True Valor (8 page)

She took a licorice whip back with her to the recliner and pulled up the writing board that swiveled and locked over the right chair arm. She sorted out the kneeboard cards and maps that would fly with her tonight.

She’d helped plan the mission over the last week, so the times, altitudes, flight lanes, and fuel numbers for the six-hour flight were already neatly written down and color coded. She was flying the Syrian border with the squadron executive officer while others in the squadron diverted to strike assignments. The last-minute change had been to the duration and altitude profiles they maintained as they lingered on that border.

Peter had assigned himself to the lead of her element for one simple reason: They were the west flank of this strike mission. Syrian airspace would be less than a mile away. If Syria decided to intrude, they’d be on the front line with MiGs coming at them. She’d been flying an F/A-18 Hornet for six years. As a team they could mount a hard fight if required to protect the others in the squadron. Tonight would be an intense flight.

She scanned the gray security card. It was generated each day by carrier intelligence. The card listed code words for locations and planes so that the daily radio traffic made sense only to someone else working off the same sheet. She was a Viper tonight.

From the drawer under the footrest she pulled out her small tape player and earphones. She slipped on the earphones and clicked on the music. Settling back in the recliner, she closed her eyes and started visualizing the mission from launch to trap recovery back on the deck. In her profession, danger was tucked far down the checklists. Point and counterpoint. In the time it took a bullet to fly she could launch a missile and move her plane a thousand feet in the air. Shooting her out of the sky would take a golden bullet and a lucky shot.

“I want to live.”
She shook her head to dislodge the words Bruce had written her all those months ago while in Ecuador. The letter had been eloquent. And it was still haunting her.

NATO FORWARD OPERATING LOCATION

T
URKEY
/I
RAQ
B
ORDER

The headquarters building was cramped as communications, weather, weapons, and logistics all vied for space. Bruce followed Wolf to the secure room. Action for the night was beginning to pick up. The SEAL mission was a go. The map on the wall overlaid the classified missions with the air tasking orders. It was a complex mosaic.

“Do you really think he’s going to defect?” Bruce asked, getting to the heart of the question that would be answered tonight.

“Fifty-fifty. He stood us up last time. He’ll likely do it again.”

“Quite a risk just to go see.”

Wolf nodded. “The official orders came down as ‘at all cost.’ If he wants to come out, we’ll go get him.”

The Syrian deputy intelligence minister had grown up a friend of the royal family, attended Western universities, and had a master’s degree in English history of all things. He’d been a hawk at the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations, and yet from the classified intercepts appeared to be a dove within the government. It would be the highest-level defection since the death of President Hafez al-Assad and the ascension of his son to lead the country.

Wolf leaned against the wall beside the map, crossing his arms. “He was involved in the quiet trade that happened to get the CIA station chief kidnapped in Lebanon out safe and fast. He’s plugged in, and if he wants out—the risk is worth it. The meeting has been set up for west of Al Hasakah.”

Bruce looked at the location and winced. Twenty-two miles inside Syria. A desert approach, but still one that would expose the SEALs to enormous risks. “What can you tell me about the area? I know you’ve been there before.”

Wolf just smiled. “There’s a Bedouin oasis around the deep well that is one of the few watering places in this area. It’s a small place, a couple tents, more camels than cars. Desert all around. It’s normally not inhabited during the night as it’s open to the desert winds. It is more a passing point to the rock ridge to the south where there is decent shelter and some vegetation for livestock. We’ll come in from the north, scope it out, and if we see the signal, one team will go in while the gunship chopper circles.” Wolf opened the flap of his jacket pocket. “I’ll save you some time. My updated security info.”

“Not very confident, are you?”

“Defectors have a habit of changing their minds.”

The information used to identify a man behind enemy lines as a friendly—unique number, unique facts—had been written for convenience on the back of a pocket-size photo. Bruce glanced at the photo. This one of Gracie was new. Wolf had snapped her picture while she was playing volleyball, and that gleam in her eye as she got ready to spike the ball made Bruce smile. He missed her enormously. “Thanks for the picture.”

“My pleasure.”

Bruce slipped it into his pocket, not missing the fact Wolf had sacrificed a picture of Grace rather than Jill when he needed something small and lasting on which to write down the information. “Grace is going to be mad if you get hurt tonight.” Not to mention Jill’s reaction. That was one call Bruce did not ever want to have to make.

“Tell me about it.” Wolf ran his finger along the map. “New tasking orders were issued to extend the air cover on the border.”

Bruce noted the transit times and mentally shifted his own watch schedule for the night out to 0300. “You’ll have all the air cover you need.” The planes covering the Syrian border were launching as part of the strike package. “
GW
has already launched the first planes.”

Seven

* * *

USS
GEORGE WASHINGTON
(CVN 73)

M
EDITERRANEAN
S
EA
OFF
THE
C
OAST
OF
T
URKEY

The flight deck of the USS
George Washington
was deafening, and the thirty-one knot wind over the deck drove the dissipating steam and engine exhaust in eddies. Planes were wedged together with their wings folded up to squeeze the maximum out of every inch of precious space. Catapult 1 hurled a Prowler into the air. It was not a place for pilots to linger.

“Have a good flight, Gracie.”

“Thanks, Henry.” The plane boss had the jet ready to fly, and her preflight had found nothing amiss. Grace slid on the fire retardant flight gloves and tightened the flight suit wristbands, then grasped the handholds and swung her legs over and slid down to the seat of the F/A-18 Hornet
.

Leaning down, she removed the safety pins on the ejection seat and stored them away, then fastened the multiple-point safety harness. She secured the ankle restraints and tested them by pulling hard against the seat. If she had to eject, firing the explosive bolts would propel the seat from the plane. The last thing she wanted was two broken legs in the process.

