“Can they help us, Leopard?” Behrouzi asked.
“I think so,” Briggs said with a smile big enough to be seen in the dim light of the Bronco’s cargo bay. “Whatever happened over Bandar Abbas and over the Khomeini carrier group tonight, I got a feeling these guys are gonna make it happen over Chah Bahar.”
BALUCHISTAN VA SISTAN PROVINCIAL NAVAL BASE, CHAH BAHAR, IRAN 23 APRIL 1997, 0408 HOURS LOCAL TIME
A flash of intense light like a billion-watt lightbulb instantly destroyed his night vision; followed by an earth-shattering explosion, louder than any sound felt like ten earthquakes rolled into one. The normally giant child’s hand had tossed them against the toy box, then the deck rolled hard to port, and the port rail was awash. Men were screaming, their faces yellowed by the fires, their voices as loud, maybe even louder—if that was possible—than the sounds of explosions and tearing metal.
For the second time since being transferred to the prison facility, Carl Knowlton was replaying the death of the S.S. Valley Mistress in his tortured mind’s eye. It had been the most horrifying experience of his life. He had seen the aftermath of the Iraqi Scud missile hit on the barracks at Khobar during the Gulf War, where 117 American soldiers had been killed or wounded; he remembered the thousands of square miles of burning oil fields of Kuwait, when he thought that he was seeing a bit of hell right here on earth. But the air attack against the Valley Mistress had been the worst by far. The ship had felt so small, so helpless, as the sea rushed in to claim it. As the sea had poured into the crippled ship, the old bitch had literally screamed—its oil-fired engines first grinding to a painful halt, then tearing themselves apart, then exploding from the stress and rapid cooling. The scream had been like a loud siren, like a wild animal caught in a trap This time, though, Knowlton had not been awakened by his nightmare, but by the sounds of real sirens—air raid sirens. He rolled painfully to his feet, his pants creaking from caked-on sweat, oil, and salt. The oil-fire burns on his arms, shoulders, and neck were wrapped in someone’s T-shirt, the pus and sweat making the cloth stick painfully to the burns.
“You all right, sir?” a young Marine lance corporal, J. D. McKay, asked. “You cried out.”
“Sorry, Corporal,” Knowlton said. “Real bad dream.”
“The guards might come back if they heard you—we gotta be careful,” McKay said. McKay had a right to lecture a superior officer: the Iranian Pasdaran soldiers had obviously recognized who McKay was right after his capture, because they had separated him and beaten him senseless, bludgeoning his face, breaking in teeth, ripping out hair, and breaking fingers. He definitely did not want to attract any more attention to himself.
“Right. Sorry.” Embarrassed, Knowlton stepped over to the one window in the room he and the Marine soldier occupied. The window was too high; Knowlton couldn’t see anything, and he was too weak to pull himself up onto the sill.
“Hop up, sir,” McKay said. Knowlton turned. McKay was crawling on his hands and knees toward the sound of the siren coming through the window.
“No, McKay, I can’t.
“Get up, sir, and see what’s going’ on,” McKay said, and the young Marine offered his back—probably the only part of his body not broken—as a footstool. Knowlton clapped the young soldier on the back, then painfully climbed up to peer out the window, pulling himself up onto the wall by the bars on the window to avoid putting his full weight on the kid’s back.
The window was open but covered with metal louvers, so he could see only a few slivers of open sky outside. Still, it was enough: “I see searchlights,” Knowlton reported. “Jesus, hard to believe anyone on this planet uses antiaircraft searchlights anymore …
I see a SAM lifting off north, looks like a Hawk, missile flying southwest … there goes a second Hawk … no secondaries, no flashes … third Hawk lifting off … still nothing.” He climbed down off the Marine’s back. “Somebody’s out there, dammit. I think … I hope it’s one of ours He pulled off his T-shirt, painfully ripping off the scabs and loose flesh from his burns.
He tore a long strip of white cloth from the bottom of the T-shirt, then removed his trousers, tore a long strip off each pant leg, and began knotting the three pieces of cloth together.
“What are you doing, sir?”
“Trying to create a flag for whoever’s out there,” Knowlton said.
“If they see it, they’ll know where to look for us.” He ripped a piece of reinforced trim from the T-shirt’s collar, tore it into thin strips, and tied that to the louvers so it could not be seen from the cell; then he stuffed the trousers and T-shirt pieces out the window through the louvers. It was hard to tell from inside the cell that anything was hanging outside. Knowlton stepped off the Marine’s back. “Thanks, McK-“
Just then the cell door burst open, and two guards entered. They jabbered excitedly in Farsi, and pulled Knowlton across the room and up against a wall. They then kicked McKay in the rib cage, sending him writhing in pain into the corner. They yelled at both of them for a few moments. Knowlton held up his burned hands to defend himself as best he could, but they saw his burns and decided they had seen enough and departed. They did not even think to look up at the window.
“Jesus Christ, those motherfuckers,” Knowlton cursed as he rushed over to the young Marine. He looked bad, but no worse than he had with Knowlton standing on his back looking out the window. He lifted the Marine up and propped him up in the corner so he could breathe easier. “You okay, McKay?”
“The name’s J. D., sir,” the Marine said, with a weak smile. “I’m not feelin’ very military right now.”
“I hear ya,” Knowlton said. “Me neither. You breathing okay, J. D.?”
J. D. clasped his broken ribs with his bent, twisted fingers.
“For now,” he said. “I just hope the beatin’ was worth it.”
ABOARD THE OV-IOD-NOS BRONCO ATTACK PLANE “Down to twenty bundles of chaff, Major,” the weapons officer reported in Arabic on interphone. “Twenty-five kilometers until we reach the shore.”
Riza Behrouzi swore to herself, then replied in Arabic, “I won’t argue with the results, Lieutenant Junayd—we’re still alive.
Just make sure it stays that way.”
“Yes, Major,” Junayd replied. “Eighteen kilometers to go.” As bad as it was up in the cockpit, the young gunnery officer thought, it would be even worse for the five poor souls back there.
The Bronco’s threat warning receiver was beeping well before they crossed into Iran’s territorial waters; the first long-range radar at Chah Bahar picked up the Bronco 100 miles into the Gulf of Oman, and they started their descent to get under radar coverage then. At fifty miles, even though they were flying less than 600 feet above the dark waters of the Gulf of Oman, the radar had picked them up once again; at forty kilometers, the first L-band Hawk acquisition radar was detected, and a few miles later they detected the Hawk’s X-band target illuminators. That’s when they decided to go down to fifty feet, using the AN/AAS-36 Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera and the radar altimeter, which measured the altitude between the belly of the plane and the surface directly below, to keep from crashing.
When the first Hawk launched at twenty-five miles, it was like a nightmare come alive. The cockpit crew could actually see the missile lift off, its bright rocket-motor plume clearly visible on the horizon. They could see the bright yellow arc as it described a powered, semi-ballistic flight path through the sky. The pilot punched out chaff, racked the Bronco into a tight right turn using max back pressure on the control stick to get the tightest turn—but the Hawk followed. A second Hawk went up, followed by a third. The Iranian missile crews knew that the attacker might evade the first missile, but doing so greatly reduced the attacker’s speed, which made it likely that a second or third missile could claim a kill. The pilot set the radar altimeter warning bug to thirty feet; Briggs, Behrouzi, and the three UAE commandos in the cargo bay heard almost constant warning tones as the pilot edged lower and lower, trying to evade the missiles.