by Peter Nealen
After that, it was a matter of getting all of the outboards distributed, mounted, and started up. It took longer than Brannigan had hoped, but not as long as they had planned for. They could still make it to shore a good four hours before daylight. Finally, all the gear stowed, the old Russian NVGs hauled out of their waterproof bags and strapped to their heads, they got ready to move in, two men per boat. One would drive, the other would sit in the bow, AK-12 ready to engage if need be.
Four boats might have seemed slightly excessive for only eight men, but they were going to need the space for the hostages on the way out. Even then, with possibly as many as thirty hostages, it was going to be a tight fit, and it would not be a fast or comfortable ride.
They could worry about that part once they had the hostages in hand. Until then, their focus was on getting ashore undetected, and in one piece.
The outboards purred as they made their way over the waves, the jagged escarpment looming larger and larger in front of them. No one said anything; even if they hadn’t been trying to stay stealthy, the noise of the motors and the hiss and slap of the water against the hulls would have made it difficult to talk. The fact that, as always, the men in the bows were getting hammered, bounced off the rubber gunwales with every wave, only made them that much less interested in conversation.
It took a long time, but they finally came to the edge of the surf zone, a little more than a hundred yards offshore. Brannigan, in the lead boat, eased off the throttle and brought the craft to a faintly drifting halt, rocking on the waves.
It was very quiet, out there on the water with the motors throttled back. He scanned the shore in the green-scale glow of the NVGs, hoping against hope that the ancient Russian optics weren’t going to crap out from the salt spray at any minute.
Waves crashed against the rocky shore, whitecaps hitting with a dull, rhythmic roar in the quiet of the night. There was otherwise no movement on the dark line of terrain ahead.
There was also no good site to land the boats; the cliff was only a few feet high, but it was still a sheer cliff. They needed to find an actual beach.
Turning the tiller, Brannigan twisted the throttle slightly, steering the boat against the current, moving to the west. He kept it slow, scanning the dark cliffs for a likely spot. The other three boats followed. Comms would make noise they wanted to avoid, and there was little to say anyway; they’d just have to stick together until he found a Boat Landing Site.
There. It was shallow, and the sandy, rocky ground rose steeply not too far inland, but there was a stretch of beach just ahead. He just hoped, as he turned in toward it, that it was unoccupied. The likelihood of tourists being out at night while Iranian soldiers held the island by force was low, but he’d spent enough time in the war-torn Middle East to have seen stranger things.
Opening the throttle a little wider, so that the boat would have enough momentum to beach properly, he aimed the bows for the narrow shingle. A couple of minutes later, they were there, the nearness of the beach announced by the harsh grinding of the outboard’s boom scraping on the bottom.
Hastily killing the motor, hoping that the props hadn’t been badly damaged, Brannigan hauled the motor up out of the water. Their momentum was dead, however, and he and Aziz had to hop out and drag the boat the rest of the way up onto the beach, wading from knee-deep water and then slogging up onto the sand. The other three boats had done better, the motors coming up out of the water before impact, allowing the boats to glide ashore, getting higher up the beach on momentum alone.
“Thanks for the warning that we were getting to the shallows,” Brannigan snarled quietly to Aziz.
“I couldn’t see shit!” the other man protested weakly.
“That’s funny,” Brannigan said. “The rest managed it.” He stepped closer to Aziz, dropping his voice still further. “Listen up, Aziz. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in for you yet, just how far out in the cold we really are on this job. There are eight of us, with no support except for some Russian mobsters who might or might not be back for us tomorrow night. You need to lose the attitude and start pulling your damned weight, or you’re not getting off this island. I’ll make sure of it. Comprende?”
Aziz was a blurry impression in the green image of the NVGs, but there was no mistaking his nervous gulp. “Understood, Colonel,” he replied in a whisper.
“Good.” They finished making sure the boat was high enough that it shouldn’t float away at high tide, and gathered with the rest up on the higher ground. Brannigan was last, having first scanned their surroundings, looking for signs of human activity. They couldn’t afford to leave a watch on the boats, and if this was somebody’s tryst spot, they were screwed. But there was none of the trash and detritus that usually marked such places in the region. This spot appeared to have been left alone for a long time.
Boots crunched on the dirt and gravel as they climbed the slope beyond the beach. Flanagan and Hancock were already in the prone at the crest, AKs pointed north, toward the interior of the island. Curtis joined them a moment later, setting up his PKP on its bipods and scanning the ground ahead of them.
“All right,” Brannigan whispered. “We’re going to move up to the planned patrol base. Keep together; it might be a smaller footprint if we scattered and moved in pairs, but we can’t afford to break comm silence if something goes wrong.”
There were all sorts of other little details that he could have gone into; in fact, he knew quite a few officers with far less experience than he who would have. But he knew that these men were pros, and didn’t need the reminder. They knew how to patrol. So, he pointed to Childress, who nodded and led out.
