Rogue Forces

PROLOGUE

The dilok, or traditional wedding celebration, had been going on now for several hours, but no one appeared to be tired in the least. Men were dancing on large defs, or frame drums, and tap-dancing to folk music performed with amplified zurna and temburs, while the other guests cheered them on.

Outside, it was a warm, dry, clear evening. Knots of men stood in groups here and there, smoking and drinking small cups of thick coffee. Women and older girls in colorful dresses and scarves carried trays of food to them, helped by sons or younger brothers carrying flashlights.

After serving the men outside the wedding reception, a woman carried a tray down the road beyond the lights, her ten-year-old son leading the way, to two Toyota pickup trucks semihidden in the trees, one on each side of the road leading to the farm. The boy shined the flashlight at the pickup truck to his left, right into the eyes of his older brother. “Alslam ylikm! Caught you sleeping again!” he shouted.

“I was not!” the brother retorted, much louder than he intended.

“Hani, don’t do that. Now your brother will not be able to see in the darkness for some time,” the boy’s mother scolded him. “Go give your brother some treats and tell him you’re sorry. Come, Mazen,” she said to her husband, “I have more coffee for you.”

The husband set his AK-47 aside on the truck’s front bumper and gratefully accepted the treats. He was dressed for the celebration, not for guard duty. “You’re a good woman, Zilar,” the man said. “But next time, send your lazy brother out here to do the work for you. It was his idea to place guards outside the reception.” He could sense her pained expression. “I see. He is busy recruiting again, no? His own daughter’s wedding and he can’t stop?”

“He feels very strongly—”

“I know, I know,” the husband interrupted, gently placing a hand on his wife’s cheek to reassure her. “He is a patriotic and committed Kurdish nationalist. Good for him. But he knows the militias, police, and military monitor such events, take photographs from unmanned aircraft, use sensitive microphones, and tap telephones. Why does he continue? He risks too much.”

“Nevertheless, I thank you again for agreeing to take a shift out here for security,” the wife said, taking his hand from her face and kissing it. “It makes him feel better.”

“I haven’t picked up a rifle in years since I left the peshmerga militias in Kirkuk. I find myself checking the safety every three seconds.”

“Oh, do you, my husband?” The woman stepped toward the AK-47 leaning against the bumper and examined it with her fingers.

“Ah, la, tell me I didn’t…”

“You did.” She flicked the safety lever back up to “safe.”

“I’m glad your brothers aren’t around to see you do that,” her husband said. “Perhaps I need more lessons from a former High Commune of Women commander.”

“I have a family to raise and a house to take care of—I put in my time in the Kurdistan independence movement. Let the younger women do some fighting for a change.”

“You can put any younger woman to shame—on the rifle range, and in bed.”

“Oh, and how would you know about the skills of younger women?” she asked playfully. She placed the weapon back down and approached her husband, swaying her hips seductively. “I have many more lessons I’d prefer to give you, husband.” He gave her a kiss. “Now, how much longer are you going to keep my oldest son out here?”

“Not long. Maybe another hour.” He nodded toward his son, who was busy fending off his younger brother from the few remaining baklava on the tray. “It’s nice to be out here with Neaz. He takes this task very seriously. He—” The man stopped because he thought he heard an approaching bicycle or small scooter, a sort of quiet hushing sound that indicated speed but not power. There were no lights on the road or highway beyond. He frowned, then placed his coffee cup in his wife’s hand. “Take Hani back to the community center.”

“What is it?”

“Probably nothing.” He looked down the dirt road again and saw no sign of any movement—no birds, no rustling trees. “Tell your brother I’m going to roam around a bit. I’ll tell the others.” He kissed his wife on the cheek, then went to retrieve his AK-47. “I’ll be ready to come in after I get…”

Out of the corner of an eye, high above to the west, he spotted it: a brief spurt of yellow light, not solid like a searchlight but flickering like a torch. Why he did it, he wasn’t sure, but he pushed his wife aside, into the trees beside the gate. “Get down!” he shouted. “Stay down! Stay—”

Suddenly the ground vibrated as if a thousand horses were stampeding right beside them. The husband’s face, eyes, and throat were choked by clouds of dust and dirt that appeared from nowhere, and rocks were thrown in every direction. The wife screamed as she saw her husband literally disintegrate into chunks of human flesh. The pickup truck was similarly chewed apart before the gas tank ruptured, sending a massive fireball into the sky.

