Bloodbath

by David Alexander

  As the team listened, waited and watched, the chugging and droning of the oncoming helos grew steadily louder. The sounds soon merged together into a single deafening roar. Somewhere, very close by and not too high overhead, the black helos were hovering, darting back and forth, listening and watching.

  Like the other members of the unit strung out along the ridge-line, Breaux's fists tightened on the hand grip and underbarrel of his AKMS as he strained to catch every nuance of sound from above. The team would remain concealed if possible, but if they were fired upon, Breaux had ordered them to hit back and kill the helos with ground-to-air missile strikes.

  This time the choppers began moving off, though. First one, then the other began to come off their hovers, and then the entire sequence reversed.

  The steady, deafening roar of dishing rotors began to waver, to unravel into an echoing, chugging, pistoning turbulence that soon faded altogether. In minutes the helos had moved off and the threat had passed.

  "You think they made us, boss?" asked Sgt. One Eyes.

  "I don't know," Breaux replied. "If these guys didn't, then the next time, or the time after that, they will. We're living on the edge, here."

  "I gotcha, boss."

  Breaux had dispatched scout units to conduct security operations on the force's flanks. He checked with them via secure radio links. Had they detected any evidence of ground forces approaching?

  "Negative," replied Cpl. Zappa. "We ain't seen nothing but sand, snakes and scorpions so far."

  The same answer came from the two other buddy teams Breaux had out working flank patrol.

  Breaux consulted his wrist chronometer. The liquid crystal digits told him that the team still had several hours of march time left before it would need to hole up with the dawn of day.

  The colonel signaled his team to remount and move out again. Vehicle engines cranked to life and combat boots began crunching sand and gravel. Men and machines picked themselves up and once more began to march and roll and curse -- straight-leg, mud-sucking infantry, doing what universal soldiers always did.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  The Eagle Patchers had gone to ground as the sun beat down upon the desert. They moved out again once darkness fell. They had come down out of the mountains into the flat stony desert that lies amidst the Elburz and Zagros mountain ranges between the Turkish border and Teheran.

  The Iranian capital city is nestled close to the middle of the spine of the Elburz range which cuts east-west across Iran's northern tier. Tehran was still several hundred miles to the southeast. Because of the inhospitable nature of the desert here, and the fact that it has few exportable natural resources except the vast salt deposits of a fossil sea, the region is sparsely populated.

  Breaux believed the odds were still in SFOD-O's favor for an extraction from a dot on the Iranian Kavir Desert, the Dasht-E-Kavir, in Farsi called Manzariyah. The remote abandoned salt mine there was just within the maximum range of Marine Sea Stallions dispatched from Masirah Island off the eastern coast of Oman, known, because of its oven-like heat and tormenting flies, as "Misery" island.

  Already Marine aviation teams were working at a makeshift airstrip on Masirah to ready the two CH-53E rescue choppers for the inbound flight. Technicians were making sure the helos cranked and that all major and backup navigational systems were working smoothly.

  At the same time an AC-130H Spectre gunship was being readied in one of the airstrip's hangars. Spooky -- as the AC-130H was fondly nicknamed -- had the range and the firepower to take down security threats to the team's extraction, and also to protect the heavy lifters as they made a run for the Persian Gulf across the lower half of Iran with the US specwar personnel onboard.

  Now, as the team began to cross the flat expanse of the open desert, the troops started noticing broken lines of craters covering the landscape. Breaux recognized these land features. They were holes in the earth created by the subsidence of the desert crust into an underground cavern system running beneath the ground.

  The northern deserts of the Middle East were once submerged beneath a prehistoric ocean that shrank back to create the Caspian Sea to the northeast, the Mediterranean to the west and the Persian Gulf to the south, as well as numerous rivers and lakes in between.

  It wasn't just oil that flowed underneath the desert, it was water too. It flowed in rivers and pooled in huge cisterns trapped in sandstone aquifers. The team was probably crossing a cavern system through which one such underground river flowed, emptying into the Gulf via caves on the distant coast beyond the Zagros range.

