The exchange on the intercom did not disturb the sleeping flight engineer Riley Henderson. The old sergeant had learned years before how to tune out unwanted noise, doze off in his seat, and be wide awake at the first hint of mechanical trouble on the Hercules.
Belfort decided to let him sleep.
Toni D’Angelo stirred in her seat, then snapped awake in a moment of panic when she realized she was in command of the C-130. “I slept too long,” she said, putting her headset on.
“No problem,” Belfort replied. “Sid’s conscious and his bleeding’s almost stopped.”
“Dave, did I cause the accident because I wasn’t strong enough to hold Sid’s hand on the throttles?”
“I don’t see how. It’s a shitty technique anyway. Besides, the problem was differential thrust. I thought Sid did well to keep us from going all over the place.”
“I never felt us hit the girl,” Toni murmured.
“First time you’ve ever seen a mangled body? It’s always tough. I’ve never seen anyone hit by a prop before. No wonder the villagers attacked Sid. Jeez. Thank God, McCray knew enough of the language to calm them down.”
“This is the second time I’ve been on Grain King,” McCray interjected, “and I had to manage the cargo sheds at Niamey for three months. It sort of rubbed off, you know, associating with the locals.”
“I’m glad you know something about first aid too,” Toni added.
“Hell,” the loadmaster said, “with all that blood from the knife wound, I thought for sure he was dead. They thought he was dead, too. He’s lucky he was kicked unconscious.”
Both officers became silent, recalling how McCray had quieted the raging villagers by yelling in Berber, telling them the C-130 was carrying food for them. After that, it had been easy for McCray to get the injured pilot onto the flight deck and arrange for the cargo of rice and vegetables to be offloaded.
The high-frequency radio crackled into life. “Grain King Zero-Three, N’Djamena Center. How do you read?”
Belfort answered the call from the Air Traffic Control center, “Read you five-by, N’Djamena. Go ahead.”
“Roger, Grain King,” the heavy French accent replied. “You are cleared as requested. Tripoli Center has cleared you to enter their airspace. Report crossing the FIR. Contact Tripoli on upper high-frequency channels eight-niner six-niner or eight-eight six-two.”
Dave keyed the mike again, “Grain King copies, N’Djamena. Please confirm that Tripoli knows we are a UN food relief flight and diverting to Alexandria South due to weather. Also that we have an injured crewman on board in need of medical attention and are requesting priority handling. Please recheck the weather for us.”
“Stand by Grain King,” N’Djamena answered. The flight deck was quiet while Belfort waited for the reply.
“Grain King, this is N’Djamena,” the flight control center radioed. “Tripoli acknowledges your status. Also be advised that all stations to the south and west are now down due to blowing sand and dust. Alexandria will remain clear for the next eight hours.”
Dave thanked N’Djamena for their help and leaned back in the co-pilot’s seat, still not able to rest. “Never hurts to double check,” he said to no one in particular.
“It’s OK to overfly Libya?” Toni said.
“They’ve given us a clearance,” Dave answered. “We’ve got to go northeast because of this granddaddy of a sandstorm and we need a hospital for Sid. There’s an American hospital at Alexandria South. The weather prophets blew this one big time.” The weather warning they had received after launching from the village was far worse than the first. They had to divert.
“It’ll be OK,” Belfort said as the C-130 approached the extreme southwestern corner of Libya and he started to establish contact with Tripoli Center. I hope, he added to himself.
The U.S. Air Force Reconnaissance RC-135 carved a lazy orbit over the Mediterranean while it monitored and recorded all the high-frequency radio transmissions made by the Grain King flight. As module commander in the rear of the big four-engine Boeing, Colonel Anthony Waters accordingly annotated his log while an old and familiar tingling signaled something was wrong. Experience had taught him not to ignore the warning. He rummaged around in his briefcase and pulled out a map of North Africa. He pressed the button keying his intercom. “Stan, can you play back the tape where Grain King gave N’Djamena Center its route to Alexandria South?”
The radio technician retrieved the transmission Waters wanted and played it back over the interphone.
The colonel frowned as he drew the C-130’s route from Niger, through the southern part of Libya, and on into Egypt. The tingling grew stronger. Again keying his interphone, Waters called the flight deck and directed Captain Kelly to fly to an orbit south of the island of Malta, as close as they could get to Libya. He unstrapped from his seat and walked down the narrow passage to Bill Carroll’s station, stretching and thinking at the same time. “Bill, what’s the Mad Colonel been doing lately?” he said, spreading out his map on the lieutenant’s desk and pointing to Libya.
“Been quiet ever since the F-111 raid on Tripoli in April ’86. He’s got lots of internal problems to keep him busy.”
Waters mulled it over. “We’ve got a Grain King flight crossing the southern part of Libya. Here’s their route. I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel right.”
Carroll shrugged. “But Grain King is a UN operation that Libya is backing.”
“I know,” Waters replied, still not satisfied. Waters had not always been in the intelligence-gathering business and had only recently been made a module commander in RC-135s. When his last position had been phased out, colonel assignments at Headquarters Military Personnel had looked hard to find him a last assignment that matched his background before he retired. Unfortunately, there was nothing available and he was plugged into the only available slot.
Waters had accepted the assignment with resignation, unhappy at losing a job he enjoyed. His career had been like that since he returned from his second tour in Vietnam as a captain. His combat experience in F-4s had led him to the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School at Nellis AFB outside Las Vegas. Once there, he had worked his way up from an instructor to become Red Flag’s key project officer — Red Flag was the Air Force’s combat training program that tried to simulate an actual combat arena for its fighter pilots. Waters had become very adept at blending tactics and technology into believable wartime exercises.
Finally he had become too controversial a figure with his constant challenges of testing weapons systems and employment plans in the cold reality of combat scenarios and had infuriated the policy makers when he demonstrated the F-15 should be a two-place aircraft. The SPO (Special Projects Office) that drove the development of the F-15 had been dominated by old-line fighter pilots who believed fighter aircraft had one pilot and one engine. It had been a bitter compromise just to put two engines in the jet. When Waters proved repeatedly that a single pilot would be overwhelmed at low altitude in a high-threat environment, the SPO solved the problem by getting Waters reassigned.
After Nellis, he had been assigned to the fighter wing at Bitburg Air Base in Germany, and again had worked his way up, this time reaching squadron commander when he made lieutenant colonel. But that ended when Bitburg transitioned to F-15s and he had been reassigned stateside to Weapons Testing and Development at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, which led into an assignment in Foreign Fighter Support at Kelly Air Force Base, Texas, where he had met and negotiated with many Arabs.