Joint Task Force #4: Africa Read online

  “Chief Razi is one of our best,” Peeters offered.

  The four turboprops of the taxiing EP-3E drowned out any reply. Colonel Jeff Hightower saluted and sauntered off toward the tower.

  Holman dropped the cigar onto the damp ground and ground it out with the heel of his shoe. Thoughts whirled through his mind about this upcoming rescue operation. He should have asked Hightower how much experience the man’s crew had in SAR missions, but a full Air Force colonel would be well trained. The Air Force left little to chance when it came to safety. A simple in-and-out rescue is never that. If you’re going to bring someone out, and you have to call it a rescue, then it is never simple. Special Forces missions on the other hand were planned well in advance, and everyone knew his mission and where to be for pickup. Search-and-rescue missions never have advanced planning. They were by-the-seat operations designed to get the fallen combatants out of the war zone and off to wherever medical attention could be provided. He slapped a mosquito on his neck. He hoped the worst the four endured was a little loss of blood to the mosquitoes.

  The engines of the EP-3E wound down as the pilot cut power. Three of the engines were quickly feathered, coming to a stop as the pilot locked them down. The outer one continued to turn, driving the onboard generators until the ground crew could hook up a ground unit. The thing about these old birds, Holman said to himself, is that they are self-sustaining. Not like the Air Force, who fly in ground crews, ground equipment, and test the runway before one of their beefy reconnaissance aircraft lands. With the EP-3E variant of the maritime reconnaissance P-3, all the crew had to do was crawl on board, take off, and they could land nearly anywhere. The aircraft had onboard-generator power, and the crew was trained to repair the aircraft. Holman pushed his sunglasses back on his nose. On the far side of the aircraft, a ladder emerged from the rear and moments later aircrew members started disembarking. The first ones were hurrying around the aircraft checking safety lines. One of those, Holman knew, would be the static electricity wire running from the aircraft to the ground.

  Everything about Africa was bright, hot, humid, and dangerous. The sun baked everything beneath it; the heat even lined peoples’ faces. The humidity drenched them continuously and when it wasn’t causing everything to remain wet, it changed to rain to make sure it didn’t miss anything. And danger; danger was everywhere in Africa. It lurked in little microscopic things that could eat away your flesh, to insects that viewed the human body as its home, to reptiles whose bites killed instantly, to animals who viewed everyone as walking groceries, and to humans who knew no other way to deal with each other than through violence. Violence stirred up the population. How anyone could want— How? Why anyone would want to emigrate to Liberia and leave the land of coast-to-coast air conditioning was beyond Holman. This was his fourth visit in two years. Each visit came with a self-made promise it would be his last. This time the promise would be kept.

  The faint wind stirred the palm trees lining the walk where Holman, Upmann, and Peeters stood watching the action on the tarmac.

  The ground crew pulled and pushed the yellow, ground generator near the aircraft and with a flip of a cover, the supervisor connected the electrical feed to the aircraft. Holman saw the ground crew shouting at each other, but their words were drowned out by the single engine keeping power to the aircraft. The young man stepped back after making the connection and gave the copilot a thumbs-up. Holman saw the copilot turn and a moment later the last engine wound down, coming to a halt.

  “Admiral!”

  Holman turned. It was Colonel Hightower returning.

  “Sir, we have our flight plan filed, but the Liberian colonel in the tower has denied it.”

  “Denied it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hightower answered as he walked up. “Said we aren’t allowed to violate the border between Liberia and Guinea.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Upmann added.

  “Not to worry, my fine Navy captain. I filed a flight plan toward the border to conduct some flight training. He accepted that.”

  “But—”

  Hightower smiled. “I think he was just going through the formalities of denying us overflight permission. This way he can tell his superiors he never approved us violating Guinea airspace.”

  Holman nodded. “Did you have to change your launch time?”

  “No, sir. We’ll still launch at o-six-hundred, around false dawn. Same time. May be a little sooner, but not much. All I want is to be able to see the ground without ground-terrain radar and lights. The four of us will be heading toward your downed airmen.”

  “The sooner the better, Colonel.”

