Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (65 page)

There was nothing to do then but wait. Most of the force had been on the ground for more than two hours. The sandstorms stirred by the aircraft whipped around the men and stung their faces, making it difficult to see. The choppers were late and getting later. They had been late in every one of the rehearsals, too, so no one was surprised.

Already the eight Sea Stallions had become six.

The original formation of eight had crossed into Iran flying at two hundred feet, and then moved down to one hundred feet. They were just behind the planes, as scheduled. When they had departed the Nimitz, more than five thousand crew members had come on deck to salute them. It had been deeply moving. On the deck of the carrier, with the last light of the dying day splayed behind it in the direction of faraway home, thousands of American sailors stood at attention, saluting the courage and skill of these soldiers off to rescue their countrymen. Major Jim Schaefer, in the third Sea Stallion to launch, had tears in his eyes.

Their approach over water was right on target. As they crossed Iran’s coast, several of the marine crews had spotted the single lead Hercules overhead moving at twice their airspeed. Two of the choppers were having difficulty with their navigation equipment, but flying that close to the ground they could steer by landmarks and by staying with the formation. They were not allowed to communicate by radio, lest they be overheard by Iranian defenses, but they had practiced flashing lights as signals; a quick one, two meant that there was a problem, and then the second sequence of lights indicated the nature of the problem. They flew in a staggered line of four pairs. Not long after crossing into Iran the marine crews spotted part of the trailing formation of C-130s, which confirmed they were heading the right way. Lieutenant Colonel Ed Seiffert, the flight leader and pilot of the lead chopper, felt relaxed enough to take a break and eat his packed lunch.

The formation made it only one hundred and forty miles into Iran, however, before one of the choppers had trouble. A warning light came on in the cockpit of the sixth in formation indicating that one of the blades had been hit by something or had cracked, a potentially fatal problem. The pilot immediately landed, followed by another, the trailing chopper, and after determining that one rotor blade was in fact cracked badly, they abandoned the aircraft, removing all of the classified documents inside and climbing into helo eight, flown by Captain Jimmy Linderman. It lifted off, gave chase, and eventually caught up with the others.

As they burned off fuel, the choppers picked up speed. They were closing in on Desert One faster and faster, 120 knots and accelerating. About two hundred miles into Iran they saw before them what looked like a wall of talcum powder. They flew right into it. Seiffert realized it was suspended dust when he tasted it and felt it in his teeth. If it was penetrating his cockpit, it was penetrating his engines. The temperature inside rose to one hundred degrees. But before it became a problem, the cloud vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. They had flown right through it.

Looming ahead was the second, much larger haboob, but Seiffert didn’t know it. Kyle’s warning had not been relayed; radio blackout conditions and the necessity for transmitting everything in code had defeated the C-130 flight crews’ efforts, that and the assumption that the hazy patches did not pose a severe problem.

This may have been the most serious miscalculation of the night, because the formation passed into the second cloud assuming that it would dissipate as quickly as the first. This one grew thicker and thicker, and soon Seiffert could no longer see the other choppers in the formation or on the ground. The choppers had to turn on their outside red safety lights, and off in the haze there were now indistinct halos of red strung out at varying distances. When the fuzzy beacons themselves vanished, Seiffert and his wingman made a U-turn, flew back out of the cloud, and landed. None of the other five choppers had seen them go down. Seiffert had hoped they would all follow him down to confer and decide on a strategy. Now he had no choice but to take off and wade back into the soup trying to catch up.

Seiffert’s manuever had placed Schaefer in the lead position. One moment Seiffert’s aircraft had been in front of him, and the next moment it was gone. One by one, the indistinct red suns in the milky haze had grown dimmer and dimmer and then they were gone. How could I lose them? Schaefer thought. He could see nothing and he heard nothing but the sounds of his own engines. All around was a smothering cloak of whiteness. He executed a “lost plane” maneuver, turning fifteen degrees off course for a few minutes, and then turning back on course, hoping to pick up the formation again. Even as low as two hundred feet he could not see the ground.

