Force of Eagles
Page 34
“Laser on,” came over the radio. Trimler had turned up the audio on the PRC-77 so the Ranger could hear the transmissions. Maintaining silence was not a concern now.
“Gadget’s on,” the Ranger said, squeezing the trigger to the first detent to place the crosshairs and then to full action to turn the laser on.
“Gadget’s on,” Trimler relayed.
A spotter yelled, “One of the guards has seen the plane, he’s coming down the ladder like his tail’s on fire. I can see the bombs…”
“Spotters down,” Trimler barked, trying to keep them from being hit by flying debris or bomb fragments…
*
Mary Hauser was curled up on her bunk, trying to conserve what body heat she could. For the first time she was thankful for the blanket-like chador. When Amini, the friendly guard, had said it was time to return to her cell and leave Landis, she had covered the doctor with her blanket. Amini had protested but she had insisted and started to raise her voice. Rather than risk discovery, he had given in.
At first the muted rumbling didn’t register with her. Then she snapped fully awake as the sound grew louder…It was a jet flying by the prison at high speed. She knew what it meant…“Come on, you beauties, come on.” Her voice, she realized, echoed down the hall, and she hoped it reached every corridor in the administration building above her head, and especially that Mokhtari heard.
“Doc, hit the deck,” she called out as she threw herself on the floor and rolled under the bunk.
*
The two five-hundred-pound, laser-guided bombs fell in tandem toward the prison. It had been a perfect toss and both seeker heads picked up the reflected laser energy bouncing off the wall. The bombs made little jerking motions, refining their trajectory as they homed. The first bomb impacted two feet left of the spot the Ranger was illuminating with the mule and exploded on impact. The Ranger’s reactions were right on. He actually saw the bomb as it struck the wall and threw himself back into the ditch, holding onto his helmet. The explosion blew over the men, pounding their bodies, stunning their senses. But they had been in the same situation before and thanks to their training there was no panic.
The second bomb lost the laser signature it was homing on when the first bomb exploded. It then went into a memory mode and continued on its last trajectory, flying through the crumbling gap the first bomb had knocked in the wall and on into the administration building. It exploded on impact.
*
The F-15E streaked down the valley, its airspeed riveted on 540 knots. Shadows and early morning mist had degraded their forward visibility but the forward looking infrared sensor in the navigation pod slung under the right intake was creating a perfect picture on Jack Locke’s head-up display. They were still ten miles away. “Amb, I’m goin’ to lay down a Snakeye,” Jack told his backseater.
Furry wished they were carrying a GBU-15 with a 2,000 pound warhead. He wanted to guide something big onto the prison. As he continued to work he did not have to bury his head in a scope like Contreraz. Instead he sat upright monitoring the four displays in front of him. His fingers played on the switches and buttons of his hand controllers as he readied the system for the delivery. He had his cursors on the same spot Jack was aiming for. And the radar image was a perfect match with the infrared. He activated the system. “You’ve got steering,” he told Jack.
“See if you can get a better picture,” Jack said.
Again Furry’s fingers played a tune on his hand-controllers as he worked the radar screen. He enlarged the area around the prison and froze the image. He had a high-resolution patch-map of the prison compound that covered two-thirds of a nautical mile.
“Shit hot,” Jack called over the intercom, “Doucette did it. Two bulls right on target. Amb, check for BDA.” Furry looked over Jack’s right shoulder doing a bomb-damage assessment. He could see the smoke and dust still rising from the right side of the prison. They were less than twenty seconds out. The HUD showed Jack that he was dead-on and had the steering wired.
On the videotape that recorded the run it looked easy with all the sophisticated systems working as advertised, but they were working because of the men in the cockpit. And there was no better example of that than Jack Locke, a cool pro who had already lived through the pressure-cooker of combat. He had learned through experience how to confront the unbelievable stress that flying a mission generated. Few men juggled the task-saturation, the disorientation, the incredible number of tasks that had to be performed at once and correctly in aerial combat. If he balanced them all, life and success were on the other side of the equals sign. It was a hard formula that most men chose not to solve—Locke was doing it out of choice—and he was a master at it.
