Evren didn’t understand half of what the guy just said, and he was getting tired of his goofy smile. “May I ask please where you are going, sir, and what you intend to do with the trailers?” he repeated, much more forcefully.
“Just around.” Jon drew a circle with his finger. “Around. Around here.”
Evren was getting angry with the guy, but he had no authority to detain him. “Please be mindful of other military vehicles, sir,” he said. “Some of our larger vehicles have limited visibility for the driver. An encounter with a main battle tank would be unfortunate for you.”
The veiled threat didn’t seem to have any effect on the American. “I’ll tell the others,” he said idly. “Thanks for the tip. Bye-bye now.” And the convoy headed off.
“What should we do, sir?” the first sergeant asked.
“Have the checkpoints report their position to me as they pass,” Evren said, “then get someone to follow them.” The first sergeant hurried off.
The convoy of Humvees drove around to the north side of the base on public highways. They passed a Turkish army checkpoint at one intersection, where they were stopped so soldiers could look inside the vehicles, but not detained or searched. They continued north for a couple more miles, then exited the highway and drove farther north through a muddy open field. Ahead they saw stakes pounded in the ground with yellow “Caution” and “Keep Out” tape strung between them, and a few hundred yards beyond that was the wreckage of Scion Aviation International’s XC-57 Loser. The Turkish missiles apparently hadn’t hit the plane directly, but proximity fuses exploded the warheads near the pod-mounted engines atop the fuselage, shearing two of them off and sending the plane hurtling to the ground. It had landed on its left front side, crumpling most of the left wing and left side of the nose, and there had been a fire, but the rest of the plane sustained what might be called moderate damage; most of the right side of the plane was relatively intact.
There was a lone Russian IMR engineer vehicle parked at the tape border, with two Turkish soldiers on guard duty with it. The IMR had a crane mounted on the back and a blade in front resembling a bulldozer. The soldiers discarded cigarettes and coffee and got on portable radios as they saw the convoy approach. “Hayir, hayir!” one of them shouted, waving his hands. “Durun! Gidin!”
Jon Masters got out of the Humvee and trudged through the mud toward the soldiers. “Good morning! Günaydin!” he shouted. “How’s it going? Any of you guys speak English?”
“No come here! No stay!” the soldier shouted. “Tehlikeli! Dangerous here! Yasaktir! Prohibited!”
“No, it’s not dangerous at all,” Jon said. “You see, that’s my plane.” He patted his chest. “Mine. It belongs to me. I’m here to take a few parts back with me and check it out.”
The first soldier waved his arms in front of his face in a crossing motion while the second picked up his rifle, not pointing it but making it visible to all. “No entry,” the first said sternly. “Prohibited.”
“You can’t prohibit me from examining my own plane,” Jon said. “I have permission from the Iraqi government. You guys aren’t even Iraqi. What right do you have to stop me?”
“No entry,” the first soldier said. “Go away. Go back.” He pulled out his portable radio and began speaking while the second soldier raised his rifle to port arms in an obvious threatening gesture. When the first soldier finished radioing his report, he waved his hands as if trying to shoo away a youngster, shouting, “Go now. Siktir git! Go!”
“I’m not leaving without looking at my plane…what you guys did to my plane,” Jon said. He quickly walked past both soldiers, then walked backward toward the plane. The soldiers followed him, shouting orders in Turkish, confused and getting angrier by the second. Jon held up his hands and walked backward quicker. “I won’t be long, you guys, but I’m going to look at my plane. Leave me alone!” Jon started to run toward the plane.
“Dur! Stop!” The second shoulder raised his rifle into firing position but not aiming it at Jon, obviously to fire a warning shot. “Stop or I will—”
Suddenly the rifle was snatched out of his hands in the blink of an eye. The soldier turned…and saw a person wearing a head-to-toe suit of dark gray, an eyeless helmet right out of a science-fiction comic book, a framework of thin flexible tubules all across its skin, and thick gauntlets and boots. “Aman allahim…!”
“Don’t be rude,” the figure said in electronically synthesized Turkish. “No weapons”—he reached out with incredible quickness and snatched the portable transceiver away from the second soldier—“and no radios. I’ll give them back only if you show me you can behave.” The Turks backed away, then started to run when they realized they weren’t going to be captured.
“C’mon, guys, let’s go,” Jon said, trotting toward the stricken XC-57. “See, I told you it wouldn’t so bad.”
“Rascal One, this is Genesis,” Patrick McLanahan radioed to Wayne Macomber. “You’ve got a couple vehicles headed your way, about ten minutes out.” Patrick had launched a small unmanned attack aircraft called an AGM-177 Wolverine, which had been brought in via the 767 freighter. It resembled a cross between a cruise missile and a surfboard. It was normally air-launched, but had the ability to be fired from a truck-mounted catapult. The Wolverine carried infrared and millimeter-wave imaging and targeting sensors so it could autonomously locate, attack, and reattack targets programmed for it. It had three internal weapons bays for attacks on different types of targets, and it could also attack a fourth target by flying into it kamikaze style. “Radar has a helicopter about ten minutes to the east,” he added. “We don’t know if it’s headed this way or just on patrol, but it’s close.”
“Copy, Genesis,” Macomber replied. He waved at the Humvees to move in. “C’mon, we’ve got company, get in there and help the egghead,” he ordered. “I want to be out of here ASAP.” The Humvees rolled in, and technicians began unloading power tools to start opening the plane up.
“I’ll be here all day at least, probably for the next two days,” Jon Masters radioed.
“Masters, I’m not here to cart the entire aircraft back to the base,” Macomber radioed back. “Grab any classified stuff and only the most essential black boxes that are intact, and let’s get out of here. We’re out in the open with three hundred Turkish soldiers coming for us and another fifty thousand in the area.” That reminder seemed to make everyone work a little quicker.
“That helicopter is definitely coming your way,” Patrick radioed. “About seven minutes out. The ground forces have increased in size—looks like six vehicles now, four troop carriers and two armored vehicles. How’s the plane look?”
“Masters says it doesn’t look that bad,” Whack said. “I think he’d say that if it was nothing but a smoking hole in the ground.”
“You’re right about that. Okay, they’re setting up roadblocks north and south on the highway, and all six vehicles are headed your way.”
“Copy.”
“No fighting unless it’s absolutely necessary, Rascal. We’re all still friends, remember.”
“I know. I’ve been extremely cordial and nice so far.”
“They should be in sight on the highway now.”
Wayne turned and saw the trucks unloading a total of about twenty troops with rifles, the armored vehicles on guard flanking the trucks and off-loading their own dismounts, and the same Captain Evren Jon spoke with at the front gate, scanning them with binoculars. “In sight. I see infantry weapons only so far. Rascal, this is One, we’ve got lookylous, stand by.” A few minutes later, Whack saw several soldiers and Captain Evren board their armored personnel carriers and slowly drive toward them. “Here they come.”