The Mingrelian (30 page)

Within minutes they are loaded into the aircraft, along with their PJ rescuers and their four snowmobiles. As the mission commander, Boyd is escorted to the front to meet the pilots and take congratulation on pulling off the “mission of the century.” They have been fully briefed on Boyd’s team accomplishments and the privations they’ve endured.

The Caspian Sea, green and calm on a cloudy day, spreads out before them as they circle for altitude to get over the coastal mountains. Mount Damavand rises bleak and isolated into the low clouds behind them. Another storm is just now coming across southern Russia. The Osprey turns east to skirt the coast of Iran into Turkmenistan. As the cabin warms up and the weary travelers enjoy a normal ambient temperature for the first time in a week, an odor permeates the cabin. No way to bathe and a makeshift portable toilet have left the group with a ripe human scent.

“That’s how we get gas,” Boyd explains to the Ayatollah and Ekaterina an hour later as they look out a side window. The Osprey has flown up behind a C-130 equipped with a probe and drogue refueling hose trailing from a fuel tank outboard of the outboard engine. The Osprey approaches and inserts its fuel probe into a basket at the end of the hose, a connection is established and the Osprey receives enough fuel to complete the journey from Mount Damavand to Kandahar, Afghanistan, a distance of well over a thousand miles as they skirt the perimeter of Iran.

“Which is Major Chailland?” the base public-relations officer, an officious Air Force captain with a clipboard, asks as he bounds aboard the aircraft as soon as the steps are lowered in Kandahar. Outside the window there are several news cameras and a half-dozen reporters, even on this combat base deep in the hinterlands of a nation at war.

Boyd raises his hand.

“Stay inside,” he is told. “Clive, Goodman, Boyle, where are you?”

“Clive is dead, Goodman and Boyle are there,” Boyd says, pointing at his associates.

“OK, you guys stay inside until the cameras are gone. This show is for the Ayatollah Mashadi and Mrs. Dadiani.”

He frowns when he sees what sad shape they are in. He must have had visions of a press conference with interviews and photo o
ps. The Ayatollah, gaunt, worn
and dirty from a year in prison, is barely able to stand, and Ekaterina is wearing men’s long underwear under a dirty hospital gown under an arctic parka. They are helped down the three steps to the ground by the band of security policemen surrounding the aircraft and are followed by the Air Force PJs who rescued them, as the reporters converge. Boyd, Davann and Emmet stay inside with the crew.

Chapter 55: Two Months Later

ight Ball sits attentively, fascinated by the device on the table. His tail wags with enthusiasm after his ears have been rubbed and his coat massaged by all of his new best friends.

“The drogue chute deploys like this,” Emmet Boyle says, holding a parachute made out of a handkerchief in his hand, the suspension lines attached to risers being held by Davann Goodman, seated at the table.

There are beer bottles on the kitchen table in Boyd’s apartment, vacant for eight months but now the scene of much activity.

“Then it pulls the top off like this.”

He picks up a cylindrical bag made from pieces of grocery bags taped together.

“I don’t know,” Boyd says, finishing a longneck and chucking it into an open waste can in the corner. “Seems like we could find something better looking than a grocery bag.”

“It’s a one-time use item,” Emmet says in defense of his contraption.

Bud Weidman, sipping a Scotch in the corner, says, “There’s a Filipino lady at the mall who makes lanterns out of some kind of thin paper. She could put something together that would look better than that. She works with paper in all sorts of colors.”

“Can she get it by tomorrow?” Boyd asks. “We do have a deadline here.”

"No.”

“OK, let’s rethink this thing,” Boyd says, stepping to the table.

“You guys have assumed it has to be paper. Why not just attach the parachute to the bottom of the urn? When it opens, it pulls the urn upright and Raybon goes home,” he says, fluttering his right hand in the air while holding the urn containing Raybon Clive’s ashes.

“What if that urn hits someone on the ground?” Bud asks.

“Pretty unlikely in western Oklahoma,” Emmet says.