“Is this fog?” he asked his crew.

His crew chief said, “Lick your finger and stick it out the window.”

He did. When he pulled his hand in, it was covered with white dust.

“What the hell is this?” he said.

He climbed to one thousand feet and was still in the cloud. Inside the chopper it was hot and getting hotter. They descended, this time below two hundred feet. Schaefer could see the ground only intermittently. For three hours they flew like this on instruments, a series of small blue panels alongside the dials. In training for instrument flying, the pilots always flew in teams, with one aircraft blacked out and the other not. And there was always the option, when things got hairy, of removing the blackout screens. Now Schaefer had nothing to go on but the glowing blue panels, and his faith was being sorely tested. The cockpit was overheated and the men in it were both hot and increasingly tense.

“Is there anything in front of us?” Schaefer asked his copilot, Les Petty.

“Well, there’s a six-thousand-foot mountain in front of us,” he said.

“How soon?” asked Schaefer.

“I don’t trust the machine,” said Petty, “and I don’t trust my map. I ain’t seen the ground in three hours. I’d say right now.”

So they started to climb. They climbed to eight thousand feet, and abruptly the dust cloud broke. Inside the chopper it was suddenly very cold. Off to one side, Schaefer saw the peak of a mountain.

“Good job, Les,” he said. “I love you.”

Desert One was still about an hour away, so they plunged right back into the haboob. This time, Schaefer leveled off at six hundred feet. He didn’t know it, but the remaining six choppers were doing the same. The lack of visibility made the crews woozy. It was especially hard on the pilots, who wore night-vision goggles, which distorted depth perception and exaggerated feelings of vertigo. The men were becoming dehydrated in the extreme heat. They knew that some more tall peaks were between them and Desert One and could only hope that visibility improved in time for them to steer around or over them. One of the choppers lost its backup hydraulic system, which under ordinary circumstances would have required it to land immediately, but the pilot pressed on.

It was a tense, difficult struggle for all of them, and finally one gave up. Lieutenant Commander Rodney Davis had watched the control lights in his cockpit indicate a number of failures. His electrically powered compass was not working, and his other navigation devices, while working, were being affected by the heat. His copilot was feeling sick. When he lost sight of the nearest chopper, Davis was alone in the cloud. He tried the lost plane manuever, but he didn’t see the other choppers and could not get a clear fix on anything below that would allow him to know his exact position. Davis took it up to nine thousand feet but was still in the milk. He might try flying higher, but that would burn more fuel and there was no telling how high up he would have to go; there was also the fear of being picked up by radar. He was at a critical point in the flight. To press on meant there would not be enough fuel to make it back to the carrier. Because they couldn’t see, ahead or down, it meant they could steer off course or collide with a mountain on their way to Desert One. He conferred with Colonel Chuck Pittman, the ranking officer of the entire helicopter contingent, who was riding in back. With the other seven choppers still presumably en route—they did not know that one had already been lost—they assumed that turning back would not fatally compromise the mission.

So they turned back.

At the desert airfield, Delta waited anxiously as precious minutes of darkness passed. It was an enormous relief, just before one o’clock, when the distinctive whoop-whoop-whoop of the first two was heard in the desert night sky.

In the lead helicopter, Schaefer saw a giant pillar of flame, and his first thought was that one of the C-130s had crashed and exploded. He flew over Desert One and counted four planes on the ground, exactly what he expected. Thank you, Lord, he said to himself.

He turned to land on a second pass, and as he came down he clipped a rut so hard that he knew he had damaged his aircraft. The tires on his landing gear were blown and knocked off the rims. He had been in the air for five hours. He was tired, relieved, and had to piss. Like the planes, the choppers kept their engines running to lower the risk of a mechanical failure; most problems showed up stopping and restarting. Schaefer and his crew got out and walked around behind his aircraft to urinate, which is what he was doing when he was confronted by the eager Beckwith, trailed by Burruss, Kyle, and the other commanders.

