Bloodbath

Chapter One

Colonel Stone Breaux, far from the bayou country of Lafayette, Louisiania in which he was born, sat behind the wheel of the fast attack vehicle, freezing his cojones off, the plastic-bagged handset of a JTRS field radio clutched in one tactical-gloved hand.

The patch on the upper right sleeve of his desert camo field jacket bore the horseshoe-shaped Greek symbol for omega on a shield crossed by a sword, down-flashing lightning bolts, and a trident clutched in the talons a rampaging American eagle.

The unit's motto "A Clip Full of Hell" was stitched in gold across the bottom of the patch. It was the insignia of the elite US Army special operations brigade officially designated Special Forces Operational Detachment-Omega (SFOD-O) — the first-in, last-out force of choice for special missions too hard and too important for the other guys to handle. In fact, there wasn't another unit fit to wipe Omega's dirty asses, and every butt-kissing grunt in the entire US military damn well knew it.

In addition to being cold, Breaux was exhausted, his stamina and energy almost totally spent. Detachment Omega had been on the ground too long, and the cumulative effects had begun to tell. Breaux would be pulling his personnel out. He'd just radioed HQ for an evacuation aircraft.

Four hundred miles to the southwest, inside Saudi, a V-22 Osprey convertiplane was already being prepped for takeoff at SFOD-O's Zebra Talon command center at Jauf, sister site to the detachment's forward operating base, code-named Drop Forge, near Amman in neighboring Jordan. Another Osprey configured as a tanker would refuel the V-22 after it got airborne, and then it would be on its way to pick them up.

Too little sleep, too much adrenaline, too many Meals Rejected by Ethiopia, First Strike Rations and HOOAH! Bars, too much living on the edge, all of it had taken its toll on the troops. Breaux had seen evidence of combat fatigue in his personnel for the last few days, but hadn't noticed it in himself — until just before, when he'd chewed out the rear-echelon pogue back at Jauf on the other end of the radio link for no good reason, stuck the fire hose down his throat and turned on the pressure. Yeah, he was losing it. His men were losing it. It was time to get the hell out.

Breaux terminated communications with HQ on "jitters" and replaced the radio's handset, which was wrapped in a plastic baggie to keep out the incredibly fine-grained powdery stuff that was less sand than lunar dust.

The dust of the largest Iranian salt-pan desert, the Dasht-e-Kavir, got into everything, and was as widespread in the rocky north as the sandy south. It sifted into automotive engines, into the bolt actions of the AKMS bullpups the team carried into combat instead of the disfavored M16 — a weapon less than worthless in sustained desert ops — it even worked its way into the minute crevices of the skin. Baggies on the radio, condoms over rifle barrels; you needed this stuff here.

The sand was a hostile force, almost alive, almost part of the enemy's battle array. At its most benign it slowly enveloped the soldier in its suffocating embrace. But at times it could gather itself into the devastating storms called shamals by the Arabs. Such sandstorms struck without warning and almost always left destruction in their wake.

In the course of the nineteen consecutive days that Omega Force had been playing in the sandbox, the company-strength detachment from Omega's brigade-sized manpower pool had been almost devastated by one such storm. Despite an early satellite warning of the storm's approach and the hasty lashing down of their desert patrol vehicles (DPVs), weapons and miscellaneous gear, they had been forced to spend a day digging themselves out like mummies emerging from a crypt.

Iranian military patrols were another constant threat. SFOD-O had successfully played frag-tag with enemy units out on the desert, but there'd been some damn close calls. Even with overhead coverage from UAVs and TACSAT imaging satellites, the desert's many landscape features — folds, crevices, wadis, gullies, dunes, caves, pillars, berms, dikes, canals, to name just a few — made consistently reliable intel on enemy movements impossible.

Breaux's combat savvy told him that his force's lucky streak couldn't last much longer. It was best to pull the troops out before the bovine excrement hit the whirling blades. Dead soldiers were no good to anybody — except the enemy.

