by Ward Larsen
His plan seemed solid. A ten-minute ride west would put him at the junction, leaving no more than fifteen miles to the outer reaches of the city. Somewhere along that stretch he would go into cover and search for a better way into Damascus. So far so good, he thought.
Slaton was beginning to feel more confident. He was making progress. The moment he looked in the other direction, that promise was lost in the ether of a soon-to-be-shattered night.
TWENTY
As was typically the case, it was motion that caught his sniper’s eye. Irregular movement in an otherwise tranquil panorama. And a great deal of motion at that.
Slaton was looking at a convoy.
The string of vehicles was two miles away, heading in his direction. He’d seen a great many military formations in his time, everything from elite armored units to gaggles that looked like circus trains. Tonight he was looking at something in the middle of the spectrum. In both the front and back of the lineup were paired technicals—pickup trucks with large-caliber guns mounted in their beds. Between these were three larger vehicles. Slaton recognized them as Ural-4320 transports—the Russian equivalent of a standard army deuce and a half. In the surreal amplified image he could make out the heat signature of engines and frames, while the canopied load bays of the Urals appeared relatively cool. In the wake of it all a miasma of dust shimmered in the cool night air. At a glance, Slaton knew perfectly well what he was looking at.
The matter of who, however, was far more relevant.
The most telling feature of the formation was that it was traveling lights out. This was why Slaton hadn’t spotted it sooner when he’d been riding without the optics, even though the trucks were barely two miles away. It was a damning set of circumstances: moving in the middle of the night, heavy escort, lights out. Whoever this was, they didn’t want to be seen. And whatever the trucks were carrying, it was important.
Oddly, Slaton realized these deductions did little to settle who he was looking at. In the badlands of As Suwayda such a formation could be assembled by any of a half dozen players. He studied each vehicle, beginning at the front. It took only one to give him an answer: snapping on a pole secured to the back bumper of the lead technical was a flag. Slaton could easily make out the image in his magnified view, and while the green and white colors were washed out, it was a standard any Israeli knew all too well: the unmistakable shape of a raised hand clutching a Kalashnikov.
This was a unit of Hezbollah. The self-proclaimed Party of God.
It was a sight to instill caution, and Slaton was struck by the possibility that the hot engine of the Hayes could be seen from the road. The drivers in the formation, at least those in front, were probably also using night optics.
He scrambled down from the promontory and pulled the bike tight against the hillside. Just to be sure, he bent down and checked the opposite line of sight. He couldn’t see either the road or the convoy. Satisfied, he scrambled back uphill to his perch.
He moved a pair of football-sized rocks in front of him to provide better concealment—anyone looking in his direction would naturally scan the high ground carefully. The convoy was roughly a mile away, traveling at perhaps thirty miles an hour. A judicious speed. In approximately two minutes it would reach the closest point, passing a hundred yards from where he lay.
Slaton studied a man in the bed of the third technical. He had the heaviest gun in the wagon train pointed skyward. Slaton recognized it as a ZSU-23, a classic Russian-manufactured anti-aircraft gun. The soldier was scanning the heavens through the targeting reticle like an astronomer looking for nebulas. With this last bit of information, the rest fell into place.
He was looking at a Hezbollah arms shipment.
For years the group had been stockpiling guns, mortars, rockets, and missiles along the length of the Israeli border. The shipments mostly came from Iran, either flown into Syrian airbases, overland via Iraq, or brought in through the sea port of Tartus. From those transit points, Hezbollah loaded the munitions and ran operations like the one he was watching. Three truckloads of armaments to be dispersed along the border with Israel—most likely in Syria, but Lebanon was a possibility. The governments of both countries, who manifestly hated the Jews on their own volition, turned a blind eye to the entire affair.
Not so visionless were the Israelis. They had long ago identified the developing threat, and the Israeli Air Force regularly launched airstrikes across its northern border. Some shipments were targeted during transport, others immolated in place once they arrived at their destinations. Hezbollah, of course, did its best to conceal and defend the shipments. The caches being delivered were kept intentionally small, limiting the potential damage from an airstrike by Israel’s jets. For Hezbollah, it was a reasonably effective strategy, a war of attrition they accepted as the cost of doing business. Over time, enough shipments got through, dispersed into storage armories and underground tunnel networks, to justify the losses. And when the next war came—as it always did—Hezbollah would have the firepower in place to respond against its Zionist foe.
Had Slaton still been in the employ of Mossad, and if he had a direct means of communication, he could have called in an airstrike then and there. Or at the very least, reported the position of a vulnerable target. Tonight, however, he had a different mission. He needed to find a way into central Damascus. He was sure this conga line would go nowhere near the city—it was destined for a tunnel complex or a warehouse far to the south.
These disparate facts began blending in Slaton’s head. Details and assumptions. The requirements of his own mission. When it finally reached critical mass, an opportunity crystallized. One that might very soon be lost.
He scrambled back downhill, details falling into place as dirt and stones dislodged under his steps. At the bottom he unzipped his backpack and extracted the MP5.
TWENTY-ONE
Sixty seconds later Slaton was ready. Lying in wait like the sniper he was.