As they flashed over the open space in front of the prison, Furry could see the Rangers crouched in the ditch and felt the bomb separate from the left stub pylon. Then they were over the prison, going straight ahead to clear the frag-pattern the bomb would kick up. Jack dipped the right wing so they could get a better view of the compound. Then they were clear, flying over the old barracks behind the prison. Jack pulled up to the right so they could see where their bomb hit.
“A bull,” Furry yelled when he saw the hole they had punched in the wall. “Not much left of the admin building. Doucette started a fire down there—nothin’ left but hot hair, teeth and eyeballs. Rangers ain’t goin’ in through there.”
“Here comes Spectre,” Jack said. The AC-130 gunship was right behind them and setting up a thirty-degree left-hand pylon turn around the prison…
*
Mokhtari was almost dressed when he first heard the deep rumble of Doucette’s F-111 running in on the prison. For a moment he stood in his bedroom, the sound not registering as it grew louder. When he realized it was an airplane he dove under his bed. The explosion of the first bomb taking down the outside wall washed over him. He was not prepared for the intensity of the second bomb when it exploded inside the administration building. The power of the noise and shock-wave stunned him but he did not pass out. In a dreamlike state he felt the floor under him collapse, was aware that he was falling through to the floor below…
He was semi-conscious as he watched the walls collapse around him. And then he saw the dark gray form of Jack Locke’s F-15 flash past, barely clearing the top of the prison. A firebrand of hate burned through him, leaving a raw urge to kill the Americans. Jack’s bomb exploded, and again a shock wave pounded at him, this time driving him into unconsciousness.
*
The two dull booms echoed across the valley of Kermanshah and the young goatherd turned in his tracks, ten feet short of the gully where Kamigami and Jamison were hidden. Like most twelve-year-olds the boy wandered around in a daydream of heroics and fancies. Now he looked puzzled by the sudden intrusion of reality into his perfect world. He stared at the smoke billowing up from the southern edge of the town, fixing its location. And he watched transfixed as Locke’s F-15 ran onto the prison and pulled up. For a moment he was in the cockpit, guiding the fighter into combat, killing the American enemies he had heard about on TV and the radio.
Then the explosion of the third bomb reverberated through the valley and he knew what it meant. Hated Americans were attacking the prison and bombing the walls. He ran back to his family’s compound, away from the death that waited for him ten feet away. He stopped in mid-flight and turned back to gather the goats, then thought better of it, turned again and ran for home…
Kamigami waited until he could no longer hear the boy’s retreating footsteps, then raised his head over the edge of the shallow ravine, keeping in the shadow of the rock, and made sure they were alone. He returned his knife to its sheath and picked up his M-203, an M-16 rifle with a 40mm grenade-launcher grafted to the underside of its barrel. “Would you actually have…?” Jamison’s voice trailed off at the thought.
The sergeant pulled his helmet’s chin-strap tight, said nothing. He only pointed down the gully and moved out.
*
The fire control officer bounced out of his seat and looked over the copilot, gauging the target area’s visibility. He squeezed back into his seat next to the navigator. “Take IR guidance,” he said, “smoke and dust might cause a problem.” He punched at the buttons on his fire-control panel and linked the infrared image with the fire-control computer.
“I count three guard towers,” the copilot said. “Tower by the admin building is down. No movement in the compound. Every-body must still be groveling in the dirt.”
“Rog,” Beasely said, “we’ll take out the front tower first, then the two at the rear. Give me the forties.” The FOCO worked his fire control panel and linked the pilot’s trigger to the two 40mm Bofors Automatic guns that stuck their ugly snouts out of the fuselage behind the left main-gear fairing. The sensor operator in the booth drove the crosshairs on his infrared viewer over the tower, illuminating it with that sensor. When he activated the system a diamond appeared on the IR viewer, bracketing the target. The same diamond appeared on the pilot’s HUD.
