On the map, in daylight, it would be a cinch; in pitch darkness, plunging through freezing air at 120 miles per hour, it would be easy to miss. There would be no lights to guide them, no flares on the ground. From blackness into blackness.
“I’ll take it,” he said. The RAF navigator straightened up.
“Right, I’ll get going.”
The navigator would have a busy afternoon. It would be his job to find the way without lights and across a moonless sky not to the drop zone but to a point in space from which, bearing in mind wind drift, four falling bodies could leave his aircraft to find that tiny valley. Even falling bodies drift downwind; his job would be to estimate how much.
It was not until the hour of dusk that all the men met again in the hangar, now banned to everyone else on the base. The Hercules stood ready, fueled. Beneath one wing was the mound of gear the four men would need. Dawlish, the RAF jump instructor, had repacked every one of the eight forty-eight-pound chutes as if he would be using them himself. Stephenson was satisfied.
In one corner was a large briefing table. Martin, who had brought enlarged photographs from the Black Hole with him, took Stephenson, Eastman, and North over to the table to work out their route from the DZ to those crevices where they intended to hole up and study the Fortress for however long it took. It looked like two nights of hard march, resting in place in the intervening day. There could be no question of marching in daylight, and the route could not be direct.
Finally each man packed his Bergen from the bottom up, the last item being the belt order, a heavy webbing belt with numerous pockets that would be unpacked after landing and worn round the waist.
American hamburgers and sodas were brought from the commissary at sundown, and the four men rested until takeoff. This was scheduled for 9:45, aiming for a drop at 11:30 P.M.
Martin always thought the waiting was worst; after the frantic activity of the day, it was like a long anticlimax. There was nothing to concentrate on but the tension, the constant nagging thought that,
despite all the checks and double-checks, something vital had been forgotten. It was the period when some men ate, or read, or wrote home, or dozed, or just went to the lavatory and emptied themselves.
At nine a tractor towed the Hercules out onto the apron, and the crew of pilot, copilot, navigator, and flight engineer began their engine run-up checks. Twenty minutes later, a black-windowed bus entered the hangar to take the men and their gear to the drop plane, waiting with rear doors open and ramp down.
The two PJIs were ready for them, with the loadmaster and chute rigger. Only seven walked up the ramp on foot and into the vast cavern of the Here. The ramp came up, and the doors closed. The rigger had gone back to the bus; he would not fly with them.
With the PJIs and the loadmaster, the four soldiers strapped themselves to the seats along the wall and waited. At 9:44 P.M. the Hercules lifted off from Riyadh and turned her blunt nose to the north.
While the RAF plane rose into the night sky on February 21, an American helicopter was asked to stay to one side before coming in to settle close to the American sector of the air base.
It had been sent to Al Kharz to pick up two men. Steve Turner, the squadron commander of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron, had been summoned to Riyadh on the orders of General Buster Glosson. With him, as ordered, he brought the man he considered his best pilot for low-level ground-attack sorties.
Neither the CO of the Rocketeers nor Captain Don Walker had the faintest idea why they were wanted. In a small briefing room below CENTAF headquarters an hour later, they were told why, and what was needed. They were also told that no one else, with the sole exception of Walker’s weapons systems officer, the man flying in the seat behind him, was allowed to know the full details.
Then they were helicoptered back to their base.
After takeoff the four soldiers could unbuckle and move around the hull of the aircraft by the dim red lights overhead. Martin went forward, up the ladder to the flight deck, and sat for a while with the crew.
They flew at 10,000 feet toward the Iraqi border, then began to climb.
At 25,000 feet the Hercules leveled off and crossed into Iraq, seemingly alone in the starlit sky.
In fact it was not alone. Over the Gulf an AWACS had orders to keep a constant eye on the sky around and below them. If any Iraqi radar screen, for some unknown reason not already totaled by the Allied air forces, chose to “illuminate,” it was to be immediately attacked. To this end, two flights of Wild Weasels with antiradar HARM missiles were below them.
In case some Iraqi fighter pilot chose to take to the sky that night, a flight of RAF Jaguars was above and to the left of them, a flight of F-15C Eagles to the right. The Hercules was flying in a protective box of lethal technology. No other pilot in the sky that night knew why. They just had their orders.
In fact, if anyone in Iraq saw any blip on the radar that night, it was assumed the cargo plane was just heading north to Turkey.
The loadmaster did his all to make his guests comfortable with tea, coffee, soft drinks, and crackers.
Forty minutes before Release Point, the navigator flashed a warning light indicating P-minus-forty, and the last preparations began.
The four soldiers put on their main and reserve parachutes, the former across the breadth of the shoulders, the latter lower down the back.
Then came the Bergens, hung upside down on the back beneath the chutes, with the point between the legs. Weapons—a silenced Heckler and Koch MP5 SD submachine gun—were clipped down the left side, and the personal oxygen tank hooked across the belly.
Finally they put on their helmets and oxygen masks before connecting the latter to the center console, a frame structure the size of a large dining table crammed with bottles of oxygen. When everyone was breathing and comfortable, the pilot was informed and began to bleed the air and pressure level inside the hull out into the night until both had equalized.
It took almost twenty minutes. Then they sat again, waiting. Fifteen minutes before Release Point, a further message came from the flight deck into the ears of the loadmaster. He told the PJIs to gesture to the soldiers to switch from main console oxygen to their own personal minibottles. Each of these had a thirty-minute supply, and they would need three to four minutes of that for the drop itself.
At that point only the navigator on the flight deck knew exactly where he was; the SAS team had total confidence that they would be dropped in the right place.
By now the loadmaster was in contact with the soldiers by a constant stream of hand signals, which ended when he pointed both hands at the lights above the console. Into the loadmaster’s ears came a stream of instructions from the navigator.
The men rose and started to move, slowly, like spacemen weighed down by their gear, toward the ramp. The PJIs, also on mobile oxygen bottles, went with them. The SAS men stood in a line in front of the still-closed tailgate door, each checking the equipment in front of him.
At P-minus-four the tailgate came down, and they stared out into 25,000 feet of rushing black air. Another hand signal—two fingers raised by the PJI—told them they were at P-minus-two. The men shuffled to the very edge of the ramp and looked at the lights (unilluminated) on each side of the gaping aperture. The lights went red, goggles were drawn down. The lights went green. ...
All four men turned on one heel, facing into the cavern, and jumped backward, arms apart, faces down. The sill of the ramp flashed beneath their masks, and the Hercules was gone.
Sergeant Stephenson led the way.
Stabilizing their fall position, they dropped through the night sky for five miles without a sound. At 3,500 feet automatic pressure-operated releases jerked open the parachute packs, and the fabric exploded out.
In second position, Mike Martin saw the shadow fifty feet beneath him appear to stop moving. In the same second he felt the vibration of his own main chute opening, then the “square” took the strain and he slowed from 120 miles per hour to fourteen, with hesitators taking up some of the shock.
At one thousand feet each man undid the snap-locks that held his Bergen to his backside and cinched the load down his legs, there to hook onto his feet. The Bergens would remain there all the way down, being released
