“Little boys and their toys,” she said as her eyes rolled up in her head.
His previous vehicle was an eight-year-old Saturn he bought used off a guy at Fort Bragg, who was rotating out, but that was long before he met Angie. He easily fit everything he owned in its trunk when he drove north to go to work for her father in Chicago, and he kept driving it even after they got married and moved into her family’s big mansion in Winnetka. That didn’t stop her frequent complaints.
“Don’t expect me to ride in that thing,” Angie told him. “And park it in the garage before the neighbors see it.”
None of that bothered him. He drove it every day. He drove it after they separated and he moved back out, and he still owned it. When he moved to Fayetteville, he left it parked at the Toler TeleCom office in Chicago. In fact, the Saturn was about the only piece of tangible property he owned when he left the Army, other than a good stereo system in his apartment and a first-rate collection of jazz CDs. Maybe his personality had been permanently scarred from all those years serving in the “light infantry,” where you carry everything you think you need on your back. Maybe that was why he had no house, no rented furniture, no extensive wardrobe, and no big-screen TV. To everyone’s surprise except his, everything he owned could still fit in the trunk of that old Saturn.
Fort Bragg’s main post, which holds all the barracks, administrative and headquarters buildings, and 50,000 army troops, is located in the southeast corner bordering Fayetteville. It takes up 19 square miles, a large area when compared to most other Army posts, but the main post is only eight percent of the entire Fort Bragg military reservation with its 251 square miles, an area larger than the city of Chicago. It stretches for many miles to the northwest to accommodate numerous firing ranges and airborne drop zones. Needless to say, most of the civilian jobs in the Fayetteville area, including the banks, real estate offices, schools, motels, auto repair shops, stores, contractors, restaurants, and occasionally even the city jail are there to serve the Army post. Its specialty has always been light infantry, airborne, and Special Operations, making Bragg the sharp tip of the Army’s spear since World War II.
Bob’s father and grandfather served in the infantry and airborne before him, and had been frequently stationed at Bragg before and after a multitude of overseas assignments. As a result, Bob grew up knowing every inch of the sprawling military reservation. His grandfather enlisted on December 8, 1941, the morning after Pearl Harbor, joining the line outside the recruiting office before dawn. He rose from buck private to sergeant major in the 82nd Airborne Division, making all its big jumps into Sicily, Salerno, Normandy, and Holland, before helping to hold the line at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a tough old bastard to his sons and grandsons, but he never said a word to them about any of it. No war stories, no bragging, no BS. The ones who were there never had to. The rows of ribbons on his old uniform did the talking for him. And to no one’s surprise, it still fit.
His father had also been career, rising from a plebe at West Point to full Colonel. His ties to the 82nd were also long and hard. He had been a company commander in the 3rd Brigade at Chu Lai during the Tet Offensive, among many other assignments. He never talked about it either, except as teaching points and life lessons to a son who usually never listened anyway. But every time his father walked in the house and dropped a new set of orders on the kitchen table, they knew it was time to fetch the cardboard boxes from the attic and start packing. It was a well-practiced routine, and Bob would soon find himself in a new army house, a new army school, and with a new set of army friends, many of whom he knew from his father’s previous assignments.
After graduating from the family “finishing school” at West Point, in its infinite, fickle wisdom, the Army assigned its new second lieutenants to whichever branch it felt like assigning them to, not necessarily the one they wanted. Bob drew the Signal Corps, a subject he knew nothing about and had even less interest in. Also like everyone else, he was temporarily detailed to a combat branch for the first few years. In his case, that was the infantry, which was what he had wanted in the first place, and he had no intention of letting it be temporary. Needless to say, those matching red-and-white “surrender flags” of the Signal Corps on his lapels drew loud guffaws from both his father and his grandfather. As the years passed, however, they provided the perfect cover for a Special Ops and Delta Force officer, especially one who ended up in the “telephone” business after he got out.
Unlike many other graduates of the service academies, Bob didn’t waste his time or the Army’s money going back to school for an advanced degree in public administration, logistics, or management science. He figured his job was to lead the most highly-trained and highly-motivated soldiers in the world, and he didn’t need a lot of “science” to make that work. As his father once said, “There are only two places in the world where they teach leadership — the Boy Scouts and the US Infantry.” As best Bob could tell, neither the Harvard Business School nor Wharton was on the list.
