At 1020, they were hanging around over the Bay of Ambon, waiting for clearance to land at Pattimura. Tatum was then in the right-hand commander’s seat, chatting with Valdez, who was in a jump seat behind him. The copilot, Bob Thornton, was at the controls.
The flight path for fixed wing aircraft put the normal final approach over the villages of Hattu and Leke, west of the airport. Their Pave Low was south of that.
As they waited, a C-130 was passing over Hattu (it was carrying medical supplies, they learned later), when Thornton cried out, shocked, “SAM!” and pointed to a pair of corkscrewing trails of smoke beyond and below the big plane.
Valdez watched, fascinated, not sure what he was seeing ... But also wondering with a chill down his back if the missiles had been shot at them.
“Christ!” Tatum groaned, turning away from Valdez to look. “Goddamn!” And then, “I’ve got it.” He took the controls, his hand on the throttle, shoving it forward.
Meanwhile, in answer to Valdez’s fears, the corkscrews ended near the port engines of the C-130, instantaneously followed by twin flashes as their warheads blew. The starboard wing lifted, and then the aircraft twisted and tumbled out of the sky. As Valdez watched, transfixed, it plunged into the forest just off the coast road, two thirds of the way between Hattu and Leke.
The Pave Low by now was traveling at high speed, 160 knots, heading for the spot where the twin corkscrews had emerged from the forest. Valdez saw an opening there, probably a yam patch some farmer had hacked out of the jungle.
In addition to the pilot and copilot, Pave Lows are manned by two gunners, who operate a pair of 7.62 mm Gatling guns. A third Gatling, aft, is manned by the crew chief. These don’t give you heavy-duty firepower, but they make up for that (in most cases where you need them) by laying down a fast stream of lead. Gunners fire them the way firemen use a fire hose. One sweep will cut a man in two.
As they hurtled toward the coast, Tatum called out instructions to his gunners, his voice clear, calm, precise, yet tense with rage: “Gentlemen, we’re gonna get the bastards that took out our C-130. Check out your guns, please, gentlemen.”
This order was quickly followed by a series of clicks and snaps, as the gunners prepped their guns.
By this time, Valdez was himself caught up in the rage he could feel swelling through the aircraft.
Transport aircraft are vulnerable, and essential, in an operation like the one then underway. Without the air bridge, the relief effort would starve. Whoever had shot down the C-130 had wanted to threaten that. Why?
At the same time, the United States Air Force takes threats to any of their aircraft very seriously. And even transports come equipped with protective measures—chaff, flares, and other tricks of the trade. In fact, the larger aircraft can move with surprising agility if they have to. Even they can dodge missiles (man-portable SAMs have short legs—their maximum range is about five km., but their optimal range is only one or two km.). Tragically, no one had expected such an attack. This was a bad guess. On the other hand, Valdez was thinking, if you shoot down a U.S. Air Force aircraft don’t expect the other cheek to get turned.
A rack contained four M-4 carbines. He worked his way out of his jump seat and grabbed one, checking it over quickly to make sure it was ready to fire. It was. He placed himself to one side of one of the now open doors.
By then they had crossed the coastline and were descending; Tatum was throttling down, starting a tight circle that had the little field as its center. It had taken the big chopper less than two minutes to cover the distance from the bay to the SAM site.
The standard procedure for SAM shooters involves a quick in and out—shoot and scoot. And that was what the bad guys were doing. There were four of them, two shooters and two spotters, and they were hustling toward the jungle, maybe fifteen meters from its hope of safety (a triple-canopy forest wilderness covered the interior of the northern peninsula; only the coast was inhabited), when the Pave Low arced behind them. None of the four expected the cavalry to gallop over the hill that fast; and they all panicked. Three of them tried to put on a burst of speed; the fourth dove for the ground. It turned out that he made the best move. The Gatlings make a noise that has been described as the fart of the gods. Valdez listened, fascinated, to the gods farting, as he watched a laserlike stream of 7.62 mm projectiles cut through the three runners. The gunner then sent the briefest of bursts in the direction of the man on the ground, to encourage docility.
