Except, the TIQ wasn’t anonymous at all, so far as I was concerned. I’d seen the homicidal look on Steve Sarkesian’s face as Mikki and Avi and Ashley and I left the Sirzhik Foundation reception. I knew I’d provoked him. And I knew, deep in my soul, that no matter what his alibi might be, he’d uttered the words that had set the plan for this . . . incident in motion. Whether he’d said them to Ali Sherafi, or Oleg Lapinov, or another of his TOCs, none of that mattered. All I knew was he’d given a command that had left Miriam Ben Gal dead.
And so, despite what Avi had said, his name went onto the execution list I carry in my head.
But, for the moment, that was all. One of the critical elements of Warriordom is carrying on. If your swim buddy gets killed, you carry on. You do not sit about and mope, or snivel, or get all touchie-feelie and weepy. You take your revenge for his death out on your enemies. You kill them. And the more of them you kill, the more you avenge your swim buddy’s Warrior spirit. Killing is what he would do for you. Killing is what Avi wanted me to do for him. And so, killing is what would happen. The white heat of my rage would radiate toward my enemies, the scum who’d murdered Mikki Ben Gal. I WOULD NOT FAIL: I would kill them all.
12
WE SLIPPED OUT OF BAKU AT ZERO DARK HUNDRED, using Araz’s wheezing trucks to hide our presence. I’d waited all day to hear General Crocker’s reaction to my messages, and get new instructions. But I received not a word from him—nothing. I tried his private number, but was told by some officious-sounding aide that he was in meetings and could not be interrupted. By midafternoon I began to feel that I was getting the runaround. And so, shortly before we pulled out, I sent him an UNODIR message, explaining in terse language that I was going to reconnoiter a possible tango-staging area that presented a clear and present threat to me and my men. I explained that the operation would take between two and three days. I closed by letting him know it would be impossible to get hold of us, but that I would make contact as soon as I got back, so he could tell me how he wanted me to deal with the materials I’d sent.
As I went out the door, there were five messages from Ashley Evans, all marked “urgent,” sitting shredded in the wastebasket. I hadn’t returned her calls. I didn’t want her to know what we were doing, and didn’t want to have to lie. The less she knew about what I was up to, the better it would be for her career.
We were able to travel light because Boomerang and Nod had already overseen the prepositioning of our equipment in a dense, ten-acre patch of thorny overgrowth convenient to the highway, on the Azeri side of the Iranian border. The border itself was fortified. There were both passive and active sensors, and while sensors can be penetrated, we’d take the path of least resistance and do the infil by water. My guys had been teaching Araz’s shooters the basics of waterborne operations, and so two RIBs lay beached on the oily sand, three kliks north of the Azeri port of Astara.
Thanks to the surveillance pictures that Pepperman provided, and the blueprints of the old CIA listening post I’d received from Jim Wink, I’d been able to construct the following mission plan.
• We’d use the RIBs to take us around Astara. Five kliks south of the town, we’d make our way ashore just south of a line of tall electrical towers. Pick and Butch would then exfil and make their way back to the Azeri side of the border, where they’d wait at a little roadhouse run by a friendly Azeri named Mahmoud on the outskirts of the seaside town of Shakhagach. We’d discovered the place during our training sessions with Araz and it had become our unofficial living room. We provided Mahmoud with copious amounts of American greenbacks, and Mahmoud provided us with plates of kebab and pilaf, cases of cold beer, gallons of hot coffee, and a couple of cots where we could grab combat naps.
• Meanwhile, the fourteen-man strike force would move inland through the thick scrub on the dunes, then climb from sea level up, making our way parallel to a winding stream, into the hills the Iranians called the Kuhe Asbinasi.
• We’d set up a covert observation post before daylight, and watch the bad guys all day. We’d count them, make note of their activities, check their weaponry, and learn their behavior patterns.