Bob’s first command was as a mechanized infantry platoon leader in Operation Iraqi Freedom, racing across the barren deserts of southern Iraq in Humvees, APCs, Bradleys, and Abrams heavy tanks, trying to catch the rapidly retreating Iraqis. After the first morning, one of his Spec 4 Bradley drivers quipped, “Them Iraqis ought to go out for the Olympics, LT. Look at ’em run. Nobody’d ever catch them boys,” to which his sage First Sergeant replied, “Oh, they’re fast, I’ll give you that. But they’d never catch the French. Nobody can run faster backwards than they can.”
After twelve years, with six deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d fought over enough useless rocky deserts and barren mountain peaks. He’d dodged enough RPG rockets and IEDs buried in every road, and enough well-aimed bullets from AK-47s to last a lifetime. Why did they always pick the thickest, trackless jungles, the most inhospitable mountain ranges, and the most parched, uninhabitable deserts to send our young men? They died fighting people who didn’t want us tromping through their country telling them what to do any more than we would want them tromping through ours, telling us what to do. Hadn’t anyone in the Pentagon read any history? Good questions, and when he stopped asking them, he knew it was time to get out.
Considered one of the best young officers in his generation and on the express elevator to General Officer, Major Robert T. Burke had become one of the best infantry officers the Army ever produced, leading, coordinating, and motivating groups of men to kill other groups of men in what was now being called “asymmetrical,” irregular wars. In the end, it was one particularly bad Op in Afghanistan, when he lost four men to a double-dealing Afghan hill tribe, bad intelligence, bad communications, and bad supporting fire that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. That was when he shocked everyone by “pulling the pin” and filing his retirement papers.
CHAPTER FOUR
Al-Sadri, Western Iraq
As the sun set, the early evening calm of the desert village of al-Sadri was shattered by the deafening “Whoomp, Whoomp, Whoomp,” of an armada of American helicopters flying directly overhead and landing in a tight formation a hundred meters to the east. Al-Sadri consisted of a handful of mud-walled houses, goats, chickens, barking dogs, and two dozen terrified peasants. They were members of the Al-Bu Mahal clan of the Dulaim tribe, which was scattered throughout western Iraq and eastern Syria. Various parts of the tribe had supported all the diverse sides of the Iraqi and Syrian wars at one time or another, from Al Qaeda to ISIS, the governments, and even the Americans. The trick of course, was to figure out which specific clan one was dealing with on any given day.
Little more than a “wide spot” in a narrow dirt road in the vast western desert of Anbar Province, calling Al-Sadri even a village was a huge exaggeration. It was located ten miles east of the Syrian border, between Mosul to the east, the Euphrates River to the south, and Forward Operating Base Sykes, with it’s concentration of US troops and helicopters. As a result, the
small village of Al-Sadri had its uses, particularly as a temporary refueling stop for Special Ops missions around Anbar Province or on into Syria to the west.
The incoming helicopters included eight big workhorse CH-34 Chinooks, plus two of the new and very lethal AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopters from FOB Sykes. As soon as the Chinooks touched ground, two crack American infantry platoons ran down the rear ramps, “balls out,” to secure the village and set up a tight security cordon around the wider area. Even the normal pack of mongrel dogs that hung around every Iraqi village figured something was up and took off in a dead run in the other direction. The infantry was accompanied by two heavily-armed Humvees and a small radar and communications van that rolled out of one of the chinooks, an air control and helicopter service group, and four large rubberized aviation gas bladders which had been slung beneath the Chinooks. A few minutes later, another Chinook with Iraqi Army markings came in and landed, late as usual. After its rear ramp came down, two squads of Iraqi infantry, about twenty men, sauntered out and gathered at the bottom in a disorganized clump. Most of them were not wearing their helmets or body armor, and were not even carrying their rifles. Instead, they stood around smoking, arguing, and giving surly, suspicious looks at the Americans, as they usually did.