  Before long, the unpredictable weather again turned sour on the unit. It was at 0130 hours, in the midst of a sudden shamal, that one of Breaux's reconnaissance patrols reported in with an alert.

  "Boss, we got some girl scouts coming on bearing Hotel Bravo-Niner. I make it a motorized company. Couple of Bimps and a truck full of rag head crunchies. They've picked up our trail, no doubt of it."

  "That's a roger," Breaux said back. "Maintain visual contact. Report back every ten."

  "I copy that. On it."

  Breaux keyed off his comms.

  A little later, Breaux got another message from his scouts.

  "Boss, they've halted. Something's up. I don't know what yet, though."

  "Keep scoping them out. When you get a handle on what they're up to, get on the horn."

  "Yessir."

  About five minutes passed, and then the team's pucker-factor skyrocketed. Aircraft were again heard vectoring in. The sounds were different this time. It wasn't the rotor noises of smaller choppers -- the black gun ships that had hit and chased them before -- they now heard. It was a single heavy lifter, sweeping in at higher altitude. Something about this made Breaux especially alert, though he couldn't say exactly why. There was just a foreboding that something was wrong. Real wrong. A minute later, Breaux learned he'd been more than merely paranoid.

  "Boss, it's a Harke that's coming and if my eyes don't deceive me there's a daisy cutter hanging off the bottom."

  "Say again."

  "A daisy cutter, boss. A BLU-82 complete with US markings. No shit."

  "Damn, I knew some shit was about to go down."

  Yeah, Breaux thought. It was possible. This was Iran. There were tons of weapons left over from the Shah's reign and Ollie North's chickenshit guns-for-hostage dealing in the mid-eighties, stuff that even survived eight years of meatgrinder warfare with Iraq. Yeah, it was possible, alright.

  Breaux issued immediate instructions to his patrols and then to the rest of the detachment over the secure radio net. Breaux ordered the unit was to grab as much gear, ammo and weapons as possible and leave the vehicles behind. They were to rappel down into the craters in the desert crust and take cover in the subterranean cavern system on the double.

  Vehicle doors slammed, boot leather beat ground, men shouted and cursed as they unfurled ropes and hastily unshipped rappelling gear, scrambling to evacuate the surface before all hell broke loose. It all took minutes and felt like hours, but by the time the Harke came thundering overhead, beating the air with its huge main rotors, the last US soldier was grabbing his helmet and biting the dirt on the hard cavern floor.

  High overhead, some bad shit indeed was about to happen.

  The ton-and-a-half worth of fuel-air explosive -- a conventional bomb the size of a Volkswagen Beetle -- was cut loose from the helo at the top of the aircraft's flight ceiling. It plunged to earth, detonating about sixty feet above ground, subjecting a football stadium-sized area to an air burst and firestorm rivaled only by a subkiloton nuclear blast.

  Forty feet underground, the caverns in which the US special forces had taken refuge shook and tremored, and portions of the cavern ceiling gave way, burying soldiers alive under tons of fallen debris. Above, at ground zero, the detachment's JLTVs were completely incinerated and the missiles and ammo stores left behind cooked off in the midst of the larger inferno. Gouts of fire whooshed down into the craters like the flaming
breath of dragons, searching for human prey. More casualties were taken as men too close to the crater shafts were badly burned. All of them were shaken up like flies in a matchbox as the ferocious onslaught pounded with all its might against the cavern roof.

  When the tremors subsided, Breaux gathered the stunned survivors together, shouting and slapping those who were too dazed to function back into reality. His men needed their wits about them, and fast. Breaux feared that the opposition force -- and he was not entirely certain of its identity at this point -- might send in combat troops after dropping the hammer on them.

  Which is exactly how it went down.

  Commando forces were soon fast-roping from transport helos and rappelling into the cavern system after their blast-shocked quarry. It was a platoon-strength contingent, armed with AK-class automatic rifles and the light, box-fed machineguns called squad automatic weapons by infantry soldiers.

