Night of the Hawk Read online

  Night of the Hawk by Dale Brown.

  One of the most stirring sights I have ever witnessed was in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May of 1991, only four months after the Soviet Army occupied the capital and massacred thirteen civilians in the street. I saw hundreds of Lithuanians waving their (then illegal) national flag, erecting posters and memorials, chanting slogans and singing songs of freedom and defiance-right in front of the Red Army tanks surrounding the national television studio. I didn’t know how long it would be before Lithuania and the Baltic states would regain their freedom, but I knew they deserved it. They wanted freedom, and they were willing to fight for it.

  Night of the Hawk is dedicated to the peace-loving people of the world, and especially our friends in the now-independent republics of the former Soviet Union. May the entire world’s transition to democracy and freedom be a peaceful one.

  This book is also dedicated to the memory of my aunt, Mary Kaminski, and my uncle, Richard Brown. They have left behind some very fond memories and the most wonderful relatives a guy like me could have.

  Acknowledgments.

  When you talk about infantry weapons, you can learn only so much from a book-you eventually have to get out to the range, get a gun in your hand, and return some lead to the earth. I was lucky enough to find the best in the business to help me. Thanks to Jefferson “Zuma Jay” Wagner, surfer chief and president of Movie Arms Management, Inc., and his partners, Ben Sherrill and Jared Chandler (“Razor” in the movie Flight of the Intruder), for taking me out to the range and showing me how to use some of the weapons described in Night of the Hawk. It was an awesome experience I’ll never forget. Special thanks also to Bill Hazen, also of Movie Arms Management, who gave me specific suggestions and details on U.S. Special Forces tactics employed in many of the scenarios I built for this novel.

  Special operations is very much a multiservice tasking, and I’ve received assistance from just about all of them.

  Although not officially a part of U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. Marine Corps is usually the spearhead in most military operations overseas and has a wealth of experience and talent in the world of special operations-I hope I’ve done justice to the time and attention they’ve given me. I’d like to thank Major Mark Hughes and Chief Warrant Officer Charles Rowe, USMC Public Affairs in New York, for a great wealth of information on Marine Corps special operations. Special thanks also to First Lieutenant Mike Snyder, who provided me with tons of information on Marine Corps weapons and equipment.

  Very special thanks go to First Lieutenant Todd Yeatts, deputy public affairs officer, Marine Corps Recruiting Depot, Parris Island, S.C. When I needed information on the USMC Confidence -ourse, Todd went out with a videotape camera and ran it for me, each and every obstacle, without a single hitch. That’s an American Marine!

  Thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Terry Meehan, U.S. Army, of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs, for the information he provided on the U.S. Special Operations Command; to Lieutenant Colonel Les Grau and Lieutenant Colonel Tim Thomas, U.S. Army, Office of Foreign Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for data on Soviet troop deployments in the Baltic states, the Commonwealth republics, and the former USSR; Kent Lee; Dr. Jacob Kipp, Russian military historian at Fort Leavenworth; and Peter Ernest, public affairs officer, Central Intelligence Agency.

  Special thanks to Army Staff Sergeant Vincent Lobello, California Air National Guard, Mather AFB, California, for an incredible tour of the Army’s AH- 1 Cobra gunship and an explanation of tactics involved with night-vision equipment.

  Thanks to Captain Kimberley Urie, U.S. Air Force, and Shirley Sikes, public affairs officers at Air Force Special Operations Command, Hurl-burt Field, Florida, for information on Air Force special operations aircraft, weapons, and tactics; and Major Norm Hils, MH-53J helicopter pilot, Captain Randy Garratt, AC-130 gunship pilot, and Captain David Tardiff, MC- 130 electronic-warfare officer, for their help with their respective special-operations weapon systems and the helpful criticism they provided on my manuscript.

  Thanks to Jeff Richelson, author of Sword and Shield; Amy Knight, at the Library of Congress; and David Colton, White & Case Attorneys at Law, New York City, for information on Soviet paramilitary forces; William E. Burrows, author of “Deep Black” and “Exploring Space,” for information on Defense Department satellites; also David McClave and Ronald Grimm, at the Library of Congress; Ian Cuthbertson, Institute for East-West Studies; David Shakley, Magnavox Defense Group, Inc.; Caroline Russell, Boeing Aircraft Inc. Product Support Division; and Mr. Evan H. Whildin, Sr., of Colt’s Manufacturing Co., Inc.

  An excellent source of information on U.S. Marine Corps special operations on which I relied is the book Strike Force by Agostino von Hassell, published by Howell Press. A good source of general information on Marine Corps history and training is The Marine Book by Chuck Lawliss, published by Thames & Hudson.

  Part of the research for this book was a trip I took to the Soviet Union and the three Baltic states in April and May of 1991. Thanks to Jurga Sakalauskaite, a guide with GT International, the first private travel agency in Lithuania, for the information she provided on Lithuania, Vilnius, and the Baltic states. Thanks also to Intourist, the Soviet government travel agency, and its representatives for being so honest and open about their country and the status and future of the breakaway republics.

