Now, the panjandrums at SOC—the Special Operations Command—down in Tampa, had already come up with an ops plan for the mission. Their blueprint, which had been designed with the help of three or four dozen think-tank professors, eight levels of middle-management officers who’d never seen the business end of an MP5 in their lives, and a lot of C2—that’s can’t cunt—colonels who wanted that brigadier general’s star real bad, predicted that the unit’s losses would run somewhere between 90 and 100 percent. Friends, so far as I am concerned, those are great odds if your mission includes being on the receiving end of a firing squad. I, however, had other ideas. I can count the men I have lost in battle on the fingers of one hand. The reason I have lost so few is that I don’t allow others to make my plans for me. And I don’t allow others to set my risks.
So I toasted Tony with my Diet Pepsi, wished him the best of luck—and said, “No, thanks.”
Now, you may think that what we’re about to do here has roughly the same chance of success that the Baghdad plan had back in 1990. But you are wrong.
Here, we enjoyed almost every one of the elements that make for a successful unconventional operation. We controlled the timing. We enjoyed the element of surprise. We had momentum on our side—and most important of all, we had a will to win that was unwavering. We could not fail. More to the point: we would not fail.
0348. The plane banked to starboard again, and began to climb. I made my way to the cockpit. “We’re in the dead zone between Sidon and Barja,” Koby said. I noticed that he’d pulled on a pair of night-vision goggles. “There’s a Lebanese power station that gives off a tremendous amount of ambient radiation. We’ve used it before to shield our approach as we head east.” He climbed steeply, and banked the plane roughly left, then right. “You guys better secure back there,” he said. “It’s about to get interesting.”
I started aft. “On my way.”
“Oh—” he called, his concentration never wavering from the windshield. “Fifteen minutes to your ETA.”
“Roger.”
I clambered back. Wonder and I got Avi into his harness first, double-checking the straps that held him across the chest, under the legs, and wrapped around his thighs. We attached a reserve chute to his chest—but I made sure to rig the trip cord so I, not he, would control it. I didn’t want him yanking on the wanker and killing us both. Below the chute was the oxy bottle we’d use during our initial descent. On his back, two sets of specially designed carabiners would attach to the straps on my own chest, so that as we jumped, I’d ride atop him, which would allow me to guide the big flat chute. If things went wrong, I could cut Avi away, open his reserve for him, then worry about myself.
I pulled the straps tight around his thighs, waist, and chest. The fit seemed good. I attached myself to him to check the play of the nylon straps.
I showed Avi how I wanted him to position his body as we’d go out of the aircraft. “Is this good for you, too?” I asked as we scrunched together. I nestled closer to him and hugged. “Matter of fact, if you had tits on your back I’d marry you now.”
He told me to perform an anatomically impossible feat first in Hebrew, then in Arabic, then in Russian, and then in English.
I laughed. “I didn’t know you cared.”
We disengaged, so we could help him attach his rucksack and his weapon. “Don’t forget,” I said. “I’ll tell you when you cut the pack loose. You don’t want to land on top of it.”
Avi nodded.
“Got the phone?”
He patted the pocket on his left thigh and gave me an upturned thumb.
“Phone detonators?”
He checked and found them in his right breast pocket. He took one and handed it to me. “I can’t use them both—you keep one.”
“Good idea.” I stowed it securely. I looked closely at Avi. His face was white. He was hyperventilating a little, now.
“You gonna be sick?” I asked.
“No—I’m fine.”
I knew damn well he wasn’t fine—wouldn’t be fine until he had both of his size seven-and-a-half shoes on terra firma. But he’d have to live with it.
I ran a top-to-bottom check on Wonder. His chute was okay. His reserve was tight on his chest. His right wrist bore the big-dial altimeter. His AK and ammo mags were stowed, strapped, taped, and double-taped.
“Got the plastic?”
He tapped the pair of zippered compartments on his chest. “Safe and sound. You?”
I did the same. I shrugged into the big tandem flat chute, and the reserve. Wonder double-checked my web gear, and ran his hands over the rucksack that hung below my butt.
