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 mountain 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."

"Can't do it. No nukes. At least none we're forced to admit having used. It has to stay covert. And I'm assuming that the small nuclear blasts we can hide won't do the trick."

"Correct, sir. But I wasn't suggesting we exercise our white-world nuclear option, Mr. President."

"Then what did you mean, Bucky?"

"A force on the ground, sir. A trained force of special operators. A sizable force, perhaps multinational in scope. A regional force under the control of a US commanding officer stationed in the area. If you will, Mr. President, you may think of it as a special forces or covert version of the Desert Storm coalition of 1991."

The president leaned forward, clearly interested. The CJCS had just set the gears in his politically attuned mind turning. Here was a concept that might resonate with Congress and the voters alike.

"Go on, general," the president advised Starkweather. "You got me interested."

"Well, sir. What we have in mind is based on the urgent need to put a big cancellation mark on Iran's still nascent but developing capability to set up those super guns and fire advanced hybrid artillery shells in a new bid for regional dominance. The shells are part conventional projectile, part guided missile, and they have so-called clip-on capability — "

"— what the hell's that again, Buck?"

"That, Mr. President, means they can be easily refitted with unconventional warheads, such as nuclear, biological or chemical armament. Conventional warhead modules are basically removed by technicians and the unconventional modules installed. The system is fully modular. The advanced projectiles can be very rapidly converted."

"Shee-yitt."

"That's absolutely right, Mr. President," the CJCS went on. "And plenty of it, unless we do something. We know Iran has a few of the super guns already set up in fixed and mobile launch sites. We don't think they have the exotic, or unconventional warhead clip-ons yet, or only enough to run tests on. We want to stop them cold before that happens. And that means destroying their capability on the ground.

"What about our Soviet friends?"

"We think the Russians will see that backing off on this one will be the better part of valor. We've left them pretty much with a free hand in the Caucasus, which was their main objective in starting the war anyway. The Mideast is basically a sideshow to the homeboys at Two Dzerzhinsky Square. We think they'll back off."

"Okay. Go on."

"Mr. President, for the rest, I believe the Army's liaison from the Pentagon, General Clifford, should continue. It's the green suiters who'll be leading the charge."

Clifford took the floor.

"The multinational brigades will be led by Detachment Omega, the Army's first-responder special forces unit. We are, at this stage, calling the initiative Operation Sand Viper. Here is what we have in mind…"

The president was listening. He liked the name Sand Viper. It had media appeal. He could probably even sell it to the house majority on the other side of the aisle. On the legal pad in front of him, he doodled a picture of a snake biting a mustachioed man on the backside while, with the trace of a smile, he listened to the rest of what the Pentagon liaison had to say.

"Oh, and one more thing I should mention, Mr. President," Clifford went on with studied casualness, unclipping a laser pen from his tunic pocket.

"Yes, general. What's that?"

"We think it's possible the Iranians may have something even bigger than those three hundred thirty-millimeter tubes stashed away — " he pointed with the laser beam to a spot on a map that an aide had just set up on an easel, " — Right here."

The president suddenly stopped doodling. He wasn't smiling anymore either.

A few thousand miles and several time zones away, the US president's Soviet counterpart sat pondering matters of similar importance. The Soviet premier's poputchik was behaving just as planned. The swaggering puppet was eager to absorb as much Russian weaponry and manpower as he could.

All in all, it was a display on an even grander scale than the Russian incursion into Egypt under Nasser in the late fifties that lasted until the late sixties and the ascendency of Sadat. Starchinov's predecessors in the Kremlin hierarchy had then sought to arm Egypt as a counterbalance to the West's sphere of influence in Iraq.

In those days, at the start of the Cold War, it was Baghdad that was the most pro-western of the Arab states, and Egypt that was seen to be slipping from the American-led alliance. In time, of course, the opposite situation had prevailed. For decades Egypt, absent Israel, had been the most powerful Western surrogate in the region, whereas Iraq had become a pariah state. So it went, in a dialectic swing that Karl Marx had seen and described long ago.

Now it was Iran's turn to swallow the Soviet bait. So far, Starchinov's poputchik was hungry for as much of it as he could have. The premier's last reports told of secret junkets on the Ilyushin mini-jet the Kremlin had supplied, one that had been bugged with sensitive yet undetectable listening devices that beamed virtually everything said by the Iranian autocrat to his trusted aides to a Soviet orbital listening post.

However, the Kremlin leader also knew that the West had detected these new inroads into Iran and would take steps to counter them. It was, of course, inevitable that they would, and in the political sphere there was little if anything they could do about it.

The military sphere posed a separate set of challenges where an entirely different array of rules applied. Just as the Western alliances had waged a covert war against Nasser in the old days, so they were already showing signs of doing this today against his own strategic maneuverings.

Starchinov would have to counter these countermoves. At the least he would need to stage holding actions until the deep installations that Soviet technicians and construction crews were already busily digging in the Iranian deserts to house the new super guns that the poputchik of Iran was acquiring.

After these preparations were completed, it would be too late for the US and her allies to do anything about it. They would never use thermonuclear weapons on first-strike terms, which was the only effective means to destroy the underground bases. Nor could they use small, subkiloton "tinynukes" on such an objective either. They were extremely limited, little better than conventionals.

The geostrategic implications were strikingly clear to Starchinov. It was a game of dominos. His poputchik would strike the West's poputchik states, which included those, like Syria or Jordan, that claimed nonalignment. Once they were destroyed or had capitulated, it would be the Persian giant's turn to feel the lash. Apart from control of vital oil reserves, the threat posed by the Islamist and ethnic rebels in Iran would be quelled. Russia would emerge stronger than before, a true superpower once again.

Then it could press outward, along its northeastern flanks. Once the borders to the south were sealed, those on the Baltic would fall between the crosshairs. And after these were brought back into the Soviet orbit as satellites…

An aide interrupted the premier's apocalyptic musings. Important visitors from the intelligence services and GRU had just arrived. They were to advise Starchinov of breaking developments in the Mideast.

Starchinov gave instructions to permit them entry, then positioned himself at his desk, looking downward. When they entered he would make them wait for long minutes while he appeared to busy himself with paperwork. It was a technique that had worked well for Stalin, and one that the current Soviet leader had perfected to a theatrical art.

Northeastern Jordan was a cold stone's throw from nowhere. The hyperbole was a bodyguard for truth in this case. Strictest secrecy prevailed in the establishment and logistical considerations for the Sand Viper headquarters.

A joint staff comprised of a Western contingent of American, British and French officers on the one hand, and a Mideast contingent of Syrian, Israeli and Hashemite Jordanian officers on the other, could only be brought together under the tightest security conditions imaginable.

The groundwork for Sand Viper had been laid during and in the aftermath of the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan. As crowds in Amman lamented the death of the king, the Western nations and other Arab states had stood alert to challenges, especially from the direction of Baghdad and Tehran, to the young King Abdullah's reign.

At the same time, Abdullah, who was a career military officer, was seen to be receptive to the West and secret protocols were established for military intervention if necessary. Abdullah well knew that his chief adversary at the time was Saddam Hussein who had reigned with a dictator's iron fist over a country many times his country's size and not very distant.

And so secret bases were established in the desert against the day when Iraq might grow strong again and prepare to once more attack its neighbors. They had played their roles in the War in Iraq and would now serve similar purposes in conflict with Iran. Intelligence assessments of Tehran's growing might and the superior weaponry they were receiving from Soviet sources were made available to Abdullah. The young king recognized the significance immediately. Orders were given to make the bases available for immediate occupation.

Colonel Stone Breaux, leader of Detachment Omega, under the command of General "Patient K." Kullimore, arrived soon after the base was prepared. Along with him came a contingent of staff personnel. Breaux, who would command special operations field initiatives, would set up shop and participate in planning sessions.

Soon the rest of SFOD-O would follow the advance cadre. To the American special operations team would fall the task of training and organizing the coalition of commando warriors who would wage a series of crippling ground strikes against the forces being built up by Iran's military. Operation Sand Viper slowly uncoiled, but would soon bare its fangs.

Chapter Fifteen

Somewhere below them, as they flew above Wadi Ar'ar, some of the aircrew caught a glimpse of the lines of overhead communications cables, petroleum conduits and four-lane blacktop that ran northwest-southeast along the eastern Saudi Arabian border between Jordan and the Persian Gulf.

This was the Tapline Road, built by the major international oil companies in the 1950s to service their oil pipeline stretching from the Gulf to the Med and intersecting Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where it terminated a few miles south of Beirut.

A few miles east of the Tapline, sand berms cut across the ochre desert, roughly and intermittently paralleling the highway for several miles. The berms, the rusting and sand-scoured wreckage of military vehicles destroyed some decades before, and the numerous unmarked graves that none aboard the helos could see from even this low altitude, were all signposts marking the sortie's crossborder entrance into Iran.

There were military outposts, border and road checkpoints, sun-baked villages and encampments of Bedouin nomads to be found here too. There were also the invisible Doppler waves of ground tracking radars and the radars of SAM sites, including Roland and SA-10 (S-300) SAM batteries, to contend with.

The sector of the Iranian desert was remote from the more populated quarter closer to Tehran, but the overflight still presented a great danger of discovery to the airborne mission.

Those that had planned the mission — those at Drop Forge, the forward operation center in Jordan, as well as those in a vaulted room within the labyrinth of the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon — were aware of the threats and had tried to level the playing field somewhat.

For weeks prior to the mission, the borderlands separating Iran politically but not geographically from Iraq, Kuwait and the Arabian Peninsula became the focus of planned incursions by ground and airborne forces.

Planes and helicopters would dart across the border, electronically tickle Iranian tripwire forces, and then dart back, having orders not to engage unless fired upon.

Ground radar and SAM sites underneath the no-fly-zone's umbrella were also baited in this way. Ferret aircraft, including the RC-135(X) Cobra Eye, subjected cross-border radar stations and military listening posts to a barrage of electronic warfare attacks.

The stage-managed confusion was the prelude to tonight's two-pronged mission. The Iranian military, who were as sophisticated as any other Middle Eastern nation's, and more so than some, knew that something was in the offing, but they didn't know what, how or when it would hit.

As long as they were kept off-balance, the mission had a good chance of success. The confusion, exploited to the maximum, was crowned by cruise missile strikes against targets outside Tehran, the flashes of which were visible on the horizon as the sortie out of Saudi stole across the enemy's homeland.

The aircrew flew its inbound course in three dimensions. It not only navigated by terrain features, but dodged and jinked and slipped between the unseen feelers of microwaves, exploiting the open seams where radar coverage failed to tightly overlap.

Like microscopic parasites weaving between the scales of a sleeping shark, the three helicopter gun ships flew their treacherous inbound course, first making use of the Wadi Ar'Ar to keep their hulls beneath the level of the ground, and then changing altitude and direction across the open desert beyond the wadi.

The Marine Corps' AH-1Z Vipers were loaded for bear. The weapons complement included HARM anti-radar missiles, Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles (deployable in dual air-to-air and air-to-ground modes), dispenser-launched Zuni rockets with Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) upgrade target acquisition capabilities and a few thousand rounds of 20-millimeter ammo for the nose cannons that were slaved to the head movements of their pilots, deadly swiveling drones that could spit out automatic fire at hundreds of rounds a minute.

The AH-1Zs were the door-kicking force for Boogie and Balls, the force elements of the double-barreled attack. Like the nose of the camel in the old Bedouin fable, the helos would open the way for the considerably larger portions of the ungainly beast that was waiting to climb inside the tent and take it over, at least for awhile.

Following the waypoints on their flight plan, the helos continued on their convoluted journey into Iran, and approximately twenty minutes into their flight, encountered the first of their two objectives.

The SAM site lay about fifty miles from the Iraqi border and about six miles from the desert airstrip that was the helo sortie's secondary objective of the night. The SAM site was a high-to-medium envelope threat, comprised as it was of SA-10 launchers and their search-track radars that were capable of engaging aircraft out to sixty thousand feet, as well as older SA-9 platforms.

