The men in the truck cabs saw the night begin to swarm with armed commandos and came out with their hands up, doing exactly as ordered. For the truckers, the road to Karachi had just dead-ended. The convoy was now in Eagle Patcher hands.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Breaux set his people to checking out the captured trucks before they were commandeered as transport. Inside their cargo areas, most of the rigs were loaded with weaponry, heavy machinery, spare parts and miscellaneous components. Breaux ordered everything videotaped for the intel people back at the Pentagon and Langley to whack off over and then had two of the trucks cleaned out.
One wasn't very full and posed little problem. The remaining three were packed to the bursting and the other two had to be laboriously emptied by means of backbreaking grunt work. Once that was done, the crew piled into the first three vehicles. The final truck was driven off the road and blown up with a missile strike.
As to the drivers, Breaux ordered them blindfolded, gagged, tied up and left near the wreckage with some food and water nearby. It would take them awhile to work themselves loose, and by that time it wouldn't make much difference to the force whether they provided directions to pursuers or not.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Breaux's crews climbed aboard their new transport, again making for their planned extraction site. They drove through the night and into the gloaming of early morning. At the same time as this was happening, the Sea Stallions and their AC-130H Spectre escort had already launched from Misery Island and were en route across the Arabian littoral to the pickup site.
The aircraft weaved a stomach-turning, swooping, diving course through the coastal mountains, following a path that stitched them through the invisible holes in overlapping ground radar coverage like a thread being passed through the eye-holes of a dozen scattered needles.
The choppers and Spooky began their penetration of Iranian air space at four hundred feet, but as they moved inland and crossed the canyons and rift valleys between the coastal mountains, they averaged an altitude of as low as twenty feet above ground.
As they flew nap of the earth, their flight paths controlled by terrain-following guidance systems, the aircraft zigged and zagged, twisting and turning to keep their fuselages hidden amid the ground clutter, but also lurching and swaying in crosswinds and thermals that buffeted the aircraft and complicated the already difficult maneuvers.
There was as much seat-of-the-pants flying here as flying on instruments, and the reactions, skill and daring of pilots were just as important to the successful inbound flight as were the high technology navigational aids the aircraft used to make the incursion.
At last, after over an hour of these gut-wrenching aerobatics, the three aircraft cleared the main spine of the mountains and overflew the far lower foothills that extended for several score miles from their base.
The aircrew now knew that there would not be much more flight time left. They had almost reached their destination and the radio direction finder pod mounted just beneath the AC-130H's left cockpit windshield was already picking up coded signals from the ground troops' transponder beacon.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Detachment Omega had made the abandoned salt mine without further incident and fanned out into defensive positions. The cargo trucks were parked just within the walls of the huge open pit, at the end of a sloping access road, and so positioned as to be available for cover in case unfriendlies appeared. This turned out to be a prudent precaution, because an assault was not long in materializing.
Suddenly the air was split by missile strikes as an armored enemy force appeared on the perimeter of the mine. As the US troops returned fire, Breaux had Jeckyll radio for an ETA on the airborne extraction package.
Jeckyll reported that the rescue mission was currently fifteen minutes away from their position. Jeckyll also notified the inbound aircrews that it would be a hot extraction, as they were now under heavy attack. Spooky affirmed that report and took the lead, outdistancing the choppers to give cover fire for the rescue force.
The AC-130H Spectre gun ship arrived on scene to find blue force personnel facing a regiment-sized ground contingent of Iranian regular troops as well as an airborne squadron of attack helicopters. Spooky's FCO or fire control officer, usually irreverently abbreviated as "Fucko," ordered his crew to go in after the helos first, and the Spectre's gunners opened up on the attack choppers with front-mounted 20 mike-mike Vulcan cannon fire and the 105 mike-mike automatic howitzer that was mounted in the well just behind the left wing. A flaming hail of the thirty-two pound projectiles fired by the howitzer slammed into the enemy choppers, literally ripping them apart in midair.
