packed a single word with special resources—“if you are the team that will get the execute order.”
He turned to Stansell. “Colonel, if Task Force Alpha is going to rescue the POWs, it’s got to be perfect tomorrow. And no security leaks.” He left the stage, walked up the aisle and exited the room.
“I want it,” Kamigami said in his soft voice.
“We’ll go with the original plan and drop the Rangers in right after the F-111 s hit the walls,” Mado said. Stansell didn’t move from the large-scale wall map in Dewa’s office. “It’s more spectacular and will impress the President,” he added.
“That’s just an option now,” Stansell argued. “The Rangers have got to be on the ground and in place if they’re to exploit the confusion right after the bombs knock holes in the walls.”
Mado walked over to the colonel and stood beside him. “You may be right, but we both know we’re obliged to make this look extra good for the boss — ring the bells, all the good stuff, if he’s going to take up our option.”
“Leachmeyer’s going to be here,” Stansell reminded him. “He’ll spot what’s wrong and tell the President. The Rangers have got to be on the ground early.”
Mado, a busy thinker, was turning over his options. If the rumors were true, the President was going to cut through the Pentagon with a meat ax, reforming DOD around unified commands. And Leachmeyer was considered one of the architects of the unified command system. So Leachmeyer and his interests counted if he was ever to make four stars. But what if the status quo held? Then he’d need to rely on Cunningham’s support for future promotion. He was a man in the middle, so he’d play both ends against the middle. Work hard on Task Force Alpha, make it and himself look good, but also keep kicking up a little dust of doubt along the way for Leachmeyer.
He slapped Stansell on the shoulder. “Do it my way, Rupe. It’ll work.”
Dewa, feeling sick, glanced at her watch and stood up. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.” Minutes later she was, listening to the two discuss the final arrangements for Sunday’s exercise.