Mission Compromised (54 page)

As he looked at the expanse of Lake Tharthar, he saw bits of wreckage and what looked to him to be at least two bodies floating in the water some four hundred meters from the shore. From the looks of things, Newman guessed that only he and Robinette had gotten out of the flaming MD-80 alive.

The ground was approaching quickly now, and Newman started look
ing for a landing site. He anticipated the impact and did a near-perfect landing fall, allowing his bent legs to take the initial shock and then rolling left onto his calf, thigh, hip, and shoulder. He quickly got up and collapsed the chute to keep it from dragging him along the rocky ground. As soon as he had unsnapped his harness, he looked around to see where Major Robinette had landed.

At first there was no sign of her, and he stood there, revolving 360 degrees until he spotted the light green billow of a USAF parachute blown by the wind on the other side of a small rise. He ran to the top of the elevation to see the smaller, lighter pilot being dragged, face down, along the rock-strewn surface. She finally came to a stop when her body slammed against a boulder. Newman ran down the slope to free her from the chute.

He grabbed the lines, pulled them down, and collapsed the canopy. He unbuckled her harness and knelt beside the injured pilot to assess her injuries.

She was unconscious. Newman eased her onto her back and examined her for injuries. Her right arm was twisted at a grotesque angle—probably a multiple fracture. She had some burns on the side of her face and on her left cheek, and when he removed her shattered flight helmet, Newman saw a fairly large swelling on the right side of her head. There was blood on her lip, and Newman prayed she had bitten her lip—that the blood wasn't coming from an internal injury.

He reached into her parachute pack for the first-aid kit, wondering what he could use as a splint for her broken arm. He unzipped her flight suit to ease her broken arm out of the sleeve. Newman put some disinfectant on the wounds on her arm and bandaged them. He could feel the edges of the shattered bone just beneath the skin of her forearm.
Thank God the skin didn't break. Who knows how long until we're rescued?

Newman saw blood oozing through her T-shirt. He lifted it carefully and grimaced again when he saw the wound. It looked fairly small, but he couldn't tell how deep it was. He pulled out a four-inch piece of shredded aluminum from between two of her ribs, just below her right breast. He used some gauze to stop the bleeding and bandaged the wound. She probably needed some stitches, at least.

After about half an hour, Major Robinette started to regain consciousness. She moaned quietly.

“I'm here, Jane… it's OK. We made it.”

“A-anyone else?”

“Not as far as I can see. I had hoped the team got out the back door in time, but it doesn't look like it. Master Sergeant Maddox didn't make it. Do you know if Charlie got out before you did?”

Robinette shook her head as tears filled her eyes.

He told the major that she had a broken arm and probably a concussion. She also had a puncture wound in her lower chest.

“That's probably what hurts so much. I may have cracked a rib or two. It's even more painful than the arm. I hope you've got something in that first-aid kit that looks like a pain killer.”

“There's morphine, but I don't think I should use the styrette with your head injury. How about if we try the Tylenol? There should be some emergency water in the bottom of your parachute pack.” He dug down in the pack until he found it, opened the small can, and offered her a sip along with two of the pain pills. “I was looking for something to make a splint for you,” he said. “Maybe I can find something over by the water.”

“Any idea where we are?” she asked.

“Yeah, I know exactly where we are. We're at the north end of Lake Tharthar. There's a road that goes east to the Tigris River. We can wait
until after dark and head that way and hopefully link up with the QRF coming down from Turkey if they can make it past Mosul.”

“At least my legs aren't broken.”

Their first option would be to trek parallel to the Tigris and keep out of sight, using the emergency radio from the kit. If they could reach the Kurds or someone from the Iraqi Resistance in the north, it might be possible to arrange an evacuation. Judging from Jane's injuries, it needed to be by helicopter—and soon. The alternative plan consisted of a two hundred-mile hike to the Turkish border. Newman looked at his injured companion. It was possible he could make it in ten or so days if he were traveling alone, but that wasn't an option. He would carry her out if he had to.

Newman cut some small branches from a stunted tree he found along the lakeshore to fashion a splint for Major Robinette. The pain pills were having little effect, but she was trying to be stoic. She suggested he cut strips of parachute fabric to make a sling for her arm.

“I'll go look around and see if I can find other survivors and anything from the crash we can use,” he said. “You stay here and gather your strength. You'll need it for our walk. We should try to cover five or ten miles tonight. We need to get as far away from here as we can. Try and eat some of those rations from the kit, if you can.”

Newman walked for nearly a mile in the gathering darkness before he saw anything that looked man-made. Newman trotted toward the object. As he drew closer he could see that it was part of the MD-80, though it was so badly charred it was impossible to tell exactly what part it had been. He also found another parachute—or what was left of it. It was almost entirely burned. Even the lines were blackened.

The body in the scorched harness was so badly burned it must have died in the explosion before it dropped from the sky. He checked the dog-tags: “Haskell, Charles M.”

Newman removed his helmet and then his dogtags and dropped them into his pocket. Then he untangled what was left of the harness and pulled Haskell's mangled body clear. He dragged the remains several yards and used the copilot's battered flight helmet to scoop out a grave in the sand.

He covered the body with the parachute and removed Haskell's wedding ring. He made a silent promise to the dead lieutenant that he would return the ring to the grieving wife who would never see her husband again. Newman choked up as he covered the young Air Force officer with a final helmet scoop of sandy soil. He went back to the parachute harness and gathered up all the emergency items—flashlight, rations, water, first-aid kit, water purification tablets, knife, pistol, ammunition, and a radio. They would all come in handy as he and Jane Robinette made their way back to Turkey. He stuffed the pistol and ammo into his flight suit pockets, along with the smaller emergency items. Then he gathered up the other items and wrapped them in the Mylar-backed thin blanket that would help them ward off the cold.

