As his glib copilot launched a one-way conversation about the Gulf War with the tight-lipped Delta Force officer, Rodman sat back and sipped his coffee. Roddy had short, light brown hair and a full face with an easy smile. His new responsibilities hadn't provided much time for tennis, leaving him a man of average height and borderline overweight. He was happily married to an ex-beauty queen named Karen Hall. They were always the life of the party at the officers' club. After twenty years of marriage, they still found sex as exciting as the night they had first explored each other's bodies in a lake beside a deserted farmhouse back in Middle Tennessee, where Karen's father was a Methodist minister. Roddy had fathered two daughters, a pair of bright young beauties named Renee and Lila, now college students in Florida. And most importantly, he was doing what he loved best, flying. In point of fact, when it came to the MH-53J Pave Low III, nobody could do it better. Two months earlier, he had been assigned as operations officer of the 39th SOW at Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany.
Sitting contemplatively in his dark green flying suit, Rodman studied Major Hardin, a small, compact man whose close-cropped black hair was hidden by a camouflage cap pulled down to his thick black eyebrows. A man who spoke fluent Farsi and had known Iran before Khomeini, the Major sat slumped in his chair.
"Did you hear of something called Task Force Normandy?" Dutch Schuler asked him.
Hardin gave a slight shake of his head. "I don't recall."
"It was the operation that kicked off the air campaign. I flew with the Colonel in the lead Pave Low that night. We guided the Army Apaches in to knock out old Saddam's early-warning radars. That's why the bastard didn't know what had hit him when the blitz began."
The Major nodded silently. Roddy suspected the random shapes and shades of color in his field uniform hid a lean, lithe body honed by constant exercise and training into a lethal weapon. He made an interesting contrast to Schuler.
Dutch, whose slow drawl established his roots in the Deep South, was also an excellent physical specimen. The young captain maintained the muscles in his arms and legs at peak efficiency. But the type of hand-to-hand combat he was trained for involved a tightly-strung racket and a spinning ball. At thirty, he was pure terror on the tennis court. The first time they had played, Roddy realized he faced a guy who might have been a pro. After that humiliation, he learned Schuler had been ranked the No. 1 singles player in the NCAA his senior year in college. Dutch became his tennis mentor and eventually turned Rodman into a pretty fair player himself.
Roddy looked across at Major Hardin. "That Task Force Normandy business was a little unusual. It was one of the few times the news people were given any info on a special operations mission. They didn't identify the aircrews."
Hardin shrugged. "I'd heard of you well before Desert Storm, Colonel."
Roddy looked up in surprise. "Where the hell did you hear anything about me?"
"A lot of Army guys think Air Force people are a bunch of pampered prima donnas. Guys in my line of work take a different view. We have to depend on you to get us where we're going. And more important, to rescue our asses when we get in a jam. Word gets around on who the really competent fly-boys are."
Roddy rumpled his brow. "And the really bad ones?"
"That, too. But you're at the top of the A list. The word is if there's a way to get in or out, you'll find it."
As a matter of fact, Colonel Rodman had showed up in virtually every hot spot around the globe since Vietnam. He had been a team player since his days at the Air Force Academy, where he had been a star wide receiver for the Falcons. On the flight line as well as the gridiron, he was always ready to answer the call, which in recent years sometimes came by telephone in the middle of the night. He wasn't so caught up in the mystique of the "wild blue yonder" that he accepted every utterance without question, but he had readily agreed to tackle Operation Easy Street. It had been laid on by the Pentagon on direct orders of the President. He and his flight crew had just returned from a trip back to the States for a crash training program with Major Hardin and his Delta Force team.
Dutch Schuler suddenly frowned and lowered his voice to a near whisper. "Here comes Pancho Villa."
Roddy looked around to see a stocky, dark-skinned officer headed their way, a well-stuffed briefcase clutched in one hand. They had met him on their first day at the training site.
Prior to being assigned to the Air Staff, Major Juan Antonio Bolivar had earned a reputation as a highly capable intelligence officer adept at briefing and debriefing aircrews and providing situation analyses for commanders and their staffs. He had never been involved in a clandestine operation, however. A small-town boy from West Texas, this was his first major assignment since arriving at the Pentagon. He was more than a little awed by it.
General Patton had personally instructed him on the mission. He carried the higher than top secret Air Tasking Order containing the essential details of the Operation Easy Street mission, the most up-to-date charts of the area, detailed satellite photos only days old of the landing zone, and a description of the chemlite pattern that would signal "all clear" for touchdown. He had the latest weather information on Western Iran. He had the satellite identification and information on the secure national command authority channel the pilots would monitor for any emergency messages during the flight.
"How about a cup of coffee, Major?" Roddy asked.
Bolivar gave him a tight-lipped smile. "No coffee. Thanks, Colonel." Tension showed in the way his eyes narrowed behind the gold-rimmed glasses.
He wasn't even going on the mission, Roddy thought, yet he looked like someone expecting to be bushwhacked. It didn't do anything to allay the Colonel's nebulous apprehension.
"I received a message when we were about an hour out," Bolivar said in a hushed voice, although they were alone in the small room. "The President has given us the final green light. We can go over the ATO now, but I still need to call General Patton. I have to make sure there aren't any last-minute revisions."
The Major spread out his charts and they went over the route that would take them along the western slope of the Zagros Mountains to a small village near Kangavar, off the Hamadan-Bakhtaran Road, a highway that meandered westward toward the Iraqi border. They would fly just over the treetops and just below the ridge line of the mountains to prevent radar detection. The Pave Low would maintain complete radio silence but monitor the assigned channel for incoming messages. The last item covered was identification procedures for the LZ.
"They will have the area marked with four chemlites in a square pattern," Bolivar explained, illustrating with small circles drawn on a sheet of paper. "As soon as they hear your engines, they will activate an infrared strobe near the center. That's your signal that it's safe to land. You should come down near the strobe, which will mark a flat area with no obstacles."
The chemical markers had been smuggled in by the CIA. Flares would play havoc with the crew's night vision devices. Chemlites, by contrast, would show up clearly to the aircrew but would not be visible on the ground without infrared viewing equipment. With refueling and loading of the passengers, the chopper would be on the ground less than ten minutes. On leaving Iran, they would have an HC-130 Combat Shadow tanker available for refueling, then fly to a point in the Gulf of Oman, where they would rendezvous with an aircraft carrier. After crew rest, the flight would continue on to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. From there an Air Force executive transport would spirit the passengers Stateside.