Bloodstorm

17

“There is no good way to get into Afghanistan,” Murdock said as he faced the gathering in Admiral Tanning’s office in NATO headquarters in Athens at a 1600 meeting. “The country is landlocked, so we can’t swim in. She’s in the middle of unfriendly countries. Commercial air might work for three or four of us, but not fourteen.”

“So you parachute in,” General Archibald said. “Do that long free fall and get down quickly.”

“Say it works,” Ed DeWitt said. “How in hell do we get out?”

“And whose airspace do we violate flying in there?” Murdock asked. “You have your choice of Pakistan, China, or Iran. None the most friendly.”

“How about the Russian breakoff nations to the north of Afghanistan?” Admiral Tanning asked. “That would be Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Yes, I just looked them up on the map. Would they be more friendly for an overflight?”

“We’re not on the best of terms with the three,” General Archibald said.

“Where does that leave us?” the admiral asked.

“At thirty-three thousand feet over Pakistan,” Murdock said. “That sounds like the best we can do.”

“The President wants you to take the lady nuclear warhead specialist along with you, Commander,” the admiral said. “Is that going to be a problem? Does she parachute?”

“With all respect, Admiral, I don’t see how we can take her. She can parachute, but we have no exfiltration route. We’d have to play it by ear and we could lose half our men. We can blow up a few nuclear warheads when we find them.”

Don Stroh coughed and got some attention. “ ‘Find them’ are the key words here, gentlemen. Afghanistan is almost as big as Texas. Lots of places to hide. We damn well better know where those warheads are before we drop in on that country.”

“How?” Murdock asked.

“The Company has some friends left in Kabul. My suggestion is that we talk with them, then we drop in two men to check out the information, and if it’s good and we can find the location of any warheads, then we send in the platoon to take the place down.”

“So that gives us some time for Kat to train four of us how to blow up a nuclear warhead without scattering the radiation over half a country,” DeWitt said.

“Not a lot of time,” Stroh said. “We’ve had our man in Kabul looking for that plane and where the goods went ever since we knew the warheads were going that way. He’s making progress. Actually, the agent there is a woman and extremely good at her job. She has a tentative, but nothing firm. She says within twenty-four she should be able to nail it down for sure.”

“I’ll go in,” Murdock said.

Stroh shook his head. “You’re too damn big. Should be the smallest men you have, especially if any speak Farsi, Arabic, or the two crazy Afghanistan languages.

“Franklin and Khai,” Murdock said. “Both speak Arabic and Franklin has Farsi.”

“What ships do we have in the Arabian Sea right below Pakistan?” General Archibald asked.

Admiral pointed to one of his men in the room. “Find out,” he ordered. The man left at once.

“Do we still have landing rights at Muscat City in Oman?” Murdock asked. “Used it during the Gulf situation. Might be a spot we could take off with a high-flying plane.”

“Once you fly to the Pakistan border you’d have three hundred miles due north to Afghanistan,” Admiral Tanning said. “Anybody know what kind of air defense Pakistan has? Then what about Afghanistan? Do they even have an air force?”

“We’ve got some homework to do,” Stroh said. “I’ll get on the horn and ask the home office about the fighter capability of those two countries.”

“Why not send our two men in on commercial air?” Murdock asked. “Stroh can get them travel papers, local documents, everything they need. Money and a fake company they work for. His meat. Then they meet his lady inside and find the nukes. Maybe the two of them can blow up the warheads and fly out. Be a lot simpler that way. We can give them the skin color they need and they go in as Arabs looking for business.”

“That sounds best,” Admiral Tanning said. “I’ll call my people and the President. Stroh, you get with your boss. Let’s get busy. Oh, Commander. You might have Kat show your two men the best way to blow up a nuclear warhead with the least fallout.”

“That’s a Roger, sir.”

A half hour later, Murdock couldn’t help but grin.

“I don’t like it at all, Murdock,” said Kat. “How can I teach these two men in a few hours what should take weeks to learn? Sure, I can draw them some pictures and show them where to put the charges, but there’s more to it than that.”

“First we have to find the damn warheads,” Murdock said. “I don’t trust the CIA too much, especially in Afghanistan, where they have had a miserable record. There’s a good chance those warheads are deep in a cave out in the desert somewhere and Osama bin Laden is sitting around his campfire chuckling, wondering how he can use the greatest of all terrorist weapons.”

“Damnit, I still want to go.”

“None of us might be going. We just have to wait and see. In the meantime, you take Khai and Franklin and teach them as much as you can about this kind of warhead, what they can do and shouldn’t do, and keep it simple.”

“I still don’t like it.” Her eyes flashed and her fists settled in on her hips.

“Join the club. Say you were in the middle of Afghanistan in the desert. It’s a hundred and fifteen in the shade and no shade. There’s a band of gunmen chasing you. Tell me, what would you do?”

“I wouldn’t sit down and do my nails, I can tell you that. I’d use that twenty-millimeter weapon we have and blow them out of sight.”

“Good answer. Here are Franklin and Khai. Make them into nuke demolition experts in four hours.”

Murdock went back to the chair at the small table in the rooms NATO had made available to the SEALs, and stared at the maps the admiral had loaned him. How in hell could they get out of the damn country if they had to go in? Jump in on a HALO — High Altitude jump with a Low Opening of the chute. Fine free fall from thirty-three thousand feet to two thousand feet, and then open the chute for a fast trip to the ground.