Right now the desert was deceptively tranquil. Outwardly, it was another freezing night in the stony badlands of Iran between Tehran and Isfahan. But the sector bristled with Breaux's troops, hidden away in wadis, spider holes and in seams and crevices in the landscape. In full battle dress, augmented with cold weather gear, the forty-member special forces commando formation was deployed across a dozen miles of almost lunar desolation, tied together by secure radio and SATCOM links.

With Breaux in command, the formation — operationally designated B-Comm (B-Command) — had been drawn from the ranks of the elite special operations brigade known variously as Detachment Omega, the Big Bad O, or simply Omega. Some called them O Shit, but weren't able to walk without support of crutches after taking that particularly liberty. Many called them Eagle Patchers because of their distinctive unit insignia. The detachment had been conducting special recon operations in the western desert for nearly three weeks, working in the nocturnal darkness accompanying a new moon and holing up during the day.

Tonight's mission marked the culmination of B-Comm's patrol activities inside Iran. B-Comm was overdue for extraction. The rigors of conducting sustained operations in the hostile desert environment combined with the unit's dwindling rations supplies and lack of sleep alone made extraction imperative.

The detachment would have been days gone already had it not been for Breaux's determination to stay until the mission's objectives had been fully met. One had been sent into Iran on a SLAM, or search, locate and annihilate mission. Breaux's brief had been to locate and identify the site of a plutonium refinement facility under construction in the Iranian desert a few hundred miles to the northeast of the Saudi Arabian border.

The job had fallen to SFOD-O because of intelligence unearthed on Omega's last mission inside Yugoslavia. Breaux's mind filled with the images of fiery holocaust in the last hours of this previous military campaign. Most of his original force had been killed in the confrontation with the Soviet-loaned Spetsnaz troops serving Macedonian maximum leader, Grand Marshall Dawit Aleksandriu, who had styled himself as the second coming of Alexander the Great, and who still menaced regional stability despite the best troops sent to depose him.

One involved party, the nameless intelligence agent — he'd used the operational alias "Congdon" — who had sent Breaux's men to their deaths, had probably been pleased at the outcome of the mission. The intelligence haul from Aleksandriu's underground lair had been a bonanza. It had pointed straight to the Middle East where weapons of mass destruction were being manufactured. Analysis of the intelligence was why Omega was here now.

Breaux's thoughts jumped forward in time, to the events of the past hour, during which he had led a team inside the Iranian installation to gather intelligence and emplace a special demolition charge to blow it up. The AH-1Z Viper gunship that was expected in minutes would raze surface structures, including the radio and guard towers, with Hellfire missile salvos and automatic cannon strikes, but its main purpose was to create a diversion to cover the Eagle Patchers' extraction by V-22 convertiplane at a nearby desert LZ.

The AH-1Z stood no chance of inflicting damage to the buried portion of the deep underground facility, or DUF, which was sheathed in layers of stressed concrete and steel and impervious even to a low-yield nuclear strike. The DUF was too deep even for a B61-11 nuclear glide bomb to destroy with complete confidence in the results.

Yet a nuclear strike would, in fact, take the base down. But this would be an explosion from within, not without. Breaux and his team had penetrated the base interior and implanted a Mk 54E SADM or special atomic demolition munition at its core level.

The blast of the compact mini-nuke, carried in a camo-patterned H-912 transport container, weighing a little under 150 pounds, and packing a 1.5 kiloton blast yield (the "E" stood for enhanced), was calculated to shatter the foundations and implode the structure down around it, burying any residual radioactivity and hermetically sealing it beneath millions of cubic tons of rubble, wreckage and sand. Iranian patrols that had gotten in the way had been eliminated and hidden out of sight.

Long before the bodies might have been found, the base would go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Breaux's reflections were shattered by a series of hi-lo tones in his earbud.

"Magic Dog, be advised that arrival of Lynch Pin is imminent. Repeat. Lynch Pin imminent."

"That's affirm," Breaux said back. "Out."