  The Air Force colonel reached up, straightened his hat, and shrugged. “Sir, we Air Force have never allowed regulations to stop us from doing what we have to do.”

  “Are you sure you’re Air Force?”

  “Leo,” Holman interrupted, reaching over, and touching Captain Upmann’s arm briefly. “Colonel, that’s good news. We’ll be here when you launch.”

  “Sir, we will have both Pave Hawks reconfigured tonight, though we only intend to take one. The other is a backup in the event the SAR requires longer than we hope.” Hightower paused a moment and then said, “Would the Admiral like to see our Pave Hawk helicopter?”

  “Colonel, I would be honored,” Holman replied. “Come on, Leo. Lieutenant Commander Peeters, would you like to join us?”

  “Admiral, I’d love to, but I’d better stay here to greet my skipper. He’s going to want to know what happened; where it happened; and what we are doing about it.”

  Holman nodded. “Tell the skipper I’ll speak with him shortly.”

  ”THIS IS THE PAVE HAWK HELICOPTER, ADMIRAL,” HIGHTOWER said, patting the side of the jungle-green helicopter. “The primary mission of the Pave Hawk is to conduct day and night operations into hostile territory, transporting the services’ Special Forces team.” He removed his hand and walked to the side door opening into the rear of the Pave Hawk. “The Pave Hawk is also known as the HH-60, a heavily modified version of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopter. Difference is we have more sophisticated communications and navigational suites.”

  “Nice ship, Colonel,” Holman said.

  “It is, isn’t it, Admiral,” Hightower replied, patting the floor a couple of times where passengers would ride. “By tomorrow morning, my team will have installed a .50 caliber machine gun. I know your intelligence officer said it should be a noncombat rescue, but it wasn’t noncombat action that caused your crewmembers to be down.”

  “Touché,” Upmann added.

  “Good planning, Colonel,” Holman said.

  Hightower pointed toward the rotors. “The Pave Hawk has two General Electric engines that give us a four-hundred-mile-plus range without air-to-air refueling, though we do have that capability. Reliability is outstanding.”

  The sound of wheels screeching, metal against metal, drew their attention. Approaching them were a group of airmen in light-gray flight suits, wearing the patches of the Air Force’s Air Combat command, pulling and pushing a trolley with gray metal boxes on them.

  Hightower pointed. “That’s our ground crew, Admiral. That will be the rescue equipment we will need tomorrow to bring your crewmen up and out of the jungle.”

  About twenty feet from the helicopter, one of the airmen recognized the stars on Holman’s hat and collars, and shouted, “Attention!”

  “Stand at ease,” Holman said.

  The team quickly returned to the task of manhandling the heavy load to the helicopter. A man wearing the stripes of a senior master sergeant approached Holman, saluted, and addressed Colonel Hightower, “Sir, we need to get in here and modify the doorway for rescue.”

  “And the fifty-cal?”

  The senior master sergeant nodded. “After we put the rescue pod in, sir. Shouldn’t take long, Colonel.”

  “Rescue pod?” Holman asked.

  “Something new, Admiral. It allows us to modify the Pave Hawk for the mi
ssion at hand. As you probably know, the most important piece of rescue gear for a helicopter is the winch, and we have a permanently mounted winch that is three hundred feet long—don’t think we’ll need that much—and has a payload capacity of a ton. Hopefully, we won’t have to lift that much because the Pave Hawk can only lift about six hundred pounds and that’s going downhill.”

  “Downhill?” Upmann asked.

  “Sorry, Captain. That was an Air Force joke.”

  “I did have an opportunity to talk with the aircrew when they returned, Admiral, and they tell me the downed crewmen have survival radios with them. The sergeant and crew will be downloading the software into our personnel-locating-system so we can ensure that we’re compatible with the survival radios your crewmembers are carrying. This will give us range and bearing to the crewmen, and let us locate them and get them home quicker.”

  “What’s the flight duration for your helicopter, Colonel?”

  “Admiral, with air-to-air refueling we could fly forever, but this time we’re going with onboard fuel only. I estimate a maximum of four hours flight time. Figure one to one and a half hours to reach the vicinity of your crewmembers. Thirty to forty-five minutes to bring them on board, and then return by most direct route.”