Two hours later, after it was as dark as the desert got under a quarter moon, a pair of specially “tricked-up” US MH-X Silent Hawk stealth helicopters came in and landed. They were from al-Asad, a major mixed-arms American air base further southeast in Anbar Province on the way back to Baghdad. The Silent Hawk was the latest top-secret and still highly-experimental helicopter to be used to insert and recover Special Ops personnel at night and in any weather. The stealth technology and durability of helicopters had steadily improved from the clunky RH-53D Sea Stallions used in Operation Eagle Claw, Jimmy Carter’s fiery, aborted raid into Iran to free the 52 American hostages in 1980. It was the first and most disastrous mission that Delta was involved in. The Sea Stallion was soon replaced by the Bell UH-1 Iroquois, then the Black Hawk that carried SEAL Team Six deep into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden, the Ghost Hawk, and now the Silent Hawk.
They were flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the exclusive “ride” for Deltas. “When you care enough to send the very best,” as they liked to say. They could carry a wide variety of weapons, depending on the mission, the load, and how much gas they needed to carry, but they weren’t attack helicopters. They were designed for covert ops, like tonight’s mission to insert eight Deltas deep into Syria on a very high-priority “black op” mission, and bring them back out. These helicopters carry a lot of gas and can easily handle a round trip of that length, but they usually carried extra gas and left most of the heavy weapons home when they had the heavily-armed Apache gunships accompanying them.
Inside each Silent Hawk sat two, two-man Delta teams, plus their weapons and tactical gear. After they landed at Al-Sadri, the Deltas remained inside, sitting quietly in their “pre-op” mode, observing the frantic activity taking place around them with cool, professional disinterest. “Been here, done that,” they would have said if asked. Besides, as completely geared-up as they were, they looked like overloaded, mechanical space aliens, and weren’t about to get up and move around unless they were forced to. With rucksacks, camelback water bladders, full body armor, tactical helmets, night vision goggles, the new Rifleman tactical radios, belts and harnesses hung with round M-67 hand grenades, ammunition pouches, a battle dressing kit, an M-4A1 rifle, a Beretta pistol, tactical knives, small flashlights, digital cameras, and energy bars space, they carried as little other crap as they could get away with. What you didn’t see on them was anything remotely resembling a name tag, rank, unit patch, or anything else that could identify them. In addition, one man in each team toted a Barrett .50-caliber “long gun” sniper rifle, while the other carried the team’s spotter scope. With a fully loaded magazine, night vision scope, and noise suppressor, the Barrett weighed close to forty pounds.
Delta had done this a dozen times before, and had been thoroughly briefed over maps and aerial photos that showed the routes, tactics, and assembly and pickup points to be used tonight. In the lead aircraft were the officer-in-charge, Lieutenant George “Fonzi” Winkler, his teammate Sergeant Leo “Beer” Stein, and Staff Sergeants Henry “Lonzo” Hardisty and Freddie “Bulldog” Peterson. In the trail aircraft sat Sergeant First Class Rudy “Koz” Kozlowski, the ranking NCO. Next to him on the rear bench sat his teammate, Sergeant Joe “The Batman” Hendrix. Staff Sergeant José “Illegal” Rodriguez and Sergeant George “The Prez” Washington sat in the front seat, facing aft.
“How come we the ones always gotta look backwards?” The Prez complained to Koz.
“ ’Cause they don’t make these things with two front seats,” Koz answered matter-of-factly, knowing that on occasion rank does have its privileges.
“I’d take it up with the chaplain,” The Batman said, looking at Koz.
“Maybe the union.” Illegal looked at the other two and nodded in agreement.
“Freakin’ Army.” The Prez shook his head and sat back in his seat, seeing he was getting nowhere. “Thought you was supposed to be on my side.” He nudged Illegal.
Four of the Deltas: Koz, The Batman, Lonzo, and The Bulldog had recently deployed from Fort Bragg. Unbeknownst to the other four, they were also charter members of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest as a result of their participation in either the Chicago or Atlantic City dustups, or both. Like rank, being a Merry Man also had its privileges, Koz thought. It was going to provide a much nicer retirement package for an old Army sergeant with a cabin and a bass boat on Fontana Lake up in the North Carolina mountains, and he couldn’t wait.