0358. Koby called me forward. He’d connected up one of the cockpit oxygen masks. “We’re at five thousand meters and climbing,” he said. He pointed to the readout ticking away on the Magellan dial. “Six minutes to release. Plug yourselves in and blow the hatch.” I gave him a thumbs-up and headed aft.
Koby was a good special operations pilot—that means he’d stayed down at wave level, climbing to the release altitude of twelve thousand feet only when he absolutely had to.
But now we were climbing and it was time to plug in. I made sure everybody’s masks were tightly strapped, and we ran the hose nozzles into the oxy tits. There was one element working in our favor. This was a commercial jump-school plane, not a military craft. Which meant, so far as I was concerned, that the owners would have probably taken good care of the internal oxygen system, since they didn’t want a bunch of lawsuits from their students.
I breathed deep. It smelled like everyday O2 to me.
I saw Koby’s gloved hand waving. Three fingers—he’d put the plane into a slow arc now, changing our heading to due south, and into a gentle, gentle climb. Wonder and I went aft and unbolted the port-side hatch, which we stowed and tied down. I held on and leaned outside, the blast of freezing air feeling great on my face. It was still dark, although there was the barest hint of crepuscular light coming from the east, over where I knew Iraq lay more than three hundred miles away.
Time to move. I pulled Avi up, turned his back to me and attached us together. I looked back toward the cockpit.
Fuck—Koby’d obviously put the goddamn plane on autopilot, because he was moving aft toward us. He’d pulled on a chute and a reserve, strapped a combat pack to his ass, and slung an AK over his shoulder. His jump helmet was tight, his goggles covered his eyes, and he had an oxy mask plugged into the quart-size bottle that hung at belly level.
I gave him a “WTF” look. He tossed me the bird and yanked the mask off long enough to tell me that there was no way I was going to HAHO with Avi without him coming along to watch. “I’ve been waiting to see this for twenty years, mister officer.” he said. “The plane’s on autopilot—it’ll make it back out over the ocean easily if somebody doesn’t shoot it down first.”
I pulled my mask. “I’ll buy you another plane when we get back,” I shouted over the wind noise. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
“Hein-hein—thank you so very much, mister officer.” Koby’s head inclined slightly in my direction. “Avi told me you’d come into money recently.” He laughed. “But this is for pleasure, this jump—the pleasure of seeing Avi squirm. Besides—you could use an extra pair of hands I think.”
There are times, friends, when even I am smart enough to take “yes” for an answer—and this was one of ’em. I answered him by giving him a thumbs-up, grabbing the hatch rail, and throwing Avi and me out into the darkness.
The turbulence caught us right away—blast of cold air—and twisted our bodies belly up—the wrong way if you want to HAHO. I tried to throw a hump—arch my back to flip us around, but Avi wasn’t giving me any help. I pounded on his shoulders, trying to hint—in my subtle SEAL way—to let me do the fucking work, lay back, and enjoy the ride. Somehow, I don’t think he was getting the message.
I slapped him on the back of the helmet hard enough to make him cringe—even in the air blast. That quieted him down enoug
h so that I was able to roll, shift, and pull.
I heard the chute release go, felt the first tug, and then all of a sudden I was kicked in the balls by the biggest mule I’d ever felt. It’s bad enough when I pull—I’m over 200 pounds, and the shock of the chute opening is considerable. Now, between my pack, weapons, ammo, and other miscellaneous goodies, plus Avi’s weight and supplies, we were probably somewhere in the 500-pound area. Try focusing that kind of weight entirely on your testicles some dark night and see if you don’t feel like singing soprano for a while.
There is a SEAL technical term for what I’d just experienced. It is called FUCKING PAIN.
But there was no time to think about pain right now—I was more concerned with the condition of the nine cells of the parachute. There was a sudden drop—about thirty feet—and I looked up to see the whole front edge of the chute folding under.
It was a motherfucking wind shear. Why they happen, who knows—and right now, who the fuck cares. All that mattered was that it had happened, and the cells were beginning to collapse on me.
