The Eagle Patchers' presence in the Elburz would not evade the attention of Iranian Pasdaran or special forces -- Iran's Spetsnaz-trained Takavar -- for long, but the longer the presence of American "advisors" to rebel forces remained covert, the better the chances for success.
Breaux and a company-strength element of Omega personnel had been in-country for approximately a month, training guerilla cadre in low-intensity warfare techniques. The guerilla groups were based in hidden encampments amid the many miles of barren, windswept hills making up the cross-border area between Turkey, Iran and Iraq north of the twenty-fifth parallel.
Ethnic Kurds and Georgians from the bombed cities in the Caucasus made up the majority of these rebel fighting cells. The two main groups did not mix very much, except at the leadership levels, and occupied separate enclaves throughout the hill country. The groups had little in common politically or culturally, and although Islam was a shared religion for many of them, it was by no means the only religion they practiced.
Ethnicity and place of origin mattered much more to how the groups got along, and here the differences were often much greater than the similarities. The Georgians considered the Kurds "Turks," the Kurds considered the Georgians "Slavs." There was no doubt that had it not been for the common enemies confronting the both of them in the Moscow-Baghdad axis, they would be at each others' throats.
And what were American commando advisors to them? Breaux had entertained no illusions about that from the first, nor, for that matter, about the true nature of his mission. Detachment Omega had been reluctantly accepted because an American presence meant a source of arms, money, food and medicine.
The rebels cared not a whit for any training or expertise that might be part of the package. By now they had been waging their guerilla wars with their respective opponents for a very long time. Outsiders were not welcome. Nor were could they ever be trusted. They might be used for a time, and then thrown to the mountain wolves. But never accepted, never brought into the community of mostazafin -- the disinherited.
Breaux understood that attitude, and never tried to get chummy with the indigenous forces he and his men were training in these cold, arid mountains. That was always a mistake, as it had been in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Sumatra for US spooks, military advisors and other even more questionable personnel carrying out stranger missions. It would have been even more of a mistake here because nobody was conning anybody anymore.
The political games had been played out in the Third World during the twentieth century and they no longer worked. Those who "went native" would be sucked dry and thrown away. Kurtzes would never be a match for the Heart of Darkness. Indigenous guerilla forces viewed the US as a fair-weather friend who would desert them as soon as the going got too tough. Nothing could shake that conviction because it had been proven correct far too many times.
It was now almost midway into the 21st century's third decade and alliances between the US and guerilla forces were based on mutual need and greed -- never trust. America wanted something from them, they wanted something from America. A deal would be done, and that was all there was to it. Anything else was merely a public relations sham to preserve a semblance of something deeper, but nobody believed it otherwise.
Breaux's team might have been conducting training exercises in the hills, but its true purpose was to carry out a strategic reconnaissance of the area. It was believed by the CIA that borderlands of the Elburz were being used as a secret conduit for weapons and embargoed weapons-manufacturing materials.
The Soviets were ferrying in the stuff in a very risky manner. The Eagle Patchers' job was to take advantage of the opportunity to fuck them up.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Rempt inhaled deeply. Taking the last drag on the Russian nonfilter cigaret for all it was worth, he flicked the butt into the stiff wind blowing off the nearby ridge line. The spook, actually a covert operations contractor to the Defense Department and CIA whose actions could be denied if deniability happened to be deemed prudent, exhaled the thick gray smoke through his nostrils and spat onto the dusty ground. He turned to Breaux.
"Let's go, partner," he said.
Breaux stared at Rempt. He did not like the spook (neither did any of the men, who called him "REMF" -- rear-echelon motherfucker -- as often to his face as behind his back) and trust was a term that had no meaning with respect to any intelligence personnel Breaux had ever encountered. Rempt was the CIA liaison with indigenous forces in the region.