Breaux now no longer needed the remote voice to inform him of the approach of the two aircraft. His pulse quickened as he heard the sounds that harbingered their arrival.

It began as a distant rumbling just a decibel or two above the audible threshold. Then it became a steady chugging, distorted by weird harmonics. Seconds later the two aircraft appeared as false-color aperture imagery in Breaux's thermal view field, the smaller, nimbler dragonfly shape of the AH-1Z Viper gunship darting in ahead of the larger, wider V-22 tilt-rotor, now in heliplane mode.

The ghost ships skimmed incredibly low across the surface of the desert, scudding like wraiths through the moonless blackness of the cold, arid night. Above the site of the Iranian NBC installation the two ships parted company. The AH-1Z took up a position several hundred yards from the base and hovered there while the V-22 broke toward B-Command's rendezvous point and LZ.

There was no communication from either ground or airborne personnel. Although they had secure radio links, the teams would continue to follow EMCON procedures and maintain radio silence. Both groups, the Osprey and Vipers supplied by Marine aviation, had their orders, both had been briefed on the OPPLAN, and both knew the parts they were expected to play.

The AH-1Z continued to loiter low above the ground. Waiting. Waiting. Hanging and waiting.

Breaux held the wireless remote-detonation unit in one tactical-gloved hand while he input the nuclear gold code necessary to arm and trigger the SADM at the small keypad on the face of the unit, watching a line of asterisks appear on the small LED panel.

Authorization approved, flashed the panel, a few moments later. Proceed to detonation countdown?

Breaux nodded at Top Sgt. Death who was seated beside him in the dune buggy and Death put shooter's plugs in his ears. Breaux did the same.

Breaux pressed the return key.

Detonation countdown initiated. Mark.

Breaux watched the numerals flash across the screen as the countdown sequence went from ten to zero in as many seconds. The mini-nuke was set with a backup timer in case remote detonation failed.

At the zero mark nothing happened for another second or two as the ignition processor in the dull gray steel canister chewed on stop bit number X-789B-00-5, then accepted it as valid, and began the ignition sequence. The nuke dutifully obliged, and shaped charges imploded a core of plutonium to critical mass, causing a nuclear chain reaction enriched by a tritium booster.

Breaux heard a dull rumbling beneath the earth, then felt the first shock waves radiating outward from the blast in the desert's bowels. The DPV's chassis shook and the lights around the base perimeter were suddenly extinguished.

There was no visible blast. The force of the explosion was contained and encapsulated within concrete and earth, but the concrete blockhouses, steel antenna pylons, barracks buildings, Quonset huts and other structures on the surface trembled as if struck by a severe earthquake. As they began to implode, then disintegrate, Breaux heard the shouts and screams of terrified Iranian troops caught amid the devastation.

Their terror would be intense, though mercifully brief. At that moment, the AH-1Z Viper began firing Hellfire missiles into the epicenter of the blast zone. Now there was flame, now there were explosions, now death strode forth from hell as a reaper of souls. As the missiles struck, seeding the earth with toadstools of flame, the gun ship circled the kill zone, pouring down twenty millimeter automatic cannon fire, glowing red tracers streaking into the molten mass of burning lava to which the base had been reduced.

"Man, that was some awesome shit," Sgt. One Eyes observed.

"Top, we're out of here," Breaux told First Sgt. Death, and the DPV swept away into the night, toward the distant LZ, leaving a cloud of dust behind it.

Across the desert Force Omega personnel were breaking cover. They fell back toward the extraction LZ from hide sites and lookout posts spread out along a circular perimeter a mile in circumference.

All but one six-man team.

Team Fang remained in position on both sides of a stretch of desert blacktop. The team's orders were to remain there and cover the withdrawal of the main body of B-Comm. Team Fang would be the last SFOD-O personnel out of the op zone.

Breaux held onto the roll bar of the DPV as Sgt. Death highballed the souped-up and heavily armed road racer across the undulations and declivities of the desert surface. Death followed the track of a GPS unit that had the waypoints to the rendezvous point already programmed in.

