Bloodbath

by David Alexander

  As the sergeant bore down on him, Breaux fired from a prone position on his back, emptying half his clip. At close range the burst cut the Iranian practically in half.

  Breaux was up and running as his opponent fell. Amid the chaos of battle he still heard the distinct sound of the BTR's guns chattering away. Mounting to the surface of the road, he scoped out the situation. Somehow the enemy war wagon had survived multiple rocket strikes.

  Bodies were piled up in front of it, however, and it was clearly mortally damaged. To make sure it would blow, Breaux ordered that jerry cans of gasoline be thrown beneath the BTR by troops covered by diversionary fire. Once this had been done, using the last of their remaining rockets, the squads fired a final salvo.

  In combination with the gasoline, the BTR began to burn, and its gun fell finally silent.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  The battle was over. Dense, moonless darkness still covered the arid desert landscape.

  The fire-fight, though intense, had been brief, and in this remote corner of the desert there was the likelihood that it had gone undetected.

  However, even in the event the unfriendly patrol had never gotten off a radio distress call, with the coming of daylight its absence would be noted and a search mission would be launched.

  Although Breaux's force would be long gone from the scene of battle by then, the longer discovery and identification was delayed, the better.

  Breaux ordered that enemy dead be buried and the wreckage of the patrol's vehicles be pushed into the wadi and draped with camouflage netting, then covered with sand and rock to further disguise and conceal the wreckage. With any luck it would be several more days before the vanished patrol was located, and if a shamal blew up, the additional sand deposited by the storm might delay discovery even longer.

  Once these actions were carried out, Breaux ordered the graves detail to put friendly dead in body bags and place them aboard the unit's vehicles. Having parked these in hide sites well-removed from the ambush site that was the major scene of the engagement with the Iranian patrol, the vehicles were completely intact.

  After scout patrol squads were again sent forward as pickets, and final preparations were made, the convoy moved out again, towards its hide site across the Turkish border.

  Chapter Eleven

  The mission into the Elburz had been completed but Breaux had not yet been able to extract Detachment Omega as he had warned Rempt he would do on completion.

  Bad weather had settled in shortly after the force's return to its borderland encampments. A period of biting cold and fierce shamals, blizzards that combined frozen rain, hail and sandstorms, had grounded inbound V-22 and helo flights. Until there was a hole in the weather to afford an opportunity window to extract, Breaux and his people were grounded.

  This was not good. The tension in the camp, temporarily dispelled by the covert mission and the subsequent fighting withdrawal, had returned, and the adverse weather conditions had worsened flaring tempers. Breaux was still being held accountable by the Peshmerga for the killing of one of their own, and he had been warned of plans for revenge.

  Not that he needed much warning: the beard-and-turban contingent was making it plain, in the way they'd done before the mission, that they were still out for blood. As far as Breaux was concerned, so be it. If the tribesman wanted another funeral or two, then that's what their sorry-assed little vendetta would cost them.

  As soon as the weather cleared, he would leave the Koran-thumping assholes to the hell on earth that they and their sheep-fucking ancestors had created. Breaux understood the geopolitical realities that led America to at times cast its lot with the fucked-up nationalities of the far-flung corners of the earth, but the ground truth was another matter entirely.

  That ground truth had driven American soldiers half-insane in Indochina, as members of the most advanced culture on earth were forced to live day to day with one of the most primitive. As far as Breaux went, dealing with the Peshmerga had been like taking a time trip back to the stone age. He'd be glad to return to civilization. Even eating fast food and breathing carbon monoxide was better than this shit.

  Another throwback Breaux would be glad to leave behind was Rempt. Here was an especially toxic spook. In hindsight, Breaux had almost been glad to find himself engaged in actual combat during the gone-sour ambush on the road.

