It was the old Alpha/Bravo system. He was Alpha, the other was Bravo. One would shout for the other to cover him, then make his move while his partner laid down covering fire. Then he’d lay down covering fire while his partner moved out, alternating back and forth until they’d reached their objective, which in this case was a withdrawal from the area.
The burning convoy furnished a fair amount of light to see by. The wind carried the smoke and smell of burning eastward, away from the Dog Team duo.
Kilroy moved out of the sniper’s nest in a half crouch, weapon cradled in his arms, keeping the boulders and then the limb of the fan itself between him and the burning remnant of the column. The foe looked all shot up, but it would only take one still-functioning soldier who could shoot to extinguish Kilroy. He hustled down the side of the fan, sliding in the loose dirt but managing to keep his balance. He ducked behind some rocks west of the fan, turning to cover Vang Bulo’s retreat.
The big man flashed into the open, backlit for an instant by red firelight blazing in the east branch of the pass, outlining his solid, bulky form. He passed Kilroy, then ducked behind some rocks deeper west into the pass. An instant later he popped up, covering Kilroy’s next run.
There was a lot of what seemed like shooting in the east branch of the pass, but it could have been caused by stores of ammunition being touched off by blazing vehicles. Masses of red and yellow firelight washed over the rocks, giving the gorge a hellish aspect.
The two men made their way west, hugging the north wall of the gorge. They rounded the limb directly below the Rock of the Hawk, circling a blind corner that took them out of the sight and firing lines of the corridor behind them. They weren’t out of the pass yet. Another half mile or so of snake-like gorge lay between them and the western gap opening into Iraq. They jogged in that direction for another fifty yards or so before coming on a cleft in the cliff wall, the mouth of a side branch.
The side branch opened on the north wall, threading northwest. The two had to look smartly for the opening not to miss it. They’d actually passed the entrance, which was partly obscured by shoulder-high scrub brush. But the scrub brush served as a landmark by which to recognize it, especially at night.
They parted the brush and stepped between it, entering the side branch. The entrance here was so narrow that they had to proceed one at a time, in single file. Kilroy took the point, with Vang Bulo jogging several paces behind. The latter’s shoulders brushed rocks walls on both sides.
After a dozen yards or so, the branch started to widen out, until it was about eight to ten feet wide. A thin strip of sky could be seen high above, the gap between the two cliffs through which the gully wormed its way. It was dark in the defile, but they didn’t want to show a light, not yet.
Another hundred yards had to be traveled on foot. It seemed longer because of the darkness and the gully’s twisty route. A wide place opened up, a long, lens-shaped clearing. Here, at the foot of the eastern cliff, a camouflage-pattern canvas tarp covered a bulky, waist-high mound.
Kilroy and Vang Bulo shucked off the tarp. Beneath it lay two vehicles—no, two and a half vehicles. One was a Kawasaki dirt bike, the other was a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. The half vehicle was a two-wheeled metal cart with a square hopper.
They had been and would continue to be integral to the success of the mission. They’d been carried in the back of the SUV earlier when the two men had blown the bridge and bagged Hassani Akkad.
The SUV had driven to the western terminus of the side branch. The side branch opened in the hills about a quarter of a mile north of where the Rock of the Hawk pass opened into Iraq. The west end of the pass opened on the Iraq side on land occupied by the Akkad gang farmhouse.
It would have been difficult to move the SUV stealthily past the farmhouse and its defenders to enter the pass into Iran, and far more difficult and dangerous to return the same way, since the fireworks in the foothills would stir up the whole neighborhood. The side branch was too narrow to be negotiated by the SUV, but not by the off-road vehicles carried in its rear compartment. The SUV was stashed, and the other vehicles unloaded.
Kilroy took the dirt bike, Vang Bulo the ATV. The two-wheeled hopper cart was fastened to a hitch on the rear of the ATV. Kilroy took the point, entering the side branch. Vang Bulo followed, his ATV towing the cart with Akkad.