• Then when it got dark, we’d slip inside the camp, cut their throats, fingerprint and photograph ’em so we could trace their identities, grab all the intel we could carry, and set explosive charges to vaporize the place. Then I’d call up the boats to come across the border, and we’d exfil down the foothills a lot more quickly than we’d made it up ’em, extract off the beach before sunrise, and return to Baku just in time for a long, hot shower, and a hearty Cajun breakfast at the hotel restaurant.
I was somewhat uneasy about running this mission in two stages, with that fourteen-hour hole-up during the daylight hours. I don’t like stop-and-go ops. I believe that operations should flow, like a single knockout punch. One single, powerful, decisive, kinetic motion from start to finish. But here I had no choice. The old CIA station was eighteen kliks inland—just under eleven miles—and all of it was uphill, through some of the roughest landscape God (and/or Allah) had ever created. And so, I’d built a fair amount of Murphy time into the op-plan, and my senior guys had seconded the opinion, because they knew we’d need every second we could get.
The reason you want your senior noncoms to work on your op-plan is because most of ’em, if they’re worth anything, have BTDT many more times than any wet-behind-the-balls junior officer. All of my senior chiefs have been blooded in battle. And there isn’t a terrain on which they haven’t fought. So they looked at the maps, and pored over the surveillance pictures, and understood immediately that the old listening post sat at an altitude of eighteen hundred feet, in a two-hundred-by-two-hundred-yard earthen pocket that had been bulldozed clear of boulders. They saw the camp was shielded to the west by a ridge that climbed as high as three thousand feet in some places. They knew that to the north lay a series of jagged, three-hundred-foot cliffs that would make an approach from that direction much too time-consuming, given the operational constraints and the amount of gear we’d be carrying.
They knew that the main road from the listening post ran due south, up, through a series of precarious ravines that S-curved inland, heading toward the high Iranian plateau town of Nara, and from there, on to Ardabīl, where the CIA’s old single-runway airfield (altitude: 4,317 feet above sea level) was still used these days by the Iranian Air Force.
And so they, just as I, determined that the most effective way to hit the tangos was through the unprotected back door, which meant coming from the east. And to come from the east, we’d have to schedule this op over two days, not one.
But in one step or two, the denouement would be the same. We’d blow the site (and the bad guys) into the well-known smithereens, and then skedaddle outta Dodge.
The six cinder block buildings on the site had been cleaned out by the Agency when it pulled out of Iran shortly before the shah fled into exile in 1978. But the shells remained, and judging from the satellite pix I was looking at, they were being put to good use by the Fist of Allah tangos.
UHF and VHF antennas had been mounted on the roof. There was a satellite dish, too. They’d built two Spetsnaz-type firing ranges, one twenty-five yarder for pistol, the other, a two-hundred-meter rifle course. There was an outdoor weight pile and a hand-to-hand combat pit that looked like the ones I’d seen the Sovs build in Afghanistan. There were a row of junker cars and trucks that the bad guys could use for target practice—I could make out impact marks on the windshields in the enhanced satellite pictures.
But what most fascinated me were the stakes pounded into the ground on a football field–size clearing. There were hundreds of them, in a random pattern. Some were plain wood. Others were painted white. Others were painted black. A few were painted red. Still others were orange.
Pepperman’s people knew the tangos were doing something bad, but they’d been stymied about their true objectives. That’s because most of the people working for Pepperman these days are kids. T
hey may have advanced degrees, but they’re still kids. And most kids don’t know shit about history.
What does history have to do with a lot of stakes in the ground? Well, lemme tell you a story. Back about twenty years ago, the Israelis decided that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program was within months of producing a nuclear weapon, and they decided to put a stop to it. And so, in the high plateau of the Sinai Peninsula, above the Gulf of Aqaba, near a top-secret Israeli Defense Forces airbase they used to call Moon Valley, they built a full-scale model of Saddam’s nuclear reactor at Tiuwatha, which was also known as Ossirak.
Well, they didn’t actually build the whole thing. They just laid out the floor plan on the plateau. They made it out of wood stakes, with different-colored plastic tape, like crime-scene tape, run between the stakes, to show the outline of the buildings, the position of the reactor core within the BURT,63 or containment building, the cooling tower, and all the other elements of the huge facility.
