Bloodbath

Chapter Seven

Insertion into the Reshteh-ye Kuhha-ye Alborz — the Elburz mountain range — had been a predictable bitch. A-Comm (A-Command) of Detachment Omega was on a tight timetable, and this added to the logistical problems faced by the Eagle Patchers. Precision timing was vital to the successful outcome of Omega's mission. So was secrecy.

The Eagle Patchers' presence in the Elburz would not evade the attention of Iranian Pasdaran or special forces — Iran's Spetsnaz-trained Takavar — for long, but the longer the presence of American "advisors" to rebel forces remained covert, the better the chances for success.

Breaux and a company-strength element of Omega personnel had been in-country for approximately a month, training guerilla cadre in low-intensity warfare techniques. The guerilla groups were based in hidden encampments amid the many miles of barren, windswept hills making up the cross-border area between Turkey, Iran and Iraq north of the twenty-fifth parallel.

Ethnic Kurds and Georgians from the bombed cities in the Caucasus made up the majority of these rebel fighting cells. The two main groups did not mix very much, except at the leadership levels, and occupied separate enclaves throughout the hill country. The groups had little in common politically or culturally, and although Islam was a shared religion for many of them, it was by no means the only religion they practiced.

Ethnicity and place of origin mattered much more to how the groups got along, and here the differences were often much greater than the similarities. The Georgians considered the Kurds "Turks," the Kurds considered the Georgians "Slavs." There was no doubt that had it not been for the common enemies confronting the both of them in the Moscow-Baghdad axis, they would be at each others' throats.

And what were American commando advisors to them? Breaux had entertained no illusions about that from the first, nor, for that matter, about the true nature of his mission. Detachment Omega had been reluctantly accepted because an American presence meant a source of arms, money, food and medicine.

The rebels cared not a whit for any training or expertise that might be part of the package. By now they had been waging their guerilla wars with their respective opponents for a very long time. Outsiders were not welcome. Nor were could they ever be trusted. They might be used for a time, and then thrown to the mountain wolves. But never accepted, never brought into the community of mostazafin — the disinherited.

Breaux understood that attitude, and never tried to get chummy with the indigenous forces he and his men were training in these cold, arid mountains. That was always a mistake, as it had been in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and Sumatra for US spooks, military advisors and other even more questionable personnel carrying out stranger missions. It would have been even more of a mistake here because nobody was conning anybody anymore.

The political games had been played out in the Third World during the twentieth century and they no longer worked. Those who "went native" would be sucked dry and thrown away. Kurtzes would never be a match for the Heart of Darkness. Indigenous guerilla forces viewed the US as a fair-weather friend who would desert them as soon as the going got too tough. Nothing could shake that conviction because it had been proven correct far too many times.

It was now almost midway into the 21st century's third decade and alliances between the US and guerilla forces were based on mutual need and greed — never trust. America wanted something from them, they wanted something from America. A deal would be done, and that was all there was to it. Anything else was merely a public relations sham to preserve a semblance of something deeper, but nobody believed it otherwise.

Breaux's team might have been conducting training exercises in the hills, but its true purpose was to carry out a strategic reconnaissance of the area. It was believed by the CIA that borderlands of the Elburz were being used as a secret conduit for weapons and embargoed weapons-manufacturing materials.

The Soviets were ferrying in the stuff in a very risky manner. The Eagle Patchers' job was to take advantage of the opportunity to fuck them up.

Rempt inhaled deeply. Taking the last drag on the Russian nonfilter cigaret for all it was worth, he flicked the butt into the stiff wind blowing off the nearby ridge line. The spook, actually a covert operations contractor to the Defense Department and CIA whose actions could be denied if deniability happened to be deemed prudent, exhaled the thick gray smoke through his nostrils and spat onto the dusty ground. He turned to Breaux.

"Let's go, partner," he said.

Breaux stared at Rempt. He did not like the spook (neither did any of the men, who called him "REMF" — rear-echelon motherfucker — as often to his face as behind his back) and trust was a term that had no meaning with respect to any intelligence personnel Breaux had ever encountered. Rempt was the CIA liaison with indigenous forces in the region.

A career Arabist, Rempt had been shuttling around across the length and breadth of the Middle East for nearly three decades, much as Kim Philby had done in a previous era. Virtually all belonging to Rempt's type had a Lawrence of Arabia complex, and Rempt was no exception.

He spoke all the major languages and dialects of the region fairly fluently. When in the field, Rempt sported a kaffiyah and burnoose and carried a short-barelled AKS autorifle slung over his shoulder and a dagger in his belt.

Breaux nodded his assent but said nothing else. He was ready. The small group of Kurdish rebels — the Peshmerga or "Fellows in Arms" — and Eagle Patcher commandos occupied four-wheel drive vehicles, quads including tactical Rhinos and DPVs, that though battered were as able along the rutted narrow mountain roads as were pack mules. The reconnaissance team would be led by Rempt who would also act as translator and mission coordinator.

Breaux had no intention of letting the spooks "coordinate" his mission beyond a certain point, however, and he knew full-well that in the field, Rempt's claim was tenuous. In the first place, General Patient K., SFOD-O's commander, would see to it that the Chief of the Army spoke the necessary benedictions to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

In the second place, if Rempt started getting too bossy, Breaux would simply frag the fucker. He would then report the unfortunate demise of Beltway defense contractor and rent-a-field-agent Rempt in an enemy ambush. It would then be with Breaux like it had been with Major Strasser in the film Casablanca — a question of whether Rempt had either "hung himself" or was "shot trying to escape."

The windswept ridge was chosen as the ideal surveillance point for the main force element. The rest of the detachment was strung out along the ridge line on a roughly two-mile front. The 4WD vehicles had been parked in natural hiding places and covered with camouflage netting, sand and rocky debris to shield them from aerial surveillance.

The hide sites would not have to hold up to scrutiny for very long. The mission would last little more than a few hours. It would be the waiting against darkness and cold, fighting off fatigue in the monotony of these desolate hills, until the moment to act arrived, that would be the hardest part.

They would have to be fully alert then, for those few minutes. After that the opportunity window would shut tight and what they had come to do might be impossible the next time around. The shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles ported by the combined teams were for defensive purposes, and only to be used as a last resort. This was a recon mission, not an assault.

Far away from that lonely, desolate hill country in the Elburz, a Soviet adviser named Major Lavrenti Ogarkov scanned another distant horizon as he smoked a French Sobranie cigaret, which he preferred to native Russian brands. He then looked toward his men, who he had permitted to fall out around the nearby circle of two-and-a-half ton trucks near the desolate landing strip.

The Spetsnaz troops were well-trained and expertly drilled. Even at ease, they looked precisely like what they were — soldiers, and superb ones too. Curse the mudozhovaniki, the shit-mouths, back at headquarters for wasting such soldiers as mere truck-loaders, Ogarkov thought.

The Spetsnaz commander idly consulted his wristwatch. Time yet. Plenty of time to go until the expected cargo plane arrived. Again, he turned his attention to the desert barrens surrounding him.

The sere wasteland looked out across the Syrian Desert and into Saudi Arabia. Beyond was Jordan, then Israel and the Med. In time, war would break out here, and the newly reborn Soviet Union would be in it for keeps.

The major continued to smoke. There was an iron logic to it all, but moreover, an iron inevitability. Ogarkov waited and watched, imagining a string of Soviet victories from the Persian Gulf clear to the Med, and the glory to be won in the coming fight.

At a little past 0400 hours they came. The stillness of the desert and hills had been broken only by the keening of the wind and the distant baying of jackals, wolves and other night predators. Now another sound began to creep into the night.

A man-made sound.

The sound began as a low rumble originating at a point far to the northeast. Soon it began to swell and surge. There was no mistake. The planes were coming.

Not that there had been doubt from the first. The team was not relying merely on its eyes and ears to sense the approach of its quarry. An array of compact battlefield computing and electronics equipment handled that part of the job.

High overhead, invisible to the naked eye, parked in geosynchronous low earth orbits, a three-platform array (or constellation as the techs at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, from which they'd been launched, referred to them) of TACSAT ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) photoimaging micro-satellites run jointly by the Pentagon and CIA, kept their sensor arrays trained on a swath of territory on the earth below.

Equipped with the ARTEMIS hyperspectral imaging spectrosocopy payload, TACSAT was capable of delivering on-demand, real-time space-based tactical surveillance imaging and intel for the warfighter. Streaming multspectral data from the TACTSAT array was immediately available to the team's mobile command center on the ground and, via encrypted over-the-horizon crosslink to mission-dedicated MILSATCOM space network platforms.

Breaux had been scoping the aerial ballet of planes navigating the treacherous airspace of the Bottleneck for some time via his combat ruggedized MIL-STD-810F and IP65-compliant BattleTRAC tablet PC linked to Omega's mobile battlefield workstation network, observing the well-coordinated aerial circus act by which the Russians were facilitating their convoy over hostile airspace.

On the Washington Beltway, they called it "flying the Elburz Bottleneck," the most direct route from the large military transshipment entrepot at Kharkov, New Soviet Ukraine, about three hundred miles northeast of Moscow, to various offloading points in Iran.

Direct yes, but only in terms of it being the shortest distance between two points. In every other respect, the route was extremely risky, requiring an overflight of approximately eight miles of Iran-Iraq borderland in the Elburz mountain chain — the so-called Bottleneck.

Risky but still attractive. All other routes into Iran were indirect sea routes requiring weeks to negotiate by freighter and subject to seizure by multinational carrier task force groups operating in the Arabian Sea and Horn of Africa region. The Russians had been tempted by the ease and speed promised by daring the Bottleneck. They had decided to take their chances.

One thing that had encouraged the Russians was a six-mile gap in Iranian ground surveillance radar that their ferret aircraft had pinpointed during reconnaissance missions to study the feasibility of a military airlift into Iran. The Chinese-made End Tray and Ball Point radars — early warning systems optimized for tracking short-range ballistic targets such as missiles and low-trajectory aircraft — that the neighboring Iraqis used were fixed stations that overlapped fairly well across most of the border, affording reliable coverage. Here they didn't.

With the aid of Tupelov TU-98W Bearwolf electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft to confuse Iraqi radars farther north and south, and able pilots for the big Antonov AN-74 all-weather variant "Coaler" transports that were used to ferry in the loads, the plan was deemed workable. To provide further insurance, the Antonovs used regularly scheduled commercial Aeroflot shuttle flights between Moscow and Tehran as additional cover against radar detection.

The military planes would coincide their takeoffs with an early morning Aeroflot commercial run, flying close against the commercial jetliner across Black Sea border regions. Once inside Turkish airspace, however, the Antonovs would break free and continue on to their destinations. For added security, transponders identified the rogue military planes as commercial cargo aircraft, conforming to bogus flight plans.

The Russians had worked on the technique ever since the Americans had used something similar to it against them during the Reagan years, timing military surveillance overflights of Soviet North Pacific bases with scheduled passenger flights between Anchorage, Alaska and Seoul, Korea.

This particular run tonight followed the usual pattern. A few miles shy of the Iranian border, over southern Azerbaijan, the Antonov Coaler heavy-lifter slipped into the flight path of Aeroflot flight 889 out of Moscow and bound for Baghdad's Richard Cheney Memorial International Airport. Farther to the southwest, a TU-22PZ "Stripper" electronic countermeasures (ECM) aircraft waited to conduct covert electronic warfare operations against the Iraqi early warning radar fence.

As the two planes approached the border, the TU-22PZ turned on its active jamming. The Aeroflot flight slipped through the Iraqi radar screen, with its military shadow plane undetected. The TU-22PZ monitored the passage for awhile, keeping the corridor open for other Soviet air assets, then lumbered off to its base in Kharkov, its work done. As had been the case on the several other shuttle overflights, the Antonov then disengaged from beneath the Aeroflot passenger aircraft once it had passed the border.

The Antonov could now navigate on its own without great risk of detection, for here the mountains turned into a maze of great rifts bordered by steep, craggy massifs. Many of these high mountain passes were large enough for even an Antonov transport to navigate safely — if the pilot was alert, and skillful, and had luck on his side.

The Soviet air force had no difficulty finding pilots eager to accept the challenge, especially since the trip, though hazardous, was relatively short. The rift valleys only amounted to under fifteen minutes of total flight time. Once out of the maze, it was straight and easy going across the flat, unbroken reaches of the forbidding Iraqi desert. The way home was a safe, though longer route west, then north — the hazards existed on the inbound flight only.

So it was with this air resupply mission. Albeit with one important exception that the Russians did not know anything about.