It was a rough ride, but eventually they penetrated the side branch almost all the way to where it joined the Rock of the Hawk pass. This lens-shaped widening of the trail marked the limits of their motorized trek. The rest of the gully was too thin and rugged to allow passage by wheel.
They had to park and walk the rest of the way, which wasn’t all that far, less than two hundred yards. First, though, the ambushers moved the vehicles off to the side, covering them with the concealing tarp.
Then they followed the rest of the side branch on foot, herding along Akkad, whose feet had been untied so he could walk to the pass on his own two legs. No man ever walked the last mile to the electric chair with less enthusiasm. And that was before they’d fitted him with the explosive belt and tethered him to a dead tree limb, staked out in the middle of the pass for Munghal and company to discover.
The getaway was simpler, since they were no longer laden down with Akkad. The duo would retrace their route through the side branch in reverse, emerging in on the Iraq side where the SUV was hidden.
Kilroy took hold of the two-wheeled cart’s tongue pole and dragged it to the middle of the clearing. “If anybody follows us this way, they can break their necks on it,” he said.
He and Vang Bulo walked their vehicles into the open, pointing them toward the northwest turning of the side branch.
Kilroy said, “You didn’t ask about the colonel.”
“I don’t have to ask. I know,” Vang Bulo said. “You didn’t miss. You never miss.”
“Shucks. It’s true, but, well, shucks.”
“Besides, if you had missed, we’d still be back in the pass, fighting for you to line yourself up another shot.”
“But I didn’t.”
“What I said,” Vang Bulo concluded. He straddled the ATV. With him astride it, it looked like a little mini-tractor or a power lawnmower on steroids. It started up with a rude, blatting thunderclap, then quieted down somewhat.
Kilroy donned his goggles. He’d removed them to shoot the colonel and hadn’t put them back on since. He’d need them for the ride ahead. Vang Bulo had had his on for the entire fight.
Kilroy kick-started the dirt bike. It was equipped with noise-baffling mufflers, but they could only do so much. The engine came alive with a sound like a string of firecrackers going off. The motor vibrated with power, a humming that Kilroy could feel clear up into his belly. The dirt bike shivered, like a racehorse trembling at the starting gate, eager to be off on the steeplechase.
The riders switched on their headlights. There was no making the run without them. The headlight’s cyclops eye shone a beam into the depths of the narrow, craggy passage.
Kilroy glanced back over his shoulder. Vang Bulo was in motion behind him, giving him a thumb’s-up sign. Kilroy’s hands on the grips worked the clutch and throttle. The dirt bike surged forward, thick knobbed tires digging into sand and loose dirt. The ATV followed, its wide, fat tires churning.
They plunged headlong into the gully. Kilroy sometimes had to use one or the other of his booted feet to steady the bike on a tight turn. Boulders would loom in his path, and he’d swerve around them and continue on. Vang Bulo’s was the steadier machine but less maneuverable, slowing on the turns.
Rock walls narrowed and widened, sometimes curving northeast before returning to their primary northwest orientation. It was a wild ride, all speed, sensation, and rushing movement. Fallen rocks and projecting spurs made it even more of an obstacle course. A half-buried rock, if taken wrong, could flip a cycle or ATV.
Headlight beams scrolled along stone walls, throwing up flashing glimpses of gnarled dwarf tre
es and bushes that grew sideways out of cracks in the cliffs. The gully began following a northwest curve. A serpentine course suddenly burst free into the open. They were on the far side of the hills, in Iraq.
They slowed, halting. They killed their lights. Blackness hammered down, vaulted by the faintly luminous rivers of sand and dirt streaming across the sky. They were in a bowl-shaped depression ringed by boulders and jagged rock outcroppings. It was partly sheltered from the sandstorm, but not as much as the side branch had been. They rode up the basin’s north inner wall, topping it and coming out on a vast, sandy flat littered with boulders, spurs, and rocky outcroppings. It had an alien, forbidding quality to it, like a Martian landscape. There was the hulking black bulk of the hillside to their east and and the slightly less utter black of the sky, with its low-scudding dust streams and burly winds.