Normal rate of descent is about sixteen feet a second. By the altimeter on my wrist and the pumping of my heart, I guesstimated that we were dropping at about thirty feet a second, which—lemme do some quick arithmetic here—works out to just under twenty-four miles an hour. For the record, let me say that hitting the ground at twenty-four miles an hour is not recommended under any circumstances.
I threw my body—and Avi’s—to the left. No response. I pulled our combined weight up three feet or so on the starboard side risers and steering lines, then dropped abruptly. There was still no change in our velocity. I tried it on the port side—playing with the lines, twisting my body, shifting side to side, all the while screaming the kind of epithets that I hoped would encourage the big chute to fill properly—things like, “you motherfucking cocksucking shit-eating piece of crap—fill the fuck up.”
Once in a great while, inanimate objects actually do take direction when it is positively offered. And, as I watched, the edge straightened, the last of the cells filled out, and our rate of descent slowed to a pace I’d call tolerable.
I slammed Avi in the back, and shouted in his ear through my mask that we were okay. He didn’t reply except to hunch his shoulders even more than they’d been hunched. My guess was that he’d closed his eyes and he wasn’t gonna open ’em until we were on the ground.
I checked the Magellan that was taped to my left forearm. We were more or less on course—even with the slight headwinds that I sensed we were facing into. Altimeter check. We were at eleven thousand feet—we’d jumped at about thirteen five, maybe fourteen—and we had an eight-mile sail ahead of us.
Us—time to check to see we were all still alive. I did a quick three-sixty to make sure that Wonder and Koby hadn’t flamed out. If this had been a training mission, I could have made ’em out easily because in training we normally wear strobes on our helmets or taped to our ankles, so we can pick one another up in the dark. Now, all I saw were shadows. But I could, I believed, make out the distinctive, fluttering sound of chute foils nearby. They make a kind of throaty, ruffling noise that once you hear you’ll never forget.
I checked the compass again. Had to keep a straight heading. The LZ I’d designated was a narrow—that’s five miles or so—area just east of the demilitarized zone in the low foothills that eventually climbed to Mount Hermon, and just west of an old Palestinian refugee camp—more a small city than a camp—called Jdaidet Aartouz. In the old days—that is, during the days of the “hot” war between the Palestinians and the Israelis—the Fatah Provisional Command, a pro-Syrian Palestinian terrorist unit commanded by Colonel Sa’id Musa Mugragha (Abu Musa), maintained a clandestine base there. I knew the place—it was one of the locations Avi and I had recced back in the eighties—and I didn’t much care for it. Jdaidet Aartouz was less than fifteen miles from the outskirts of Damascus. And Abu Musa had for a long time been a paid agent of the KGB.
0402. Eight thousand feet and descending. The ground was indistinct but I knew it was there all right—there were occasional lights in the tiny villages that dotted the foothills to our right—west of the glide path. At one point, directly below us, a bright white strobe flashed in an irregular pattern. I remembered from the map it was a smokestack just southeast of Sahl As Sahara.
0405. Five thousand two hundred feet according to the altimeter on one wrist, four-and-a-half miles from our drop zone according to the Magellan on the other. I tapped Avi on the back to let him know we were okay. As I did, I heard a change in the sound of the air as it raced through the airfoils. I pulled at the lines but didn’t get a response. Yanked again. Nothing. Suddenly, we were veering to our left—eastward, directly toward Damascus—caught in a freak gust.
No way. I leaned forward and shouted in Avi’s ear “Stay with me,” and I put all of my energy and all of our combined weight into the right-hand steerage line to make it respond. I looked up. The right-hand foil was beginning to collapse on me. Not good. Not with this much weight, and an unbalanced situation.
I loosened up on the right-hand steerage line, and put my weight on both risers. Then, with my forearms, shoulders, back and legs taking every bit of the strain they could, I pulled, and dropped, pulled, and dropped, pulled, and dropped, trying to “shake” the chute so its foils would even out. I didn’t care how cold the air racing past us was—I was sweating through this one, friends.
Finally, I felt the chute even out, and our eastward arc ceased. I swung us back onto course, hoping that Koby and Wonder hadn’t experienced the same detour that I had.