Spooky next went after the enemy ground troops. It began pouring fire down at the Iranians while Omega emptied its guns at the bearded men in olive drab opposing them on the ground. Between the AC-130H and Omega the Iranian regiment was quickly whittled down to a bloody butt-end. The remnants of the force soon withdrew to sheltered fire positions while their commander radioed for reinforcements.
Amid continuous firing, and before fresh troops could arrive on the scene, the two CH-53E Sea Stallions landed inside the abandoned salt mine. With engines idling they began taking on evacuees.
With full loads of grateful soldiers, the choppers rose up off the ground and began the outbound leg of their flight. They were thousands of pounds heavier by now, and their fuel stores were borderline, but each CH-53E was certified to carry a nine-ton payload and each Stallion had been outfitted with two external 450 gallon drop tanks, enough to nearly double its five hundred mile range. The AC-130H continued to ride shotgun as the mission made a run back to the Iranian coast.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Onboard the helos, Detachment Omega was dazed and confused. Some of the men experienced the post-battle euphoria that can overcome soldiers after prolonged combat. Under the circumstances this was a dangerous high to ride. There were still almost two hours of flight time left, involving tricky negotiation of miles of treacherous terrain. The mission was still open to attack by Iranian aircraft.
In short, they were all still in the shit and had no cause to party.
"Fighters," the lead helo pilot suddenly announced.
The euphoria died as quickly as it had come on.
Dead ahead there were MiG-29 Fulcrums. Two first-line fighters manned by Iran's best pilots. The fighters closed in, going after the AC-130H Spectre first, which they rightfully judged to be their most serious threat. Spooky had a fight on its hands, and its flight crew all knew it. While the pilot kept the left wing-tip pointed at the oncoming planes, the Fucko's sensor operators locked on with their radar and infrared target identification and acquisition systems, awaiting their chief's order to commence firing. The Fucko gave the order and Spooky's 20 mike-mike Vulcan gun array, 40 mike-mike cannon and 105 mike-mike howitzer unleashed a coordinated pattern of fire at the incoming fighters.
The trick here was to get the planes on the first salvo, because the AC-130H Spectre was not an aircraft designed for aerial combat. Intended to take on ground targets, all the plane's guns and most of its sensors were located on the left side of the fuselage, and an attack on its vulnerable blind side could easily prove fatal.
Spooky's crew cheered as they saw one of the MiGs take a hit and go spinning out of control, its right wing completely chewed off by a burst of intense automatic and cannon fire. More of the fighter fuselage disintegrated under the steady barrage, and the burning, smoking hulk went spinning out of control, the shot-up pilot ejecting in a bloody, burning mass and falling to earth without his chute ever opening.
The rest of the smoke-spewing metal eggshell went smashing into the side of a mountain, exploding into a balloon of fire and scattering blast debris down the sheer slope to the floor of the canyon below.
The second Fulcrum had been hit by Spooky's fire too, but it managed to evade mortal damage and returned fire at the AC-130H while winging-over onto the Spectre's blind-side. A
salvo of AA-11 missiles exploded near the gun ship and jagged, whirling shrapnel tore into the skin of the nacelle of its right prop engine.
With one engine now dead, the AC-130H went into a spin. Before the pilot could compensate, Spooky had crashed into the cavern wall and burst into flames, and the airframe's wreckage cascaded to the rock floor below.
With the Spectre gone the surviving MiG came hurtling after the Stallions. By this time, though, pursuer and pursued alike had flown into the teeth of another cyclonic sandstorm. With visibility cut down by the shamal, infrared and radar targeting accuracy was reduced, and the choppers evaded missile strikes that slammed into the mountainside, sending gouts of shattered rubble spraying against their rotors and hulls. The lone MiG tried to follow but was leaking hydraulics by now. Its manual backup flight control systems had begun to fail too. Spooky hadn't killed the Fulcrum outright, but it had injected slow poison into its veins that would end up killing it by delayed reaction.
