The Soviet helos continued to hover slant-range of the Antonov, and Breaux knew that the battle management systems onboard were reading sensor input and calculating firing solutions for the AT-2 Swatter missiles carried on rails at the tips of their stub wings. Moments continued to pass, and then the first of the missiles cooked off the rails, coming off the helos belching contrails of dense white exhaust smoke as they vectored in on their target.
The first salvo hit with a wallop. Striking the airframe fore and aft, and exploding immediately, the warheads caused a massive double explosion that vaporized much of the plane in a balloon of flame and smoke that rose up in a mushroom cloud over the top of the bluffs.
The helos fired another two-rocket salvo into the burning wreckage, completing the job of destruction. After the fires died out, there would be little left of the Antonov and its secret cargo except a debris field of shattered fragments strewn across the rift valley floor.
The AN-72 transport now destroyed on the ground, the two Hinds rose still higher, soaring toward the top of the bluffs from which they would fly nap of the earth on a north-northeast bearing back toward Soviet airspace.
Would have flown, more precisely, because the Hinds never got farther than the crest of the bluffs.
Just before they would have changed main rotor pitch and translated to forward flight, Rempt used the computer's integrated pointer to click on the detonator button. Instantaneously, a powerful microwave beam activated the miniature radio-actuated detonator-ignitors inserted into the sheets of plastic explosive with which Rempt had earlier lined the flight helmets of the Hind pilots.
The small explosive charges imploded the skulls of the pilots of both gun ships, spattering the cockpits with blood, bone matter and optical gore from eyeballs which had been blown clear out of their sockets due to intra-cranial overpressure. Death spasms induced by traumatic shocks to the central nervous systems wrenched the cyclical and collective controls, making the helos career wildly through the sky.
In any event they would have crashed against either the steep walls of the bluffs or the rift valley floor -- computer projections run on the NSA's massive arrays of blade server clusters had demonstrated this result with nearly a hundred percent certainty. But the best outcome was what the analysts had dubbed "the Rice Bowl scenario," referring to the debacle elsewhere in the Iranian desert at another secret LZ known as Rice Bowl.
Here, late in the last century, two Marine Corps Sea Stallion helicopters crashed together on dust-off after the abortive attempt to free the American hostages from the US embassy in Tehran was abruptly canceled.
The NSA had then utilized the "Rice Bowl Scenario" to good effect in order to protect secret assets that an extraction of US personnel would have compromised. The embassy hostages were never intended to be freed -- the NSA had projected that the mission would end in embarrassing failure, seriously undermining the incoming Reagan administration's foreign policy effectiveness.
It therefore had to be stopped. Cold.
On this night, decades later, the scenario would be used again in the service of other clandestine operational ends.
As the scenario played itself out, the two Soviet helicraft pitched wildly toward one another, moving so quickly that the action was almost missed in the midair explosion and blossoming fireball that immediately followed the collision.
The bluffs flashed with intense, hellish light, as sparking from the collision ignited fuel lines, and even the protective circuits in the advanced false-color aperture GEN-IV night vision devices used by the strike force did not totally protect the hidden watchers from the blinding glare of NVG bloom-out effect.
A split-second behind the detonation flashes, the blast wave followed, booming and echoing back and forth across the walls of the steep chasm like peals of unearthly thunder.
As the fireball continued to burn in midair, spinning, whirling chunks of pulverized, vaporized wreckage cascaded downward to the flat of the valley floor, there to join the debris field of smoldering fragments of the destroyed Antonov in a memorial to covert death.
Soon the last of the echoes of man-made thunder died away, leaving only the crackling and popping of the flames burning in the ash-filled cauldron of the arid valley. The hidden watchers were silent for a moment, and then, emerging from concealed crevices amidst the south wall of the bluffs, there arose a chorus of hoarse cheers from the throats of the hill tribesmen.