They sit there for a minute and then take a vote. The urn wins. They attach the small parachute to the bottom of the brass urn, clear the empty beer bottles and Boyd brings out a new, unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. They each take a shot glass and fill it up.

“I’ll go first,” Weidman says. “I didn’t get to meet Raybon, but I can tell you his crash at Camp Bastion
is legendary in the Air Force, especially among C-130 pilots. And, when he showed up wearing his wooden leg at the appeal hearing contesting his medical retirement? Classic. To a friend I wish I’d had: Raybon Clive!”

They all downed their shots. Weidman filled in some details he’d heard about the exploits, and they talked for a few minutes, savoring Raybon’s favorite drink.

Boyd took the bottle and filled the glasses.

“When I first met him in Mombasa, I could tell he didn’t want to talk to me. He’d had some bad experiences with the CIA.”

They all laughed.

“He got over that, apparently,” Boyd says as Davann nods emphatically.

“Then he takes me to the bar, and we drink beer all afternoon while I tell him about the mission out to that island in the Seychelles and ask him to contract with us to use that old Grumman Albatross you guys were flying. And I think I have a deal. Then he starts ordering shots of Jack. By the end of the night, we had an agreement and I had committed the government of the United States to be responsible for any eventuality.”

Everyone laughed in agreemen. Raybon was a known party man.

“But, the big thing I’ll remember about Raybon Clive was over Tehran,” Boyd says turning to Bud, the only member of this group who wasn’t over Tehran with Raybon. “We’re in the clouds, in a snowstorm, climbing up the side of an 18,000-foot mountain with an Iranian F-4 chasing behind us, and Emmet tells him there’s a ridge up ahead and we should go over it and down the into the valley to evade the F-4’s air-to-air missile.”

Boyd turns back to the group, holding his right hand in front of him in the classic fighter pilot’s gesture demonstrating a flying situation.
      

“You guys know, you can’t make an airplane just point its nose down – negative G’s. It can stall a big aircraft or tear the wings off. When we cross a ridgeline in a fighter, we roll inverted, go over the ridge and pull the nose down, then roll back. Fighters are made to do that.”

Boyd raises his glass.

“To Raybon Clive, the only man I know with the balls to roll a C-130!”

They down their drinks.

“And, it saved our ass.”

Emmet steps forward and pours some shots. He holds his and looks at it for a moment.

“I’ve been in the C-130 my whole adult life,” he says. “I treasure the aircraft and all it has accomplished in its storied history. I’ve known some pilots, guys who took the ‘Herc’ to some places people still talk about. But flying a hundred feet over that prison in Tehran and blowing the front gate open with a burst of 20 mm cannon shells from a Vulcan cannon on the ramp tops them all! To Raybon Clive, the best C-130 pilot I’ve known!”

The group mills around for another 10 minutes, dipping tortilla chips into a mixture of Ro-tel and Velveeta and telling other Raybon Clive stories, waiting for Davann to be ready for his toast. Finally he stands, pours the shots and raises his.

“After we got shot in Afghanistan, we were in the plane coming back to the States. We’d been in Germany for a week, both of us had had more surgery. He’d lost his leg, I was afraid I’d never walk again. It was dark. And cold. And we were bouncing along in the middle of the night. We were on those canvas litters stacked three high in the back of a C-17.

“ ‘Hey,’ he said. He pulled at my arm. ‘Hey. Hey.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. I was irritated, he woke me up. ‘You got anybody, back home? Anybody meetin’ you when the plane gets in?’ ‘Shit,’ I said, ‘nobody meetin’ me.’ ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he said again, pulling on my arm. ‘Hey, let’s me and you stay together. You Marines, you go to Bethesda. Think they’d take me there?’ ”

Davann’s eyes were welling with tears. He raised his glass higher, and the others did the same.

“So, we stay together through the whole rehab thing and one day he says to me, ‘Hey, whatcha gonna do when we get outta here?’ I said I didn’t know, probably go back to Memphis and get a job in a liquor store. He said, ‘No, stick with me. I’ll
teach you to fly.’ I said, ‘Shit, I can’t fly no airplane.’ He says, ‘If I teach you, you can fly an airplane.’ ”

Davann’s face is wet with tears as he chokes back a sob. Others are wiping tears from their eyes.