***
It was not a walk in the park. The entire island was basically a dusty, sandy rock pile in the middle of the Gulf, and there didn’t seem to be a level spot wider than a couple of yards to be found anywhere. Brannigan had read that the airport had needed to be blasted level, in some places knocking down ten-meter tall hills just to create a straight enough strip of ground to land aircraft.
Every step seemed to find a jagged rock, and footing was treacherous, especially carrying as much ammo as they were, along with assault packs full of explosives, batteries, water, and just enough chow for three days. It felt like half the rocks on the island were loose, just waiting to slip or turn under an unwary foot.
They’d barely gone three hundred meters from the beach, and Brannigan was already feeling it. The fact that each rifleman was carrying twelve loaded AK-12 magazines, in addition to the mag in his weapon, didn’t help anything. Despite his still above average conditioning, between the difficult footing, trying to see through the old Russian night vision, the heat, the humidity, sand and salt abrading skin already softened by seawater, and the weight of their loads, Brannigan was breathing hard, soaked in sweat, and thoroughly miserable before Childress suddenly sank to a knee ahead of him, holding up a fist.
Brannigan dropped immediately, as did the rest. He scanned all around, having to crane his neck backward just enough to be uncomfortable in order to see. The NVGs just wouldn’t sit quite right, not on the Russian mounts.
He didn’t see any movement, or lights. But Childress had stopped for a reason. Slowly, rolling his feet so as to make as little noise as possible, he rose into a half crouch and crept forward until he could take a knee next to the point man.
“Got a road,” Childress whispered, the breathed words barely audible over the sound of the surf, already well behind them.
“Let’s check it out,” Brannigan said, looking back to make sure Hancock was watching them. He gave the signal for “Linear Danger Area,” then tapped Childress on the shoulder.
Together, the two of them moved up to the edge of the road. It wasn’t paved; it was only a packed earth and gravel track through the desert. And in the less-than-ideal image of the NVGs, it was impossible to see if there were fresh vehicle tracks in the dust.
Even if it was unused, they would have to get across it quickly a
nd back into the rolling, rocky hinterlands. A road was a bad place to be, especially since they still didn’t know what kind of patrols the Iranians might have out. He looked back, got Hancock’s attention again, and signaled that they would cross by twos. “Let’s go,” he murmured to Childress, and the two of them rose and scurried across the road, pushing up a couple of meters into the rocks on the far side before crouching back down and pointing their weapons up and down the road. They might not have practiced it together much, but the drills were old ones, and the habits were still solid.
By twos, the rest of the team quickly crossed the road and moved into the hinterland. Once the last man was across, Brannigan and Childress moved back up to the head of the formation, and they continued inland.
***
They were north of the escarpment now, and more of the island was becoming visible. The airport was a blaze of lights, seemingly far too close for comfort. Brannigan felt horrifically exposed on the open, rocky ground, a niggling fear in the back of his mind that they had to be clearly visible in the bright sodium glow of the airport’s lights. The rotating green and white beacon sweeping its beams across the landscape only made things worse.
When he saw Childress flinch lower as the white beam of the beacon swung overhead, he knew that he was not alone.
Childress began to angle to the east, trying to keep their distance from the airport itself. So far, Brannigan hadn’t seen any patrols around the airport, though he knew that they had to be there. He kept one eye, as best he could, on the splash of lights, watching for any sign that they had been detected.
They still had to get past the airport, and they were going to have to go closer; the end of the runway was a bare four hundred meters from the eastern shore. So, reluctantly, Childress started to move north again as they neared the eastern end of the airport.
Brannigan wanted to tell him to slow down, but trusted that his pointman knew his business. They had all studied the same imagery, and he was pretty sure that Childress would remember the checkpoint on the coastal road, placed to shut off any traffic when an aircraft was landing or taking off.
But after another hundred yards, Brannigan was starting to have his doubts. Childress wasn’t slowing down or showing appreciably more caution, the closer they got to the spot where he was sure the checkpoint was set up. He was about to stop the other man when Childress halted, once again sinking to a knee and raising a hand to signal the rest to stop.
Through the grainy green of the NVGs, Brannigan could just see the roof of the little guard shack at the checkpoint, as well as the red-and-white striped pole of the swing-arm, presently raised and pointing at the starry sky. There was no sign of guards, but they wouldn’t be within line of sight, anyway, given the low pile of jagged rock between them and the checkpoint.
Childress looked back at him, and signaled with a curved hand that he planned on sneaking by the checkpoint to the northwest. Then he put a finger to his lips, as if to signal Quiet.
No shit, son.
Brannigan just passed the signals back, noting in the process that they had needed to get a lot closer together just to be able to discern the hand and arm signals. He swore that if he ever took a job like this again, he was going to find a way to get better night vision.
And not do business with organized crime, he added in his head. Not that they would always have the option. He was under no illusions about what kind of compromises had to be made in mercenary work, no matter how justified the ends might be.
Childress was fiddling with his AK. He finally figured out what he was trying to do, and dropped down to all fours, then began crawling forward, carefully placing each hand and knee, his AK across his hands. He wasn’t moving fast, but he was being very quiet.
