But Washington wanted to exert pressure when it wanted to exert pressure. Conducting a full-scale military operation so close to the border was a provocation Washington was not prepared to initiate at this time. The closing of the kidnap pipeline would be conducted solely in Iraq, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of deniability.
That was the official line, at least as far as the CIA/Special Forces mission was concerned. It didn’t take in the Dog Team’s secret agenda, so carefully compartmentalized and insulated from discovery by outsiders and even Army insiders.
But of such things Steve Ireland was as yet happily unaware.
Tonight was the night, the op was a go. The Special Forces unit had been on standby at Border Base Foxtrot for the past few days, and it felt good to be given the green light to actually get out and go do something.
A line of three Humvees left the base at night, the sandstorm whipping up a mass of murky darkness. The storm, the wildness of it, had an intoxicating effect on Steve Ireland. Extremes always did.
The Humvees worked their way northeast toward the border. The storm slowed down their advance but masked their presence. They rode bunched up, maintaining visual contact. Visibility was poor.
The staging area was a wadi west of the farmhouse. The three vehicles halted there. Even without the concealment of the storm, the tops of the banks of the wadis would have hidden them from the view of any observers at the farmhouse. Several fiftul hours followed.
Prester of CIA was there with the unit. He’d come along with them on the mission, at least as far as the jumping-off point. But he wouldn’t be there for the kill. He was no trigger puller, he hadn’t trained with ODA 586, and in a shooting situation he’d be lucky not to be a liability. His role was strictly advisory, observational, and auxiliary.
ODA 586 team leader Sgt. McBane—Bane, as he was known—was in command of the mission, the final authority on all operational details.
He’d been schooled by Prester in operating the handheld locator device linked to the transmitter implanted in al-Magid. McBane’d be carrying the locator device during the foray.
It was time to go. The unit formed up into two five-man squads. Another two men would stay behind to secure the vehicles and staging area. Prester would remain with them. All were fitted with headset transceivers allowing them to communicate.
As the squads formed up, Garza said, “Right here is where some cornball says, ‘This is it.’” Nobody had anything to say about that.
They clambered up the east bank of the wadi. Storm winds tore at them, hot streaming blasts that sprayed them with a high-intensity stream of airborne sand, chaff, and dust.
They faced the farmhouse, several fields distant, a dimly lit structure with shrouded lights glowing amid a mountainous vortex of sand and storm. Too distant to make out any human figures who might have been patrolling the area.
The attack would be a pincer movement. One squad would circle around from the north, and the other would come up from the south. The squad coming from the south was First Squad. Bane headed it.
Bane gave the signal for both squads to move out.
“This is it,” Garza said, gulping.
He was in Second Squad, Steve Ireland’s squad, which would be coming in from the north.
The squads arrowed out, separating, crossing the fields in a crescent-shaped movement that would swing them seemingly out, away from the objective, only to send them curving back, to hook it on the tips of their horns.
It had been a long time since this farm had raised any other crop beside weeds. A dirt road ran east-west; the farmhouse sat north of it. Branches split off from the main road at right angles, dividing fields into lots. The lots were crisscrossed with irrigation ditches, now dry.
The farmhouse was a low, rambling rectangle of a building whose long sides ran north-south. Beyond, to the east, rose the foothills of Iran. Most of the farmhouse’s nearby outbuildings were east and south of it, including a big, corrugated metal garage barn and a couple of equipment sheds.
Second Squad neared the farmhouse. The back of the farmhouse, since it fronted east. It was a flat-roofed building with thick, mustard-brown stucco walls. The upper half of the rear wall was lined with a row of deep casement windows with dark wooden shutters that were now closed. Pale light showed behind some, but not all, of them.
The structure’s roof was bordered by a waist-high parapet. Sentries were posted on it, but the storm made them keep a low profile. The farmhouse gang didn’t know that they’d been burned, that their locale was no longer a secret.
Their concern as regards security threats was focused eastward, toward Iran. There in the borderland hills was where the recent troubles were located, where Fadleel’s gunrunners had been slaughtered and the scout car misappropriated. Where al-Magid would be handed over to Colonel Munghal at the western mouth of the pass of the Rock of the Hawk.
The Akkad gang apprehended no trouble from the west. Any such apprehensions they might have had were suppressed by the sandstorm, which discouraged doing anything much in the way of keeping watch on all quarters.
It was estimated that the farmhouse was guarded by anywhere from fifteen to twenty defenders. Steve Ireland had every confidence in the superiority of Special Forces fighting skills over less well-trained though numerically superior forces, but he couldn’t help wondering if the mission wasn’t somewhat undergunned.
Secrecy sometimes trumps security, and it looked like this was one of those times. It would have been one thing if the mission had just been to kill any and all of the enemy on site. It would have been easier. A hostage rescue was a tricky thing, a complicating factor.
Hostage rescues weren’t necessarily a Special Forces stock in trade; it was more of a Delta Force specialty. ODA 586 wasn’t a hostage rescue team, but such a rescue was something they were trained to do.