  What had preceded it was sickness and perversity, acts unworthy of a soldier and an American. Breaux would need to wash the memory of his time in the Elburz borderlands from his mind, and he knew it had already cost him another little piece of his soul.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  The weather worsened as winter storm systems marched across the face of the land. Above the thirty-fifth parallel, in the extreme north of the Mideast, the rocky, arid deserts and stony gray mountains are often swept by freezing rain, pelted by hail and scoured by blizzards of wind-driven sand.

  The weather picture complicated the mission, increasing the challenges to the planning cell based at Incirlik, Turkey. They were professionals, however, and had conducted numerous clandestine paramilitary operations in the regional theater over the years.

  They knew the vagaries of the region's storm systems, and were certain that a window of opportunity would open up within the time frame for the operation. Plus they had some very accurate meteorological data available to them.

  For the moment the biggest problem would be in keeping the operation sterile and tightly compartmentalized. The operational detachment had been taken from one of the Western European NATO countries, and had been told nothing concerning the operation, other than that their objective would be the destruction of an Islamist terror group based on the eastern flank of NATO.

  In operations such as these, where foreign nationals are used as surrogates, the procedure is based on the quick turnaround. The operational detachment is trained, briefed, sent out to do its job, debriefed and returned to its home nation, all within a few days' time.

  Here, the delay caused by the weather posed several problems and risks. The airborne assault elements and ground forces both needed to be kept at the base near Incirlik in a state of seclusion. They could not be permitted to roam from the base.

  But experience had taught the planners that even the most thoroughly indoctrinated troops can be ingenious in breaching security when claustrophobia sets in. The planners didn't like that.

  It came as some relief when the chief meteorologist brought them the favorable report for which they had hoped. The operational detachment would be able to commence its assault on the target at two hundred hours. The planning cell wasted no time in bringing their end of the operation to a close.

  Nightstalker was on again.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  The unmarked black helicopters converged on the strike zone amid worsening weather conditions. Although the night skies had been clear when they had lifted off from Incirlik several hours before, the helo crews had encountered the tail end of a fierce shamal that had barreled its way across the mountains west of Tabriz like a runaway express freight.

  Still, the crews had their orders. They were not to turn back unless the weather made further flight impossible. Since this was not the case, the flight leader continued on toward the target. As the gun ships reached their objective, the crews turned on their recording equipment, including gun cameras, and prepared to strike.

  The sandstorm that the Nightstalker gun ship sortie had pushed through also began to abate as the strike mission neared its final target initial points. Within minutes the night sky was clear again, and the terrorist encampment visible on their infrared head-up displays.

  Now about a half-mile slant-range of the target, the encampment appeared almost identical to the scale models placed on sand tables that had been used to plan the mission. The primitive stone and mud-brick yurts were scattered here and there across a main compound, with several others on ledges of the adjoining mountain peaks.

  Vehicles of vario
us types, including some Land Rovers outfitted with TOW missiles, heavy machineguns and twenty-millimeter coaxial cannons, were also in evidence, most of them concealed under camouflage netting.

  Apart from this, and a lone sentry spotted smoking a cigaret on a lonely, windswept hillside, there was no evidence of activity at the terrorist encampment at three hundred thirty five hours. The terrorists would all be asleep inside the buildings, except for the sentry, and he didn't count in the overall picture.

  The Nightstalker flight leader had seen enough to convince him that the mission would go down without a hitch. He flashed the thumbs-up to his copilot and signaled two clicks over the comms net to alert the other members of the sortie that they were to move into their pre-planned attack vectors.

  Now the helos split up and commenced the assault, the lead chopper acquiring the large central building that he was told would house an especially dangerous terrorist element. The death dot moved to the center of the crosshairs and the gun ship pilot triggered a salvo of missiles that came off the sides of the chopper in two flashing bursts. White smoke contrails snaked downwards, following the warheads to the points of impact.

  The building went up in a ball of flame, and the pilot came off the vector, slewing the gun ship out of the rising toadstool of flame and destruction that belched up into the night.

