Guests of the Ayatollah

“What did Beckwith think?” asked Jordan, thinking along the same lines as Brzezinski.

Carter explained that they had consulted Beckwith and that the decision had been unanimous.

“At least there were no American casualties and no innocent Iranians hurt,” Carter said softly.

6. Two Loud, Dull Thunks

At Desert One there wasn’t time to dwell on the decision, no matter how disappointing. Paul Zeisman, Delta’s radio operator, raised Dick Meadows by satellite radio. Meadows was waiting at the hide site. Zeisman and Meadows had worked out a code. Meadows was “Test Alpha,” Zeisman was “Test Bravo,” the hide site was “antenna,” the helicopters were “trucks,” and Delta Force was “antenna parts.”

“Test Alpha, this is Test Bravo,” said Zeisman, speaking into the radio on the flight deck of one of the C- 130s. “We can’t get the antenna parts to you because we had a lot of trucks break down. We’re going to go ahead and cancel the contract. You should come back.”

The decision left Meadows and his crew hanging. If the American intrusion were discovered, it would imperil their trip out of Iran. The authorities were likely to take a strong interest in every caucasian foreigner who had recently entered the country. Meadows was greatly disappointed but he didn’t sound worried.

Fitch went back to his men and directed them to board one of the fuel planes. As he saw it, they weren’t dead yet. This might just mean as little as postponing the mission one day. With Meadows and their trucks and local help poised and ready, they could not delay long. He and his men piled in on top of the nearly deflated fuel bladder, which rippled like a giant black waterbed. Everyone was weary and disappointed. Eric Haney stripped off his gear and his black field jacket, balling it up behind him to form a cushion against the hard metal angles of the plane’s inner wall. He and some of the other men wedged their weapons snugly between the fuel bladder and the wall of the plane so they would be secure and out of the way. Some of the men fell immediately asleep.

Lyle Walton, one of the members of the refueling crew, had no idea that the mission was scrubbed. He and his fellow crew members were in the back of the same plane as Fitch’s men, congratulating themselves for having so efficiently refueled their chopper. It was still dark outside. So far as they knew, everything was going as planned.

Fitch told his sergeant major, Dave Cheney, to make sure everyone was accounted for. The sergeant shouted out the roster and ticked off the team members and came up short. It wasn’t surprising, in their haste, and on a patch of desert roaring with the propellers and rotors of four big planes and five helicopters, it would have been easy for one man to get on the wrong plane or to somehow have gotten hurt and now be lying alone just out of eyeshot. Their plane was supposed to take off first and the pilots were eager to depart.

“Don’t let them take off until I make sure we find this guy,” Fitch told Cheney and then took off to search for his missing man. He checked all the other aircraft, without success, and then saw what appeared to be a figure lying on the desert floor a short distance away. He ran over to look and discovered a heap of camouflage netting. He returned to the C-130 that held his squadron.

“He’s got to be here,” he told Cheney. Their search located him curled up in the front of the plane, right where he was supposed to be, fast asleep. Either he had never heard the sergeant major call out his name or, in the general clamor, no one had heard his response.

“We’re all set, let’s go,” Fitch told the plane’s crew chief.

Just behind their plane, a combat controller in goggles, one of Carney’s crew, appeared outside the cockpit of chopper three and informed the pilot, Major Schaefer, that he had to move his aircraft out of the way. Schaefer had refueled behind that tanker, and he now had enough fuel to fly back to the Nimitz, but first they wanted to get the C-130s off the ground. The tanker needed to turn off to the left to clear the runway, and they needed Schaefer’s helicopter out of the way.

Schaefer lifted the nose of his craft. His crew chief Dewey Johnson jumped out to straighten the nose wheels, which had been bent sideways when they’d landed. Straightened, they could be retracted so they wouldn’t cause drag in flight. Johnson climbed back in and Schaefer lifted the chopper into a hover at about fifteen feet and held it, kicking up a wicked storm of dust that whipped around the combat controller on the ground. He was the only thing Schaefer could see below, a hazy black image in a cloud of brown, so the pilot fixed on him as a point of reference.