Breaux knew all about it, though. And it had been what he had come to this desolate and forbidding mountain country to witness.

In only a few minutes Breaux and Rempt, who stood with their eyes alternately scanning the skies and fixed on the central flat panel screen of a tri-screen portable battlefield computer, would be certain whether the prize was within their reach or not.

The minutes ticked off. The computer screen remained blank; the digital portal to another world stayed dark, empty. Breaux again turned his gaze to the skies. He no longer needed the light-amplifying gear to detect the arriving aircraft.

Though flying without lights, the Antonov was cruising less than twenty feet below the tops of the ridges flanking the high rift valley within which the surveillance team had taken shelter. There was enough ambient light to see the airframe limned darkly against the flanks of the towering bluffs.

Breaux admired the skill of the Russian pilot. It was an impressive feat of precision flying. He would have liked to watch the planes just soar through the chasm like an immense pterodactyl, but the tactical computer's screen had come to life, and something more important had appeared, riveting his attention.

On the screen, the interior of the same Antonov that was now passing overhead was limned in shades of green and black. A procession of faces belonging to the contingent of soldiers onboard the aircraft seemed to move relative to the motion of the hidden camera onboard. Rempt was nodding his head.

"Beautiful," he muttered. "Fucking beautiful."

Breaux watched his face, transfixed with a perverse fascination.

"Absolutely fucking beautiful."

Rempt sickened him, especially since Breaux knew the source of the spook's glee. Onboard the Antonov was a surgically altered human, a cyborg. The man's name was Yevgeny Karlovich, and he had been forced to undergo a risky operation to graft sensing equipment onto his optic nerves.

Karlovich had been compromised in a monkey trap set by the CIA in Moscow and given a choice between a life sentence at the notorious Lefortovo prison or submission to the surgical procedure.

The nuclear physicist had developed a sex and drug habit that had been used to compromise him by field assets in Moscow. Nanotechnology had created a microminiature low-light camera and transmitter that could run by electrical impulses generated by the mitochondria of the nerve cells. It had been implanted in Karlovich's skull in the cavity called the stylo-mastoid foramen directly behind the eyes.

From that moment on Karlovich became the CIA's walking camera lens. He had been used extensively, and this was to be his final mission before deactivation. Karlovich had been promised asylum in Arizona and enough money to start his own insurance business under a new identity.

Far below, Breaux continued to watch, nauseated as much by this surgically altered monstrosity passing overhead, as by the unholy glee that Rempt exuded from every pore as he drank it in. Karlovich was following orders, feigning airsickness in order to be permitted to wander along the cabin for a while, transmitting back imagery of the plane's cargo in the process.

Now the physicist had reached the main cargo section. Clearly visible on pallets were tubular components in protective wooden casings, lashed down securely with tie-downs to bolts on the aircraft's deck. There were large military transport cases as well, many of these bearing the universal warning symbol for radioactive materials.

"Shit, look at that," Rempt declared. "There's no doubt about what the Sovs are flying in now. No doubt."

The downlink of imagery continued as the airframe transited the Elburz. But the transmission was brief. The plane soon navigated the rift valley and vanished into the night across the border into Iran. Moments later the silence of the night again descended across the isolated mountain barrens on the edge of nowhere.

"Let's —"

Rempt stopped in mid-sentence.

Something else was coming, something that hadn't been anticipated. Rempt quickly punched keys at the console of the mobile command station and let out a whistle. Breaux saw it there too, moments before they arrived — Mi-24 Hinds, two of them. Both mammoth gunship helicopters were heavily armed with rockets and automatic cannons.

Breaux judged they had been sent along on this mission to ride shotgun on an especially important cargo. Maybe the brass back at Kharkov had gotten nervous and wanted to add a little insurance coverage to the package. Whatever the reason, the Hinds had tagged along.

Suddenly Breaux saw the signs of struggle out of the corner of his eye. It was at a nearby rock ledge occupied by a group of Peshmerga. To his horror Breaux saw two men wrestling each other, heard their quarrelsome oaths echoing across the canyon, saw and heard other Peshmerga rushing to the scene.

Again he looked up toward the Hinds, relieved to see that they continued on along a straight path, for the moment oblivious to the commotion below.

Breaux turned his attention back toward the struggle. Now one of the Kurds knocked the other down and rose to his knees, and the dark silhouette of a blunt-ended tubular object described a tangent in the night as it pointed at the sky.

Damn — he was going to fire a Stinger missile at one of the Hinds.

Breaux moved quickly, sprinting across broken ground, his combat knife already unscabbarded, knowing what would have to be done, and done quickly to avoid blowing the entire mission. As he advanced, Breaux saw the prone man rise, knock the other down before he could fire. The black tubular weapon fell into darkness once more. Breaux would not give it a second chance to sweep upward again.

In moments he had reached the scene of the continuing struggle. The first man had again shoved the other one down. Breaux reached the Kurd with the Stinger shoulder-fire weapon as he raised it again.

Breaux sprang and grabbed the hill man by the hair, pulling his head back and twisting his neck with a savage wrench. The neck broke in a second with a dull, wishbone-snapping sound and the man went limp. Breaux cradled the dying man's head in the crook of his arm, slowly lowering him to the broken earth and silencing any noises he might have made as life left him.

He lay prone and watchful beside the corpse, searching for the Hinds. To his chagrin he saw that the gun ships had slowed their forward progress. They were now hovering in a search pattern, as though they had seen something on the floor of the ravine.

Breaux's hand moved to the missile launcher that had fallen near the dead man. If they attacked, he would have to use it anyway. There would be no other choice. The entire operation would be compromised and Eagle Patcher commandos would probably be killed in the fire-fight that would follow.

In the air, the immense steel dragonflies darted and hovered, moved to and fro, circling through the canyons. Amplified by reflection off the sheer rock walls of the defile, the chugging of the Hinds' main rotors took on a deafening cadence, crept into the skull like rats into a hole, chewed its way into the brain.

It quickly became a contest of nerve, a battle against the fear-fed urge to strike first before the Hinds shot up the valley with cannon fire or air-to-ground missiles and the voice of prudent caution that counseled, "Stay put, wait it out, see what happens."

The Hinds continued to dart and hover, circle and dance, rise and fall. More tense moments ticked away. And then suddenly the two helos climbed for altitude and sped westward along the track of the departed Antonov.

Moments later they were gone.

Breaux was rolling the corpse of the Peshmerga guerilla who had been panicked into nearly firing at the Hinds into a convenient chimney in the rocks. The other Kurd, the one who'd tried to stop him, was jabbering away in Dari, the Kurdish dialect of Farsi, while bowing and trying to kiss Breaux's mud-spattered boots. Rempt translated, something about how Allah might bless him for saving them all with his quick thinking.

Breaux's response was to kick the sniveling Kurd in the face, shattering his nose, and walking away as the injured hillman howled in pain.

All Breaux knew was this: these shits had fucked up. They could not be trusted. They were a liability and Detachment Omega did not need liabilities — there were far too many on this mission already.

Sometime later, the Antonov set down on a desert runway marked by luminous green chemlights. The Spetsnaz commander ordered his crew to start offloading the cargo onboard the Vafl'a — which meant "Flying Dick," a Russian nickname for any cargo aircraft — to the small convoy of waiting GAZ 3937 Vodnik four-bys that loitered near the airstrip.

While this was taking place, there was one other detail to which he had been instructed to attend.

"You are Karlovich?" asked Major Ogarkov, as he compared the color photograph he had produced from his field jacket pocket with the face of the man standing before him in the night.

"Yes, tovarisch," answered the physicist. "You are my driver, then?"

"That is correct, tovarisch," replied the Spetsnaz, finishing another Sobranie and flicking it into the night. "Your bag, please."

The commander accepted the scientist's grip and stowed it in the rear of the staff car, then pulled open the door.

"Please have a seat."

"The ride will not be long?" asked Karlovich.

"No," replied Ogarkov, "it is very short. You will be able to rest and wash up in no time."

"I meant…"

"Ah yes, I see," Ogarkov cut in. "That is not a problem. The entire desert is yours."

Karlovich muttered something and walked off into the night. The Spetsnaz leaned against the side of the staff car as he watched him disappear around a large rock formation and lit another smoke. He took a long, deep drag and then shrugged, thinking that now was as good a time as any.

Pushing himself erect off the side of the vehicle, Ogarkov followed Karlovich's footprints in the loose sand covering the desert crust. As he reached the outcropping, the major drew his 9-millimeter Makarov PM (Pistolet Makarov) semiautomatic service pistol and casually threaded an eccentric-chamber LARAND-type suppressor tuned to the specific sound dynamics of the weapon onto its muzzle.

None of his men heard the volley of rapid clicks that signaled the entry of bullets into the back of the traitor's skull. Major Ogarkov's roughened hand unthreaded the now hot silencer, dropped it into the pocket of his field jacket and re-holstered the semiautomatic pistol.

Some blood spatter had gotten on his palm — he had held it upraised as a splash guard — and he wiped it clean on the sand. It was a lucky break that the traitor had a weak bladder; saved him a trip into the night to do the job. But burying him — ni khuya — that was work for one of his men. The major would have no part of that.

"Ryabov! Kushkin!" he shouted toward the trucks as he two-fingered another smoke from the crushed pack in his pocket. "Get the fuck over here on the double. I have a job for you two lazy svoloki…"

Chapter Eight

Breaux walked through the mostazafin encampment, feeling the hostile eyes of the Peshmerga upon him. He was on his way to Rempt's yurt to be briefed on new developments concerning Force Omega mission in the Elburz. Just ahead of Breaux, a group of pancake-hatted and turbaned men carrying Kalashnikovs had congregated, and it was clear by their glances and gestures that Breaux was the topic of conversation.

It was also clear they weren't paying him any compliments. No matter that the trigger-happy rag head would probably have signed all their death warrants by shooting at the Hinds. All that the clannish hill tribesmen knew was that Haneen had left behind a bereaved widow and five hungry children.

Far worse was the fact that Haneen had been killed by an unclean foreigner, one who fucked dogs, as it was said of Americans. The hands of an American infidel had snapped Haneen's neck, and such a death was an ignoble one.

The near-debacle at the surveillance post in the mountains had marked a clear turning point in Omega's

mission. From that point on the shit had began hitting the fan with a vengeance. Tensions in the Kurdish encampment had been inflamed by the loss of one of their own people. Rempt had intervened with the khadkhuda, the Peshmerga tribal council, to restore order with some success, but it was obvious that the blood of the Kurds was up and a thirst for vengeance went unslaked.

Rempt had come down hard on Breaux, blaming him for having stirred up a hornet's nest.

"There was no other way," Breaux had protested. "What was I to do, let him fire? The fucker was disobeying orders. There was no other choice. I had to take him out."

"They told me you were a hard case," Rempt said. "They warned me you were a crazy motherfucker. That you were out of control."

"You didn't answer my question," Breaux had replied.

Rempt repeated his meaningless catechism about Breaux being crazy, out of control, and several other things besides. Breaux would notify Rempt that he was pulling his people out. For Detachment Omega the mission was over, and fuck the CIA.

As Breaux continued on the winding path up the hillside to Rempt's yurt, the group of hostile hill men moved toward him. They now blocked Breaux's path. One of them stuck out his hand, giving Breaux the finger.

"Charra alaik! American fuck! Charra alaik!"

He spat on the ground, keeping his black button eyes glued on Breaux's face. He was saying "Shit on you" in Dari. The other men began circling, moving out of Breaux's direct field of view.

Breaux gave him the finger right back. He knew a few choice words in Dari himself. "Coos!" he shouted. "Tal hazi zib umak!" This meant, "Fuck you. Call your mother over to suck my dick."

"Telhazi teezi — Go suck my ass," shouted back the Kurd. "Coos, American. Coos! Coos!"

"Coos yourself, shitbag."

Breaux looked around for a rock to throw at the evil-smelling, foul-mouthed, rag-clad hill men whom he had come to regard by now as little more than a noisy species of two-legged, humanoid cockroach, when he caught a flash of movement in his peripheral vision.

Before the raghead to Breaux's left could bring the butt of his Kalashnikov down against the side of his skull, Breaux pivoted, sidestepped the blow and launched a spinning giri at the attacker's heart region. The karate foot blow shattered the Kurd's collar bone and sent him sprawling to the ground.

Breaux was already centered on the follow-through, turning to face the vengeful cousin who had raised his Kalashnikov to fire a burst into Breaux's chest. As the cousin pulled the trigger, Breaux grabbed a knife-wielding rag head by the beard and one arm and heaved him around right into the line of fire.

