Ashes of Victory

— 8 —

The long, desolate boundary between Syria and Iraq had long ago turned into an open doorway for jihadists to cross from Syria into Iraq. Faced with growing internal conflict, the Syrian president, along with his council of ministers, had turned a collective blind eye to the activities of all but those directly opposing them.

Thirty-five minutes before daylight, eight cells of insurgents, each ranging from twenty-four to thirty-nine men, began crossing into Iraq. They were spaced at approximately one-mile intervals, near Jabal at Tanf, halfway between the Dead Sea and the Euphrates River.

High overhead the barren landscape, an unmanned Global Hawk reconnaissance aircraft sent a video feed to a command center at Lajes Air Base in the Azores, several hundred miles off the coast of Portugal. There, the drone operator determined the coordinates of the infiltrators and fed them to a flight of two United States Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. Flying in trail, the sharklike supersonic aircraft were hugging the ground at two hundred feet as they snaked their way toward the targets.

The early-morning air seemed eerily still, with not a sound to be heard in the wide, arid Syrian Desert. While the terrorists smoked cigarettes and discussed their immediate plans, they were unaware of the two four-engine bombers rapidly approaching.

With their swing-wings swept back, the dark gray camouflaged planes were impossible to detect close to the ground. Like a supersonic lawn dart, the sleek bombers stalked their unsuspecting prey. There would be no sound, no warning for the terrorists. The enemy would suffer a triple shock: first from the sudden and mind-numbing sonic boom, second from the roar of the four powerful afterburners, and third, from the concussions of the massive carpet-bombing. With the second B-1B five miles behind, the lead bomber would overfly the first two cells and drop conventional MK 82 500-pound bombs on the third and fourth groups. The second B-1B aircraft commander would unload his string of bombs on the first and second cells.

When the lead bomber rocketed over the first two targets, the explosive, eardrum-splitting sonic boom literally knocked the terrorists in the second cell to their knees. The stunned, temporarily deaf insurgents watched in horror as bombs rained down less than a mile away. Whatever it was, the flying demon disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Feeling euphoric that they had dodged the massacre, the terrorists barely had time to breathe a sigh of relief before they literally ceased to exist. Delivering tons of astonishing destruction, the second B-1B had added forty-one dead to the thirty-one from the lead bomber.

Fifty-five seconds later, the first of two B-52 heavy bombers rolled in for their run over the terrorists. The formidable “Buffs” dropped conventional bomb loads on the insurgents, killing an additional fifty-five terrorists and severely injuring seventeen.

Following the heavy bombers, a two-plane section of Air Force A-10 Thunderbolts hunted the survivors who tried to escape in every direction. Suffering from shock and fear, many of the terrorists sprawled on their stomachs and pretended to be dead. The attack “Warthogs” killed an additional fourteen jihadists, and made high-speed, low-altitude passes over the terrified survivors. Any who escaped would not forget the horrific, buzzing sound of the 30 mm, seven-barrel cannon carving ten-foot-wide tracks on the rocky terrain.

The A-10s orbited overhead until three Marine Corps AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters arrived on the scene. The “Snakes” would loiter over the area and wait to see if anyone tried to make a break.

The Marine aviators were not going to gun down the terrorists. They wanted the survivors to carry the message back to their fellow terrorists. Not only could the Americans track them anywhere, anytime, but the terrorists wouldn’t even see or hear them coming.

The warehouse by the private pier swarmed with guards from three different nationalities. Prince Omar Al Saud had brought his own men, a half dozen professional operatives dressed like businessmen, carrying 9 mm Micro Uzi submachine guns under their jackets.

General Deng Xiangsui always traveled with an entourage of PLA Special Operation Forces as his private security detail, all armed with a mix of JS 9 mm submachine guns and QSZ-92 pistols.

And the third party in the negotiations, Ivanovich Zyubov, former Soviet general and GRU operative, arrived at the pier with his own protection, a dozen members of the Russian Mafia, some former Spetsnaz—Russian special forces — armed with enough weapons to start a revolution.

