Call to Duty (42 page)

It all had meaning for Pontowski. He knew what it was like to fly at low level in weather like that. He could remember the constant jolting and twisting as the aircraft banged about, the dryness in your mouth, the sweat, and the chafing of your beard’s stubble under the oxygen mask. Jericho!

“Well, Leo,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, “there’s nothing we can do but wait now.”

“The hardest part,” Cox conceded.

“I’d like to monitor Jericho when it goes down,” Pontowski said.

“The Battle Staff at the NMCC will be fully manned until the helicopters have landed and gone into hiding,” Cox explained. “After that, the Battle Staff will be reduced and a general will monitor the situation until the attack starts. You can bet they’ll all be back then. Where would you prefer to be?”

“I’ll be here,” Pontowski said. “I want Mike Cagliari in the NMCC when it goes down. Have him talking directly to the generals and experts. Have Bobby Burke there, too.” He thought for a moment. “In the meantime, I’d like Mazie Kamigami to monitor things from this end.” Cox raised an eyebrow at this. “She’s got her head screwed on straight and probably knows more of the big picture than anyone else,” Pontowski explained.

“Mr. President, why did you change the name of the operation to Jericho?” Cox asked. He was keeping a daily journal of his tour as the President’s chief of staff and planned to publish his own account. He already had a title, “A Time of Honor.”

“Since we’re blowing some walls down, it seemed appropriate.” And, he mentally added, like I did in World War Two on my own Jericho. Silence came down in the room.

The Army colonel spoke into his boom mike again, paused, and then said, “Sir, you have a message from Dr. Smithson at Bethesda. He says your wife is awake and requests your presence, if possible.”

Pontowski rose to his feet, suddenly feeling tired and very old. Smithson might be an ass but he would only have sent that message if Tosh had taken a turn for the worse. A bitter panic touched his heart when he thought that this might be the last time he would ever speak to his wife. “I’m going to the hospital,” he said. Cox followed him out of the room. “History won’t let us go,” the President told him, “and keeps repeating itself, reminding us that human condition hasn’t changed. I just wish it would let up on me.” But he knew it wasn’t to be; his past was his fate and now he would have to experience it all again, reliving that day in February of 1944.

1944
RAF Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, England

What will the censor do to this? Zack mused, thinking of the pompous officer who read all the mail leaving RAF Hunsdon. Zack was sitting in the reading room of the officers mess writing a letter to Willi. They had not seen each other since he had flown out of Manston after
K for King
had been repaired. But not before they had spent one more night together. The room she had found for them over a pub had been much more comfortable than the lighthouse and the negligee she had produced from her bag had been a work of art. He had no idea that clothes could be so provocative. The next day she had seen him and Ruffy off to their new base at Hunsdon with a cheery good-bye. Two days later her first letter arrived and they started an almost daily correspondence. Not even the war had diminished the efficiency of the Royal Mail. Her last four-page letter had sent scorching shivers through the lower regions of his body and he wanted to get an answer in the mail immediately—before she changed her mind. Her last word had been “hurry,” and he wanted to do exactly that.

He wrote:

The censor will no doubt razor that out, he thought. Time to get even with the pompous bastard. He scribbled:

Now that will get you wondering what was in Willi’s letter, Zack mused.

Zack knew the censor would have fits if he mentioned that it was a four-thousand-pound bomb that looked like a huge garbage can and he and Ruffy were testing it for the first time in combat. The brass had thought it was too heavy for the Mosquito, but 140 Wing had proven them wrong.

He would tell her more in person about what he had learned from watching Group Captain Percy Charles Pickard. In Zack’s estimation, Pickard was the best leader he had ever met and was directly responsible for the outstanding success of the wing.

Oh, the bomb worked very well, he recalled, his pen still. What death and destruction had he and Ruffy caused when they dropped that bomb? It was all so clean and antiseptic for the crews. All they saw of the target was smoke and maybe some flames. Later, Intelligence might show them reconnaissance photos of bomb damage. But those photos were impersonal and could have been taken over London. It was the same with his squadron mates. Impersonal. A person was there in the morning and then he was gone, never to return. No mess, just pack up his things while the commander wrote a letter to his wife or parents. For a time, the others might remember him; what he looked like, his personality, his voice. But because of some unwritten rule, the men would not talk about him, probably because it would remind them of their own mortality. Then the memory would fade, saving them from confronting the reality of his death; the charred remains, a dismembered body so totally smashed and pounded into the aircraft’s wreckage that the two were inseparable.

