Direct Action

13

The CIA had wanted all the mission preparations to take place at their training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, known as The Farm. Murdock, suspecting that their real desire was to supervise him more closely than he wanted, used the excuse that the residents of nearby Williamsburg wouldn’t take kindly to thousand-pound demolition shots going off at all hours. So Niland it was. The country was suitably bland and covered with scrub, and the mountain range was perfect to train for the helicopter part of the mission.

But one of the advantages to working for the CIA rather than Special Operations Command was that things got done in days rather than weeks. Murdock found plenty for the platoon to do. First, everyone had to be briefed on the mission, even though only half the platoon, eight men, would be going. Someone might get sick, or have a training accident, and one of the others had to be ready to step in. Of course, Murdock also had a more devious motivation behind the arrangement. The second eight, furious at being left behind, would bust their balls trying to prove to the lieutenant that he’d made a mistake in not picking them. They would push the first eight so hard that Murdock wouldn’t have to as much as raise his voice.

And the first eight would be Murdock, DeWitt, Roselli, Kosciuszko, Jaybird Sterling, Doc Ellsworth, Magic Brown, and Professor Higgins.

Once the plan was briefed, they fell into a daily routine. In the mornings they did a hard PT while the desert was still fairly cool, and then fell to on the book work. Each man would have to memorize the entire route they’d be driving. From the insertion landing zone, to Baalbek, then out of town to the extraction landing zone. Satellite photos were put through a stereoscopic projector to give a 3-D view. Murdock insisted that everyone commit the entire street plan of Baalbek to memory. It would be night, there might be no street signs or time to consult them, and they might also have to deviate from the planned route. Getting lost was not an option. Neither was stopping at the nearest gas station to ask for directions.

In the afternoons they drove out to a secluded spot on the eastern side of the Chocolate Mountain range. A team from the CIA’s office of Technical Service had flown in with some civilian contractors and heavy equipment. Near an old dirt auxiliary landing strip they constructed a wooden replica of the Baalbek warehouse. Any Russian noticing something new on a satellite photograph would have figured it for an airplane hangar target, since SEALs practiced air base attacks all the time. Inquisitive SEALs from other platoons were encouraged to think the same thing. The Technical Service people surrounded the warehouse with a chain-link fence, and graded in a rough dirt road in exactly the right spot.

Technical Service were the people in the CIA who did everything from supplying disguises to agents to planting listening devices in objects without leaving a mark or a seam. They also supplied the Russian AKM assault rifles and PKM machine guns, the same weapons used by the Syrians, that the SEALs would be taking on the mission. The pink-dappled camouflage uniforms, Presidential Guard berets and insignia, boots, and web gear were fitted to each man and then packed away for the actual mission.

With Hummvees initially standing in for the armored cars and limousines, and man-shaped metal targets scattered about, the SEALs practiced the actual mechanics of shooting their way into and out of the area. It was all done with live ammunition — SEALs never used blanks.

The trick, as always, was not so much hitting the targets. It was not accidentally shooting one of your own in the smoke, noise, and confusion. If you wanted it to come off fast, you had to first walk your way through step-by-step in daylight. Then half speed, then full speed in daylight. Then with live ammo, and then at night. It took time, and was as complex as any grand ballet. If you didn’t rehearse, the wrong people died.

A few days later they were joined by what the Army called a Special Operations Aviation Task Force.

The Army’s premier helicopter unit was the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne). It had formed in the aftermath of the botched Iranian hostage rescue mission, when everyone had realized that the skills to fly helicopters behind enemy lines had been lost after Vietnam. The 160th had three battalions. The 1st and 2nd were the “black” battalions, stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The 3rd Battalion was stationed at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia. It supported the Army Rangers, in particular the 1st Ranger Battalion, also located at Hunter.

The task force that showed up at Niland to support Murdock consisted of five MH-60K Blackhawks of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion of the 160th, all eight MH-47E Chinooks of Alpha Company of the 2nd Battalion, and a maintenance element from the maintenance companies of both battalions.

These were not plain-vanilla helicopters. Both the Blackhawks and Chinooks had the same avionics suites, optimized for low-altitude penetration of hostile airspace: a forward-looking infrared system for night flying, in addition to the pilots’ night-vision goggles; a terrain-following/terrain-avoidance/digital ground-mapping radar; automatic target hand-off and digital automatic flight controls; radar and laser warning systems, infrared jammers, and chaff and flare dispensers to handle any missiles that might be launched at them; six-barrel 7.62 mm miniguns for the door gunners to shoot at anything else that might bother them; and several redundant precision navigation and communications systems. Both aircraft types had in-flight refueling probes, and the Blackhawks had pylons for extra fuel tanks or weapons.

