your tanks. You are to put your aircraft on automatic pilot and then the entire crew should leave the aircraft via parachute. The pilot shall be the last to leave the airplane. Prior to leaving, he is to remove the contents of the four wooden crates and then dispose of the crates. Upon reaching the ground, the entire crew will make its way to the Special Forces camp at Lo Nimh, on the Laotian border, for retrieval and return to Udorn. You will not disclose the details of this mission to anyone.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in.
Then the flight engineer said, “They want us to let the plane crash? On purpose? That doesn’t make sense.”
The pilot reread the orders, then shook his head.
“This is Vietnam, boys,” he said. “Nothing makes sense over here.”
* * *
THE FLIGHT ENGINEER and the cargomaster went back to the cargo bay and, per their orders, dragged the four wooden crates to the front of the aircraft.
Then, five minutes before reaching their coordinate, the baffled crew climbed into their parachutes and prepared to bail out.
With one minute to go, the pilot set the plane’s controls as ordered and then told the others to jump. Each man stepped out the side access hatch and disappeared into the blustery dark night. The pilot could just barely see their parachutes open.
Returning to the flight deck, the pilot unscrewed the lid of the first wooden box. He was shocked by what he found inside.
It was a dead body. Male, Caucasian, with a bloody chest wound, the corpse was wearing a flight suit exactly like his own. Most astonishing, though, the flight suit’s name tag read DAVIS, his own name.
Totally confused now, the pilot rolled the crate over and let the body fall out. That’s when he noticed the corpse had a chain around its neck with a small key attached. The pilot had no idea what it was for and, at the moment, didn’t care. He hastily took the lids off the three other wooden crates, finding three more bodies, each wearing an ID tag bearing a name identical to one of his crew. He guessed the bodies belonged to soldiers recently killed in battle.
He emptied them onto the deck as well and then kicked the four plywood boxes out the open door. All this took him about a minute and it was very disturbing and weird.
“Why do they want someone to think we’re all dead?” he thought, once the four makeshift coffins were gone. Then he looked back at the SMT, still sitting at the rear of the plane, and added: “And what the hell is inside that thing?”
He didn’t have any time left to think about it. He rechecked the plane’s controls, purged its fuel tanks to just 200 pounds, and then jumped.
His chute opened quickly but roughly, jerking both his shoulders up and nearly cracking his collarbone.
The C-130 continued flying north, toward North Vietnam, the bodies and the mysterious SMT still on board.
The pilot figured by that course, and at that altitude and fuel load, the intentionally doomed plane would crash about twenty miles north of the DMZ, well inside communist-controlled territory.
But just as he was preparing himself for his landing, the pilot saw a sudden flash of light rise up from the dense jungle below. It exploded under the C-130’s right wing. It took the pilot a moment to realize an antiaircraft shell had hit the cargo plane.
The last time he saw the C-130, it was disappearing into a cloudbank, its right wing completely engulfed in flames.
2
Gulf of Aden
Present Day
THE SWARM OF paparazzi helicopters finally dispersed around sunset.
The armada of fast boats and Zodiacs carrying even more photographers left shortly afterward. Those villagers who’d gathered on the nearby cliffs at Ghadir also called it a day and went home. The western end of the Gulf of Aden was calm again at last.
The center of attention was a 210-foot Blenheim & Koch mega-yacht named The Immaculate Perception. At the request of the U.S. consulate in Aden, the giant luxury craft had skirted the Yemeni coast for about twenty miles, allowing a few people in the highly troubled, impoverished country, as well as the crush of international media, to get a fleeting glimpse of the vessel’s very famous passenger, American film star Emma Simms.
Now that the show was over, the yacht’s captain turned away from the barren coastline and headed toward Bab el Mandeb, the narrow strait that separated Yemen and Djibouti and served