All of which led to a very tense atmosphere as the three negotiators waited for Dr. Ayman al-Rouby to inspect the contents of the case that two of Zyubov’s men had hauled from a truck to the warehouse.

Neither Deng nor Al Saud had ever seen a tactical nuclear weapon — or “suitcase nuke”—before, so they stood behind Dr. al-Rouby, while Zyubov, a trim, grim-faced man with dark circles around his equally dark eyes, waited patiently for the suitcase full of cash being guarded by Al Saud’s men.

“It is the real thing, yes?” Zyubov said before checking his watch.

Deng ignored him, as did Al Saud, listening to Dr. al-Rouby speak in an almost forensic tone. “This is an implosion-type weapon using conventional explosives as the firing charge, an electronic trigger mechanism connected to a digital counter, plus two sets of uranium-235 rings. Based on its size, I’m estimating a yield of around two kilotons.”

Deng and Al Saud looked over at the Russian, who gave them a thumbs-up and said, “Good. Yes?”

But they ignored him again as Dr. al-Rouby used a laser pointer to identify the components of the three-foot-long weapon. “The rings of the projectile have been properly stacked against the conventional charge, and the correct distance separates it from the rings of the target. Upon firing, the projectile will impale the target and reach the desired critical mass to achieve fission, thus the term implosion-type device. Very simple and very effective.”

He spent another ten minutes measuring the uranium rings, as well as using a variety of instruments, including a Geiger counter, to inspect the weapon. “I assure you,” he said, “that the radioactive exposure from the weapon is negligible.”

Finally, he looked up and said, “It is acceptable.”

“And the blast radius, Doctor?” Al Saud asked.

“I’m estimating an effective radius of just under a kilometer, destroying an area approximately two kilometers in size.”

The Saudi prince looked at his guards flanking the suitcase and gave them a subtle nod.

It took Zyubov just a couple of minutes to inspect its contents before zipping it shut. “Good business, yes?” he said.

“Yes, General,” Al Saud replied. “Good business.”

After the Russians were gone, Al Saud’s team closed the case and carried it to a pier along the far end of the warehouse, where the prince approached a stocky man with dark hair dressed in gray coveralls. He stood quietly by the short gangway connecting the pier to a motorsailer yacht with the name Santo Erasmus painted in blue across its stern.

The large Cheoy Lee transoceanic vessel registered to a private charter company out of Bilbao, Spain, monopolized almost eighty feet of waterfront.

“Don Omar,” the man said in a thick accent, heavily rolling the R. His well-tanned face sported the handsome damage from years out at sea.

“Hello, Javi,” the prince replied before turning to Deng and adding, “General, meet Javier Ibarra. One of my associates from Spain, and the best smuggler in the business.”

Deng shook the man’s calloused hand, noticing the strong grip. But what impressed him the most were his dark eyes, steady and focused, like those of his best fighter pilots. And that alone instilled confidence that this stranger and his equally stoic crew gathering at the top of the gangway might just be able to pull this off.

“A pleasure, General,” Ibarra said.

“The pleasure is mine,” Deng replied as Al Saud’s guards rolled the case up to them. “The pleasure is all mine.”

Lt. Amanda “Diamond” Diamante made it out of sick bay by midmorning and headed to the squadron room, or “ready room” of the Golden Dragons, located on the 03 Level immediately below the flight deck. She found Lt. Cmdr. Juan Ricardo and Lt. Cmdr. Trey Malloy sitting by the bar stools along the back of the room, where a new De’Longhi espresso machine provided the fuel that kept the pilots going. The machine had been a gift from the squadron commander, who knew the Navy ran on coffee but thought it needn’t be bad coffee.

Five rows of airline-style armchair seats faced the main board at the front of the room. Typically, a few pilots would occupy them working on their laptops or preparing for their flights. But in sharp contrast with the bustling activity prior to last night’s raids, the majority of the Golden Dragons fighter pilots were either sleeping, having some chow, or, like Ricardo and Malloy, enjoying a cup of coffee.