He shifted his sight between the leading vehicles of the convoy, settling on each one at a time. He did so as an exercise, tracking the front quarter panel of each and reckoning a lead correction for his shot.
He’d already measured the range using his optic—to the nearest point on the road, 110 yards. A simple shot under most circumstances, but one that tonight came with complications. To begin, his targets were moving at roughly thirty miles an hour. His subsonic ammunition had a substantially lower muzzle velocity than a standard round. That meant more lead and a greater bullet drop, even at short range. In his favor, his intended target was quite large. Also, thanks to the suppressor, not to mention the mechanical clamor of a seven-vehicle caravan, he could afford multiple shots.
Best of all: he had three chances to make his plan work.
With only moments before the convoy reached the nearest point on the road, Slaton checked his sat-phone. He was extremely careful to shield the screen’s glow. He’d turned it on moments earlier—the first time he’d done so since crossing the border. He checked and saw a solid connection to a satellite somewhere overhead. He typed out an urgent request to Sorensen. He had no idea if she could provide what he needed. If not, he would simply have to find another way.
He pocketed the phone and shifted his attention to the scope of the MP5. In the magnified image the leading transport looked like a cruise ship. Slaton settled the reticle on the front quarter of the truck’s cab, slightly behind the bumper. He applied what felt like a reasonable lead.
Ever so slightly, he began to pressure the trigger. Waiting for the familiar break.
* * *
Sorensen was at home, getting into her nightclothes after a long hot shower, when the message from Slaton arrived. Because she carried the CIA’s most secure communication device, and because messages from Corsair were routed immediately for her eyes only, it arrived without having been filtered through Langley’s operations center.
She read through one long paragraph of text. Then she read it again.
/> “You gotta be shittin’ me, David!” she muttered to herself.
Sorensen closed her eyes, but only for a moment. Sixty seconds later she was talking to the CIA’s Defense Department liaison at SOCOM headquarters. Thirty after that, she was talking to the commander on shift. An Air Force one-star named Smithers was in charge of the country’s special operations that night.
“You want what?” he asked incredulously.
“A little close air support in southern Syria. I have an operative on the ground who urgently needs assistance.”
“Syria.” A pause. “All right … I’m looking at it now.” A longer pause. “No, I don’t show any ordnance in the sky near those coordinates.”
“What do you have?”
“Closest thing is a pair of F-22 Raptors. They’re about a hundred miles out—just came off a tanker in western Iraq. But they’re loaded for air-to-air, internal missiles only. We keep a combat air patrol running most days just in case. To tell you the truth Miss … ah…”
“Sorensen.”
“Right, Sorensen … even if these jets were packing bombs, I’d pretty much have to wake up the president to drop inside Syria.”
“I never said I wanted bombs.”
“Well then, what the hell—”
“General, what my guy needs is very simple! And you won’t have to wake up the president to do it…”
* * *
As had been the case for three hours, Corporal Mahmood Arian’s attention was padlocked on the bumper of the Toyota Hilux twenty paces in front of him. Arian was not wearing night vision gear—the only sets they possessed were reserved for two men in the lead Hilux. The rest of the drivers had only a dim moon and starlight to work with.
To that end, wanting to keep his night vision at its peak, he had dimmed every light on the instrument panel in front of him. For the most part it worked. The tailgate ahead was a steady, albeit muted reference on the narrow two-lane road.
“You are too close again,” fussed Captain Quraishi from the passenger seat next to him.
Arian let up on the gas. The captain had been berating him for the last fifty miles, although he suspected it had less to do with his driving than a simple case of nerves—they were now squarely in the killing grounds, the southern desert where Israel preferred to make its airstrikes.
After backing off a bit, Arian was accelerating back to speed when a loud bang sent him rigid in his seat. The steering wheel pulled to one side and the truck became difficult to control.
“What is it?” Quraishi bellowed.
“I … I don’t know, sir. Something is wrong with the truck.” He brought the Ural to an awkward stop, its hood canted to the left in the middle of the road. Arian saw his captain looking up at the sky, then heard commotion on the radio.
“What is wrong?” said a voice Arian recognized—Jamal, the driver behind them.
Arian picked up the dash-mounted microphone. “I don’t know. Something happened to my truck.”
Everyone sat still, waiting for the worst. When nothing happened, the captain ordered, “Well don’t just sit there, Corporal! Get out and see what is wrong!”
Arian turned off the engine. He stepped down on the wide running board, then to the ground. He saw the problem right away. The truck’s left front tire was flattened under its rim, and a section of the sidewall had shredded. Arian felt the tension wash away as if cleansed by the night breeze.
He said, “We have a flat tire, sir.”
The captain climbed down and stood next to him. “Did you not inspect them before we left?”
“I did,” said Arian.
The captain looked again at the sky. He frowned, and said, “Well … don’t just stand there. Fix it!”
TWENTY-TWO
Slaton checked his watch.
Fifteen minutes.