Across the desert, other teams making up B-Comm were doing likewise. At the LZ, the V-22 had set down with its huge engine nacelles and giant paddle-blade prop-rotors tilted up in helo mode, ready for a rapid takeoff. Its rear loading ramp was lowered. Pilot and copilot scanned the horizon through NODs, the copilot standing at the base of the ramp and carrying an M-249 Minimi SAW charged and fed from a 7.62-millimeter box mag, just in case things got hairy.

Mobile detachment VI of the 12th Battalion of the Ali Khamenei Division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, was stationed at a lonely outpost in the desert not far from Omega's strike zone. The motorized contingent had been on a routine night patrol trawling for smugglers which had been using the route to run contraband into Turkey along the northwestern Iraqi border north of Amadiya when it heard the rapid, pulsating booms of multiple explosions.

Its commander, Captain Yahya Shah, had radioed headquarters for orders and to request support. Both were immediately given. Shah's contingent was of company strength with Shah and three other men in a scout car and the rest of the unit in two BTR-70s, each BTR containing a platoon-strength element. Several of Shah's men, including Shah himself, were equipped with Belgian copies of the Litton binocular M-912A night vision goggle, Gen-III-class gear, and the best night vision equipment the Iranians possessed.

With the arrival of another company from battalion HQ imminent, Shah judged his own small force sufficient to reconnoiter the source of the blast and issued orders to roll toward it.

If nothing else, his troops could establish an observation post near the epicenter of the blast. If it had been a military strike, they could then spot for artillery and aircrew, even other follow-on mechanized forces.

If it turned out to be an attack, his force might then play a more active role.

He was hopeful that it would be the latter.

Chapter Two

From his seat in the AH-1Z Viper's front cockpit, the gun ship's weapons systems officer or WSO (Whizzo) gazed down upon a landscape of utter devastation.

The gunner had fired off virtually every last round of ordnance the helo had carried into combat — minus a small reserve of armor-busting Hellfire missiles, unguided Zuni rockets and a few thousand rounds of twenty mike-mike depleted uranium (DU) cannon rounds for the return trip back across the fence into the land of the Sheiks and the home of the rich.

Hovering several hundred yards slant-range of the target, the gun ship was now lighter by nearly a ton as it hung above the burning witch's cauldron, swaying in the air as the snake driver — seated in the second cockpit above and behind the gunner's capsule — used cyclic and collective pitch controls to compensate for the powerful thermal updrafts generated by the conflagration.

The helicrew's OPPLAN called for transiting from the attack site once it had visual confirmation that the target had been neutralized and cover the withdrawal of the special forces unit in theater. The snake driver was about to beeline for the RV point when his WSO warned him of trouble.

"Moose, hold off on the transit," Marine Airman 1st Class Johnny Costanza advised over cockpit interphone, "I've just received an Urgent Arrow priority alert."

The snake driver eased back on the cyclical pitch control stick, causing the pitch of the AH-1Z's dishing main rotor to change from the thirty-degree cant for forward locomotion to a flat, horizontal rotation for stationary flight. At the same time he eased back on the collective to slow the revolutions of the tail boom rotor. The helo stabilized into a low hover some twenty feet above the desert crust.

Urgent Arrow was the code phrase for battlespace intelligence derived from the Global Hawk long endurance UAV that had been tasked to overfly the op zone and transmit near-real-time and real-time tactical intelligence to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, from which the operation was remotely coordinated.

Because Global Hawk needed satellite relays to transmit the data to receiving stations on the Washington Beltway, there was a time-lag of several seconds in the Pentagon's link to the UAV. Viper's line-of-sight links were instantaneous, however. The WSO's console-mounted thermal scope dedicated to UAV downlink showed what the large, plane-like unmanned aerial vehicle's long-range cameras were seeing from about twenty thousand feet above the battlespace.

