Strike Force Delta

by Mack Maloney

  The Chief arrived to a flurry of handshaking and ass kissing by his officers. They had much to report to him, but he demanded a cup of tea and for someone to light him a hashish cigarette first. He dealt with several small matters first: The moving of two more field pieces up to the city’s front gate. An increase in the ration of the hallucinogenic qat to be dispensed to his fighters starting with their evening meal. The testing of the city’s half-dozen huge bells, located in the minarets as well as atop the Holy Towers. These bells would be rung as the signal for the visiting Muslim fighters in the city—the Taliban and Al Qaeda—that they would be needed after all in the defense of the city.

  The Chief then heard a report on the city’s pride and joy—the huge SA-6 SAM. He wanted to make sure that the batteries inside the big missile’s launcher were fully charged—this weapon had to be ready at all times. He was assured that everything was hot within the missile and that the backup batteries were also fully charged.

  These things done, the Chief sat atop an old, moldy rug and called on each of his cohorts to give his latest report.

  First to appear before the Chief was a group of mullahs. They were essentially his department’s secret police. They reported something the Chief already knew: that rumors were going through Khrash that the city was about to be attacked by the Americans, possibly even a strike by B-52 bombers—a very frightening thought. The mullahs had a warning for the Chief: They were sure that those civilians who could would attempt to escape the city before whatever was coming finally arrived. And the mullahs said, just as certainly, if such a trickle began, it would soon turn into a torrent.

  The Chief knew this was a problem. One part of the Iranian defense plan called for civilians to be used as human shields. Just as they were reluctant to fire on religious places, the Americans rarely opened fire if there were civilians around. Again, this gave a huge advantage to the Islamic fighters. In this regard, the lowly citizens of Khrash were one of its most valuable commodities at the moment.

  The Chief moved quickly. He told one of his commanders to take a squadron of technicals out to the western edge of Khrash and stop the first group of civilians they encountered who were trying to leave the city. These civilians would then be brought back to the city square located next to the Holy Towers. Their time up, the mullahs kissed his hand and quickly departed.

  The next officer to step before the Chief was his arms master, the man in charge of the city’s weaponry. He reported that he was expecting a huge arms shipment to arrive in Khrash sometime tonight. More RPGs, more AK-47s, and ammunition for both were due to be delivered. But more important, several tons of TNT and HE were coming as well. These explosives had been slated to go into the terrorists’ schools to make booby traps and improvised roadside bombs for Iraq but could be made available to the Chief’s police force at his request.

  The shipment was scheduled to arrive around midnight, via a river caravan, coming up the Farāh from the Iranian border town of Rimut fifty miles downstream. The exact time of delivery was unknown, though. The Chief waved away the man’s apologies for the imprecise timetable. He just wanted to know one thing: Would the arms shipment be here before sunrise the next day? The arms master replied in the affirmative.

  “Then all will be well,” the Chief declared.

  The arms master departed to be replaced by one of the religious police’s lowest deputy officers. This man was visibly shaking when he knelt before the Chief.

  “We have come up empty on our search,” the man said, eyes glued to the floor.

  The Chief just stared back at him—what was this man talking about?

  “The search for what?” the Chief asked.

  “Videotapes, sir,” the man replied, certain a hatchet of some kind was about to come down on his head.

  “You? You’re the one in charge of looking for videotapes?”

  “I am, sir,” the deputy said.

  “And still you can’t find any? Not a one—in this entire city?”

  The man shook his head slowly. “No, sir.”

  The Chief felt his shoulders slump a bit. What a pain this was! TV sets, batteries, cell phones—even fax machines. These things could be had at just about any shop in Khrash as well as throughout the Qimruz But not a single usable videotape? Anywhere? Who was going to tell the Patch?

  The Chief stuffed his mouth with more strands of qat, but suddenly he wasn’t feeling as good as he was just moments before. He dismissed the deputy but told him to continue his search. That’s when one of the Chief’s field commanders burst into the room. The Chief’s bodyguards were right on the man’s tail, but seeing the look on his face, the Chief beckoned him forward. The man was highly upset.