The cousin's automatic burst punched a ragged hole in the hill man's stomach. Breaux launched another foot blow and knocked the rifle to the ground. A couple of well-placed punches to the cousin's face reduced his nose and cheeks to red, pulpy custard. The would-be killer howled in pain as he tried to hold his busted nose together amid the blood pouring out of his smashed septum, then ran off into the encampment.

The staccato sounds of automatic fire made all the parties to the brawl turn and look up at the source of the sudden report. Rempt stood outside his yurt on a rock ledge about thirty feet above them. He clutched a Kalashnikov in his right hand, barrel upraised.

The beard-and-turban contingent picked up their wounded and limped off, muttering curses in their local dialect and directing angry looks at Breaux.

Breaux walked on, reaching Rempt on the precipice above, still clutching his AKS just outside his yurt.

"What the hell was that about?"

"Take a wild guess. A couple of rag heads ambushed me on the way over. One of them said he was the cousin of the clown I had to take out. He said they were going to do some nasty things to my pecker with their knives."

"Shit, fuckin' shit," Rempt cursed. "Just what we need here. A vendetta. I want you to know I hold you responsible, Breaux. If you hadn't —"

"— Hadn't what, Rempt?" Breaux had taken two steps toward the spook and grabbed him by the collar. "I've taken enough crap from you and from them. What I came here to tell you, my friend, is that I'm pulling my force out of this quagmire as of three hundred hours."

"You can't do that." Rempt had squirmed free of Breaux's grip by this time. "I'm in command of this operation."

"You're in command of diddly squat, Rempt," Breaux shouted back. "I don't take my orders from you. I, and my forces, only liaise with you. My orders come down through the military chain of command, and you're not one of the links." Breaux reached into his shirt pocket. "This is a printout from Washington."

Rempt read the telex, which had been delivered over satellite downlink less than an hour before. The orders stated that Colonel Breaux would keep his force in theater at his own discretion.

"Unless you have a very good reason to the contrary I'm yanking my people out of this hellhole in three hours."

Rempt stood dumbfounded for a few minutes, his eyes darting to and fro. Here was a guy whose mental gears you could almost see turning inside his skull, thought Breaux.

"Okay, look," he said. "I can contest these orders. The DCI will have one of his deputies camping out in front of the Oval Office before the page comes out of the printer at Meade. But I agree that your mission's been compromised by the events of last night and SFOD-O should pull out. Except not tonight."

"Why not?"

"Tonight is important," Rempt said. "Tonight is the culmination of a lot of behind-the-scenes work. Trust me, Breaux. We have to do this."

"I'd sooner trust a rattlesnake. Convince me."

Rempt tried. Breaux listened to the intelligence field asset talk about the planned mission. Another mission up in the hills of the Elburz watching big Russian planes dance on the thermals. But it was more than watching this time. Much more.

The plan was pure spook. Insane. Yet it was precisely the kind of operation that would in fact have the DCI's hatchet men camping out on the White House lawn if necessary. Breaux knew this for sure. Were he to balk and insist on extraction, Rempt would make his calls and the Eagle Patchers' orders would change.

"Let's assume I were to agree to keep the force in this shithole another twenty-four hours, Rempt," Breaux began. "What would keep the whole camp from going ballistic. You saw what happened on my way over. The Kurds have their tits in an uproar. They won't let it alone."

"You leave that to me," Rempt advised. "I'll handle it."

Breaux told Rempt that he doubted he could, but he would keep SFOD-O in theater an additional twenty-four hours in order to conduct the night's final mission into the Elburz.

"There's something else besides," Breaux added. "In my opinion the entire support operation here's been compromised. Those Hinds last night — I don't think they just happened to be there by coincidence. I think the Russians knew, or suspected, that something was shaking."

"That'll be my problem too, Breaux," Rempt answered. "After tonight's mission you and your force will be history."

Something about the look in Rempt's cold blue eyes as he said that gave Breaux the creeps. It could just be common, garden variety spookery — every one of them had a streak of James Jesus Angleton in his soul— but then, again, maybe it was more than that. Breaux would keep his guard up, and pass the word to his men.

The night mission proceeded on schedule. Their fearless leader Rempt had been true to his word, after a fashion. He had succeeded in quelling the fires of discontent in the encampment, but the uneasy truce between tribesmen and US specwar personnel had been bought rather than negotiated.

Rempt had dug into his Company imprest fund and paid off the tribal khadkhuda in fifty dollar gold pieces. He had also promised a new consignment of better weapons at the next air drop. But first came the mission.

As with the last mission into the heights of the Elburz range, the mixed force was deployed along the rocky ledges and jagged outcroppings of the Bottleneck, awaiting the next clandestine resupply run out of Kharkov. Only this time there were a few wrinkles that had not been in evidence during the previous mission.

One of these wrinkles was not even present in the operational area at all. On the contrary, it was parked in low earth orbit some hundred miles above the action. It was a satellite that bore the code name Cerberus, and it differed from most other satellites in that it was mostly a huge rectangle, about the size of a trailer, filled with wet-cell electrical storage batteries.

Another wrinkle on the night's operation was a tubular weapon that was mounted on a tripod. The tube did not fire a projectile of any kind, however. Instead, a series of cables ran from the rear of the tube to a regulated power source and an electronic device housed in a MIL-SPEC-hardened carrying case. Rempt had set up the rig himself, calibrating the weapon by means of a head-mounted display that was plugged into the central processing unit.

The rest was standard operating procedure. The team got into position well in advance of the expected arrival of the airborne shuttle run and settled down to wait in the darkness and biting cold of the arid, windswept heights.

Time ticked by, and then the first satellite warnings of the approach of the Antonov came over the downlink and the ghost images of overhead thermal surveillance appeared on the tactical computer screens of the ambush force.

Breaux crouched in the darkness of the windswept heights, overlooking the rift valley below him, waiting for the plane to come gliding in. As was the case previously, Detachment Omega was strung out around the north face of the cliffs above the yawning ravine, ready to intervene with rocket and small arms fire if the situation demanded aggressive response.

Rempt stared transfixed at the screen of the battlefield computer station, his fingers poised above the keyboard.

Soon the distant drone of the Antonov heavy-lifter's huge, shoulder-mounted jet engines was heard in the distance. The sound grew louder as the plane approached. The sound became a deafening roar as the winged metallic leviathan appeared, incredibly low over the top of the bluffs, and glided across the chasm that opened beyond, beginning its overflight of the rift valley.

Rempt paid the plane no attention. His eyes followed the computer's tracking window that showed the satellite view of the oncoming aircraft. Above the window, digital readouts showed the Antonov's altitude, course heading, velocity and other statistics. The most important of these numbers to Rempt, however, was the readout whose flashing numerics had begun steadily rolling down toward the zero mark.

Rempt might just as well have kept his eyes on the plane, because the entire procedure was automated and out of his control. When the flashing numerals counted down to zero, an attack sequence was automatically initiated.

High overhead in low earth orbit, the hundreds of power cells that had been charging with current now released the charge into a step-up transformer that increased the voltage by a factor of twenty.

The thousand kilovolts of electromagnetic energy generated by Cerberus began streaming from the projector dish pointing earthward. The EMP projector was in tickle mode, however. The electromagnetic pulse could be unleashed on ground or airborne targets in a variety of modes, some more severe than others. In tickle mode, the main beam was broken up into a series of smaller, less powerful pulses. The intended effect was to compromise, but not permanently damage, the electronic and electrical systems of the target.

The pulses of electromagnetic energy played across the airframe of the Antonov as it entered the airspace above the arid gorge. The precise point along the trajectory of the aircraft at which the pulses would begin to strike had been calculated by earth- and space-based computers so that the Antonov's autopilot, manual control systems, radio and backup systems would fail, yet leave the pilot with enough room to land the plane on the floor of the ravine.

Now, as the scenario played itself out, these calculations made thousands of miles away by shirt-sleeved intelligence staff wired on coffee jags and hunched over computer terminals studying animated simulations of the operation, these calculations in the service of ends that only a handful of individuals with high security clearances knew in full, these calculations were about to become reality.

The Antonov's onboard systems began to fail as the invisible shock waves penetrated its hull, entered the wiring and overloaded integrated circuitry. Inside the cockpit, the navigational screens and gauges began erratically flashing. Emergency backup systems fared no better. The pilot had no choice — or rather, he was only left with one.

"We are experiencing massive systems failure," he reported over the secure radio, breaking silence in the emergency. "Backup systems are going too. We must land immediately."

In the cockpit of the lead Mi-24 Hind gun ship that had followed the transport plane a half mile behind, the pilot only caught a fraction of the garbled message. But it, and the view through his forward looking infrared head-up display, that showed the huge plane dropping altitude as it struggled to keep its nose up, was enough. The Antonov would need to make an emergency landing. That or crash.

"Damn the luck," Captain Josip Panshin, the pilot, said to his copilot, seated back of him in the elevated weapons system officer's cockpit. "Of all the god-forsaken places to have to land a plane, it's here."

"What do we do about this?" Vanya Petrovsky in helo two put in over the radio net. "This isn't supposed to be happening?"

"We land and call Kharkov for further instructions, that's what we do, Vanya. Don't ask stupid questions. We don't even know if they'll make it down safely at this point. Nothing we can do now except wait and see."

The two Hinds hovered and danced in the black air as their crews watched the spectacle unfolding below them. The Hinds were unaffected by Cerberus, because the space-based EMP projector was capable of focusing on extremely narrow beam widths and precisely tracking its targets. The OPPLAN crafted by nameless operatives in windowless rooms in secret offices on the Washington Beltway did not call for the helos to be disabled.

Another part of the OPPLAN had been crafted specifically for the Hinds, however. That part would be activated soon. In the meantime, the OPPLAN called for the big cargo plane to land safely. Every precaution had been taken to insure that the Russian flight deck crew had enough clearance to accomplish this feat.

Without knowing it, the Antonov's crew carried out its part of the plan almost flawlessly, the pilot putting down the flaps on the still-functional hydraulic controls to yank up the plane's nose and bring it to an emergency landing mere feet from the sheer wall of the cliff face at the opposite end of the gorge.

Once the Antonov was down, the second phase commenced. Small metallic circles positioned along the straps of Rempt's HUD fit close to the temples and crown of the skull, and a projecting flap fit close against the center of his forehead.

There were twin grips at the rear of the tubular weapon that Rempt now positioned in the general direction of the Antonov, and as the two Hinds set down nearby, Rempt activated the weapon by moving a virtual mouse cursor keyed to his eye movement across the visual field of the HUD and clicking the cursor with a double blink on the appropriate button.

Rempt instantaneously felt the weapon vibrate as the amplification circuitry was activated, and a beam of invisible force streamed from the psychotronic projector. The weapon was the end-product of a half century of clandestine research and development. In the early stages of development, only the USSR. had taken the concept seriously, but during the Cold War the US had realized the military potential of psychotronics and pushed to close the gap in the way an earlier generation had closed a nuclear missile gap.

Although the hows and whys of the technology were still poorly understood, enough was known to produce a variety of useful weapon systems, mainly for clandestine warfare. One major difference between psychotronic beams and more conventional beams, such as laser or microwave radiation, is that psychotronic beams cannot be stopped or deflected by any known force or substance.

The projector Rempt fired sent its energies straight through the Antonov's hull, and its effects were immediate. In the same way that the electromagnetic pulse from Cerberus had neutralized the Antonov's electronic systems, so psychotronic attack had unplugged the crew members' brains and central nervous systems. After a few seconds' exposure, the crew sat motionless in their seats, cut off from all experience of the world around them.

Rempt then turned the projector on the two descended Hinds. The weapon produced the identical result on the four crewmen in the double cockpits of the Soviet gun ships. Brain wave analysis by the weapon's remote scanning sensors showed that the targets had been completely overcome by the weaponized force. Rempt then deactivated the weapon and removed the HUD.

"They're out of it," he told Breaux with unconcealed relish. "And, partner, we are going in."

Chapter Nine

Slowly, cautiously, as though approaching a trio of tranquilized prehistoric monsters, the concealed commandos and rebel forces emerged from hiding places amid the crags and crevices of the tableland and moved toward the silent, immobilized aircraft.

The tableau was surreal, yet there it was. Breaux's troops approached with weapons drawn and unsafed.

"Man, they're sure as shit out of it," Sgt. Death commented. "They're like zombies."

"Rempt, how deep are they under?" asked Breaux.

Breaux's squad had surrounded the two choppers and Breaux had opened the cockpit compartment door to peer inside at the pilot.

"Deep as you can get," Rempt answered as he put on a pair of padded leather gloves. "Watch this."

