Tom Clancy Support and Defend

47

A cell of six Hezbollah operators from Lyon, France, sat strapped inside the Eurocopter EC145 that streaked sideways over the snowswept Italian highway. Five men were in the back, firing down on the Americans on the road with their mish mash of automatic weapons, while one man sat in the copilot’s seat and held his CZ nine-millimeter pistol to the head of the pilot.

His name was Ajiz, he was leader of this cell and the oldest at twenty-four, and he had been in near-constant communication with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer running this operation for most of the past twenty-four hours.

From the moment Mohammed Mobasheri arrived in Geneva and saw the welcome reception of ITP members, he decided he might need to snatch Ross out of the hands of the ITP to satisfy his mission parameters. To do this, he began planning on a way to effect the abduction. He was well aware the weather would be turning bad, the winter storm was all over the news because it was coming so late in the season, but he didn’t think he could take Ross overland all the way to the Mediterranean, a five-hour drive.

Mohammed knew he needed a helicopter and a pilot, and with the approaching storm he decided he would need the best pilot available to travel in the miserable winter conditions. He did some Google research the previous afternoon and found a private helicopter rescue organization that operated in the area. Their helos were responsible for plucking injured climbers off of Mont Blanc, as well as other mountains in the Graian Alps, so he decided they would be best suited to the horrible conditions coming. He ordered the Lyon cell of Hezbollah men to hijack a helicopter and a pilot from the service and to have it meet him on the road outside of Geneva.

More research showed Mobasheri that he could mask the flight of the helicopter on radar if it flew low through the alps, so he made the decision to move the transfer of Ross from the van to the helicopter to somewhere in the Aosta Valley, the nearest suitable location.

The six Hezbollah operatives had arrived at the hanger of Mont Blanc Copter Services at ten o’clock that morning. Flight operations had been cancelled due to the snowstorm, but the staff lived on the mountain, so they showed up to work for paperwork and routine maintenance. There was no security on the property, just a secretary at a desk, three maintenance men, two pilots, and a receptionist.

Ajiz and his team took the entire staff at gunpoint into an office, where he demanded to know which of the two pilots had more experience. Neither man spoke up, but a photograph on the receptionist’s desk told Ajiz what he needed to know. Claudette, the thirty-year-old receptionist, was the daughter of the fifty-six-year-old pilot named Henri. The Hezbollah cell commander knew instantly he could use this to his advantage.

The French pilot told the young Middle Easterners that they were mad if they thought anyone could fly in such poor visibility.

The honest truth was no one in the Lyon cell wanted to fly in this weather any more than the Frenchman did, but they had their orders from Mohammed Mobasheri, and they knew failing to carry them out would mean a certain death sentence back in Lebanon for themselves and their families.

The French pilot and his daughter were pulled into the hangar and the others were lashed with tie-down chains and locked together in a supply room off the hangar with padlocks from the storage doors. They weren’t killed, because Mohammed had passed orders on to Ajiz mandating that he keep them alive. He knew the pilot would need the incentive of believing he would be left alive at the end of the operation.

Killing the others would tip him off that even his total compliance would not save him and his daughter.

Ajiz ordered the pilot to fuel and preflight the largest craft in the hanger, a blue Eurocopter EC145, then he, his daughter, and the six Hezbollah operators from Lyon rolled it out into the heavy snow on a trailer.

The pilot begged the armed men to reconsider, telling them they would all likely slam into a mountain before they accomplished whatever the hell it was they were planning. Ajiz just strapped in beside him and waved his gun while Claudette was placed in the back in the middle of the rest of the Lyon cell. Ajiz put on his headset and told the Frenchman they would be heading somewhere down in the valley, and he’d provide him more information soon.

The helicopter lifted off into the gray, the pilot used his instruments and his radar and his GPS to pick his way forward slowly between the peaks of the mountains, certain they were all going to die, but aware he’d saved his colleagues back in the hanger, and desperately trying to come up with some way to somehow save his daughter, as well.

The flight was miserable and stressful for all involved, but Ajiz was in comms with Mohammed for most of the flight, and this made things ever more difficult. The pilot flew much slower than Mohammed demanded, but Henri refused to fly faster, even with a CZ pistol jabbed in his neck.

By using a locator app from Mobasheri’s iPhone, Ajiz was able direct the pilot to the van on the road, although the iPhone signal was intermittent as the phone entered and exited tunnels.

When the helo reached an altitude of only twenty-five feet above the highway, the pilot could see both the ground and any wires along the road, and this gave him the confidence to pick up speed.

Mobasheri contacted Ajiz seconds after the van crashed down the hill, and he told the Lyon cell leader they were under attack, and he ordered the men in the helo to engage the Americans and the vehicles on the road.

Just seconds later the two silver SUVs appeared one hundred yards in front of the helicopter, Ajiz ordered the pilot to turn sideways so the men could shoot out of the side door. Henri feigned trouble with the task, but the butt of an AK-47 rifle to the side of Claudette’s head showed him that he needed to comply. As he flew perpendicular to the highway Henri heard the heavy gunfire coming out of the cabin of his aircraft. He ducked down as low as he could, and hoped his daughter would be able to do the same behind him.

A minute earlier, Dominic Caruso raced through the rustic village of Villair as fast as he could do so without sliding his big bike into the side of a stone house or crashing through a wooden fence. Off his right shoulder and a thousand yards away he could hear the rolling echoes of gunfire from both M4 rifles and handguns, and he hurried to get back on the road, and then race back to get his own weapon into the fray.

