Well, the President was right, nothing he could do for now. He motioned to his aide. “Dick, I want General Sims to monitor the operation for me.” He barreled out of the room, heading for his office. This is going to be a long one, he thought. Mado, we’re finally going to find out if you’ve got what it takes.
Strangely, he never considered Colonel Rupert Stansell.
“Delray Five-One, Scamp One-One. How copy this frequency?” Kowalski’s copilot, First Lieutenant Brenda Iverson, was handling the radios.
“Five-by,” Delray, the orbiting AWACS replied. “We should have a target for you in twenty minutes.” The radio calls sounded like a routine air defense mission.
“Sue,” Kowalski hit her intercom button, “how long to the departure point?” Sue Zack, the navigator, told her seventeen minutes. “It had better be twenty minutes. They ran around in circles too long trying to make a decision and almost blew it.” The “they” she was talking about was General Mado. The captain didn’t think very much of the general.
The target the AWACS was directing them on was the Iranian airliner they were to intercept as it took off out of Rezaiyeh. The plan called for them to hold just inside Turkish airspace thirty-five nautical miles from Rezaiyeh. The AWACS had been monitoring Rezaiyeh for ten days and had picked up the airport’s rhythm of operation. When the airborne controller in the E-3C, the highly modified and specially-built version of the Boeing 707 that had been designed for Airborne Warning And Control, determined the timing was right, he would guide the C-130 into Iran to intercept the Iranian airliner as it climbed out of Rezaiyeh. Since neither had trained together, it was going to be tricky.
“Scamp, your target is moving into position now,” the AWACS radioed. “Can you depart holding in eight minutes?” An interpreter aboard the AWACS was monitoring radio transmissions from the airport at Rezaiyeh and had heard the Iranian airliner call for its clearance to Bandar Abbas.
Kowalski over the intercom: “Sue, how far out?”
“Sixty miles. Twelve — twelve and a half minutes.”
Kowalski’s voice was calm when she answered the AWACS. She could have been an airline pilot acknowledging a routine air traffic call between Kansas City and St. Louis. But she preferred to be where she was. “No problem, Delray. May be a little late. Starting an early descent now.” She pushed the yoke forward and nudged the throttles up, accelerating as she started a high speed descent into the tri-border area. “How long, Sue?”
“Ten and a half minutes,” the navigator replied, “over two minutes late. Those assholes launched us too late.”
“We’re not out of it yet.” Kowalski said. “How much time can we make up on the leg into Rezaiyeh?”
Sue spun the wheel on her navigation computer, a circular slide rule, “Balls to the wall — little over a minute. Still fifty seconds late. We’re going to miss the airliner.”
But the pilot had other ideas. She pushed the C-130 for all it was worth, hoping she wouldn’t tear the wings off as their true airspeed touched three hundred and forty knots. Kowalski had to time the rate of descent with the distance left to go. She planned to overfly their departure point while still descending and be leveled off just above the mountain tops when they crossed into Iran. She backed the throttles off a bit when the old cargo plane started to shake and buffet. Their Lockheed Hercules had first seen service in 1966 in Vietnam and was older than many of the Rangers it was carrying. During the years it had done great service for the Air Force, hauling cargo and doing endless practice airdrops. Now it was the real thing and Kowalski was demanding that the cargo plane hold itself together once more. “Come on Herky Bird …”
In the rear of the aircraft the Rangers looked about, uneasy with the strange sounds the plane was making. “Ain’t never heard one sound like it was comin’ apart,” a sergeant said, loud enough for Baulck to hear.
“Shut your mouth,” he told the man. “Kowalski knows what she’s doin’. Captain,” he yelled across the cargo bay, “time to cammy up?” Trimler gave him a thumbs up and the word was passed. Sticks of camouflage paint appeared and the men started to change their faces into bizarre blends of green and black.
“Man, you look great in living color,” a black buck sergeant from the streets of Watts told the white corporal sitting next to him. “Better than black on white,” the corporal shot back.
“Scamp,” the AWACs controller radioed, “I hold you at departure now. Turn to a heading of two-seven-two degrees. Target will be on your nose at thirty-five miles.”
“Roger,” the copilot answered. The last radio transmission was intended to deceive any hostile monitoring of their radio frequency, make it sound like they were turning to the west, back into Turkey. Kowalski reached down onto the center flight-control pedestal and switched the IFF to standby. From here on the Iranians would have to find the C-130 by a skin paint as the Hercules continued on its old heading, straight into Iran.
Mado was hovering over the command post’s Emergency Actions Controller. The twenty-year-old had sewn on her third stripe a week before and had never seen a general, much less talked to one. And now a man with two stars on the lapels of his fatigues was giving her his undivided attention as she decoded the message from the AWACS orbiting over four hundred miles to the east. Her fingers moved down the page, finding each code group and then reading the correct decode in the column to the right.
“I need that message.” Mado’s voice was like a threat.
“General, you might want to look at this,” Stansell said, drawing the man’s attention away. He had rummaged around in his brief case until he had found a map of an alternative ingress route Thunder had drawn up in case of decreased radar coverage by the Iranian air defense net. “This route can save us almost three minutes …”
The general studied the route for a moment. “No. Stay with the original plan. That will give us terrain-masking in case Maragheh comes back on line. We won’t gain that much by saving three minutes.” It was enough time for the command post controller to finish decoding the message and double check it for accuracy. She handed it to Mado, glad to get him off her back.
“Not good,” Mado said. “Kowalski hit the departure point two minutes late. Maybe we should send a recall message,” he muttered.
Stansell read the message, then checked the clock. “I think it’s too late, General. By the time she receives any recall she’ll have either linked up with the airliner or be on her way out of Iran, aborting the mission on her own.” The general’s indecision was almost palpable. “Sir, check the time and look at the numbers. Kowalski left the departure point seven minutes ago. It’s thirty-five miles to Rezaiyeh.
She’s one or two minutes from intercepting the airliner. We have to relay a recall order through the AWACS. Any order you give now is O.B.E.”
Overtaken by events … Mado glanced at Stansell, still hesitating.
“Our command-and-control system, doesn’t give us the benefit of real time or even near real time in making decisions,” Stansell went on, fighting for every second of delay possible. “It’s the same old problem, sir, a commander has got to rely on his people to make the right decisions because there’s just no way he can control what everybody does.” The general only stared at him. “Look, let me query the AWACS for a status report while the Emergency Actions Controller encodes a recall message.” And an inspiration hit Stansell. “If you don’t like what you hear, then you sign the message for release and we send it.”