Hauling back and bunching his fist, the spook suddenly launched a savage right directly into the center of the pilot's face. Hot dark blood jetted from the shattered nose.

Breaux grabbed Rempt's hand and spun him around.

"You do that again and I'll break your jaw, so help me, you sick sonofabitch."

Rempt struggled loose, and his toothy smile returned to his long, lean, Texan's face.

"Don't worry, partner," he told Breaux. "One shot's all I allow myself. But these guys are history anyway, so what's the difference?" Rempt began removing the flight helmets of the first Hind's aircrew.

"It's hard to resist. It's like being on a drug high and thinking you're god, that you can do anything to anybody, but here it's true. I could cut them to pieces and they wouldn't know or feel a thing. Their nervous systems are just — unplugged's the best word, I guess."

"Rempt," Breaux said, "if this is what war's becoming in the twenty-first century, then I'd just as soon buy the farm right now. What I'm seeing disgusts me."

"Relax, you self-righteous bastard," Rempt said back. "These weapons have been around for decades. They've never been produced for the battlefield and probably never will. There are already secret treaty protocols banning their use. But in the case of covert operations, well, that's another story entirely. In this here sandbox, any game that works, you play."

By now Rempt had removed the first flight helmet, inserted a thin charge of plastic explosive and a microminiature remote detonator, and placed the helmet back onto the pilot's head.

"This poor bastard's all done," he announced, after wiping away the blood. He'd probably come out of it without even a sore nose. "Now let's take good care of the second pilot."

Rempt turned and walked off into the darkness toward the other downed gun ship.

Meanwhile other members of the force were conducting their part of the operation at the downed Antonov. Here too, the flight crew was completely immobilized, although there was no attempt made to tamper with any of the personnel as Rempt had done to the crew of the Hind.

On the contrary, the attention of the force was given over to the palleted and lashed-down cargo that had been carried onboard the huge heavy lift transport aircraft. Squads of specially equipped SFOD-O personnel swarmed over the crash-landed Soviet aircraft, some devoting their attention to the exterior hull, others entering the plane's cavernous interior.

The detail that went into the plane immediately set up generator-powered high-intensity lamps that lit the Antonov's cargo bay in a bright, hard glare. While they unshipped videocams and set about recording the specifics of the war materials that were stowed onboard the transport out of Kharkov, those stationed outside in the cold and darkness were treated to the eerie spectacle of ghost lights gleaming from within the crash-landed jet.

While the videocam crews swept through the Coaler's cargo area, technicians went to work on the lashed, palleted and crated payload onboard the heavy lifter. These crews were equipped with NBC agent detectors and precision tools of various types. Crates were opened and the cargo carefully video-recorded, some components removed where necessary.

In the case of the heavy caliber artillery tubes that were lashed down the length of the Antonov's cavernous cargo area, these were uncrated and then subjected to a metallurgical sampling procedure. A specially modified drill was used to extract a few millimeters of metal from the tube casings, then the tubes were re-crated and lashed into their original positions.

By the time the operation at the Antonov's landing site was completed, the squad operating on and in the vicinity of the two immobilized Hind helicopter gunships had already finished up its work. The area around the Hinds had been carefully and thoroughly sanitized of all human presence, and the special forces personnel prepared to withdraw back into concealment at the base and summit of the bluffs prior to commencement of the second phase of operations.

Rempt was back behind the projector, this time inducing the reverse of the neural paralysis that had disabled the Soviet aircrew at the bottom of the gorge. Other elements of the covert mission unit monitored the ostensibly secure radio frequencies used for communications between the helos and the transport plane, using a duplicate made from Soviet radio equipment captured or copied during other missions.

Still others, including Breaux, watched intently through night observation devices as the Soviets returned to normal consciousness, albeit with no recollection of what had taken place in the approximate two hours during which the operation had been conducted.

All clocks onboard the Hinds had been reset to only a few seconds after the time that the helos had set down on the sandy floor of the ravine. The Mi-24s' systems, unlike those of the Antonov, had not been subjected to electromagnetic pulse attack, and so had remained undamaged. The covert ops technical squad onboard the Antonov had confirmed that its onboard clock had been permanently disabled, while its radio gear, which was specially hardened against EMP effect, remained functional.

Among the aftereffects of the induced neural incapacitation was no memory of missing time for those affected. The Hind aircrew, and the Antonov flight crew, both believed that they had set their aircraft down only moments before.

"Juliet Bravo, this is X-Ray Lima One. Report your status please."

The pilot of the lead chopper had radioed the crashed Antonov, requesting its crew to state its condition.

"X-Ray Lima One, we have experienced massive systems failure of unknown origin which has crippled our navigational and propulsion systems. We retain marginal systems function, including radio and satcom. Fortunately, the crew seems unhurt."

"I copy, Juliet Bravo," said the Hind flight leader. "Do you believe that the aircraft can be made operational again so that a takeoff can be attempted?"

"Negative," replied the Antonov's pilot. "The plane not only sustained systems damage, but damage to the airframe on landing, including nose-gear. This bird isn't going anywhere."

"I copy," said the gun ship pilot. "In that case we must fall back on our emergency instructions," he went on. "Am I correct that you have no injured requiring medical evacuation assistance?"

"Yes. We can all make it under our own power. Have you enough room onboard?"

"We'll manage," replied the helo pilot, glad at least that the capacious Hinds were as much troop transport as gun ship. "How soon can you evacuate? The damned dushman — hill bandits — might have seen something and start nosing around. The sooner we leave the better."

"I have already begun to evacuate. As soon as we destroy code books I and my copilot will follow. Out."

The Soviets aboard the two Hind gun ships could already see crew members exiting from the Antonov. Fortunately there were not many personnel aboard this flight for security and other reasons. Also fortunately, the big gun ships had a great deal of extra carrying capacity.

The lead pilot checked his flight manifest, quickly punching calculations into the onboard computer for the increased rate of fuel consumption due to the extra weight the two helos would have to carry all the way to Kharkov. He nodded as he saw that there would be a slim but acceptable margin for safety, even enough to compensate for some additional delay in flight time.

As the pilot continued to watch the rest of the Antonov aircrew emerge from the stricken plane, he made further calculations, which showed that the helos would be well inside Soviet airspace before their fuel reserves had run two-thirds dry.

Here too the results looked encouraging. The new Hinds were equipped for air-to-air refueling. Immediately upon reentering Soviet airspace, he would radio for a fuelbird to meet the inbound flight and refill their tanks. The plan seemed workable.

He informed his frontseater — like many combat helos, including the US Cobra, the pilot sat behind and above the weapons systems officer — of the good news over helo interphone and again broke radio silence to inform his wingman.

Knowing that further radio communications would be necessary to coordinate the liftoff anyway, he also informed the wingman of what needed to be done per the emergency evacuation plan.

The helos would take on their passenger load and then lift off. At their translation altitude of approximately sixty feet, the helos would move into attack formation and fire rocket salvos down into the Antonov, reducing it and its cargo to burning wreckage.

They would then get the hell out of there as fast as possible, knowing that the dushman would certainly come to investigate after that, if they were not on their way already.

In darkness and silence, the hidden forces waited and watched. Breaux had been assured by Rempt that the indigenous fighters, the Peshmerga, the Mujahideen, and the other categories of rebels, guerillas and true-believers, had been put in their place and would not panic.

To make sure of this, the Breaux's forces had divested their mostazafin allies of all rocket launchers prior to moving out to the Elburz. Breaux still had strong misgivings about permitting them to be in on the mission at all, no matter what Rempt's assurances.

They were loose cannons, all of them, stoned on religion or hashish or Marxism or the revolutionary flavor of the week. Still, they hadn't yet made a false move, and it would all be over soon.

Breaux turned his full attention to the activities taking place at the flat, sandy floor of the steep-walled gorge. The main rotors of the Hind gun ships were dishing now, as the last of the evacuated Antonov aircrew got onboard the two attack helos. They remained stationary as final preparations, including a last-minute flight check, were conducted.

And then, almost in tandem, the two heavily-laden helicopters rose sluggishly up off the valley floor and straight up into the air.

Breaux glanced sidelong at Rempt as the Hinds reached their translation altitudes and then changed the rotor pitch to move slightly apart, pivoting their noses in the direction of the downed airframe.

As Breaux had expected, Rempt's face was again transfigured by a form of twisted rapture, the mouth contorted into a strange, rictus-like smile, the eyes focused on the screen of the battlefield computer station as Rempt's hands hovered over the tactical computer's keyboard.

The Soviet helos continued to hover slant-range of the Antonov, and Breaux knew that the battle management systems onboard were reading sensor input and calculating firing solutions for the AT-2 Swatter missiles carried on rails at the tips of their stub wings. Moments continued to pass, and then the first of the missiles cooked off the rails, coming off the helos belching contrails of dense white exhaust smoke as they vectored in on their target.

The first salvo hit with a wallop. Striking the airframe fore and aft, and exploding immediately, the warheads caused a massive double explosion that vaporized much of the plane in a balloon of flame and smoke that rose up in a mushroom cloud over the top of the bluffs.

The helos fired another two-rocket salvo into the burning wreckage, completing the job of destruction. After the fires died out, there would be little left of the Antonov and its secret cargo except a debris field of shattered fragments strewn across the rift valley floor.

The AN-72 transport now destroyed on the ground, the two Hinds rose still higher, soaring toward the top of the bluffs from which they would fly nap of the earth on a north-northeast bearing back toward Soviet airspace.

Would have flown, more precisely, because the Hinds never got farther than the crest of the bluffs.

Just before they would have changed main rotor pitch and translated to forward flight, Rempt used the computer's integrated pointer to click on the detonator button. Instantaneously, a powerful microwave beam activated the miniature radio-actuated detonator-ignitors inserted into the sheets of plastic explosive with which Rempt had earlier lined the flight helmets of the Hind pilots.

The small explosive charges imploded the skulls of the pilots of both gun ships, spattering the cockpits with blood, bone matter and optical gore from eyeballs which had been blown clear out of their sockets due to intra-cranial overpressure. Death spasms induced by traumatic shocks to the central nervous systems wrenched the cyclical and collective controls, making the helos career wildly through the sky.

In any event they would have crashed against either the steep walls of the bluffs or the rift valley floor — computer projections run on the NSA's massive arrays of blade server clusters had demonstrated this result with nearly a hundred percent certainty. But the best outcome was what the analysts had dubbed "the Rice Bowl scenario," referring to the debacle elsewhere in the Iranian desert at another secret LZ known as Rice Bowl.

Here, late in the last century, two Marine Corps Sea Stallion helicopters crashed together on dust-off after the abortive attempt to free the American hostages from the US embassy in Tehran was abruptly canceled.

The NSA had then utilized the "Rice Bowl Scenario" to good effect in order to protect secret assets that an extraction of US personnel would have compromised. The embassy hostages were never intended to be freed — the NSA had projected that the mission would end in embarrassing failure, seriously undermining the incoming Reagan administration's foreign policy effectiveness.

It therefore had to be stopped. Cold.

On this night, decades later, the scenario would be used again in the service of other clandestine operational ends.

As the scenario played itself out, the two Soviet helicraft pitched wildly toward one another, moving so quickly that the action was almost missed in the midair explosion and blossoming fireball that immediately followed the collision.

The bluffs flashed with intense, hellish light, as sparking from the collision ignited fuel lines, and even the protective circuits in the advanced false-color aperture GEN-IV night vision devices used by the strike force did not totally protect the hidden watchers from the blinding glare of NVG bloom-out effect.

A split-second behind the detonation flashes, the blast wave followed, booming and echoing back and forth across the walls of the steep chasm like peals of unearthly thunder.

As the fireball continued to burn in midair, spinning, whirling chunks of pulverized, vaporized wreckage cascaded downward to the flat of the valley floor, there to join the debris field of smoldering fragments of the destroyed Antonov in a memorial to covert death.

Soon the last of the echoes of man-made thunder died away, leaving only the crackling and popping of the flames burning in the ash-filled cauldron of the arid valley. The hidden watchers were silent for a moment, and then, emerging from concealed crevices amidst the south wall of the bluffs, there arose a chorus of hoarse cheers from the throats of the hill tribesmen.

As the mostazafin shouted, they aimed their Kalashnikovs at the stars and fired off bursts of automatic fire into the air.

Breaux felt a crawling repugnance. The tribesmen had nothing to celebrate. They had played no part in the drama. They had risked nothing, done nothing, been nothing to the mission. His only desire now was to get the hell out of this place, and as soon as possible.

