FROM INSIDE THE TALON, I could see a giant fireball blazing about a kilometer away. My mind flashed to the worst-case scenario: the Iranians somehow discovered the mission and had been lying in wait. I listened over the prop noise for the rattle of automatic weapons, but it didn’t come. Because we rode up near the cockpit, I was among the last to deplane. Bucky and Logan were waiting for me. Logan had a bloody gash on his nose, which was already muddy with the fine dust that covered his face.
“Welcome to World War III!” Bucky said, grinning.
Behind us, the four tanker birds began landing in sequence, each one multiplying the noise and sandstorm that now swirled around us.
“What’s going on!” I asked Bucky, yelling to be heard.
He grinned. “Ish and the Rangers fired up a fuel tanker!”
The rest of the story came out in bits and pieces. As the first C-130 approached Desert One, the pilots spotted a fuel tanker rolling down the dirt road that bisected the landing area. Trailing it was a small pick-up. The Talon circled once, landed, dropped the ramp. Ish jumped on a Yamaha motorcycle and a Ranger named Rubio, armed with a light anti-tank weapon, jumped on behind him. They raced down the ramp, followed by a Delta/Ranger security team in a Jeep. As soon as Ish pulled within range, Rubio fired the LAW and the tanker burst like a supernova.
“They chased the other truck, but it got away!” Bucky shouted.
We agreed there wasn’t much to worry about. A fuel tanker with an escort rolling through the Iranian wastes at midnight? Smugglers, probably. They wouldn’t be likely to alert authorities. Even if they did, we’d be long gone before the Iranians could mobilize to investigate.
The moon glowed bright, but with the tanker shooting flames three hundred feet into the night, Desert One was lit up like a Midnight Madness sale at a used car lot. Now, as Delta operators began the heavy work of dragging a massive cargo net off the second Talon, their shadows flickered off the white desert floor. The net would be transloaded to the helos, then used to cover them at the hide site. Dust devils twisted up off the desert floor as the C-130s parked and kept their props turning. Eddies of fine sand stung my eyes and I moved away from the Talons’ deafening thrum. Then, strangely, I could have sworn I heard the high faint sound of . . .
Women.
Crying women.
I was surprised to find out that the smugglers weren’t our only visitors. Before Ish’s security team could finish setting up a perimeter, a passenger bus—a passenger bus!—also trundled across our landing site. The security team popped off warning shots then had to fire into the engine to stop the bus. Onboard were about forty-five people, mostly women, old folks, and kids. A Delta operator now guarded them closely, but the women, naturally, were terrified, and every now and then one would cut loose in hysterical wails.
We picked Desert One for its remoteness. I mean, the place was the definition of bleak. Now, past 9 p.m. on what should have been an unremarkable date in April, we had encountered something in the neighborhood of fifty people. It didn’t matter, though, because we planned for this problem. Anyone we encountered at Desert One would be hauled out on the C-130’s then returned to Manzariyah the next night. People have suggested the mission planners were such buffoons that we hadn’t dreamed we might encounter interlopers at the landing site. That’s simply not true. We expected the unexpected, and it materialized.
I was discussing this with Bucky when Charlie walked over. “On our way in here, Vaught called about the helos. Eight off the deck, he said.”
Excitement surged through me. All eight helos had launched successfully off the Nimitz. Most of us weren’t as worried about the Iranians as we were about the helos. Vietnam proved that the rotor driven birds were notoriously cranky. For this mission we needed six working RH-53s. So far, we still had eight.
Now Charlie radioed Vaught in Wadi Kena: “What’s the status on the helos?”
“Fifty minutes out and low on fuel,” came the reply.
A little late, but not too bad.
Delta began to break into our element groups in preparation for onloading to the helos. Boris and Fast Eddie were with me. They sat down with the rest of the LZ element to wait for their ride to the hide site. The fire-lit sandstorm swirled around us all. Every man had extra pockets sewn into his jacket lining and we all bristled with extra clips, rope, carabiners, water, and assorted widgets. Prior to leaving Wadi Kena, I weighed every man to make sure we didn’t overload the helos. Fast Eddie packed so many explosive goodies into his jacket he tipped the scales at three hundred twenty-four pounds. Now, sitting in the desert, he looked like the Michelin Man.
Soon the tankers were set, the cargo net was set, the onload groups were set, and there was nothing left to do but wait. And the helos were now officially late.
We didn’t worry much at first—they’d even arrived late during rehearsals. Still, time was critical: we had to get off the deck here soon in order to reach the hide sites before sunrise. Hedging our bets, Bucky searched me out. “Jerry, if we get too far behind schedule, we’re going to need a different hide site,” he said. “Get the map out and start looking.”
I did, poring over the pictured wasteland until I found a little niche in the side of a mountain that looked flat enough to land the helos. I wasn’t comfortable with it. We had no way to recon it, the way Dick Meadows had reconned the approved hide sites. There was really no way to know whether we’d find ourselves landing on top of some kind of goat-herding village. But it was our only option.
I circled the site on the map and showed it to Bucky.
He looked at it then stared off to the south. “I wish to hell they’d get here,” he said.