Along the left side of the room hung the squadron’s “Greenie Board” that provided the up-to-date results on the carrier landings for each member of the fighter squadron. Green represented a “4.0 OK Pass,” and the best pilots had a string of greens after their names; the rest had a dispersion of yellows for a “3.0 Fair Pass,” brown for a “2.0 No Grade,” and red for “1.0 Wave Offs.” The board also ranked the pilots by providing an average for their recent landings similar to a college grade point average, or GPA. Ricardo had the highest in the squadron at 4.0. Malloy was second at 3.93. Their CO, Commander Benjamin “Dover” Kowalski, ranked third at 3.87. Amanda had ranked fourth at 3.84 before last night’s flight. Her name was now at the bottom until the incident could be reviewed.

And to make matters worse, she could no longer find her name in the flight schedule hanging between the Greenie Board and a large flat screen slaved to the PLAT system, the Pilot’s Landing Aid Television fed by the five cameras covering the entire flight deck, providing continuous views of landings and launches.

“There she is! Quickdraw Diamante!” Malloy shouted. A native of San Diego, who looked like a surfer rather than a naval aviator, Malloy had once sported his call sign as an actual hairstyle, but it had been left on the floor the day he’d joined the Navy. He was average height but very muscular.

In contrast, Ricardo fit the classic Hispanic stereotype, thin and a bit shorter than Amanda’s five-nine, with very short, dark-brown hair and brown eyes, a smooth honey-colored skin, and a chiseled, angular face. They wore their flight suits sporting shoulder patches depicting a golden dragon holding a mushroom cloud in its claw.

“How’s the ankle?” Ricardo asked.

“Fine,” Amanda said, producing a small plastic bottle of ibuprofen. “Take two before bedtime and call in the morning.”

“Join us for a latte courtesy of your friendly squadron commander?” Malloy offered.

“Speaking of that, have you gotten your ‘bend-over’ time yet?” Ricardo asked. Then increasing the pitch of his voice, he added, “’Cause you got some ’splainin’ to do, Lucy!”

She smiled without humor. “I had to bail, guys. Stick was nonresponsive.”

“I keep telling you, Mullet,” Ricardo said, poking Malloy’s large bicep with an index finger. “That’s why you gotta get off those steroids, dude. FCS failure.”

Malloy was about to reply when an Asian man in his midforties with a full head of short salt-and-pepper hair stormed the ready room dressed in a desert flight suit. The silver oak leaves of a commander were stitched on his shoulders. Two other men, also in flight suits, followed him. They sported the gold oak leaves of lieutenant commanders, like Ricardo and Malloy. One had a narrow, somewhat gaunt face. The other was well tanned and heavyset, and held a clipboard and a pen.

All three pilots jumped to attention.

“Diamond! What the hell?!” shouted Cmdr. Benjamin “Dover” Kowalski, leading the charge in his heavy Brooklyn accent. “That wasn’t some toy aircraft! That was a United States Navy Rhino worth ninety-eight million dollars!” Kowalski had to answer to Captain James Buchelle, the “CAG,” or commander of Carrier Air Wing 2, also called the “Air Boss,” for all twelve F/A-18E Super Hornets assigned to his squadron. Whether the plane had crashed due to an FCS malfunction, as she had reported, or due to pilot error — or even if nailed by a SAM — it was still his responsibility.

“I kept resetting it, Skipper,” Amanda replied. “But the damn FCS warning light kept coming back with that ‘deedle-fucking-deedle’ chime that I can’t get out of my head.” Everyone in the Golden Dragons fighter squadron referred to their CO as either skipper or sir. Everyone outside of the squadron called him Commander Kowalski or by his call sign.

Malloy and Ricardo chuckled but quickly shut it when Kowalski turned his scorching glare on them.

