It wasn’t going to end like this—not like this. Ariel could hear footsteps drawing nearer, struggling to get his breath as the Iraqi guardsman closed in, his own weapon hopelessly out of reach.
His left hand closed around the holstered Beretta on Ze’ev’s hip, jerking it free as he rolled his friend’s body off him—revealing not one but two Iraqi soldiers approaching, only a few feet away.
Close enough to make out the looks of surprise on their faces as he brought the pistol up, the weapon describing a painfully slow arc as it came to bear. His vision narrowing to a tunnel focus on the men. Targets.
One, two shots. Echoing out through the night. Striking his target squarely in the chest. Center mass.
The man’s legs went out from under him and he went down—his partner managing to get his own rifle up before Ariel fired again, the bullet ripping through his throat and out the back of his neck.
Target down. Ariel watched as the second Iraqi collapsed in a heap on the rocky ground, his breath coming fast and shallow as the adrenaline slowly faded from his body, his vision clearing as he searched the night around him for further threats. Nothing.
Nothing except the continuing chatter of fire from the cliff, reminding him of their danger. Ze’ev.
He dropped the pistol, pushing himself painfully to his knees as he bent over his friend’s body—the older man’s face deathly pale in the night.
“Stay with us,” he whispered fiercely, clasping Ze’ev’s bloodstained hand in his own as he began to perform a blood sweep, checking his body for wounds. The multiple ragged holes in the front of the man’s Kevlar already telling him everything he needed to know. The bullets had struck his friend in the back, traveling through his body and exiting through the front plate—the hammer-like blows he had felt against his own vest. “Hang on, just stay with me. We’re going to get you out of here, we’re going to get you home.”
Dear God, we’re going to get you home, Ariel thought, scarcely conscious of the prayer. He saw Ze’ev smile, seeming to grip his hand with renewed strength, his lips moving as if he was trying to speak.
“Save it,” he ordered brusquely, beginning to unstrap the damaged vest from Ze’ev’s shoulders, “you’re going to need your strength.”
His old friend shook his head, gripping Ariel’s bloodstained hand tightly in his own.
“Hear,” he whispered, his voice desperately weak, but seeming to grow in power with each passing moment, every word striking Ariel’s ears like a death knell. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God.”
The Lord, He is one. . .
11:43 P.M.
Palmetto Flight
“. . .that’s a negative, Control,” Capano responded, glancing once more at his gauges as he brought the big strike fighter around to the south for a final pass over the target area. “I’ve hung around here as long as I dare—already pushing the envelope on fuel. We have to RTB at once.”
“Just give it a bit more time, Palmetto,” the voice insisted, for the second time in as many minutes. “Our men are on the ground.”
“And that’s where we’re going to be if we stick around, sir,” the lieutenant responded sharply. Wishing for the thousandth time that he knew where this man fit into the command structure. How far he could go. “On the ground, out of gas. I—”
His voice broke off suddenly as a third, unfamiliar voice came on the radio net, breaking up for a moment in a haze of static before coming through loud and clear. “Palmetto, this is Dogpatch. Do you copy?”
10:43 P.M. Eastern European Time
Incirlik Airbase
Adana, Turkey
Thank God, David Lay breathed, grabbing up the microphone. “Palmetto, this is Control. You are cleared hot. I say again, you are cleared hot.”
He took off the headset, pacing back across the tent toward the map table where Shoham stood.
“We’re still in the game, Avi. Still in the game.”
11:44 P.M. Arabian Time
The ridgeline
Al-Anbar Governate, Iraq
“Reading you loud and clear, Dogpatch,” came the pilot’s reply through Black’s headset as he set up the AN/PEQ-1 SOFLAM laser designator, spreading out the legs of the tripod on the hard rock of the clifftop before mounting the designator itself atop it. “What’s your status?”
It was a moment before he replied, rifle bullets caroming off the rocks around him as he switched the unit on, aiming it through a narrow gap in the rocks. The Israeli woman was up and moving, trying to draw fire away from him—the rest of her compatriots nowhere to be seen, not since Ariel had sent him back to the cliff face.
A bullet spattered off the stone nearby, sending chips of rock flying into his face, cutting into his cheek. He winced at the sudden flash of pain, shaking his head as if shooing away a fly.
He hadn’t been under fire this intense since Somalia, seven years before, skinnies hunting him and his fellow Rangers through the streets of Mogadishu.
Twenty-four hours the like of which he’d never forget. No matter how hard he might try.
“We are in position, Palmetto,” he responded finally, keeping his voice steady with an effort as he took aim through the side-mounted night-vision sight, the soldiers clustered around the trucks clearly visible in the sight’s magnification. “I have eyes on the target.”
“Copy that, Dogpatch,” came the pilot’s voice after another moment, “we are cleared hot. Stand-by ten seconds.”
Hurry up, he thought, watching his targets through the sight. The SOFLAM was vastly superior to the units he’d used just a few short years before in Kosovo and yet—
“Laser on,” the pilot announced, the soft drawl of the Carolinas tinging every syllable.
There. The order he’d been waiting for.