  The attackers had the advantage of shock and surprise in their favor and they had fallen on a force still dazed from the effects of the walloping bomb strike. The shock tactics were effective and in the first few seconds of the assault the invaders took still more casualties among Breaux's beleaguered troops. But the American combatants soon rallied and their rage at the enemy drove away every other concern. Breaux's troops hit back with savage counterattacks that first blunted the assault and then turned the tide of battle. In the brief but bloody underground battle, the Americans steadily whittled down the assault forces to a stub, shooting and grenading most of the enemy and bayoneting the rest until the cavern floor ran with blood and the air of the tunnels was close with the stench of cordite and death.

  When the hellaceous fire-fight was over, Breaux examined the unfriendly KIAs. They wore Iranian regular army battle dress and carried natively manufactured AK variants. The enemy was now a known quantity. They had been attacked by Iranian forces, not paramilitary black operatives out of Incirlik. This meant that they had either evaded the scalpel teams or that the dogs had been finally called off. The distinction was hardly a cause for celebration -- dead was dead, no matter who killed you.

  And now Detachment Omega had to find a way to its extraction zone without motorized transport and most of its ammo and food stores. The strike team still had its radios, battlefield PC and tactical geolocation gear, but even if these continued to function, they weren't reliable deep underground. A safe exit from the cavern system would need to be found without benefit of sophisticated positioning devices.

  Stripping their dead of dog tags, burying friendly KIAs beneath cairns of stones, and bandaging the wounded, the SFOD-O detachment now navigated the cavern system by magnetic compass and NVG-enhanced visual reconnaissance. The idea was to keep due east, in the direction of the planned extraction site at Masiriyah.

  The notion of following the underground river down to the coast, suggested by Sgt. Hormones, was nixed by Breaux who pointed out that at least fifty miles of hard going lay ahead. Even if they made it to the Gulf coast, it was doubtful a seaborne extraction from there was doable. No, the team would stick to the original extraction plan and try to carry it out. That was their best, and probably their only, shot.

  Hours later, after a forced march with only a single rest break, the Eagle Patchers came to another rock chimney that led up onto the floor of the desert.

  Breaux sent a five-man recon squad roping up the chimney to scout the perimeter and determine whether it was secure or not. Once topside on the desert crust, night-seeing binoculars were brought into play and the squad scanned the four compass points for signs of unfriendlies in the vicinity.

  But there was nothing amiss out in the desert night. All around them was a flat, sere landscape broken only by massive sandstone pillars that jutted up here and there like the pegs of broken teeth in a giant's mouth. The squad leader was about to stow his field glasses and report back to Breaux when he saw the constellation of tiny, yellow stars; fairy lights that shimmered and danced on the horizon line as they passed between the pillars.

  Sgt. Hormones continued to train his field glasses on the fairy lights, studied the spectacle awhile, nodded to himself in confirmation at what he'd surmised, then climbed down to report.

  "Boss, the coast is clear. There's a road or highway about five klicks due east. I saw the headlights of some cars or maybe trucks heading south just before."

  Breaux ordered Jeckyll up top with Hormone's scouts. Jeckyll was to set up his dual-screen tablet laptop and mobile tactical communications equipment and do a fast map recon to pinpoint their position. A security detail armed with SAWs and SRAWs was also sent topside onto the flat desert crust.

  Breaux decided to climb up and eyeball the scene for himself, ordering the main force to fall out below. After breathing the stink of death for hours it was good to feel the bite of the chill night wind against his face and inhale the cold, fresh desert air. In the distance, more dancing pinpoints suddenly sprang into being, then just as quickly disappeared.

  Yeah, there was a road there, alright.

  Jeckyll had by this time set up his rig and performed a preliminary map recon.

  "Boss, we're about forty klicks southeast of our last position," he reported. "The road we've seen is called Highway Seven, which runs between Teheran and a place called Chah Rabat at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman."

  "What's our position relative to Masariyah?" Breaux next asked.