The Pave Low made a couple of fast circuits around the field to make sure there were no other bad guys ... and that the three that were down were truly down. Then it settled to the ground, not gently; the two gunners and the crew chief, armed with M-4s and sidearms, leapt out, with Valdez following.
Valdez headed for the fourth man; the others for the three nearer the forest.
His had been hit ... not directly, it appeared, but by ricochets. He was still alive, and he was wearing the uniform of an Indonesian Army officer (a captain, Valdez recognized); an AK-47 lay where he had dropped it, not far from one of his hands, and a holstered pistol was at his side. He had been hit in the thigh and shoulder, and was in a great deal of pain, though the wounds weren’t life threatening.
Valdez was a little surprised to find the man in uniform ... because of this very eventuality. Why would the Indonesian military want to proclaim responsibility for shooting down a U.S. aircraft? Did they have Saddam’s crazy chutzpah?
“Bangsat!” 114 Valdez called out to the other man in Indonesian as he approached, his carbine leveled. “Can you hear me?” he continued in Indonesian.
“Yes,” the captain murmured.
“Get rid of your pistol. And then give the Kalashnikov a good toss.”
The Indonesian officer gave him a pained look, indicating his wounds.
“I don’t give a ratfuck how much you hurt, motherfucker! Get rid of your weapons!” Valdez screamed out in English. Even so, the other man got the idea, and very delicately removed his pistol from its holster and flipped it away into the yam patch. He then crawled to the AK-47, struggled with it for a second, but managed to give it a heave.
“Okay,” Valdez said, satisfied. He moved closer. “Now let’s see about patching you up.”
As he said that, one of the gunners showed up to announce that the other three were truly and finally out of the picture forever. Then he went off into the yam patch, to find the discarded launch tubes. A few minutes later, he reappeared. “They were Russian SA-16s,” he told Valdez, then went over to give the same message to Major Tatum, who by this time was out of the Pave Low and checking out what had been wrought.
Valdez, meanwhile, was thinking: Unless these bastards are acting on their own—not very likely—they have a cache somewhere in the jungle. If we find where that is, no more SAMs ... probably.
Later, after they had clambered back into the helicopter, and the Indonesian had been safely stowed with his wounds patched up enough to allow him to be moved, Valdez took Al Tatum aside and cocked his head in the direction of the wounded man. “This guy needs to have a date with a friend of mine, Kumar, the JISF commander over here,” he said. “Do you think you can run me and the Indonesian back to Kota Ambon? I kind of think Kumar will take him into a room and shut the door while I go out and have a beer. When I come back, I’m pretty damned sure Kumar will be able to tell me where they have cached their other SA-16s.”
Tatum gave him a tight, pleased smile. “Fine by me,” he said. “Can I join you ... for that beer? I hear they make a pretty good brew in Ambon.”
“Sure thing.”
By the time the Pave Low was lifting off from the yam field, Air Force traffic controllers back in Pattimura had already placed local airspace in high-security mode. A pair of OH-58D helicopters (all that were available at that point) were put on watch along the approaches to the airport. The OH-58Ds are FLIR-equipped, and armed with a variety of antipersonnel weapons (rocket pods and 50-caliber machine guns). They could reply to ot
her SAM launches swiftly and decisively.
In order to warn aircraft of actual launches, teams of ground spotters were sent out along the airport approaches.
And finally, air traffic had to be slowed down, and everything coming in that was not essential (or low on fuel) had to be put off until after nightfall. That meant a slowdown on the air bridge, but that couldn’t be helped.
Man-portable SAMs are simple beasts that do not work well at night. They are visually aimed and visually tracked. Darkness makes that difficult (darkness or bad weather cut vulnerability to such missiles by 80-85%). On top of that, the missile’s ability to home in on heat sources comes in the form of a simple sensor on the missile itself. There is no thermal-imaging capability in the aiming and ground guidance system, nor any kind of sophisticated radar guidance. All of these nice things come in packages that are too heavy for people on foot to handle. In other words, man-portable SAMs are nothing but simple bazooka-type systems with a heat-seeking nose. Even at that, they weigh in the neighborhood of fifteen kilos. That’s a big load if you’re walking.