What appeared to be a mechanized Pasdaran scout patrol was moving across the desert toward friendly troops. The Whizzo hit the keypad on the instrumentation panel facing him a few times to increase magnification, and nodded his head. There it was in all its glory. No question now. Enemy.

But he did one more thing too, and that was key IFF per international rules of engagement. Since the Gulf War's high friendly casualty rate, US rules of engagement called for IFF interrogation, even with a visual confirm, unless first fired upon. As he'd known it would, IFF returned a negative confirm. The WSO keyed his mike again.

"Urgent Arrow shows two Bimps and a command vehicle approaching on Vector Bravo X-Ray Charlie Seven. I estimate we'll have 'em on thermal in thirty seconds."

"Good copy," the snake driver said back. "Let's frag them muthafuckin' goat dick suckers."

"That's affirm. I'm up for it."

The snake driver pulled back on the cyclical, again canting the helo's dishing rotors into an angle some forty-five degrees from the horizontal and increased the revs to the aluminum-honeycomb and stainless steel tail boom rotor. The AH-1Z shot forward, nose slightly down, tail slightly up, in hunter-killer mode as it closed with the enemy formation.

Within a matter of minutes the Viper's gunner had the unfriendly patrol sighted on forward-looking infrared. The FLIR scope presented a slant-range view of the two BMPs and an armored scout car. The helo closed fast at thirty knots but suddenly the false color FLIR images began to break up. The two armored personnel carriers each turned and rolled away from the contact's position on the desert, heading for the cover of nearby berms.

The Iranian patrol had spotted the gun ship and was taking evasive maneuvers.

The WSO already had one of the fleeing BTRs framed in his target acquisition reticle. He hit the joystick pickle button and the helo's onboard fire control system calculated a solution for a Hellfire strike. A heartbeat later, the helo bucked as one of the last remaining anti-armor missiles cooked off the AH-1Z's left stub wing dispenser and screamed down at the target Bimp on a contrail of white smoke.

"Go, bitch, go!" shouted the WSO as the round streaked on its slanting trajectory. "Notch my gun, you sucker!"

"Impact! Impact! Good kill! Good kill!"

The night exploded as the warhead slammed into the upper glacis of the target armored vehicle, blowing a gaping, petaled hole in the steel-plate armor of the vehicle and killing most of the men inside. Those still alive spilled from the ruptured hull as the vehicle heeled over and began to snap, crackle and pop on the desert floor, sending up voluminous clouds of dense black smoke. The AH-1Z's crew saw a few figures tumble from the wreckage just before the ammo and fuel stores began cooking off, creating a spate of secondary explosions.

Before the Viper turned to go after the surviving vehicles, the gunner turned his head to swing around the slaved M197 tri-barreled autocannon beneath the first cockpit. He hit the pickle and cooked off a sixteen-round burst — the maximum per salvo — of depleted twenty mike-mike uranium bullets at the survivors, seeing most of them blown apart in sprays of blood, one of them cut literally in half by a fusillade across the midsection. The WSO was about to finish off the stragglers when an explosion rocked the chopper.

"Hoo-ah," shouted the pilot. "That's some close shit." A rocket had just gone streaking by.

And close it had been. The surviving Bimp had turned and struck back at the helo while it was busy trashing the other armored vehicle. In retaliation the BTR crew had launched a Sagger antiaircraft missile at the AH-1Z. The Sagger had missed the chopper but exploded close enough to the target to box its ears.

The helo had been rocked hard by the midair detonation. Shrapnel spewed from the warhead casing's fragmentation sleeve had torn holes in the gun ship's main rotor and right engine nacelle, damaging sensitive propulsion systems.

Now, close behind the first, another Sagger missile streaked upward. The snake driver took immediate evasive action, jinking hard left and pulling for altitude. The incoming missile's vapor trail hissed past the cockpit canopies as the enemy warhead whooshed up into the night sky. In a moment the desert was lit up by the pulses of strobing explosions high above the sand.