Sammy, the wingman he had lost over Dunkirk, materialized in Zack’s mind. Every detail was there, his face, his wispy mustache, the way he left the top button of his tunic undone, and his bright blue eyes. Zack could hear his voice as clear and true as if Sammy were with him. He closed his eyes, leaned back into his chair, and let the memory carry him. I hope it wasn’t my bombs that killed you, he thought. I’m glad I haven’t forgotten, he said to himself. And I won’t, he promised.

A whiff of a half-remembered tobacco smoke assaulted his
nose. He glanced up and saw the rotund figure of a man standing in the foyer—the man from the house at Wimbledon. Images of Chantal came rushing back and a longing hurt mixed with guilt feelings beat at him. It wasn’t right that he should be involved with Willi while she was in danger. He forced himself to concentrate on the man and masked his guilt feelings. What the hell is he doing here? he thought. Why am I caught in a vicious circle and keep running into people I’d like to avoid? What the hell is going on?

Slowly, he reasoned it out. It was not a vicious circle or some perverse fate, but one of the ironies of life that the phrase “it’s a small world” becomes especially true in wartime. In spite of the scale of the war and the millions of people involved, certain operations overlapped geographically and Zack figured that because he was occupying the same space and time, they were likely to run into each other. A change in assignment could alter all that. But that would mean he would not see Willi until the war ended. Did that mean he was betraying Chantal? Damn, he thought, I haven’t practiced guilt in a long time.

He finished the letter, stuffed it in an envelope, and dropped it unsealed in the box for the censor. Ruffy found him an hour later. “Pick wants you over in operations. Seems there’s an ops on. Must be a bit of a flapper because Embry’s here from Two Group.”

“It’s a small world,” Zack said, mystifying Ruffy.

The acrid aroma of the pipe smoke and the light blue haze tinting the air hit Zack the moment he walked into the room. An uneasy feeling of foreboding captured him and he half-expected the portly little man from the house in Wimbledon to be there. But only the squadron leaders who commanded the three squadrons that made up 140 Wing were in the room with Pickard and Embry. Then he saw it, a cloth-draped target model sitting on a table, waiting to be revealed. But why had he been called in? He sat down in the rear of the room and waited. The tingling sensation that had always warned him when something was wrong stirred.

Embry stood up. “Right then, we’re all here. The French Resistance has made an unusual request.” He pointed to a map of northern France that was tacked up on the wall and circled the town of Amiens. “The Gestapo is holding over
seven hundred Resistance workers in the jail at Amiens and are being their normal bloody selves and have sentenced a hundred of them to death. Needless to say, the Resistance would like to do something to prevent that but find themselves powerless. Jerry had been most adept at penetrating their operations in this sector. That’s why so many Resistance workers are in the bloody place to begin with.

“The Resistance has asked the RAF to bomb the jail, blow the walls down, kill a few guards, and effect a jailbreak to allow the poor bastards a chance to escape.” Embry was looking directly at Zack and watched the young pilot stiffen. “This is where you come in, Mr. Pontowski. You do seem to have some skill for this type of thing. The French have assured us that the prisoners would much prefer to take their chances with our bombs than die at the end of a German rope or in front of a firing squad. This is a chance to do something very worthwhile and send the Gestapo a message they won’t forget.” He walked over to the scale model and whipped the cover off. “Gentlemen, your target.” It was an exact replica of the prison at Amiens.

The three squadron leaders crowded around the model, looking at it from different angles, picturing a bomb run. “Which squadron leads the attack?” one of them asked. Pickatd smiled, his faith in his men reaffirmed. The 140 Wing was made up of three squadrons: 21 being British, 464 made up of Australians, and 487 from New Zealand. They all wanted to go and he would not show favoritism.

“I’ll flip a coin later,” Pickard said. “Right now, each of you pick your six best crews while we work out the navigation and details. It should be on within the next forty-eight hours. I don’t need to remind you that mum’s the word.”

“You’d never do that,” one of the men laughed. They filed out of the room to see what crews they had available and check on the status of their aircraft. Zack’s commander, a cool New Zealander, stopped and said, “If you want, you’re on.”

“I want,” Zack replied, ignoring his inner alarm bell.

The squadron leader nodded, pleased that his best pilot was volunteering. He pointed at the model. “You best get on with it. Please see that they don’t have us doing anything stupid.”