“Forties are ready,” the loader in the rear called.
The copilot maintained their altitude and airspeed while Beasely flew the yoke for bank. It took a carefully synchronized routine in crew coordination to bring the awesome fire power of the gunship to bear. Beasely turned his head and sighted through the HUD mounted beside the left cockpit window. He jockeyed the yoke and rudders to position the lighted circle on the HUD inside the diamond that bracketed the tower. The circle showed where any round he fired would impact. He mashed the trigger and sent a short burst of high explosive 40mm toward the guard tower. The burst lasted less than two seconds as eight rounds smashed into the structure, shredding it.
Beasely now worked his rudder pedals and slipped the gunship into a turn over the next tower. He could see a guard waving something at him. Again, he mashed the trigger and ripped the head of the tower off. “I think maybe he was trying to surrender,” he muttered, then moved over the third remaining tower.
The illuminator operator, the fancy term the Air Force chose to give the sergeant in charge of operating the searchlight mounted in the tail section of the cargo deck, was doing his most important job—lying down on the ramp. His parachute was off and a cable snapped onto his harness to hold him in the airplane as he stuck the upper third of his body over the edge of the ramp. He was checking their six o’clock position and he was cold. “Ground fire from the tower,” he yelled into his mike.
Beasely stomped on his right rudder pedal to skid the Hercules, then jerked it further to the right. No gunship commander in his right mind ignored a warning from the IO. “Type,” he barked.
“Small arms only,” the IO told him. “The Rangers are running for the wall.”
“Gimme the one-oh-five,” Beasely commanded. The fire routine repeated itself as he repositioned the gunship into a new firing orbit. When he hit the trigger button this time the crew felt a dull thump as the C-130 absorbed the recoil from the 105mm cannon mounted in the left paratroop door. The tower flashed into a ball of fire. When the smoke and debris cleared, there was…nothing.
The gunship flew an orbit around the prison, letting General Mado and Thunder scan it with binoculars. “The first C-130 is over the airfield,” Beasely told them. “Shall I clear the escorting F-15s back to the tanker?” Mado hesitated, and only after Thunder told him that was part of the plan did he give his okay. Beasely turned to the north. “Time to head for the holding pattern and get out of the way.” He had decided to start telling the general what he was doing rather than wait for directions.
Thunder watched Duck Mallard’s C-130 pass down the airfield two-and-a-half miles to the east. And Mado, that intrepid warrior, was on the SatCom with an update for the command center in the Pentagon.
Chapter 47: H Plus 11
Kermanshah, Iran
The first four-man team of Rangers was against the wall. Smoke and dust were still swirling out of the huge holes the bombs had opened up. The buck sergeant leading them only hesitated long enough to check his back up. Three more teams were behind him, running across the open area in front of the prison. Captain Trimler and his radio operator were coming out of the ditch, running as hard as they could. He could see movement in the ditch—the two M60 heavy machine-gun teams were moving sideways in the ditch—they would offset to each side to hold the flanks of the prison and secure the road.
The sergeant pointed at the wall and went through in a crouched position, holding his 9mm MP5 submachine gun down on its assault sling, ready to sweep the area with gunfire. His high man came through right behind him, looking over the sergeant’s shoulder. The third man came through offset to the right, and the fourth came through backward, looking for anything that might spring up behind them. They rushed across the 110 feet of open quadrangle to the main entrance of the cell block. Another four-man team was right behind them. So far no reaction from the guards.
The team paused to reconfigure. The lead sergeant pushed his submachine gun back onto his shoulder and unclipped a stun grenade from his LBE. The high man drew his pistol and the other two waited. The lead pulled the pin while the high man tested the door. It was unlocked. As he twisted the handle and threw the door open the sergeant tossed in the stun grenade, fell back and drew his Beretta. A flash and bang echoed in the building, and the four men went through, exactly as they had come through the wall.