  “Very bad news, sir,” was how he started his report.

  “What could it be?” the Chief asked with a snort. “The city is tight. Security is high and we are dispelling any rumors. So, what bad news could you possibly give me?”

  The man gulped. “Kundez Sharif’s compound has been destroyed,” he said.

  The Chief stared back at him in disbelief. “What did you say?”

  “I saw it myself,” the commander reported. “It has been turned to dust. There is nothing left.”

  To emphasize the point, the commander pointed out the room’s only window facing north. There was still a distinct red glow on the horizon.

  “That could be a simple brush fire,” the Chief said. “Or some fool burning his manure pile.”

  One of his top lieutenants intervened. “Sir—it is coming from the same direction as Sharif’s compound,” he said. “Perhaps you should call him.”

  The Chief nodded brusquely to the lieutenant. This man dialed Sharif’s private cell phone and handed the phone to the Chief. The phone rang and rang. There was no answer.

  Now the Chief’s face creased with worry. He did not want to even think about an existence without the protection of the almighty Kundez Sharif.

  “The sheikh has many escape routes in his palace,” the Chief suddenly told those assembled. “He would have managed to get out of any kind of bandit attack.”

  But the field commander just shook his head. “This wasn’t just a bandit attack,” he insisted. “Sharif’s compound was bombed from the air. There is nothing left but dust, and even that is still burning.”

  “Bombed from the air?” the Chief roared. “By who? Certainly not the Americans. We have a deal with Kabul . . . .”

  “They might not have been sent by Kabul,” the man reported meekly.

  At this point, another of the Chief’s officers burst in unannounced. He was the man the Chief had sent out to look for any civilians attempting to escape. He reported that his men had corralled two dozen civilians—women and children mostly—who’d been attempting to leave Khrash via the northwest wadi. They had been brought to the city square as the Chief had ordered.

  In a foul mood now, the Chief demanded to be taken to them.

  It was now late afternoon and the sun was beginning to sink over the mountains to the west when the Chief arrived back in Khrash’s main square.

  The civilians who’d been caught trying to escape were huddled next to a wall of the Holy Towers. There were 26 of them, and indeed most were women and children. They were all carrying hastily packed bags and suitcases. Besides these and the rags on their backs, they had little else. Many of them were crying.

  The Chief had his men round up as many locals as they could find, and a crowd of several hundred was soon gathered in the square. The Chief stood atop his Land Rover with a battery-powered megaphone and made an announcement: Anyone caught trying to leave the city in this crucial time would be considered an enemy of Allah and dealt with accordingly.

  Then the Chief had his men line the escapees up against the Holy Towers wall. It took some time to get them to obey; some had to be whipped or beaten. The wailing and panic grew. The Chief waited impatiently, chewing qat and fanning himself in the seat of his truck. If only he’d found a damn videotape, he
was thinking. Then everything would have had a positive face on it.

  Finally, the 26 people were in place. Eighteen of the Chief’s men lined up in ragged fashion, each holding an AK-47. The Chief gave a signal and each man raised his weapon. Stunned silence enveloped those looking on. The Chief returned to the hood of his Land Rover, again with his electronic megaphone, and recited his speech a second time: Anyone caught leaving Khrash would be shot.

  Then he gave the order for his men to fire.

  But just before they could pull their triggers, the air above the city started rumbling again.

  They came in low, wingtip to wingtip, two airplanes so loaded down with bombs, they looked like they were carrying pianos.

  The noise was horrific, the sound wave that arrived was so intense. The men in the firing squad saw the planes first, coming in right over the city’s main gate, with barely a shot thrown up in response from the gate guards. The planes seemed huge to these men; they quickly broke and ran.

