Brown was quickly switching from window to window, keeping an eye on the position of his aircraft. “Belly wet,” he announced. “Don’t move any farther left or we’ll be in the trees.” He moved over to the right side of the PAVE HAMMER aircraft. The rotors were churning up the narrow river into a white froth. “Whipping up lots of water on the right — he’ll spot that from the air.”
Maybe hiding wasn’t such a hot idea after all — we might have to fight our way out of this.
“Let’s have the Stinger and gun pods, Marty. I’ll take control of the aircraft and the Stinger pod; you got the cannon. Check our ECM and jammers are active.” Watanabe deployed the two weapons pods from the side sponsons, and Fell lowered the Target Acquisition and Designation System visor over his eyes. A yellow round aiming reticle called the “donut” was superimposed over his visor, indicating the field of view of the Stinger heat-seeking missiles. Meanwhile Watanabe activated the radar jammers and the ALQ-136 INEWS infrared jamming system, which set up invisible spikes of energy in all directions to decoy infrared-guided missiles like the Soviet Atoll.
The two Soviet-made fighters were now in full view, and Fell realized how vulnerable, how exposed, he was. Out the starboard window he could see the froth and the waves bubbling across the narrow Nemas River, and out the portside window he could see his rotors churning and dashing tree branches around. They were like giant neon signs pointing right at them. This entire daylight insertion mission was turning into a major nightmare. Fell’s thoughts drifted momentarily to the other CV-22 crew that launched from the USS Valley Mistress, tasked to approach Smorgon through northern Lithuania and southwestern Russia, and he hoped they were having an easier time of it.
“Stand by, crew,” Fell warned over interphone as the Byelorussian jets drew closer and closer. “This could get hairy.”
One of the busiest spots on Smorgon base that morning was the base fuel depot. Two lines of twelve tanker trucks were waiting at the fueling station — there were only two stations operating, out of the six normally available — and the wait was long. One line was for jet fuel, destined for the aircraft and helicopters on the fuel line that could not use the in-ground refueling equipment, and the qther was for diesel to refuel the numerous trucks, utility vehicles, and power generators throughout the base and in the Lithuanian deployment. The Home Brigade of the Belarus Army was taking nearly a hundred fuel trucks with it during the invasion of Lithuania to keep the convoys moving.
The fuel depot normally had two platoons manning the facility, but one by one the men had been reassigned to the convoys, so only a handful of workers and guards remained — most truck drivers ended up pumping their own fuel. So it was a great relief to the NCO in charge of the facility when a truckful of soldiers showed up and reported to him, saying they were ready to work.
“Excellent,” the NCOIC, Senior Sergeant Pashuto, said to the NCO in charge of the detail. “Your men can begin by getting the paperwork ready from all those drivers, so when they pull up to the pumps they are ready to go.”
The young detail leader nodded that he understood, saluted, and departed.
He wasn’t very talkative, Pashuto observed, but that was the first salute anyone had rendered him in quite some time, and he didn’t need another blabbermouth here anyway.
The operation went very smoothly after the fifteen-man detail arrived, so much so that Pashuto was able to sneak away for a cup of coffee and a few slices of bread while the detail worked. When he returned, the detail leader was back with a stack of fuel-authorization forms. “Good work, Corporal,” Pashuto praised the young detail leader as he signed off the fuel-requisition forms. “You have a real talent for this. Who is your commander? I’d like to speak with him.”
“Menako, cela,” the detail leader replied, thanking him in heavily accented, slow Byelorussian. The man’s voice sounded syrupy, hesitant, as if he were a bit retarded, but that certainly didn’t match his performance. “My commander’s name is White.”
“White? I’m not familiar with that name.” It was hard to understand the man because of his slow speech. “Please repeat your commander’s name again?”
“My commander is Colonel Paul White, United States Air Force,” the detail leader said, this time in very understandable Byelorussian. He withdrew a small submachine gun with a silencer from a small “fanny pack” and aimed it at Pashuto. “Raise your hands and place them on your head or—”
Pashuto didn’t wait for the rest — he immediately turned and sprinted for the rear exit, diving for the door and trying to swing it shut behind him before the bullets started flying. But as he reached the door, he ran headlong into two Home Brigade soldiers who were entering the building from the back. “Commandos!” Pashuto shouted, pointing at the man in front. “American commandos in front! Give me a gun!”
“Sorry, Comrade, can’t help you,” one of the Home Brigade soldiers said in English. Pashuto didn’t understand the words, but he knew he wasn’t going to get any help. The first soldier grabbed him and pinned his arms behind his back, and the other soldier placed a rag soaked with some sort of foul-smelling liquid over his nose and mouth. The world immediately turned dark and silent, and he was out of the conflict for a while.
“Trucks secure, Wilson?” Marine Corps Sergeant Thomas Seymour asked the man out front. Other Marines, members of Colonel Paul White’s MADCAP MAGICIAN strike team, entered the office and began checking desks and file cabinets.
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Ed Wilson replied. “Drivers were sedated, and our team members are on board ready to go. We’ve got three trucks destined for the flight line, one for the motor pool, and eight for convoys.
“We’ll need two more for the flight line and two for the command center,” Seymour said. “The convoys won’t get any, I’m afraid.” He turned to one of the other Marines rifling through the desks. “You find those change orders yet, DuPont?”
“Got ‘em,” the Marine replied. He sat down in front of an old typewriter and began to type in the new information, using a map of the base behind the desk as reference. When he was finished with the new orders, he spent a few moments practicing Pashuto’s signature until he had it down, signed the forms, then scuffed them on the floor a bit to make them look properly worn. Seymour found line badges and gate passes in a locked file-cabinet drawer and gave them to Wilson for distribution. Seymour briefed the plan one more time, then sent the Marines off to their destinations in the fuel trucks.
“About time you got here, Private,” the Byelorussian crew chief of the Mil-24 Hind-D assault helicopter grumbled as the fuel truck pulled up. As the private handed over his orders to be countersigned by the crew chief, he said, “Everyone was waiting on you fuel handlers. What’s the holdup?”
“Sergeant Pashuto made someone go back for proper orders,” the driver said. He placed the truck in neutral, engaged the parking brake, then jumped out and placed tire chocks under the wheels of his truck. After that, he went to the right side of the fuel truck, where assistant crew chiefs had already begun unreeling grounding wires from it.
The crew chief walked back to the private and stuck the signed orders back in his pocket. “These orders are freshly typed,” he observed, staring the private right in the eyes. “It was you who had the screwed-up orders, wasn’t it?”
The Marine Corps special operations commando had to struggle to remain calm. “It wasn’t my fault,” he replied in hesitant Byelorussian.