The lead sergeant was the low man and he pounded up the short flight of steel steps leading to the first floor of the cell block. His high man was right behind him, perched over his right shoulder. The door to the first-floor guards’ office on the left was open, and the low man went right through it at an oblique angle, his Beretta automatic extended in front in a two-handed shooter’s grip. He swept the corner opposite to him and then swung his pistol in an arc to the center, concentrating on anything below the waist. His high man was right behind him, button-hooked to the left and cleared his opposite corner just like the low man, but he concentrated on anything above the waist.
Two guards were in the room, one crouched on the floor holding the telephone in his right hand. The low man pumped two shots into his head. The other man was standing barefoot with his hands above his head. He lived. The second team rushed past the office door heading for the second floor while the third team flushed the basement. The backup man came through the door and slapped plastic flex cuffs on the guard’s wrists and ankles while the high man mashed a strip of wide adhesive tape across his mouth. Then they were out the door and up the stairs, following the second team to leap frog them to the third floor.
A burst of rapid shots echoed down the stairwell. The second team had found three guards in the office holding weapons. The first team waited until they were waved past the office before they charged the flight of stairs that led to the next landing. They heard a single shot ring out from the basement followed by four shots from two 9mm pistols. Then silence.
Before they reached the turn landing the sergeant caught a vague movement in the shadows directly above him on the next flight of stairs. It had been little more than a flicker through the open steps, but it was enough. He stopped and pointed with his forefinger to the shadow, his thumb pointed down—hand-sign for the enemy. The backup man leveled his M-16 under his right arm, the forefinger of his left hand extended along the stock in a point-and-shoot position. At the go sign from his lead he moved up the steps to the landing, but his boot caught under the last step and he stumbled, falling out onto the small platform. He rolled and fired up the stairs before a shot ripped into his left leg, just below the knee, shattering the fibula in his lower leg.
Silence.
The lead holstered his 9mm and swung his submachine gun down. He inched up the steps and shoved his w
eapon around the corner, firing blindly. The high man stepped around him and placed four shots into the shadow above them. A body slid down the stairs.
They regrouped and went up the stairs, and a burst of gunfire came out of the office door, sweeping the area in front of the door but not down the stairs. Whoever was up there obviously did not want to look. The lead unsnapped a frag grenade, pulled the pin, moved soundlessly toward the door, threw in the grenade and moved quickly back. An explosion ripped the room apart and the high man then darted into the room, spraying bullets. Two went into the head of the guard lying on the floor, making sure he was dead before the high man kicked his AK-47 into a corner. The Rangers looked for more guards, and then as quickly as it began, it was over.
“Kamigami would be having your ass right now if he was here,” the lead sergeant’s high man said.
“What for? It was goddamn perfect except for klutzo here falling on his face.” They were watching a Ranger bind up the leg of their wounded comrade.
“Bullshit. You didn’t clear the second team past the first-floor office. Next time…”
*
Stansell could see smoke billowing up from the prison as Mallard flew the C-130 across the roofs of Kermanshah at 240 knots. The pilot holding the plane straight and level at 800 feet above the ground, wracked the throttles back, slowing the cargo plane to 130 knots as they approached the airfield and lined up on the runway. “One minute warning.” Drunkin Dunkin’s voice carried over the intercom.
“We won’t come back this way,” Mallard said, “but nothing like a little low flyin’ to keep a fella’s head down and discourage unwanted guests.” Stansell silently agreed.
“Runway in sight,” Dunkin called. “Thirty-second warning.” The loadmaster acknowledged the call. The Rangers were ready to storm the airfield.
The jumpmaster was standing at the left paratroop door, his head stuck out into the slipstream as he checked the field. He had flown enough practice jumps with Drunkin Dunkin to trust him, but this was combat and this particular jumpmaster had gone in with the Rangers in Grenada. He knew what could happen in combat so he did one last double-check himself. Dunkin had it wired. The C-130 slowed to 130 knots.