As the mostazafin shouted, they aimed their Kalashnikovs at the stars and fired off bursts of automatic fire into the air.
Breaux felt a crawling repugnance. The tribesmen had nothing to celebrate. They had played no part in the drama. They had risked nothing, done nothing, been nothing to the mission. His only desire now was to get the hell out of this place, and as soon as possible.
Breaux gave the order for the teams to pack up their gear and move back to their staging area where an Omega security detail was keeping an eye on the perimeter. Rempt was already overseeing a team of Peshmerga who were packing his specialized spook gear into the same MIL-SPEC-hardened carrying cases in which it had been carried into the mountains.
The teams now began to file from their hiding places and march toward the staging area. Here, the vehicles that had formed the team's transport convoy were taken from the two large desert wadis in which they had been parked and kept well-concealed under roving guard patrols throughout the duration of the operation in the hills high above the desert.
Because of the strong probability of Iranian intervention, the convoy would split up and take pre-planned routes toward the cross-border regions, across which they would dart to the mission's hideouts inside Turkey.
Before moving out, however, Breaux ordered a mobile scout platoon to strike out a mile ahead of the main motorized force and act as an advance warning detail. If Breaux's pickets saw evidence of enemy movement across the line of advance, they were to report back to Breaux immediately and new plans would be made.
Breaux issued final orders, gave the scout platoon a head start, and then signaled the convoy to get rolling. Lights out, the vehicles pushed out across the desert, into the moonless blackness of the night.
Chapter Ten
In fact, the covert action in the Elburz mountains had not gone unnoticed by the Iranians. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if it hadn't been detected by Pasdaran mobile ground forces, or even by civilian outposts in the desolate borderlands.
To the covert planners, the noise and flash of the explosions had posed a calculated risk. The risk had been reduced by the apparently accidental detonation of an oil well at the nearby petroleum fields of Siphan Dagi, in southeastern Turkey, at approximately the same time as the destruction of Soviet airframes was taking place in the Elburz tablelands. But the risk couldn't be removed entirely.
Still, the deception had worked, and it had worked effectively. The mysterious detonations that preceded the ignition of the well (its source would never be conclusively determined) sending immense contrails of flame and smoke geysering high into the atmosphere were heard hundreds of miles away, across the vast Iranian salt desert in the key military outposts at the provincial capital, Tabriz. The oil explosions had masked the triple aircraft kills so well that nothing about the true action in the Elburz was suspected by indigenous forces.
Consequently, no tripwire military response had been mobilized to investigate the strange thunder and lightning in the mountains. Mobile troops were occupied elsewhere, conducting normal night operations. Instead, the mission was compromised by pure chance.
A lone Iranian motorized patrol making its way across the desert simply happened to see a remote series of flashes from a direction other than that of the blasts at Siphan Dagi.
Had the patrol not been in its precise position on the desert at that precise moment in time, it might have missed the flashes, but it was and so it hadn't.
"We've just observed evidence of an attack," the patrol leader had radioed to base.
>
"No, you are mistaken," he'd been informed. "A major oil well fire is burning across the border in Turkey. This is certainly what you have seen."
"Impossible," the patrol leader replied. "What I saw came from an entirely different direction -- in the Elburz."
"You mean what you think you saw." The voice of the base commander fell silent a moment while he thought things over. "Is there continued activity?"
"No. Nothing more."
"Then resume patrol."
"Sir, I -- "
"You have your orders, captain. Obey them."
And the Iranian captain did as ordered. Except not quite in the way he had been instructed by his superior officer. He knew old Manoucheher as a drunken slob who buggered sheep in his drunken off-hours, at least so went the rumor. He also knew that he had seen what he had seen and heard what he had heard, and fuck Manoucheher on a camel's ass.
The captain knew the desert landscape quite well, having conducted many an exercise and patrol by day and by night across an area encompassing hundreds of square miles.