“So, I get my private pilot’s license, Instruments, multicrew, and commercial licenses. He’s there the whole way, teaching, pushing encouraging,” Davann sobs. “I never had a friend like that. He knew I could be a better man than I was. He made me a better man than I was. And now, I’ve got a wife and a son on the way, and a job, and … and, a life.”

Crying openly now, he raises his glass even higher. “Hey, Raybon, Hey.”

*****

Davann Goodman sits in the left seat. He is the chief pilot of the South Sudan air force, though they have no aircraft. With his dual citizenship and his connections within the government of South Sudan, he has come to Little Rock at the invitation and with the full support of the government of the United States to learn to fly the C-130. It is a routine training mission. Bud Weidman sits in the right seat, instructing. Boyd Chailland has completed his C-130 training and is along as an additional crew member. Emmet Boyle is on the manifest as an observer. Though there is no navigator on the C-130 H-model they are flying, he sits at the console behind the co-pilot, which has most of the same instruments the old model navigator’s consoles had. Another student pilot lounges on the bunk in the back.

“Clinton, Oklahoma, just ahead,”
Emmet says, eyes on his map.
“The Canadian River is 40 miles north. Surface winds up there are 10 knots from the west.”

Davann turns to the north and begins a descent. Boyd and Emmet climb down the steps to the cargo bay, carrying the small package.

The aircraft descends to 500 feet as the Canadian River, muddy and wide with water from melting snow in Colorado and New Mexico, flows through the hilly ranch land of western Oklahoma. Davann gets up, and the other student pilot takes the left seat. Davann hurries down the ladder. Boyd and Emmet have already opened the jump door just in front of the tail. Wind rushes by. They hand the package to Davann. He unwraps the package, holds the parachute-wrapped urn in his right hand, grabs a hand-hold on the left side of the door and peers out. The river is just below.

“Bye, old friend,” he says, and pitches the package out the door.

The little parachute catches the wind and yanks the urn upright. Raybon Clive’s ashes disperse across the Oklahoma hills where he was born.

Chapter 56: The Kremlin

miling with robust good humor, the Russian president strides to the microphone. The large theater-like press room is many times the size of the White House press room, and it is filled to capacity with the world’s media. A sophisticated common feed with a dozen cameras controlled from the control room at the back is ensuring any record of this event will feature perfect lighting, camera angle and sound. He smiles out at the reporters; dapper, confident, in control.

“The world has had its second nuclear war.”

He pauses to let that sink in. Print reporters are frantically typing away, some writing on legal pads.

“Like all war, the origins of this one are open to interpretation.”

He pauses again.

“To the dead and the injured and the homeless, it makes no difference. The cataclysm in the Middle East has swept away old alliances, old power structures and old differences.”

He pauses again, scanning the crowd, savoring their attention to his every nuance.

“A new wind blows there. The wind of cooperation, of tolerance, of recognition of the needs of the long suffering oppressed people of that region, a region of vast wealth and hopeless poverty.”

The Russian president looks back at the only other person seated on the stage. It is the newly elected president of Iran, selected only the week before by the National Council of
Resistance of Iran, the parliament in exile, now in control in that nation.

“Today the Russian people extend
a helping hand to an old friend. Through turmoil of every type, the Persian people have been neighbors, trading partners and allies with Russia. Through them, we hope to extend our good wishes and assistance to the entire Middle East. This treaty of cooperation is more than a promise of aid in a time of crisis. It is a military alliance, a cultural exchange, a bond of friendship.”

He pauses again, smiling benignly at the crowd of reporters.

“The people of Iran have chosen wisely in their search for one to lead them from the destruction and turmoil of war and despotism. This is a man of the world, a contrite Muslim, a skilled politician and a man who risked everything to mold the inevitable collapse of a corrupt regime into the world’s first pure Islamic state. Today I wish to present to the world Russia’s newest ally, the president of Iran, Eskander Khorasani.