Kilroy throttled down, cutting the engine off and dismounting. He stood stiff and bowlegged. “Feels like my tailbone’s busted,” he complained.
A nearby rocky spur concealed the SUV, which was parked behind it, facing out. Vang Bulo climbed in it and started it up. The machine rolled out from behind the outcropping,
Kilroy went around to the back of the vehicle and raised the hatch. He unfolded a sliding ramp, lowering one end to the ground. He drove the ATV up the ramp into the rear compartment. The dirt bike was far lighter than the ATV. He wheeled it up the ramp and into the rear of the SUV.
The off-road machines were secured upright in place by floor-bolted clamps. Kilroy hopped down from the back of the SUV, closing the rear hatch.
Shooting sounded in the distance, off to the southwest. Strings of faint popping noises that were shots were bottomed by occasional loud crumping sounds of grenades going off. They came from the direction of the Akkad gang farmhouse.
Kilroy stood in the open, the wind blowing sand in his face. He squinted through his goggles, still not able to see much. Blurred smudges of light filtered through the storm showed where the farmhouse was, though not the structure itself.
Something was burning out there, an outbuilding or vehicle, burning strongly enough so that the winds hadn’t yet extinguished the blaze. Points of light that were muzzle flares stitched the blackness surrounding the site. Vang Bulo rolled down the driver’s side window and stuck his head out of it with an ear cocked, listening to the gunfire.
“Our guys raiding the farmhouse,” Kilroy said. “Mmm, sounds like a hot one.” He went around to the front passenger side and got in. Vang Bulo put the SUV in drive and drove away. The SUV was dark, with only its parking lights for illumination. Here on this side of the border, the landscape was mostly all sprawling fields marked out by roads and cut by canals, some active, others dry.
Kilroy said, “Sneak up on the farmhouse, but not too close. I want to take a look-see.”
Vang Bulo gave him a quick side-glance. “What’s the matter? Haven’t bagged your quota yet?”
“I’m always looking to up my stats.”
The SUV angled toward the farmhouse, which was still a long way off. When it neared, Kilroy cautioned, “Not too close. We don’t want to get shot at—by our own guys or anybody else.”
Vang Bulo’s mouth downturned at one of the corners. “You are the original backseat driver.”
“Not too far away, either,” Kilroy continued, ignoring the other’s remark. “Let’s see what’s going down.”
“For your information, we are now on overtime.”
The machine crept up on the farmhouse, using a line of tall palm trees as a screen to hide them from view of those in and around the structure. The palms were about five hundred feet away from the farmhouse.
“Plenty of shooting going on over there,” Kilroy said, rolling the words around his tongue like a mouthful of fine whiskey, savoring the taste.
Vang Bulo smirked. “Just itching to get into it, aren’t you?”
Kilroy didn’t deny it. “I’m a neighborly fellow. I like to pitch in and help out where I can, so long as it’s not costing me any money.”
“It’s okay as long as you don’t get shot. Or worse, get me shot.”
“There’s that too,” Kilroy conceded. “Steer for that knoll there,” he said, pointing. “That’ll cover us.”
The SUV made for the knoll, a low hillock topped by a bald, rocky knob. It was about a football field’s length away from the farmhouse. Vang Bulo kept it between the SUV and the farmhouse. He pulled in behind it.
Kilroy got out of the SUV, taking his sniper rifle with him.
Eleven
I wanted action, Steve Ireland said to himself, and now I’m going to get it.
The prospect was exciting but scary, scary in a good way, like in the opening pause before kickoff in a big game.
This was a big game, all right. High stakes. The highest, maybe. Nuclear. What could be higher than that? Except for the fact that he was risking life and limb, too. Oh, yeah. There was that, too.
He realized he was thinking too much and he silenced the voice in his head because it was a distraction, and being distracted was a good way to get yourself killed when you were minutes—seconds, maybe—from going into combat.
He was a member of ODA 586, an Army Special Forces unit poised to make a night raid on the Akkad gang farmhouse on the Iraq-Iran border. Their mission: to rescue a kidnap victim and terminate the farmhouse cell.