“About that, Miss Diamante…,” said Lieutenant Commander Ed Stone, the fighter squadron’s maintenance officer and also a Super Hornet pilot. In charge of keeping the World Famous Golden Dragons airborne, it would be on Stone and his team if the plane had suffered a critical malfunction. Rubbing his bony chin and briefly regarding Kowalski and then the stocky officer next to him making notes on the clipboard, Stone asked, “How much time elapsed from the first time you observed the FCS caution light to the moment you lost control of your Rhino?”

And that was, of course, the question Amanda had been dreading to answer. “About nine minutes, sir.”

“I see,” Stone said. “And you reported the problem to your flight leader about thirty seconds after your bombing run?”

“That’s correct,” she replied, glancing over at the officer making notes.

“And you concur, Ricky?” the heavyset officer asked, looking up from his clipboard. Lieutenant Commander Vince Nova, the fighter squadron safety officer and also an F/A-18E pilot, would be responsible for performing a thorough investigation of the incident and writing the official report. That report would be sent up the chain of command, starting with Kowalski and then Captain Buchelle, who, along with the skipper of Vinson, Captain Peter Keegan, reported to the embarked flag officer, Rear Admiral Jack Swift, the commander of the Carl Vinson Strike Carrier Group.

“Yes, sir. Thirty seconds sounds right.”

“And you guys were subsonic going in, Mr. Ricardo?” asked Kowalski. It was customary to address junior officers by either rank, call sign, or simply by their last names.

“Correct, Skipper. Went in low and quiet on max endurance,” Ricardo said. “Didn’t feel like catching an Iranian SAM in the ass.”

Kowalski raised his brows at Stone and Nova, who exchanged glances. The latter made more notes, while Stone pulled out his smartphone, tapped on it for several seconds, then showed it to Nova, who frowned, made another entry on the clipboard, and then tilted it toward Kowalski.

The strike fighter commander eyed it for a few seconds, shook his head, then said, “So, Lieutenant, you discovered a problem with your aircraft over one hundred and eighty miles from your target — actually before even reaching the Iranian coast — and it didn’t occur to you to just… turn back? Isn’t that the reason we keep the Alert Five aircraft ready to roll?”

“I thought it would go away, Skipper. Those fly-by-wire systems are always twitchy, and we just reset them and they’re usually good again. Besides, I was over five hundred miles from mother when it happened, so I thought it best to stick with my flight leader.”

“Which you obviously did,” Kowalski said.

As Amanda was about to reply, all eyes turned to the flat screen as a Hornet approached the carrier’s stern and snagged the number two wire while slamming onto the flight deck. The ready room trembled and rattled as if a subway train had just careened overhead.

She paused to let the clanging on the flight deck above them settle down, marking the controlled-crash landing of another navy jet. Although the Golden Dragons were enjoying a break, other squadrons were running daytime raids or flying CAP. Averaging between 120 and 140 sorties launched each day, it translated into somebody landing every ten or so minutes. And even if they were not launching actual strikes, all carrier pilots had to fly practice sorties on average four days a week, and that meant that from noon to around midnight jets constantly took off and landed on a flight deck roughly three football fields in length right over their heads.

“Well, Lieutenant?” Kowalski asked.

Amanda decided to stand her ground. “Yes, sir. I chose to stick to my flight leader, and I accomplished my mission. Had I turned back, I would have likely ditched with my full load of bombs. No way was I making it all the way back. At least this way I let those bastards get a piece of Dragon justice before going down.”

“The fact is, Lieutenant, you really don’t know if you would have made it back or not,” Kowalski said, before looking at his maintenance officer. “And it all checked out before the flight, Mr. Stone?”

Stone looked behind him toward the open bulkhead and shouted, “Come in, Master Chief!”

Up to that point, the discussion had been kept strictly among pilots, but now Lt. Cmdr. Stone had pulled in his right-hand man, the senior NCO who oversaw all of the maintenance belowdecks for the Golden Dragons.