Then she heard it—a horrible sound, impossibly loud, lasting only a fraction of a second. It was like a giant growling animal standing over her, like a house-size chain saw. The sound was followed moments later by the loud whoosh of a jet plane flying overhead, so low that she thought it could be landing on the dirt road.

In the space of just a few heartbeats, her husband and two sons were dead before her eyes. Somehow the woman got to her feet and ran back toward the wedding reception, thinking of nothing else but warning the other members of her family to flee for their lives.

“Lead is clear,” the lead pilot of the three-ship A-10 Thunderbolt II bomber radioed. He pulled up sharply to make sure he was well clear of the other aircraft and the terrain. “Two, cleared in hot.”

“Good pass, lead,” the pilot of the second A-10 Thunderbolt radioed. “Two’s in hot.” He checked the AGM-65G Maverick missile’s forward-looking infrared video display, which clearly showed the two pickup trucks at the end of the road, one burning and the other still intact, and lined up on the second pickup with a gentle touch of his control stick. His A-10 was not modified with a dedicated infrared sensor pod, but the “poor man’s FLIR” video from the Maverick missile did the job nicely.

Nighttime cannon runs were not normally advisable, especially in such hilly terrain, but what pilot would not take the risk for a chance to fire the incredible GAU-8A Avenger cannon, a thirty-millimeter Gatling gun that fired huge depleted uranium shells at almost four thousand rounds per minute? Besides, with the first target burning nicely, it was easy to see the next target now.

When the Maverick aiming reticle showed thirty degrees depression, the pilot dropped his plane’s nose, made a final adjustment, announced “Guns, guns, guns!” on the radio, and pulled the trigger. The roar of that big cannon firing between his legs was the most incredible feeling. In a single three-second spurt, almost two hundred huge shells flew to their target. The pilot centered the first second’s worth on the pickup, covering it with fifty shells and causing yet another spectacular explosion, and then raised the A-10’s nose to let the remaining hundred and thirty shells stitch up along the road toward a fleeing terrorist target.

Careful not to get target fixated, and very aware of the surrounding terrain, he pulled up sharply and vectored right to climb to his assigned altitude. The maneuverability of the American-made A-10 was amazing—it did not deserve its unofficial nickname of “Warthog.” “Two’s clear. Three, cleared in hot.”

“Three’s in hot,” the pilot of the third A-10 in the formation responded. He was the least experienced pilot in the four-ship formation, so he was not going to do a cannon pass…but it was going to be just as exciting.

He centered the target—a large garage beside a house—in his Maverick missile aiming screen, pressed the “lock” button on his throttle quadrant, said “Rifle one” on the radio, turned his head right to avoid the glare of the missile’s motor, and pressed the “launch” button on his control stick. An AGM-65G Maverick missile flew off the launch rail on the left wing and quickly disappeared from view. He selected a second missile, moved the aiming reticle to the second target—the house itself—and fired a Maverick from the right wing. He was rewarded seconds later with two bright explosions.

“Lead has a visual, looks like two direct hits.”

“Three’s clear,” he radioed as he climbed and turned toward his planned rendezvous anchor. “Four, cleared in hot.”

“Four copies, going in hot,” the fourth A-10 pilot acknowledged. His was possibly the least exciting attack profile and one that normally was not even performed by the A-10, but the A-10s were the new members of the fleet, and their full capabilities had yet to be explored.

The routine was far simpler than his wingmen’s: stores control switches set to stations four and eight; follow the GPS navigation cues to the release point; master arming switch to “arm”; and press the release button on the control stick at the preplanned release point. Two thousand-pound GBU-32 GPS-guided bombs dropped into the night sky. The pilot didn’t have to lock anything on or risk diving toward the terrain: the guidance kits on the weapons used GPS satellite navigation signals to guide the bombs to their target, a large building near the farm that was advertised as a “community center” but that intelligence sources insisted was a major gathering and recruiting spot for PKK terrorists.

Well, not anymore. Two direct hits obliterated the building, creating one massive crater over fifty feet in diameter. Even flying at fifteen thousand feet above ground, the A-10 was rocked by the twin explosions. “Four’s clear. Weapon panel safe and clear.”

“Two good infilaks,” the lead pilot radioed. He didn’t see any secondary explosions, but the terrorists might have moved the large cache of weapons and explosions reportedly being stored in the building. “Muhtesem! Good job, Thunderbolts. Check arming switches safe, and don’t forget to turn off ECM and turn on transponders at the border or we’ll be sweeping you up in the wreckage like they’ll be doing with those PKK scum back there. See you in the rendezvous anchor.”