  “Ergo, home for lunch.”

  “Captain, if everything goes well, we may have them back in time for a late breakfast.”

  “Sirs, would you mind moving back so my team can work on the chopper?”

  Holman acknowledged the senior master sergeant’s request and led them to the shade of a nearby palm tree. Here is another one of those wonderful places a pilot should be, near a runway, watching professionals doing the nation’s work on aircraft. Personally, he wouldn’t fly a helicopter. Why would anyone give up the throttle and yoke of a F/A-18 Hornet for the complicated, coordinated arms-and-leg movements needed to fly a helicopter? On the other hand, he would fight any budget-cutter’s dream to save money by chopping out the helos. While it had never happened where he needed to be yanked out of some strange land, the whup-whup sounds of a helicopter settling in to bring you out has to be a tearjerking one for the pilot on the ground.

  A tall, lanky figure wearing a khaki hat with the silver oak leaf of a Navy commander stepped into the shade with them and saluted. “Admiral, I’m Commander Charles T. Greensburg, sir; commanding officer of Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron Two.”

  “VQ-2 skipper?” Holman politely asked as the three of them returned the salute.

  “Yes, sir. Just landed, Admiral, and according to my officer-in-charge here—”

  “Lieutenant Commander Peeters?”

  “Yes, sir, Captain. He’s the deployed OIC. He told me a rescue attempt will commence tomorrow morning?”

  Holman nodded at Colonel Hightower. “That’s true, Skipper. Colonel Hightower and a crew from the Air Combat Command are going out first-light to bring them back.”

  “Sir, unless otherwise directed, we intend to launch tonight, locate them, and keep them company until Colonel Hightower brings them home.” Greensburg said. The VQ-2 skipper clasped his hands behind his back and looked at Hightower. “Colonel, if we can exchange frequencies, then when you arrive tomorrow morning, we should be able to make your job easier.”

  Hightower nodded. “That would make our job easier.”

  “Skipper, you have my permission, but you may have a hard time getting flight-plan approval through the tower.”

  “No sweat, Admiral. We filed flight plans at the beginning of the month for twenty-five missions. Our flight plan was approved days ago. Lieutenant Commander Peeters told me the Liberians are being assholes about us flying into Guinea, but then again, I never intended to ask them. If they do, I’ll tell them we’re trying to see what altitude is best for the EP-3E to fly.”

  CHAPTER 10

  RAZI STUMBLED FROM THE BUSHES, FALLING ONTO THE same path he had traveled more than an hour ago. His eyes widened as he pushed himself up, his smile growing for a moment before he burst into loud laughter, until after a couple of minutes, it decreased in intensity to a low, soft laughter that sounded more like an uncontrolled murmur. “Fuck you,” he finally said, his voice low, not directing the expletive toward any one person but at everything that had tried to stop him, including his own imagination. “Fuck you,” he said louder.

  He squatted, unzipped his survival vest, and drank deeply from the plastic container of water. When he finished, he looked at the remaining water, sloshed it around a couple of times. “Will save you, but if I need water, what’s a little monkey shit?” He patted his stomach and looked down at it. “Worm, you’re dead meat when I get my hands on you. Just keep growing because it’s not going to be a fair fight.”

  He picked the top of the plastic container up from the ground. “Got to tighten you or tight,” he mumbled talking to the container as he screwed the top down. “Can’t lose you, Mister Water. No, can’t lose you.” He shoved the pint container back into the survival vest and patted it a couple of times. He stretched his head and shoulders forward, his body tense. Razi raised himself slightly on his haunches like a lion waiting to pounce. There be evil pirates in these woods, boys, he thought. His slowly turned his head, his eyes narrowing as he looked both ways, unsure of what he would see or even what he was looking for, but deep within Razi a primal urge surged, desiring something, anything, to emerge onto the path with him. His hands opened and closed, one moment a palm with fingers spread wide and the next, knuckles showing white through a mud-caked fist. He stared transfixed at the sight of brown turning to red-white and back again. Seconds turned into minutes and nearly half-hour passed with him squatting, staring at his hand until a loud screech caused Razi to look up, breaking the trance.