The SAM site — actually there were two of them, counting the Roland battery and revetmented "Shilka" ZSU 1-23-4 triple-A guns at the airstrip — posed a serious threat to the hump of the camel and had to be taken out first thing. One AH-1Z gun ship was deemed enough to do the job, with the second helo tasked with securing the airstrip and the third along for backup. And so it came to pass as the Vipers neared the first mission objective.

At this stage in the mission, the attack choppers had been flying nap of the earth or NOE as opposed to the low-level and contour flight paths inbound to their targets. NOE was the safest way to fly, but it was also the slowest, so it was reserved for the most critical and dangerous stretches of the trip and for the final few seconds before reaching the engagement zone.

Now, only a short distance off the desert, the lead chopper executed the pop-up maneuver called unmasking and sprang from under ten feet to an altitude of about thirty feet above ground. Below, the heavy vehicles that made up the launchers, radars, power supplies and transportation for the missile battery were visible to the aircrew in the greens and blacks of night vision head-up displays.

A human figure sprang into action, firing a Kalashnikov variant as he ran toward one of the trucks, crying out a warning, but it was too late for him or anyone else on the ground. In an instant, HARM anti-radar missiles shoot off the launch rails at either side of the AH-1Z, slamming into the radar trucks and blowing them sky high in a thunderclap of flame.

Zuni strikes followed the HARM rounds off the launchers, taking out communications trucks and support vehicles, and blowing apart other Iranian soldiers regardless of whether they were trying to hide or trying to fight.

As the AH-1Z circled the target, the pilot brought its nose cannon into play, slaving it back and forth to spray red tracer fire into whatever happened to be left semi-intact in the zone of death and fire below, including soldiers trying to surrender with their hands raised in the air, these latter being blown limb from limb by the firepower directed against them.

Modern war and modern society has desensitized Americans to the full implications of what their weapons did to the things they struck. To the young combatants onboard the chopper, the Iranians had about as much reality as Nintendo simulations.

The other two choppers had by this time passed on toward the main objective, reaching it only a few minutes later. The small desert airstrip lay vulnerable beneath the moonless, star-flecked sky. The runway was large enough to land a C-5B Galaxy — a plane dubbed "Fat Albert" by its crews — loaded about one-third to capacity.

The C-5 — the hump of the camel — would be barreling in behind the gun ships, but it would be full to capacity with men and materiél, including fuel bladders to re-tank the helos. Much of the weight would be reduced by LOREX-dropping the mechanized armor and heavy guns it carried, and then the transport would circle and land to debark the troops onboard.

First the airstrip had to be secured, and the second and third gun ships were soon engaged in doing precisely this. The work went quicker because there were fewer targets to contend with here, and the battle — if you could call a turkey-shoot a battle — was over almost as fast as it had begun. Their grim work now accomplished, the Vipers hovered at a safe distance, giving the inbound Fat Albert a wide berth.

The giant strategic heavy-lift aircraft was minutes behind the gun ship sortie, and soon the earsplitting roar of its four massive TF39-GE-1C turbofan engines (they are said to have the equivalent power of forty-eight railroad locomotives) began to churn up the night almost as physically as the growing cloud of exhaust-blown sand that was disturbed by its slipstream and wing vortexes spread through the crystal-clear desert air.

The C-5 came in low, its rear ramp already lowered, and parachutes began to blossom. One after another, paletted and cushioned multipurpose Barack Obama Ground Combat Vehicles (GCVs) — commonly called "Bam-Bams" — mine-resistant and highly mobile JLTVs and crates of weapons, ammo and gear came popping out the back end of the enormous metal bird.

In a matter of minutes, the cargo load was down on the ground close but well-clear of the landing strip, and the C-5 was turning in the air to make a second pass for a landing. Passing through clouds of smoke and fires from the burning Pasdaran military vehicles that flanked the landing strip, the super-transport screamed as reverse-thrust buckets came down and friction brakes were applied to landing gear. Before it had rolled to a complete stop on nitrogen-filled tires, Detachment Omega was hustling to ramp-off and get down to the job of unpacking its combat gear.

Minutes later, with the sounds of automotive engines coming to life in the background, Top Sgt. Death was on secure JTRS communication to the final element of the mission.

"We're on the ground, boss," the NCO reported. "Hoo-ah. We're good to go."

Many miles away, and approaching their common objective from a different angle, Colonel Stone Breaux affirmed the transmission and told the Detachment Omega team members onboard the C-130H-30 Hercules.

The smaller transport plane was coming in at a higher altitude. The landing of the first element at the airstrip was a signal that the assault on the largest and most difficult of the mission's twin objectives would soon commence.

Now it was the turn of the element onboard the Herky Bird.

Within a matter of minutes, the C-130H-30 had reached the drop zone for the HALO insertion that would send a company of Army special forces operators under Breaux's command gliding on the wind toward their target several miles inland.

The plan was fraught with risk, besides being somewhat alien to Breaux, who was straight-leg infantry through and through. The paratroop landing had to coincide with Balls' main ground assault or Breaux's element would be caught in a quagmire with no way out.

But neither Breaux nor the others tried to think very hard about that as the stick of parachutists lined up behind the jumpmaster and waited for his signal to take a walk into space and hit the silk.

At about the same time as this was happening, the second element of the coordinated assaults inside Iran had reached its first phase line. Boogie was a company-strength unit whose mission was to secure a smaller and less heavily fortified or defended objective than the first air-ground element, Balls, which had the job of taking control of one of Iranian leader Faramoosh Mozafferreddin's presidential palaces.

These so-called palaces were much more than castles on the desert as the name might imply. Some of them were really small cities, complete with apartment blocks, villas leading onto artificial lakes with artificial pleasure islands in their midst, housing for sizable contingents of troops and SAM batteries to protect them from air strikes.

In addition to all this, Mozafferreddin's larger "palaces" showed just the tip of the proverbial iceberg aboveground. These also harbored extensive subterranean networks of bunkers, research labs, military command posts, motor pool areas, and much else beneath the visible portion on the surface.

While Mozafferreddin's guests or members of the Iranian maximum leader's extended family — most of the presidential palaces were rarely visited by the Rais himself — cavorted with harem girls in the lake or indoor Olympic pools, or sipped cool drinks beneath imported shade trees, or even played golf on the eighteen-hole courses some of the palaces featured on their country club-like expanses, cadres of weapons scientists might be at work in the underground portion of the palace developing who-knew-what diabolical weapon of mass destruction.

Faramoosh Mozafferreddin, who considered himself the reincarnation of the ancient Persian potentate Abalgamash, legendary warrior king of the ancient Warakhshe dynasty, used this over-under scheme in virtually every weapons design facility that he'd built, and there were hundreds scattered throughout Iran, each one of them engaged in a cellular manufacturing or research process that compartmentalized the individual cells.

Few besides the Rais himself possessed a working knowledge of the entire picture of Iran's weapons development programs.

The same Iranian strategy that had led to the rounding up of human shields against fighter plane and Reaper air strikes, and that had filled the sleeping areas of the a supposed "goat cheese factory" at Qom with innocent Iranians above a chemical weapons plant, divided the presidential palaces into heavens and hells reminiscent of the ancient kingdoms of light and darkness ruled by Marduk and Tiamat of ancient Mesopotamian legend.

Those in the heavenly realm disported above, while those in Abaddon slaved over infernal machinery in the fiend's workshop.

The presidential palace at Mashdad was the objective of strike force Balls. It was a large palace as Mozafferreddin's palaces went, but the fact that it was more than just a glorified country club for the Iranian elite had been indicated by Western underground remote sensing scans using spy satellites.

For years Iran had built no underground facilities, aware that US satellites possessed remote-sensing capabilities using thermal imaging, synthetic aperture radar imaging and magnetic anomaly detection. Then the Iranians got more adept at maskirovka, or camouflage and concealment, and tunnel hardening techniques, and started digging bunkers again. But the NSA's hardware also got better, so that it was getting increasingly more difficult for Faramoosh Mozafferreddin to hide his bags of dirty tricks underground.

For one thing, earthbound magnetic anomaly detection by space-based platforms had become more accurate, and projects using massive amounts of metal were impossible to hide. The largest of the Soviet-supplied super guns might be buried beneath a false dome in the Mashdad palace. It was believed that this gun could blast a projectile through the dome and into orbit, at least if the Soviets had supplied Iran with artillery tubes following the original plan for the original-design Bull super gun — the so-called Project Babylon super gun that Bull had once designed for Iraq — as indicated by evidence found on the Antonov transports.

This is why the main push was to take over Mashdad. Remote, space-based sensing had also indicated the possibility of large-bore barrels of the smaller, but still formidable, three hundred thirty millimeter tubes at a secondary installation. The OPPLAN included a provision for these to be assaulted as well.

Balls and Boogie were preparing to take down these two objectives. Boogie was a mechanized ground force driving light armored vehicles. Boogie would be landed close to its objective, a medium-sized research facility. Using man-portable rocket launchers and small arms fire, in addition to the weapons on its rolling armor, Boogie would storm the lightly fortified weapons research station, conducting a recon by fire. Boogie's operational plan called for support by two of the three Viper gun ships that had shot up the SAM site and secured the landing strip several miles to the southwest.

All three AH-1Z Vipers had refueled using portable fuel bladders dropped along with the other paletted cargo from the C-5B Galaxy's hold, and two of the attack helos had dusted off to fly toward Boogie's staging area. As Boogie reached its phase line, the helos were bird-dogging the team at a distance of about a kilometer, running a security operation in case of attack as Boogie rolled its armor toward its attack position near the installation that was its target.

The combined SFOD-O special forces contingents would seize their individual objectives, thoroughly search the sites for evidence of the super gun technology, and destroy in place any weapons found with special demolition charges.

As of 0300 hours, Lima, all strike units were well en route to their tactical objectives under the OPPLAN.

Chapter Sixteen

The stick of paratroops waltzed out the side of the plane into the darkness of a moonless desert night, their night vision preserved by the red lights that had softly illuminated the cabin of the C-130H-30.

The gear that had been lashed down in webbing against the bulkheads or balanced on the deck was now securely strapped to the backs, fronts, legs, arms, and in some cases, heads, of the treeheads jumping out of the hold of the plane and free-falling through space.

Now that gear was secured against their bodies, clipped to MOLLE harnesses, and in the cases of grenades, combat knives and rifles, taped into place so that gun barrels were pointing down on landing, blades stayed secure in their scabbards, and cotter pins didn't catch on external objects and come loose.

One after another the members of SFOD-O jump teams cast their fates to the desert winds as they fell through the C-130's prop-wash and steeled their bodies for the sudden jerk of the chutes unfurling and opening. And one by one this happened. One airfoil parasail after another popped into being above the desert-camo-fatigued soldier below it, until the entire stick of paras was underway.

As the Hercules disappeared into the night, the airborne force began the first leg of its controlled, tapering descent, a descent that, if all proceeded according to plan, would land the troops right in the heart of the Mashdad presidential palace just as Balls' mechanized ground component — code-named Gorilla — and its single dedicated AH-1Z helo gun ship were attacking from the outside.

If there were any major snags, if the timing was too far off the mark, or something unforeseen happened, there could be major trouble. But the team had its collective mind fixed on the objective. Nobody was thinking of failure. Breaux hadn't trained them to do that. To the fighters and killers of Omega the word didn't exist.

The stick of SFOD-O paratroops had no way of knowing about a conversation that had taken place several hours before inside a villa of a presidential palace distant by many miles from their current position. Had they been privy to the conversation, they might have felt differently about the chances of their mission's ultimate success. They might have had serious misgivings, to say the least.

The speaker was Bashar Mozafferreddin, the Iranian president's eldest son, a man despised and feared by Iranians second only to his aged but still feared father. Bashar, who enjoyed pulling the teeth from the mouths and nails from the fingers of those who had fallen out of favor with him, and was rumored to have personally clubbed an adversary to death, was sitting at one side of a comfortable sofa of black Milanese leather that, like most of the villa's furnishings, had been custom-designed to his specifications.