A career Arabist, Rempt had been shuttling around across the length and breadth of the Middle East for nearly three decades, much as Kim Philby had done in a previous era. Virtually all belonging to Rempt's type had a Lawrence of Arabia complex, and Rempt was no exception.
He spoke all the major languages and dialects of the region fairly fluently. When in the field, Rempt sported a kaffiyah and burnoose and carried a short-barelled AKS autorifle slung over his shoulder and a dagger in his belt.
Breaux nodded his assent but said nothing else. He was ready. The small group of Kurdish rebels -- the Peshmerga or "Fellows in Arms" -- and Eagle Patcher commandos occupied four-wheel drive vehicles, quads including tactical Rhinos and DPVs, that though battered were as able along the rutted narrow mountain roads as were pack mules. The reconnaissance team would be led by Rempt who would also act as translator and mission coordinator.
Breaux had no intention of letting the spooks "coordinate" his mission beyond a certain point, however, and he knew full-well that in the field, Rempt's claim was tenuous. In the first place, General Patient K., SFOD-O's commander, would see to it that the Chief of the Army spoke the necessary benedictions to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
In the second place, if Rempt started getting too bossy, Breaux would simply frag the fucker. He would then report the unfortunate demise of Beltway defense contractor and rent-a-field-agent Rempt in an enemy ambush. It would then be with Breaux like it had been with Major Strasser in the film Casablanca -- a question of whether Rempt had either "hung himself" or was "shot trying to escape."
▪▪▪▪▪▪
The windswept ridge was chosen as the ideal surveillance point for the main force element. The rest of the detachment was strung out along the ridge line on a roughly two-mile front. The 4WD vehicles had been parked in natural hiding places and covered with camouflage netting, sand and rocky debris to shield them from aerial surveillance.
The hide sites would not have to hold up to scrutiny for very long. The mission would last little more than a few hours. It would be the waiting against darkness and cold, fighting off fatigue in the monotony of these desolate hills, until the moment to act arrived, that would be the hardest part.
They would have to be fully alert then, for those few minutes. After that the opportunity window would shut tight and what they had come to do might be impossible the next time around. The shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles ported by the combined teams were for defensive purposes, and only to be used as a last resort. This was a recon mission, not an assault.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Far away from that lonely, desolate hill country in the Elburz, a Soviet adviser named Major Lavrenti Ogarkov scanned another distant horizon as he smoked a French Sobranie cigaret, which he preferred to native Russian brands. He then looked toward his men, who he had permitted to fall out around the nearby circle of two-and-a-half ton trucks near the desolate landing strip.
The Spetsnaz troops were well-trained and expertly drilled. Even at ease, they looked precisely like what they were -- soldiers, and superb ones too. Curse the mudozhovaniki, the shit-mouths, back at headquarters for wasting such soldiers as mere truck-loaders, Ogarkov thought.
The Spetsnaz commander idly consulted his wristwatch. Time yet. Plenty of time to go until the expected cargo plane arrived. Again, he turned his attention to the desert barrens surrounding him.
The sere wasteland looked out across the Syrian Desert and into Saudi Arabia. Beyond was Jordan, th
en Israel and the Med. In time, war would break out here, and the newly reborn Soviet Union would be in it for keeps.
The major continued to smoke. There was an iron logic to it all, but moreover, an iron inevitability. Ogarkov waited and watched, imagining a string of Soviet victories from the Persian Gulf clear to the Med, and the glory to be won in the coming fight.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
At a little past 0400 hours they came. The stillness of the desert and hills had been broken only by the keening of the wind and the distant baying of jackals, wolves and other night predators. Now another sound began to creep into the night.
A man-made sound.
The sound began as a low rumble originating at a point far to the northeast. Soon it began to swell and surge. There was no mistake. The planes were coming.
Not that there had been doubt from the first. The team was not relying merely on its eyes and ears to sense the approach of its quarry. An array of compact battlefield computing and electronics equipment handled that part of the job.