The Navy didn’t have a chopper that could travel even six hundred miles for a lift-out. The Sea Knight, their old workhorse, had a round-trip range of about 425 miles. That would dump them out somewhere in Pakistan, instead of in the wet of the Arabian Sea, where they could meet a boat or a chopper.

They could steal a couple of cars and try to fight their way out of the place. Hire a truck and head for the border. Yeah, sure. Maybe six men, two each day, could make it in and then out again by commercial air. Right now he didn’t see any other way.

He and his father had lunched with the admiral that noon. It was authentic and the food was not all that good, but there was plenty of Greek atmosphere. Congressman Murdock had a meeting with the Greek defense minister later that afternoon, and he’d left in a NATO car shortly after they’d returned from the restaurant.

Now Don Stroh came in, flopped into a chair across the small table, and tipped up a can of Diet Coke.

“Well, a report from Kabul. Our lady there has nothing. Her best contact was just cut in half by the secret police. Not with bullets, with machetes. So she’s starting over. She bristled when I told her we were sending in two Navy SEALs to help her. I’d guess your guys haven’t done a lot of undercover spy work.”

“Not lately. It’s firm for us to send in two men?”

“Boss says it’s a go. President and the CNO gave it a go. So it should come through Navy channels sometime tomorrow. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get papers and clothes and passports and everything they’ll need so they don’t get shot at the airport.”

“Do it right, Stroh, or you’ll have two SEAL ghosts haunting your every move for the rest of that miserable thumb-sucking thing you’ll call a life.”

“Yeah, and they probably would jerk every fish off my line that I hooked. Oh, yeah, I’ll make certain all papers are up to date and absolutely authentic.”

Jaybird made an entrance, sputtering and swearing about the Navy and the delays in getting him off the cruiser and back to Athens. Then he began asking questions to catch up on what he had missed.

“Hell, yes, my arm is okay for duty. Just don’t ask me to make any rope climbs and I’ll haul my weight. Now what the fuck do we have on the fire?” After he said it, Jaybird frowned and looked over at Senior Chief Dobler. He had been so careful lately around Dobler. If he was going to have any chance at all with the senior chief’s daughter, Helen, he was going to have to be on his best ever behavior. A damn strain, but it would be worth it. Oh, yeah. He could picture her now and remember kissing her in the library. Just wait until he was back in Coronado.

Later Murdock watched as two makeup artists from town did a whole body-paint job on Khai and Franklin. They used some kind of water-based light stain that would wear off in a month or two. Both were given haircuts to conform to the Arab world, and then had their pictures taken for the slightly used passports.

Clothes came next, and small Old World suitcases for the trip with extra clothes and things Arabic inside. Their papers said that both men were from Saudi Arabia and they had been in Greece on business.

The two had Saudi passports, Saudi personal identification papers, an export-import license from Saudi Arabia, and two credit cards issued by Saudi banks.

“Best I can do,” Stroh said. “They fly out tomorrow. They go to Ankara, Turkey, then directly to Tehran, Iran, and from there the long hop into Kabul. I’ve booked them on Iran Air, and they have return tickets to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.”

“They have an address or two to contact this lady spy once in Kabul?” DeWitt asked.

“They do, and no Western gear to give them away. That means no SATCOM. We’ll have to rely on Jeru, our lady in Kabul, for all of our communications.”

Stroh sat the two Arab-looking SEALs down at a table and began his in-country lecture.

“You should know something about Afghanistan. It’s a highly unstable country. There have been about a dozen new governments, coups, and counter-coups in the past ten years. The Taliban is now in control of the nation. It’s a country of about twenty-four million people who are eighty-five-percent Sunni Muslims. It is a mountainous country with most of the land over four thousand feet elevation. It has mountains that rise from sixteen thousand to twenty-five thousand feet. The famous Khyber Pass is located here. It’s thirty-five miles long and is an ancient highway that runs from east to west.

“Kabul, where you’ll start your search, is a city of just over two million people. So be ready for it. There is one doctor for each seven thousand people. Almost ninety percent of the adults have had no formal schooling.

“The most potent force in the country right now is the Taliban militia. They seized control of Kabul and the nation in 1996 and set up a government. Leader of this government is probably Mullah Mohammed Omar, who led the militia in its fight. There are few pictures of him, and he refuses to talk with journalists from any country.

“Some who have seen him say he is a determined man about thirty-seven years old who lost an eye fighting the Soviets. Some say that Omar is a nominal leader trained and controlled by the Pakistan intelligence agency, ISI. Others say that he is not even a mullah, a Muslim teacher of the sacred law. His opponents say he is illiterate and knows nothing about Islam.

“Remember, the Taliban is in total control. You’ll be dealing with Taliban officials in the country.

“Money. You’ll have plenty. The medium of exchange there is the afghani, easy to remember. It takes over fifty of them to make a dollar. So you’ll be dealing in lots of paper. Each of you’ll have over ten thousand dollars worth of the paper money in large bills in your pockets and your suitcases.

“Now, any questions?”

“Say we find out where one or more of these nuclear warheads are. Do we get some dynamite from somewhere and blow them up, or what?”

“First find them, then have Jeru tell us about it and we’ll figure out what to do next. Getting explosives in that country will be damn near impossible.”

“Anything else?”

Both men shook their heads.

“All right. You have two hours before boarding the plane here at the Athens airport. It’s a long trip, but don’t take any English books to read. Look at the pictures in Arab magazines is your best bet. Oh, and sleep a lot.”

Murdock chimed in. “Franklin, you’ve got the con on this one. You two guys find the damn nukes and we’ll come help you finish them off. But first, you have to find them.”