Minutes later, all four A-10 Thunderbolts, newly acquired warplanes of the Turkish Air Force, were safely back across the border. Another successful antiterrorist mission against the rebels hiding out in Iraq.

The woman, Zilar Azzawi, groaned in agony as she awoke a short time later. Her left hand was in terrible pain, as if she had broken a finger or thumb when she fell…and then she realized with shock that her left hand was gone, severed off at midforearm. Whatever had killed her husband and sons and destroyed the truck had almost succeeded in killing her. Her PKK commando training took over, and she managed to tie a strip of cloth from her dress around her arm as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

The entire area around her was in flames, and she had no choice but to stay where she was, on the side of the road, until she could get her bearings. Everything around her, except this little patch of dirt road, was burning, and she had lost so much blood that she didn’t think she could go very far even if she did know which way to go.

Everything and everyone was gone, utterly blasted away—the buildings, wedding reception, all the guests, the children…my God, the children, her children…!

Azzawi was helpless now, hoping just to stay alive…

“But, God, if you let me live,” she said aloud over the sounds of death and destruction around her, “I will find the ones responsible for this attack, and I will use all of my powers to raise an army and destroy them. My previous life is over—they have taken my family from me with brutal indifference. With your blessing, God, my new life shall begin right now, and I will avenge all those who died here tonight.”

“Canak Two-Seven, Diyarbakir Tower, winds three-zero-zero at eight knots, ceiling one thousand overcast, visibility five in light rain, runway three-five, cleared for the ILS approach normal category, security status is green.”

The pilot of the American-made KC-135R tanker/cargo plane acknowledged the call, then clicked on the passenger address system. “We will be landing shortly. Please return to your seats, be sure your seat belts are secure, stow your tray tables, and put away all carry-on items. Tesekkur ederim. Thank you.” He then turned to the boom operator/flight engineer seated behind the copilot and shouted cross-cockpit, “Go see if he wants to come up for the landing, Master Sergeant.” The engineer nodded, took off his headset, and headed aft to the cargo compartment.

Although the KC-135R was primarily an aerial refueling plane, it was frequently used for both hauling cargo and carrying passengers. The cargo was in the forward part of the cavernous interior—in this case, four pallets filled with crates, secured with nylon netting. Behind the pallets were two twelve-person centerline economy-type passenger-seat pallets bolted to the floor, with the occupants facing backward. The ride was noisy, smelly, dark, and uncomfortable, but valuable force-multiplying planes such as this were rarely allowed to fly unless fully loaded.

The crew engineer squeezed around the cargo and approached a napping passenger seated at the end of the first row on the port side. The man had longish and rather tousled hair, several days’ worth of whiskers, and wore rather common street clothes even though anyone traveling in military aircraft had to wear either a uniform or business attire. The engineer stood before the man and lightly touched his shoulder. When the man awoke, the master sergeant motioned to him, and he stood and followed the master sergeant to a space between the pallets. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” the boom operator said after the passenger had removed the yellow soft foam earplugs that everyone wore to protect their hearing from the noise, “but the pilot asked to see if you wanted to sit in the cockpit for the approach and landing.”

“Is that a normal procedure, Master Sergeant?” the passenger, General Besir Ozek, asked. Ozek was commander of the Jandarma Genel Komutanligi, or Turkish national paramilitary forces, a combination of national police force, border patrol, and national guard. As a trained commando as well as commander of the paramilitary unit charged with internal security, Ozek was authorized to wear longer hair and whiskers to better slip in and out of undercover roles and more unobtrusively observe others around him.

“No, sir,” the boom operator replied. “No one is allowed in the cockpit that is not on the flight crew. But…”

“I asked that I not be singled out on this flight, Master Sergeant. I thought that was plain to everyone on the crew,” Ozek said. “I wish to remain as inconspicuous as possible on this trip. That is why I chose to sit in the back with the other passengers.”

“Sorry, sir,” the boom operator said.

Ozek looked around the cargo pallets and noticed several passengers turning around to see what was going on. “Well, I suppose it’s too late now, isn’t it?” he said. “Let’s go.” The boom operator nodded and escorted the general to the cockpit, thankful he didn’t have to explain to the aircraft commander why the general hadn’t accepted his invitation.