Breaux gave the order for the teams to pack up their gear and move back to their staging area where an Omega security detail was keeping an eye on the perimeter. Rempt was already overseeing a team of Peshmerga who were packing his specialized spook gear into the same MIL-SPEC-hardened carrying cases in which it had been carried into the mountains.

The teams now began to file from their hiding places and march toward the staging area. Here, the vehicles that had formed the team's transport convoy were taken from the two large desert wadis in which they had been parked and kept well-concealed under roving guard patrols throughout the duration of the operation in the hills high above the desert.

Because of the strong probability of Iranian intervention, the convoy would split up and take pre-planned routes toward the cross-border regions, across which they would dart to the mission's hideouts inside Turkey.

Before moving out, however, Breaux ordered a mobile scout platoon to strike out a mile ahead of the main motorized force and act as an advance warning detail. If Breaux's pickets saw evidence of enemy movement across the line of advance, they were to report back to Breaux immediately and new plans would be made.

Breaux issued final orders, gave the scout platoon a head start, and then signaled the convoy to get rolling. Lights out, the vehicles pushed out across the desert, into the moonless blackness of the night.

Chapter Ten

In fact, the covert action in the Elburz mountains had not gone unnoticed by the Iranians. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if it hadn't been detected by Pasdaran mobile ground forces, or even by civilian outposts in the desolate borderlands.

To the covert planners, the noise and flash of the explosions had posed a calculated risk. The risk had been reduced by the apparently accidental detonation of an oil well at the nearby petroleum fields of Siphan Dagi, in southeastern Turkey, at approximately the same time as the destruction of Soviet airframes was taking place in the Elburz tablelands. But the risk couldn't be removed entirely.

Still, the deception had worked, and it had worked effectively. The mysterious detonations that preceded the ignition of the well (its source would never be conclusively determined) sending immense contrails of flame and smoke geysering high into the atmosphere were heard hundreds of miles away, across the vast Iranian salt desert in the key military outposts at the provincial capital, Tabriz. The oil explosions had masked the triple aircraft kills so well that nothing about the true action in the Elburz was suspected by indigenous forces.

Consequently, no tripwire military response had been mobilized to investigate the strange thunder and lightning in the mountains. Mobile troops were occupied elsewhere, conducting normal night operations. Instead, the mission was compromised by pure chance.

A lone Iranian motorized patrol making its way across the desert simply happened to see a remote series of flashes from a direction other than that of the blasts at Siphan Dagi.

Had the patrol not been in its precise position on the desert at that precise moment in time, it might have missed the flashes, but it was and so it hadn't.

"We've just observed evidence of an attack," the patrol leader had radioed to base.

"No, you are mistaken," he'd been informed. "A major oil well fire is burning across the border in Turkey. This is certainly what you have seen."

"Impossible," the patrol leader replied. "What I saw came from an entirely different direction — in the Elburz."

"You mean what you think you saw." The voice of the base commander fell silent a moment while he thought things over. "Is there continued activity?"

"No. Nothing more."

"Then resume patrol."

"Sir, I — "

"You have your orders, captain. Obey them."

And the Iranian captain did as ordered. Except not quite in the way he had been instructed by his superior officer. He knew old Manoucheher as a drunken slob who buggered sheep in his drunken off-hours, at least so went the rumor. He also knew that he had seen what he had seen and heard what he had heard, and fuck Manoucheher on a camel's ass.

The captain knew the desert landscape quite well, having conducted many an exercise and patrol by day and by night across an area encompassing hundreds of square miles.

He was aware that the most passable routes away from the Elburz ran roughly east-west and were not far from his current position. Further, in this part of the Iranian desert, motorized travel for any distance needed to keep to the road, further limiting the search area.

He would deviate his patrol just far enough to avoid charges of dereliction of duty, yet neatly circumvent the major's orders. With any luck, he would come upon something of interest. Something that might lead to the action he had so long craved.

"Boss, company's comin'."

Cherokee, which was Lt. Frisky's scout patrol, had just reported in. Cherokee had been conducting its flank security operations about twenty miles ahead and to the southwest of the main force element, staying off the road and stopping periodically to reconnoiter.

"Am ID'ing an Iranian Pasdaran scout patrol, probably out on night ops. We're laying low and watching them roll by on the road. Wait one."

There was dead air as Lt. Frisky paused to check the image on his thermal scope against what he could see with unaided night vision.

"Enemy force strength is about forty troops. These guys are in two BTR-70s with a GAZ heavy scout vehicle up front. Be advised they're heading directly towards you."

Breaux didn't like what he'd heard. He figured that the explosions in the mountains had been noticed despite diversionary precautions. Still, this had been a possibility all along.

"Can you take them out?"

"Negative," Lt. Frisky answered right off. "We could try but I'd prefer not to go up against those BTRs with the two rocket launchers we have available."

Breaux acknowledged and issued orders. An ambush would be set up. It would be a kill basket with Lt. Frisky's patrol closing any rear exit. The main force element would take up positions at either side of the road — Breaux had kept his eyes open for good ambush sites along the route out of long habit — and had noticed a likely spot only a few hundred yards back.

Within a matter of minutes, the force had moved skillfully and silently to position its vehicles off and away from the desert road while men armed with small arms and rocket launchers, including the heavy Dragon and smaller caliber SRAW Predator, took up positions on either side.

The ground here sloped down from the road, which had been laid right across part of a large wadi. In bulldozing the road, the builders had simply built up an embankment for the asphalt surfacing. The earthworks sloped away into the hollow of the wadi on both sides.

Men armed with rocket launchers and automatic weapons could effectively position themselves to bring intersecting fields of enfilading fire and high explosive strikes down on a target in between without much threat to their own safety, since the fire lanes would be directed upward on the diagonal.

Once the ambush teams were in position, Breaux waited and watched, ready to issue the order to commence firing on the enemy troops. SFOD-O had to strike fast and score clean kills. It was imperative that they prevent the Iranians from reporting the contact via radio.

An unfriendly patrol was one thing, but Breaux's force would not survive direct engagement with a brigade-strength detachment, and such is what the Iranians would send out to comb the desert if an alert came in. It would include helos, APCs and a lot of troops.

In the visual field of the binocular night vision scope strapped to his head beneath his Fritz helmet, Breaux saw the unfriendly patrol emerge onto his event horizon.

"Safe fire until I signal," he reminded his unit commanders, whispering into his lipmike.

The enemy scout patrol continued to roll closer to the narrow end of the killbox. Breaux's right hand tightened on the trigger grip of his Predator anti-armor missile launcher and his pulse quickened. The moment to attack was drawing near.

But then, suddenly, the tactical picture changed.

The scout patrol, rolling into the jaws of the waiting trap like a bit of iron drawn irresistibly toward a magnet, stopped without warning. Its commander then stood atop the rear seat of the scout car and raised a pair of night-seeing binoculars to his face.

Holding the light-amplifying field glasses, he moved his upper torso to and fro, sweeping the binocs around in a wide arc. Like a pendulum swinging back, he began to return the binoculars to their starting point. With relief, Breaux watched him begin to lower the field glasses. He had seen nothing…

Breaux's judgment proved premature. In a second, as if to confirm something he had noticed earlier, the young Pasdaran captain again raised the light-amplification binoculars to his eyes and held them there for several long seconds. This time the binoculars were brought down abruptly. This time he had seen something that had convinced him not to move forward another inch.

Breaux watched with mounting alarm as the captain began issuing rapid-fire orders for the troops in the first BTR to emerge from the armored war wagon and fan out along the part of the road that spanned the wadi. Now Omega's commander suspected what the Iranian officer had seen to change his plans so drastically. Like Breaux, he too had noticed that the sides of the road were ideally sited for an ambush point and had decided to deploy a squad of crunchies to reconnoiter before the patrol continued along the road.

Breaux's mind whirled like the hard drive of a computer as he mentally processed options to deal with the emerging FUBAR situation. He selected the only workable option from his mental checklist and prepared to put the plan into action.

"Gusher, Crash. Don't answer. Listen. On my three count get on your feet and fire your rockets at the patrol. Gusher takes the scout car. Crash takes the first BTR. I'll take the second BTR." Breaux paused a beat, and the mental hard drive spun some more.

"All unit commanders, listen up — when you see us fire, give us two seconds to duck back down again, then open up with everything you got."

Breaux began counting down, from three to zero. On the final count, he jumped up, seeing Gusher and Crash do the same from their positions. Sighting the crosspiece of the SRAW's pancake scope on his target, he triggered the forty millimeter rocket projectile, feeling the launcher tube kick like a mule on his shoulder from the recoil of the back-blast, and hearing the whoosh of the rocket's contrail like a steam pipe had just burst next to his right ear.

Time slowed in the familiar way it does in the heat of combat, and Breaux's visual field turned into a kind of tunnel. Down the length of that tunnel he watched the warhead streak toward its target, then impact into the armored hull of the BTR in a devastating blast of flame and concussion that blew molten fragments of steel and fused, flaming debris out from the epicenter of the blast.

As the BTR burned up on the desert, Breaux's mind also registered the second and third impacts that marked Gusher and Crash's rounds hitting their targets. His launcher spent, he ducked down again, and heard the din of battle start up all around him. Picking up his AKMS assault rifle, Breaux joined its stuttering voice to the choir of death, quickly becoming aware that the unit had a pitched battle on its hands.

Troops armed with AK-47s were attacking the ambush teams from all sides, and it fast became obvious to Breaux that the rocket strikes, while incapacitating the mobile armored patrol, had far from destroyed it or stopped its ability to counterattack.

The Iranian vehicles were halted, and many enemy had been killed and seriously wounded in the surprise strike, but others were still alive and the unfriendlies had at least one big gun still operational.

Breaux's force was now taking casualties as Iranian regulars, clad in olive-drab fatigues, began to engage them on the ground. The ambush had turned into nasty close-quarter fighting in many places, with men trading automatic fire and throwing grenades at close range.

In some cases, the fighting got even closer than that. As ammo clips were bled dry in the heat of combat, the opposing forces resorted to hand-to-hand fighting and bayonet attacks. Breaux found himself engaged in one such confrontation as a big Iranian sergeant suddenly jumped over the roadbed and launched a deft martial arts front-kick at his AKMS as he was about to reload. The bullpup rifle flew from his hands and fell with a clatter in the darkness somewhere off to his left.

The sergeant immediately went into a defensive stance as Breaux drew the long, serrated knife scabbarded at his belt. The sergeant scoffed at this and said something in Iranian, gesturing contemptuously at Breaux to advance and try his luck with the knife.

Breaux continued to circle warily. As a martial arts expert he had pegged the sergeant's movements to the native Iranian martial arts style called Zur Khane.

Zur Khane is practiced in an octagonal arena and is a style that is heavily dependent on muscular strength and stamina. The sergeant had the look of a Zur Khane practitioner, one accustomed to many confrontations in the octagon.

Again the sergeant gestured contemptuously for Breaux to lunge at him, spitting on the ground. Breaux had another idea. He flung the knife, knowing it would miss, but used his opponent's distraction to tuck down and roll sideways for his lost rifle.

As the sergeant bore down on him, Breaux fired from a prone position on his back, emptying half his clip. At close range the burst cut the Iranian practically in half.

Breaux was up and running as his opponent fell. Amid the chaos of battle he still heard the distinct sound of the BTR's guns chattering away. Mounting to the surface of the road, he scoped out the situation. Somehow the enemy war wagon had survived multiple rocket strikes.

Bodies were piled up in front of it, however, and it was clearly mortally damaged. To make sure it would blow, Breaux ordered that jerry cans of gasoline be thrown beneath the BTR by troops covered by diversionary fire. Once this had been done, using the last of their remaining rockets, the squads fired a final salvo.

In combination with the gasoline, the BTR began to burn, and its gun fell finally silent.

The battle was over. Dense, moonless darkness still covered the arid desert landscape.

The fire-fight, though intense, had been brief, and in this remote corner of the desert there was the likelihood that it had gone undetected.

However, even in the event the unfriendly patrol had never gotten off a radio distress call, with the coming of daylight its absence would be noted and a search mission would be launched.

Although Breaux's force would be long gone from the scene of battle by then, the longer discovery and identification was delayed, the better.

Breaux ordered that enemy dead be buried and the wreckage of the patrol's vehicles be pushed into the wadi and draped with camouflage netting, then covered with sand and rock to further disguise and conceal the wreckage. With any luck it would be several more days before the vanished patrol was located, and if a shamal blew up, the additional sand deposited by the storm might delay discovery even longer.