When he was still several hundred yards away from the SS26 he backed off on the throttle for a moment, because he thought he heard a helicopter overhead. It seemed unlikely, impossible really, as there were high hills on both sides of the road here that disappeared into the clouds just a hundred feet or so above his head.

The sound disappeared and he all but dismissed it, but suddenly a new barrage of even more intense gunfire erupted from the site of the FBI traffic stop to the north. It seemed several more guns had entered the fight, and the only explanation Caruso had for it was that somehow the Iranians had managed to show up with reinforcements from the air.

He rolled onto the SS26, turned west toward the gunfight, opened the throttle on his BMW bike, and leaned down behind his little windscreen. He flew headlong through the snowstorm with no idea what he would encounter when he arrived at the battle.

Supervisory special agent Darren Albright pressed himself tight against the frozen highway. There was no cover from the helicopter above him, so all he could do was fire on it with his pistol and attempt to make himself as small a target as possible out here in the open.

Another man from the HRT team went down just feet away, and bits of road kicked up around him.

The helicopter made a slow pass over the road, still flying sideways. Albright dumped an entire magazine from his pistol at the threat, then he scooped up the fallen tactical officer’s rifle. The helo spun around quickly to come back for another pass, and Albright flipped the fire selector switch on the rifle to semiautomatic. He aimed on the tail rotor of the aircraft, and it squeezed of a carefully aimed round. Then a second, then a third.

After another shot at the tail rotor, Darren knew he had to take cover behind the SUV on his right, because the blue helo was heading right for him. He lowered the rifle and started to run, but out of the corner of his eye he saw a man on the hill by the side of the road. It was one of the men from the van, and Albright spun his rifle toward him just as the gunmen got him in his sights of his pistol.

Albright felt the blow to his right shoulder, well above his body armor, and his gun flew out of his hand. A second round hit his vest, but the third shot slammed into his pelvis, breaking it and buckling the FBI man to the highway. He fell on his back, his eyes to the sky as the helicopter flew directly overhead on another gun run.

Inside the Eurocopter, two of the Lyon cell men were dead, shot by FBI HRT men and still strapped in their seats with their heads bobbing along with the movements of the aircraft. A third man had been hit in the right hand, but he continued firing on the road below with his left hand, until he and the others saw the Iranians move up the hill to the road and walk between the human forms lying still there.

Ajiz ordered the pilot to land, and Henri did as he was told.

As the helicopter touched down Mohammed Mobasheri climbed to his feet behind the van at the bottom of the hill. He pointed his pistol toward Ethan Ross, who remained on the frozen ground in the fetal position.

“Move!” Mobasheri ordered.

Ethan stood slowly, his hands in the air, and Gianna Bertoli stood up with him. Together they walked up the hill with Mohammed bringing up the rear.

The French pilot looked to Ajiz while they sat parked on the highway. Through his headset he said, “I want to speak to my daughter.”

“Why?”

“She knows the highway down here. She can help us get away. I only fly up on the mountains.”

Ajiz looked over his shoulder. The woman’s wrists were bound with the straps cut from of one of the seats, and she was buckled into another seat. There was blood across her face, but it was blood from one of the dead Hezbollah men and not her own. She sat next to a headset on the wall behind her. He motioned with his pistol for her to put the headset on.

She did so, and before she could say anything, Henri spoke to her in Italian. Henri and his daughter were French, but they both knew Italian. He could only pray the Middle Eastern man next to him did not know the language.

“When we leave I will fly low over the mountains. If you can do it… you must get out.”

“But what about you?”

“These men won’t let us live. Believe me. I want you to survive. I will try to survive myself, but only if you are safe.”

“I can’t leave you—”

He snapped at her. Ajiz glanced at him, but assumed they were arguing about the route through the valley. “Then we both die today. Please, Claudette. You are the one who can give us both a chance.”

Their eyes met, she nodded slightly, and then they discussed the route they would take to the south.

The stretch SS26 near the idling helicopter was a scattered scene of bodies, blood, and damaged vehicles. Four or five civilian vehicles had stopped in each lane; the drivers had missed the shooting and saw merely what they at first perceived to be a horrific automobile accident and a rescue helicopter. The rotor wash of the helicopter blew the already whipping snow into a blinding torrent and added to the chaos and confusion. Only the first car facing each direction saw the guns and the fact the men standing were doing nothing for the men lying in the road.

The four Quds Force operatives still alive climbed into the helicopter after unfastening the two dead Lebanese men from the Lyon cell and letting their bodies fall out onto the frozen highway.

Ross boarded as ordered, he was shoved into a seat in the back and strapped down.

Mobasheri himself was in the back of the group boarding. As the men loaded up, he realized there would not be enough room for everyone, he pushed past Gianna Bertoli as she tried to board, and she was happy to let him take the final place, thinking he would let her go.

But as soon as he took his seat Mohammed turned to Gianna. Over the booming rotor noise, he shouted, “Unfortunately for you, I need Ross, and I need these men. I no longer have any use for you or ITP.”

His pistol rose quickly and he shot her through the forehead at a distance of six feet. Her head snapped back, her curly black hair flew over her face and she dropped onto her back on the highway.

Ross saw the Swiss woman die, he screamed in shock, and the helicopter lifted off into the snow.