It had been many years since Ozek had been inside a KC-135R Stratotanker refueling aircraft, and the cockpit seemed a lot more cramped, noisy, and smelly than he remembered. Ozek was a veteran infantryman, and didn’t care to understand what attracted men to aviation. An airman’s life was subject to forces and laws that no one saw or fully comprehended, and that’s not the way he ever wanted to live. The re-engined KC-135R was a good plane, but the airframe had been around for over fifty years now—this one was relatively young at only forty-five years—and it was starting to show its age.

Yet aviation seemed to be all the rage in the Republic of Turkey these days. His country had just taken possession of dozens of surplus tactical fighters and bombers from the United States: the much-loved F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter-bomber, which was also license-built in Turkey; the A-10 Thunderbolt close air support attack plane, nicknamed the “Warthog” because of its ungainly, utilitarian appearance; the AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunship; and the F-15 Eagle air superiority jet fighter. Turkey was well on its way to becoming a world-class regional military power, thanks to the United States’ desire to relieve itself of battle-tested but aging hardware.

The boom operator handed the general a headset and motioned to the flight instructor’s seat between the two pilots. “I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, General,” the pilot said over the intercom, “but the seat was open and I thought you’d enjoy the view.”

“Of course,” Ozek responded simply, making a note to himself to have the pilot removed from the service when he got back to headquarters; there were plenty of men and women who knew how to follow orders waiting to fly tankers in the Turkish air force. “What is the security status at the airport?”

“Green, sir,” the pilot reported. “Unchanged for more than a month.”

“The last PKK activity in the area was only twenty-four days ago, Captain,” Ozek said irritably. The PKK, or Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, was an outlawed Marxist military organization that sought the formation of a separate state of Kurdistan, formed from parts of southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, northeast Syria, and northwest Iran, all of which had Kurdish ethnic majorities. The PKK used terrorism and violence, even against large military bases and well-defended places such as civilian airports, to try to keep itself in the public eye and pressure the individual states to work out a solution. “We must remain vigilant at all times.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot acknowledged in a hushed voice.

“You are not performing a maximum-performance approach, Captain?”

“Uh…no, sir,” the pilot responded. “The security condition is green, the ceiling and visibility are low, and the tower advised that we are cleared for a normal-category approach.” He swallowed, then added, “And I did not want to upset you or the other passengers with a max-performance descent.”

Ozek would have berated this young idiot pilot, but they had already commenced the instrument approach, and things would get very busy here shortly. Maximum-performance takeoffs and approaches were designed to minimize time in the lethal envelope of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons. The PKK used Russian-made SA-7 and SA-14 missiles against Turkish government aircraft on occasion.

However, the probability of such an attack today was small. The ceiling and visibility were fairly low, which restricted the time available for a gunner to attack. Also, most attacks occurred against large helicopters or larger fixed-wing aircraft during takeoff phase of flight because the heat signature that the missiles locked onto was much brighter—during approach, the engines were running at lower power settings and were relatively cooler, which meant the missiles had a harder time locking on and could be jammed or decoyed easier.

The pilot was playing the odds, which Ozek disliked—especially because he was doing so just to try to impress a senior officer—but they were in the soup now, and breaking the approach off at such a moment, close to mountains in bad weather, was not an ideal choice. Ozek sat back and crossed his arms on his chest, making his anger apparent. “Continue, Captain,” he said simply.

“Yes, sir,” the pilot responded, relieved. “Copilot, before glideslope intercept checklist, please.” To the pilot’s credit, Ozek thought, he was a good aircraft commander; he would be a good addition to some airline’s crew complement, because he wasn’t going to be in the Turkish Air Force for very long.

This lackadaisical attitude was unfortunately more and more prevalent in the military these days as the conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurds continued to morph. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, had changed its name to PAG, or the Congress for Freedom and Democracy, and avoided using the term Kurdistan in its literature and speeches in an effort to appeal to a wider audience. These days, they held rallies and published papers advocating more human rights laws to ease the suffering of all oppressed persons in the world rather than advocating armed struggle solely for a separate Kurdish state.

But that was a ruse. The PKK was stronger, wealthier, and more aggressive than ever. Because of the U.S. invasion and destruction of Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq, as well as the civil war in Iran, the Kurdish insurgents were fearlessly staging cross-border raids into Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria from numerous safe camps, hoping to capitalize on the chaos and confusion and establish a strong base in each nation. Every time Turkish forces responded, they would be accused of genocide, and the politicians in Ankara would order the military to stop pursuit.