High overhead, invisible to the naked eye, parked in geosynchronous low earth orbits, a three-platform array (or constellation as the techs at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, from which they'd been launched, referred to them) of TACSAT ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) photoimaging micro-satellites run jointly by the Pentagon and CIA, kept their sensor arrays trained on a swath of territory on the earth below.
Equipped with the ARTEMIS hyperspectral imaging spectrosocopy payload, TACSAT was capable of delivering on-demand, real-time space-based tactical surveillance imaging and intel for the warfighter. Streaming multspectral data from the TACTSAT array was immediately available to the team's mobile command center on the ground and, via encrypted over-the-horizon crosslink to mission-dedicated MILSATCOM space network platforms.
Breaux had been scoping the aerial ballet of planes navigating the treacherous airspace of the Bottleneck for some time via his combat ruggedized MIL-STD-810F and IP65-compliant BattleTRAC tablet PC linked to Omega's mobile battlefield workstation network, observing the well-coordinated aerial circus act by which the Russians were facilitating their convoy over hostile airspace.
On the Washington Beltway, they called it "flying the Elburz Bottleneck," the most direct route from the large military transshipment entrepot at Kharkov, New Soviet Ukraine, about three hundred miles northeast of Moscow, to various offloading points in Iran.
Direct yes, but only in terms of it being the shortest distance between two points. In every other respect, the route was extremely risky, requiring an overflight of approximately eight miles of Iran-Iraq borderland in the Elburz mountain chain -- the so-called Bottleneck.
Risky but still attractive. All other routes into Iran were indirect sea routes requiring weeks to negotiate by freighter and subject to seizure by multinational carrier task force groups operating in the Arabian Sea and Horn of Africa region. The Russians had been tempted by the ease and speed promised by daring the Bottleneck. They had decided to take their chances.
One thing that had encouraged the Russians was a six-mile gap in Iranian ground surveillance radar that their ferret aircraft had pinpointed during reconnaissance missions to study the feasibility of a military airlift into Iran. The Chinese-made End Tray and Ball Point radars -- early warning systems optimized for tracking short-range ballistic targets such as missiles and low-trajectory aircraft -- that the neighboring Iraqis used were fixed stations that overlapped fairly well across most of the border, affording reliable coverage. Here they didn't.
With the aid of Tupelov TU-98W Bearwolf electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft to confuse Iraqi radars farther north and south, and able pilots for the big Antonov AN-74 all-weather variant "Coaler" transports that were used to ferry in the loads, the plan was deemed workable. To provide further insurance, the Antonovs used regularly scheduled commercial Aeroflot shuttle flights between Moscow and Tehran as additional cover against radar detection.
The military planes would coincide their takeoffs with an early morning Aeroflot commercial run, flying close against the commercial jetliner across Black Sea border regions. Once inside Turkish airspace, however, the Antonovs would break free and continue on to their destinations. For added security, transponders identified the rogue military planes as commercial cargo aircraft, conforming to bogus flight plans.
The Russians had worked on the technique ever since the Americans had used something similar to it against them during the Reagan years, timing military surveillance overflights of Soviet North Pacific bases with scheduled passenger flights between Anchorage, Alaska and Seoul, Korea.
This particular run tonight followed the usual pattern. A few miles shy of the Iranian border, over southern Azerbaijan, the Antonov Coaler heavy-lifter slipped into the flight path of Aeroflot flight 889 out of Moscow and bound for Baghdad's Richard Cheney Memorial International Airport. Farther to the southwest, a TU-22PZ "Stripper" electronic countermeasures (ECM) aircraft waited to conduct covert electronic warfare operations against the Iraqi early warning radar fence.
As the two planes approached the border, the TU-22PZ turned on its active jamming. The Aeroflot flight slipped through the Iraqi radar screen, with its military shadow plane undetected. The TU-22PZ monitored the passage for awhile, keeping the corridor open for other Soviet air assets, then lumbered off to its base in Kharkov, its work done. As had been the case on the several other shuttle overflights, the Antonov then disengaged from beneath the Aeroflot passenger aircraft once it had passed the border.