  The Chief’s bodyguards saw the planes a split second later—their reaction was just about the same. They instantly fled, though two of them managed to put the Chief back into his Land Rover before they ran away. That’s when the intended execution victims scattered as well. The Chief was furious.

  This was not the way things were supposed to go.

  The two planes arrived over the square a moment later. They were the F-14s, crudely converted into Bombcats. Each was weighed down with 12 five-hundred-pound bombs, way over the expected safe load of the F-14, especially shit boxes like these two. To add to the stability of this very risky attack, both planes were flying with their movable wings extended fully, as if they were landing. Between the weight, the swept-out wings, and the generally bad condition of both planes, they were moving very slowly.

  To the surprise of just about everybody on the ground, a siren began blasting away across the city. Then two searchlights stabbed into the early-evening darkness. Suddenly the sky above Khrash looked more like World War Two Dresden or Berlin. There were streaks of tracer fire coming up to meet the two planes. So-called golden BBs were being sprayed over the sky.

  The two planes turned almost painfully to the south. They were so low, they both nearly clipped the tops of the Holy Towers as they banked left. It took a while, but finally the F-14s went level again. Straight ahead, about a half mile away, was the city’s Grand Mosque.

  The two jets went down even lower, if that was possible; they reduced their airspeed, too. Now just a few blocks away from the huge ornate mosque, both planes put their noses up sharply and dropped four bombs each. This slow-motion lobbing technique resulted in all eight bombs—two tons of explosives—hitting the mosque squarely on its minaret.

  The impact caused an explosion that turned night into day. An instant after that, there was another explosion, just as grand, just as bright. Then came another, and another. . . .

  The bombs had found the huge stockpile of weapons and explosives hidden in the basement of the mosque by the Chief’s men. Things started lighting off in a big way, this as the two planes rode right through the massive fireballs, turning this time to the east. The noise was incredible. The flames rising so high and being so concentrated, they created a mini–mushroom cloud.

  When the smoke was blown away a few seconds later, not only was the Grand Mosque gone—every building within two blocks of it was gone, too.

  Now the two planes, weighing slightly less, headed for the minor mosque located in the city’s Old Quarter. This structure known as the Easter Moon Mosque was more than 300 years old; it was also filled with explosives and weapons, especially RPGs. The holy building received the same treatment as the first—four bombs from each slow-moving plane, two tons of explosives slamming into a dozen tons of the same inside. Another great explosion, another bright flash of light. Another mushroom cloud streaming up into the night. Another gust of wind, another peek at the destruction. As before, more than six blocks of buildings, including the three century-old mosque, had been turned to searing rubble.

  Still locked in the searchlights, the planes turned back to the west. The Red Star Mosque, also known as the poor people’s mosque, was located in this part of the New Quarter of the city. It was here that the religious police had stored hundreds of gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel.

  There was a storm of antiaircraft fire coming up at the two raiders now. What had looked like Dresden a few minutes before now looked like Baghdad, January 1991. The two planes pressed on, though, throwing four more bombs each into this third mosque, igniting all that fuel and creating a flash brighter than the two previous ones combined. This time there was a fireball that didn’t dissipate. Fueled by all the gasoline and diesel, it spread a burning, napalmlike substance all over this western neighborhood, creating a small firestorm. As most of the buildings down here were made of wood, rather than stone—it was the poor section—the fire was quickly raging out of control.

  Only then did the two planes, now free of their ordnance, finally accelerate and disappear over the mountains in the north, leaving the stunned people inside the city to assess the damage.

  Three parts of Khrash were on fire. More than half the city’s ammunition, explosives, and fuel was gone. Many of the top religious police commanders, caught inside the mosques, were dead.

  All in less than three minutes.

  Even to the most uneducated on the ground, it was quickly apparent this had not been done by typical Americans.

  And that was very scary.

  Chapter 17

  Obo Field

  Red Curry was one of the bravest men Ryder Long had ever met.