  The best source of historical, cultural, and geographical information on the Baltic states that I used was A Guide to the Baltic States, edited by Ingrida Kalnins, published by Inroads, Inc..

  A continuing source of information, morale, inspiration, and encouragement were Lieutenant General Robert Beckel, commander of Fifteenth Air Force, Strategic Air Command (soon to be part of USAF Air Mobility Command); Major General James Meier, Fifteenth Air Force deputy commander; and Lieutenant Colonel Fredric Lynch, Fifteenth Air Force Chief of Public Affairs, March Air Force Base, Riverside, California.

  They have helped me immeasurably by sharing their time and enthusiasm for their profession with me over the past several months.

  It has been a wild and woolly time trying to keep up with the changes going on in the old Soviet Union, and I couldn’t have done it without help. As ever, I wish to thank my wife, Jean, for helping me cook up these stories; my editor and friend, George Coleman, at Putnam; and especially my executive assistant and friend, Dennis T. Hall, for chasing down information sources, handling the phones, checking my sources and contacts, and helping me straighten out the kinks in a rapidly changing real-world political scene. I can’t wait to see what happens next…

  Dale Brown

  Folsom, CA

  March 1992

  Actual News Excerpts.

  WASHINGTON POST, 8 December 1991—The leaders of Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia formally announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union today and said they had agreed to establish a “Commonwealth of Independent States” in its place.

  The decision to liquidate the 69-year-old Communist-forged union and halt activity of all Soviet government organs came during a closed-door meeting at a Byelorussian hunting lodge near the Polish border in the absence of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

  There was no immediate comment from Gorbachev, whose constitutional position as president and commander in chief of the 4-million-member Soviet armed forces has now been challenged throughout the Slavic heartland of the former Soviet superpower.

  In Washington, Secretary of States James A. Baker III said in a television interview that “the Soviet Union as we’ve known it no longer exists,” but he warned that there is still a risk of civil war amid the ruins of the Soviet empire.

  NEW YORK TIMES, 24 December 1991—… The nuclear weapons issue [in the
new Commonwealth of Independent Statesi, while the subject of reassuringly worded promises in the Kremlin, remains to be worked out in its critical details by the new commonwealth.

  The republic leaders are to gather … in Minsk, the commonwealth headquarters, to try to resolve their differences over how to craft a common defense council that does not smack of the old union. They also will be facing resistance by [many Soviet republics] to a plan under which Russia ultimately becomes the guarantor of disarmament and repository of the entire Soviet nuclear armory.

  WASHINGTON POST, 20 February 1992—A classified study prepared as the basis for the Pentagon’s budgetary planning through the end of the century casts Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests and presumes the United States would spearhead a NATO counterattack if Russia launched an invasion of Lithuania.

  U.S. intervention in Lithuania, which would reverse decades of American restraint in the former Soviet Union’s Baltic sphere of influence, is one of seven hypothetical roads to war that the Pentagon studied to help the military services size and justify their forces through 1999. In the study, the Pentagon neither advocates nor predicts any specific conflict.

  The Lithuanian scenario contemplates a major war by land, sea and air in which 24 NATO divisions, 70 fighter squadrons and six aircraft carrier battle groups would keep the Russian navy “bottled up in the eastern Baltic,” bomb supply lines in Russia and use armored formations to expel Russian forces from Lithuania. The authors state that Russia is unlikely to respond with nuclear weapons, but they provide no basis for that assessment.

  An unclassified draft preface to the seven scenarios describes them as “illustrative” of the demands that might be placed on the U.S. military in coming years, adding, “They are neither predictive nor exhaustive.”

  The Lithuanian scenario judges the likelihood of war with Russia as “low,” but goes on to say that economic and political tensions “could compel political leaders to make decisions that appear irrational” and asserts that a Russian invasion of Lithuania “is plausible in light of recent events in the former Soviet Union.”

  More striking to analysts inside and outside the government has been the Pentagon document’s description of Lithuania as a “U.S. vital interest.” The language of vital interests traditionally describes something that the U.S. government would use military force to protect. Though applying the term to Lithuania, the document, titled “1994-1999 Defense Planning Guidance Scenario Set for Final Coordination,” does not propose to represent current U.S. policy.

  National security officials outside the Pentagon sharply disputed the scenario’s premise, noting that the United States never recognized the Soviet Union’s World War II conquest of the Baltic states but steered clear of interference there for fear of nuclear war.

  ANNUAL REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT AND THE CONGRESS, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, February 1992—Special operations forces are essential contributors to strategic deterrence and defense. The ongoing proliferations of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them threaten to erode strategic stability … SOF special reconnaissance and direct action capabilities can help to locate and destroy storage facilities, control nodes, and other strategic assets… SOF are one of the few instruments available to precisely apply measured force to deal with an adversary’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

  ASSOCIATED PRESS, 12 March 1992—Russia’s vice-president confirmed Wednesday that nuclear weapons are stored in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, the former Soviet republics embroiled in a vicious conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

  … It was not known what kind of nuclear weapons were in the republics, although they are assumed to be tactical—or “battlefield”— weapons.

  BEE NEWS SERVICES, 13 March 1992—Ominous new concerns were raised Thursday about the safety of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal when Ukraine said it has stopped returning nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantling.

