The pilot was playing the odds, which Ozek disliked—especially because he was doing so just to try to impress a senior officer—but they were in the soup now, and breaking the approach off at such a moment, close to mountains in bad weather, was not an ideal choice. Ozek sat back and crossed his arms on his chest, making his anger apparent. “Continue, Captain,” he said simply.
“Yes, sir,” the pilot responded, relieved. “Copilot, before glideslope intercept checklist, please.” To the pilot’s credit, Ozek thought, he was a good aircraft commander; he would be a good addition to some airline’s crew complement, because he wasn’t going to be in the Turkish Air Force for very long.
This lackadaisical attitude was unfortunately more and more prevalent in the military these days as the conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurds continued to morph. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, had changed its name to PAG, or the Congress for Freedom and Democracy, and avoided using the term Kurdistan in its literature and speeches in an effort to appeal to a wider audience. These days, they held rallies and published papers advocating more human rights laws to ease the suffering of all oppressed persons in the world rather than advocating armed struggle solely for a separate Kurdish state.
But that was a ruse. The PKK was stronger, wealthier, and more aggressive than ever. Because of the U.S. invasion and destruction of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq, as well as the civil war in Iran, the Kurdish insurgents were fearlessly staging cross-border raids into Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria from numerous safe camps, hoping to capitalize on the chaos and confusion and establish a strong base in each nation. Every time Turkish forces responded, they would be accused of genocide, and the politicians in Ankara would order the military to stop pursuit.
This only emboldened the PKK. The latest travesty: the emergence of a female terrorist leader. No one knew her real name; she was known as Baz, or “The Hawk” in Arabic, because of her ability to strike quickly and unexpectedly but seemingly fly away and escape her pursuers so easily. Her emergence as a major rallying force for Kurdish independence, and the Turkish and Iraqi governments’ lackadaisical response to her call for bloody war, was disturbing to the Jandarma general.
“Coming up on glideslope intercept,” the copilot said.
“Gear down,” the pilot said.
“Here it comes,” the copilot responded, and he reached over to just above the pilot’s right knee and moved the round landing gear actuator switch to the “down” position. “Gear in transit…three green, no yellow, press-to-test pump light checks, gear is down and locked.”
The pilot took his eyes off the horizontal situation indicator just long enough to check the gear lights and push to press-to-test “gear hyd” light. “Checks, gear is down and locked.”
“On course, on glideslope,” the copilot said. “Two thousand feet to decision height.” The copilot reached across and discreetly tapped his airspeed indicator, a silent warning for the pilot that his airspeed had dropped a bit—with a general in the cockpit, he didn’t want to highlight even the tiniest mistake. Their speed had dropped only five knots, but tiny errors seemed to snowball on an instrument approach, and it was better to catch and correct them right away than let them create bigger problems later.
“Tesekkur ederim,” the pilot responded, acknowledging the catch. A simple “roger” meant the pilot had found his own mistake, but a thank-you meant the copilot had made a good call. “One thousand to go.”
Filtered sunlight began to stream into the cockpit windows, followed moments later by sunlight filtered through widely scattered clouds. Ozek looked out and saw they were dead centered on the runway, and the visual approach lights indicated they were on glideslope. “Runway in sight,” the copilot announced. The ILS needles began to dance a bit, which meant the pilot was peeking out the window at the runway instead of watching his horizontal situation indicator. “Continue the approach.”
“Thank you.” Another good catch. “Five hundred to decision height. Stand by on the ‘before landing’ checklist and…”
Ozek, focusing out the window and not on the gauges, saw it first: a white curling line of smoke coming from a street intersection ahead and off to the left, inside the airport perimeter fence, heading straight for them! “Strela!” Ozek shouted, using the Russian nickname, “Star,” for the SA-7 shoulder-fired missile. “Break right, now!”
To his credit, the pilot did exactly as Ozek ordered: he immediately jammed the control wheel hard right and shoved all four throttles up to full military power. But he was far, far too late. Ozek knew they had just one chance now: that it was indeed an SA-7 missile and not the newer SA-14, because the older missile needed a bright hot “dot” to home in on, while the SA-14 could track any source of heat, even sunlight reflecting off a canopy.
In the blink of an eye, the missile was gone—it had missed the left wing by scant meters. But there was something else wrong. A horn blared in the cockpit; the pilot was trying desperately to turn the KC-135 to the left to straighten it out and perhaps even line up on the runway again, but the plane was not responding—the left wing was still high in the sky and there was not enough aileron authority to lower it. Even with the engines at full throttle, they were in a full stall, threatening to turn into a spin at any moment.
“What are you doing, Captain?” Ozek shouted. “Get the nose down and level the wings!”
“I can’t get turned around!” the pilot cried.
“We can’t make the runway—level the wings and find a place to crash-land!” Ozek said. He looked out the copilot’s window and saw the soccer field. “There! The football field! That’s your landing spot!”
“I can fly it out! I can do it…!”
“No you can’t—it’s too late!” Ozek shouted. “Get the nose down and make for the football field or we’re all going to die!”
The rest happened in less than five seconds, but Ozek watched it as if in slow motion. Instead of trying to wrestle the stalled tanker back up into the sky, the pilot released back pressure on the controls. As soon as he did, and with the engines at full military power, the ailerons immediately responded, and the pilot was able to bring the plane wings-level. With the nose low, airspeed built up rapidly, and the pilot had enough smash to raise the nose almost into a landing attitude. He pulled the throttles to idle, then to “cutoff,” moments before the big tanker hit the ground.
Ozek was thrown forward almost into the center console, but his shoulder and lap belts held, and he ruefully thought that he had felt harder landings before…and then the nose gear slammed down, and the Turkish general felt as if he had been snapped completely in half. The nose gear collapsed, and mud and turf smashed through the windscreen like a tidal wave. They plowed through a soccer goalpost, then crashed through a fence and a few garages and storage buildings before coming to a stop against the base gymnasium.
CHAPTER ONE
“Masters Two-Two, this is White Sands.” The portable radio squawked to life, splitting the still, early-morning air. “You are cleared for takeoff, runway one-zero, winds calm, altimeter two-niner-niner-seven. Threat condition red, repeat, red, read back.”
“Roger, Masters Two-Two copies, cleared for takeoff, runway one-zero, threat condition red.”
A large, rather strange-looking aircraft spooled up its engines and prepared to take the active runway. It somewhat resembled a B-2 Spirit “flying-wing” stealth bomber, but it was vastly more bulbous than the intercontinental bomber, suggesting a far larger payload capacity. Instead of the engines embedded inside the fuselage, the aircraft had three engines mounted atop the rear of the fuselage on short pylons.