The task force was led by a dapper little major who sported a full mustache that wouldn’t do him much good with his next Army promotion board. He listened carefully while Murdock briefed the plan and then broke into a huge smile, visions of Distinguished Flying Crosses obviously dancing in his head.

Besides a captain and two first lieutenants, the rest of the major’s pilots were warrant officers. While Army commissioned officer pilots had to follow career paths and only did three-year tours with their respective units, all the warrants did was fly. In a unit like the 160th, which was all volunteer and handpicked, the best pilots in the Army, that told.

The warrants were the kind of people who enjoyed screaming over the treetops at more than a hundred knots in the dead of night, their only view through the green tunnels of their night-vision goggles. So of course they couldn’t wait to fly into Lebanon and get their asses shot off.

In fact, like Murdock’s SEALS, the pilots nearly got into a fistfight after the major decided who was going to fly the mission and who would be backup.

Unlike Air Force helicopter pilots, who sometimes acted as if the safety of their expensive aircraft was more important to them than accomplishing the mission, the pilots of the 160th were beloved by the SEALS, Delta, and Special Forces. All you had to do was point to a spot on a map and the 160th would take you there, and when you were done working, fly back through any kind of weather, ground fire, or the gates of Hell itself to get you out. They were shit hot, and bigger prima donnas than even the SEALS. They called themselves the Nightstalkers.

And while the SEALs trained to take down the target, the Nightstalkers got busy. The National Security Agency had electronically mapped the location of every radar and antiaircraft system in Lebanon and Syria, and the pilots carefully plotted their route through the gaps and dead spaces. Satellite radar mapping gave them the exact radar images they would see in their scopes as they flew the route. Their computer planning system digitized satellite photographs and gave the crews a virtual-technology view of the route as seen through any of the aircraft windows. It could simulate daylight, night, and night-vision-goggle light.

The pilots slept during the day and flew at night, skimming over the desert and through the canyons of the Chocolate Mountain range. They didn’t need Murdock and the SEALS. The helicopters were loaded with the equivalent weight of the vehicles and personnel they’d be carrying, and if one went into the ground only the crew would be lost. The 160th had lost more men in training than they had in Panama, the Gulf, Somalia, and other unmentioned places around the world combined.

Then the Office of Technical Service showed up with the mission vehicles. The Shorlands armored cars were painted in Syrian camouflage with all details correct, even the extra smoke dischargers Murdock had requested.

The Shorlands had the same general shape as the classic Land Rover, except the body was steel armor. The entire suspension and tires had been beefed up to take the extra weight. The Shorlands normally came with a machine-gun turret on the top, but it made the vehicle too high to fit in the back of a Chinook and had been removed. Even if they had kept the turret, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to work the gun; the entire compartment would be filled with explosives. The front lights were covered by heavy wire grills, and the bumpers were reinforced to take a heavy impact. Top speed from the four-stroke V-8 engine was sixty-five miles per hour. Being a British vehicle, it was right-hand-drive. Being good Americans, the SEALS were driven absolutely crazy learning to shift with their left hands.

The Mercedes were big black sedans, with Syrian flags on the front bumpers and little lights to illuminate the flags at night. The sedans were equipped with the German GSG-9 protective detail package: armor, run-flat tires, fire-suppression systems, ram bumpers, sirens, and firing ports. In fact, they were almost identical to the cars purchased by the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, an act that he described in his book as getting him in Dutch with the chicken-shit SEAL brass. All true as far as it went, but the unmentioned part of the story was that the Mercedes were so spiffy, the SEALs of Team Six drove their official military vehicles out into town for nights of partying. That was a bit beyond the pale, and other C.O.s had been fired for much, much less.

For the explosives that would fill the armored cars, the CIA provided the first production samples of Trinittroazetidine, or TNAZ. TNAZ was brand new, and projected to replace C-4 plastic as the special operations explosive of choice. It generated fifteen percent more energy, with twenty percent less volume and weight. With it, Murdock expected close to the equivalent of a two-thousand-pound bomb from each vehicle.

Almost six weeks from the day they arrived in Niland, after a final live-fire rehearsal, the vehicles were loaded into the helicopters and everyone flew north to Edwards Air Force Base. There they began a movement that had taken weeks of work and enough classified message traffic to fill a room to arrange.

The helicopters were loaded aboard four C-5B transports, and the entire force flew to Naval Air Station Sigonella on the island of Sicily. They landed at night, and the Chinooks were reassembled in enclosed hangars.

The next night the helicopters took off from Sigonelia and flew onto the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington. They were immediately whisked down into the hangar deck. To make room for them, a squadron of the Washington’s F/A-18s had flown off to Aviano, Italy. The official statement was that they would support operations in Bosnia while the Washington made a scheduled port call in Haifa, Israel.

In reality, the U.S.S. George Washington was making thirty knots for the coast of Lebanon.