Once these actions were carried out, Breaux ordered the graves detail to put friendly dead in body bags and place them aboard the unit's vehicles. Having parked these in hide sites well-removed from the ambush site that was the major scene of the engagement with the Iranian patrol, the vehicles were completely intact.

After scout patrol squads were again sent forward as pickets, and final preparations were made, the convoy moved out again, towards its hide site across the Turkish border.

Chapter Eleven

The mission into the Elburz had been completed but Breaux had not yet been able to extract Detachment Omega as he had warned Rempt he would do on completion.

Bad weather had settled in shortly after the force's return to its borderland encampments. A period of biting cold and fierce shamals, blizzards that combined frozen rain, hail and sandstorms, had grounded inbound V-22 and helo flights. Until there was a hole in the weather to afford an opportunity window to extract, Breaux and his people were grounded.

This was not good. The tension in the camp, temporarily dispelled by the covert mission and the subsequent fighting withdrawal, had returned, and the adverse weather conditions had worsened flaring tempers. Breaux was still being held accountable by the Peshmerga for the killing of one of their own, and he had been warned of plans for revenge.

Not that he needed much warning: the beard-and-turban contingent was making it plain, in the way they'd done before the mission, that they were still out for blood. As far as Breaux was concerned, so be it. If the tribesman wanted another funeral or two, then that's what their sorry-assed little vendetta would cost them.

As soon as the weather cleared, he would leave the Koran-thumping assholes to the hell on earth that they and their sheep-fucking ancestors had created. Breaux understood the geopolitical realities that led America to at times cast its lot with the fucked-up nationalities of the far-flung corners of the earth, but the ground truth was another matter entirely.

That ground truth had driven American soldiers half-insane in Indochina, as members of the most advanced culture on earth were forced to live day to day with one of the most primitive. As far as Breaux went, dealing with the Peshmerga had been like taking a time trip back to the stone age. He'd be glad to return to civilization. Even eating fast food and breathing carbon monoxide was better than this shit.

Another throwback Breaux would be glad to leave behind was Rempt. Here was an especially toxic spook. In hindsight, Breaux had almost been glad to find himself engaged in actual combat during the gone-sour ambush on the road.

What had preceded it was sickness and perversity, acts unworthy of a soldier and an American. Breaux would need to wash the memory of his time in the Elburz borderlands from his mind, and he knew it had already cost him another little piece of his soul.

The weather worsened as winter storm systems marched across the face of the land. Above the thirty-fifth parallel, in the extreme north of the Mideast, the rocky, arid deserts and stony gray mountains are often swept by freezing rain, pelted by hail and scoured by blizzards of wind-driven sand.

The weather picture complicated the mission, increasing the challenges to the planning cell based at Incirlik, Turkey. They were professionals, however, and had conducted numerous clandestine paramilitary operations in the regional theater over the years.

They knew the vagaries of the region's storm systems, and were certain that a window of opportunity would open up within the time frame for the operation. Plus they had some very accurate meteorological data available to them.

For the moment the biggest problem would be in keeping the operation sterile and tightly compartmentalized. The operational detachment had been taken from one of the Western European NATO countries, and had been told nothing concerning the operation, other than that their objective would be the destruction of an Islamist terror group based on the eastern flank of NATO.

In operations such as these, where foreign nationals are used as surrogates, the procedure is based on the quick turnaround. The operational detachment is trained, briefed, sent out to do its job, debriefed and returned to its home nation, all within a few days' time.

Here, the delay caused by the weather posed several problems and risks. The airborne assault elements and ground forces both needed to be kept at the base near Incirlik in a state of seclusion. They could not be permitted to roam from the base.

But experience had taught the planners that even the most thoroughly indoctrinated troops can be ingenious in breaching security when claustrophobia sets in. The planners didn't like that.

It came as some relief when the chief meteorologist brought them the favorable report for which they had hoped. The operational detachment would be able to commence its assault on the target at two hundred hours. The planning cell wasted no time in bringing their end of the operation to a close.

Nightstalker was on again.

The unmarked black helicopters converged on the strike zone amid worsening weather conditions. Although the night skies had been clear when they had lifted off from Incirlik several hours before, the helo crews had encountered the tail end of a fierce shamal that had barreled its way across the mountains west of Tabriz like a runaway express freight.

Still, the crews had their orders. They were not to turn back unless the weather made further flight impossible. Since this was not the case, the flight leader continued on toward the target. As the gun ships reached their objective, the crews turned on their recording equipment, including gun cameras, and prepared to strike.

The sandstorm that the Nightstalker gun ship sortie had pushed through also began to abate as the strike mission neared its final target initial points. Within minutes the night sky was clear again, and the terrorist encampment visible on their infrared head-up displays.

Now about a half-mile slant-range of the target, the encampment appeared almost identical to the scale models placed on sand tables that had been used to plan the mission. The primitive stone and mud-brick yurts were scattered here and there across a main compound, with several others on ledges of the adjoining mountain peaks.

Vehicles of various types, including some Land Rovers outfitted with TOW missiles, heavy machineguns and twenty-millimeter coaxial cannons, were also in evidence, most of them concealed under camouflage netting.

Apart from this, and a lone sentry spotted smoking a cigaret on a lonely, windswept hillside, there was no evidence of activity at the terrorist encampment at three hundred thirty five hours. The terrorists would all be asleep inside the buildings, except for the sentry, and he didn't count in the overall picture.

The Nightstalker flight leader had seen enough to convince him that the mission would go down without a hitch. He flashed the thumbs-up to his copilot and signaled two clicks over the comms net to alert the other members of the sortie that they were to move into their pre-planned attack vectors.

Now the helos split up and commenced the assault, the lead chopper acquiring the large central building that he was told would house an especially dangerous terrorist element. The death dot moved to the center of the crosshairs and the gun ship pilot triggered a salvo of missiles that came off the sides of the chopper in two flashing bursts. White smoke contrails snaked downwards, following the warheads to the points of impact.

The building went up in a ball of flame, and the pilot came off the vector, slewing the gun ship out of the rising toadstool of flame and destruction that belched up into the night.

Somewhere inside that pillar of fire were the vaporized remains of the approximately twenty to twenty-five terrorists who had been asleep in that no-longer-existent barracks building. The thought sobered the pilot, but only for a second. His most important thought was that he had scored a good kill, and that's what he'd been paid to do. The hazardous duty bonus he'd receive wouldn't hurt either.

He was also paid to die, which is what happened before his heart finished its next contraction as a TOW missile streaked in the helo's direction. The TOW had come up off one of the parked, camouflage-netted and apparently unmanned trucks scattered throughout the encampment.

Not having taken these out first was a tactical blunder, albeit an explainable one. After all, the vehicles were thermally neutral, showing no evidence of hot spots associated with warm engines, or even human operators.

The flight leader would be able to explain the error, but only in the afterlife, if there was one, because in the blink of an eye, the TOW's shaped-charge, proximity-fuzed warhead exploded amidships, vaporizing the helo into a million flaming fragments.

The flight leader and copilot were broiled in their seats even as they reached for the ejection levers. They should have thought about what might be concealed underneath those parked vehicles.

Warm bodies against the cold sand, thermally insulated from above, thermally neutral to slant-range TI detection.

Now, man-portable and vehicle-mounted anti-air was coming up at the gun ship sortie from every direction. Ass-kicker details had been placed throughout the compound in positions of maximum surprise and tactical advantage if met by an opposing force.

There had been no "terrorists" in the buildings, only empty bunks. Breaux had deployed his combat personnel and some of the hill tribesmen he could halfway trust throughout the encampment. He had smelled a stink brewing on the wind, and he had not been mistaken.

As salvos of deadly fire were traded and the ground shook under the impact of crashing flying machines and thundering missile strikes, Breaux thought back to the events of the past several hours.

A fierce shamal had closed in, subjecting the mountains to a mixture of wind-blasted sand and pounding hail that had gone on for hours.

During that time atmospherics had played hob with radio and SATCOM communications, but more than that was going on within the encampment. It started to become evident that under cover of the storm much of the insurgent force was moving off into the mountains, taking advantage of the storm's cover to hide their departure.

Breaux was about to go off in search of Rempt for an explanation when "Doc" Jeckyll, Omega's comms officer and chief technical, flagged him down. Jeckyll had gotten a momentary patch into surveillance satellite downlink. He had seen what had appeared to be a helo force approaching from the northwest. What's more, he didn't think it was only atmospherics that had ruined transmission. Jeckyll told Breaux that he thought they were being deliberately jammed.

Sensing an impending attack, Breaux issued immediate orders to the SFOD-O detachment. His forces were to grab their socks, drop their cocks and prepare to move out, overland if necessary.

Breaux explained that the extraction helos might not be coming and that they could be faced with a situation that called for SERE (search, evasion, reconnaissance and escape) procedures. But first he deployed the force in anticipation of a heliborne strike. It materialized quickly, but SFOD-O was ready to confront it and prevail using ground-to-air weapons.

Returning to the present, Breaux watched another unmarked black gun ship explode in the air and burst apart into a cascade of showering fragments. The team had done its work well. The sky was now clear of unfriendly air assets.

Breaux issued instructions for the team to mount up and move the hell out. Breaux would follow once he had gotten the skinny on one final matter.

As he suspected, Rempt's living quarters had been completely destroyed. The spook's yurt was a heap of smoldering wreckage. And in the midst of that wreckage, there were the charred remains of a man wearing the hill tribesman's attire that Rempt had affected.

The only thing was, Breaux was sure it wasn't Rempt. For one thing, the corpse had a broken nose. Right where Breaux had bashed it in with the steel toe of his combat boot two days before. Rempt had taken a powder. Breaux would bet his life on it.

Chapter Twelve

Detachment Omega rolled, walked and bitched on into the mountains, eventually crossing from Turkey into the Kurd country of Anatolia. The traversal of national borders was marked only by cursor position and numerical readouts on GPS displays.

There were no mile markers in these desolate borderlands, and no natural terrain features to mark the boundary lines. Just the arid hill country, the treacherous switchback road and the limpid blue stretched tight above them like a pastel plastic lid. Though Turkey was a NATO member, Breaux chose to avoid withdrawing the team through it for several reasons.

One, the covert kill-strike had come from the direction of Incirlik, and Breaux well knew that the southeastern corner of Turkey had been a spook haven since the earliest days of the Cold War.

Two, Breaux had suspected there might be trouble brewing ever since the clandestine operations in the Elburz Bottleneck.

He well knew the pattern of cold-blooded deception followed by spasmodic violence that could develop when black ops planning cells buried deep in the CIA's Directorate of Operations ran the show. The techniques had been developed and refined during the Reagan era in the midst of counter-Soviet operations in neighboring Afghanistan. Breaux knew them well, having served as a military adviser in low-intensity warfare and special weaponry to the Jamat-I–Islami Mujahideen faction in mountain enclaves near Spin Gar Bor, and he also knew the way the "black minds" in those cells at Langley thought — then, and now.

In the Afghan theater both the Soviets, the United States, and the Islamist third-party insurgents were developing the tools and stratagems of twenty-first century small-unit warfare. Afghanistan was the place where West met East and both met Mideast.

While America's attention was directed to Oliver North's actions in Latin America, the new face of subwarfare was showing itself far to the east, in the rugged mountains of this ancient battleground.

Here, both sides perfected the use of exotic weaponry such as Rempt had directed against the Neo-Soviets. Here grand deception and dispassionate manipulation of fighting cells became the first order of battle.

The pattern was familiar. Covert paramilitary teams would conduct clandestine missions. Later, other scalpel forces would be deployed to wipe out those teams so the knowledge of the events they had set in motion would be lost forever.

Compartmentalization would be airtight, but the multiplication of paramilitary cells in the war zone produced results similar to the wildfire spread of cancer cells in the human body. From that spook war in Afghanistan had emerged the Osama bin Ladens and the Hassan Ramad Ali's — the Mahdi and his cohorts in Al Qadr — of the new millennium's terrorist international, turning the United States' own secret warfare tactics against their creator.

Some of those nasty little backchannel combat campaigns begat dire consequences. The attack on the Golden Gate bridge by Ali's bloodthirsty Shadow Brigades in 2015, for example, had been one of them.

No. There would be no sanctuary in Turkey for Detachment Omega.

Not yet, at least.

The shamals came barreling in again like a freight out of hell. The weather worsened. This time Breaux welcomed the storms as part blessing, at least, because he suspected that a second Nightstalker attack wave would be coming in behind the first covert strike teams.

Detachment Omega marched on through the shamals. The unit humped mostly by night, halting only when weather conditions became so grave as to prohibit movement entirely.