  Somewhere inside that pillar of fire were the vaporized remains of the approximately twenty to twenty-five terrorists who had been asleep in that no-longer-existent barracks building. The thought sobered the pilot, but only for a second. His most important thought was that he had scored a good kill, and that's what he'd been paid to do. The hazardous duty bonus he'd receive wouldn't hurt either.

  He was also paid to die, which is what happened before his heart finished its next contraction as a TOW missile streaked in the helo's direction. The TOW had come up off one of the parked, camouflage-netted and apparently unmanned trucks scattered throughout the encampment.

  Not having taken these out first was a tactical blunder, albeit an explainable one. After all, the vehicles were thermally neutral, showing no evidence of hot spots associated with warm engines, or even human operators.

  The flight leader would be able to explain the error, but only in the afterlife, if there was one, because in the blink of an eye, the TOW's shaped-charge, proximity-fuzed warhead exploded amidships, vaporizing the helo into a million flaming fragments.

  The flight leader and copilot were broiled in their seats even as they reached for the ejection levers. They should have thought about what might be concealed underneath those parked vehicles.

  Warm bodies against the cold sand, thermally insulated from above, thermally neutral to slant-range TI detection.

  Now, man-portable and vehicle-mounted anti-air was coming up at the gun ship sortie from every direction. Ass-kicker details had been placed throughout the compound in positions of maximum surprise and tactical advantage if met by an opposing force.

  There had been no "terrorists" in the buildings, only empty bunks. Breaux had deployed his combat personnel and some of the hill tribesmen he could halfway trust throughout the encampment. He had smelled a stink brewing on the wind, and he had not been mistaken.

  As salvos of deadly fire were traded and the ground shook under the impact of crashing flying machines and thundering missile strikes, Breaux thought back to the events of the past several hours.

  A fierce shamal had closed in, subjecting the mountains to a mixture of wind-blasted sand and pounding hail that had gone on for hours.

  During that time atmospherics had played hob with radio and SATCOM communications, but more than that was going on within the encampment. It started to become evident that under cover of the storm much of the insurgent force was moving off into the mountains, taking advantage of the storm's cover to hide their departure.

  Breaux was about to go off in search of Rempt for an explanation when "Doc" Jeckyll, Omega's comms officer and chief technical, flagged him down. Jeckyll had gotten a momentary patch into surveillance satellite downlink. He had seen what had appeared to be a helo force approaching from the northwest. What's more, he didn't think it was only atmospherics that had ruined transmission. Jeckyll told Breaux that he thought they were being deliberately jammed.

  Sensing an impending attack, Breaux issued immediate orders to the SFOD-O detachment. His forces were to grab their socks, drop their cocks and prepare to move out, overland if necessary.

  Breaux explained that the extraction helos might not be coming and that they could be faced with a situation that called for SERE (search, evasion, reconnaissance and escape) procedures. But first he deployed the force in anticipation of a heliborne strike. It materialized quickly, but SFOD-O was ready to confront it and prevail using ground-to-air weapons.

  Returning to the present, Breaux watched another unmarked black gun ship explode in the air and burst apart into a cascade of showering fragments. The team had done its work well. The sky was now clear of unfriendly air assets.

  Breaux issued instructions for the team to mount up and move the hell out. Breaux would follow once he had gotten the skinny on one final matter.

  As he suspected, Rempt's living quarters had been completely destroyed. The spook's yurt was a heap of smoldering wreckage. And in the midst of that wreckage, there were the charred remains of a man wearing the hill tribesman's attire that Rempt had affected.

  The only thing was, Breaux was sure it wasn't Rempt. For one thing, the corpse had a broken nose. Right where Breaux had bashed it in with the steel toe of his combat boot two days before. Rempt had taken a powder. Breaux would bet his life on it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Detachment Omega rolled, walked and bitched on into the mountains, eventually crossing from Turkey into the Kurd country of Anatolia. The traversal of national borders was marked only by cursor position and numerical readouts on GPS displays.