Embry turned the mission planning over to Zack and two
navigation officers and retreated into a nearby office. The man from Wimbledon was waiting for him, puffing on his pipe. “I hope it went well,” he said. Embry nodded. “Make sure you attack at lunchtime. Most of the prisoners should be out of their cells and in the dining hall, which should make it easier for them to escape. Also, could you pay special attention to the guards quarters? The Germans will be sitting down to dinner and it would be nice to dispatch a few of them.” He gave Embry an encouraging smile. He had no intention of telling Embry that many female prisoners, the young and pretty ones, were kept in the guards’ quarters to serve as prostitutes. “We do have another reason,” the pipe smoker added. “The French collaborator who has sold many of our agents to the Gestapo has been invited to lunch. We don’t know which day, but then we mustn’t overlook any opportunity.”

“I’m sure we can spare a SAP or two,” Embry said. “A SAP,” he explained, “is a semi-armor-piercing, hard-nosed bomb. It should do the job.”

“This raid is more important than you know,” the man told Embry. “The collaborator has managed to feed most of our new network, code name Sosies, to the Gestapo. Sosies has a priority one.” He puffed on his pipe and let that sink in. Priority one meant that the Sosies network was critical to the Allied invasion preparations. “The Germans don’t know it, but they have captured Sosies’s leaders. Quite a gold mine of information there. We must get them out.” Or kill them with our bombs, he mentally calculated.

“I’ll have Mr. Pontowski make sure we target the guards’ quarters,” Embry promised. “He is very good at that type of thing.”

The Burma ADIZ

It was a three-way battle—Gillespie versus the goat versus the weather. The captain’s strategy was simple, make the goat his ally, his friend. He wasn’t fighting the heavily loaded MH-S3, the twenty-two tons of metal, fuel, mechanical gadgetry, electronic wizardry, and human flesh called Rascal One. Instead, he was seducing the beast to his will, making it want to do what he wanted. The designers of the helicopter thought in aerodynamic terms: the control of pitch, roll, and yaw; thrust vectors, stress analysis, center of lift versus the center of gravity translational lift; and thousands of other technical concerns, all capable of being reduced to mathematical abstractions and force-fed into a computer. Now the young captain was living with those results and he made no attempt to recall the formulas or forces at work on his machine. He had mastered them all in pilot training and they were part of his nature. Now, Gillespie concentrated on what the goat was telling him, instinctively understanding the signals and coaxing the beast to do the right thing, which in this case was to stay airborne and on course.

And Gillespie was winning. But the weather was not going to give the two MH-53s an easy victory as they beat their way into Burma’s airspace, penetrating Burma’s ADIZ, the Air Defense Identification Zone.

A steady stream of water was leaking out of the overhead panel onto the center console. An electrical short was the last thing he needed. “Can you cover it up?” Gillespie asked the flight engineer. The sergeant grabbed a poncho and spread it over the console. “I thought these puppies were watertight,” Gillespie mumbled. “We’re leaking like a sieve.” A hard bump punctuated the light turbulence they were flying
through, twisting and shaking the aircraft. Gillespie automatically stroked the flight controls, coaxing the goat to do the right thing. He was flying totally on instruments, relying on the magic that went on behind the instrumental panel and in the black boxes that gave the MH-53 the ability to penetrate a monsoon rainstorm flying three hundred feet above the terrain.

The copilot concentrated on navigating, constantly crosschecking the Doppler/inertial navigation system with the ground mapping radar and the Global Positioning System monitor, GPS, to keep them on course. He kept hoping for a break in the rain so he could rely on old-fashioned map reading to fix their location. But it was not to be, so he kept up the cross-check, trying to keep everything in agreement. He kept the whole system honest by relying on DR—dead reckoning—as the final arbiter. The old, time-tested technique of flying a compass heading for a specified time was still basic to navigation. Another hard bump lifted them out of their seats and drove them against their lap and shoulder harnesses.

The stream of water stopped. “Something must have snapped back into place,” the flight engineer allowed. He removed the poncho.

The intercom crackled. “We’re drowning in water and puke,” one of the gunners complained. “I’m talking Niagara Falls back here.”

A shudder twisted the helicopter to the right. Again, Gillespie compensated. Sweat, not water, was oozing out from under his helmet. His eyes darted from the horizontal situation indicator to the terrain-following radar to the altimeter and then across the engine instruments. All was well. “A few of the troops sick?” he asked.

“About half,” came the answer. “The big colonel is chucking his guts all over the floor.” Mackay was suffering from a violent case of motion sickness and adding to the mess in the cargo compartment. “The sergeant major is sleeping like a baby,” the gunner added.