The Israelis used the tape so their pilots could get used to hitting a precise spot within the Ossirak compound during their dry runs, which they performed with inert training bombs. When they finished the session, they removed all the tape, leaving a mass of stakes, planted in what appeared to be a random pattern, on the plateau floor. That way, the KeyHole satellites that we had flying over the region in those days picked up nothing significant. And the Israelis went on to flatten Ossirak, and stymie Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program for almost two decades.
So the minute I saw those stakes, I knew what the bad guys were doing. They were using ’em to simulate targets.
I had six sequential pix from Pepperman—and the colored stakes were being moved around, which told me that the Japs were working on a number of hits. The fact that the most recent image was less than twelve hours old was good news, too, because I didn’t want to pull a Son Tay, which is to say, stage a balls-to-the-wall raid and come up dick-handed empty, with no results. Uh-huh. Negatory. I wanted to find these Fist of Allah sons of bitches and their Russkie-pusskie advisors right where they were supposed to be: in their goddamn beds. Then I’d kill them. Every fucking one of ’em.
13
0102. THE TRANSITION TO SHORE WENT ALTOGETHER FAR too smoothly. The new moon made us all but invisible with our blacked-out faces and black BDUs. We didn’t lose any equipment. Nobody sprained an ankle or hyperextended a knee. That perfection made me nervous. Well, I didn’t have to worry: Mister Murphy made his presence known about three and a half kliks inland.
We’d worked our way across the rocky beach, camouflaged our tracks, crossed the two-lane highway that paralleled the coast, then began the long trek up into the foothills. The going was rough. What topographic maps don’t show you are things like thorns that shred BDUs. Or heat. Or the creepie-crawlies—in this case a repulsive mix of attack-trained sand fleas, vicious brown gnats, malevolent horseflies, and thirsty mosquitoes, which combined to make our lives downright unpleasant, since no one had thought to bring insect repellent. But being SEALs, and therefore used to discomfort, we pressed on, humping the sixty-pound packs, weapons, water, and rations we were carrying, unmindful of the insect bites, the thorn pricks, and the ninety-plus-degree weather.
Duck Foot had the point, with Nod in the number-two position. In the old days, Nod would have counted paces so we’d know how far we’d come. But now, thanks to an endless supply of double-A batteries and a network of global positioning satellites, we knew within six meters where we were, how far we’d come, and how far we had to go. I’d programmed the information into our three Magellan GPS units. But like topographic maps, GPS position finders can merely show you where you are and where you’re going. They can’t deal with situations.
It was 0258. We’d made good progress—until now. In front of us was a sheer, vertical rock wall, about fifty feet in height, which stretched north and south as far as we could see. It hadn’t shown up on the topographic map. It hadn’t shown up on the satellite photo. But it was here nonetheless.
I dropped to one knee, extracted my map, and put my red-lensed flashlight beam on the pertinent section. Nada. Bupkis. Obviously, then, this cliff did not exist. Yeah—right.
Had we brought the climbing ropes? No, we had not brought the climbing ropes. And so, we’d have to go around.
I checked the map again. About three-quarters of a klik north of us, I made out a thin, wavy broken line, which signified a mountain stream, or creek, or wadi, or whatever the fuck they called those things in this part of the world. I squinted and looked closer at the wrinkled paper, tracing the wadi with my index finger. The line wove its way through the hills, descending to the Caspian. Okay. We’d head toward the wadi. If the rock face didn’t dissipate soon, we could work our way up its bank, then go south again.
0410. Our detour cost us precious time. Now there was less than an hour and a half until dawn, and we were still three kliks—just under two miles—from where I wanted to be. Now just under two miles may not sound like much. And if you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, even the toughest parts of it, that distance can be covered in a relatively short period of time. But those same three kliks become a long, grueling, arduous fucking hike when you are in the middle of hostile territory, operating blind, and trying not to make any noise that would alert the various Iranian military, Revolutionary Guard, Ivan and/or fundamentalist tango units who might happen to be out prowling and growling and searching for people like us.
