Gregory and his S-3 were on the radios organizing a withdrawal, working out how to pull in the Rangers from Objective Red and bring in the road teams. While they worked Stansell located one of the incendiary explosive devices they had brought along. He planned to shove it into a gear-well of Locke’s F-15, pull the pin and leave another burning hulk at the airfield. The sooner the better, he calculated, too many things were against getting it airborne. Besides not being able to crank the engines, the F-15 needed the hard surfaced runway to take off. And the burning C-130 had that blocked.
Jack appeared in the doorway of the command post. “Colonel,” and he stepped aside. Stansell looked up and saw Bill Carroll and Mary Hauser standing there.
Stansell tried to find the right words, couldn’t. “You had us worried …” was all he could come up with, but they didn’t need words. Carroll told Stansell and Leason about Doc Landis while Mary stared into a corner. “That’s a rough one,” Stansell said. “We’ll go back and get him if—” Lydia Kowalski came into the room then with Duck Mallard.
“Sorry to take so long getting here,” she said.
The MX-360 radio above the RTO’s head crackled and a strange voice started talking. “You are surrounded. Your position is hopeless. I will accept your surrender.”
“Mokhtari,” Mary said. Leason went rigid … Just the sound of that voice …
“Why waste lives needlessly?” Mokhtari went on. “We have, of course, taken prisoners.”
“The bastard,” Leason said. “He‘s got someone, he’ll torture—”
“It’s Doc Landis …” Mary said.
“Ah, you don’t believe me,” the voice went on. “Here, perhaps I can encourage him to talk to you …”
Mary was crying. “I knew I shouldn’t have left him …”
The sound that came over the radio was unintelligible, pathetic.
“What the hell?” This from Jack.
“Mokhtari, the prison commandant,” Leason said. “A sadistic, vicious”—he fought for control—“he tortures …”
“Please don’t make me encourage him again. Perhaps you would like to talk to the doctor. He is conscious now.”
The voice was faint, but more intelligible. “Cleared in hot, nail the bastard—”
They heard the sharp report of a small caliber weapon, then nothing.
“What?” Kowalski said, then understood.
“Doc was telling us to bomb his position,” Jack said bitterly. “I wish to hell my jet would crank …”
Kowalski looked at him. “I’ve got a crew chief named Byers on my bird who might be able to—” Jack was already out of the room and running for Byers.
Stansell looked out the window. Again words couldn’t express his feelings. Get on with it. “The C-130… it’s stopped burning … let’s see if that fuel truck can play bulldozer again.”
Trimler on the ground was listening on the PRC-77. “We knocked out the lead tank,” Thunder reported from the gunship. “They’re laying a lot of smoke … hold on … there’s five tanks in a V formation coming at you.”
Trimler passed the word that another attack was starting.
The two army captains bent over a map and planned their withdrawal to the airfield. “We stop ‘em here and make them regroup,” Trimler said. “When that happens we lay down smoke and have Spectre move in for another pass — make it look like we’re counterattacking. But the forward fire teams pull back and we leapfrog backwards to the prison — fast. We lay smoke all the way and shoot at anything that comes through it.” He glanced at the low hills that framed both sides of the road and intersection. They should help hold the smoke in the area.
“It will get tough past the prison,” Bravo Company’s C.O. said. “The terrain opens up … hard to hold … the tanks will spread out and flank us.”
“Yeah, you’re right, we need to fall back to a holding position at the prison, get Spectre to slow ‘em down while we disengage and run like hell for the airfield.” Trimler keyed the PRC-77 and relayed their plan to Gregory.
“My mother didn’t raise me to be a hero,” Andy Baulck said to his buddy Wade. They were holding the point furthest away from the intersection and closest to the advancing tanks. A jeep team was backing them up 150 meters down the road, around the comparative safety of a bend. “You ever fire one of these suckers before?”
“Yeah, me and the Dragon are old friends,” Wade told him. He wiggled along a shallow depression, searching for a good spot to fire the missile. “Those got to be the new T-72s with laminated armor. They’re tough, takes lots to knock ‘em out.” He could see the tanks, still over 1,000 meters away, advancing up the road, almost to the pass that led to Objective Red. “I’m going for the tracks …” He fired the Dragon at 800 meters and kept the crosshair on his tracker riveted on the front left track of the T-72. Wade never actually saw the missile as it followed the commands coming from his tracker and fed through a thin wire spinning out from behind the missile, but the Dragon hit within inches of where Wade had placed the crosshairs, blowing the tank’s track off a sprocket. The tank jerked to the left and stopped. The other four tanks turned and headed back, laying smoke. “Son of a bitch,” Baulck yelled, “I don’t believe it. MOVE.” The two men ran for the rear as a mortar team sent round after round toward the retreating tanks, adding to the confusion. They piled into the waiting jeep and raced for the intersection.
Behind the smoke, the tanks headed away. Until a radio command stopped them and they pivoted on their tracks and headed back up the road, toward Objective Red.
Byers was under the left wing of the F-15 poking into an open access panel on the underside of the fuselage. “Cap’n, you ever hear of the golden BB?”
Jack Locke did not answer.
“What’s that?” Staff Sergeant Marcia Maclntyre, Kowalski’s flight engineer, asked.
“A goddamn lucky shot,” Byers answered. “Two bits of frag hit, one knicks a wiring bundle in a fire-control junction-box and one fractures the coupling for the nitrogen bottle.” Byers didn’t take time to explain how the jet fuel starter used compressed nitrogen to start and how the JFS, in turn, started the engines. “Mac,” Byers called, “go get my scrounge bag. I think I got a coupling.” MacIntyre ran for the C-130 and Byers dove into his tool box. He pulled out a set of wrenches and reached inside the access panel, working furiously. “Cap’n you may just be in luck.”
Maclntyre was back in moments with the canvas bag full of spare parts Byers had misappropriated from supply. “Got to go,” she told them. “We got the word to start engines. The Rangers are pulling in.”
Jamison watched Kamigami drift through the trees. He was a ghost, floating soundlessly toward the hidden ZSU-23-4. The lieutenant could not credit it — that such a large man could move with so much skill and grace. Then the sergeant stood up and ran back toward him, not caring about the racket he made. Now Kamigami was a very noisy and visible tank. “It’s moving,” Kamigami said, hardly slowing.
The ZSU had already passed when the two men piled into the pickup they had abandoned in the alley. “It’s outta range here,” Kamigami explained. “It’s going to get closer to the airfield and hose down the planes when they take off.”
Jamison was on the radio, relaying the information to Lifter. “Gregory wants us to come in,” he told the sergeant.
“Tell him right after we nail this bastard … tell him not to wait for us.” Lt. Jamison did as he was told …
The ZSU was weaving its way through town. It turned onto the road that led to the airfield and the modified tank had just turned a bend when it ran into Ratso Nine. The jeep team had been making a last sweep of the road, making sure no unwelcomed visitors would appear on the Rangers’ flank as they drew back from the prison. Ratso Nine reacted first, but only the rear gunner could bring his M-60 to bear on the ZSU. His loader grabbed a LAW and fired. He missed. The driver wrenched the steering wheel back and forth, zigzagging down the road as he raced for the protective cover of a large concrete structure, a wheat granary, less than a hundred meters away.