Let’s do this. Black heard movement across the rocks behind him in that moment, jerking the Beretta on his hip from its holster as he turned to confront the threat. Ariel.
He lowered his weapon, cursing beneath his breath at the close call as the Israeli team lead emerged from the darkness, crossing the open space bent low at the waist before throwing himself into cover.
Alone, he thought, glancing into the darkness from whence the Israeli had come as if expecting to see the other members of the Kidon team following close behind.
Nothing.
“Do you have the plane?” Ariel demanded, a raw edge to the words, his face obscured by the night-vision goggles as he glanced over.
Black nodded wordlessly, a round impacting less than six inches from his hand as he reached forward, flicking the switch on—taking a deep breath to calm his nerves as he adjusted his eye once more to the sight.
Seeing the trucks painted in a beam of infrared light, the laser “firing” a rapid stream of pulses toward the target to be reflected back up into the night sky. “Palmetto, Dogpatch, lasing the target. How copy?”
Another agonizingly long moment passed, the Beretta clutched tightly in Black’s left hand as he held his position, forcing himself to ignore the fire, the staccato chatter of Ariel’s Kalashnikov as the Israeli opened up. Come on, baby. Make it rain.
Then his radio crackled with static once more. “Dogpatch, Palmetto, we have the spot. Target locked.”
He took his eyes off the scope for only the space of a second, glancing over at Ariel to mouth a silent warning.
Get down.
11:45 P.M.
Palmetto Flight
Here we go. The F-15 Strike Eagle came around once more from the north as Lieutenant Capano brought the fighter down to ten thousand feet, throttling back as they approached the target zone.
“I have the spot,” he heard Garrison announce once more from the backseat, re-affirming that they were locked on to the designator’s beam. “Ten seconds. . .five. . .three. . .”
He felt the stick vibrate into his hand, the entire airframe shuddering as a thousand pounds of ordnance dropped off the F-15’s left wing.
“Stores away, stores away.�
��
The trucks
Chaos. Captain Thamir flinched involuntarily as another bullet came in over his head, the sniper who had already killed two of his men keeping them all under fire as they tried to extricate the wrecked trucks from each other, the men straining to roll the second truck back onto the road, its tire shredded by a bullet—Major Halawa cursing them as they worked, the Palestinian’s broad face purplish in the pale moonlight.
“Push, you fools!” he screamed, his voice sounding as though it was on the brink of cracking. “What are you—women? Push. We have to get out of here. We have to—”
“Get ahold of yourself,” Thamir warned, cutting him off as he stepped in close to the Palestinian, seizing hold of his arm. Smelling the stench of fear off the man, wide-eyed panic written across his face. “We’re going to get you out here, we—”
He never got to finish the sentence, a peculiar whistling sound from somewhere in the night above interrupting his words. He started to look up. . .and that was the last thing Captain Raffi Thamir ever saw in this world, stars shining down from above.
Exploding in fire.
11:46 P.M.
Umar Hadi felt the earth rumble and shake beneath his feet, nearly throwing him off his feet as he threw out a hand to catch himself. The shockwave rippling over him, tearing his maroon beret from his head.
He looked back, his ears still ringing from the force of the explosion, seeing a pillar of fire, smoke, and dust ascending into the night. The broken rear half of one of the Soviet military trucks falling from the sky to crash into the desert barely eighty meters distant, nearly two hundred meters from the epicenter of the blast.
My God, the Republican Guard officer thought, feeling a tide of panic break over him as he watched in horrified awe, seemingly rooted in place. Unable to move.
The other two and a half trucks, the Palestinians, all gone—vanished in a fiery cloud of smoke and ash. Along with his men. Raffi.
Echoes of American airpower in Kuwait, years before. Memories of stragglers from once-proud Army divisions, fleeing back across the border in abject terror.
Fleeing the carnage of what the Western media would come to call the “Highway of Death”, but there had been no escape. The sheer power of it all. . .
Now come for them this night.
Another large piece of flaming debris from the wreckage crashed down into the desert sand not twenty feet away from where he stood, seeming to jar Hadi from the stupor which had fallen over him.
He felt a soldier run past him, nearly bowling him over in his panic and he reached out, grabbing the man by the arm and pulling him roughly back toward him, cursing violently as he did so.
“You run, you die,” he hissed, his face only inches from the soldier’s. He took the man by the collar, gesturing back toward the ridge, where the man who had called in that airstrike had to be sheltering. “The only way you live—the only way any of us live—is to take that ridge.”
11:47 P.M.
The ridgeline
“Palmetto, Dogpatch, confirm target destroyed. I say again, the target has been destroyed,” Black repeated, keeping the elation out of his voice with an effort. They weren’t home just yet.
Long way yet to go.
“Shift south,” he continued, taking advantage of the momentary cessation in fire to reposition the SOFLAM, this time aiming the laser directly at the Iraqi base camp. “Lasing secondary target.”
Destroy their vehicles. Cut off their means of giving pursuit.
“Stand by, stand by,” came the response, the strike fighter describing a turn in his mind’s eye as it came back for another attack run. “We have the spot. Target locked. Ten seconds. . .five. . .”