Slowly Maintenance Master Chief Gino Cardona made his way through the bulkhead, dressed in a Navy Working Uniform, leaning down a bit to clear the hatch. The large man always reminded Amanda of Jessie Ventura during his wrestling days. Cardona had been handling maintenance for navy fighter squadrons for the better part of a quarter of a century. Although Stone was the officer ultimately responsible for all aspects of servicing the Golden Dragons’ jets, Cardona was the man in the hangar making it all happen. The master chief, who everyone aboard knew had seen pretty much everything during his years of service, just stood there a moment regarding the scene.

“Well?” Stone asked. “What’s the word from our boys belowdecks?”

“Just went over the maintenance records with my line chiefs, sir,” Cardona replied in his booming voice. “All checked out good. That Rhino was in perfect condition when it left my hangar. But, as you know, it isn’t unusual for pilots to report issues when flying that we sometimes can’t reproduce in the shop.”

“What are you saying, Master Chief?” asked Stone.

“I’m saying that sometimes shit happens, and we just don’t know why.”

Stone frowned and gave the large NCO a slight nod before turning to Kowalski and shrugging. “You heard the man, Skipper. It was, well, a fluke.”

“Yeah,” Kowalski said, his features tightening. “A very fucking expensive fluke, Mr. Stone, and in ten minutes the air boss is going to be chewing on a bowl of Chinese stir-fry with a pound of chopped Polish sausage.” Capt. Buchelle had a reputation for being a tough, old-school aviator who believed it was a pilot’s duty to do everything under the sun to bring your bird back home. And it became obvious the moment you stepped in his office. Behind his desk hung a large, framed photo of the man back when he was a young lieutenant standing through the gaping hole in the starboard wing of the F/A-18 Hornet that he had nursed back to the USS Saratoga (CV 60) after surviving a hit from an Iraqi SAM during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

“With all due respect, Skipper,” Cardona chimed in. “We all thought it was just a quarter-pounder.” He stated it with a completely impassive face while Stone grinned and Nova looked up from his writing.

“Go to hell, Master Chief,” Kowalski growled.

“Copy that, sir,” Cardona replied.

Amanda kept her eyes front and did not even twitch.

Looking over at Stone, Cardona added, “Does that mean I’m excused from your naval aviator party, sir?”

Stone sighed and nodded. “Thank you, Master Chief.”

“Aye, sir.” And he was gone.

Turning to all three pilots still standing at attention, Kowalski bellowed, “I want full written reports turned into Mr. Nova by 1500! No excuses! So, stop drinking my lattes and start writing!”

“Yes, sir!”

Kowalski then got right in front of Amanda. She could smell his cigarette breath. The man just loved those damn things.

“So, two ragheads point-blank and now you’re hot shit?”

“Two shots each, Skipper. Center mass. No way were those Iranian bastards getting their greasy paws on me.”

Kowalski exchanged glances with Stone and Nova, then he said, “They’re already calling you Quickdraw Diamante. God help us.”

“I prefer Deedle-Deedle, sir,” Stone chimed in.

Kowalski grinned. “I actually fucking love that! Deedle Diamante it is.”

She blinked. “What? Wait, I already have a call—”

“Want to fly again, Deedle?”

“Aye, sir!”

“Then go see Mr. Stone after you turn in your report. Maybe he’ll fix you up.”

“Aye, sir!”

The commander then turned his attention to Malloy, standing ramrod straight between Ricardo and Amanda.

“Mullet? What the fuck was that last pass with the canons? The helo was already away.”

“Ah, Skipper, I saw—”

“You saw what, Mr. Malloy? The chance of exposing yourself and my plane unnecessarily? Of getting your ass shot down so we had to deal with another downed pilot? A second lost bird? You know better than that!”

“I do, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“Yeah,” Kowalski said. “Me too.”

The commander turned to leave, but just before disappearing through the bulkhead, he looked over his shoulder at all three aviators still standing at attention and said, “Top-notch flying. Helluva fucking rescue… and great shooting. Dragon style.” And then he was gone.