Another near-miss.

Heavy tracer fire was now spurting up at the helo too, as both the scout car and the surviving Bimp opened up with their NSV 12.7 millimeter heavy machineguns, replacements for the lighter DShKs on earlier versions. The Bimp's crew was all over the desert now, taking up positions in swales and declivities on the uneven desert floor — anywhere they could find cover. Small arms and light machinegun fire soon merged with streams of bullets from the heavy MGs directed at the AH-1Z.

The helo swiveled on an invisible axis in the sky as the WSO acquired the most dangerous of the two remaining vehicles, the second BTR-70 armored carrier, for a follow-up Hellfire strike. Pin flares were now being sent up from the desert floor, their hellishly flickering white phosphorous light illuminating the battlespace.

Whether deliberate or unintentional, the action on the part of the Iranians had the effect not only of degrading the ability of the AH-1Z to hide in the night and strike from cover of darkness, but also affecting the helo's missile fire solution capability. The gunner's thermal sights were confused by the flares with the result that the Hellfire went dumb, slamming into the ground near the Bimp but not scoring a direct hit.

The close call left the BTR unhurt, except for shrapnel strikes on its armored skin. But the explosion did dislodge the machinegunner from his position inside the embrasure up top of the vehicle, temporarily putting the MG out of action. Turning, the AH-1Z overflew the BTR, raking the nearby scout car with DU rounds. The driver and unhorsed machinegunner were killed instantly and the vehicle set ablaze.

Now the pilot hovered the AH-1Z as the WSO acquired the Bimp with their last remaining Hellfire missile. He cooked it off, scoring a direct hit. The armored carrier burst into flames and began to burn up on the desert.

The helo swung around to finish off the Iranian personnel on the ground. The spluttering light of the pin flares had died by now and infrared targeting was once more effective.

However, as the AH-1Z hunted its prey, neither the snake driver nor the WSO saw one of the surviving Pasdaran troopers rise to his knees clutching a French-made Matra Mistral shoulder-fire missile launcher. Remaining at a half-crouch, the Iranian aimed the forty-millimeter weapon, acquired the target and quickly fired.

The bird left the pipe amid a whoosh of back-blast, and his comrades began to cheer as the warhead streaked toward the blind side of the helo. It struck a second later, blowing apart inside the second cockpit canopy and instantly ripping the snake driver limb from limb.

The WSO ejected, breaking his shoulder and collarbone as the explosive charges that ejected the survival capsule slammed him with crushing force against the instrumentation console. As the chute opened and he sailed down to earth, already losing consciousness, his last glimpse of the battlefield was the sight of the broken hulk of the Viper crashing to earth and erupting into a meteor shower of flame.

He had hardly hit the ground when the Iranian troops began running toward the downed capsule, smashing out what was left of the cockpit glass and dragging the semiconscious airman out onto the freezing sand.

Once in the mob's hands, the leader gave the signal. The bayonets attached to the enemy's AKM rifles thrust downward again and again, until their vengeance was satisfied, until all the bayonet blades were painted with the hated one's blood. Not satisfied with this, they further desecrated the corpse by cutting off its head and booting it across the sand. The Iranians had no word equivalent to "hoo-ah." But what in their language came closest, they shouted as they kicked it back and forth between themselves.

Breaux and Sgts. Death and One Eyes were taking fire as they hard-charged toward the LZ, goosing the DPV to wring every last ounce of power from its overworked V-8 engine. The trio didn't know it, but they had been spotted by scouts attached to the second Iranian scout patrol, a follow-on unit at full combat strength that had been dispatched to aid the smaller patrol that had called in a report on the helo strike.

Breaux punched up Urgent Arrow UAV data from Global Hawk on the integrated tablet PC unit fitted onto the console of the vehicle. The unit had an integrated touch screen display, JTRS and organic radio capability and was GPS-capable. Less than a minute later, the picture was clear to Breaux. The UAV showed the tactical situation in both thermal and synthetic aperture radar imagery modes.