The American sergeant took his eyes off the scoped night-vision sight at the last possible moment, throwing himself into cover behind the rocks just as the night erupted once more into fire—the ground trembling and shaking beneath his feet.
11:48 P.M.
Umar Hadi had barely made it into the cover of the shallow wadi which ran along the foot of the ridge perhaps fifty meters from its base—extending a hand back to help one of his men down—when the second bomb struck.
The night behind them lit up by a flash as powerful as a bolt of lightning, the shock wave throwing both men into a heap at the bottom of the wadi.
Screams of pain and fear ringing hollowly against his battered eardrums, sounding distant, far-off as he extricated himself from beneath the other man, seeing only then the jagged piece of metal—as big as a man’s hand—buried in the soldier’s back with the precision of a throwing dagger, inches from the spine.
Devastation. That was all that greeted the Republican Guard officer’s eyes as he pushed himself to his feet, absently wiping away blood from a long cut across his cheek.
The trucks which had transported him and his men out into the middle of this desert, now reduced to flaming, unrecognizable wreckage on the brink of a yawning crater. Their communications, their supplies. All gone.
Soldiers who had been caught closer to the blast staggering away from its epicenter, dazed—clothes nearly torn from their bodies. One of the survivors struck down by an unseen sniper even as he watched, brains exploding from the back of the man’s head—the shot barely even audible, only the explosion ringing again and again and again in his ears.
The man seeming to collapse in slow-motion, falling to his knees on the hard earth before pitching forward. Dead before he hit the ground.
And he knew in that moment, a premonition as certain as the coming of the dawn. This is where he would die.
Here in the desert, like so many soldiers before him.
But that was how he was going to die—on his feet, like the soldier he had been all his life.
The lieutenant colonel stooped down painfully, picking up his rifle—his own voice echoing faintly in the dark corners of his mind as he rallied his remaining men around him.
Another sixty meters down the wadi and they’d be able to ascend the ridge out of the view of the cliff—mount an attack from the flank, take their enemies off-guard.
If they were going to die. . .they wouldn’t be alone.
11:50 P.M.
Palmetto Flight
“Confirm target destroyed, Palmetto,” Capano heard the ground controller announce, the relief clearly audible in the man’s voice. “I say again, secondary target is destroyed.”
Yes, the National Guard lieutenant thought, pumping his clenched fist exuberantly into the air as the F-15 banked over the desert—the oily pillar of smoke and fire visible even from ten thousand feet in the air.
It wasn’t his first strike, but there was something about blowing things up that never really got old. Reminded him of why he’d become a fighter pilot in the first place.
“Anytime, Dogpatch,” he replied, his smile fading as he looked once more at his fuel gauges. “Anytime.”
10:51 P.M. Eastern European Time
Incirlik Airbase
Adana, Turkey
“Good work, Palmetto Flight,” Lay announced, keying his mike as he exchanged a tense smile with Shoham. The mission was far from over, but their objectives. . .those were achieved. “Come on home.”
Their men, achieving the impossible. Once again.
“Sir,” he heard the Air Force sergeant begin, “we just received an updated status report from Baton Flight. They’re approaching the Turkish border, and—”
He started to turn toward him, only then hearing Black’s voice once more over the Air Force comms network. The transmission breaking up into static but the tension in the Delta Force sergeant’s voice coming through crystal clear.
“Palmetto, Dogpatch. . .request—requesting a gun run against OPFOR ground targets.”
Opposing force. He was asking for a strafing pass, down low and fast—apparently the Iraqis were still present in strength.
All their plans for extraction threatened, if that were the case.
There was only silence on t
he radio net for a long moment, until Lay interjected, “Palmetto, this is Control—can you do it?”
“That’s a negative, Control,” the young National Guard officer responded, the exasperation clearly audible in his tones. “I’ve overstayed my welcome—gonna be lucky just to make it back to Prince Sultan with the fuel I’ve got left. If I go down on the deck for a gun pass. . .”
His voice trailed off, the implication only too clear. No way. Lay closed his eyes, steeling himself against the realization of the truth.
There was nothing they could do. Not a thing, and that was the hardest burden of command you could ever bear. To become the man on the other end of that phone.
“Dogpatch, this is Control,” he began, pain in every word, “I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible. Our air assets have used up their time on-station. Extraction is less than thirty minutes out, you’re going to have to hold on your own until then.”
There was another long pause of silence, only static crackling across the radio. Then he heard a curse and another voice came on the ’net, as if he had taken the radio away from Black.
Ariel.
“In another thirty minutes,” the Israeli team lead responded, his voice clear and even. Lifeless. “The only thing those helicopters are going to need to bring are body bags. I’ve already lost good men on this ridge tonight—not going to lose the rest of them if I can help it.”
“. . .lost good men. . .”
A cold chill seemed to grip Lay’s heart at the words, a look at his counterpart’s stricken face revealing that the Mossad officer had heard the radio transmission as well. “Dogpatch, this is Control, I need your sitrep.”
Nothing. Only silence meeting his request, the faint crackle of static over the net
“Dogpatch, this is Control—requesting a sitrep. . .Dogpatch?”
11:53 P.M.
Lion of God- The Complete Trilogy Page 23