“Deal? What do you have in mind?”
“You know as well as I do that Rob will go to the ends of the earth to find us, and when he does finally find us, he’ll kill you. Here’s my deal: we go to the top of that hill and watch in the direction of that compound. If we see the convoy leaving without being pursued, then we can safely assume that Rob got the warheads, and we go back. Agreed?”
“I can agree to that.”
“If Rob is successful in getting the warheads, and we’re not with him, you won’t know where the warheads are. Any message you send about the location of the warheads will be wrong. Now, wouldn’t you rather be near the warheads than somewhere out in the desert?”
Logan thought for a moment. He had not even considered that possibility, and he knew it was one he couldn’t overlook. “Yes, I want to know where those warheads are.”
“Then give Rob a chance. If he pulls this off, and experience should tell us not to underestimate him, then we join back up with the convoy. I’ll tell him I asked you to drive us a safe distance away for the safety of the children. If he doesn’t come back... Well, I think the children will be safer if they’re not there. Will you agree to that?”
“You agree to cooperate with me if they fail?”
“If they fail, it means Rob is dead. Yes, I’d cooperate then.”
“Okay. You’ve got a deal.”
Terry had been watching Logan from a distance and saw him leave with Marie. Puzzling. Was it planned? Where were they going? Did Rob know?
“Colonel, you’ve got three seconds. Take your shot!”
Rob held his breath, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Again, a shot rang out, and the rifle recoiled in his arms. Taylor watched in nervous anticipation. He was watching probably the most important shot of the entire war.
Rob hung his head, closed his eyes, and waited to know.
Suddenly, Taylor’s mouth fell open, and he moved as if to say something. He took another look through the binoculars as if to make sure. He dropped his binoculars and looked at Rob in total disbelief. “You got it!” Then he turned around and laid on his back. “I don’t believe it. He got it!”
Rob picked up the binoculars and lifted them to his eyes. He was not looking at the tower but at the soldiers approaching it. “They’re almost there. Let’s prepare to move out.”
As Wright maneuvered through the field, he knew that, in seconds, the dead guard would be in view of the camera. He continued to peer through his infrared scope as he slowly crawled along. Then, in front of him, he heard a quiet crash followed by the dull sound of a gunshot behind him. He looked up from the scope to see the shattered remains of the camera still rotating atop the tower.
The hatch under the guard tower was now only twenty yards away. He couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before guards were sent to investigate the malfunctioning camera. Perhaps they would get lucky and make it all the way down the tunnel before anyone was concerned.
He dropped the scope as he approached the tunnel and looked down the tube. It extended down about thirty feet to a small room. He had no time to worry about what lay beyond that, so he stepped into the tunnel and started down. He turned to instruct one of his men. “Sergeant, stand guard at this end and report to the colonel if we are not successful.”
With Rock immediately behind him, he began to slide down the ladder. Just before he hit the floor, a bolted door at the bottom of the tunnel opened, and a guard walked in. Wright kicked him into the door he came from, dropped to the floor, and fired through the door, killing the guards who were following the first.
It was an extraordinary turn of luck, for if they had not opened the door to check the camera above, Wright and his men would have remained locked out. As it turned out, they had now penetrated the inner hatch and still had not tripped an alarm. Haste was now crucial.
Wright knew which direction they had to go to open the outside vault doors to let the main force in. He quickly glanced around the room, observing that it seemed to be designed as an inner choke point in case of an attack, but the hatch was left unbolted by the guards he had killed. With a simple motion of his hand, he instructed his men to secure the next hatch and take the next room. So, with a Marine at each side of the hatch ready to follow, Rock bolted through.
A weapons locker! Grenade launchers, flame throwers, and automatic weapons lined the walls. Within minutes, the soldiers had rearmed themselves with weapons and ammunition. Rock grabbed a grenade launcher, another soldier a flame thrower, still another took a squad automatic weapon. They were now armed to the teeth!
Rock rushed through the next hatch and found himself standing in long wide tunnel that extended in two directions. It was a road with vault doors at either end.
“That way.” Wright pointed to the right. “This has to be an inner choke point, and that door must be to the outside.”
So far, it had been relatively easy. They had managed to catch the Iraqis completely off guard. Then, with another motion of his hand, he sent two soldiers the opposite way to guard the rear while he and Rock ran to the exterior vault doors. This place had to be monitored by security cameras, he told himself, but he hadn’t the time to be concerned about it. They had to act fast before the Iraqis could react!
To the left of the vault doors was a control panel clearly marked in Russian. Rock pressed the button that said open. An alarm sounded loudly, and the door began to open. Wright and Rock knelt down and lifted their weapons toward the opening, but all that appeared on the other side was a small army of Marines and tribesmen.
“Could you make a little more noise?” Rob shouted over the alarm.