The sun setting over distant mountains cast a warm, red-gold glow across the room, lighting up the wall where a large flat-panel TV showed an Italian soccer match in progress.

Bashar sipped a sherry from a cut-crystal goblet and his guest caught the flash of gold from the band of the Rolex Oyster on his wrist. Bashar set the glass down and continued speaking. The guest of the son of Mozafferreddin, who had spent the most part of several months at a smaller and somewhat less sumptuously appointed villa within the palace grounds, sat in an easy chair facing his host. He did not drink, but instead smoked a filterless Turkish cigaret.

Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni, terrorist bombardier supreme, inhaled the pungent smoke as he carefully listened to Bashar's words. It was important to pay close attention whenever one of Mozafferreddin's trusted associates addressed him, he had learned this during his stay as the Iranian president's guest.

With Mozafferreddin himself — who Dalkimoni had spent almost an hour with on two separate occasions since his arrival in Baghdad — it was also important to think the right thoughts, or at least appear to be thinking the right thoughts.

Mozafferreddin could be charming or he could be brutal, or again, he could be something in between. But Mozafferreddin was always paranoid, no matter how he might act, and on top of this he was convinced he possessed the omniscient power to detect treachery in the hearts of men merely by looking them in the eyes.

If Mozafferreddin saw the wrong thing, that was all you needed. Mozafferreddin would issue an order and you would be taken away to meet your fate — sometimes even shot by the Iranian president himself. Dalkimoni had been warned that the best way to act in Mozafferreddin's presence was to keep your mouth shut and say yes to everything Mozafferreddin said.

Dalkimoni had found that this was equally good advice with Bashar, who had increasingly taken over many of Mozafferreddin's projects in recent years. So Dalkimoni listened attentively, smoking his cigaret while Bashar spoke.

"I envy you, Jubaird, I truly do," Bashar said, his eyes not on the bomb-maker but on the Italian soccer team on who he had bet a million dollars to win against their German opponents. "Very soon your — "

Suddenly Bashar stopped speaking and stared at the screen. Then, with a curse, he flung his unfinished drink at the wall. An aide almost magically appeared, and began wiping at the stain while Bashar punched a quick-dial button on a compact SATCOM phone he unclipped from his belt.

With pretended unconcern, Dalkimoni listened to Bashar berate someone on the other end of the line about how his team was losing, and on certain punishments that would await certain parties unless certain things were done immediately to drastically change certain events on the soccer field.

Almost instantly, time was called in mid-play. A few minutes later, play resumed, but this time it was the Bashar's team that was winning. Dalkimoni heard Bashar promise someone a bonus, and then he put away the phone, his aide handing him a fresh drink before disappearing back into the woodwork.

Still intent on the TV screen, and without so much as once having glanced Dalkimoni's way, Bashar picked up where he had left off before the interruption.

"Your name shall be numbered among those mighty heroes of legend. You, Dalkimoni, hold the keys to the universe in your hands. For it is you who will shepherd the Winged Bulls to glory."

"Thank you," Dalkimoni replied. "Yes, it is truly an honor as you say it is."

"Have all the preparations been made? Is everything in order for your journey? There must be no mistakes, no slip-ups. Failure cannot be tolerated. You know this."

"There shall be none, Excellency," Dalkimoni replied. "All is in readiness. The Winged Bulls shall be unchained and permitted to take flight. The prophesy made many thousands of years before shall be fulfilled."

"Excellent. That is all I wanted to hear from you, Dalkimoni," Bashar said and turned back to the television. Dalkimoni saw that he was again caught up in the action of the soccer match and had already forgotten all about him. The bomb-maker stubbed out his cigaret in the ashtray on the end table by the side of the chair, rose and then left.

They had been talking about nuclear bombs.

Breaux's parasail detachment continued to glide toward its mission objective. Although still distant by the better part of a mile, their rate of descent had increased as their altitude dropped. Breaux, at the lead of the airborne shock force, checked his wrist chronometer whose luminous dial showed him that his troops were meeting their timetable.

He decided to break EMCON to ask for a situation report from his ground commander. He would do it by burst transmission over the Defense Tactical Internet. The encrypted data packets would travel up to a satellite then bounce down again, and would produce a random pulse of noise to anybody listening.

Breaux used the wrist-top keypad linked by cable to the SATCOM phone nestled in a MOLLE pouch and encoded a message. It was addressed in conventional email format to the operation's domain name: sgt.death@operation.viper.mil. Minutes later the message was received and an answer flashed on the wrist-top's screen.

"Am in position. Good to go. Attack to commence at 4030 hours."

Breaux keyed back, "Affirm."

The strike was proceeding as planned. The timetable was being met. All operational elements were coming together. The Fat Lady was warming up her act.

Breaux's parafoil team now could see the muted lights of the presidential palace growing closer and brighter. Each descending sky trooper knew that final preparations for landing needed to be made.

Within minutes, the team got in close enough to clearly make out the guards in the towers surrounding the base and the missiles ready for launch at SAM batteries here and there on the grounds. They saw too the gleam of the artificial lake and the stands of plane trees along three sides of the vast estate's circumference.

Of course the guards below soon spotted the down-dropping American soldiers as well, but the sighting had come too late to do the Iranians much good. At this stage the Gorilla ground element with its helo air support had already initiated contact with the enemy. As Breaux's parasail team came dropping in for the kill, new sights and sounds overwhelmed the stillness of the night. They were the sounds of battle, the strobing flashes of rocket strikes and belching muzzle flames of automatic small arms fire. And in the midst of it all, the sounds of men dying.

Barry White and Chaka Khan were fifteen minutes outbound from Zebra Talon at Jauf and cruising at eighty thousand feet. At that altitude whether or not the search-and-track radars of Iranian SAMs painted them or not was immaterial.

They flew beyond the lethality envelope of all but the very best SAMs that the Pasdaran fielded, and as far as these latter went, they were at the very edge of their envelopes too.

But the chances of their being caught by radar were slender at best. Both aircraft had radar cross-sections as small as the F-117A Nighthawk, but they were a hell of a lot faster and more maneuverable than the now mothballed stealth fighter.

The planes could afford to come in high, and it was also tactically advantageous to do this. Coming in high they would have a better chance of spotting any Iranian fighter assets that might be scrambled before the unfriendly planes saw them.

Then the Raptors would bare their claws.

Balls swept in toward its strike objective as Boogie converged on the mission's secondary target. Code-named Ripped, the complex at Kermanshah was a medium-sized installation that had recently been identified as engaged in missile warhead and artillery projectile manufacturing. It also served as a storage entrepot for finished product.

Being far smaller in size than the mission's primary objective, the presidential palace at Mashdad, the Kermanshah installation was accorded a correspondingly smaller takedown force. An assortment of low-rise cinderblock buildings and Quonset huts was scattered across a bulldozed stretch of desert about the size of two city blocks. This was Kermanshah.

The facility was encircled by a twenty-foot high hurricane fence generously topped by coils of razor wire. It was either manned by a detachment of specialist Takavar or Pasdaran regulars; the intel was somewhat fuzzy on that score.

The troops had some heavy metal at the ready in case of attack, that much was clear — quad Shilka guns mounted on a BTR track chassis, sentries in two guard towers located to place intersecting fields of .50 caliber machinegun fire on approaching targets and maybe some smaller stuff too, such as Plamya automatic grenade launchers, known to be a favorite toy of Iranian Takavar forces.

Breaux and Omega's planning staff had proceeded on the assumption that the Iranians had the surrounding desert divided into a grid system like the Germans had set up at Normandy, so spotters could radio in grid coordinates and the guard posts put fire on them without even needing visual contact with enemy forces.

The firepower at Kermanshah was enough to pin down a medium-sized assault element, but Boogie packed enough firepower to overwhelm the base defenses, plus it would have the advantage of surprise in its favor.

Apart from the armaments on the GCVs and mine-resistant and highly mobile JLTVs, which included TOW missiles, the team was armed with Dragons — lighter-duty analogs of the TOW, capable of shoulder- or tripod-launch — 81 millimeter mortars that could be set up to drop fire inside the compound, and a SADARM-(Sense and Destroy Armor) ILS top-attack rig for use against roving enemy armor. These had proven highly effective on Omega's mission into Vojvodina during the Second Balkan War conflict to destroy nuclear-capable SAM missile TELs sometime before.

The Eagle Patchers of Boogie also had two guardian angels in the form of AH-1Z Vipers that had been assigned the troop for offensive and supporting fire during the attack. The AH-1Zs were shadowing the unit as it approached the target.

The presence of the helos was a time-saver, the added security they offered making it feasible for the mechanized troop to use the Isfahan-Shiraz highway that ran close to Kermanshah instead of navigating open desert.

If a stink brewed up, the Vipers could stamp it canceled in a hurry.

The mechanized force rolled on toward its objective, the ground elements keeping in contact with the two trailing gun ships while themselves keeping a weather eye cocked for trouble that might materialize from the outlying desert or the road.

There were a lot of wadis in the vicinity, some of them deep, twisting, meandering ravines cut by flash-flood waters. It was possible in theory for unfriendly patrols to be holed up somewhere inside them and remain unseen by either the helos or the Eagle Patchers until friendly troops were practically right on top of them.

Breaux steeled himself for a hard landing. The stick of HALO chutists that had walked from the hold of a C-130 two hundred miles away and a few thousand feet up was now nearing the end of its long, tapering, downward glide.

Limned in his head-mounted display, hardly twenty feet below and directly ahead of him, lay the south corner of the Mashdad presidential palace that was the strike's primary target. The light-amplifying screen in front of him showed that the darkened landing zone was clear of troops and other combat hazards.

The complex was now under attack by Eagle Patcher ground and heliborne elements. Gorilla's mechanized infantry forces were converging on the palace from the opposite end while the single AH-1Z fired missile strikes and automatic cannon at targets of opportunity, drawing defensive fire in its direction while the paraforce dropped in unseen like Santa down the chimney.

Breaux's multifunction see-through HMD displayed alphanumeric readouts in three colors. The blue altitude line similar to a fighter cockpit's dropped between numeric brackets to show the rate of descent. The relative positions of the other members of the paratroop detail were displayed as small human symbols in red, relative to the wearer's position in yellow.

Breaux keyed his lipmike and gave the troop last-minute instructions before they hit the ground running. By now the chutist stick was only a few feet above the rooftop level of the multistory apartment block rising up from the south end of the mini-city.

As Breaux dropped below the level of the roof parapets he could see inside some of the windows of the upper floors where lights dimly shone. But his attention was now tightly focused on the bare ground in front of him and his thoughts raced ahead to what had to be done very quickly during the next few minutes.

While making their descent the paratroops were as vulnerable as clay pigeons at a skeet-shoot, but they would be more vulnerable still as they hit the ground and shucked their chute harnesses, disoriented and slowed by the changeover to land combat. Breaux, like all the others, had to stay agile and alert.

Within seconds, Breaux was down on the ground, striking the paved surface with both feet and simultaneously pulling the quick-disengagement hand grip to get rid of the chute which was now a major encumbrance. With a quick tug on the hand grip, the parafoil broke away and scudded along the pavement in the direction of the wind.

Breaux immediately had his main weapon, an AKS-74 with an under-mounted M-203 grenade launcher, in his tactical-gloved hands, moving quickly to a defensive position to get clear of the other Eagle Patchers coming down behind him and to cover their flanks while they too unharnessed on the ground.

As he watched the airborne element come gliding down all around him, a muted warble sounded in his ear and one of the soldier-icons on his NVG display flashed blue, signaling a transmission from a member of the paraforce.

"Blue Man in position."

"You're not supposed to be. How'd you get there?" Breaux returned.

"Boss, I figured the rooftop was just big enough to take the chance, and it was so close I couldn't resist. So here I am."

Blue Man was the team's sniper designation, named for Tuareq rifle marksmen of the North African desert. Blue Man had orders to enter the multistory apartment block at the center of the complex once it was deemed secure and then go to the rooftop to cover and spot for the team.