The Antonov could now navigate on its own without great risk of detection, for here the mountains turned into a maze of great rifts bordered by steep, craggy massifs. Many of these high mountain passes were large enough for even an Antonov transport to navigate safely -- if the pilot was alert, and skillful, and had luck on his side.
The Soviet air force had no difficulty finding pilots eager to accept the challenge, especially since the trip, though hazardous, was relatively short. The rift valleys only amounted to under fifteen minutes of total flight time. Once out of the maze, it was straight and easy going across the flat, unbroken reaches of the forbidding Iraqi desert. The way home was a safe, though longer route west, then north -- the hazards existed on the inbound flight only.
So it was with this air resupply mission. Albeit with one important exception that the Russians did not know anything about.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Breaux knew all about it, though. And it had been what he had come to this desolate and forbidding mountain country to witness.
In only a few minutes Breaux and Rempt, who stood with their eyes alternately scanning the skies and fixed on the central flat panel screen of a tri-screen portable battlefield computer, would be certain whether the prize was within their reach or not.
The minutes ticked off. The computer screen remained blank; the digital portal to another world stayed dark, empty. Breaux again turned his gaze to the skies. He no longer needed the light-amplifying gear to detect the arriving aircraft.
Though flying without lights, the Antonov was cruising less than twenty feet below the tops of the ridges flanking the high rift valley within which the surveillance team had taken shelter. There was enough ambient light to see the airframe limned darkly against the flanks of the towering bluffs.
Breaux admired the skill of the Russian pilot. It was an impressive feat of precision flying. He would have liked to watch the planes just soar through the chasm like an immense pterodactyl, but the tactical computer's screen had come to life, and something more important had appeared, riveting his attention.
On the screen, the interior of the same Antonov that was now passing overhead was limned in shades of green and black. A procession of faces belonging to the contingent of soldiers onboard the aircraft seemed to move relative to the motion of the hidden camera onboard. Rempt was nodding his head.
"Beautiful," he muttered. "Fucking beautiful."
Breaux watched his face, tr
ansfixed with a perverse fascination.
"Absolutely fucking beautiful."
Rempt sickened him, especially since Breaux knew the source of the spook's glee. Onboard the Antonov was a surgically altered human, a cyborg. The man's name was Yevgeny Karlovich, and he had been forced to undergo a risky operation to graft sensing equipment onto his optic nerves.
Karlovich had been compromised in a monkey trap set by the CIA in Moscow and given a choice between a life sentence at the notorious Lefortovo prison or submission to the surgical procedure.
The nuclear physicist had developed a sex and drug habit that had been used to compromise him by field assets in Moscow. Nanotechnology had created a microminiature low-light camera and transmitter that could run by electrical impulses generated by the mitochondria of the nerve cells. It had been implanted in Karlovich's skull in the cavity called the stylo-mastoid foramen directly behind the eyes.
From that moment on Karlovich became the CIA's walking camera lens. He had been used extensively, and this was to be his final mission before deactivation. Karlovich had been promised asylum in Arizona and enough money to start his own insurance business under a new identity.
Far below, Breaux continued to watch, nauseated as much by this surgically altered monstrosity passing overhead, as by the unholy glee that Rempt exuded from every pore as he drank it in. Karlovich was following orders, feigning airsickness in order to be permitted to wander along the cabin for a while, transmitting back imagery of the plane's cargo in the process.
Now the physicist had reached the main cargo section. Clearly visible on pallets were tubular components in protective wooden casings, lashed down securely with tie-downs to bolts on the aircraft's deck. There were large military transport cases as well, many of these bearing the universal warning symbol for radioactive materials.
"Shit, look at that," Rempt declared. "There's no doubt about what the Sovs are flying in now. No doubt."
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