“So they’re moving them somewhere?”
“Apparently. Sit down, Marty.”
Church dropped into one of the straight-backed chairs at the table.
“I got a signal from Cummings.”
“Okay, good.”
“They’re going at 0430 hours.”
“That soon?”
“Today. Today in Libya, anyway.”
“Shit.”
“You want to call Wyatt, or should I?”
“I’d better do it.”
Ben Borman woke Wyatt.
“What?”
Borman turned the penlight on his own face.
“Hey, Ben, what time is it?”
“0223 hours, Andy. You’re wanted on the radio.”
“Damn. He wasn’t going to call until four.”
Wyatt rolled over, pushed himself onto his knees, and slipped out from under the Hercules. Now, it was cold. Either that, or he couldn’t adapt to the range of temperature change in this desert.
He followed Borman through the hatchway into the crew compartment and picked up the desk microphone on the console. A red light for night work had been rigged above the unit.
“Yucca One.”
“Paper Doll One, Yucca. I’ve got some new and hot data for you.”
“How hot?”
“This is just off the wire. They’re jumping off at 0430 hours.”
“Okay, we’ll be ready.”
“That’s 0430, one August.”
“Goddamn it!” Wyatt said, involuntarily checking his wristwatch. “What happened?”
“They may have tumbled to you, and moved up the deadline to get a jump on you.”
“That’s nice to know.”
“Also, our source thinks she’s been uncovered. She’s going to get on the first plane out of the country.”
“This only gives us a couple hours,” Wyatt said.
“Maybe more. The analysts think, because of the distance involved, the transports will leave with the infantry first. As a matter of fact, we can see them loading choppers now. Paper Doll Two has made some calculations here, if I can interpret his handwriting. He thinks the transports have to have about an hour-and-a-half lead over the bomber force, in order to set down somewhere and deploy the choppers.”
“Hell,” Wyatt said, “they could leave two days early, if they wanted to.”
“The source thinks not.”
“Okay, so that puts the bombers on the runway at 0600 in the morning.”
“At the latest.”
“If we leave here at 0500 and hit them an hour later, we miss the bombers if they go half an hour early.”
“I know, Yucca. It’s a judgement call.”
“They need tankers. Are they coming out of Marada?”
“We don’t think so. It’ll probably be Tripoli, but we don’t have an eye in the area.”
“I’m stretching it to get five minutes on-target,” Wyatt said. “I can’t hang around longer than that.”
“Your call, Yucca. Suggest something.”
“Hell, we’ll split the difference. We’ll hit the target at 0545 hours.”
“Go with it,” Church said. “Anything else?”
“I’ve got as much as I’m going to get, I think.”
“Hold on. Two wants a word.”
Embry took over on the other end. “Yucca, I’ve got a request from my asset.”
“You allow that in your business?”
“She’s special.”
“What’s she want?”
“Don’t shoot al-Qati.”
Jesus Christ.
“Don’t shoot him. Damn it, I don’t even know what he looks like.”
“I’m just passing it on, Yucca.”
Wyatt signed off.
Borman said, “You want me to ring the chow bell?”
“Yeah, Ben, let’s get them up and around. We’re about to go visiting.”
Fifteen
One of the effects of Church’s last-minute alteration of their timing, Wyatt thought, was that it circumvented a build-up of anxiety. If they had had to wait around in the heat for another twenty-four hours, thinking about the coming fight, their nerves would have achieved jangled status.
Everyone rolled out of their sleeping bags, bitching in expected ways, and dove into the chores that had been originally scheduled for later in the afternoon.
“Flashlights, Andy?” Win Potter asked.
“Why not? If a roving patrol hasn’t spotted us by now, maybe our luck will hold.”
Kriswell and Vrdla made a circuit of the aircraft, performing final checks on the avionics, especially the critical data-links and the video-links between aircraft.
Potter and Littlefield topped off the fighter and transport fuel cells to within a quarter-inch of the caps.
Borman, with Dave Zimmerman’s reluctant help, retrieved the C-4 plastic explosive from the Hercules and started cutting it into smaller blocks and shaping it into small cones. They carried the small charges from plane to plane, attaching it to the super-secret electronic black boxes, to instrument panels, and to fuel cells. All eight aircraft received a liberal dose of plastique. Then Borman, without a very relieved Zimmerman’s assistance, inserted detonators in each charge and wired them into already installed wiring harnesses according to a schematic he had designed. Two switches were part of the harness. One, controlled by the pilot, initiated either a thirty-second or a forty-five-second timer, hopefully giving the pilot time to eject after he closed the circuit or to get a long way away from the plane if he was on the ground. In the event that a pilot was unable to flip the toggle on his own, an impact switch — requiring five-hundred foot-pounds of force — was installed in the nose.
If any F-4, or either of the C-130s, was hit or went down, there wouldn’t be enough left of it for salvagers to reconstruct key components.
The downside of the self-destruct precaution was that flying the aircraft was like piloting a volatile fuel cell while smoking half-a-dozen Havanas. Borman had been thorough in his design, however. All of the charges were in protected spots, behind titanium panels or in structural members, so that a few rounds from a hostile gun was unlikely to set off the sensitive detonators. The plastique itself, Borman liked to say when he was juggling balls of the stuff, was completely harmless.
Jim Demion and Cliff Jordan spent their time removing the plunger-type impact fuses from the twenty-four Mark 84 bombs slung beneath the E-model Phantoms. There were three bombs on each pylon, six per plane. The bombs on the C and D models would remain in their factory configuration.
In place of the impact fuses, they installed the nose cones that Kriswell, Vrdla, and Borman had modified in Nebraska and brought with diem. The cones contained the avionic heads from the HOBOS two thousand-pound guided bomb. Though the three designers had not had a MK 84 available as a model, the cones slipped into place perfectly, substituting an electronic impact fuse, and giving the bomb eyes. The nose cone and trailing antennas were taped into place with duct tape. The additional wiring harness plugged directly into a receptacle already installed in the pylon.
Wyatt, Gettman, Hackley, and Barr preflighted each airplane, paying particular attention to weapons hardware connectors and firing up the computers and radars for software checks.
Dennis Maal and Hank Cavanaugh installed the final linkages and examined and tested all of the new solenoid-activated controls. They tested the electronic consoles built into the transport and into the backseat areas of Yucca Three and Yucca Four.
They had completed four dry runs of the procedures while still in Ainsworth, and the live exercise came off without a hitch. They were finished by 0410 hours.
Formsby, who had not had an assignment, contented himself with tending the radio and positioning the two start carts before Borman rigged them with plastic explosive.