Blue Man was equipped with a Heckler & Koch Präzisionsschützengewehr-1 (PSG1) sniper rifle with a very accurate digital scope developed by DARPA to replace the standard Zeiss Hensoldt 6 X 42 LED-enhanced scope and manual reticle. Blue Man would be able to pick off or pin down Takavar that Eagle Patcher ground elements might not be able to spot.

But Blue Man wasn't supposed to be up there yet, not without a team having first secured the building. Still, there he was. Breaux told him to stay alert and report in at regular intervals. He'd be informed when a security detail would be in the building to provide security backup.

Meanwhile the rest of the chutist stick was almost fully landed. So far there was no hostile engagement with the paratroops. The diversionary assault fire from Gorilla and the helo — code-named Angry Falcon — was obviously doing its intended job, and it was obvious to Breaux that said fire was intensifying as the defenders responded with a fierce resistance.

The Takavar were not Special Revolutionary Guards. They were regular Iranian army, members of the elite 23rd Commando Division. But they were elite cadre nevertheless, having received specialist forces training at the 23rd's combat training center at Imam Daneshkadeh Afsari Ali Military Academy, and been awarded the right to wear the purple berets of specialist commando troops.

The Takavar had high morale and had been expected to put up tough and determined resistance once the attack commenced. But the blue forces combat personnel were far stronger and had struck with both speed and tactical surprise in their favor. They would prevail; of this Breaux had no doubt.

Breaux could now hear the sounds of the Force Omega 81-millimeter mortar shells landing at the other end of the palace grounds. Every time one hit, the earth trembled slightly and the salvos of Iranian small arms fire suddenly halted.

Breaux smiled grimly. He wasn't surprised. Few weapons of war could put the damper on a mud-soldier's fighting spirit than dropping some mortar cans on top of his head. All it took was the sight of what one mortar shell could do to the human body to make the survivors drop everything and take cover when the ripping silk sound preceded the next salvo.

He almost pitied the Iranian purple-beanies. He could picture them scuttling for cover as the fire came hurtling down on them. But such was war, and fuck them anyway; better they were on the receiving end than his own men.

By now all of the paratroop force was fully deployed on the ground. They had jettisoned their chutes and harnesses and were ready for action. Breaux's people knew the drill backwards and forwards by now, and were already methodically going about their appointed tasks.

Some were unshipping Claymore mines they'd carried in with them, crimping caps, unwinding det wires, and setting up the convex antipersonnel mines for remote detonation. Others were forming up into mobile assault squads and getting ready to do some fast-and-dirty door-kicking. One of those details was already on its way to secure the multistory apartment building with Blue Man already set up on the roof.

Breaux keyed his comms and called up the assault team.

"Stingray, this is Magic Dog. We are down and dirty. Say your situation."

"We are shit hot and ready to kick some fucking You-Ran ass, boss. And I thank the Lord above for making me a mud-suckin', sand-eatin', pussy-lickin' straight-leg grunt. God bless the Army and piss on the Marines. Amen."

It was Sgt. Mainline at the other end of the link. Breaux rogered that transmission as he heard the steady pounding of automatic weapons fire punctuated by the sporadic explosions of heavier armament in the background. Mainline went on to quickly and succinctly give an account of the shape of the battle so far.

"We've just breached the enemy's forward security defenses. Combat teams are already penetrating the palace grounds and setting up a security perimeter. Friendly casualties have been extremely light."

"Let me know if things change. Otherwise, go the whole nine yards."

"Fuckin'-A, boss."

Hardly had Breaux broken contact with Stingray when Blue Man came back on the net with an update.

"Activity on the rooftop of the building to your left."

Blue Man watched Iranians setting up a machinegun emplacement on the flat of the roof through his infrared magnifying nightscope. It's okay to look, boss. You won't see anything, though."

Breaux cautiously craned his neck. He didn't.

"Taken them down," he ordered.

"Consider them wasted, boss."

Blue Man was already drawing a bead on the head of the bereted NCO who was ordering the other troops around as they set up the MG. Others were piling sandbags in front of it and hauling in ammo crates.

The shot was near the limit of the PSG1's six hundred meter range, but still well enough inside it for Blue Man to be confident of making it. Windage was favorable too. With his target in the crosshairs, Blue Man squeezed off a round. The gun bucked once as the 7.62 x 51 millimeter bullet exited the weapon's polygon-bored heavy barrel at a muzzle velocity many times higher than conventional rifles produced, while its low-noise bolt closing feature reduced the sound of the shot to a low-decibel, subsonic crack.

Almost instantaneously a red blossom appeared where the bridge of the nose had once been on the face of the Iranian NCO on the distant roof as the heavy slug impacted, crushing bone and cartilage and plowing a track through brain tissue clear to the base of the skull.

The Iranians had only enough time to react to the sight of their commander doing a spastic death jig. Some even began to smile, thinking it was some kind of a joke by the otherwise humorless noncom. But then they heard the delayed crack of the subsonic round and knew what was really happening as the Iranian pitched sideways and sprawled over the edge of the rooftop, before Blue Man aimed and fired a second of the twenty hollow-nosed bullets in the PSG1's magazine.

Three quick trigger-pulls later he had put as many additional rounds into three unfortunate members of the MG squad setting up on the rooftop. The survivors had ducked down in panic, shouting and randomly firing rifle bursts in blind fear reactions. Two of them made the mistake of running toward the open door of the rooftop cupola, snapping off automatic AK salvos as they beat boot leather.

Blue Man dropped them in their tracks before they reached the cupola's dubious safety and their twitching bodies served as an object lesson to the rest of the team who had wisely chosen to remain where they were. They were not about to go anywhere soon, but the muzzle flashes of their weapons had drawn the attention of Angry Falcon which fired two Zuni rockets onto the rooftop, blowing the machinegun emplacement apart and instantly killing all of the survivors.

Far below, Breaux's crew now began to deploy throughout the complex. The cat was out of the bag. The Fat Lady was singing her ass off. But the good guys were now on the ground, in position and ready to whale.

Chapter Seventeen

Some distance away, far beneath the desert crust, opposition forces were shrugging off surprise and the lethargy of sleep and preparing to counter the shock assault from air and ground.

Some land-mobile battalions of the Iranian Takavar are housed in underground bunkers scattered strategically across the vast salt-pan deserts that cover much of central Iran. The submerged complexes are buried about fifty feet below the surface crust. They are completely covered by two-foot-thick slabs of stressed concrete which extend approximately twenty feet beyond the edge of the complex, affording protection from missile strikes at any angle.

The bunkers, which apart from being hardened are segmented into modular units sheltering one hundred troops each, and with separate units for mess, sick bay, water, ammunition storage and the like, were designed for nuclear-chemical-biological warfare and built to specifications enabling them to sustain blast overpressure from up to a ten megaton nuclear strike. Since the Gulf War, the bunkers — most of which survived the decades since Desert Storm intact — were upgraded and extended, so that heavy vehicles and mechanized armor can be safely stored on-site.

It was in such a bunker complex beneath the desert that the troops of the General Hassan Firouzabadi Mechanized Brigade (Pasdaran VII Brigade) were now rousing themselves to wakefulness and running to their war machines to mount up. The heavy concrete-and-steel blast door that protected a steeply sloping ramp was raised on pneumatic pistons.

From deep within the darkness, like the growling of the spirits of the dead, came the throbbing of engines and the clanking of armored caterpillar treads as the VII Mechanized Brigade rolled up onto the floor of the desert. The brigade belonged to the feared King Cyrus the Great Division and it flew the banner of the twin eagles rampant above crossed ram's horns emblem of the Shahanshah, the reverenced sign of the ancient Fatamid caliphs, feared and obeyed throughout the Mideast. With sleep now a memory, the brigade was eager for battle. Tonight they would bring glory to their standard.

On its way to the Kermanshah complex, Boogie was well clear of the Iranian VII Brigade's line of advance, since the main force of the Firouzabadi was preoccupied with reaching the Mashdad presidential palace which, according to reports, was under attack by a sizable paratroop force. Nevertheless, Boogie was to come under fire by a far smaller platoon-sized element of Takavar that was lurking just beyond the downslope of a deep wadi athwart the Eagle Patchers' line of advance.

In the wake of sporadic yet insistent special operations strikes against Iranian WMD facilities located in the vastness of the desert reaches, the general staff in Baghdad had opted to deploy small mobile units in strategic locations.

These light commando forces were downsized but heavily armed and, for Iranian troops, well-trained.

Each motorized desert platoon was equipped to fight spoiling attacks and stage ambushes against Western counter-WMD units sent into Iran. They had studied the enemy's methods of operation and had trained hard.

They were motivated, their unit morale was high and many of their troops were seasoned desert fighters. So it was not much of a surprise that neither Sgt. Death's Boogie Force or the two Viper gun ships spotted the telltale silhouette of the camouflaged periscope that poked its way up from above the crest of a sandy rise. Behind it, a spotter peered at the oncoming formation through one of the newest and most accurate night-vision scopes that Iran had imported from Germany.

Minutes later, Boogie was suddenly taking fire from seemingly everywhere at once. The jackhammering of automatic weapons began to fill the air and an RPG rocket strike came shrieking in, blowing up a JLTV, killing the troops inside and cooking off the stored armaments it carried, including the TOW missile in its roof-mounted launcher.

As the US armored vehicle burned, the rest of Boogie ate gravel and took up defensive positions. The chattering of small arms fire intensified as 80 millimeter mortar shells now rained down on the Americans with the characteristic sound of zippers opening to explode near the armored vehicles.

The mortars initially fell wide of the mark, but the Iranians in the mortar pit were getting updates from a spotter behind binoculars flat against the top of a desert rise, and they were beginning to walk their fire toward the center of the massed enemy armor.

The Pasdaran were clearly intent on slugging it out, because from out of the wadi came two BMP-2s, front-mounted 30-millimeter cannons blazing away while machinegunners poured 7.62-millimeter automatic fire at the American invaders. By this time, though, Boogie's fast and upgunned Bam-Bams were answering with their own 25-millimeter cannons, coaxial MGs and TOW ATGMs. In the course of the battle one of the Bimps took a TOW hit broadside from a maneuvering Bam-Bam, catching fire and going up in a whooshing fireball that rained down charred body parts and burning debris.

By now the two backup Angry Falcon AH-1Zs had overflown the combat zone and were cooking off missiles into the unfriendlies' positions.

The mortar pit was taken out by a salvo of Sidewinder missile strikes from one chopper while the surviving Bimps were set ablaze by the other helo. As every veteran infantry crunchy knows, one drawback of mortars is that being short-range artillery weapons, they make easy targets for counter-mortar air. The Takavar in the now blazing mortar pit had been taught this lesson the hard and permanent way.

The battle was extremely brief, but it was also very bloody. It had whittled down Boogie's forces and had caused many friendly casualties. Now the Omega unit's target installation would surely also be on the alert. Still, Boogie had no option except to push on, taking friendly dead — or what was left of some — with it in human remains pouches. The enemy the troops just left to the whims of the buzzards and the hot desert sun.

Breaux's forces were meanwhile mopping up resistance from other Iranian special ops detachments at the presidential palace, many of whom were putting up fanatical resistance. Either they had been threatened with death if they failed to halt the advance, or their objective was to stall the consolidation of the base by unfriendly forces until Iranian reserves from the Firouzabadi VII Mechanized arrived.

Probably the defenders' motivation was a mixture of both motivations, Breaux decided. The cluster of Global Hawk surveillance UAVs and manned E-8 JSTARS surveillance aircraft (both airborne assets fielded by USAF) orbiting just across the Iranian border in Iraq and over the northern reaches of the Persian Gulf were reporting the approach of a battalion-sized mobile force over Omega's ground-soldier ensemble technology-enabled tactical geospatial mapping displays so their morale might have been buoyed by reports that arrival in theater of friendlies was in progress.

The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System, or JSTARS system, used a GSM or ground station module, a mobile companion rig on the ground containing radar and communications equipment needed to calibrate the movements and positions of the ground forces that JSTARS tracked. The GSM had been moved as close as possible to the Iranian border. Though sited in Kuwait, the GSMs were near enough to Iranian territory to bring the ops zone into proximal range of Joint STARS' scopes.