With the top of the canyon wall looming up in front of his cockpit, the Fulcrum pilot tried one last time to pull up his plane's nose, but it was like stirring a kettle of mush with his joystick and he knew he'd never make it in the second or two he had left.
A split-second after he yanked the ejection lever, the nose of the Fulcrum struck the side of the canyon, and the plane flipped back on its belly like a hooked marlin, crashing upside down into the reverse slope of the canyon. A massive fireball marked the spot where it exploded into a thousand fragments.
A few hundred feet slant-range of the crash, the pilot's chute opened and he floated to earth unconscious, never feeling the harsh impact with the ground that broke his collar bone in three places until he came to, much later, to find himself alone in a bleak and savage place.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
The two Sea Stallions reached the Gulf coast over an hour later. Their auxiliary drop tanks had been sucked dry and jettisoned not long after dust-off, and their main tanks were now almost out of fuel. In addition, one of the choppers had been damaged by munitions strikes during the fight with the MiGs. The lead chopper made it in for a landing on Masirah island, but the second helo, its right GE turboshaft engine now noticeably trailing a plume of sooty black smoke, was forced to ditch in the sea.
Breaux was among those onboard who had to bail out and swim for the rescue boats that were sent out from the Eisenhower's support ships. As he dog-paddled to safety he heard a familiar voice shout a familiar refrain.
"Lord, how I just fucking luvvvvv the Army," Sgt. Mainline was bellowing as he stroked toward the boats. Breaux almost believed him.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Book III
Bloodbath
▪▪▪▪▪▪
Chapter Fourteen
Like any true carrion-eaters the White House press corps knew when something rank was in the wind.
In the space of forty minutes three official limos, each bearing the flag of the SecDef, the CJCS and State, respectively, were seen rolling through the gates of the West Wing entrance. Wireless netbooks were instantly in hands and nanophones were quickly activated by rapid jaw muscle flexion.
Some reporters continued to stand vigil outside the White House, phoning in reports or sending emails to their respective White House news desks.
Others, wearing cellular ear or jaw sets, i-pens madly scribbling on beeping, chirping e-pads, hastened to the White House Press Room, where they hoped to both find explanations for the V.I.P. arrivals and find a seat for the press briefing they suspected was imminent. At the very least, Percy Higgins, the White House Press Secretary, could be relied on for some immediate off-the-record quotes on whatever the developing situation might involve.
Suddenly one of the newsmedia people who were crowding the West Wing entrance gate was heard to shout to his assistant that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was seen getting out of his limo carrying a number of charts and audiovisual aids.
A buzz immediately spread through the gathered journalistic throng. Those who had put away their cellular gear and wireless gadgets brought them out again.
Others who had been en route to the Press Room, stopped in their tracks and fed more breaking information to their headquarters. The sighting of the maps was significant. It always signaled an important briefing would soon be taking place in the Oval Office.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Buck Starkweather, was a green-suiter. No matter that the Pentagon's chiefs of staff were supposed to mentally clothe themselves in nonpartisan purple -- a mixture of army green and air force and navy blue -- the service chiefs could never escape the imperatives of service or the dictates of career.
Starkweather had arrived at the White House not very long after one of the regular morning meetings of the chiefs, this one held in the SecDef's third floor E-Ring office. While the chiefs do convene in the Tank for briefings, this famous Pentagon conference room is not by any means their sole place to discuss military affairs.
The chiefs have considerable latitude in where, when and how they will meet, and often convene at different places in the Pentagon at different times, and for different purposes. During times of intense crisis, a secure conference room overlooking the operations pit in the National Military Command Center might be utilized, for example.
For highly secret discussions the Tank, which is kept ultra-secure against electronic eavesdropping, might be used, but there are also various other sterile rooms available in the depths of the Pentagon that are far more secure than even the Tank or the NMCC's conference suite.