The borderland was a potential minefield for Coalition and Iraqi interim government interests. The Coalition’s prime mover was the U.S., and Washington put a high premium on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Iraqi interim government wanted to avoid conflict with Iran. It was having a hard enough time securing internal Iraq and getting a permanent government up and running without becoming embroiled in a war. So there was a built-in tension between Washington’s immediate goals in Iraq and its broader strategic goals in the region.
Iran had been smart enough not to put all its atomic eggs in one lead-lined basket. In addition to several atomic reactors that were up and running, Tehran had salted away possibly as many as two dozen secret nuclear weapons research labs in farflung locations throughout the land, many secreted underground in the midst of populous areas. It would be impossible for a combined U.S. aircraft and missile strike to get them all in one hit. The attempt would generate horrendous numbers of civilian casualties that would be a propaganda disaster for American interests.
The main vehicle of the atomic weapons program was the so-called Atoms for Peace project. Iran had already openly built several atomic reactors and had several more under construction. They were power plants designed to supply electricity to the Iranian grid. This could be argued to be more or less legitimate, apart from the subjective consideration that with its plentiful stocks of oil and natural gas, Iran already had more than enough power supply available without the additional atomic-generated stores.
But it was the by-product of these conventional reactors, the enriched uranium and other radioactive waste material, that was the key component needed to make atomic bombs. It was this element that had come under the microscope of a skeptical Western world suspicious of Tehran’s motives.
Here was where the importance of the Razeem process came in. It was the element of distraction and diversion. While international arms inspectors and nuclear nonproliferation administrators fought to probe Tehran’s handling and disposition of the fissile atomic waste, a crash secret program was underway to shortcircuit the entire multi-staged operation by building and operating a Razeem electron coupler.
Iran lacked experts in the process. Iraq had some. Iranian Pasdaran secret police had put Colonel Munghal in charge of the acquisition operation. Iraqi crime gangs abducted scientists with some expertise in the Razeem process and shopped them to the Iranians.
The latest victim in the quest to build the coupler was Iraqi Professor Ali al-Magid. He needed rescuing and the kidnap ring was slated for demolition.
Tonight.
So Steve Ireland and the rest o
f the members of Special Forces unit ODA 586 had been told earlier this day, during a final briefing delivered by a liasion CIA operative: Albin Prester.
It was a joint CIA/Special Forces operation. This was the new shape of covert operations, black ops. The adminstration in Washington wanted CIA mostly out of the paramilitary business, apparently feeling that the Agency’s spotty post–Cold War track record in the field was not a confidence builder. CIA defenders countered that they were being made the fall guys for a power grab by the administration’s civilian appointees at the Pentagon. The agency didn’t want to cede the power and prestige that came from running their own ops. Their paramilitary capacity hadn’t been taken away from them, not officially, but their freedom to move had been cut way back.
Which suited army top brass just fine. They had never much trusted the CIA’s ability to carry out paramilitary ops on its own. Its best use was as a cut out, a third force that could bury U.S. fingerprints on an overseas op, thus providing deniability. But the agency had personnel and resources not readily available to the military, providing the basis for an alliance of convenience.
The current mission was indicative of a new working relationship between certain mid- and upper-level CIA personnel in the clandestine Directorate of Operations and Army Special Forces intelligence officers.
So much Steve Ireland had been told, or deduced from various scraps and bits of related information he’d managed to pick up here and there. Some of it was probably true. But it was a sure bet that there was plenty he hadn’t been told. There was a heavy intelligence component here and these intelligence deals were always like that: wheels within wheels.
The mission parameters were delicate. The border was a hot zone. The U.S. government followed a policy of exerting multiphased pressure on Iran to deter its nuclear weapons ambitions. These included not-so-subtle allusions and even threats of military action to be taken in the near future, to present-day clandestine black ops missions into Iran for reconnaissance and surveillance—and everything in between.
The Return Of Dog Team Page 13