The Iraqi command center duty officer in Baghdad noticed on his radar presentations the flight of aircraft crossing the Kuwaiti border and another flight coming in from Arabia, all converging on Samarra. This was unusual, the deviation from the standard allied patrolling tactics that he had been briefed to look for. He was about to pick up his telephone when the first of the navy Tomahawk cruise missiles struck its target and one of his radars went blank. Then a second, and a third. Frantically he jiggled the hook on the telephone. The operator came on the line. Alas, Iraq’s fiber-optic, state-of-the-art military communications system was heavily damaged during the Gulf War and was still under repair. So the duty officer had to use the civilian telephone system.
“The air base at Samarra, quickly.”
What he would have said to the people at Samarra we will never know, for at that moment a Tomahawk missile penetrated the reinforced concrete wall of this command and control center and six-thousandths of a second after the initial impact its thousand-pound warhead detonated. The people inside the structure never felt a thing — they merely ceased to exist.
The battle had begun.
Flights of A-10 Warthogs and A-6 Intruders raced into the area around Baghdad and Samarra and began attacking antiaircraft missile sites. They were protected by electronic warfare jamming planes and a curtain of chaff that a flight of B-52s was dumping from thirty-six thousand feet.
The SEALs in the C-141s were up and in line. Silent, tense, they watched the red jump light high in the rear of the compartment, above the open ramp that led into cold, black nothingness. Jake Grafton, Toad Tarkington and Jack Yocke were in the middle of the line against the starboard side of the aircraft.
Jack Yocke had switched his mind off. He was running now on adrenaline and instinct.
It was like being back on the high school basketball team waiting for a tipoff, all hot and sweaty, ready to go whichever way the ball bounced.
Once his eyes caught a glimpse of the blackness yawning beyond the lead men, but he ignored it. Then the jump light turned yellow. The man behind him crowded him forward, so he took a step, nudging up toward Toad’s back.
He was chanting into the oxygen mask: “Come on, baby, let’s do it! Let’s go, go, go, go,” so when the light turned green his muscles surged and he was charging right behind Toad and shouting “Go, go, go,” and the ramp wasn’t there anymore and he was falling, falling, falling into the infinite eternal darkness.
Jake lay spread-eagle in the sky and waited for his eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness. It would have been great if they could have worn the night-vision goggles, but those bulky headsets would have been torn off by the wind blast. In seconds he was up to terminal velocity, 120 miles per hour.
He was still getting oxygen. Fine. So how many seconds had it been?
He scanned, trying to pick up the men who were falling with him. He saw a few shapes in the darkness, but that was all. He concentrated on staring into the blackness below. Nothing was visible, of course, since there was a thin cloud layer at twenty thousand feet. After they were through that the lights of Samarra should be visible underneath, perhaps the air base lights if they were still on, and to the south, the lights of Baghdad.
So he lay there in the sky feeling the cold wind tear at him, maintaining his balance. That was important, and extremely difficult to do in the darkness without a visual reference. All you could do was pray you didn’t tumble, and if that happened of course you would know it. Even though the wind was cold, he wasn’t freezing. His jumpsuit and clothes seemed to be enough. And as he fell the air would become warmer.
What was down there? Were the Iraqis on full alert, or would the surprise be enough?
Toad Tarkington had a problem. His goggles had somehow come off in the scramble out and now he was squinting against the wind. There was nothing to see, so he scrunched his eyes tightly closed and began counting. “One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three…”
He was falling at the rate of two miles a minute, a mile every thirty seconds. At the end of a minute he should be through the cloud layer. Then he would open his eyes.
This fall was a whole hell of a lot different than the last time he jumped, that time in Nevada when he and Rita had nearly bought the farm.
Actually this wasn’t bad. He could feel the cold but he wasn’t freezing. And nobody was shooting.
They were going to be shooting on the ground. Toad was certain of that. The most dangerous part of this whole jump was the last few hundred feet, when any Iraqi draftee who could lift a rifle would have a free shot.
The thing to do was to get the weapon out when the parachute deployed and be ready. He rehearsed the moves that he would make, how he would get the weapon free and cycle the bolt. Ahmad the Awful might get his shot at the ol’ Horny Toad, but it wouldn’t be free.
Yocke wasn’t counting. He was trying to stabilize himself in the spread-eagle position. He could feel the dizziness of rotation, and try as he might, he couldn’t seem to stop it. Damn!
And he had lost track of the time. Well, two minutes and forty seconds was an entire lifetime. He would still be falling like this in the middle of next week if he didn’t get stabilized.
He forced himself to spread his arms and hands to full extension. According to the chief who had briefed them, that should stop the tumbling.
But he wasn’t spread out. Now he realized that he was almost doubled up at the waist. He was so pumped up he couldn’t even tell what position his body was in!
He forced himself to full extension. The rotating feeling slowed. And stopped.
And he was still chanting. “Go go go…” He stopped and took a deep, ragged breath.
He stared straight ahead, which must be down. The wind was in his face, trying to pull his arms and legs backward, so straight ahead must be down.
Thirty years of life, and all of it led up to this. School, work, family, women, good moments and bad, and all of it was mere prelude for this moment, this free fall into a cold, black eternity.
Jack Yocke began to laugh. He laughed until he choked, then decided he might be getting hysterical, and stopped himself.
How long has it been?
Does it matter?
And the answer came back. No.
He fell on toward the waiting earth.
Jake knew he was through the cloud layer when lights suddenly appeared in the velvet blackness below. There was Samarra, and the base almost directly under him. He twisted his head so he could see Baghdad. The navy and air force were doing their job, he noted. In the blackness he saw the wink and twinkle of explosions, here and there jeweled strings of tracers streaking through the darkness at odd angles. No sounds, just muzzle blasts and flashes of warheads and those twinkling strings of tracers.
He tried to steer toward the center of the air base below, that black spot where the runways must intersect.
Now the two-miles-per-minute rate of fall was quite discernible. The lights below were coming up at sickening speed. Even though he had spent years flying tactical aircraft at night, the visual impact of his rate of descent was disconcerting. Would the parachute open?
This question must run through the mind of every free fall parachutist. Jake Grafton had a pragmatic faith in military equipment — through the years he had occasionally witnessed the spectacular, usually fatal, outcome when vital equipment failed.