All this also requires some kind of central storage location.
And that was a big reason why Carlos Valdez wanted to find where that was hidden.
He was not wrong in thinking he would not have long to wait.
RAAF Base Darwin
Darwin, Australia
28 December 2005
Flying very long distances is hard work. You lose lots of water. You lose lots of electrolytes. You lose lots of time zones. You come out of the silver tube a dehydrated zombie, your body clueless about what the hell time it is.
You need downtime—rest, rehydration.
Rangers are mean, and they are tough. One big reason why they are trained to be in top physical condition is to give them the ability to get on an aircraft in battle gear and then get off it eighteen hours later and swarm out fighting. (These aircraft, it should be noted, do not come equipped with cute stewardesses, in-flight movies, or seats you’d want to sit in for more than about ten minutes.)
That they can do that is a good thing. But they are also human. They’d rather not. And if they can, they’ll take a day or two off after a world-spanning flight to get their bodies back in synch. That’s what they did when they arrived at RAAF Darwin on 27 December.
Meanwhile, their soon-to-be partners, the Tactical Assault Group of the Australian SAS, who had arrived at RAAF Darwin on the 26th, were busy building what looked like very crude stage sets—two-by-fours, butcher paper, canvas cloth. Special Operations in many ways parallel theatrical performances—performances with very high stakes. Carpentry, lighting, and stagecraft skills come in handy. Rehearsals are crucial. And if you are a special operator, the more time you have for rehearsals, the happier you are. (The bad guys at Entebbe gave the Israeli Special Ops guys three days to prepare. That rehearsal time sealed the bad guys’ fate.) What you want to have is mock-ups of your target (they don’t have to be elegant) that will allow you to experience and internalize spatial relations at your target, proportions, layout, exits, sight lines, lines of fire, routes and timing and locations of obstacles and hostiles. You want to also synchronize all the pieces of your own actions.
So, while the 1st/75th Ranger Regiment rested, the Aussies built a stage set, representing the one-time Merdeka Aircraft Plant that was now the nuclear weapons storage site.
On the 29th, the SAS TAG and the Rangers would start rehearsing together, with buildings on the base (like the control tower, for instance) doubling as likenesses of buildings at Bandung’s Husein Sastranegara Airport.
The Rangers can take 99% of the airports in the world in twenty minutes. The SAS TAG expected to have the nuclear weapons and the Indonesian vice-president (assuming he was being held at the storage site) within a similar time frame.
It would not be pretty. But it would be fast.
Husein Sastranegara Airport
Bandung, Indonesia
1625 28 December 2005
Radu Adil was confined in a small but comfortable room, which he correctly took to be underground. It was in fact about 100 meters from the hastily constructed storage vault for the nuclear weapons, and a few doors down a hall from a much larger room that served as a comms and C-and-C center. General Nusaution had been left in Jakarta to continue to act as spokesman, while the rest of the conspirators had retired to the greater safety of their facility at Bandung.
At this moment he was being graced by the presence of the conspiracy leader, General Bungei, and Colonel Cancio. Bungei was in his fifties, portly and prosperous looking. Cancio was ten years younger and a good hand taller; and unlike his boss, he was fit and hard. Under other circumstances, Adil might have liked the man, and he might have been proud to have Cancio serve under him. It was difficult to understand why such a man had thrown in his lot with these thugs. Both men were dressed in BDUs. Cancio carried a leather folio case.
Adil watched them both closely, searching for signs that might tell him something about what was going on outside his four walls and tiny bathroom.
Meanwhile, his jailers had so far maintained the “official” fiction that he was their guest; and he had so far maintained an “official” blind eye to that. He had tried to preserve an “official” neutrality. He knew orders had been going out in his name (as interim president). There was no way he could stop them. He had even allowed himself to be photographed with Bungei. This was a calculated compromise. He hoped it would gain himself and his family time.