“Sorry, sir,” the Captain responded with a newfound respect. “Bad news, though. There’s another vault door inside.”
Rob peered in at the barely visible door at the end of the tunnel, then turned. “Bring up that anti-tank truck!”
Moments later, as the machine rumbled up, he pointed to the interior vault door and yelled to the Marine who was standing by the gun, “There’s your target, Marine. Eliminate it!”
Marines and tribesmen were scattered around the floor away from the door in anticipation of an attack. Several minutes later, the gun was loaded and pointing toward the door. Then, with a loud explosion, the gun fired, and smoke filled the tunnel. The men on the gun didn’t wait. Their orders were clear: fire and keep on firing until there was nothing left inside to hit.
Two shots later, the explosion inside the tunnel took place much farther down the tunnel. The inner vault door had been compromised. The soldiers and tribesmen worked their way through the smoke toward the vault door. It had been completely blasted off its hinges into the next tunnel, dead guards lying around. The secret was out now. The Iraqis knew they were there.
Beyond the vault door were trucks, one exploded truck, and a motor pool filled with smoke. Behind those, a company of Iraqi soldiers was raining a hailstorm of automatic gunfire at the attacking Marines and tribesmen.
One Marine, Blue Boy, rushed into the middle of the vault doorway with his SAW. Though hit twice, once in his right thigh and once in his side, he laid down fiercely suppressing fire. Blue Boy continued to fire pin-point precision as the others moved up and into the motor pool room. In the end, Blue Boy was hit by four rounds, the last of which took his life.
Once inside the motor pool, Wright and Rock each lead a squad around the sides of the motor pool, surrounding the main body of Iraqi soldiers. The enemy’s uncoordinated efforts proved that these were not front-line troops. Rock blasted away their defenses with his new automatic grenade launcher while other Marines methodically picked off anyone who ran.
Another Marine, known only as Flash, lost his life to gunfire while saving the lives of a handful of tribesmen. In all, four Marines and eight tribesmen lost their lives in taking the motor pool, but at least the worst was behind them. The rest of the rooms showed little resistance as they continued to press on.
Fifteen minutes later, t
hey reached a huge bunker with a row of missiles along one side, each on a wagon in what appeared to be the final stages of assembly. The bunker was heavily fortified, more so than the rest of the underground compound. Apparently, the Iraqis were using this compound to assemble the missiles, but they could find no warheads in this assembly area. The only possible place left to search was the vault door at the back side of the bunker.
Wright paced around the bunker. “There are no warheads.”
Rob moved toward the vault doors. “We don’t know that.”
“So you suspect they’re in there?”
“I’m going on the assumption that they are here. We just have to find them. If I were going to store nuclear warheads, I certainly wouldn’t store them out in the open.”
Wright joined Rob as he was studying the keypad beside the vault door.
“In all the movies I’ve seen, you people are trained in how to bypass these keypads,” Rob told him.
“Yeah, well, in all the movies I’ve seen, you hackers can crack these keypads with an ink pen.”
Rob turned to look at him. “Okay, you made your point. Now what can we do about this vault?”
“Don’t even think about explosives! It wouldn’t take much to send this entire room up in flames, and we don’t have a clue what’s behind this door.”
Rob nodded. “Okay, I can handle this vault, but what do you make of these missiles? I thought all the SCUD missiles Iraq had purchased were accounted for and destroyed?”
Wright, who was standing in the middle of the large assembly facility, shook his head as he turned and started to walk back toward Rob. “These aren’t SCUDs! Well, they’re a good imitation, but there are several differences.”
“Such as?”
“Well, these are longer and larger in diameter. These missiles must be some new, improved version of the SCUD. And no, we did not get all the SCUD missiles.”
This news immediately drew everyone’s attention, especially Taylor’s. “What are you talking about? That’s not what I’ve seen in the army reports.”
“Yes, I’ve seen the same reports. But they were wrong. A couple of nights ago, we stumbled upon an Iraqi SCUD missile and launcher out in the desert. We destroyed it, but it was the real thing. It lit up the whole night sky when it blew. And another thing. It was shorter and smaller than these. These are much larger. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that these are ICBMs that could target Europe!”
The old tribesman had been listening. “ICBMs?”
“Yes, that’s short for Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile,” Wright explained. “These missiles are about the size of our submarine-based missiles. I wonder if they were purchased from some ex-Soviet state.”
“You believe that’s where they came from? You certainly don’t believe that Iraq has the technology to create something like this do you?” Rob asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, we have to destroy them!”
“Agreed. How do you suggest we do that?”
“That’s the easy part. These missiles use an extremely explosive solid propellant. These missiles here contain enough propellant to blow this underground fortress to oblivion. It would take the combined bombs from an entire Air Force air wing to do that much damage.”