The ties between her and the plane increased as she plugged in communication and the oxygen necessary for high altitude flights. She secured her kneeboard. Even as she did the routine she was aware of the need for speed. Twenty-three planes had to launch in eighteen minutes. Making that happen without killing someone took a miracle of coordination.

Men and women in different colored shirts to make very clear their assignments ran the flight deck, and there wasn’t a pilot aboard who didn’t know at the moment they were at the bottom of the totem pole. The purple shirt “grapes” were handling fuel, tons of it, and the red shirts were handling live ordnance. They were sweating every detail. Grace tried not to think about the dangers she could do nothing about as she sat in her plane and finished the internal preflight checklist. The sooner she got off this flight deck the better.

She signaled the yellow shirt plane director she was ready to start the engines. After a check around the plane he cleared her to do so. She started first the left and then the right. They came alive with a muted roar. She ran them up to check fuel and power flow and found all systems were nominal.

The plane director motioned her to taxi. Grace kept a sharp eye on him as she eased the throttle forward with her left hand to move the Hornet from its deck-edge parking place. Her jet wash could kill someone or explode another aircraft, and she couldn’t see the carrier deck around her plane.

He motioned her to hold and she eased back on the throttle, bringing the jet to a stop with the nose nearly touching the massive blast deflector protecting her plane from the jet wash of the plane being launched. The F/A-18 Hornet was a heavy, stubborn plane when fully fueled and armed. As graceful as it was in the air, it was unresponsive on land, or in this case steel, due to its back-weighted center of gravity. It took throttle on both engines to move its bulk.

She would be launching into the twilight. She took a deep breath as the plane ahead went to maximum burners. She hoped his launch was smooth so she could get away before that moment where the horizon shimmered in the fading light and her eyes lied about what was water and sky.

She punched a button and the takeoff checklist appeared in her left display. She was fighting the clock now and there was no time to waste. She ran the list, slamming the control surfaces around to check maximum movement, pushing the rudders, scanning the internal panels checking oil pressure, hydraulics, fuel flow—looking for anything with even a hint of a problem before it became too late to address it.

The safety officer gave final approval, the deflector shield lowered, and the plane director signaled her forward onto the catapult track. Steam was still swirling from the catapult shot of the EA-6B Prowler just launched. Dread began to build deep at the base of Gracie’s spine as she eased the throttle forward and rolled the Hornet across the catapult hook. The nose wheels locked and the green shirt catapult crewman hurried to attach a holdback bar to keep her plane in place until the catapult fired.

Two ordnance men moved beneath the wings of her plane, pulling safety pins to arm the weapons. One of the catapult officers held up a weight board, 41,300 pounds, and Gracie confirmed it with her own readouts and signaled her agreement.

Underneath her, in the interior of the carrier, pressure was building to the point that at the touch of a button, the steam-driven catapult would hurl her from the carrier deck, taking her from a dead stop to 125 knots in under two seconds.

She rested her hands on her thighs and deliberately tightened then loosened each muscle group in her arms and back to help her settle more deeply into the seat while she waited for the catapult officer to signal full burners.

On the next catapult the executive officer, Peter “Thunder” Stanford, was also getting ready to launch. She’d be off first. She felt an overwhelming sense of dependency on God during these moments. She knew if the catapult failed she was dead. She would hit the water doing anywhere from sixty to a hundred knots, and the impact would shear the plane into pieces.

If she did manage to eject in the two seconds before impact, she would either land on the carrier deck like a pancake and have her ejection seat chute get sucked into the roaring jet engines of another F/A-18 Hornet or she would land in the water and literally get run over by the carrier steaming ahead to maintain the thirty-knot minimum wind across the flight deck.

She prayed for safety but she didn’t dwell on it. She had decided years ago when she chose this profession that she would accept the training rigors, the risks, the dangers, and not ask God to remove the consequences of her choices. She was a Navy pilot. She loved it. And she accepted everything that meant.

The catapult officer signaled for full burners. Gracie tightened her left hand, took a deep breath, and shoved the throttle full open. The engines roared as the afterburners kicked in, the sound deafening even inside the cockpit with the helmet on, and the plane began to quiver around her.

The status screens were still green. She was good to go.

God, don’t let me die in the next twenty seconds.

She took her right hand from the stick and saluted the catapult officer, signaling all systems were good for launch.

She braced her head against the seat rest as the catapult officer reached down and touched the deck, getting himself down to survive the wash of air as he visually told the operator just off the flight deck to launch the plane. The operator depressed the launch button.

The hold bar released. The steam-driven catapult fired.

The F/A-18 shot forward.

Her head was driven back, her chest felt like it was being crushed, and her eyes watered.

Aerodynamics. Lift. Propulsion.
Come on, beat gravity; you can do it. . . .

The ship was gone from beneath her; she was looking at the sky. Her hand crept toward the yellow and black striped ejection handle as the plane dipped and the airspeed slowed approaching 110 knots. She had to reach 120 knots or she died. Had they set the catapult weight wrong? Was she going to suffer a cold shot?

The plane’s speed crept past the safety of 120 knots and her hands returned to the stick and throttle. The thirty-degree climb was grabbing air now, beating it into submission—she could feel the plane taking control of the aerodynamic battle.

“Viper 02, airborne.” Her calm words reflected none of the surging adrenaline. She’d survived.

A launch was almost as harrowing as a landing, a moment in time where everything she had ever feared dumped its emotions into her system and left her with wet palms and exhausted muscles when it was over.

The ship and its carrier deck were half a mile behind her. She had the sky, the plane, and the beat of her own heart. Six years flying an F/A-18 Hornet and every time up was like the first time. This moment of joy could never be described.