JSTARS, unlike AWACS, didn't operate with an air component alone, because it was one thing to track objects in the skies as AWACS did, but another to be flying hundreds of miles slant-range of ground-based targets and thereby fall victim to false returns common to slang-ranging. The airborne component of JSTARS was only one-half of the system; it was actually a ground/air system.

Breaux was not surprised either by the heavy defensive resistance or the new intel that enemy troops were advancing. Contingency plans had included the very obvious and distinct possibility that a battalion of invading Americans might just happen to alert Iranian forces to the fact they were coming under coordinated attack. Sand Viper's OPPLAN took this development — and other, even worse, scenarios — into consideration and provided for extraction under fire, should such become necessary. In the meantime, whatever jokers the Pasdaran was about to deal SFOD-O were still far enough away to worry about later. Right now, the force had its work cut out for it.

Breaux's assault troops were home free in some places, bogged down under fire in others, and mopping up suppressed resistance in yet others still. Blue Man was still on his rooftop, commanding a bird's eye view of the unfolding developments on the ground, while the building itself was in the hands of an Eagle Patcher security detail, part of whose role was to set up an O.P. and aid Blue Man as spotters from above.

On Breaux's end of the fight, the perimeter was already in friendly hands. Breaux wasted no time in joining one of the squads that were hunting for the super gun tubes and/or hybrid ammunition thought to be hidden somewhere on the estate. Breaux had been back-briefed and knew where the likely hiding places might be located.

His crew's job was to clear those hiding places of opposition, carefully search them, and destroy any weapons of mass destruction that were discovered.

Three squads had been assigned the task of locating and destroying weapons of mass destruction and precision machinery found on the estate. These squads, numbering six combat personnel each, now hit their assigned search areas.

Each squad had been briefed in what the search areas were suspected of harboring, in the type of threats they might face, and in what to do if they found anything. From downloaded satellite imagery, sand table models had been constructed. The squads had used the models to help plan their ends of the mission, and had also used the Ground Soldier Ensemble system's computerized TACMARS mission planning system.

In all cases special equipment, such as ROC-1 NBC agent detectors, were carried by squad members. The handheld units could analyze even microscopic samples of NBC agents including chemical and biological toxins and radioactive isotopes used in nuclear warheads.

The squads were also equipped with full MOPP-6 level protective gear which was not as cumbersome as the old style gear. Most of the protective gear was kept stowed in their rucks so it wouldn't compromise troop mobility. If toxic or radioactive agents needed special handling, weapons disposal teams would suit up and go to work while their buddies secured the area.

Breaux hitched up with A-Squad, whose objective was the domed central structure at the southern sector of the palace. This was thought to be less a building than an elaborate shell to house and conceal a working prototype of the largest of the big artillery tubes that the Iranians were suspected of harboring here.

Though its objective appeared undefended, A-squad inched up carefully. Doing it by the numbers, one team was positioned to provide cover fire while a door-kicker squadron took the point for the actual assault.

Even up close, the Omega hard-chargers met no resistance. The building appeared unoccupied, its doors unlocked and swinging freely open. Just to make sure, a two-man team pitched frag grenades into the interior, ducking back behind the colonnades fronting the entrance as the grenades exploded with multiple ka-rumps somewhere inside. When the smoke and debris cleared, Chicken Wire came rushing in hurling blindfire from his M60E4 MG this way and that. Yet there remained no sign of defensive personnel and the area was pronounced secure.

Breaux ordered A-squad to deploy into the building, but warned his troops to look sharp and watch out for booby traps. One too-green soldier, about to kick in a door, paid no attention to the colonel's shouted warning to hold off, and then it was too late. As the sole of his boot made contact, the door blew off its hinges, taking most of the foot that had kicked it with it. A few ounces of plastic explosive had been hidden just behind the door, the detonator triggered by a mercury tilt-switch sensitive to the slightest vibration. As a medic rushed over, the legless paraplegic lay moaning and bleeding on the terrazzo.

On the building's below-ground level, other squad elements were suddenly taking fire. Apparently there were Pasdaran troops inside the multilevel building, most of which was underground, after all.

The fire came from enemy who had taken shelter in the base as the attack unfolded, hoping to evade discovery. Now that they'd been discovered, they'd decided to shoot it out rather than surrender, but they were apparently not well-trained as commandos and porting small arms only.

Some of these troops did surrender after more fire was traded, but others had no intention of being taken alive. One Iranian ran straight into a group of US grunts detonating two grenades in a suicide attack, shouting, "Vengeance! Vengeance!" in Arabic. He took three of Breaux's crew with him to wherever it was he thought he was going, heaven, hell or neither.

Minutes later, Breaux was blowing a door off its hinges with a bullpup shotgun blast using special door-busting power loads. Behind the door there lay a vast storeroom. The big artillery tube was there — almost. Sections of metal ranging from components of a large super cannon to the same crated heavy artillery tubes that had been videotaped by SFOD-O in the Elburz mountains the previous month were stacked here and there on the concrete floor.

But there was nothing else. And there was no functional weapon in place. The team had come up empty. This was a dry hole.

B-Squad found its objective and secured it without a shot being traded. Moonlight streamed in through the shattered windows as the team fanned out through the interior of the low-rise cinderblock building, their weapons at the ready, alert for the tripwires of booby traps, the silhouettes of snipers on the catwalk above or other signs of danger.

But the place had the look and smell of dereliction and disuse about it and they met no challenge. The bare cement floor was strewn with debris ranging from discarded food wrappers to yellowed newspapers that had been left to rot and mildew. The four corners also had obviously been used as toilets, and it was obvious from the stench that this use was of recent vintage. Apart from this, there was no sign of human habitation

The hard-chargers of B-Squad continued to search through the interior of the single-story building, looking for concealed rooms or entrances to hidden below-ground workshops or storage bunkers. In the end, their efforts yielded nothing and the area was judged secure.

What the squad did turn up were indications that stockpiles of components of weapons of mass destruction had been stored here until fairly recently. Abrasion marks on the concrete floor showed that forklifts and heavy loaders had probably been working in the warehouse structure only a short while ago.

Moreover, the ROC-1 sniffers showed miniscule traces of NBC contaminants in the air, with concentrations absorbed in the porous concrete where stacks of crates were thought to have been piled.

But now — nothing.

Another dry hole.

It was no cakewalk for C-Squad which found itself facing determined resistance from within its search objective. The fire started up well before the Omega Force commandos had approached the multistory white-brick building, forcing the detail to scramble for cover. A couple of Americans had been hit by the fusillade and the Eagle Patcher medic attached to the unit had his hands full treating the wounded, especially because the pill-roller himself was taking fire as he ran to attend them.

C-Squad was pinned down behind the low, decorative stone walls and manicured plane trees that lined the gently curving walkways that led up to the building. It was obvious that an Iranian defensive unit had dug in here and was expecting an attack, because the fire was accurate and well-coordinated.

Fire lanes had obviously been mapped out in advance by an officer who knew his business and sniper teams on the roof and in the windows of the multistory building were shooting as if they knew exactly where to place their rounds. There was undoubtedly a spotter or spotters somewhere high up who could call in fire by means of grid coordinates.

As the minutes ticked by, US forces on the ground were getting picked off by the Iranians holding the building. C-Squad was left with one option, and that was to call in Angry Falcon. Mst. Sgt. Spudder, the squad's commander, didn't like to have his dirty work done for him by helo-jockeys, but it was either get some air in fast or fall back under intense fire, taking more casualties in the process.

The Viper on loan to the assault force vectored in for the strike a few minutes later. Almost instantly it came under attack from the Pasdaran pom-pom gun emplacement on the roof. They had set up a Norinco twenty-millimeter triple-A rig with enough range to hit the chopper if it came in too close. The triple-A crew was pumping out red tracer fire at the helo with a will to vengeance.

It was notoriously hard to ignite an aircraft's fuel tanks with ordinary rounds, but with a salvo of phosphorus-coated 20-mike-mike, you could certainly do it. The AH-1Z's pilot made sure to keep his bird well out of range of the slug-spitting Chinese coaxial gun on the roof for that one good reason.

And so, from a hover at standoff range, the pilot uncaged one of the helo's Sidewinder missiles, got a firing solution and launched the bird. Seconds later, the missile slammed into the roof, its twenty-five pound shaped charge warhead exploding with tremendous impact in the center of the gun emplacement. The troops were blown literally to bits, heads and limbs ripped from their torsos and hurled to and fro by the force of the powerful explosive concussion.

The chopper then turned its malevolent attentions on the troops stationed on the upper levels of the building below the now vigorously burning roof. The Iranians were at this stage pouring everything from Kalashnikov fire to 40 millimeter canister grenades at the chopper, hoping to knock the airborne predator out of the sky before it killed them all. Automatic fire strobed the windows with flame.

Darting this way and that like a gigantic black mosquito, the AH-1Z raked the side of the building with its under-nose mounted 20-millimeter chain gun, thousands of glowing tracers spurting in a deadly arc across the entire facing wall, shattering glass and chewing up the interior of the rooms. All enemy fire from those uppermost floors was rapidly suppressed. As the Iranians either ran or were taken out, and their shooting tapered off, the Viper just hung there, swaying slightly as it poured out fire. The heavy caliber DU (depleted uranium) rounds from the slaved, electrically driven, tri-barreled machinegun just kept chewing up walls and furniture, reducing everything in sight to splinters amid a cloud of dust and exploding debris.

Below, on the ground, C-Squad's shooters now had their blood up and were eager to join the fray. Cheering like madmen and howling like banshees, they rushed the building, taking incoming automatic rifle and light machinegun fire as they charged hell-bent for leather. Several Eagle Patchers dropped in their tracks and never got up again. Their buddies ran forward, automatic rifles blazing at the hip in vengeful anger. As they breached the building's lobby, the fighting deteriorated into close-order combat in a narrowly confined space.

Those on both sides who had bayonets fixed to their rifle muzzles now used these ancient offensive weapons without hesitation or mercy. Opposing troops engaged each other in a combination of pointblank gunfire and fierce bayonet-stabs into the throats, chests and abdomens of their antagonists.

The fighting was hard, fast and viciously savage, with heavy casualties developing on both sides. After the dust cleared, Omega combat personnel found they had prevailed. They then went about the business of taking prisoners and counting friendly and unfriendly dead. Fresh reinforcements were called in, and these soon began circulating through the building, taking still more casualties from booby-traps, snipers and enemy diehards as they conducted door-to-door and floor-by-floor security actions.

It was in the basement of this building that an element of the now beefed-up force (it had started out as only C-Squad, but as the fighting intensified, more men had been poured in until its ranks had swelled to near-company strength by the time the building fell) encountered something, and made a discovery, that was to change the complexion of the entire mission.

It was not what they had expected to find or anything with which they had been trained to deal. They did not encounter any of the weapons of mass destruction that they had been drilled to detect and destroy. Instead, the Eagle Patchers came under suicidal fire from an entirely unexpected direction.

The building had a large underground parking area that ran its entire length. Except for the odd vehicle parked here and there, the garage was deserted. But under the dim glow of overhead mercury vapor lamps — many had been shot out to deliberately darken the area — Breaux's combat teams saw a large eighteen-wheel truck of a kind used internationally to transport containerized cargo.

Hardly had this discovery been made than they were suddenly taking fire from the truck.

The beefed-up C-Squad, now C-Detachment, went into action, immediately deploying to counter the determined fire from the truck. With superior numbers in favor of Force Omega, the engagement was one-sided and brief. The fire-fight reached its climax when one of the shooters emerged from inside the cab of the big rig, from where he had been pouring fire at C-Detachment, and advanced toward the Americans, pumping out grenades from an under-mounted rifle launcher to cover his clip changes.

While he threw cans at the US commandos, he shouted something in Arabic that might have been intelligible to one of the native speakers that manned each assault element, had it not been drowned out in the din of battle. Minutes passed and more fire was traded, until a multiround burst caught the gunman in his chest and he went down in a bloody heap. Then the Americans loped in to secure the truck.