He was aware that the most passable routes away from the Elburz ran roughly east-west and were not far from his current position. Further, in this part of the Iranian desert, motorized travel for any distance needed to keep to the road, further limiting the search area.
He would deviate his patrol just far enough to avoid charges of dereliction of duty, yet neatly circumvent the major's orders. With any luck, he would come upon something of interest. Something that might lead to the action he had so long craved.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
"Boss, company's comin'."
Cherokee, which was Lt. Frisky's scout patrol, had just reported in. Cherokee had been conducting its flank security operations about twenty miles ahead and to the southwest of the main force element, staying off the road and stopping periodically to reconnoiter.
"Am ID'ing an Iranian Pasdaran scout patrol, probably out on night ops. We're laying low and watching them roll by on the road. Wait one."
There was dead air as Lt. Frisky paused to check the image on his thermal scope against what he could see with unaided night vision.
"Enemy force strength is about forty troops. These guys are in two BTR-70s with a GAZ heavy scout vehicle up front. Be advised they're heading directly towards you."
Breaux didn't like what he'd heard. He figured that the explosions in the mountains had been noticed despite diversionary precautions. Still, this had been a possibility all along.
"Can you take them out?"
"Negative," Lt. Frisky answered right off. "We could try but I'd prefer not to go up against those BTRs with the two rocket launchers we have available."
Breaux acknowledged and issued orders. An ambush would be set up. It would be a kill basket with Lt. Frisky's patrol closing any rear exit. The main force element would take up positions at either side of the road -- Breaux had kept his eyes open for good ambush sites along the route out of long habit -- and had noticed a likely spot only a few hundred yards back.
Within a matter of minutes, the force had moved skillfully and silently to position its vehicles off and away from the desert road while men armed with small arms and rocket launchers, including the heavy Dragon and smaller caliber SRAW Predator, took up positions on either side.
The ground here sloped down from the road, which had been laid right across part of a large wadi. In bulldozing the road, the builders had simply built up an embankment for the asphalt surfacing. The earthworks sloped away into the hollow of the wadi on both sides.
Men armed with rocket launchers and automatic weapons could effectively position themselves to bring intersecting fields of enfilading fire and high explosive strikes down on a target in between without much threat to their own safety, since the fire lanes would be directed upward on the diagonal.
Once the ambush teams were in position, Breaux waited and watched, ready to issue the order to commence firing on the enemy troops. SFOD-O had to strike fast and score clean kills. It was imperative that they prevent the Iranians from reporting the contact via radio.
An unfriendly patrol was one thing, but Breaux's force would not survive direct engagement with a brigade-strength detachment, and such is what the Iranians would send out to comb the desert if an alert came in. It would include helos, APCs and a lot of troops.
In the visual field of the binocular night vision scope strapped to his head beneath his Fritz helmet, Breaux saw the unfriendly patrol emerge onto his event horizon.
"Safe fire until I signal," he reminded his unit commanders, whispering into his lipmike.
The enemy scout patrol continued to roll closer to the narrow end of the killbox. Breaux's right hand tightened on the trigger grip of his Predator anti-armor missile launcher and his pulse quickened. The moment to attack was drawing near.
But then, suddenly, the tactical picture changed.
The scout patrol, rolling into the jaws of the waiting trap like a bit of iron drawn irresistibly toward a magnet, stopped without warning. Its commander then stood atop the rear seat of the scout car and raised a pair of night-seeing binoculars to his face.
Holding the light-amplifying field glasses, he moved his upper torso to and fro, sweeping the binocs around in a wide arc. Like a pendulum swinging back, he began to return the binoculars to their starting point. With relief, Breaux watched him begin to lower the field glasses. He had seen nothing....
Breaux's judgment proved premature. In a second, as if to confirm something he had noticed earlier, the young Pasdaran captain again raised the light-amplification binoculars to his eyes and held them there for several long seconds. This time the binoculars were brought down abruptly. This time he had seen something that had convinced him not to move forward another inch.