“How we doing on fuel?” Gillespie asked. The copilot and flight engineer conferred, checking the fuel remaining against what the flight plan called for. Again, all was well. They had enough fuel to make their landing zone and then extract Delta Force, but they would have to refuel on the way out. “No
way we can hook up in this crap,” Gillespie said. If fuel did become a problem on the way home, he would find an isolated clearing in the jungle and land to wait for a break in the weather. Then they could take off and join up on E-Squared’s MC-130 for a drink of JP-4.

“IP in one minute,” the copilot said.

The gunner in the rear passed the word when he heard the copilot announce they were one minute out of the initial point. The flying time from the IP to their landing zone was two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Relief spread over the sick men as they realized their ordeal was almost over.

The rain came down harder when they overflew the IP, a sharp bend in a river with a prominent rock. No one saw it. “It’s okay,” Gillespie said. He sensed it was all coming together. He turned to a new heading as the copilot started the elapsed time hand on the clock. Gillespie peered into the weather, trying to get a visual on their landing zone. Nothing. But he wasn’t worried. At exactly two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, Gillespie pulled on the collective and reduced airspeed with the cyclic. Instinctively, he compensated and kept them from sinking like a rock. They hovered. “We’re here,” he announced.

“Yeah, but I don’t see a goddamned thing,” the copilot growled. They were hovering over a solid canopy of trees and blow-drying the green foliage beneath them. There was no sign of the clearing that had been chosen as their LZ. A quick check of the GPS monitor indicated the LZ was at their three o’clock position.

“We’ll circle in an expanding search pattern,” Gillespie said as he pivoted the helicopter to the right. They had barely entered the first circuit when the clearing appeared. Gillespie calculated they had missed it by less than two hundred meters after flying blind in a driving monsoon rain, at low level, for three hours. He’d settle for that any day of the week.

He settled the MH-53 into the clearing and the security team ran out the back to secure the landing zone. Rascal One had landed and within two minutes, he had a thumbs-up from the team. A sergeant directed him to taxi the goat closer to the trees, where they could better camouflage and hide it. Just before he cut the engines, the copilot broadcast the code word telling the orbiting MC-130 carrying the two colonels that
they had safely landed. Then they heard Rascal Two, the second helicopter, report in, also safely down.

“Check that out,” the copilot said. The rain had slackened off to a slight drizzle and the low clouds were clearly visible, four hundred feet above their heads. “Someone up there likes us.”

Orbiting at thirty-four thousand feet and a hundred miles south of their position, a USAF reconnaissance RC-135 monitored the two transmissions from the helicopters, which were immediately followed by a short message from the command MC-130 to the NMCC in the Pentagon reporting that the teams were safely inserted. Since the RC-135 had not monitored any “hostile” transmissions that indicated the helicopters had been detected, it maintained radio silence. The aircraft commander moved the RC-135 farther south and reestablished a new orbit as the MC-130 returned to Udorn. The recce bird would continue to monitor Chiang’s communications while the two assault teams moved into place. If it detected any sign that the Americans had been discovered, it would immediately down-link with the NMCC. The first phase of Operation Jericho had been successfully completed. The assault teams had been inserted without being detected by Chiang’s defense net. Now phase two began. The two teams, Fastback and Bigboot, had to move through the jungle to reach their initial positions for the attack.

Landing Zone Alpha, Burma

“You’re looking better, Colonel,” Kamigami said.

Mackay was glad to admit that he was feeling much better after getting off the helicopter. His queasy stomach settled down almost immediately once his feet were on solid ground and was demanding to be fed. He gingerly nipped at one of the granola bars he liked to carry in the field and waited to see if his stomach would accept it. No problems. He took a bigger bite and checked his watch. They had been on the ground six minutes and should be moving out.

The captain leading Fastback reported in. “We’ll be ready to move out shortly,” he said. “One of our shooters is still
puking his guts up. Severe motion sickness. I had to replace him with Marston from the LZ team.”

“Good choice,” Mackay said. Kamigami nodded his approval. The intense training program he had put Delta through had anticipated using the LZ security team as a backup to Fastback and every member had cross-trained to be part of the assault team. Mackay checked the clearing one last time. Camouflage netting had been spread over the helicopter; foliage had been carefully cut and placed, further concealing the aircraft; the LZ team was out of sight, already established in covering positions where they could intercept anyone approaching the clearing. Fastback formed up and moved silently into the jungle. Mackay, his RTO, and ammo bearer were sandwiched in the middle. Kamigami attached himself to Mackay’s small command and control unit for the first part of the trek. They maintained radio silence, confident that Bigboot, the second half of the assault force that had been inserted by the other helicopter, was also moving.