Inside they found nothing to explain the suicidal resistance they'd encountered. The truck was empty except for some large packing crates and corrugated cardboard cartons, some of which had ostensibly contained bulky home appliances. There was nothing in the truck worth dying for, as far as any member o f the team could surmise.

There was something else though — the Iranian soldier who had attacked them, shouting oaths and seeking martyrdom, was still alive when the victorious US troops reached him.

He didn't stay that way for long. He somehow managed to bite something taped to his wrist and died in a shuddering paroxysm of flailing arms and lashing legs. To make it all even stranger, it was now discovered that he had been firing a Galil, an Israeli-manufactured automatic rifle which closely resembled the AK-variants used by the Iranians. His uniform also presented the

Eagle Patchers with an enigma, as it was not a Pasdaran uniform. The soldier was garbed in Israeli battle dress, his fatigues bearing a patch with a six-pointed star.

The squad leader immediately called up Breaux on the force's JTRS radio net. The boss would want to know about this A-SAP.

Chapter Eighteen

The ruined, sandblasted and time-stained concrete buildings were scattered throughout the dusty corner of the desert, a mere stone's throw from the highway. The area was known to the long-haulers who traveled the route as a truck park, the modern-day equivalent of the caravansaries that had dotted the ancient Middle East.

The structures, first erected during the 1960s as pumping stations along a now derelict oil pipeline stretching between Turkmenistan and Mazandaran, had long ago been abandoned, and the heavy equipment that had filled them scrapped. For decades the remaining concrete shells had been used by long-haul truckers as refuges from the shamal, bandits and the biting desert cold, places to sleep off the fatigue of the road in relative safety or to perform makeshift repairs to their rigs.

This morning the old pumping station was empty, the concrete shells of defunct pump houses sitting abandoned and forlorn beneath the pale light of the setting moon. Yet in the distance there now arose a sound familiar to the wayfarers who frequented this place. The rumbling of powerful diesel truck engines began to be faintly heard. A truck convoy was drawing near.

Above the keening of the wind, the rumbling steadily rose in pitch and intensity. Before long, the sound of the approaching diesel-powered leviathans rolling from the highway onto the flattened earth between the buildings had reached a deafening crescendo. Soon the rectangular black shapes, showing only amber and red running lights stopped, their air brakes squealing, their motors sputtering and coughing as the drivers killed the ignitions.

Doors were thrown open and men with muscles cramped from long, tedious hours of sitting in crowded cabs emerged into the night, stretching and rubbing their hands against the chill air. As they emerged, some of these men eyed their former traveling companions surreptitiously, stealing up close behind them as they reached into the pockets of their coats for the peg-ended steel wire garrotes they carried concealed there.

Soon the muffled screams and choking death rattles of the unfortunates were whipped away by the rising desert wind, and the bodies hidden in the utter darkness that followed moon set. With sunrise, the buzzards would scent the carrion, and begin to circle.

Caught in the middle of a nasty fire-fight before its objective, Boogie was pinned down on the desert by Iranian defense cadre. Earlier on, in the surprise attack by Takavar forces, the unit had received its baptism under fire, and its men were in no mood for gratuitous heroics. All they wanted now were results, and the only casualties they were willing to accept were the enemy's.

And so nobody complained about Angry Falcon air support stealing the glory when the choppers were called in to soften up the enemy's defenses. This they did speedily, rocketing and shooting up the installation with their nose cannons and missiles. Within a short span of time the target objective was reduced to a mass of blazing ruins.

Boogie then moved in to secure the area. Omega Force encountered small arms fire, savage in some parts of the base, but not on an order of magnitude that the invading force was not well-equipped to handle.

Now Boogie hived off into separate squads of mechanized and straight-leg ground patrols. The armor rushed in ahead of the foot troops, plowing 25-millimeter cannon fire, heavy MG salvos and LAW and TOW rocket strikes into enemy gun emplacements and Iranian armor. The AH-1Z helos continued to circle, shooting up the steel pylon supporting the base radio mast and sending the antenna dishes clustering its upper tier crashing to the ground. The choppers also shot up the upper floors and rooftop of a large building that was being used as a sniper nest by Pasdaran defenders.

Because of the stiff opposition, the teams were not able to secure the compound for the better part of an hour. Then they fanned out to complete their recon by fire. Yet here too, they discovered nothing.

Here too, the installation had turned out to be a dry hole.

The nonmilitary vehicles, mostly high-end SUVs, flew the flags of the Union of People's Fedayeen of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Revolutionary Command Council, the latter defined by the Iranian Constitution as the supreme legislative and executive authority of the state. Anyone daring to attempt to stop the motorcade would have been shown a pass signed by the highest ranking members of Tehran's ruling elite. The rights of a holder of such a pass could not be dismissed, and the name of the questioner would have been taken down for later investigation by MISIRI and the inevitable punishment which would follow such an investigation.

But there had been no opposition on the road, and the vehicles that made up the motorcade ate up the miles. Driving hard, they reached their destination shortly before sunup.

Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni saw to his relief that the truck convoy had arrived before him exactly as planned. The bodies of those who would not have the honor of martyring themselves for the holy cause were scattered on the ground. This too, had been expected. The others, the Trusted Ones, had done their work swiftly and well — as they had been trained to do.

Dalkimoni emerged from the rear of the air-conditioned limousine and stepped toward the men who were waiting in a small semicircle, prepared to greet him. They had built a fire in an old oil drum, burning trash to make a wan flickering flame adequate to warm their hands against the receding night's chill.

Dalkimoni smiled as he approached them, opening his arms to enfold the first of the men at one end of the crescent, and embrace him as a brother in arms. Soon, he thought, as he moved to the second man in line, they would all be going to a place where such contrivances would no longer be necessary.

With luck, many others would forever join them there.

Breaux had flagged down one of the assault force's JLTVs and ridden the almost half-mile distance to the building that had been assaulted by C-Detachment. With a screech of tires, the son-of-a-Hummer rolled down the steeply graded ramp, soon disgorging the strike force's commander in the midst of the underground car park.

The place, which had been in semi-darkness at the time of the fire-fight, was now well-lit with sodium-arc lamps — part of the gear the American forces had brought along — powered by taps applied to the building's electricity. The truck and the bloodied corpses of the Iranians who had defended it, stood out in stark detail, grimly lit by the harsh blue-white glare of the portable lamps.

Breaux was quickly briefed by the unit's leader and then had a look around for himself. As he surveyed the corpses strewn around the captured truck, Breaux had no doubt that the men who his force combatants had surprised here had been about to embark on a covert behind-the-lines mission of some kind.

The Israeli uniforms and weapons that they ported alone bespoke this fact. The truck was found to have had mechanical difficulties, which explained its presence in the garage.

Inside the truck's cargo area, they found mounts on floor and ceiling for cargo that would require strong cushioning against the shock of rough desert road transport. There was no manifest of any kind found inside the truck's cab or on the persons of the corpses to describe what this cargo might have been, though.

All that Breaux knew for sure was that men had been prepared to die here, rather than surrender, and this fact told him that the cause for which they'd martyred themselves had to have been of great importance to them. The truck told him more as well. His mind flashed back to the road beyond the Elburz, flashed back to the team's undercover work in Germany earlier in the mission, flashed back to the high meadows of the Swiss Glarner Alps. There was surely a connection between this truck and the Bonn-Karachi truck convoy route. But what exactly? That question didn't yet have an answer.

The findings of the team equipped with NBC agent sniffers confirmed Breaux's growing fears, however. The sniffers showed heavy traces of chemical toxins and radioactivity clinging to the interior of the cargo bay. The truck had contained something extremely deadly and, to judge by the fittings in the cargo bay, fairly large and bulky. Breaux thought that there weren't too many things that fit that description — besides a bomb.

Breaux had a difficult choice to make.

He now suspected that there had been other trucks, containing a dirty hybrid nuclear device that had left the presidential palace for the same destination or destinations. But the unit's safety window was beginning to close. It was time to withdraw from the presidential palace. Satellite imaging showed a large contingent of VII Brigade reserve troops on its way to stage an assault to take back the palace.

Detachment Omega could not permit itself to be trapped here. The invasion's personnel requirements had been calculated to be sufficient to storm and secure the Mashdad presidential palace. The force could not prevail in a siege situation with as many troops as the Iranian military chose to throw against it.

The V-22 Ospreys that were to evacuate Detachment Omega were already in flight from Oman. The convertiplanes, which had refueled over the Persian Gulf, had a current ETA of fifteen-plus minutes. Breaux's teams were already forming up in the compound, ready to embark on landing. Breaux had his orders: they were to evacuate along with the rest of his hard-chargers.

But as the final V-22 came in to pick up the troops, Breaux issued entirely different orders. A platoon-sized detachment of hand-picked volunteers was to fly toward the highway in the Osprey with Angry Falcon AH-1Z support. It was to search for any large trucks it found similar to the one in the underground car park and destroy them after warning the drivers to evacuate. If capture seemed immanent, the American troops were to blow the aircraft and themselves up rather than surrender to the Iranians. Breaux and his volunteers had now also found a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Jubaird Dalkimoni walked to the first of the four trucks to inspect the precious cargos each carried onboard. He actually needed only two of these big lorries; the others were for backup in the event that the first two failed for some reason to perform as expected. Yet a fifth truck had malfunctioned, and its cargo offloaded to one of the present vehicles, he had learned; but this possibility had been anticipated, thus the redundancy built into the plan.

The operation, Dalkimoni knew, would be his crowning achievement, and would represent a major victory for the Rais.

Faramoosh Mozafferreddin would in the end emerge victorious in an uneven conflict with the Western democracies that had lasted the course of many decades.

The victory would bring incalculable glory to the Iranian leader. It would destroy the American presence among the Arab states of the Gulf and it would pour the holy fire of Islam's righteous wrath down upon the Israelis in a bloodbath unequaled by anything in antiquity, just as the Rais had promised long ago.

In the first dull glimmers of early morning, Dalkimoni stepped into the first truck to inspect the cargo. The false fronts of the packing crates had been moved aside by his soldiery, and the smooth metallic surface of one of the Winged Bulls of King Darius was exposed to his view.

Beautiful, awesome, he thought. A beauty as terrible and fierce as that of the desert sun that was now rising over the land to cast its scalding rays over the parched and desolate earth.

Since prehistory, men here had worshipped that celestial power, and now Dalkimoni would unleash that same elemental force in the service of his country and his cause. He could now die, in the knowledge that the culmination of everything to which he had devoted his life was about to be realized in a single obliterating flash of terrible glory.

Dalkimoni moved closer within the confining shadows of the truck's cargo hold. He reached out to touch the ovoid weapon slung between the welded steel cocoon of its support assembly. Such protection against shock was necessary to ward off premature detonation. The nuclear explosives were sensitive to the slightest vibration. They were as delicate as eggs.

Yet these were dragon's eggs. The fiery beasts that would emerge from them would consume the Middle East, changing it for a thousand years. They were indeed that consuming fire that Mozafferreddin had promised years before, during the cowardly attacks of the Western coalition's many shock and awe campaigns against Iranian WMD installations.

Then, the Leader had pledged that sacred fire would eat up all of infidel Israel. He had sworn this by Allah, sworn his holiest of oaths before the assembled nations of the earth, sworn it at the unbelieving warmonger in the White House with heroic defiance.

And the Rais had meant it. Had meant every word that he had uttered, there in the confines of his bunker beneath the presidential palace, that same bunker beneath the complex of buildings that had once been the US Embassy in Tehran.

Over the years of his long and provident rule the Rais had proven that he was not like other men. Surely not like the cowardly Americans. He did not calculate his actions in days, weeks, or months. He thought in terms of years, in decades, in centuries. Surely the Leader wove his plans for all eternity.

Mozafferreddin had known then that he was powerless against the United States' formidable technological might, even the courage and prowess in battle of its soldiers. But he had been ready to sacrifice for victory, and to plan even in defeat. Even then, the germ of his nuclear weapons program was taking root. Slowly, steadily, irresistibly, despite the brutal economic sanctions and the UN inspections imposed by the unfair peace treaty he had signed, the expertise and technology base grew.