And so, we proceeded meter by meter, moving cautiously through the dry streambed, climbing the rough rock outcroppings, picking our way so as not to leave the sorts of tracks that security units look for.
Did I know for sure there were hostiles operating in the area? No, I did not. But I wasn’t going to assume there weren’t. Assumptions like that can get you killed.
0455. The sky was quickly metamorphosing from black to dark blue. Which meant it was way past the time for us to dig in. I didn’t want the opposition waking up and scanning the area with a set of binoculars and discovering a bunch of gringos trying to make themselves invisible.
Now, as we’re working to conceal ourselves, let me give you a concise primer about the problems of concealment in this sort of terrain. It is: it’s fucking hard to do.
In heavily wooded areas, you can use the natural, thick vegetation to help you conceal your positions. The same goes for jungle venues. Thick forest is a great help because it allows you to augment your ability to camouflage yourself by using the natural lighting—and shadows—to advantage. Here, the light during daylight hours was direct and strong, and the lack of vegetation would make camouflage difficult.
But I have seen SEAL snipers who’ve managed to create what my Brit friends at SAS call a LUP, or lying-up point, on a sandy beach that doesn’t have a single fucking piece of vegetation within sixty yards, and do it so artfully that the unsuspecting natives walk right over ’em.
And so, because nothing is impossible, and because every once in a while you can fool Mother Nature, I’d anticipated the problem, and we’d brought an assortment of helpful materials with us.
But first I had to select the right spot for our hideout. I shrugged out of my pack, dropped most of my equipment, and then started exploring.
0514. The God of War must have been watching out for me tonight, because after about nine minutes of crawling, climbing, and clambering, I found a cave whose opening actually faced the old CIA site at an oblique angle from a distance of about three-quarters of a klik, making it perfect as an observation post. The cave’s mouth was partially covered by a short outcropping of rock, and large irregularly shaped boulders added to the concealment possibilities. I dropped behind the natural cover, took my night-vision glasses out of their case, and scanned the tango camp. There was nothing moving. I rolled over and peered inside the cave.
From what I could see, it was perfect. Perhaps fifteen to twenty feet deep, with a ceiling that was just over three feet high at the mouth, then opening up to five f
eet for much of the chamber, closing back down to roughly eighteen inches at the rear. The width of the chamber was nine, perhaps ten feet. Oh, we’d be crowded inside. But we’d be hidden—and we could observe the enemy all day. I crawled inside, scanning closely. I ran my hand along the wall. It was cool—and dry. That was a good sign.
I used my elbows and knees to make my way toward the far rear corner of the cave, my night vision probing as I proceeded along the rough floor. About halfway back, something dropped onto the back of my neck. Instinctively, I swatted at it. Too late: whatever it was bit the shit out of me. I slapped at the fucking thing, knocking my night vision off, and sending the goggles clattering to the cave floor. The noise echoed slightly in the chamber, and instinctively I stopped moving. Then, I reached onto my H-harness and grabbed my red-lensed flashlight, switched it on, and swept the cave floor.
I reached down to pluck my night-vision goggles off the deck. The fucking things moved. I drew my hand back, then carefully reached down and lifted the goggles by their strap. Underneath was one of the largest damn spiders I’ve ever seen. Who knows what color it was, because the red lens made colors impossible to see. But it had a rough hourglass-and-diamond pattern on its back. This was not good news.
I held the goggles out of the way, then smashed the fucking thing with my boot. It struck me that the dead creepie-crawlie might have friends or relatives, so I directed my flashlight beam toward the chamber roof, just to make sure the place wasn’t filled with other sharp-mandibled nasties.
All I saw was rock. So this little mother and I had been brought together by Mister Murphy. The bite didn’t itch, but it had a slight burning sensation to it. And it began to swell almost immediately. Well, I know how to deal with insect bites: I reached into my fanny pack, found an alcohol swab and scrubbed the bite clean, then pulled a well-used OD doo-rag out of my pocket and wrapped it around my neck to cover the slight swelling, and Just Kept Going.
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