For most occasions, though, the private office of the Secretary of Defense is the meeting place of choice. Apart from other considerations, the SecDef's office is spacious and is located adjacent to a small but extremely well-stocked kitchen from which hot food, canapés, fresh-brewed coffee and other delicacies are always served to the chiefs.
The bottom line is that the US Defense Secretary is the boss of the Pentagon. The Building is the house over which he presides. Some SecDefs prefer to delegate functions to subordinates. Some, like the present one, do not, and so Lyle Dalhousie, wingtip Oxford-shod feet perched across the immense Pershing desk that had been a fixture of the third floor office since the end of World War I, presided over yet another morning meeting of the chiefs.
Although this morning's main topic of discussion continued to be the in the continuing Second Balkan War, a new situation of growing concern was where the Soviets might be moving next. The Soviets had begun to pull back from Bulgaria and the Romanian border, and Russian-backed insurgency into Kosovo and Macedonia in the former Yugoslavia had begun to evaporate.
The peace treaty that had been brokered by the UN at the Helsinki peace summit a few weeks before was being honored, and UN peacekeeping forces were monitoring the phased withdrawal of NATO and Warsaw Pact troops from the Balkan theater. Despite these positive signs, the mood was tense. The Bear was still in a very belligerent mood, and he was beginning to turn in a new direction, scenting the wind and baring his teeth.
The chiefs, their deputies, and their civilian counterparts at Defense closed the meeting with a consensus opinion that would be brought before the president later on that day. General Starkweather, armed with his charts, now began to relay that consensus to his commander in chief.
▪▪▪▪▪▪
"Gentlemen ... Mr. President," Starkweather began. "These digital images you now see on the screen represent an intelligence coup of the first magnitude. They came from an elite Army special operations unit that has recently returned from a mission in the Middle East.
"Operation Speedball was intended to both conclusively establish the nature of armament shipped to Iran and to interdict the clandestine channels of supply between Moscow and Tehran. The operation, conducted jointly by the CIA and the Pentagon, involved the insertion of a special unit into the Elburz mountain region bridging the northern borders of Turkey and Iran. The Russians were using the high mounta
in passes to transport planeloads of materiél to the Iranians."
The CJCS clicked his wireless remote and satellite photos of the Elburz region flashed across the screen. Taken from orbital space by multimillion dollar camera-eyes, they were of crystal-sharp resolution. The mountain pass that SFOD-O had staked out was clearly recognizable within a blue circle that drew the eye toward it.
"In this complex operation, our forces were able to get inside one of the transport planes in order to document and analyze the cargo it carried."
The CJCS clicked again, and again. Imagery of the cargo of the Antonov gathered by SFOD-O filled the screen.
"Here, in these frames, we can pick out some of the weapons components that have been in the process of reaching sites inside Iran. There are several, but I want to draw your attention to these specifically..."
Again the remote clicked, and clicked again. Starkweather got out a laser pen and directed the red pinpoint beam at the image of the contents of one of several long crates that had been lashed to the Antonov's deck.
"These are artillery tubes, Mr. President. Not ordinary artillery tubes, by any means, however. Such tubes are for super-howitzers, monsters with a three hundred thirty-millimeter bore that we know the Russians have been developing along the lines of one of the prototypes of the infamous Bull super gun.
"You can see the strategic implications on this next map. The increased artillery range it gives Iran would enable it to possess the equivalent of accurate ballistic missiles at a small fraction of the cost. From inside the borders of Iran their batteries could then hit targets in Syria, Jordan, even Turkey or US bases in Iraq."
The president knew about the super guns from previous intelligence reports, but the graphic detail of the CJCS's presentation brought the dangerous implications of this development home to him in a very powerful way.
"I'm told we can hit many of the installations these guns have already been set up at, but not all of them."
"Correct, Mr. President," the CJCS went on. "Not all of them. And even one surviving installation poses a global danger. Those others are in hardened installations. Deep underground facilities or DUFs. We can damage those DUFs with conventional cruise missile strikes, but only direct nuclear intervention can destroy them using standoff weapons."
Bloodbath Page 14