He spoke Hungarian into his microphone again: "Change of plans. Cleanup will have to wait until we get some of these people to show us the runway lights generator and get it started for us. Commence operations in sixty seconds from…" He waited until the sweep second hand on his wristwatch touched the luminescent spot at the top "… time." The next stage of the operation went well. Not perfectly. No operation ever goes perfectly, and that is even more true, as the case was here, when the intelligence is dated or inadequate, and there has been no time for thorough rehearsals.
There had been several rehearsals, but there had been no time to build a replica of the airport and its buildings. And if there had been time, they had had only satellite photography, old satellite photography and thus not to be trusted, to provide the needed information.
They had improvised, using sticks and tape to represent the fence and the buildings, and guessing where the doors on the buildings would be.
But despite this, the team leader thought the operation had gone off-so far, at least-very well.
The man with the bolt cutters had opened the gates to the terminal area and to the tarmac. Then one two-man team had entered the terminal to make sure there were to be no surprises from there, and two teams of three men each had stormed and secured the building where the workers and their families lived.
The operator with the suppressed Uzi-who was the number two-had climbed up into the control tower.
The sniper-who was the number three-had gone first into the terminal building to make sure that team had missed nothing, and then into the living quarters, where he checked to see that everyone had been rounded up and securely manacled.
The operations scenario had used that term, but the "manacles" actually used to restrain the locals was a plastic version of the garrote.
The locals were frightened, of course, but none of them seemed on the edge of hysteria, which was often a problem with women and children.
Another potential problem, language, didn't arise. The team leader had been told to expect the locals might speak only the local languages, and the team had been issued hastily printed phrase books in Daza, Maba, Gulay, and Sara.
The trouble with phrase books was that while they permitted you to ask questions, they were not much help in translating the answers.
All four of the men the sniper had "manacled" in the living quarters spoke French. And so did most of the thirteen women and children, to judge by their faces and whispered conversations.
One of the men was a tower operator, and another was in charge of the generator. The former reported that the radios in the tower seemed to be operable, and that the runway lights could be turned on and off from the tower. The latter reported that if he had his hands free, he could have the generator started in three minutes.
The team leader signaled one of the operators to cut the plastic handcuffs from both. The sniper took the generator man to wherever the generator was, and the team leader took the tower operator to the tower.
He had just about reached the top of the ladder to the control tower when he heard the rumble of a diesel engine starting, and as he put his shoulders through the hole in the tower floor, the incandescent lightbulbs began to glow and then came on full.
There was a screeching sound from the roof as the rotating radar antenna began to turn.
All the avionic equipment in the tower was of American manufacture, and both the team leader and his number two were familiar with it. Nevertheless, the team leader ordered the control tower operator to get it running.
Dual radar monitors showed a target twenty miles distant at twelve thousand feet altitude. Just the target. No identification from a transponder.
"Light the runway," the team leader ordered.
The tower operator threw a number of switches on a panel under the desk which circled the room. As the sound of the diesel engine showed the addition of a load, the lights on the runway and two taxi strips leading from it glowed and then were fully illuminated.
Number two dialed in a frequency on one of the radios.
"Activate transponder," he said in Russian.
Thirty seconds later, a triangle appeared next to the target on the radar screen.
"I have you at twelve thousand, twenty miles. The field is lit. The runway is clear. Land to the south."
The target blip on the radar screen began moving toward the center of the screen. The numbers in a little box next to the transponder blip began to move downward quickly from 12000.
The team leader pointed to something under the desk.
The tower operator looked confused.
Impatiently, the team leader pointed again.
The tower operator dropped to his knees to get a better look at what was under the table that he was supposed to see.
The team leader put the muzzle of the.22 caliber submachine gun against the tower operator's neck at the base of his skull and pulled the trigger.
The short burst of fire made a thump, thump sound, and the tower operator fell slowly forward on his face. Then his legs went limp and his body completely collapsed.
There was no blood. As often happened, the soft lead.22 bullets did not have enough remaining velocity after penetrating the skull to pass through the other side. They simply ricocheted around the skull cavity, moving through soft brain tissue until they had lost all velocity. There might be some blood leakage around the eyes, the ears, and the nose, but there seldom was much and often not any.
A team member entered through the tower floor hole. The leader ordered: "Stay until the plane's on the ground. Then set these to twenty minutes."
"These" were four thermite grenades. Each had a radio-activated fuse, and, for redundancy, in case the radio detonation failed, a simple clock firing mechanism.
The team leader set the thermite grenades in place, two on the communications equipment, one on the radar, and the last on the spine of the tower operator near the entrance wounds made by the.22 rounds.
He took a last look around, and then spoke to his microphone.
"Commence cleanup," he ordered. "Acknowledge." Before the team leader had carefully climbed completely down the ladder, there was about thirty seconds of intense Uzi fire as the site was cleaned of the remaining three men and their women and children.
The firing made more noise than the team leader would have preferred, but the options would have been to either garrote the locals or cut their throats, and that was time-consuming, often a little more risky, and this way there was less chance of messy arterial blood to worry about. As he watched one of his men carry a box of thermite grenades into the living quarters, the team leader heard a rushing noise, and a split second later, when he looked up, he could see two brilliant landing lights come on as the aircraft approached the field.
A moment later, he could see the aircraft itself.
It was an unusual-looking airplane, painted a nonreflective gray, ostensibly making it invisible to radar. That was a joke. As soon as they had turned on the radar just now, they had seen it twenty miles distant.
There were two jet engines mounted close together on top of the fuselage, where the wings joined the fuselage just behind and above the cockpit. This had made it necessary for the vertical fin and the horizontal stabilizers to be raised out of the way of the jet thrust. The tail of the aircraft was extraordinarily thin and tall, with the control surfaces mounted on the top.
The aircraft, a Tupolev Tu-934A, was not going to win any prizes for aesthetic beauty. But like the USAF A-10 Thunderbolt II-universally known as the Warthog-it did what it was designed to do and did so splendidly.
The Warthog's heavy armament busted up tanks and provided other close ground support. The Tupolev Tu-934A was designed to fly great distances at near the speed of sound carrying just about anything that could be loaded inside its rather ugly fuselage, and land and take off in amazingly short distances on very rough airfields-or no airfields at all.