  …Perfilyev [advisor to the Russian vice-president] accused Kravchuk [Ukrainian

  president] of using nuclear weapons to prove Ukraine’s independence, and said that Russia would react harshly.

  Note

  This story is not intended to chronicle or explain actual U.S. government, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Special Operations Command, or military contractors’ tactics, doctrines, procedures, equipment, or capabilities. The scenarios, units, equipment, and tactics described in Night of the Hawk are purely products of my imagination. I have made every effort to be accurate, but this is a work of fiction and none of the persons, units, equipment, scenarios, or tactics I describe are intended to accurately depict the real thing. I hope I’ve done our special operations forces some justice (at least so they won’t be out gunning for me!), but my intention was not to tell their story for them. I hope to be qualified to do so someday.

  I don’t especially care for sequels, but I do like bringing back many of the characters from previous stories-they are like old friends. The plot and settings for this story stand alone, but in general occur after Flight of the Old Dog and Hammerheads, but before the events described in Day of the Cheetah and Sky Masters.

  I still refer to the B-1B bomber as “Excalibur,” although its official Air Force nickname is “Lancer.”

  Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener

  fangs than freedom never endangered.

  -CICERO

  Prologue

  ANADYR FAR EAST FIGHTER-INTERCEPTOR BASE

  RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

  DECEMBER 1988

  This was not the way the flight of the Old Dog was supposed to be ending First Lieutenant David Luger, United States Air Force, thought grimly.

  Not at all.

  And yet here they were, in the very northeastern tip of the Soviet Union, forced to land at this snowy, bitterly cold enemy backwater base to steal fuel because their B-52 (I) Megafortress was running on fumes. Holding a gun to the head of the base chiefs custodian, they had commandeered one of his fuel trucks and put whatever they could into the plane. The custodian had escaped and obviously put in a frantic call to the regional militia. Luger shook his head. During the course of this mission-one of the most highly classified in the annals of American military warfare-they’d successfully penetrated restricted Soviet airspace, fought off waves upon waves of surface-to-air missiles, swarms of deadly MiG fighters, and, with a Striker glide-bomb, knocked out the most sophisticated weapon the USSR had ever developed.

  The mission should have been a success, but now they were going to be captured by the fucking Red Army. Luger was sure of it. Even in a backwater, the Red Army was going to protect the Motherland-at all costs.

  The tall, lean, twenty-six-year-old Texas-born crew navigator was alone in the bitterly cold belowdecks section of the crew compartment aboard the Megafortress, an experimental B-52 “test-bed” aircraft that had been pressed into service on this unusual and dangerous mission. He felt an uncontrollable shiver of fear, frustration, and sheer anger take hold of his body. Maybe it was finally going to be over.

  They certainly weren’t in any condition to fight-maybe they should just surrender. The stolen fuel they had pumped into their tanks was contaminated fuel oil, not jet fuel. One of their eight engines had been destroyed, and another was leaking oil so badly that it was all but useless. The Old Dog’s fuselage was full of holes, and their stabilators-the odd-looking V-tail assembly that served both as rudder and horizontal stabilizer-had been shot out. The plane’s wheels were frozen in knee-deep snow, and it was doubtful that the plane could even taxi on six engines, let alone attempt a takeoff on the short, snow-covered Soviet runway. The pilot, Lieutenant General Bradley Elliott, had been dragged upstairs by some of the other crew, unconscious and nearly frozen to death.

  Now they were surrounded by Russian militia.

  Luger had been strapping himself into his ejection seat in the downstairs compartment, but had stopped when he realized how r
idiculous the idea of trying to launch the Megafortress seemed right now-not much use in strapping in if there was no way the plane would ever get off the ground-so he laid the straps aside.

  There was a gaping hole in the downstairs crew compartment big enough that he could see footprints in the snow outside. Just a few hours earlier his right leg had been in back of that jagged hole. For the first time since arriving at the Russian base, Luger surveyed the damage on his leg-and felt his stomach turn at the sight. Even heavily wrapped in bandages from the first-aid kit, he could feel his kneecap gone, see the limb twisted and his right foot pointing at an unnatural angle. The leg had frozen into an unrecognizable stick, thanks to both the windblast inflight and then spending several hours in freezing temperatures outside. He was probably going to lose the leg or, at best, be crippled for life. Most of the navigation equipment was damaged or in reset, and the weapons were probably shut down. Were they kidding themselves, or what?

  Luger’s partner, Captain Patrick McLanahan, had finished helping Lieutenant General Elliott and the two women crew members up the ladder and was going to strap into the seat beside Luger when copilot Lieutenant Colonel John Ormack called McLanahan upstairs. Ormack had kept one engine running while they had refueled the Megafortress, and incredibly had started engine number five just a few minutes ago. The contaminated fuel was causing tremendous explosions in each engine during ignition, but amazingly the engines kept running. Now more engines were starting. Luger thought McLanahan was probably acting as copilot with Elliott incapacitated. He put on his headphones to block out the bangs and screams of the engines. He could hear Ormack and McLanahan on the interphone.