With an inaudible sigh, Brannigan followed suit. This was going to hurt; even aside from the sharpness of the rocks, and the likelihood of running into scorpions out there, his knees weren’t all they used to be. But it was better to have sore and bleeding knees than to get shot through the skull.
In a winding, slow-moving line, they crept around to the northwest of the checkpoint, never going far without turning to look back toward the shack and the swing-arm. They were closer than any of them would have liked, but that had been necessitated by the need to keep their distance from the runway. Get too close, out on that level, clear ground, and get accidentally illuminated by one of the runway lights, and it would be all over.
Voices speaking in Farsi sounded in the night. Brannigan froze, wanting to hiss at Childress, who was still slowly moving forward. But the other man must have heard something anyway, because he stopped, sinking to his belly on the ground.
Not a moment too soon; headlights blazed on the coastal road in front of them, sweeping brilliant white illumination across the rocky ground and the eight mercenaries. All eight were already hugging the rocks, trying to become one with the dust. They weren’t seen; no gunshots split the night, no cries of alarm rang out across the barren plain.
A truck rolled up to the checkpoint, stopping with a crunch of tires on gravel that they could hear clearly from where they lay. Doors slammed, and more voices spoke in Farsi. The guard was being changed at the checkpoint.
It certainly confirmed the intel reports, Brannigan mused as he tried not to breathe in too much of the dust, his face pressed against the jagged rocks beneath him. The Khadarkhi Army spoke Arabic; the Iranians were obviously in full control of the entire island and all of its infrastructure, if they were stationing guards on the checkpoints at the airport.
It also said something about how many of them there were, if they could spare the manpower to set rotating shifts at checkpoints that far from the city. This was not going to be easy.
There were more raised voices, their tone sounding fairly jocular, then the doors slammed again, and the truck was turning, gravel crunching beneath the tires before it trundled off back to the north, its brake lights blazing bright red in the dark.
Someone was chatting down by the checkpoint. The Iranians did not seem overly concerned; even if someone had seen the dhow loitering near the southern end of the island, it had not been classed as a reason for any kind of serious alert. These were soldiers doing a boring, unpleasant task, and doing as much joking about it as they could.
Footsteps crunched on the rocks, not far away. Brannigan risked lifting his head just enough to see, hoping that he could bring his AK-12 to bear quickly enough if they were spotted. Someone was walking around the perimeter of the checkpoint, examining the lay of the land. Making sure everything really was secure.
Just our luck that one of these bastards turns out to be a professional.
He could see the man’s silhouette against the starry sky before he could bring his NVGs in line, a dark shape with a rifle slung over its shoulder. In the green glow, he could see a man of medium height, wearing what looked like khakis and combat gear not unlike their own, a cap on his head, with no NVGs, just scanning the rocks with his naked eyes. After a moment, the man unzipped his fly and took a piss on the rocks, before turning and sauntering back down to the checkpoint.
Brannigan let out a breath he hadn’t quite realized he had been holding. He suddenly braced himself again, hoping that Curtis could resist the urge to make a wisecrack. But the little machinegunner stayed silent.
They lay there for a few more interminable minutes, waiting for the checkpoint to settle down into boring, sleepy routine, no longer fully alert, unlikely to react to the faint rustling of crawling men out in the dark.
The entire time, the tension in Brannigan’s chest was winding tighter. Not because of the nearness of their enemy, but because of the time they were wasting. The urgency of their mission was eating at him, silently screaming at him that they couldn’t afford to stay there, that they had to move if they were going to get to the hostages in time. They had no way of knowing if another one had been executed since Trevor had been shot. How much time did any of them have?
But Brannigan
had been soldiering for a long, long time, and he knew to shut that part of his emotions off. They would do the hostages no good if they were discovered and killed before they could even get close to the Citadel. So he lay there, and waited, and listened, until Childress was satisfied that they had waited long enough, and recommenced his forward crawl.
***
It still took a long, long time to get far enough past the checkpoint that they could no longer hear the voices of the guards. Only then was Childress comfortable with getting up and moving forward on foot.
***
The eastern sky was beginning to brighten by the time they finally reached their chosen lay-up site. It had been impossible to select a precise site just going off of the imagery; one pile of rocks looks much the same as any other on a LANDSAT image. Brannigan even knew of one instance where Marines had gone looking for a series of apparently artificial hills in Iraq, only to find that the images had in fact been of pits in the ground, not hills. So, they’d picked a general area, far enough away from roads, buildings, or the outskirts of Khadarkh City, and decided that they would find a good spot there.
At first, there hadn’t seemed to be a good spot. The entire area seemed to be nothing but a solid stretch of dusty rock, without a depression or elevation of more than a few inches. They had to push farther north, closer to the now-looming Citadel, before Childress found a depression, part of a shallow wadi leading down toward the shore, probably a channel cut by runoff on the rare occasions that it ever rained on the island.
The eight of them crammed themselves down into the crack, huddling against the rocks as much as possible, wishing for more in the way of camouflage, and prepared to wait out the day.