This only emboldened the PKK. The latest travesty: the emergence of a female terrorist leader. No one knew her real name; she was known as Baz, or “The Hawk” in Arabic, because of her ability to strike quickly and unexpectedly but seemingly fly away and escape her pursuers so easily. Her emergence as a major rallying force for Kurdish independence, and the Turkish and Iraqi governments’ lackadaisical response to her call for bloody war, was disturbing to the Jandarma general.

“Coming up on glideslope intercept,” the copilot said.

“Gear down,” the pilot said.

“Here it comes,” the copilot responded, and he reached over to just above the pilot’s right knee and moved the round landing gear actuator switch to the “down” position. “Gear in transit…three green, no yellow, press-to-test pump light checks, gear is down and locked.”

The pilot took his eyes off the horizontal situation indicator just long enough to check the gear lights and push to press-to-test “gear hyd” light. “Checks, gear is down and locked.”

“On course, on glideslope,” the copilot said. “Two thousand feet to decision height.” The copilot reached across and discreetly tapped his airspeed indicator, a silent warning for the pilot that his airspeed had dropped a bit—with a general in the cockpit, he didn’t want to highlight even the tiniest mistake. Their speed had dropped only five knots, but tiny errors seemed to snowball on an instrument approach, and it was better to catch and correct them right away than let them create bigger problems later.

“Tesekkur ederim,” the pilot responded, acknowledging the catch. A simple “roger” meant the pilot had found his own mistake, but a thank-you meant the copilot had made a good call. “One thousand to go.”

Filtered sunlight began to stream into the cockpit windows, followed moments later by sunlight filtered through widely scattered clouds. Ozek looked out and saw they were dead centered on the runway, and the visual approach lights indicated they were on glideslope. “Runway in sight,” the copilot announced. The ILS needles began to dance a bit, which meant the pilot was peeking out the window at the runway instead of watching his horizontal situation indicator. “Continue the approach.”

“Thank you.” Another good catch. “Five hundred to decision height. Stand by on the ‘before landing’ checklist and…”

Ozek, focusing out the window and not on the gauges, saw it first: a white curling line of smoke coming from a street intersection ahead and off to the left, inside the airport perimeter fence, heading straight for them! “Strela!” Ozek shouted, using the Russian nickname, “Star,” for the SA-7 shoulder-fired missile. “Break right, now!”

To his credit, the pilot did exactly as Ozek ordered: he immediately jammed the control wheel hard right and shoved all four throttles up to full military power. But he was far, far too late. Ozek knew they had just one chance now: that it was indeed an SA-7 missile and not the newer SA-14, because the older missile needed a bright hot “dot” to home in on, while the SA-14 could track any source of heat, even sunlight reflecting off a canopy.

In the blink of an eye, the missile was gone—it had missed the left wing by scant meters. But there was something else wrong. A horn blared in the cockpit; the pilot was trying desperately to turn the KC-135 to the left to straighten it out and perhaps even line up on the runway again, but the plane was not responding—the left wing was still high in the sky and there was not enough aileron authority to lower it. Even with the engines at full throttle, they were in a full stall, threatening to turn into a spin at any moment.

“What are you doing, Captain?” Ozek shouted. “Get the nose down and level the wings!”

“I can’t get turned around!” the pilot cried.

“We can’t make the runway—level the wings and find a place to crash-land!” Ozek said. He looked out the copilot’s window and saw the soccer field. “There! The football field! That’s your landing spot!”

“I can fly it out! I can do it…!”

“No you can’t—it’s too late!” Ozek shouted. “Get the nose down and make for the football field or we’re all going to die!”

The rest happened in less than five seconds, but Ozek watched it as if in slow motion. Instead of trying to wrestle the stalled tanker back up into the sky, the pilot released back pressure on the controls. As soon as he did, and with the engines at full military power, the ailerons immediately responded, and the pilot was able to bring the plane wings-level. With the nose low, airspeed built up rapidly, and the pilot had enough smash to raise the nose almost into a landing attitude. He pulled the throttles to idle, then to “cutoff,” moments before the big tanker hit the ground.

Ozek was thrown forward almost into the center console, but his shoulder and lap belts held, and he ruefully thought that he had felt harder landings before…and then the nose gear slammed down, and the Turkish general felt as if he had been snapped completely in half. The nose gear collapsed, and mud and turf smashed through the windscreen like a tidal wave. They plowed through a soccer goalpost, then crashed through a fence and a few garages and storage buildings before coming to a stop against the base gymnasium.