In SAR mode, which encompassed a wider field of view than TI, Breaux was able to observe his own unit, the pursuing Revolutionary Guard and other SFOD-O units nearby making for the LZ. The bad news was that the pursuing enemy force was a sizable one, but the good news was that so far no hostile aircraft were in the vicinity.

Breaux keyed buttons on the MIL-SPEC magnesium alloy housing of the tablet's flat-panel display and called up a moving map display linked to GPS, showing waypoints to the LZ. He noted to his satisfaction that the dune buggy was only a short distance from the kill basket Breaux had established for just such a contingency.

In the course of the team's patrol of the area over the last two weeks, Breaux had noticed telltale cratering surrounding a stretch of desert track. From his combat experience in Mideastern deserts and in the rocky hill country of Afghanistan with splinter factions of the mainly Tajik Jamiat-I–Islami Mujahideen, Breaux recognized the cratering for what it was — an indication of a subterranean river that coursed beneath the desert, rising close to the surface before again plunging down into the deep layers of aquifer a few hundred yards down. The precise pathway of the part of the river close to the surface was marked by the procession of pits in a straight line that paralleled the desert roadway.

Breaux had dispatched a team to reconnoiter the largest pit, and found what he'd suspected — about thirty feet below a thin shelf of rock, there was a cavern, and at the bottom of the cavern, there flowed the river he'd known would be there.

Breaux realized he had stumbled onto the perfect place to set up a kill basket on extraction, should unfriendly forces appear. The roadway went right across the roof of the cavern, and with properly placed C-4 demolition charges, the entire roadway could be blown down into the cavern in a matter of seconds, burying an entire mechanized column amid tons of rubble.

Breaux's close attention to extraction security would now pay off. He quickly cued his comms and called Team Fang manning the detonator block a few hundred yards from the sides of the roadway.

"One Zero Foxtail to Big Bear," Breaux said. "You listening?"

"Five by five," Gunnery Sgt. Mainline answered. He was crouching behind a tripod-mounted binocular TI spotter scope. Sgt. Mainline commanded a three-man team, one member of which was already warming up their dune buggies for a fast exit. "Got the frag bait on thermal."

"As soon as we pass, hit 'em, then head for the LZ."

"Hoo-ah," Sgt. Mainline said back. "They are fragged. They are history. They are smoked. Shit — I love the Army! Every day I thank almighty God for the Army. Makes my dick hard, makes my shit hot. I love the fuckin' Army."

"Just do it, gunny," Breaux told him.

"That's a roger. Out."

Breaux hoped the gunny was as good as his bravado, for Team Fang's sake. A lot of enemy hardware was rolling toward the LZ and it was coming on fast. The extraction Osprey would be heavily loaded, even with the buggies and other field equipment left behind. The A/C would be more vulnerable to ground fire on takeoff than was normal.

Top Sgt. Death, behind the DPV'S wheel, tapped Breaux on the shoulder, pointing into the night.

"Complications, padrone," he said.

"No shit," Breaux replied, as he saw what Death meant. Complications were right.

Against the now lightening horizon, danced the telltale form of a Mil Mi-8 "Hip" helicopter. The chopper was basically a transport helo, but had limited multi-role applications — its rocket pods and, in the Mi-8MTKO variant, optimized for night reconnaissance operations, 12.7 millimeter front-mounted heavy machinegun, gave it limited offensive capability. Tonight it was plenty.

All at once the Mi-8's nose cannon opened up on the DPV. Bullets spanged off the dirt and rubble as Sgt. Death drove a zigzag path across the lunar terrain, the dune buggy's oversize tires keeping the wide-carriage vehicle stable at high speeds. Sgt. One Eyes jumped behind the TOW launcher mounted atop the tubular metal crash frame surrounding the top of the vehicle and got ready to counter-strike.

