The Mingrelian (25 page)

Davann looks briefly into the shattered face, then covers it with the blanket.

“Who is the fatality in the back?” Boyd asks.

“The Ayatollah’s secretary. Pretty much the same story as Raybon.”

“We’re going to crash land right up there, get everyone to the front of the cargo bay and strapped in.”

“Roger.” Shands descends the steps, shouting as he goes. “Everybody to the front, strap in, put your head between your knees, get ready for an impact. We’re going to crash.”

“Get in the seat,” Boyd says to Davann, unhooking his headset from the right seat and stepping over to the left seat. He is grateful for the blast of cold air coming in from the shattered window; he won’t have to smell Raybon’s blood. He hooks his headset in by the left seat and adjusts the shoulder harness and seatbelt.

“Before crash checklist.”

Davann hurriedly plugs his headset into the right seat and begins the checklist from memory.

“Flaps, full. Landing gear, down …”

Davann pulls the flaps down and grabs the landing gear lever as he’s picking up the checklist.

Boyd has dropped the aircraft a thousand feet, and the airspeed is above 200 knots as he turns into the mountain, heading south again. Closer now, the wide expanse of clean-looking snow is huge, at least a mile wide and several miles extending up the side of Mount Damavand. He pulls up the nose
and throttles back almost to idle as he lines up the approach. Visually, it appears there is a slight side slope of about 5 percent. That will require him to hit nose up 20 degrees and one wing slightly lower.

Airspeed drops as he climbs, adjusting his angles, trying to convert landing going up to the feeling of landing flat. He uses the rudder to compensate for a slight crosswind.

“PECOS, this is JUBA. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Davann is on the radio now.

“JUBA, squawk 7777.”

“Roger.” Davann dials in the transponder code. The transponder is an aircraft unique signal that gives location, speed and altitude when queried by the air traffic control system. It is used to identify specific aircraft in traffic and help air traffic controllers to de-conflict flight patterns. The AWACS radar could not get an accurate location for them while they are so close to the mountain. The transponder will help locate the crash site.

“Airspeed 120.” Davann begins calling out the airspeed as they approach stall.

Boyd pulls the throttles to idle.

“One ten, 50 feet.”

The stall warning buzzer comes on.

“One hundred knots, 20 feet.”

Boyd feels the controls begin to go mushy, he pulls the nose up just as the wings lose lift and the 100,000 pound aircraft drops 10 feet into snow at 100 miles an hour.

There is a deafening noise as the landing gear hit first and shear off, cutting the speed substantially and throwing the pilots forward in their shoulder harnesses. Then the aircraft belly hits the snow and the propellers, still turning slowly, are bent back. As the aircraft slides up the hill, the tail breaks off, just in front of the jump door. The left wing, which has been burning for five
minutes, breaks off at the outboard engine, and the right wing digs into the snow. The aircraft jerks to the right and makes a half turn before coming to a creaking stop.

There is silence.

Chapter 45: Niavaran Palace

abney St. Clair is locked in a cell in the basement of Niavaran Palace. She’s been hearing gunfire since she was brought here two days ago from the shattered hotel room she’d been in when the first nuclear detonations occurred. The first night it was volleys, 10 minutes apart. It sounded like a firing squad. If so, a dozen people had been executed, and more the next day. Then she heard random shots in the neighborhood. Bandits? Looters? Now it sounds more like a siege, and it’s getting more intense.

The door bursts open, and Farhad Shirazi rushes in.

“We must go,” he says, standing in the door holding her suitcase and motioning for her to exit. All pretense of her being an honored diplomatic guest is now gone; she is a prisoner and she knows it. She’s been well cared for, with a bathroom in her cell and regular food and water, but a prisoner nonetheless. Odd, she’d thought at first, to have a fully functioning jail cell in the palace of the supreme leader of a modern nation. Now the utility of it was beginning to dawn on her.

“Where are the others?” she asks. She’d been part of a group of a dozen diplomats and has not seen them for four days.

“They are safe elsewhere,” Shirazi says.