The unit kept to the high ground as much as possible. More than once, the detachment had seen flash floods completely fill large wadis in a matter of minutes. There would have been no escape from such an inundation, at least not in time to save the team's vehicles, missile launchers and critical food and ammo supplies.

Nature wasn't their only adversary. Suddenly, in the midst of clearing away debris from a rock slide that blocked their line of withdrawal, Breaux's teams heard the sound of helicopter rotor blades somewhere slant range of them. Breaux signaled for vehicle drivers to kill their engines and for everybody to hit the dirt. The team's JLTVs were driven into any available hiding places, and the team hunkered down for cover, weapons at the ready.

They had heard and seen many helo overflights since their departure from the rebel sanctuary inside the Turkish border. The hunters were keeping up the pressure, intensively searching for the team. The first attackers had come in by helo, and while the next attack might come by land, the scalpel force would certainly use airborne patrols of some kind in an effort to track Omega's position.

As the team listened, waited and watched, the chugging and droning of the oncoming helos grew steadily louder. The sounds soon merged together into a single deafening roar. Somewhere, very close by and not too high overhead, the black helos were hovering, darting back and forth, listening and watching.

Like the other members of the unit strung out along the ridge-line, Breaux's fists tightened on the hand grip and underbarrel of his AKMS as he strained to catch every nuance of sound from above. The team would remain concealed if possible, but if they were fired upon, Breaux had ordered them to hit back and kill the helos with ground-to-air missile strikes.

This time the choppers began moving off, though. First one, then the other began to come off their hovers, and then the entire sequence reversed.

The steady, deafening roar of dishing rotors began to waver, to unravel into an echoing, chugging, pistoning turbulence that soon faded altogether. In minutes the helos had moved off and the threat had passed.

"You think they made us, boss?" asked Sgt. One Eyes.

"I don't know," Breaux replied. "If these guys didn't, then the next time, or the time after that, they will. We're living on the edge, here."

"I gotcha, boss."

Breaux had dispatched scout units to conduct security operations on the force's flanks. He checked with them via secure radio links. Had they detected any evidence of ground forces approaching?

"Negative," replied Cpl. Zappa. "We ain't seen nothing but sand, snakes and scorpions so far."

The same answer came from the two other buddy teams Breaux had out working flank patrol.

Breaux consulted his wrist chronometer. The liquid crystal digits told him that the team still had several hours of march time left before it would need to hole up with the dawn of day.

The colonel signaled his team to remount and move out again. Vehicle engines cranked to life and combat boots began crunching sand and gravel. Men and machines picked themselves up and once more began to march and roll and curse — straight-leg, mud-sucking infantry, doing what universal soldiers always did.

The Eagle Patchers had gone to ground as the sun beat down upon the desert. They moved out again once darkness fell. They had come down out of the mountains into the flat stony desert that lies amidst the Elburz and Zagros mountain ranges between the Turkish border and Teheran.

The Iranian capital city is nestled close to the middle of the spine of the Elburz range which cuts east-west across Iran's northern tier. Tehran was still several hundred miles to the southeast. Because of the inhospitable nature of the desert here, and the fact that it has few exportable natural resources except the vast salt deposits of a fossil sea, the region is sparsely populated.

Breaux believed the odds were still in SFOD-O's favor for an extraction from a dot on the Iranian Kavir Desert, the Dasht-E-Kavir, in Farsi called Manzariyah. The remote abandoned salt mine there was just within the maximum range of Marine Sea Stallions dispatched from Masirah Island off the eastern coast of Oman, known, because of its oven-like heat and tormenting flies, as "Misery" island.

Already Marine aviation teams were working at a makeshift airstrip on Masirah to ready the two CH-53E rescue choppers for the inbound flight. Technicians were making sure the helos cranked and that all major and backup navigational systems were working smoothly.

At the same time an AC-130H Spectre gunship was being readied in one of the airstrip's hangars. Spooky — as the AC-130H was fondly nicknamed — had the range and the firepower to take down security threats to the team's extraction, and also to protect the heavy lifters as they made a run for the Persian Gulf across the lower half of Iran with the US specwar personnel onboard.

Now, as the team began to cross the flat expanse of the open desert, the troops started noticing broken lines of craters covering the landscape. Breaux recognized these land features. They were holes in the earth created by the subsidence of the desert crust into an underground cavern system running beneath the ground.

The northern deserts of the Middle East were once submerged beneath a prehistoric ocean that shrank back to create the Caspian Sea to the northeast, the Mediterranean to the west and the Persian Gulf to the south, as well as numerous rivers and lakes in between.

It wasn't just oil that flowed underneath the desert, it was water too. It flowed in rivers and pooled in huge cisterns trapped in sandstone aquifers. The team was probably crossing a cavern system through which one such underground river flowed, emptying into the Gulf via caves on the distant coast beyond the Zagros range.

Before long, the unpredictable weather again turned sour on the unit. It was at 0130 hours, in the midst of a sudden shamal, that one of Breaux's reconnaissance patrols reported in with an alert.

"Boss, we got some girl scouts coming on bearing Hotel Bravo-Niner. I make it a motorized company. Couple of Bimps and a truck full of rag head crunchies. They've picked up our trail, no doubt of it."

"That's a roger," Breaux said back. "Maintain visual contact. Report back every ten."

"I copy that. On it."

Breaux keyed off his comms.

A little later, Breaux got another message from his scouts.

"Boss, they've halted. Something's up. I don't know what yet, though."

"Keep scoping them out. When you get a handle on what they're up to, get on the horn."

"Yessir."

About five minutes passed, and then the team's pucker-factor skyrocketed. Aircraft were again heard vectoring in. The sounds were different this time. It wasn't the rotor noises of smaller choppers — the black gun ships that had hit and chased them before — they now heard. It was a single heavy lifter, sweeping in at higher altitude. Something about this made Breaux especially alert, though he couldn't say exactly why. There was just a foreboding that something was wrong. Real wrong. A minute later, Breaux learned he'd been more than merely paranoid.

"Boss, it's a Harke that's coming and if my eyes don't deceive me there's a daisy cutter hanging off the bottom."

"Say again."

"A daisy cutter, boss. A BLU-82 complete with US markings. No shit."

"Damn, I knew some shit was about to go down."

Yeah, Breaux thought. It was possible. This was Iran. There were tons of weapons left over from the Shah's reign and Ollie North's chickenshit guns-for-hostage dealing in the mid-eighties, stuff that even survived eight years of meatgrinder warfare with Iraq. Yeah, it was possible, alright.

Breaux issued immediate instructions to his patrols and then to the rest of the detachment over the secure radio net. Breaux ordered the unit was to grab as much gear, ammo and weapons as possible and leave the vehicles behind. They were to rappel down into the craters in the desert crust and take cover in the subterranean cavern system on the double.

Vehicle doors slammed, boot leather beat ground, men shouted and cursed as they unfurled ropes and hastily unshipped rappelling gear, scrambling to evacuate the surface before all hell broke loose. It all took minutes and felt like hours, but by the time the Harke came thundering overhead, beating the air with its huge main rotors, the last US soldier was grabbing his helmet and biting the dirt on the hard cavern floor.

High overhead, some bad shit indeed was about to happen.

The ton-and-a-half worth of fuel-air explosive — a conventional bomb the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — was cut loose from the helo at the top of the aircraft's flight ceiling. It plunged to earth, detonating about sixty feet above ground, subjecting a football stadium-sized area to an air burst and firestorm rivaled only by a subkiloton nuclear blast.

Forty feet underground, the caverns in which the US special forces had taken refuge shook and tremored, and portions of the cavern ceiling gave way, burying soldiers alive under tons of fallen debris. Above, at ground zero, the detachment's JLTVs were completely incinerated and the missiles and ammo stores left behind cooked off in the midst of the larger inferno. Gouts of fire whooshed down into the craters like the flaming breath of dragons, searching for human prey. More casualties were taken as men too close to the crater shafts were badly burned. All of them were shaken up like flies in a matchbox as the ferocious onslaught pounded with all its might against the cavern roof.

When the tremors subsided, Breaux gathered the stunned survivors together, shouting and slapping those who were too dazed to function back into reality. His men needed their wits about them, and fast. Breaux feared that the opposition force — and he was not entirely certain of its identity at this point — might send in combat troops after dropping the hammer on them.

Which is exactly how it went down.

Commando forces were soon fast-roping from transport helos and rappelling into the cavern system after their blast-shocked quarry. It was a platoon-strength contingent, armed with AK-class automatic rifles and the light, box-fed machineguns called squad automatic weapons by infantry soldiers.

The attackers had the advantage of shock and surprise in their favor and they had fallen on a force still dazed from the effects of the walloping bomb strike. The shock tactics were effective and in the first few seconds of the assault the invaders took still more casualties among Breaux's beleaguered troops. But the American combatants soon rallied and their rage at the enemy drove away every other concern. Breaux's troops hit back with savage counterattacks that first blunted the assault and then turned the tide of battle. In the brief but bloody underground battle, the Americans steadily whittled down the assault forces to a stub, shooting and grenading most of the enemy and bayoneting the rest until the cavern floor ran with blood and the air of the tunnels was close with the stench of cordite and death.

When the hellaceous fire-fight was over, Breaux examined the unfriendly KIAs. They wore Iranian regular army battle dress and carried natively manufactured AK variants. The enemy was now a known quantity. They had been attacked by Iranian forces, not paramilitary black operatives out of Incirlik. This meant that they had either evaded the scalpel teams or that the dogs had been finally called off. The distinction was hardly a cause for celebration — dead was dead, no matter who killed you.

And now Detachment Omega had to find a way to its extraction zone without motorized transport and most of its ammo and food stores. The strike team still had its radios, battlefield PC and tactical geolocation gear, but even if these continued to function, they weren't reliable deep underground. A safe exit from the cavern system would need to be found without benefit of sophisticated positioning devices.

Stripping their dead of dog tags, burying friendly KIAs beneath cairns of stones, and bandaging the wounded, the SFOD-O detachment now navigated the cavern system by magnetic compass and NVG-enhanced visual reconnaissance. The idea was to keep due east, in the direction of the planned extraction site at Masiriyah.

The notion of following the underground river down to the coast, suggested by Sgt. Hormones, was nixed by Breaux who pointed out that at least fifty miles of hard going lay ahead. Even if they made it to the Gulf coast, it was doubtful a seaborne extraction from there was doable. No, the team would stick to the original extraction plan and try to carry it out. That was their best, and probably their only, shot.

Hours later, after a forced march with only a single rest break, the Eagle Patchers came to another rock chimney that led up onto the floor of the desert.

Breaux sent a five-man recon squad roping up the chimney to scout the perimeter and determine whether it was secure or not. Once topside on the desert crust, night-seeing binoculars were brought into play and the squad scanned the four compass points for signs of unfriendlies in the vicinity.

But there was nothing amiss out in the desert night. All around them was a flat, sere landscape broken only by massive sandstone pillars that jutted up here and there like the pegs of broken teeth in a giant's mouth. The squad leader was about to stow his field glasses and report back to Breaux when he saw the constellation of tiny, yellow stars; fairy lights that shimmered and danced on the horizon line as they passed between the pillars.

Sgt. Hormones continued to train his field glasses on the fairy lights, studied the spectacle awhile, nodded to himself in confirmation at what he'd surmised, then climbed down to report.

"Boss, the coast is clear. There's a road or highway about five klicks due east. I saw the headlights of some cars or maybe trucks heading south just before."

Breaux ordered Jeckyll up top with Hormone's scouts. Jeckyll was to set up his dual-screen tablet laptop and mobile tactical communications equipment and do a fast map recon to pinpoint their position. A security detail armed with SAWs and SRAWs was also sent topside onto the flat desert crust.

Breaux decided to climb up and eyeball the scene for himself, ordering the main force to fall out below. After breathing the stink of death for hours it was good to feel the bite of the chill night wind against his face and inhale the cold, fresh desert air. In the distance, more dancing pinpoints suddenly sprang into being, then just as quickly disappeared.

Yeah, there was a road there, alright.

Jeckyll had by this time set up his rig and performed a preliminary map recon.

"Boss, we're about forty klicks southeast of our last position," he reported. "The road we've seen is called Highway Seven, which runs between Teheran and a place called Chah Rabat at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman."

"What's our position relative to Masariyah?" Breaux next asked.

Jeckyll told him that they were less than thirty klicks away from the hoped-for extraction site.

Breaux nodded and told Jeckyll to try and raise the rescue team over mobile SATCOM tactical VOIP. This turned out to be a tougher bill to fill because the equipment was still not working right.