In time, the four Winged Bulls — Al Assur, the Warrior, Al Tammuz, the Anointed, Al Gerra, the Fire Bringer and Al Samas, Lord of Light — had been fashioned from bomb-grade U-235 extracted by cascades of gas centrifuges hidden deep below the Leader's many presidential palaces.

And here they now were, these terrible weapons of glory. Ready for use against the hated enemies of the Rais.

Dalkimoni continued his inspection. The nuclear weapons were complete and perfect in every regard, except for the arming and blast initiation modules engineered from the Columbine Heads he had spirited with him to Tehran. These he now screwed into special receptacles in each bomb casing. They were not yet armed, however, but they soon would be. For the time being, Dalkimoni issued instructions for his soldiers to move the false crates into position and to seal the trucks' cargo holds.

Then he approached the drivers. Those who would deliver the weapons were each given what Dalkimoni told them were "visas for heaven." On one side of each wallet-sized Mylar card were printed the arming codes for the nuclear weapon onboard an individual truck. On the other side, prayers and greetings for the guardians of the gates of Behesht Zahra — heavenly paradise. On meeting these celestial gatekeepers they were to present their visas, and gain admittance to an eternity of unceasing delight.

As to arming the weapons, they were instructed to do this just before crossing the two borders. The first would be detonated away to the north, inside the Americans' puppet state of Iraq — this weapon's team carried the designation Al-Marduk. The second nuke would explode in the west, beyond the border crossing with Syria — Al-Tiamat was its team's designation.

Dalkimoni assured the drivers that the visa cards they carried would not fail to win them a place of honor in the next world. In heaven these cards would be read by the Prophet himself, and would instantly assure their bearers of the blessings reserved only for Islam's heroic mujahideen.

In their eyes, Dalkimoni saw that they truly believed every word he told them. That was good. The ration of hashish issued to each man would also help, the doctor well knew. It would make it easier for the simpletons to chew on the ration of bullshit about heaven he now expected them to swallow hook, line and sinker.

Breaux's team rotored low across the parched desert crust toward the rising sun in the V-22. Meanwhile, the rest of the unit was extracting westward, to the safety of Drop Forge inside friendly Jordan. Those on the way back had grumbled at deserting the boss, but Breaux had laid down the law, and they'd done as ordered.

Breaux's destination was the main trunk of the Tehran-Isfahan highway. There, he might chance to interdict the route of the other trucks he suspected would form a convoy, as trucks usually did along the route.

He realized his strategy was a long-shot. Hell, it was worse than that. It was Quixotic and probably suicidal. On the other hand, what would you call who-knew-how-many nukes making their way across the highway? Genocidal. And genocide beat suicide any day of the week. Besides, what other option did he have? Calling in B-52 strikes against every truck in Iran just wasn't going to cut it.

No. Breaux had to bet on those trucks being on the Tehran-Isfahan stretch of the Bonn-Karachi truck route. It was the most likely place to find them in a region of the world where few highways existed capable of supporting heavy vehicle traffic. This fact alone brought the chance of locating the rigs within the realm of the possible. The highway amounted to the only transport corridor the trucks could use.

But then what? On this point Breaux figured he would just have to improvise.

The two Iranian Mig-29 Fulcrums had been scrambled to deal with the escaping convertiplanes. Two of the Viper attack helos were along to ride shotgun, but they would be of little use against the speed, armament and sophisticated avionics of Russia's personal best.

This was especially so since, with covert Soviet retrofitting, the relatively few first-line MiG fighters that the Iranian air force possessed had been upgraded with the latest that the Mikoyan Design Bureau had to offer. The planes were not only faster and more maneuverable than ever before, but they could be equipped with anybody's weapons, thanks to their hybrid missile launch rack systems. The wing strakes on the retrofitted Fulcrums could take French, British and American air-to-air or air-to-ground munitions, as well as natively manufactured Russian bombs and rockets.

Soon the MiG pilots closed with the escaping helos, which had split up and began undertaking evasive maneuvers. The Fulcrums did too, each selecting their first targets. The prioritizing was cut-and-dried here: The AH-1Z Vipers were the most dangerous, so they had to go first.

They were not about to go easily, though. Spotting the Fulcrums, one of the helos banked and got off two Sidewinder strikes before the MiG could return fire, causing the Fulcrum pilots to break left and right in order to evade the heat-seeking missile warheads.

When the Fulcrums came out of their defensive maneuvers, the escaping helos were no longer in visual range. The Fulcrums searched the skies, hunting their prey like the mechanical sharks they so closely resembled. They were not stymied for long. Their long-range threat identification radars soon got a target skin paint on a due west bearing.

Yes, they had them again.

This time the MiG pilots would not make the mistake of closing before firing. They would fire their French Mistral-3 missiles at the weapons' maximum standoff range. The Vipers were primarily tank- and armor-busters, never intended to undertake airborne combat. They possessed nothing like the radars of air dominance fighter planes such as MiG-29 Fulcrums. The MiG pilots simply kept out of range of the helos' weapons, put the pipper on their targets and pickled off their ordnance.

The Vipers didn't stand a chance, and they soon were history. The missiles scored two good kills within a matter of seconds. Puffballs of orange-black fire marked the places in the sky where the Marine helos had flown, whole and intact, moments before. The choppers had completely disintegrated under the impact of the lethal air-to-air munitions strikes. There was just nothing left.

Now the Fulcrums went after the V-22 convertiplanes. Here they had even less to fear from their far slower and completely unarmed quarry. And here again, they could effectively engage and destroy the target from the limits of standoff range. The Fulcrum pilots selected AA-10 Alamo beyond-BVR-capable missiles, the next best in their hybrid warload, and uncaged the birds. The missiles began to track and in moments would be ready to launch.

The MiGs had only seconds left before destruction, however, though their pilots didn't yet realize it. A far deadlier and far stealthier opponent than even the Fulcrums had been tracking the fighter sortie through the skies and was about to launch an AMRAAM strike on each enemy plane.

Behind the sleek armored laminate bubble canopies of the F-22 Raptors, the flight leader and his wingman had both acquired their targets, opened the internal weapons carriage doors and exposed the CSRL multiple launch racks so the AMRAAMs could uncage and complete the launch sequence. Now the Raptors' automatic fire control systems cooked off their birds.

The first and last intimation of the onset of death was the threat radars screeching out warning tones in the Fulcrum pilots' headsets. One moment they were about to fire on their slow-moving, unprotected targets, the next they themselves had come under surprise attack from a far deadlier foe. The MiG pilots broke sidelong to evade, their own attacks automatically aborted because the uncaged missiles had not yet been ready to launch.

The two AMRAAM missiles closed with the bogies and detonated on impact, destroying the Fulcrums in a meteoric shower of metal and flame. High overhead, the Raptors streaked past the fireworks display on opposite bearings. One F-22 escorted the Ospreys toward the Jordanian border. The other fighter plane broke eastward, in search of the idiot treehead colonel who the sortie had learned had gone off looking to win himself a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Chapter Nineteen

Breaux's problems were complicated by a shamal that had blown up during the convertiplane's low-altitude transit of the desert. The V-22 was of course equipped with advanced FLIR imaging modules, but forward looking infrared is essentially a navigational and targeting aid, not a search tool. An effective airborne search effort requires a lot of visual scanning of the outlying terrain with the naked human eye and field glasses where necessary.

The swirling clouds of sand and ice particles, blown by winds of often cyclonic velocity, also made keeping the V-22 airborne a test of the cockpit crew's skill, nerve, grit and determination. The Omega combat personnel at the helm were scared shitless, but they kept right on flying into the teeth of the worsening weather system. None of them had ever encountered anything like this before, not in training or in combat. It was, in short, a gold-plated, died-in-the-wool, fifty-ton-gorilla-sized bitch.

The Osprey continued to fly on.

The prayers of supplication had been concluded. The Trusted Ones, those brethren beloved of Allah, rose from the dust of the desert floor, their outer clothing stained with ochre patches. In their eyes, Dalkimoni saw the telltale gleam of fanaticism.

He had never fully understood it. He had always loathed it. Sometimes, indeed quite often, he had feared it as the force of mindless destruction that it undoubtedly was.

But the doctor had always known that it could be used. Focused and directed like a laser beam it was one of the primal, elemental forces of human nature, perhaps of the universe itself. It could and had toppled empires throughout the ages. Soon; very, very soon, it was to perform this miracle yet again.

The bomb-maker nodded at his bodyguard of Takavar, provided by Bashar himself. They were to secure the area after the trucks departed. No sign of their presence — including the hapless ones who'd been killed — was to be left behind.

Then Dalkimoni and they would depart for Tehran, there to await news of the developments that would take place within the space of a scant few hours. As the cool of the morning gradually changed to the fiery heat of the day, as the shamal dissipated and the desert sun rose to its zenith, other suns would rise. Suns of death — and vengeance long delayed.

The Marine piloting the Osprey angrily shook his head. The V-22 was running low on fuel. The convertiplane had limited avgas reserves and would have to turn around real soon if the crew and passengers stood any chance of reaching safety. Though the Osprey was equipped for air-to-air refueling, though it could drink avgas from a KC-10A through its nose-mounted refueling probe, it would first have to cross over to the friendly side of the Saudi or Jordanian border before filling up.

Fuelbirds preferred to dispense aviation gasoline at approximately twenty thousand feet. Flying the boom at this altitude kept the fuel at the right pressure and temperature to insure the maximum rate of dispersal, and also helped prevent other things happening to the avgas, like the formation of ice crystals in the mix.

The maximum ceiling for tanker aircraft was about forty thousand feet. This was a high ceiling for a tanker, but a low ceiling for a SAM. A fuelbird coupled up with a V-22 would be as easy a target for an Iranian SAM as two roaches fucking on the kitchen wall for a well-aimed sneaker.

The bottom line was that the V-22 had to be over friendly air before it had its drink. That was the long and the short of it. The Osprey had been outfitted with additional onboard fuel storage capacity, but the aircraft burned up hundreds of gallons by the minute, and flight time had to be precisely calculated. Breaux understood the equation. He knew that mere minutes remained to spot those trucks, and if he didn't luck out, then the Fat Lady had already sung, and that was it.

Then, with unexpected suddenness, through a break in the swirling maelstrom of the shamal, he caught sight of the dull glimmerings of white-painted rectangular objects below. He thought there were numerical markings on them, the kind trucks often had on their roofs; the kind the captured lorry at the presidential palace had also displayed.

Breaux told the pilot to circle around for another look. As the convertiplane made a second pass, the swirling curtain of sand and ice parted enough to reveal the pumping station directly below.

To Breaux's relief the rectangular objects he'd spotted before turned out to be trucks.

Four of them.

Suddenly, and from out of nowhere, they had come under attack.

It was difficult to determine just who or what was shooting at them.

Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni looked up, shielding his eyes, trying to piece together exactly what had happened. He'd heard the unmistakable sound of helicopter rotor blades. That much was clear. Through the parting sheets of whirling sand and driving sleet Dalkimoni could make out the bulky black shape weaving back and forth across the sky.

It was a helo.

Yes. A large one. Almost like a plane.

And he soon saw men fast-roping down from its open rear hatch.

Commandos!

The Israelis perhaps?

Or the Sons of Dogs, the Americans.

Still more likely.

Whoever it was, they would die. Thankfully, he had brought along a force of Takavar and they were ably trained. Let them now do their job.

"Shoot them! There! Above you!" Dalkimoni shouted, gesturing upwards.

Pulling a Skorpion machine pistol from the pit holster slung across his chest, Dalkimoni began firing three-round bursts at the invaders from the sky as if to lead by example. His wild, desperate shooting accomplished nothing, struck nothing. But it encouraged the others to go into action.

All at once defensive small arms fire started up from positions scattered throughout the truck stop. Glowing tracer bullets spat toward the hovering chopper from which human targets were emerging.