That’s what happens when the military gets involved in the spy world, Steve thought. Lines get blurred. Gray areas predominate. You had to keep watching for hidden motives and secret agendas, even among the guys on your own side. Especially the guys on your side. Where did common-sense caution end and paranoia begin?
It was a distraction and in combat, distractions were dangerous. But you’ve got to take your missions where you find them, and make them work. So Steve Ireland told himself.
Second Squad swung wide of the farmhouse. From where they were they could see some of the grounds east of the structure.
The farmhouse fronted a dirt yard. On the opposite side of the yard was a metal garage barn. Its face was turned to the farmhouse. It had a peaked roof and two bays. The walls were made of sheets of thin, corrugated metal. They were badly rusted. Walls and roof were dark with corrosion that had bitten deep. An electric light hung from the wall above the tops of the bays. More lights showed inside. The bay doors were closed against the storm.
A handful of men stood outside, keeping watch. They kept pretty close to the garage, on the lee side, sheltering against the sandstorm. They stood huddled together. Two of them separated from the others and went on patrol, making a quick circle around the garage and some nearby sheds.
A dog darted out from behind a couple of fifty-gallon drums standing against a shed wall. It rushed the two men on patrol, snapping and barking at them.
They both started, the man standing nearer the dog reacting more violently. He jumped to one side. The other started, too, but managed to recover some of his poise before his partner could notice his upset.
The dog stopped short, leaning on its front paws and yapping fiercely at the duo. The first man, the one who’d jumped, unslung the auto-rifle strapped across his shoulder and started to level it.
Quick as thought, the dog turned on a dime, running away. It rounded a corner of the shed, taking it out of the man’s firing line before he could get a bead on it. The man raced around the corner, but by then the dog was well away into the distance and the man put down his weapon, mouthing obscenities in the dog’s dire
ction.
The two men cut short their rounds, returning to the garage and entering it by a side door. Light from inside slanted through the open doorway, laying a yellow oblong down on the ground. A number of men were in the garage, what looked like a half dozen or more, not counting the two who now entered, closing the door behind them. Three more remained outside, flattened against the north side of the garage.
There were more in the farmhouse, too, at least a half a dozen.
The time had come for Steve Ireland to separate himself from the rest of Second Squad. The mission required him to operate more or less solo.
The locator not only identified al-Magid as being in the farmhouse, it even showed where in the farmhouse he was being kept: the northern end. Steve was posted to the northwest corner of the building. Other squad members would approach the farmhouse from different angles.
He angled one way while the rest of Second Squad angled another. He felt a pang watching the squad move off. He was on his own now.
Time to get to it, then. He looked around. A dry drainage ditch would allow him to get close to the building while providing some cover. He stepped down into it and hunched down low, moving toward the farmhouse. He was linked to the others only by his comm unit headset. He moved forward in a crouch, M4 machine gun at the ready, leading with its blunt snout poking out.
Then came his encounter with a dog of war. A real one, not just a figure of speech. A mangy dog pack haunted the area around the farmhouse, searching for what scraps of food and garbage they could forage and harrying the site’s inhabitants. Akkad gang members were of two minds about the dogs. When one of the beasts became too obnoxious or aggressive, they shot it. This was a windfall for the rest of the pack, who fell on the dead dog to rend it to bits and eat it.
And yet the dogs might still prove useful to the gang, if only according to the theory that they would serve as watchdogs, their barks and growls warning of the presence of strangers and intruders. But they weren’t watchdogs; they were mangy, backbiting curs so unruly and disputatious that they were as liable to be snarling and ripping at each other or at nothing at all as they were to be howling down some unannounced newcomer.
So the gang members mostly ignored them. It was a case not of the boy who cried wolf, but of the dogs who cried wolf. Tonight’s sandstorm further minimized the dogs’ effectiveness, since the roaring chaos of the winds had already driven the beasts into a frenzy. Steve Ireland could hear them as he moved toward the farmhouse.
They ranged unseen on various parts of the grounds, ceaselessly playing out the rites of dominance and submission. The alpha males routinely harrassed and terrorized the rest of the pack, in between attempts to best each other. The top dog, the one who can defeat all comers, becomes leader of the pack.
Steve was a hunter, and back home he’d sometimes gone on night hunts where hunting dogs were used. Hearing the hounds baying in the moonlight during those hunts, he thought it a primordial sound like a fanfare of bugles that would send chills down his spine. A joyous sound.
But there was no joy in the snarlings and mutterings and shrill cries of pain coming from the farmhouse dog pack. They sounded like a machine slipping gears and tearing itself apart.
The dog that suddenly came on him now, in the ditch near the farmhouse, made no such warning noises, however, but came on him silently. It had sensed him long before he sensed it. It was not the same dog as the one that had startled the guards patrolling the outbuildings. This was another dog from the same pack. A mongrel, it was built somewhat along greyhound lines, the top of its head coming level with a man’s waist. It was moon colored, with a boxy snout, pointed triangular ears, and moist reddish-brown eyes. And a mouth of ripping fangs. Like all the pack, it was half starved, its ribs showing.
It came on Steve Ireland from the south, padding toward him. At the last instant, some eager whine or bloodlust snarl escaped it. Stealth was discarded now, replaced by speed. It leaped ahead, its forward motion quick, intent. It charged head down, low to the ground.