Finally Jeckyll managed to connect to Eisenhower, the Nimitz-class carrier anchored off the Omani coast that was coordinating the extraction effort. A complicated arrangement followed in which the team communicated through three parties with the chopper rescue detachment gearing up to go from Misery Island.

After the palaver over the airwaves, Breaux realized that the unit could still reach the extraction site at Masiriyah, at least in theory. It would be a little later than originally planned, because they'd lost all their motorized transport and had been forced to stage a fighting withdrawal.

But Breaux figured that with luck maybe some new transport might be picked up on the highway. If the team could commandeer itself some trucks, that could change the time-frame completely.

Breaux issued orders for the rest of the troops to climb out of the hole in the earth and form up by squad. Special Forces Operational Detachment Omega was to march toward Highway Seven and deploy along its flanks. He would tell them what to do next when they got there.

Chapter Thirteen

From here to a vanishing point in the north between the rock-ribbed ramparts of the Zagros mountains, the highway stretched ruler-straight, paralleling the easternmost bifurcation of the coastal mountain range right up to the Turkish border. In fact, Jeckyll's map recon made clear that the highway was part of the Bonn to Karachi truck route that Breaux's crew had begun to investigate back in the Swiss Alps several weeks before.

Along this route traveled the trucks that had departed from Germany toward Pakistan, carrying contraband dual-use technology destined for the new Soviet Union. And, going in the other direction, the Neo-Soviets were using the selfsame route to shuttle military gear into Tehran to complement the clandestine air cargo flights across the Elburz and northern Iran to installations beyond the border.

But more surprises were to come. As Breaux and the team scouted out the highway, they saw, around a distant bend, the procession of wheeling, flickering star points that marked several pairs of approaching headlights. Breaux watched the headlights appear and disappear as the road looped around the colossal sandstone pillars that rose for several miles along its flanks. As he watched, a light bulb flashed on in his head.

"Top, you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"About dem trucks?"

"Yeah."

"I t'ink we both got the same idea."

"Switzerland."

"I gotcha."

"Jeckyll," Breaux next said, turning to his main technical. "Do a fast computation on travel time between here and Frankfurt for that truck convoy we saw leave. See if it's possible that it's the same one."

"On it."

Jeckyll entered data into the PC and in a couple of minutes came back with the answer.

"Affirmative," he replied. "Allowing for downtime on the road that could definitely be the same convoy. Pretty neat if we hitch ourselves a ride on those trucks, huh?"

"You know it," Breaux replied, and ordered the rest of the unit to get their heinies in motion. The team needed to deploy along the flanks of the road and be ready to interdict the convoy. In order to do that it would need to be in position well in advance of its approach.

The team reached the road while the convoy was still at least a mile away. It was rolling on, doing about thirty miles on the road, moving at a steady pace down the highway.

Breaux ordered Sgts. Mainline and Death to set up fire positions with SRAW rockets and Chicken Wire to get ready with his M-60E3 "Pig" GPMG. On his signal they were to launch rocket salvos and small arms fire at either side of the road, though placing their strikes wide enough to make sure the blacktop stayed undamaged.

If the lead truck — or any of the others behind it — ignored the warning salvos and tried to barrel their way through the blockade, Top Sgt. Death was to open up and shoot the driver of the lead vehicle.

The ambush went down pretty much as Breaux had anticipated. The salvo of SRAW rocket strikes did its work, and the lead truck stopped short, its hood thrown back against the windshield and its shattered engine block gushing flames and dense black smoke. The other trucks behind it followed suit with barely enough clearance to keep from slamming into each other as their drivers stomped on their brakes.

The men in the truck cabs saw the night begin to swarm with armed commandos and came out with their hands up, doing exactly as ordered. For the truckers, the road to Karachi had just dead-ended. The convoy was now in Eagle Patcher hands.

Breaux set his people to checking out the captured trucks before they were commandeered as transport. Inside their cargo areas, most of the rigs were loaded with weaponry, heavy machinery, spare parts and miscellaneous components. Breaux ordered everything videotaped for the intel people back at the Pentagon and Langley to whack off over and then had two of the trucks cleaned out.

One wasn't very full and posed little problem. The remaining three were packed to the bursting and the other two had to be laboriously emptied by means of backbreaking grunt work. Once that was done, the crew piled into the first three vehicles. The final truck was driven off the road and blown up with a missile strike.

As to the drivers, Breaux ordered them blindfolded, gagged, tied up and left near the wreckage with some food and water nearby. It would take them awhile to work themselves loose, and by that time it wouldn't make much difference to the force whether they provided directions to pursuers or not.

Breaux's crews climbed aboard their new transport, again making for their planned extraction site. They drove through the night and into the gloaming of early morning. At the same time as this was happening, the Sea Stallions and their AC-130H Spectre escort had already launched from Misery Island and were en route across the Arabian littoral to the pickup site.

The aircraft weaved a stomach-turning, swooping, diving course through the coastal mountains, following a path that stitched them through the invisible holes in overlapping ground radar coverage like a thread being passed through the eye-holes of a dozen scattered needles.

The choppers and Spooky began their penetration of Iranian air space at four hundred feet, but as they moved inland and crossed the canyons and rift valleys between the coastal mountains, they averaged an altitude of as low as twenty feet above ground.

As they flew nap of the earth, their flight paths controlled by terrain-following guidance systems, the aircraft zigged and zagged, twisting and turning to keep their fuselages hidden amid the ground clutter, but also lurching and swaying in crosswinds and thermals that buffeted the aircraft and complicated the already difficult maneuvers.

There was as much seat-of-the-pants flying here as flying on instruments, and the reactions, skill and daring of pilots were just as important to the successful inbound flight as were the high technology navigational aids the aircraft used to make the incursion.

At last, after over an hour of these gut-wrenching aerobatics, the three aircraft cleared the main spine of the mountains and overflew the far lower foothills that extended for several score miles from their base.

The aircrew now knew that there would not be much more flight time left. They had almost reached their destination and the radio direction finder pod mounted just beneath the AC-130H's left cockpit windshield was already picking up coded signals from the ground troops' transponder beacon.

Detachment Omega had made the abandoned salt mine without further incident and fanned out into defensive positions. The cargo trucks were parked just within the walls of the huge open pit, at the end of a sloping access road, and so positioned as to be available for cover in case unfriendlies appeared. This turned out to be a prudent precaution, because an assault was not long in materializing.

Suddenly the air was split by missile strikes as an armored enemy force appeared on the perimeter of the mine. As the US troops returned fire, Breaux had Jeckyll radio for an ETA on the airborne extraction package.

Jeckyll reported that the rescue mission was currently fifteen minutes away from their position. Jeckyll also notified the inbound aircrews that it would be a hot extraction, as they were now under heavy attack. Spooky affirmed that report and took the lead, outdistancing the choppers to give cover fire for the rescue force.

The AC-130H Spectre gun ship arrived on scene to find blue force personnel facing a regiment-sized ground contingent of Iranian regular troops as well as an airborne squadron of attack helicopters. Spooky's FCO or fire control officer, usually irreverently abbreviated as "Fucko," ordered his crew to go in after the helos first, and the Spectre's gunners opened up on the attack choppers with front-mounted 20 mike-mike Vulcan cannon fire and the 105 mike-mike automatic howitzer that was mounted in the well just behind the left wing. A flaming hail of the thirty-two pound projectiles fired by the howitzer slammed into the enemy choppers, literally ripping them apart in midair.

Spooky next went after the enemy ground troops. It began pouring fire down at the Iranians while Omega emptied its guns at the bearded men in olive drab opposing them on the ground. Between the AC-130H and Omega the Iranian regiment was quickly whittled down to a bloody butt-end. The remnants of the force soon withdrew to sheltered fire positions while their commander radioed for reinforcements.

Amid continuous firing, and before fresh troops could arrive on the scene, the two CH-53E Sea Stallions landed inside the abandoned salt mine. With engines idling they began taking on evacuees.

With full loads of grateful soldiers, the choppers rose up off the ground and began the outbound leg of their flight. They were thousands of pounds heavier by now, and their fuel stores were borderline, but each CH-53E was certified to carry a nine-ton payload and each Stallion had been outfitted with two external 450 gallon drop tanks, enough to nearly double its five hundred mile range. The AC-130H continued to ride shotgun as the mission made a run back to the Iranian coast.

Onboard the helos, Detachment Omega was dazed and confused. Some of the men experienced the post-battle euphoria that can overcome soldiers after prolonged combat. Under the circumstances this was a dangerous high to ride. There were still almost two hours of flight time left, involving tricky negotiation of miles of treacherous terrain. The mission was still open to attack by Iranian aircraft.

In short, they were all still in the shit and had no cause to party.

"Fighters," the lead helo pilot suddenly announced.

The euphoria died as quickly as it had come on.

Dead ahead there were MiG-29 Fulcrums. Two first-line fighters manned by Iran's best pilots. The fighters closed in, going after the AC-130H Spectre first, which they rightfully judged to be their most serious threat. Spooky had a fight on its hands, and its flight crew all knew it. While the pilot kept the left wing-tip pointed at the oncoming planes, the Fucko's sensor operators locked on with their radar and infrared target identification and acquisition systems, awaiting their chief's order to commence firing. The Fucko gave the order and Spooky's 20 mike-mike Vulcan gun array, 40 mike-mike cannon and 105 mike-mike howitzer unleashed a coordinated pattern of fire at the incoming fighters.

The trick here was to get the planes on the first salvo, because the AC-130H Spectre was not an aircraft designed for aerial combat. Intended to take on ground targets, all the plane's guns and most of its sensors were located on the left side of the fuselage, and an attack on its vulnerable blind side could easily prove fatal.

Spooky's crew cheered as they saw one of the MiGs take a hit and go spinning out of control, its right wing completely chewed off by a burst of intense automatic and cannon fire. More of the fighter fuselage disintegrated under the steady barrage, and the burning, smoking hulk went spinning out of control, the shot-up pilot ejecting in a bloody, burning mass and falling to earth without his chute ever opening.

The rest of the smoke-spewing metal eggshell went smashing into the side of a mountain, exploding into a balloon of fire and scattering blast debris down the sheer slope to the floor of the canyon below.

The second Fulcrum had been hit by Spooky's fire too, but it managed to evade mortal damage and returned fire at the AC-130H while winging-over onto the Spectre's blind-side. A salvo of AA-11 missiles exploded near the gun ship and jagged, whirling shrapnel tore into the skin of the nacelle of its right prop engine.

With one engine now dead, the AC-130H went into a spin. Before the pilot could compensate, Spooky had crashed into the cavern wall and burst into flames, and the airframe's wreckage cascaded to the rock floor below.

With the Spectre gone the surviving MiG came hurtling after the Stallions. By this time, though, pursuer and pursued alike had flown into the teeth of another cyclonic sandstorm. With visibility cut down by the shamal, infrared and radar targeting accuracy was reduced, and the choppers evaded missile strikes that slammed into the mountainside, sending gouts of shattered rubble spraying against their rotors and hulls. The lone MiG tried to follow but was leaking hydraulics by now. Its manual backup flight control systems had begun to fail too. Spooky hadn't killed the Fulcrum outright, but it had injected slow poison into its veins that would end up killing it by delayed reaction.

With the top of the canyon wall looming up in front of his cockpit, the Fulcrum pilot tried one last time to pull up his plane's nose, but it was like stirring a kettle of mush with his joystick and he knew he'd never make it in the second or two he had left.

A split-second after he yanked the ejection lever, the nose of the Fulcrum struck the side of the canyon, and the plane flipped back on its belly like a hooked marlin, crashing upside down into the reverse slope of the canyon. A massive fireball marked the spot where it exploded into a thousand fragments.

A few hundred feet slant-range of the crash, the pilot's chute opened and he floated to earth unconscious, never feeling the harsh impact with the ground that broke his collar bone in three places until he came to, much later, to find himself alone in a bleak and savage place.

The two Sea Stallions reached the Gulf coast over an hour later. Their auxiliary drop tanks had been sucked dry and jettisoned not long after dust-off, and their main tanks were now almost out of fuel. In addition, one of the choppers had been damaged by munitions strikes during the fight with the MiGs. The lead chopper made it in for a landing on Masirah island, but the second helo, its right GE turboshaft engine now noticeably trailing a plume of sooty black smoke, was forced to ditch in the sea.

Breaux was among those onboard who had to bail out and swim for the rescue boats that were sent out from the Eisenhower's support ships. As he dog-paddled to safety he heard a familiar voice shout a familiar refrain.

"Lord, how I just fucking luvvvvv the Army," Sgt. Mainline was bellowing as he stroked toward the boats. Breaux almost believed him.