There were commandos descending on the truck stop. Americans. There was no mistaking it now. From glimpses of the enemy's chocolate-chips BDUs it was obvious they were under attack by US troops.

The purple berets worn by the assault force completed the picture. Special Forces. From where had they come? It didn't matter. They were here. Fight or be killed was the name of the game.

Dalkimoni's men took cover wherever they could, reloading and firing again and again as the final red tracers in sustained automatic bursts informed them that their ammo magazines were running dry. The Eagle Patchers were now on the ground, outnumbered by unfriendlies. The unarmed Osprey cleared out, but the AH-1Z's rockets and nose cannon evened the score considerably. Once Omega was down and engaged with the enemy, the fight moved away from the trucks, spilling over into the abandoned buildings of the pumping station.

In sum, it became a melee, with part of the US strike force up to its ears trying to take out the Takavar in fierce close-quarter combat, and the rest attempting to secure the nuclear weapons trucks before their hell-bent-on-suicide drivers were able to get them rolling onto the highway again.

Breaux glimpsed the familiar face of the Arab bomb-maker amidst the shifting, surging chaos of combat. It was just as pug-ugly as in the three-position Bertillon mugshot that the German cop Winternitz had shown him back at the safe house in Berlin. Now, Dalkimoni was hotfooting it to one of the motorcade's SUVs where the bloodied corpse of a bullet-pocked Takavar commando was slumped over the steering wheel.

The bomb-maker struggled to pull the heavy, dead weight from behind the wheel and dump the corpse onto the ground. While Dalkimoni was busy heaving the cadaver, Breaux snapped off a burst of AK-74 fire and a brace of stub-nosed 5.45-millimeter bullets spanged and wheezed against the side of the cab, shattering glass and pockmarking metal. Unhanding the dead man, Dalkimoni quick-drew his Skorpion machinepistol and snapped off an answering nine-millimeter autoburst, forcing Breaux to drop down and kiss the sand.

When he rose back up again, Dalkimoni had ditched the troublesome corpse and was already behind the steering wheel with the ignition roaring. The SUV was now barreling away from Breaux, peeling off smoking rubber as its tires screamed for purchase on the shifting desert sands. Breaux tried to shoot out the tires, but the marker tracers he'd loaded showed him the bullpup rifle's clip only had a few rounds left in it. So far none of them seemed to have inflicted any severe damage on the getaway car. Breaux tossed aside the now dry AK and unholstered his Beretta service sidearm, a double-action weapon he carried unsafetied and hammer-down in condition-one mode.

Gun drawn, Breaux bolted after the truck, nearly taking a hit from another volley of Skorpion autofire that Dalkimoni backhanded his way out the driver's-side window. With the SUV still floundering in the sand, Breaux jumped onto the passenger-side running board and smashed the window to splinters with the receiver of this pistol, shards of safety glass peppering his face and temporarily blinding him.

As Breaux shook off the translucent blue flakes of shattered window glass, Dalkimoni leveled his machinepistol and fired a burst straight across the seat. Breaux ducked just in time to dodge the shot pattern as bullets went whipping past his head, triggering an answering Beretta round on the follow-through.

But nothing happened as the hammer dropped. The Beretta had apparently jammed and hung fire. Not surprising, the thought flashed through Breaux's mind — only an asshole would trust an automatic to function in the middle of a sandstorm after using it as a fire axe.

Breaux guessed that this clearly made him an asshole, but he could kick himself later. Right now he had a raging Arab terrorist pointing a Skorpion machinepistol at his head, and, unlike his own, the bad guy's gun seemed to be working just fine.

Breaux ducked below the shattered window as a burst of hot lead punched through the space his head had occupied a moment earlier. He considered pitching a mini-grenade into the cab and then jumping off the SUV, but at the reckless speed Dalkimoni was driving he'd probably wind up breaking his own neck. Besides, Breaux wanted Dalkimoni in one piece if he could at all arrange it. He had his own reasons for this.

Now the door went pock — pock — pock. Three steel rosebuds blossomed in quick succession to the right and left of the handle.

Then suddenly, from within the cab of the SUV, Breaux heard Dalkimoni howl in pain. Breaux intuitively knew what had happened. Dalkimoni had let his emotions overrule his common sense and continually aimed low to shoot right through the door frame hoping more easily to hit his opponent's vitals.

Inevitably one or more of the PB slugs he'd fired through the door had fragmented on impact. A ricocheting sliver of lead had probably hit him.

Breaux risked taking a Skorpion volley in the face and snapped back up to peer through the glass-less window frame.

Sure enough, Breaux saw that Dalkimoni was bleeding from a wound above his left eye. Blood was pouring down his collar too. A slug fragment had gouged a chunk of meat from his head, but it was a superficial wound. The bomb-maker was still very much alive and kicking. But at least he didn't have his gun anymore. In the heat of action he'd dropped it and it had tumbled out of reach.

With Dalkimoni now disarmed, Breaux tried to yank open the passenger door but it was locked from inside and the lock mechanism damaged by bullet strikes. Reaching in with his hand, Breaux tried to pull the frozen inner latch, dodging the wickedly sharp blade of a spring-loaded knife that Dalkimoni suddenly pulled from his pocket and with which he now tried to slice off Breaux's fingers as he one-handed the wheel.

But the swaying, lurching path of the SUV made it impossible to play Japanese sushi chef with Breaux's hand and control the vehicle at the same time. Breaux was finally able to get a sufficiently solid grip on the latch so he could apply enough leverage to yank open the door.

Breaux was soon in the passenger seat, the passenger door banging open and shut as its damaged lock prevented it from securing against the wildly careening vehicle. Dalkimoni's knife went clattering out the driver's window as both men grappled for it. The fight for control of the SUV quickly degenerated into an ugly primal contest between two antagonists bereft of weapons, bereft of even the ability to use combat skills in the tightly enclosed space. It was now a clawing, punching, head-butting, body-thrashing, arm-wrenching brawl. A death match where grunts of struggle displaced words, and stabs of blinding pain replaced coherent thoughts.

In the end it was the SUV that decided the issue, and the human combatants who had to abide by its judgment call. Now Breaux's hands were on the wheel, now Dalkimoni's. And now again possession of the steering wheel changed once more. In the end, the four-by-four careened off the access road of the truck stop, fishtailed almost completely around, and crashed head-on into the concrete base of a steel electrical pylon located just off the highway.

The impact of the collision sent both men sprawling against the dashboard, roof and doors, badly cut and batiked with blood as the truck's airbags inflated. The main difference between them was that Dalkimoni had been knocked unconscious in the collision while Breaux still had his wits about him. Breaux figured that made him the winner by default as he dragged the dazed bomb-maker out of the wreckage by his feet.

By the time Breaux returned to the pumping station, Force Omega combat personnel had the area nailed down tight. Those Takavar who had not been killed in battle were seated in a line with their hands clasped behind their heads, watched over by Eagle Patcher teams with rifles pointed at their faces.

The wounded were either being treated by the team's medic or were already aboard the V-22, while the Raptor, which had found Breaux's detachment, flew a high-altitude security CAP overhead. Bandaged and bloodied, in many cases, most of the American volunteers had survived the engagement and were grateful to be alive. Later, they would be called heroes, but Breaux would see that those who started bragging about it would no longer be part of Omega.

As for the rest — friendly and unfriendly KIAs were lined up on the desert crust in the burnished copper light of dawn. The only difference between them now was that the friendlies were being zipped into vinyl body bags while the unfriendlies were dragged inside the empty pumping station's blockhouses. Worms, snakes and scorpions would soon have their way with them there.

By the time Dalkimoni came around he was securely handcuffed with cable-ties and under guard with the rest of the Iranian POWs. Breaux was over by the trucks where his counter-WMD people with special technical training and equipment were completing an assessment of the nukes.

They had come to the Mashdad presidential palace prepared to destroy weapons of mass destruction in place if necessary. The Eagle Patchers had carried into combat with them special demolition charges developed by DARPA that were supposed to be able to accomplish this job with minimal risk of environmental contamination.

The charges were part plastic high-explosive, part incendiary. They were phased detonation charges, designed to surround a nuclear or biological/chemical weapon in a cocoon of blast, intense heat and overpressure sufficient to vaporize even plutonium weapon cores and the most virulent weaponized biologicals known to exist in the arsenals of rogue nations.

The one problem was that they had never been tested in actual battlefield use, only in computer simulations. But there was a first time for everything.

As Breaux watched, the counter-WMD specialists were completing the placement of the charges on the nuclear weapons in all four of the captured trucks. The charges would be set for delayed time detonations to enable the helos to get clear of the blast with a radio-controlled backup available in case the timers failed to work.

This was possible but not probable — the best timing electronics had gone into the timers, and they were multistage, so if one chip failed, two more ICs backed each of them up. Everything was redundant. It would fly.

With the nukes rigged to blow, Breaux gave the orders for the team to deploy. As for the captured Iranian commandos, they were handed the keys to their vehicles and told what was about to happen. They had five minutes to put as much distance between themselves and the next Sodom and Gomorrah as they were capable of doing. The Takavar wasted no time in climbing into their SUVs and beating a path out of the pumping station, the wounded helped by those who had emerged from battle unscathed, the dead left behind without a second thought.

The sandstorm, which had abated, was again worsening somewhat. Yet now for the first time the V-22 pilot looked upon the shamal with equanimity, even something approaching welcome. The weather would help hide the multirole transport from Iranian air and ground patrols, he surmised. And the powerful blasts from the det charges would also keep the enemy guessing.

Within minutes, loaded down with SFOD-O personnel, the Osprey lifted off and translated to horizontal flight. The special-purpose charges detonated before the convertiplane had gotten more than a mile from ground zero.

On the horizon there arose a mushrooming pillar of fire and luminous, billowing cloud that reached up to momentarily eclipse the sun, or so at least it seemed. Satellite sensors in space would later determine that the fissile pits of Iran's Winged Bulls had been vaporized with only a few percentiles of radioactive fallout having leaked into the atmosphere. Most of the fallout was clean. That was considerably better than what Iran had planned for its Middle Eastern neighbors.

Inside the Osprey, Breaux looked down to where Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni lay hog-tied on the deck. The bomb-maker was the sole prisoner that Omega was taking back to Jordan with it. But Dalkimoni would not be turned over to the Army provost marshall at Drop Forge. Far from it. Breaux would make sure nobody there even knew about the prisoner. Dalkimoni's fate was to be a private matter, one that SFOD-O would handle as a special favor to a good friend.

The bomb-maker didn't know it yet, but in a few days a large containerized, climate-controlled shipping module would arrive on a Lufthansa flight into Tempelhof International Airport. The cargo would appear listed on the airline's manifest as a rare silverback gorilla destined for the internationally renowned Berlin Zoo.

The manifest would further inform customs officials that although the gorilla had been sedated for the stressful flight, the beast was still highly dangerous and not under any circumstances to be disturbed or provoked. At the airport, a team of expert animal handlers dispatched from the Berlin Zoo would arrive by truck and the cargo container be duly claimed. On the autobahn, however, the turnoff for the zoo would be bypassed and another one taken that would shortly bring the truck to BKA headquarters in Berlin. Here a grateful German cop would snap the cuffs on the savage who had killed his only joy in life.

At about the same time that this would happen, several thousand miles and several time zones away, Bashar would receive a fresh jar of fish food from one of his lackeys. He would inspect its contents and permit himself the seldomly enjoyed pleasure of a smile.

The fish would have quite a treat today, he would muse, dropping a choice tidbit from the tweezers into the tank. They seemed to relish human gonads, he would say to himself, even those such as these, still bloody from being hacked with a very dull knife from the traitorous mahmoons who had run from Americans rather than fight the hated Sons of Dogs.

Farther still from Berlin, yet another player in the just-ended game would sip a vodka martini and ponder the events that had recently transpired, thinking about another scheme in which his poputchik might prove useful. It would be wise to console him in defeat, he decided.

Setting down his glass, Soviet Premier Boris Starchinov would pick up the desk phone and order a dozen prize Siamese fighting fish delivered to Tehran on the next available flight.