The two stealth helicopters had landed near the fuel bladders and were waiting for the ground support crew to finish topping off their tanks for the long night run into Syria. Like the others, Koz passed the time looking out at the disorganized clump of Iraqi infantry standing near their Chinook. Finally, he keyed his chin mic. “Fonzi, Koz. Is that the bunch we’re taking in?” he asked the officer in charge.
“Roger that” came the Lieutenant’s equally disgusted reply.
“Gives me a real warm, fuzzy feeling,” Koz heard one of the others mumble, and “Christ, how we supposed to know which Hajis to shoot?” followed by “Does it freakin’ matter?” and “You got that right.”
“Point taken. Just stay behind them, and watch your own Six,” the Lieutenant told them, expressing what the rest of them already knew. Out in the field, you couldn’t trust the Iraqi Army as far as you could throw them. It was all tribes, politics, bribes, and religion. Half of them were totally incompetent and the other half had been bought and sold by the bad guys. Fortunately, the Rifleman tactical radios they were using were scrambled, designed for small units like this, with a limited range of perhaps 500 yards, so they were in no danger of anyone overhearing what they said. “Our job’s to go in first and provide them fire support.”
“Too bad we can’t ‘provide’ them with a pair of balls for a change,” someone said.
“We stand off and take out sentries and neutralize any response, that’s all. It’s the Iraqis who are supposed to take down that building, not us.”
The refueling and final commo checks took 20 minutes, and the final order to proceed was given. Finally, the two Silent Hawks took off and banked west toward the Syrian border, flying low, trailed by two heavily-armed Apache gunships.
Thirty minutes later, Prez Washington said, “I heard this is a big target.”
“You’re a fox, Prez,” Illegal answered. “With the Chinooks, the Apaches, and us, what else could it be?”
“ISIS, I figure,” Beer Stein added. “Bet we’re goin’ after that goddamned Caliph!”
“Sounds like your Intel’s better than mine,” the Lieutenant laughed.
“Good Intel? That’ll be a goddamn first,” Lonzo quipped, followed by a chorus of “Roger that!”
“It’s probably nothing, but everybody needs to stay tight-assed and frosty anyway,” the Lieutenant warned. “Y’all got that?”
The helicopters stayed low and to the north of the Euphrates River as they headed west. As Koz turned his head and looked out the door, he could see the quarter moon reflecting off its slow-moving surface as the river and its green banks cut through the empty desert. Beautiful, he thought. This must be what it looked like when the Babylonians like Nebuchadnezzar and the rest of them were running around. A heavily armed squad of Deltas could’ve taken down him and his whole army, not that they’d want the damn place afterwards.
The inbound flight took slightly over an hour. No one was expecting any problems in the air, but the Stealth Hawks and the Apaches had a full array of electronic countermeasures and weapons at their disposal. With infrared night vision, forward-looking, ground-hugging, and air-to-air radar, and a fully automated flight control system, they almost flew themselves. In addition, Koz knew there was a pair of Air Force F-16s providing top cover, a Navy cruiser with Tomahawk cruise missiles available off Cyprus out in the Mediterranean, and an Air Force EA-18G “Growler” AWACS command-and-control version of the F-18 Hornet up there somewhere that would be coordinating it all over the target. Koz smiled, wondering how many billions of dollars that array of systems cost per Delta.
The target was a small, nondescript cement-block house in the middle of a cluster of other small, nondescript cement-block houses on the northern edge of Raqqah, the ISIS capital on the north side of the Euphrates River in north-central Syria. This wasn’t the first time Delta teams had been sent into that area, not by a long shot, but it was the first time Koz and the others had had the dubious pleasure. The LZ was in the desert on the other side of a small hill, one and a quarter mile to the east of the target. It had been intensely studied all afternoon and evening from satellite, topographic, and infrared imagery by the experts and non-experts who study and decide such things, from Baghdad all the way up to the Pentagon. They concluded that this LZ afforded the best available cover and access to the target, and the resulting Ops Order the best chance of success.
Burke's Revenge: Bob Burke Suspense Thriller #3 (Bob Burke Action Adventure Novels) Page 4