  There were no mile markers in these desolate borderlands, and no natural terrain features to mark the boundary lines. Just the arid hill country, the treacherous switchback road and the limpid blue stretched tight above them like a pastel plastic lid. Though Turkey was a NATO member, Breaux chose to avoid withdrawing the team through it for several reasons.

  One, the covert kill-strike had come from the direction of Incirlik, and Breaux well knew that the southeastern corner of Turkey had been a spook haven since the earliest days of the Cold War.

  Two, Breaux had suspected there might be trouble brewing ever since the clandestine operations in the Elburz Bottleneck.

  He well knew the pattern of cold-blooded deception followed by spasmodic violence that could develop when black ops planning cells buried deep in the CIA's Directorate of Operations ran the show. The techniques had been developed and refined during the Reagan era in the midst of counter-Soviet operations in neighboring Afghanistan. Breaux knew them well, having served as a military adviser in low-intensity warfare and special weaponry to the Jamat-I-Islami Mujahideen faction in mountain enclaves near Spin Gar Bor, and he also knew the way the "black minds" in those cells at Langley thought -- then, and now.

  In the Afghan theater both the Soviets, the United States, and the Islamist third-party insurgents were developing the tools and stratagems of twenty-first century small-unit warfare. Afghanistan was the place where West met East and both met Mideast.

  While America's attention was directed to Oliver North's actions in Latin America, the new face of subwarfare was showing itself far to the east, in the rugged mountains of this ancient battleground.

  Here, both sides perfected the use of exotic weaponry such as Rempt had directed against the Neo-Soviets. Here grand deception and dispassionate manipulation of fighting cells became the first order of battle.

  The pattern was familiar. Covert paramilitary teams would conduct clandestine missions. Later, other scalpel forces would be deployed to wipe out those teams so the knowledge of the events they had set in motion would be lost forever.

&n
bsp; Compartmentalization would be airtight, but the multiplication of paramilitary cells in the war zone produced results similar to the wildfire spread of cancer cells in the human body. From that spook war in Afghanistan had emerged the Osama bin Ladens and the Hassan Ramad Ali's -- the Mahdi and his cohorts in Al Qadr -- of the new millennium's terrorist international, turning the United States' own secret warfare tactics against their creator.

  Some of those nasty little backchannel combat campaigns begat dire consequences. The attack on the Golden Gate bridge by Ali's bloodthirsty Shadow Brigades in 2015, for example, had been one of them.

  No. There would be no sanctuary in Turkey for Detachment Omega.

  Not yet, at least.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  The shamals came barreling in again like a freight out of hell. The weather worsened. This time Breaux welcomed the storms as part blessing, at least, because he suspected that a second Nightstalker attack wave would be coming in behind the first covert strike teams.

  Detachment Omega marched on through the shamals. The unit humped mostly by night, halting only when weather conditions became so grave as to prohibit movement entirely.

  The unit kept to the high ground as much as possible. More than once, the detachment had seen flash floods completely fill large wadis in a matter of minutes. There would have been no escape from such an inundation, at least not in time to save the team's vehicles, missile launchers and critical food and ammo supplies.

  Nature wasn't their only adversary. Suddenly, in the midst of clearing away debris from a rock slide that blocked their line of withdrawal, Breaux's teams heard the sound of helicopter rotor blades somewhere slant range of them. Breaux signaled for vehicle drivers to kill their engines and for everybody to hit the dirt. The team's JLTVs were driven into any available hiding places, and the team hunkered down for cover, weapons at the ready.

  They had heard and seen many helo overflights since their departure from the rebel sanctuary inside the Turkish border. The hunters were keeping up the pressure, intensively searching for the team. The first attackers had come in by helo, and while the next attack might come by land, the scalpel force would certainly use airborne patrols of some kind in an effort to track Omega's position.