To escape the dust storm created by Schaefer’s rotors, the combat controller retreated toward the wing of the parked C-130, but seeing only a blurry image of the man on the ground, and concentrating on his own aircraft, Schaefer didn’t notice that he had moved. He kept the nose of his blinded chopper pointed at him, and as the combat controller moved, the helicopter turned in the same direction.

“How much power do we have, Les?” asked Schaefer, performing his usual checklist.

“Ninety-four percent,” said his copilot Les Petty.

Then Schaefer heard and felt a loud, strong, metallic whack! It sounded as if someone had hit the side of his aircraft with a large aluminum bat. Others in the desert heard a cracking sound as loud as an explosion but sharper-edged somehow, more piercing and particular, like the shearing impact of giant unmoored industrial tools. The marine pilot’s rotors had clipped the top of the plane, metal violently and loudly cracking into metal in a wild spray of sparks, and instantly the helicopter lost all aerodynamics, its cushion of air whipped out from beneath, and it fell with a grinding bang into the C-130’s cockpit, an impact so stunning that Schaefer briefly blacked out. Both aircraft were engorged with fuel and the sparks caused by the collision immediately ignited both with a powerful, lung-emptying thump! that seemed to suck all the air out of the desert. It formed a huge blue ball of fire around the front of the C-130 and then rocketed a pillar of white flame three hundred feet or more into the sky, in a split second turning the scene once more from night into day.

Beckwith pivoted the moment he felt and heard the crash and started running toward it. He pulled up short the length of a football field away, stopped by the intense heat, and thought immediately with despair of his men, Fitch’s entire White Element, trapped.

Inside the C-130, Fitch had felt the plane begin to shudder, as though the pilots were revving the engines for takeoff. There were no windows and he couldn’t tell if they were moving yet. Then he heard two loud, dull thunks. He thought maybe the nose gear or landing gear had hit a rock or a divot, but when he looked toward the front of the aircraft he saw flames and sparks. His first thought was that they were under attack.

He had removed his rucksack, and leaning against it was his weapon, an M203. He grabbed it and stood in one motion. Beside him the plane’s loadmaster, responding wordlessly to the same sight, pulled open the troop door on the port side of the plane. It revealed a solid wall of flame. Fitch helped him slam it down and push the handle in to lock it. He and the men were sitting and standing on a thousand gallons of fuel, and they appeared to be caught in an inferno.

“Open the ramp!” Fitch shouted, but it lowered to reveal more flames. The plane was going to explode. Loaded as it was with fuel, it was an enormous bomb, and it was enveloped in fire. The only other way out was the starboard troop door to the rear of the plane above two-thirds of the distance to the tail, which had been calmly opened by three of the plane’s crewmen. That doorway proved blessedly free of flames. Men were piling out of it before it was completely opened.

One of them was the Hercules crewman Walton, who had been trying to walk to the front of the plane to get a cup of coffee, picking his way through the crowd of men while keeping his balance on the shifting fuel bladder, when he heard the collision and felt the plane tilt forward and then shake from side to side. He fought his way out of the door and dropped six feet to the desert floor. Men were raining on top of him so fast he couldn’t stand up. He rolled until he found himself under the plane, surrounded by fire. Then a marine grabbed him beneath both arms, hauled him into the clear, and shouted, “Haul ass, brother!”

Still inside the plane Cheney, a bull of a man with a big deep voice, kept shouting, “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” as the men crowded toward the only escape. Flames spread rapidly from the ceiling of the plane and were wrapping down on both sides. Fire ignited a primitive flight instinct that none of the men could control. One of the junior air force crewmen was knocked down and was being trampled by the aggressive, fleeing Deltas, when Technical Sergeant Ken Bancroft fought his way to the man, picked him up, and carried him to the doorway and