  Then, he stood, stepped to the side of faint path, unzipped, and marked his territory. His narrowed eyes searching for danger as he peed.

  He had a mission. Ahead was his crew. Young, naïve, and unable to care for themselves. It was his job. The job of every chief petty officer—teach and protect. Razi zipped up, reached into his survival vest, and pulled out his compass. Yes, this was definitely the trail he had walked earlier. He looked down the path, as far as the overgrowth of the jungle permitted. Somewhere ahead were four, maybe five, armed African boy scouts whose idea of being prepared meant making sure the chamber had a bullet in it. He jammed the compass back into his pocket. His hand slipped over to the other side of the survival vest, patting the pocket for his knife, finding an empty scabbard, and he recalled losing it somewhere in the fall off the cliff. Raising his hands, Razi balled them into fists. Knife? I don’t need any frigging knife.

  Razi closed the survival vest and he marched off, covering the same territory he had covered a couple of hours ago. Thirty minutes later he came to the fallen tree that had caused him to stop—where he had worried about how to cross it, and what venomous snake might lie on the other side. This time, without hesitation, Razi jumped up onto the trunk of the fallen giant, dashed across it, and quickly jumped down. He didn’t even bother to glance back or notice the African cobra that quickly slithered away from under the fallen tree into the bush.

  Minutes later, Razi pushed huge leaves out of his way, only to have the water on the leaves soak his now jungle-heat-dried flight suit. He stopped. The leaves curled like natural saucers, trapping water from the earlier rainfall. Razi leaned down, tilted one leaf after the other, letting the tepid water flow into his open mouth, each leaf moving him forward along the path. Man-eating lions, African crocodiles, and monkey-shit worries had disappeared. Sure, the thoughts of jungle dangers flitted across his mind, but for some reason they no longer mattered nor did they worry him. No one, or thing, was going to stop him from saving his sailors. Not even the monster worm growing in his stomach. A day ago, he would have thought of those African boy warriors as kids. Now, deep inside, he knew if he encountered them, he’d wring their necks without a moments’ hesitation. Civilization was only minutes deep in any man’s soul, where on
e event could erase it and hurl you back into the primal jungle in which Razi now walked.

  The seconds turned to minutes and into hours. Razi tripped on a vine growing across the path he followed. He threw his hands out, stopping his body before it hit the ground. Razi pushed himself up. It felt good, and without thinking about it, Razi began to do push-ups—at ten he started counting aloud—and when he reached one hundred, he stopped in the upward position. Holding stable, staring at a column of ants swarming beneath him where his actions had disturbed their path.

  He rolled over onto one hand and started doing one-armed push-ups, one after the other, silently counting, and each upward motion slower than the last until he reached thirty, and then he stopped again in the upward position. His arm and stomach ached. Razi dropped a knee and pushed himself upright, standing, breathing rapidly from the exertion.

  Razi’s eyes danced right and left as he tried to rationalize why he wasted time doing what he just did. While he stood quietly, growing uncomfortable with what had happened, he realized the light beneath the jungle canopy was fading. He looked up, his thoughts turning from the push-ups to his surroundings. The sun was setting. He wiped his hands against each other, knocking off decaying twigs and leaves. “Not much longer,” he said to himself. He could hardly continue if he was unable to see where he was going. Still his hands were filthy. He wiped the mud and debris off the legs of his flight suit, pulled out his gloves, and slipped them on. He wiggled his fingers in front of his eyes. “Now you look clean.”

  Razi glanced at the compass, confirmed his direction, and started off. He pulled out his flashlight and flipped down the red lens over the lamp. The red light of the flashlight would show him the way, when what little daylight remained disappeared. It wouldn’t light much of the trail, but it would be hard for anyone to see it unless they knew what to look for. Even aircraft carriers light their flight decks at night with red lights. You have to be looking for the soft diffused glow of red light to see it. He’d flown EC-2s when he was a petty officer—the small two-engine turboprop aircraft with the radar dome on top of them. Back when he was a young sailor, and before he switched ratings to cryptologic technician. Aircraft carriers look small when you’re orbiting above them, waiting to land. At night, they’re nothing more than faint red outlines with blackness between the lights. Some first-timers never returned for seconds.