He took another look through his optic. The lead Ural had come to rest crookedly in the road. Two soldiers were torqueing the final lug nuts off the pancaked front wheel. No one seemed to suspect that the tire had been shot out. He knew because no guards had been posted, and the perimeter wasn’t being watched. What little caution he saw from the platoon was directed up at the sky. A wariness he’d been banking on. And one he hoped to soon exploit.
Since the convoy had ground to a halt, things were playing out nicely. Half the men had dismounted and were milling about their respective trucks. Most were smoking cigarettes and bantering casually. A pop music playlist was running on somebody’s phone. It was the kind of delay soldiers dealt with on a daily basis—particularly those who served in scattershot armies like Hezbollah.
From his hide Slaton kept his eyes fixed on the stricken truck—its driver had disappeared behind the cab minutes earlier. He again checked the time. Sorensen had acknowledged his request seventeen minutes earlier.
He fired off another message: Were you able to get fighter support?
The reply seemed to take forever, but in fact came after only twenty seconds: Just arrived at staging point. Awaiting three-minute warning.
No sooner did that message arrive than Slaton saw his cue: the driver and another man dropped the big spare tire from its stowage rack behind the cab. Slaton thought it better to err on the early side, even if it meant more work for himself.
He sent what he hoped was the last message of the thread: Three minutes! Go!
* * *
Seventeen miles east, and twenty-two thousand feet up, a flight of two F-22 Raptors, call sign Bones 22 from the 95th Fighter Squadron, were wheeling in a makeshift holding pattern. The unit had been deployed for two months, and the hundreds of missions flown so far had been largely uneventful: a lot of air refueling and holding patterns, a lot of radar work and gathering electronic intelligence. But when it came to turning and burning engagements, things had been slow.
Which was why, when the unusual order came via datalink, both pilots’ attention ratcheted up. The flight lead addressed his wingman on a secure radio. “Okay, we’re turning inbound. Go loose trail.”
The wingman, Bones 23, acknowledged and performed a hard S-turn to separate. Once established a mile behind his flight lead, the wingman said, “Tell me again what our objective is.”
“You saw the orders as well as I did. It’s not anything we ever trained to do, but it seems simple enough.”
“Boss, we are in Syrian airspace.”
“That’s why we have stealth, Fledge. Flares armed, radars air-to-ground mode. We paint this convoy and light ’em up.”
The flight lead pointed his jet toward the given coordinates and initiated a gentle descent. He studied his primary tactical display. The radar painted their targets like a spotlight on a prison break. “Sure enough, there they are. Okay, Bones 23. Push it up!”
* * *
Slaton looked at his watch, then scanned the pitch-black sky. Thirty seconds to go. He saw and heard nothing.
His eyes were locked on the disabled truck. The new tire was in place, and a soldier—surely the lowest ranking—was torqueing the lug nuts with the wheel still jacked up off the ground. Elsewhere he saw cautious glances and clipped exchanges. The music had been turned off, and cigarette butts had long been flicked into the desert. The unit had been here, sitting still, for longer than was healthy—the mood was that of a flock of ducks who’d been on a pond too long during hunting season. Even the vehicles, dispersed along the road shoulder and parked at odd angles, exuded an aura of wariness.
Ten seconds. Slaton hoped the Air Force kept a good time hack.
To his surprise, he saw the assault before he heard it. A momentary glint in the pale moonlight before an arrow-like shape shot past in impossible silence. At impossible speed. It was like a bolt of lightning without the thunder. Slaton understood why because he’d been forewarned—and because that was the point of the entire exercise. Streaking at no more than two hundred feet above the ground, the jet was traveling so fast it was outrunning its own sound.
The jet was gone in a flash and the sonic
boom hit, shattering the cool night. That was followed almost immediately by the shriek of engine noise. The crack from the second jet came seconds later. The sonic booms were still reverberating amid the hills when the night came alive with light: self-defense flares and afterburners, a veritable fireworks show in the sky. The result was exactly what Slaton wanted.
In a word, chaos. The ground that he owned.
The convoy erupted to life like a kicked termite hill. Soldiers began running, and the guns on two of the technicals opened up, lacing the night with tracers. A handful of the more belligerent troops pointed their AKs upward and began spraying lead into the sky. The return fire was ungoverned, frantic, like a stunned drunk swinging at air after being punched in the nose. The odds of hitting two jets that couldn’t be seen, and that were traveling faster than the speed of sound, was effectively nil. Yet as random as it all was, it was a response, which was why Slaton was surprised when the jets made a second pass.
If it hadn’t been nighttime, he imagined, it would have looked like an airshow, sleek jets sweeping low over the dunes before climbing straight up. On the second pass Slaton never even saw the Raptors, and he suspected they’d offset by maybe a mile—a reasonable precaution, he supposed, to stay clear of the small arms fire. Even so, the second iteration of sonic booms was as convincing as the first.
There was nothing for Slaton to do but sit back and watch. If he hadn’t been working solo, deep inside enemy territory, he might have smiled. The Hezbollah men, clearly convinced they were under air attack, responded with all the orderliness of an exploding bomb. Twenty-odd men, who’d moments ago been milling about nervously, ran and jumped into their vehicles—and not necessarily the ones they’d rode in on.