The first two hours went smoothly and Mackay calculated they had covered about a mile. They were making unbelievably good time. They worked hard to move silently, for only stealth could preserve the critical element of surprise. The men were little more than shadows as they penetrated the darkness, moving parallel to a stream. Their night vision goggles helped them to some extent and the rain was cooperating. Then the terrain grew rough and they started to slip and fall in the darkness. “Better call a halt,” Kamigami said. Mackay agreed but the captain leading the team chose to press on for another hour before establishing a bivouac until morning. The captain keyed his GPS to check their position. They were in a valley seven miles from Chiang’s compound. Kamigami checked his watch—they had twenty-five hours to cover those seven miles.

“If we move out at first light,” Mackay said, “and reach here”—he pointed to a spot five miles away where the valley they were in opened onto a flood plain less than two miles away from Chiang’s compound—“we can hunker down for the rest of the day before moving into position under the cover of darkness. That’ll cut down our chances of being discovered and still give us plenty of time to make contact.”

“If this rain keeps up, that’s going to be a pretty hard five
miles tomorrow,” the captain said. He gave a little snort. “We can always put the sergeant major at the head and let him lead.”

Not a bad idea, Mackay thought.

The fourteen men that made up Fastback were ready to go at first light but the rain was driving down again. The men moved out. It was not the jungle underbrush that hindered their movement but the mud. Their boots were sticking and sliding and every step was an effort. It became a slogging contest and the men were rapidly tiring. The spot they were trying to reach was on the slope of the limestone ridge, called a karst, that formed the northern wall of the valley they were in. Kamigami studied his map as they moved and calculated their progress. We ain’t going to make it, he thought. Then he slipped and fell, splattering the man behind him with a barrage of muck. He heaved himself to his feet and wiped his plastic-covered map clean. It was time to change. Then he saw it. On the map, two contour lines about one third of the way up the slope of the karst widened, telling him that the slope was not as steep. There’s a shelf up there paralleling our direction of travel, he decided, remembering his last tour in Vietnam. Probably much more rocky up there with better drainage and less foliage. Time to do some mountain climbing.

At the next halt, he showed Mackay and the captain his map. “If you’re right,” the captain said, “there won’t be much canopy to hide under.”

“Who’s going to be up there with us?” Kamigami asked. “And no one is going to be flying around in this weather.” Five minutes later, Fastback was moving up the ridge, Kamigami in the lead. The mud quickly gave way to more solid footing as the vegetation thinned out. He set a blistering pace, making the men follow him. Soon they were angling along the ridge making good time.

Six hours later they were nearing the end of the karst formation and almost at the spot where they wanted to hide when Kamigami caught the smell of cooking. His left hand shot up above his head, his arm fully extended and palm forward. The men halted and silently took cover. They watched as Kamigami crouched then disappeared into the underbrush. Within minutes he was back and raised his MPS submachine
gun above his head with one arm, the barrel parallel to the ground and pointing in front of him. He had the enemy in sight.

Kamigami lowered the MP5 and raised his right fist to his waist and rotated his forearm several times in a horizontal clockwise circle. It was the signal to prepare for action. He drew out the black anodized Bowie knife he preferred to carry in combat and held the blade upright with the forefinger extended. He was ordering an immediate action drill they had practiced many times.

Silently, two men shed their rucksacks and moved out, one above the trail and one below. Kamigami moved forward in a crouch, becoming a shadow. His eyes drew into a narrow squint when he could see the lean-to where the cooking aroma was coming from. One of the men appeared on his right, gave a slight nod, pointed to the lean-to, and held up two fingers. He could see two people inside. Kamigami passed the signal to the man on his left, who could not see the lean-to but was contracted to keep Kamigami in sight. Kamigami moved closer to the rear of the lean-to. Now he could see that it was an observation post that in good weather had a commanding view of the valley and flood plain. That meant there was a radio inside.

A happy babble of laughter erupted from the lean-to and a young boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen, emerged. He tugged his poncho into place and took a few steps down the slope, toward his number two man. Kamigami didn’t know or care why the boy had come out, probably to answer a call of nature, but it was a mission he would never complete. A dark shadow moved from behind a large bush and fell in behind the boy. Kamigami saw an arm come up and jerk the boy’s head back as a knife flashed across his throat. Then the shadow dropped the body. It was a mistake. The man should have supported the body and lowered it silently to the ground, holding the chin back so the neck would be stretched tight. With the tension released, Kamigami could hear a loud gurgling sound much like a perking coffeepot.