Christopher Reich - The First Billion

But ten minutes later when Nurse Chiu finished her talk about the hospital’s need for volunteers willing to come and walk the infants—to help them grow comfortable with the touch of another human being, to teach them to accept the gaze of another set of eyes, and, yes, just to keep the noisy little gremlins quiet—he’d found himself alone agreeing to return. And he wondered whose expectations he was challenging. His or the kids’?

Gavallan shut his eyes. He couldn’t handle another body laid at his feet. Oh no. Byrnes’s call had freed him of illusions. Konstantin Kirov was just as Cate had described him—“ruthless and conniving, and maybe even more.” This time Gavallan could not look elsewhere for excuses. This time he couldn’t fall back on bungled intelligence or fumbled orders. This time it was up to him.

“Don’t know if I can handle this one, chief,” he whispered to Henry’s sleeping brown face. “Think you can give me a hand?”

And he marveled in disbelief at how once upon a time he’d been a warrior.

The whine in his ear built slowly, as it had in the plane itself. A steady high-pitched cry that signaled the powering-up of the aircraft’s avionics package. He was going back to the Gulf. To Saudi Arabia. To Iraq. To Desert Storm. To the night the infrared cameras on the underside of Darling Lil recorded the tape that sat even now in his flight locker. The tape titled Day 40—Abu Ghurayb Presidential Complex. He was going to his own private little corner of hell, and his familiarity with the territory did little to lessen his terror over the trip.

“Thunder three-six. Red one. How do you read?”

“Roger, Red one. This is Thunder three-six. Ready to copy words. Which way to Wonderland?”

Gavallan is sitting in the cockpit of Darling Lil, far out on runway two-niner at King Khalid Air Force Base deep in the Saudi Arabian desert. It is 01:15 Continental European Time, the morning of February 25, 1991. Day 40 of Desert Storm. Ground operations have begun twenty-four hours earlier and the vaunted Republican Guard is surrendering en masse. Morale is high. But Gavallan is ever cautious. When will Saddam unleash his biological weapons? Is he waiting until the last minute to launch a nuke at Israel? What exactly is the Iraqi dictator keeping up his sleeve?

Despite the cockpit’s airtight seal, the desert air seeps in and surrounds him. It smells of jet fuel and sweat and a million square miles of superheated sand. Gavallan loves the scent. Inside its arid folds, he can taste his country’s victory.

Darling Lil is fully loaded for her night’s work. Two GBU-27s sit inside the weapons bay. Each a two-thousand-pound package of high explosives capped with a delayed detonation fuse and a laser guidance system to guarantee hand delivery to the target.

“Thunder three-six. You are clear for takeoff.”

“Thunder thirty-six copies all. Salaam Aleik’hum.”

Gavallan wraps the fingers of his left hand lightly around the throttle and guides it forward. For a moment, the plane rocks, as if a boat in a chop, then he releases the brake and the Black Jet begins its shot down the runway. At 180 knots, he rotates the aircraft up and the wheels lift off the ground. He loves this moment, when the aircraft leaves the earth and he feels as if he too has been freed from his temporal moorings. The first climb is brief. At fifty feet, he levels off the aircraft and allows it to build speed to three hundred knots, then pushes up the nose and begins his ascent to his cruising altitude of twenty-four thousand feet.

Outside the cockpit, the sky is cloudy. Few stars are visible. Gavallan’s eyes are trained on his instruments: altimeter, flight speed, fuel. Tonight’s flight plan is typical of the twenty-two missions he has logged to date. Takeoff to be followed by a rendezvous with a KC-135 to top off the tanks. After the completion of midair refueling, he will cross the Iraqi border and hit two targets, an IOC, or intercept operations center, at Ash Shamiyah, and an SOC, or sector operations center, at Ali Al Salem, one hundred miles to the south. Time to target is two hours forty-seven minutes.

Gavallan runs a hand over his pistol, flight harness, and G suit, fingers probing for the search and rescue map wedged into his leg pocket and the cloth “blood chit” on top of it. The blood chit is to be used in case of forced landing or ejection and carries four “tickets” offering a reward to its holder for helping shepherd the downed airman to safety. The 9mm pistol is in case the ragheads need more convincing.

Suppression of enemy air defenses has been ruled 98 percent successful, but someone has forgotten to inform the Iraqis of the fact. The flak that has greeted Gavallan on his most recent sorties is as hot and heavy as on the first night over Baghdad. Sooner or later, he will be hit. It is a law, not a probability.

He completes refueling without incident. Routine, he says, working to quell his apprehension, feeling restless in the green-glow midnight of the Black Jet’s cockpit. He stays on the KC-135’s wing for ninety minutes, then “stealths up” and turns east, driving Darling Lil into Iraq. As he kills the primary radio, he glides his thumb over the CD player in his flight suit and hits the play button. Axl Rose screams, “Welcome to the jungle.”

Ash Shamiyah goes off without a hitch. A grown man’s video game. Bomb armed. Systems check good. Target acquired: a gray rectangle dead center in his infrared display. Bombs away. The long downward ride, his thumb steering death on its unerring path. Thirty seconds later the screen whites out—a desert flower blossoming on his IR display. The IOC is a rectangle no more.

Gavallan pushes the stick left, banking the plane hard into a four G roll. Gut tight, head in a hammerlock, he turns to a heading of 210 degrees, driving Darling Lil to the night’s second target. Five minutes later, static tickles his ear. The steely guitars of Guns N’ Roses abruptly cut out.

“Thunder three-six. We have a code red, change of target.”

Gavallan stiffens. The primary rule of Stealth flight has been broken. Radio contact on the newly installed EML—emergency transmission link.

“Proceed to target designation ‘Alpha Golf.’ This is a Priority One, Ring One engagement. Do you copy?”

Priority One. Ring One.

Unconsciously, Gavallan leans forward, a tiger who has caught scent of his prey. Ring One refers to “command control communications centers,” or C3s, the highest-priority target on the modern battlefield. Priority One denotes that the commander of the C3 may be present at the target. In Iraq there is only one man who carries the moniker Priority One, and one of his many palaces is located in Abu Ghurayb—target designation Alpha Golf.

“Thunder three-six. Copy.”

“Okay, Tex, this is your chance for the big time. Don’t fuck it up.”

It is his flight controller, Rob Gettels, and for once Gavallan can’t think of a witty response. Suddenly his throat is dry, his stomach jittery. He’s a rookie all over again and he’s taking the plane up for his first flight. But a second later, the nerves calm, the hand steadies, and the breathing slows. He programs the onboard navigational system and banks the plane north. He is on his way. Priority One. Ring One. The Abu Ghurayb Presidential Complex.

Twenty minutes later, the radio crackles to life.

“Thunder three-six, green light on target Alpha Golf.”

“Copy.”

Gavallan lowers his seat an inch or two so that he can no longer see out of the cockpit. His world shrinks to the cocoon of instruments surrounding him. The stick between his legs. The throttle and weapons guidance joystick to his left. The infrared display that looks like a six-inch black-and-white television screen. The heads-up display above it.