  Jeckyll told him that they were less than thirty klicks away from the hoped-for extraction site.

  Breaux nodded and told Jeckyll to try and raise the rescue team over mobile SATCOM tactical VOIP. This turned out to be a tougher bill to fill because the equipment was still not working right.

  Finally Jeckyll managed to connect to Eisenhower, the Nimitz-class carrier anchored off the Omani coast that was coordinating the extraction effort. A complicated arrangement followed in which the team communicated through three parties with the chopper rescue detachment gearing up to go from Misery Island.

  After the palaver over the airwaves, Breaux realized that the unit could still reach the extraction site at Masiriyah, at least in theory. It would be a little later than originally planned, because they'd lost all their motorized transport and had been forced to stage a fighting withdrawal.

  But Breaux figured that with luck maybe some new transport might be picked up on the highway. If the team could commandeer itself some trucks, that could change the time-frame completely.

  Breaux issued orders for the rest of the troops to climb out of the hole in the earth and form up by squad. Special Forces Operational Detachment Omega was to march toward Highway Seven and deploy along its flanks. He would tell them what to do next when they got there.

  Chapter Thirteen

  From here to a vanishing point in the north between the rock-ribbed ramparts of the Zagros mountains, the highway stretched ruler-straight, paralleling the easternmost bifurcation of the coastal mountain range right up to the Turkish border. In fact, Jeckyll's map recon made clear that the highway was part of the Bonn to Karachi truck route that Breaux's crew had begun to investigate back in the Swiss Alps several weeks before.

  Along this route traveled the trucks that had departed from Germany toward Pakistan, carrying contraband dual-use technology destined for the new Soviet Union. And, going in the other direction, the Neo-Soviets were using the selfsame route to shuttle military gear into Tehran to complement the clandestine air cargo flights across the Elburz and northern Iran to installations beyond the border.

  But more surprises were to come. As Breaux and the team scouted out the highway, they saw, around a distant bend, the procession of wheeling, flickering star points that marked several pairs of approaching headlights. Breaux watched the headlights appear and disappear as the road looped around the colossal sandstone pillars that rose for several miles along its flanks. As he watched, a light bulb flashed on in his head.

  "Top, you thinking what I'm thinking?"

  "About dem trucks?"

 
; "Yeah."

  "I t'ink we both got the same idea."

  "Switzerland."

  "I gotcha."

  "Jeckyll," Breaux next said, turning to his main technical. "Do a fast computation on travel time between here and Frankfurt for that truck convoy we saw leave. See if it's possible that it's the same one."

  "On it."

  Jeckyll entered data into the PC and in a couple of minutes came back with the answer.

  "Affirmative," he replied. "Allowing for downtime on the road that could definitely be the same convoy. Pretty neat if we hitch ourselves a ride on those trucks, huh?"

  "You know it," Breaux replied, and ordered the rest of the unit to get their heinies in motion. The team needed to deploy along the flanks of the road and be ready to interdict the convoy. In order to do that it would need to be in position well in advance of its approach.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  The team reached the road while the convoy was still at least a mile away. It was rolling on, doing about thirty miles on the road, moving at a steady pace down the highway.

  Breaux ordered Sgts. Mainline and Death to set up fire positions with SRAW rockets and Chicken Wire to get ready with his M-60E3 "Pig" GPMG. On his signal they were to launch rocket salvos and small arms fire at either side of the road, though placing their strikes wide enough to make sure the blacktop stayed undamaged.

  If the lead truck -- or any of the others behind it -- ignored the warning salvos and tried to barrel their way through the blockade, Top Sgt. Death was to open up and shoot the driver of the lead vehicle.

  The ambush went down pretty much as Breaux had anticipated. The salvo of SRAW rocket strikes did its work, and the lead truck stopped short, its hood thrown back against the windshield and its shattered engine block gushing flames and dense black smoke. The other trucks behind it followed suit with barely enough clearance to keep from slamming into each other as their drivers stomped on their brakes.