On the other hand, there were circumstances that might compel him to sacrifice himself and his family. He was under no illusions. He expected to face one of those circumstances soon.
Now what do they want? He wondered, as General Bungei settled into one of the two easy chairs that had come with the room. Adil took the other. Cancio remained standing.
Like most Asians, Indonesians do not come quickly to the point. During his time in America, Adil had grafted onto his personality a measure of American impatience. His fears for his family magnified that. As Bungei went through his obligatory circling around and around, Adil churned. Though he endured the general’s courtesies with polite, yet stony-faced replies, he almost screamed inside: “Get on with it!”
Cancio, a man of few words, looked on impassively.
“I have a request to ask of you, Radu,” Bungei said, at last coming to the point of the visit, his face a mask of friendliness.
“Yes?” Adil replied carefully.
“We’re at a point in our restoration where the people of our country need a word of encouragement from a respected figure ...”
“... Such as the interim president.”
“Exactly. We would like you to address the nation. We would like you to reassure the people.” He brought his finger and thumb to a near touch. “We are on the very edge of success, my friend; we are that close.” He gave his hand a little flutter. “But we need someone ... of your high stature ... to bring our nation over that edge. A man of the hour is required. You can be that man.”
Adil stared at the other man, his mind churning. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“You will have the support of the CRR to assume the presidency. But we will, of course, require gestures of support on your part. The relationship could be mutually beneficial.”
“And if I find that I can’t help you?” Adil asked, using all his strength of will to keep his voice casual and uncolored by the turmoil he felt. It was clear to him that the coup was not going well. If it had been, they would not have needed him for this.
It was probably for such an eventuality that they had kept him alive.
How can I use that? he asked himself. How can I turn this to my advantage? ... Shall I agree to go along with them, and then say what I must say when I’m in front of the cameras? ... Of course not. They will tape the speech. If I try that, I’ll be dead in seconds.... No, not before they show me my wife and daughters as they rape and torture them to death.
; “I can’t imagine how you could refuse your nation in its time of trial,” Bungei said smoothly. “Yet the examples of Sutopo, Yani, Suwandi, and Dhani point toward the consequences of a negative choice. And there are other consequences.” He glanced at Colonel Cancio, who produced from his folio case a seven-by-nine photograph and passed it over to Adil.
The photo showed his nineteen-year-old daughter, Reni, under fierce, glaring lights, standing naked and terrified against a featureless cinderblock wall, her hands behind her back, certainly bound. Adil had not seen his daughter unclothed since she was a child.
The sight of her that way now seared his soul ... enraged him.
There were no marks on her ... as yet. Their continued absence was clearly a condition of his future cooperation.
Adil stifled the impulse to lash out. It would do no good (his eye had already caught Cancio’s hand resting casually yet alert on the gun holstered by his side). He also stifled the equally useless verbal abuse he wanted to scream out.
He made his decision.
The bastards had made another mistake. They had tried to push him to submit. Instead, they had pushed him toward resistance. Adil had seen through their pressure (which wasn’t hard to do) ... leaving Adil with a granite certainty: Reni and Suya and Nuri were dead. And so was he. In hours. Or days. Soon. They would not be allowed to live. Cooperation would only delay that.
With that the case, honor won.
“No,” he said quietly, his voice a near whisper. “I can’t join you.”
“Do you want to elaborate on that?” Bungei asked, visibly surprised. Cancio, on the other hand, was staring at Adil with something like respect.
“No,” Adil said. “I don’t think I have anything to add to that.”
“Your choice will have consequences,” Bungei said, the surprise now melting into disappointment; beneath which was anxiety, and swiftly emerging from that was rage. He had been counting on Adil’s weakness. With Adil on their side, the CRR could win without having to rattle their nuclear sabers. Without him, they would have no other choice but to do that. And there was no telling what would come then.