Packer could see Mayfield stiffen. What Langley was proposing would take him out of the picture.
Mayfield spoke.
“As you pointed out. Captain Langley, despite your acknowledged familiarity with the weapons testing being carried out at Ammash, you are not any more familiar with the actual layout of the base than the rest of us. How are you and three or four men going to t accomplish something that a strike force led by Colonel Rogers could not accomplish?”
Langley knew what he was about to propose could make him open to ridicule.
“There is a small Kurd village called Koboli within an hour’s flying time from Ammash. This village is the site of recent NIMF atrocities. In talking to the survivors of those atrocities, I met a former Iraqi nurse who’d worked at the Nasrat facility for three years. It was through her that I learned Bogner and two others had been taken to Ammash. I propose we return to Koboli and enlist this woman’s assistance to help us find our way through the complex.”
“And what makes you think this woman could or even would be willing to help us. Captain?”
Mayfield sneered.
“Because the NIMF killed both her husband and her son. General. She buried her son — and then she had the strength and courage to bury most of the men in her village.”
Mayfield looked at Colchin. His face was flushed.
“Mr. President, I admire Captain Langley’s sense of decency and compassion, but I hardly think a mission of this magnitude should be predicated on the cooperation of a—”
“Of a what. General?” Colchin scowled.
“A long time ago, back in my Vietnam days, it was a woman who helped dig me out of a goddamned tangle of metal that used to be my chopper. I lay in that woman’s hut for two months before a recovery team found me. While I was lying there several things crystalized for me. First, when you need help, you don’t look at the color of a person’s skin and you damn sure don’t quibble about their gender. Second, once you’ve made your mind up, put your best man on the job, and third, don’t waste time second-guessing yourself.
“Time is of the essence here. I was talking to Vice President Blanchard earlier. General, and he thinks Captain Bogner will be damn lucky if can survive ten, twelve hours at the most. Expressed in odds, we’re dealing with something like one chance in a hundred. I want to make damn certain we do everything in our power to lessen those odds. To me that means we play our trump card and we do it as soon as we can put the pieces together.” Then Colchin lowered his voice and looked across the table at Langley.
“This is about trying to get Bogner out of Ammash, Captain, but if you have doubts about pulling this off with this unorthodox approach, express them now, because you are leaving me open to a great deal of second-guessing. No matter how this turns out, I’m bound to catch a ration of shit from our fair-weather friends over at the U.N. and a whole lot of second-guessing from the media. Do what you can to make this as clean as possible.”
Bogner had lost track of time. At the same time he realized he had been lucky. Early on he had discovered how Fahid’s men, many of them illiterate according to the Kurd woman, found their way through the underground maze. At each major intersection in the tunnels there was a detailed, color-coded diagram painted on the concrete walls of the tunnel. The descriptions were in Arabic, but the accompanying icons in each of the drawings gave him some idea of what was located directly above or just ahead of him.
Each time he referenced back to the view outside the window in the room where he had been confined, and each time the distances were greater than he had anticipated.
For the most part he was forced to work through the tunnel in the dark, using a flashlight only when he had to, and keeping to the primary service passageway to avoid as many of the electronic sentries as possible. Twice he had ventured into what turned out to be service junctions and found himself all but trapped in a labyrinth of narrow crawl spaces designed to carry essential services into other parts of the complex.
It wasn’t until he again successfully manipulated the electronic sentry with his makeshift refractor and climbed the access ladder into a large open supply bay that he realized he had actually found his way into the essential service access to one of the hangars. The hangar was dark except for a well-lighted area at the far end of the bay, and there was a large service door, which he assumed opened into an elevator. Baddour had been clever. Most of what Bogner had been able to uncover so far would have been hidden from the prying eyes of the satellites.
At the far end of the hangar he could see two men dressed in coveralls. They kept up a steady line of chatter as they worked on a catwalk around an engine stanchion positioned some fifteen or so feet above the floor. Across the bay from the two men was a MiG-25 Foxbat minus an engine, and behind it, three Soviet built Mi-8 Hip helicopters and two Kamov Ka-25 Hormones. Bogner picked his way along the far side of the hangar until he was close enough to the two 302
Hormones to disable them. He got down on his hands and knees, crawled under the fuselage, pulled the wire cutters out of the aux pack, and began clipping anything that looked like it might be a hydraulic or fuel line. Then he worked his way to the Mi-8’s and repeated the operation. He was still cutting on the second Mi-8 when he suddenly heard a door open. Two guards, both carrying Uzis, came through a service door on the far side of the building and shouted at the two mechanics.
For the next several minutes the four men carried on an animated conversation punctuated with frequent laughter, what sounded to Bogner like grousing, and hand gestures. Bogner reasoned that the mechanics might just have been told he had escaped.
He inched his way as close to the four men as he thought he dared, trying to determine what they were saying, but the exchange was all in Arabic and he was able to pick up on only fragments of their conversation. He heard one of the men say ana af-ham, which he knew meant the listener understood, and another used the term as-sa a kam, which he assumed to have some kind of reference to time because each of the men looked at their watches when he did. The exchange lasted no more than a few minutes, and the guards began milling around the hanger, making what Bogner believed to be another halfhearted search effort.
In the process, one of the guards came within twenty feet of him at one point, and Bogner was forced to reach for the Mk 2, but at the last minute the man turned, walked back across the hangar, and resumed his conversation with the two mechanics.
While the four men continued to talk, Bogner had a chance to take an inventory. In addition to the Hips, the Hormones, and the disabled Foxbat, there were two light, single-engine trainers and several crates of engine parts. In the far corner of the building he could identify six Chinese-built Silkworm missiles with the explosives bay still open. From a distance they appeared to be unarmed.
Next to the missiles was a GAZ-66 truck with the rear-mounted 14.5mm antiaircraft gun removed. It appeared that someone had converted it into a supply truck of some kind.
To Bogner, much of what he was seeing didn’t make sense. The Silkworms had been primarily designed for use against naval targets, and Ammash was a long way from where the missiles would have been useful. The same went for the two Hormones. Hormones usually were armed with AS torpedoes or depth charges, and the Hips were primarily built to carry cargo or troops. If Baddour’s long-range plans included launching an offensive against the government in Baghdad, the selection of hardware seemed curious. Judging by what he could see, only the thirty-year-old Foxbat seemed to have any kind of practical application.