  Though Curry had flown jet aircraft before he joined USAF Special Operations as a copter pilot, he’d never piloted an aircraft like an F-14 before. First, he was Air Force and the F-14 was a Navy jet. Second, it was big and old. Third, these Iranian versions were big and old and just barely airworthy. It was all Ryder could do to keep his own beast in the air, and he’d had thousands of hours in jets. He didn’t know how Curry was able to do it.

  They were now circling Obo Field, draining off speed before coming in for a landing. The surprise bombing-raid run on Khrash, it being the first step in the team’s final option plan, had been a success. But not without a price. The pair of Tomcats had been so overloaded with bombs, the strain on their engines, already in bad condition, had been close to catastrophic for both of them.

  Just taking off from Obo proved to be a nightmare. At thirty-five hundred feet, the runway held just the bare minimum of roll distance for an F-14 that wasn’t carrying any bombs. As it was, both jets used every inch of the bumpy airstrip just to fling themselves off the Obo ridge and out into the turbulent air between the mountains beyond, praying all the way for some wind beneath their wings. It made taking off from a carrier seem like kid’s stuff. Again, it had been a puckering adventure for Ryder—he couldn’t imagine what it was like for Curry.

  Somehow they made the liftoff, though, went over Khrash, dropped their pianos, and made it back alive. But now here was the hard part. Landing again, on the portable arresting wire setup that no one at Obo was really sure had been installed correctly. And it was Curry who was going to try to land first.

  The problem was that while they had stolen the mobile arresting gear fairly easily, the damn thing didn’t come with an instruction book. They had no idea how taut to pull the wire that would catch the jet’s arrestor hook. The Spooks had tried to help, suggesting tension data they’d gleaned from the Internet, but it was all relative to stopping planes at sea, on carriers, not a few miles up, in Arctic-like conditions.

  The first time they’d banged in at Obo, the cable had been pulled too tight—the Ghosts had guessed at the needed tension, and it had been too much. It nearly ripped the arrestor hooks from both Tomcats. Some of the tension had been relieved from the wire for their second landing, after hijacking the Psyclops plane, but it was still a guess on the right amount and it wound up being too slack. Both Ryder
and Curry nearly wound up at the bottom of the next mountain over. Now they had put a new tension setting on it. But again, too much and the plane would tear itself apart. Not enough and the plane would go over the cliff.

  That’s why Curry volunteered to land first, on the premise that as Ryder was the better pilot and the team’s CO, he would be more needed should anything go wrong with the cable. This was a fatalistic decision if there ever was one—but that’s how the Ghosts were operating these days. Most, if not all, believed that their days were numbered. In fact, some of the team members were so hardened by now, going out in a blaze of glory was not all that objectionable to them. This was just another occupational hazard, part of the price of being thought of as “America’s terrorists.”

  Besides, as corny and melodramatic and clichéd as it sounded, this one was personal. And to a degree, everyone in the team shared it. It was ironic that Li never thought of herself as one of them. Even the guys who’d only known her for the few days they’d all spent on the ship considered her as much a part of the Ghosts as Murphy. For the slime of Al Qaeda to take away such a beautiful creature was a crime against nature itself. That’s why they were here, on the moon, ready to take back the pound of flesh.

  That’s why they knew if one, two, or all of them cashed in during this, their last mission, it would have at least been in pursuit of a very noble cause.

  There weren’t many better ways to go.

  It took Curry three tries, but he finally managed to put his F-14 on the ground. The noise the portable cable setup made when his Tomcat’s hook caught was so loud, Ryder heard it plainly even though he was flying several hundred feet above and riding on top of two very noisy engines. Bouncing around his crash helmet, it was the most horrible grinding sound.

  It was amazing the damn wire didn’t snap, which actually would have meant big trouble for both of them. But the cable held and Curry was down, and even now the Ghosts were pushing his F-14 off the runway. With the horrible noise still echoing in his ears, Ryder put the nose of his own Tomcat to the ground and started his landing approach.