“What the hell’s going on?” asked the colonel. “How did you get so goddamned late?”

“First of all, we’re only twenty-five minutes late,” said Schaefer. “Second of all, I don’t know where anyone else is because we went into a big dust cloud.”

“There’s no goddamned dust cloud out here,” said Beckwith, gesturing at the open sky. He had not been told about the haboobs on the way in.

“Well, there is one,” said Schaefer. He said that the flying conditions coming in had been the worst he had ever flown through. His men were badly shaken. His chopper still flew but may have been damaged. He wasn’t sure they could go on.

This is not what Beckwith wanted to hear.

“I’m going to report this thing,” he said angrily. He thought the pilot looked shattered, as though the pressure of this thing had completely broken him down. He slapped Schaefer on the back and told him that he and the others were going to have to suck it up.

The refueling crew went right to work on Schaefer’s chopper. Lyle Walton, one of the airmen helping with the hose, was approached by one of the helicopter crewmen.

“Where are you from, airman?” he asked.

“Little Rock, Arkansas,” said Walton.

“No shit, I’m from Pine Bluff,” said the crewman. They had not met during any of the training runs. He said his name was George Holmes, and it turned out they had grown up just thirty miles apart. They talked a little about that, and Holmes said, “I guess we’re going to have to go show this ayatollah you don’t mess with Arkansas boys.”

Burruss was surprised by how rattled the first two pair of chopper pilots looked. It occurred to him that it might have less to do with haboobs than the dangers of this mission. Maybe these guys never believed they might actually be called upon to fly it. Training was one thing. He had known men before who were superb in practice but shrank from a real fight.

Two more choppers arrived, and there was trouble with one of them. The helicopter flown by Captain B. J. McGuire had been flying with a warning light on in the cockpit, indicating trouble with his backup hydraulic system. Fitch was the first person to him on landing.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” the Delta squadron leader said, shouting to be heard. “Where are the rest of the guys?” Fitch asked.

“I don’t know,” said McGuire. “We don’t have any communication.”

McGuire told the Delta squadron commander about the problem with his helicopter. He said he thought the working hydraulic system was sufficiently trustworthy for him to continue.

When at last the final two choppers landed, it was cause for quiet celebration. It was one-thirty in the morning, which gave them just enough time to get everything done and hidden before full daylight. They had the required six. Some members of the assault force exchanged high fives. Seiffert soon had them maneuvering into position behind the four C-130s to refuel. Their wheels made deep tracks in the fine sand and the turning rotors whipped violent dust storms. It was deafening with all the rotors and propellers running. The truck fire was still burning brightly.

Beckwith, impatient to get going, climbed into the cockpit of the last chopper to land and tried to get the attention of Seiffert, who was coordinating these maneuvers on the radio with his pilots.

“Request permission to load, skipper,” said Beckwith. “We need to get with it.”

“Hey, remember me?” he asked.

Seiffert either didn’t hear him or ignored him. The colonel slapped his helmet.

Seiffert took off his helmet and confronted Beckwith angrily.

“I can’t guarantee we’ll get you to the next site before first light.”

“I don’t care,” said Beckwith.

Seiffert told him to go ahead and load his men.

Because they were transferring from the plane to choppers, Fitch and his men had been carrying all their own gear as they hauled the camouflage netting. In some cases men were carrying well over eighty pounds—Fitch himself was hauling ninety-five extra pounds of gear on his two-hundred-pound frame. They were eager to get settled on the choppers. When he got word, the major told his team to begin loading the camouflage netting and themselves on the choppers and went off to retrieve the men he had left guarding the bus passengers. Supervision of the Iranians was given to Carl Savory, the Delta surgeon. Doc Savory, a less experienced shooter than his Delta comrades, had been guarding the passengers for some time before one of the other men pointed out that he had forgotten to put the magazine in his weapon.

Beckwith was moving from chopper to chopper, urging things forward, when another of the marine pilots stepped out and said, “The skipper told me to tell you we only have five flyable helicopters. That’s what the skipper told me to tell you.”