He’s been her only contact. There are no English speakers on the Grand Ayatollah’s personal staff.

They rush upstairs to general chaos. Men are running around with weapons and carrying suitcases to the back of the
palace and packing them in the Ayatollah’s limousine and accompanying vehicles. Shirazi pushes her to the back of the palace and into the Ayatollah’s personal vehicle. Automatic weapons on the roof of the palace rake the street in front of it that hours ago had held hundreds of people. There is answering gunfire from surrounding buildings.

In a moment, the Ayatollah himself rushes in. He has shaved his beard and is dressed in a Western-style suit. The doors are closed. It is the driver and a bodyguard in front, Shirazi, the Ayatollah and Dabney in the back seat. She can see a side gate open, and the van in front filled with heavily armed guards races out through it. The limo accelerates to follow it. They turn in the street as bullets bounce off the armor plate. In a moment they are on a main street with a police escort and accelerating away from the palace.

“Sir?” Dabney leans around Shirazi to engage the Ayatollah in conversation. She had met him just five days ago in a formal state dinner, though it was in a receiving line and not an actual conversation. He doesn’t speak English.

The Ayatollah scowls and turns toward the window.

“Don’t address the Supreme Leader,” Shirazi says, pulling her back.

She sits back but watches the man out of the corner of her eye. He smells like tobacco and cheap cologne.

Shirazi says something to the driver and guard in front. They pull passports out of their pockets and hand them to Shirazi. He puts them together with three passports he has in his hand, securing them with a wide rubber band. Dabney St. Clair’s black diplomatic passport is on top.

*****

Prince Col. Turki bin Muqrin Al Saud of the Royal Saudi Air Force is leading a four ship flight of F-15E Strike Eagles
traveling at Mach 1.1 at 45,000 feet, 100 miles south of Tehran. He is now a fighter pilot ace, having been credited with six “kills” in the opening engagements of this war. The Iranian Air Force turned out to be less formidable than previously thought. Its tactics were no match for the Arab and Israeli fighters they met at their border, and any that strayed even an inch into the Persian Gulf met American fighters.

The skies now belonged to the Arabs and Israelis. The Imam Khomeini International Airport had been spared in the initial assault, as no known combatant aircraft were located there. But just an hour ago, a fighter had launched from there and gone supersonic over Tehran. In addition, there was a rumor that the Grand Ayatollah was going to try to escape the country in his personal jet. Prince Colonel Al Saud had orders to crater the runway to prevent any flights from Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Preceding Prince Col. Al Saud into Tehran is a flight of four electronic countermeasures Tornados armed with radar-seeking missiles. As he decelerates from supersonic, his aircraft detects the first sweep of air defense radar in the Tehran defense district. Almost immediately, he hears the flight lead of the Tornado flight vector his aircraft and within seconds there are explosions on the horizon. The radar is silenced. The air over Tehran belongs to Prince Al Saud. His flight of four aircraft makes one pass at 20,000 feet, dropping eight 1,000-pound bombs equipped with an inertial navigation system. The bombs crater both runways at Imam Khomeini International Airport making them unusable.

Chapter 46: Mount Damavand

rab the fire extinguisher,” Boyd says to Davann, leaping from his seat and rushing to the ladder behind the cockpit. Looking down into the cargo bay he sees bright sunlight and a vast snow field behind as the aft third of the aircraft is gone. He smells jet fuel. The passengers, bunched up in a pile against the forward bulkhead just beneath the ladder are beginning to move.

“Get that fire extinguisher,” he says, pointing aft to the right side of the aircraft just in front of where the ramp and the Vulcan cannon had been. One of the Marines jumps aft. Boyd descends the ladder, reaches over Ekaterina, who is just standing after removing her seat belt, and grabs another fire extinguisher, which he hands to another Marine.

Stepping over Grand Ayatollah Mashadi, Boyd closes the oxygen shut-off valve on the bulkhead. He steps to the back of the aircraft and looks down the mountain following their skid mark. The tail broke off first and rests 200 yards down the hill. The left wing, with the outboard engine still burning, is 50 yards closer and off to the side of the skid. When the left wing fell off, the right wing dug into the snow, and the aircraft turned a quarter turn to the right. It sits across the mountain, angled downward.