On his walk back, the full depth of the tragedy began to sink in. He tried to count how many deaths had occurred in this terrible place. He did not know for certain how many were dead. McDade and the seven men from ISET Charlie were missing, presumed dead. Master Sergeant Maddox and Lieutenant Haskell were confirmed dead. Captain Weiskopf and the seven members of ISET Echo were all dead near Tikrit. One F-16 pilot had been killed when he had sacrificed himself in a futile attempt to save the MD-80.

Newman had come to this forsaken place hoping to successfully carry out a mission that would eliminate some of the world's most notorious terrorists—and help him lay to rest the injustice of his brother's death in Mogadishu. He had hoped to make the world a safer place. Instead, nine
teen of his men were killed—and he and Jane Robinette were in a desperate fight for survival.

There were other casualties that day, too, though Newman couldn't know it at the time. One hundred forty-seven Iraqis also died that day. The ISET team killed seventy-nine enemy soldiers, and the missiles and bombs of the F-16s killed the others.

It was for Newman a devastating day, full of blood and carnage. But he would have been
totally
demoralized if he had known the fate of the QRF, trying to make their way to Tikrit from the Turkish border.

 

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Command Center

________________________________________

UN Headquarters, 38th Floor
New York, N.Y.
Monday, 6 March 1995
0635 Hours, Local

 

K
omulakov was tired, frustrated, and angry. The Russian general had been up virtually around the clock since ISET Echo had parachuted into Iraq on Friday. Now, after more than fifty hours with little happening, events were spinning out of control for his grand scheme to protect Hussein Kamil, his most valuable client. Then, he had lost communications with the units on the ground and Lieutenant Colonel Newman. He stared at the last entry in the watch officer's log:

0531: Lost all R/F audio signals from UN ISEG units in vicinity of Iraq.

He stared at the notation as if that might help, somehow. But Komulakov still had no clue as to why the audio feed through Incirlik had failed. All he knew for sure was that Dotensk was probably going insane with frustration, trying to keep Kamil in business—unless Kamil had summarily executed the Ukrainian out of panic and outrage. Komulakov and Dotensk had such grand plans for making Kamil a hero in Saddam's eyes and persuading him not to defect—enabling them to sell him hundreds of millions' more in weaponry. But with no communication at such a critical juncture, those plans could very well be melting like ice cream in the desert sand.

Since the audio link had gone down, information was now flowing the opposite direction from what Komulakov and his co-conspirator had intended. Instead of receiving crucial intelligence on the ISET relayed through Komulakov's UNHQ communications link, Dotensk was now passing information to the Russian in New York.

Dotensk had called Komulakov immediately after the sniper on the tower had killed Weiskopf. And moments later he had called back to tell Komulakov that USAF F-16s had materialized out of the desert air to support the ISET—something Komulakov had assured Dotensk would not happen.

Over the course of the next forty minutes, Dotensk had called Komulakov a dozen times with blow-by-blow descriptions of events. Interspersed with Dotensk's telephoned narrative were Kamil's Arabic expletives as his best Amn Al-Khass battalion was decimated by the ISET and the F-16s.

Not only had Kamil's Amn Al-Khass hunter teams failed to quickly dispose of the eight man ISET, but the entire Iraqi Air Defense system was engaged, a half-dozen or more USAF aircraft were attacking Iraqi ground troops and SAM sites, and Komulakov had no idea where Newman or the
QRF were. The last message from Dotensk on an EL-3-encrypted satellite telephone call at 0650, New York time, had only heightened his anxiety.

“I think the UN assassins must all be dead. The firing has stopped,” the Ukrainian reported from hangar 3 at Tikrit South. “But our client is very agitated. Qusay, the number-one son, just told Kamil on the radio that Saddam is furious that his meeting was interrupted by the air strikes and wants to know how the mercenaries could get this close to the presidential palace. Kamil did not tell him about the unmanned bomber—what did you call it, a ‘UAV'—the thing your assassins have headed toward the palace. You must stop it before it gets here or Kamil may be finished. And if he is finished, we're out of business.”

Komulakov's heart almost stopped. Distracted by the furor of the engagement with Weiskopf's ISET, he had forgotten about the UAV winging its way at 350 miles per hour toward Tikrit. He saw his plans for the future going up in a blinding flash when the fuel- and explosives-laden Global Hawk detonated on the west wall of Saddam's palace. The Russian tried to remember what Newman had told him about the device and wished that he had paid more attention to the technical details.
Does this device have a command-destruct feature that could stop it?
the Russian general wondered.

And then it dawned on him: the technicians who had delivered and launched the device were still at Incirlik. If he could reach the people at Incirlik who had launched the device, perhaps they could send a signal that would destroy the thing or at least cause it to go off course.

But with the connection to Incirlik broken, the only way he had of reaching those who could stop the weapon was through Harrod.

He shouted at Major Ellwood. “Get the National Security Advisor at the White House on the secure phone and put him through to my office!”

Komulakov raced out of the command center to his office. By the
time he reached his desk, the call-waiting light on his phone was blinking. He picked up the receiver with one hand and engaged the Encryption Lok-3 with the other.

“Simon, this is Dimitri. Are you aware of what's happened to the operation in Iraq?”

“Aware?” Harrod's voice blared in his ear. “Of course I'm aware! I've been in the White House Situation Room with the Director of Operations for the JCS for two hours! We saw the ISET team leader get killed, and before the video signal went out, it looked from here as though the whole team was killed. I can't raise Lieutenant Colonel Newman on any net and if we can't stop them, the QRF is probably heading into the same fate. This is precisely the kind of debacle you were supposed to prevent!”