Sgt. One Eyes acquired the Hip in the TOW's sights and triggered the round. The wire-guided missile sped upward, hissing and spinning on its curved stabilizer fins, spooling out a black fiber optic cable. The helo began to jink, but One Eyes trimmed attitude and course. Seconds later he had scored a kill on the chopper. It exploded in midair, raining wreckage and burning fuel slicks down on the ground.

The helo was out of commission, but the mechanized Pasdaran patrol was rapidly closing with the DPV. Breaux felt the tension lessen somewhat as Death highballed the small, fast vehicle across the mined section of desert road, past the concealed places where Sgt. Mainline's crew waited in ambush. From behind his thermal spotter scope, Mainline watched the Iranian column roar into the kill basket, not suspecting that the road was mined to blow the ground out from under them.

"On my signal," Breaux said over the radio net. "Wait… wait… Now!"

Gunnery Sgt. Mainline flipped a switch on the main control panel, activating the electrical ignitors that would blow the detonator caps screwed into the blocks of C-4 arranged in a rough rectangular pattern around the roadbed. Mainline had checked the circuits twice and once again. He was sure everything was good to go. He wasn't proven wrong by events.

In the near-silence the night was rent suddenly by a flashbulb-popping series of magnesium-bright, quick-pulsating strobes. Light travels faster than sound, and the explosions still had to earn their miles. Moments later the rolling boom and echoes of multiple explosions rumbled like thunder across the arid desert landscape.

Enemy troops shouted in pain and uncomprehending horror as the ground supporting them gave way and they and their war machines were swallowed up, tumbling thirty feet down into the cavern where secondary explosions from the burning vehicles boomed and thudded violently up into the rain of falling rubble. For a few long minutes the earth seemed to be vomiting up its fiery guts.

When the fireworks died down, and the screams of the dying subsided, Team Fang mounted up their DPVs and bolted away from the flaming havoc they had unleashed upon the enemy.

Sgt. Mainline hollered praise to the Lord for creating the US Army, and this time nobody was about to stop him.

Breaux and his crew arrived at the LZ to find that most of his units had already boarded the Osprey. Others still on the ground were busily stripping classified gear from their vehicles, carrying what they could take with them onboard, and blowing the rest with demo charges.

Breaux's team gathered up code books, personal gear and weapons, and tossed grenades into the DPV. The explosions in the night would give their position away, but their situation was compromised anyway by now.

The V-22 pilot leaned out the flight deck window, waving Breaux over.

"Let me know when we can take off, sir, and we're out of here."

"Won't be long, captain."

The convertiplane's twin engines were upturned in helicraft mode, the rotors spinning and the engine warm. The multimode transport was ready for immediate dust-off.

Breaux took a head count. Only Sgt. Mainline's Team Fang was missing. Where the hell were they?

The sudden sound of approaching vehicle engines made those standing guard train their weapons in its direction. Breaux looked out into the night and lowered the barrel of his AKMS. It was the last DPVs with the four Team Fangers inside them.

"Shake your asses," he shouted at the latecomers. "Grab your gear and blow the rest. You know the drill."

"Yes sir!" Sgt. Mainline yelled back. "Man, I love the Army! Shit, the Army's better than any pussy I ever ate. Every day's a good day in the Army. Every night's a party. The latrines in the Army smell better than a sixteen-year-old virgin's cunt. God bless the Army!"

The team knew the drill backward. Within two minutes time the DPV was a burning hulk and its former passengers had joined the rest of B-Comm inside the waiting Osprey.

"Come on, get this bird airborne," Breaux shouted at the pilot, who flashed him the OK sign. The V-22's copilot immediately raised the rear hatch and the convertiplane ascended straight up into the night.

Flying nap of the earth, ten minutes off the LZ, the tilt-rotor aircraft took fire from something out on the desert, but it was now moving too fast to be accurately taped by small arms bursts and there was no more incoming after that.

Only when they returned to Jauf did ground maintenance crew notice the pattern of bullet punctures just inches from a critical part of the Osprey's left engine nacelle. In the end it had been a closer call than anybody had realized.