Rogue Forces (3 page)

A
PPROACHING
J
ANDARMA
P
UBLIC
O
RDER
C
OMMANDO
B
ASE
, D
IYARBAKIR
, R
EPUBLIC OF
T
URKEY

S
UMMER
2010

“
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.