“Fire!” One of the Marines is looking out the window. The right outboard engine is engulfed in flame.

“Take that fire extinguisher and see if you can get it out. Everyone, prepare to evacuate. We’ve got two hot engines and 10,000 pounds of jet fuel on board.”

The ragged little band of wounded and evacuees shuffles to the rear. The first Marine with a fire extinguisher rushes to the jagged open aft of the aircraft and steps out. He sinks up to his waist in loose snow, unable to move.

“Up here,” Davann calls from the top of the ladder. “Emmet’s got the forward hatch open.”

They pull Raybon’s broken body off the bottom bunk and replace it in the left seat. Then Boyd and one of the Marines climb into the top bunk and pull themselves out of the forward escape hatch onto the top of the aircraft. They walk out on the right wing and direct the two Halon fire extinguishers at the fire.

“Good stuff, Halon,” Boyd says as the flames are snuffed, yet the fire reignites as soon as they stop spraying it.

“Got to get under it,” the Marine says as he jumps off the high side of the wing, landing half-seated, half-standing in the snow below. He rolls downhill under the engine and sprays his Halon into the cowling. That stops the fire. The other Marine approaches from the rear. He has taken the emergency casualty litter and used it to tamp down the snow, then pushed it in front of him to make a trail beside the aircraft. He pulls his buddy back up the hill from the hot engine. They take turns spraying Halon into the engine until it cools down and fire is no longer an issue.

Boyd, standing on the wing, surveys the terrain. Stunning. In bright sunlight, the snowcapped peak of Mount Damavand is only a mile above them, and the north wind coming off the twinkly, blue-green Caspian Sea behind them is blowing swirls of snow around the peak and over the top toward
Tehran. The angry clouds to their east and south are moving away. Down the mountain, he follows their skid up the mountain; it is only a few hundred yards long.

Many have tried to crash land an aircraft on the side of a mountain, and only a few have successfully walked away from it. He feels wonderful.

“No new injuries,” Emmet calls out, head poking out of the forward escape hatch.

Then Boyd notices the cold. Crystal clear sunlight, but the temperature is near zero with a brisk wind. He checks the horizon. The sun is just hanging above it. It will be dark in half an hour.

*****

“Oh God, forgive him and have mercy on him, keep him safe and sound and forgive him, honor his rest and ease his entrance; wash him with water and snow and hail, and cleanse him of sin as a white garment is cleansed of dirt. Oh God, give him a home better than his home and a family better than his family. Oh God, admit him to Paradise and protect him from the torment of the grave and the torment of Hell-fire; make his grave spacious and fill it with light.”

Grand Ayatolah Sayyid Al Mohammad Mushadi is reciting the Salat al-Janazah, the Muslim funeral prayer, over the blanket wrapped bodies of his secretary and Raybon Clive. He recites it in perfect, unaccented English, then in Farsi and then in Arabic.

“We should say the funeral prayer,” he had said when Boyd gathered everyone in the cargo bay after the fires had been extinguished.

“You speak English!” Boyd had exclaimed.

“Of course. I attended the English language school in Tehran as a boy, under the Shah. Obviously, you haven’t gone
to my website; all my fatwas are in English, Farsi and Arabic,” he responded with a twinkle in his eye. “And, we have an obligation, in both Islam and Christianity, to say the funeral prayer over our dead.”

The little band of soldiers and wounded and evacuees huddles mute in the back of the broken C-130, the scene illuminated by three battery-operated emergency lights attached to the walls of the cargo bay. It is dark outside, and the wind whips around the open tail of the aircraft and into the cargo bay. They are wrapped in blankets, which are in generous supply as the aircraft was used to transport oil field workers in the North Sea.

“Never thought we’d need these,” Davann says after the service, pulling out the arctic box from a storage compartment in the front bulkhead. It contains six arctic parkas.

“You never know,” Emmet says. “All those survival lectures we got. What was it, Boyd, every year?”