0409. Two thousand five hundred feet. The descent had been slowed by a head wind—which managed to keep us higher than expected. That was fine with me. I wanted to assemble over the target, and then come down in slow deliberate circles, so that we could pick our landing spot.
That’s the way I liked to practice when I had my guys do twenty, thirty, even forty HAHO jumps in a short period of time over the Arizona desert back in the US of A. Everyone forms up, and we come in nice and tight—a unit that’s full of tactical integrity. Of course, in Arizona, we had miles and miles of open desert—all belonging to any number of government agencies, and nicely encircled by hundreds of miles of chain-link fence. Here, the ground was open, it was occupied by people who wouldn’t mind slitting our throats given half a chance, and I had no idea what the fuck we’d find once we set our feet down.
0410:40. I could make out the ground now—two to three miles off to my left there were the lights of the Syrian airfield at Mezzeh. Below, a two-lane highway wove back and forth. I steered right. The landing point was a hilly, scrub-covered area out of sight of the highway, close to the same abandoned camp Avi and I had reconnoitered.
Piece of cake. No big trees. No tall buildings—I hate landing in heavily wooded areas. The fucking tree limbs beat the shit out of your body as you come in. Often, you can’t flare and land—instead, you have to drop like the proverbial sack of shit—which is exactly how you feel when your tired, sore, hyperextended, and aching bones hit the deck.
I was just congratulating myself on a textbook approach when Avi started beating a tattoo on my gut with his elbows—jamming them into me bam-bam-bam as if he was running for his life. I looked down and saw that he actually was running—his legs were going a mile a minute. Then I looked ahead and realized why: five, maybe six hundred feet directly in front of us—and maybe two hundred feet below—a series of high-tension power lines crossed our trajectory path. Two hundred meters to our left I could make out one of the big support pylons. A hundred meters or so to our right was another. The lines hung between in a casual, lethal arc.
My friends, the reaction time in a situation like this one is zero. If you think, you will die. I did not think. I grabbed the starboard steerage line and hung on it with every ounce of Avi’s and my combined weight. We went into a tight turn, the chute veered right, we began to pick up speed, and we descended at twice the speed a
t which we should have been moving. What am I talking about? I’m talking about a testicle-sucking thirty yards in about a second and a half. But it also carried us just under the lowermost of the high-tension lines.
The corkscrewing didn’t help our landing either. I cut our combat packs loose at the very last second so we’d lose about a hundred pounds of weight. It helped—but not much: we spiraled in more or less uncontrollably—no way to flare or use the natural air-brake capabilities of the big flat chute. So the final fifteen yards of descent might be best described as sheer terror punctuated by potential trauma.
We hooked and dragged and landed in a fucking heap—Avi on the bottom, me atop him, and the chute covering everything. I reached between us to release the harnesses.
He groaned loudly, then went silent.
“Avi—what’s up?”
He didn’t answer. I threw the canopy off, rolled him over, and checked. His neck had pulse—so he was alive. I unstrapped the helmet, ripped off his goggles, and ran my hands over his body in a superficial search for broken bones. None. His face was white—no color at all. But he was breathing, and I couldn’t see any blood. I’d probably knocked the sonofabitch cold when I’d landed on top of him.
I pulled the rucksack up, opened the valve on the Camelbak water container, drizzled some on my hands, and rubbed Avi’s face. Finally, his eyes opened. “What the hell—”
“You just lived through your first HAHO, boychik,” I said.
“Welcome to the club.”
“If this is living …” The Israeli tried to sit up, but he had a hard time doing so.
I pushed him back down. “Lie there. Catch your breath. Give it a few seconds.”
He lay back, closed his eyes, and rolled an arm over his forehead. “Great idea. Wake me when this is all over, okay?”
I disengaged the tangle of harnesses, and had just begun to lock and load our weapons and run an equipment check when I heard movement to my left. I swung the AK around. Wonder and Koby came over a low rise through the scrub brush, bearing their chutes and equipment.
Designation Gold Page 37