Ever so slowly, the horrid miles slid past for Fowler and the convoy while they drove through the night toward an unknown destiny.
Inside the truck, Fowler’s thoughts were racing.
Outside, the world was strangely quiet.
CHAPTER 16
January 29—12:58 a.m.
On the Flight Line
Ramstein Air Base
With his parka pulled tightly around him, Airman First Class Arturo Rios drove a small tractor across the snow-covered tarmac. It was one of those little yellow tractors used around airports to take luggage out to the planes. But Rios wasn’t carrying luggage. Behind his tractor trailed a long line of two-thousand-pound bombs.
Twenty-year-old Arturo Rios worked as an armaments loader for a wing of F-16 Falcons. Mainly, he drove the yellow tractor back and forth to the ammunition-storage area in an isolated corner of the base. There, while the young airman sat daydreaming, a crew of loaders would prepare his lethal convoy. Rios would then carry death across the base to the flight line. At the flight line, others waited to take the bombs and attach them to the belly of an F-16.
It wasn’t a glamorous job. And if Rios ever made a mistake, it wasn’t going to be a job with any longevity.
Tired of his mundane life in Miami’s Little Cuba, Rios had joined the Air Force to see the world. In eight months in Germany, he hadn’t seen much of the world yet. But he’d seen the two miles between the ammunition dump and the flight line often.
For the young airman from balmy Miami, this first, frigid German winter was pure misery.
In the past few days, he’d noticed a marked increase in the activity on the base. There was a definite sense of urgency in the work on the flight line. But so far, no one had bothered to explain why. His hours in the blizzard’s bone-crippling cold had grown longer. And his trips to and fro with his lethal cargo had become nonstop.
Three squadrons of F-16s from South Carolina had arrived at Ramstein earlier in the day. Rios had spent the last five hours taking munitions to the South Carolina fighters.
Rios pulled up in front of a reinforced bunker where a South Carolina F-16 waited to receive the last two bombs from this tractorload. Master Sergeant Arnold, chief of the flight-line crew, spotted him. Arnold walked through the falling snow to where Rios sat in the open tractor.
“Rios, I’ve been looking for you. As soon as you drop off these bombs, you need to report to the base armory.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“I don’t know, but we got word a few minutes ago that all augmentation air police need to report to the armory. Your name was on the list. You did two months of augmentation training, right?”
“Yeah, back in September and October.”
“Well, then get over there as soon as you finish here.”
“Okay, Sarge.”
• • •
Fifteen minutes later, with his head down to shield his face as he trudged through the blowing gale, he started the lonely walk to the base armory. When Rios arrived, a madhouse greeted him. In rapid succession, people hurried in and out the doorway to the modest room that served as the base’s weapons-distribution center. Inside the dingy room, Rios passed a dozen airmen sitting cross-legged on the floor, furiously disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling boxloads of never-before-used M-4s. An air policeman in a wire-mesh cage motioned the bewildered airman over.
“Name?” the air policeman said.
“Arturo Rios.”
“Rios . . . Rios,” the air policeman said, while scanning a lengthy list on his clipboard. “Ah, here we are . . . Rios, Arturo J. Let me see your I.D. card.”
Rios dug into his pocket, withdrew his identification, and handed it through a small opening in the screen. After a cursory glance, the air policeman returned it.
“Okay, Rios, wait here while I get your equipment.”
The air policeman disappeared through a doorway into a weapons-storage area. In less than a minute, he returned with a large, heavy machine gun cradled in his arms. In each hand, the air policeman carried a metal ammunition container. He clumsily opened the door through the screen and brought out the machine gun and ammunition. He placed them in Rios’s arms. At over 125 pounds, the gun and its tripod weighed nearly as much as the slight airman.
“You’re checked out on .50 calibers, aren’t you?” the air policeman asked.
“Yeah, I spent two weeks on them during augmentation training.”
“Good. There’s a Humvee waiting outside. Go out there and tell the driver to take you to defensive position fourteen on the eastern perimeter of the base.”
“Why? What’s going on?” Rios asked.
“Man, didn’t you get the word? The Russians attacked the border over an hour ago. We’re expecting some kind of attack on Ramstein anytime now.”
• • •
Unlike the Army, which took the position that every soldier was an infantryman first and whatever else he was second, the Air Force’s approach was to concentrate on making their airmen proficient at the primary job they performed. Without the distractions his Army counterpart faced, an Air Force technician was hands down more proficient at performing the same tasks. The downside to such an approach was that should it ever come to ground combat, the airman, while not completely help
less, was nevertheless at a severe disadvantage.
The Air Force’s solution was to leave the primary combat role to the air police. The air police would be supplemented by the air base’s augmentation force, individuals who’d been released from their primary duties and given a period of combat training. Only in a dire emergency would the average Air Force technician be compelled to fight.
Army and Marine Corps Vietnam veterans were ripe with stories about Communist attacks on air bases. Inevitably, two little guys in black pajamas would sneak through the wire of an American air base and attempt to destroy an airplane or two. As soon as the fighting started, airmen from all over the base would race to the scene of the battle—with their cameras.
There was even a recorded case where a pair of malnourished figures attacked the world’s largest B-52 base. At the moment of the attack, there were five thousand airmen on the base. The base’s commanding general called a small Army camp five miles away for reinforcements.
As was typical of most air bases, on the evening of January 28, the M-4s of the thousands of Ramstein airmen were still sitting in their original grease and wrappings in unopened containers.
• • •
The Humvee stopped in front of a heavily sandbagged, horseshoe-shaped position on the isolated eastern end of the sprawling base. The bunker was directly in front of the air base’s primary runway. It was less than fifty feet from the chain-link and barbed-wire security fence. Thirty yards beyond the fence lay a dense woods. The air policeman helped lift the machine gun from the vehicle and assisted Rios in setting it up. The task completed, he shoved the metal ammunition containers into the airman’s hands. Without another word, the driver got back into his Humvee and disappeared into the blizzard.
Rios adjusted the machine gun’s positioning. Satisfied, he opened one of the containers. He removed an ammunition belt and placed it in the machine gun. The confused airman did a little housekeeping, brushing away the snow from the top of the sandbags. Then, all prepared for an attack, he sat wondering what else to do.