Its panting breath, the sound of its claws tearing into the earth, alerted Steve and caused him to look in its direction. A glance was all he got as the beast coursed across the ground toward him. It seemed to have materialized like a phantom. One instant it wasn’t there; the next it was charging at him, slavering for its fangs to be at his throat.
To shoot would prematurely betray his presence and endanger the whole operation. Given a slightly longer lead time, he’d have drawn his survival knife and used it to gut the animal. There was no time. The hound would be on him in a heartbeat. It was already almost upon him, gathering itself for a leap.
He had just enough time to swing up his weapon and deliver a slashing butt-stroke, bringing it up from way down low and jabbing it hard against the hound’s snout and tender nose. The blow impacted with a most satisfying crunch. The devil dog’s eyes crossed, its forward motion stunningly arrested. It did a kind of backward flip, somersaulting head over heels and crashing to the ground.
It shook its head, dazed, its eyes slowly unfog-ging. Talons scrabbled on dirt as it got its paws under it and managed to stand up shakily on all four legs, swaying. Yipping and whining, it ran away with its tail between its legs.
Once it started running, it seemed to steady itself on its feet and darted a swift straight course elsewhere, until it was out of sight. Steve watched it go with no small sense of satisfaction. I showed him who’s top dog, he said to himself.
He closed on the farmhouse without further incident. Other squadmen were watching the roof and grounds. Should a sentry or patrol start toward Steve Ireland’s locale, he’d be alerted by comm set.
He crouched opposite the windows in the west face of the building’s north end. The windows all had dark wooden shutters that were closed. Light filtered through the spaces between the slats. The air was so hazy with fine-grained dust that it made the light cling to the window squares like glowing fog.
There were guards up on the roof. He could hear them, their voices, in the lulls when the wind fell. In the center of the roof stood a structure like a square-sided bandbox. One of its sides housed a door that accessed a stairwell leading down into the building. The guards hung around this structure because it provided shelter against the sandstorm.
They didn’t like having their faces sandblasted every time they turned toward the direction from which the wind was blowing. They ducked out of the storm and into the protective kiosk and the stairwell below.
Steve rose out of the ditch, slipping noiselessly across the ground to the farmhouse. He flattened his back against the wall, glancing left and right. He saw no immediate threat. No one had seen him. He was alone behind the back of the farmhouse.
A shuttered window rose to his right. Thin sheets of pale, watery light slanted through the slats. Their downslanting angle hampered his view into the room. He couldn’t hear much, either. From inside came sounds of motion, stirrings, murmuring voices. All vague, indistinct; nothing he could put a handle on.
Shadows fell across the window, the shadows of figures moving around in the room. Their movements made the shadows glide across the slatted shutters. By squatting down so that he looked up through the spaces between the slats, he was able to catch a partial glimpse of the inside of the window.
The shutters were secured from inside by a horizontal crossbar held in place by a pair of brackets affixed to their inner sides. The bar looked pretty solid. Beyond the shutters, the window consisted of square panes set in an iron grid. It was closed, all but a gap of six inches at the bottom, even though it was a warm night. The glass was so smeared and grimy that it was almost opaque.
By going through some contortions he was able to peer through the open space at the bottom of the window. He couldn’t see much. His view of the room was by necessity circumscribed and narrow. The interior was dimly lit. He caught glimpses of parts of bodies moving back and forth in front of his slitted window opening. The bodies were intact; it was his vi
ew of them that was truncated. He couldn’t see the hostage, but he was reasonably sure that al-Magid was not in a direct line with this window.
He reached into his pack and took out a stun grenade. It was similar in size and shape to a hockey puck. One face was covered with a film of thin gray plastic. He peeled it off. The face was now coated with sticky adhesive. He pressed the sticky side against the lower-left corner of the shutter frame.
The grenade was a concussion job, with little explosive power. It would deliver a blinding flash and shattering noise, both designed to shock and awe its victims so they would be paralyzed with ineffectiveness for several critical seconds—heartbeats that meant the difference between life and death.
The charge it carried was virtually nil, but it had enough oomph to blow the shutters off their hinges and clear the window frame. It would blow the glass, too, which was potentially hazardous to anyone in its path. That was why he’d checked to make sure as best he could that the captive was nowhere along its line of force.
He couldn’t help but note the paradox of being so solicitous of al-Magid’s welfare on the one hand, and having received orders to kill him if that was the only way to prevent the gang from carrying him into Iran.
Steve edged away from the window. He reported his current status over the comm set. The other members of Second Squad were in position. First Squad was not yet ready. They were still moving up toward the south end of the blockhouse and the outbuildings.
Steve figured that the Go would be given in no more than five minutes. Before that happened, however, the unexpected occurred.
Shooting sounded. More shots followed, strings of popping noises. They came from somewhere off in the distance. It’s harder than one might think to determine the source of sounds without a visual cue to direct the search.
East of the farmhouse, amid the hills of Iran, lights flashed. That’s where the shots were coming from. Shots and blasts. The blasts looked like heat lightning and were followed by big booms.
The Return Of Dog Team Page 14