“But how do you intend to explode them? Obviously, we can’t have anyone in here exploding them. It would be too dangerous.”
“Look at the road leading into this place. It goes straight through the other parts of the facility and out the vault doors in the front. All we have to do is move one of these missiles into the doorway of the assembly area. The rest is obvious.”
“I see where you’re going. All we have to do is fire a single round from our truck mounted recoilless rifle from outside the compound down the road into the assembly area.”
“That’s right,” Taylor added. “Even if it doesn’t hit the missile, an explosion anywhere around it would probably be enough to detonate the propellant.”
Wright nodded. “The rest is academic.”
Rob was quiet for a moment as he stared at the missiles. “Captain Wright, what if we don’t destroy the warheads? What if we take them with us?”
“What for?”
“The Iraqis would assume that they were destroyed in the explosion also, right?”
“No, a simple sweep with a Geiger-counter would establish that there were no radioactive materials present, so they would assume that they were taken.”
“If they knew we had nuclear weapons, wouldn’t they be more cautious in attacking us?”
The question drew a smile from Wright as he moved toward Rob. “Probably just the opposite. Every available unit would be on our trail, and none of them would be told who we were or what we were carrying. We would be pursued with reckless abandonment.”
Rob paused as he thought it over, but Taylor had already made up his mind. “I say we take them with us.”
Both Rob and Wright were surprised. “Why?” Rob asked.
“I don’t know. But I have a feeling we’ll find a reason later. If for no other reason, it’ll give us more options. Look, with or without the warheads, they’re coming after us, and we can always detonate them later. Let’s just take them and decide what to do later.”
“Agreed.” Rob looked to Wright for concurrence.
“It sounds reasonable to me also.”
Rob turned his attention back to the vault. “Get Katz and Grant. Tell them to bring their tools and laptop.”
Wright went to get the two while Rob continued to examine the keypad. Moments later, he, Grant, and Katz were removing the keypad.
“What’s the plan?” Grant asked.
“I want you to connect the keypad to your laptop. I want to record to hard drive the signal given off by each key to begin with. Can you do that?”
“Piece of cake!”
It took less than ten minutes for Katz and Grant to connect the keypad to the laptop and record the signals. They made a simple connector to connect the keypad to the COM1 port.
“It’s connected, and we configured the port with the DOS ‘mode’ command.” Katz stepped back. “How you get it to write to disk is your problem.”
“This one is relatively simple since I can use DOS interrupts to examine the port.” Rob quickly configured a simple program to monitor the port and dump the results to the hard drive. Then he pressed each key on the keypad in sequence and disconnected the keypad.
“What I have now is a file that contains the exact signal for each key on the keypad.” He handed the laptop back to Grant. “Now if you’ll hook up the laptop to go the other way. I need you to connect the laptop up to the vault door so that I can send it signals.”
Once again, Grant and Katz went to work and had connected it in about ten minutes.
While they were working, Wright took Rob to the side. “I think I should tell you that the hummer is missing... And so is Marie, your children, and...”
“And Logan. Does anyone know where they are?”
“No one seems to know anything. Should we send out a search party?”
“Yes...” Rob thought for a moment, then changed his mind. “No! Belay that. I don’t expect you to understand, but I think we need to wait.”
“It’s your call, Colonel.”
“Is there a lookout stationed outside?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want to know if they see anything out of the ordinary.”
Moments later, Rob was again working on the laptop, explaining to Katz and Grant what he was doing.
“I think we can safely assume that the signal to open this vault will not be a single key. That would be too easy. I’m creating a program that will send every combination of triple keystrokes first. Then, if the door does not unlock, it’ll send every combination of four keys, then five, and so on.”
Katz smiled. “Pretty slick. But can you do that to an Automatic Teller Machine, too?”
Rob grinned. “Where do you
think I got the idea!” After a sudden increase in whispers, he announced, “I was only kidding!”
A few minutes later, he started his program. After less than a minute, the vault door clicked and opened. In the middle of the vault was a small pile of wooden crates. If the warheads were anywhere, they would be there.
“Open up those crates,” Rob ordered. “We must know that we have them!”
Carefully, they removed the lid from each crate and examined the contents. “No question about it,” shouted a Marine. “These are the real McCoys! Nuclear!”
“Let’s load them and leave.”
With a great deal of effort, they moved the crates to a truck and prepared to leave. They could not understand why no reinforcements had arrived to support the Iraqi garrison. Perhaps they were under orders for a communication blackout. Or maybe the explosions from the recoilless rifle rounds had crippled their communications. Possibly, in all the confusion of the attack, no one knew who was responsible for communicating the message to their command. The reasons may never be known. All Rob knew was that his little command had just became one of the most powerful armies in the Middle East! But now where would they go?
Ron Schwartz - The Griffins Heart.txt Page 21