Breaux watched with mounting alarm as the captain began issuing rapid-fire orders for the troops in the first BTR to emerge from the armored war wagon and fan out along the part of the road that spanned the wadi. Now Omega's commander suspected what the Iranian officer had seen to change his plans so drastically. Like Breaux, he too had noticed that the sides of the road were ideally sited for an ambush point and had decided to deploy a squad of crunchies to reconnoiter before the patrol continued along the road.
Breaux's mind whirled like the hard drive of a computer as he mentally processed options to deal with the emerging FUBAR situation. He selected the only workable option from his mental checklist and prepared to put the plan into action.
"Gusher, Crash. Don't answer. Listen. On my three count get on your feet and fire your rockets at the patrol. Gusher takes the scout car. Crash takes the first BTR. I'll take the second BTR." Breaux paused a beat, and the mental hard drive spun some more.
"All unit commanders, listen up -- when you see us fire, give us two seconds to duck back down again, then open up with everything you got."
Breaux began counting down, from three to zero. On the final count, he jumped up, seeing Gusher and Crash do the same from their positions. Sighting the crosspiece of the SRAW's pancake scope on his target, he triggered the forty millimeter rocket projectile, feeling the launcher tube kick like a mule on his shoulder from the recoil of the back-blast, and hearing the whoosh of the rocket's contrail like a steam pipe had just burst next to his right ear.
Time slowed in the familiar way it does in the heat of combat, and Breaux's visual field turned into a kind of tunnel. Down the length of that tunnel he watched the warhead streak toward its target, then impact into the armored hull of the BTR in a devastating blast of flame and concussion that blew molten fragments of steel and fused, flaming debris out from the epicenter of the blast.
As the BTR burned up on the desert, Breaux's mind also registered the second and third impacts that marked Gusher and Crash's rounds hitting their targets. His launcher spent, he ducked down again, and heard the din of battle start up all around him. Picking up his AKMS assault rifle, Breaux joined its stuttering voice to the choir of death, quickly becoming aware t
hat the unit had a pitched battle on its hands.
Troops armed with AK-47s were attacking the ambush teams from all sides, and it fast became obvious to Breaux that the rocket strikes, while incapacitating the mobile armored patrol, had far from destroyed it or stopped its ability to counterattack.
The Iranian vehicles were halted, and many enemy had been killed and seriously wounded in the surprise strike, but others were still alive and the unfriendlies had at least one big gun still operational.
Breaux's force was now taking casualties as Iranian regulars, clad in olive-drab fatigues, began to engage them on the ground. The ambush had turned into nasty close-quarter fighting in many places, with men trading automatic fire and throwing grenades at close range.
In some cases, the fighting got even closer than that. As ammo clips were bled dry in the heat of combat, the opposing forces resorted to hand-to-hand fighting and bayonet attacks. Breaux found himself engaged in one such confrontation as a big Iranian sergeant suddenly jumped over the roadbed and launched a deft martial arts front-kick at his AKMS as he was about to reload. The bullpup rifle flew from his hands and fell with a clatter in the darkness somewhere off to his left.
The sergeant immediately went into a defensive stance as Breaux drew the long, serrated knife scabbarded at his belt. The sergeant scoffed at this and said something in Iranian, gesturing contemptuously at Breaux to advance and try his luck with the knife.
Breaux continued to circle warily. As a martial arts expert he had pegged the sergeant's movements to the native Iranian martial arts style called Zur Khane.
Zur Khane is practiced in an octagonal arena and is a style that is heavily dependent on muscular strength and stamina. The sergeant had the look of a Zur Khane practitioner, one accustomed to many confrontations in the octagon.
Again the sergeant gestured contemptuously for Breaux to lunge at him, spitting on the ground. Breaux had another idea. He flung the knife, knowing it would miss, but used his opponent's distraction to tuck down and roll sideways for his lost rifle.
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