Fox Hunt

by James Phelan

  Colonel Pugh stomped from the pilothouse towards Major Scot, his face red with anger. “We have to evac. Now!” he barked, as a shell exploded a hundred metres inland of their position.

  “We can afford a few more minutes,” Scot said casually, turning his back on the colonel to look ashore again. He was searching for somebody in particular, someone whom he had specifically ordered to the boat but who was no longer answering his calls over the radio.

  “Listen, son!” Pugh said, landing his rough hand on the younger man’s shoulder and twisting him around. “I don’t think I need to bring rank into this. You know the importance of this mission as well as I. We’re moving, now!” He released the marine and turned back to the pilothouse—only to find his way barred by a member of Scot’s squad with a raised M16.

  “We leave in three minutes, Colonel. I trust you can wait that long,” Scot said and jumped from the boat, two of his trusted marines in tow.

  “Out of my way, boy!” Pugh screamed at the marine in front of him, expelling all the air from his mighty lungs.

  The marine, a career sergeant who measured as rugged and tough as any of the resourcer men, did not even blink at the barking of the superior officer. “Seems you are in quite a predicament, sir,” the marine sergeant said.

  “I think not,” Pugh said calmly, as three of his resourcers came to stand with him, brandishing small firearms. More of his men came from below and a heavy wrench swung against the marine’s Kevlar helmet. The sergeant fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

  When the Germans arrived at the boat, Zimmermann’s last GSG-9 trooper handed Ben Beasley a heavy square rucksack.

  “I understand you are a signals expert,” the trooper said.

  Beasley took the proffered rucksack and inspected it closely on the deck. It was the marines’ radio-jamming equipment, it’s netting-covered carry case splattered with blood, hinting at what had become of its rightful owner.

  “All right! Gentlemen, it’s time to give the marines a taste of their own medicine,” Beasley said as he twisted the dials and pressed some buttons.

  The device could be set to jam all radio communications within five kilometres, certain bands or even specific frequencies. Beasley set the frequencies to be blocked out below 900.00 MHz. His own team’s gear ran above that, and he was counting on the Chechens’ older gear being at a lower frequency, like that of the NATO officers. He flicked the switch.

  “Presto!” he said, as the radio earpieces of the GSR team came alive.

  “I still have static,” Farrell said, fiddling with the volume dial on his radio’s waist unit.

  “I don’t know the frequency the Chechens are using,” Beasley said, “so I’m jamming all those below ours. Sorry, but I don’t think it fair we just block out the marines.”

  “You’re right, of course. We have no need for the radios now anyway,” Farrell said.

  Zimmermann turned to the others on deck outside the pilothouse. “May I suggest we make a hasty retreat?”

  “Fox, Gammaldi, this is Sefreid, do you copy?” Fox strained his still limited hearing at the sound in his earpiece.

  “We copy,” Gammaldi replied as they slowed their run around the hillside.

  “We’re ready at the boat. Are you far off?” Sefreid asked, yelling over the raging gun battle.

  “We’re at the southern end of the hill. It’ll take us about ten minutes!” Fox replied. An explosion rocked the ground fifty metres behind them, spraying the area with debris.

  “I don’t know if we can wait that long,” Sefreid replied, his voice full of despair.

  Before Fox or Gammaldi could reply, an object crashed to the ground with incredible force in between them. They halted in their tracks, staring down at the ground.

  “What was that? Are you all right?” Sefreid’s voice came over the radio.

  Fox crouched down and tentatively turned the object over. He recognised it instantly and remembered what the German had told him: ‘A type of fuel air explosive.’ It had been blown into the air by a nearby explosion, its heavy stainless steel casing undamaged from the ordeal. He turned it over; the digital display was cracked across its face, but there was no mistaking its message:

  00:24:16

  00:24:15

  00:24:14

  “Head off,” Fox replied to the GSR team. “Move away and get the injured out of here. We’ll follow the coast until we reach the research facility—after creating a little hell around here.”

  Fox looked to Gammaldi with a foreboding frown, which his mate answered, understanding. They knew that if the boat waited for them, and managed to leave shore unscathed by the attackers, it would still be in the blast radius when the Germans’ bomb went off.

  The pair resumed running south around the hillside, away from the boat. Fox pointed ahead and he and Gammaldi watched with fascination as an attack took place between the two fighting forces.

  “You’re sure?” Sefreid asked.

  Although Fox had just witnessed more lives lost, he allowed himself a slight smile as an opportunity presented itself.

  “We’re sure.”

  Pugh ordered his boat underway, leaving Scot’s marines ashore to fight alongside their comrades. “This will be close,” he growled to his second-in-command as they stood in the pilothouse.

  “We’ve had closer. Remember the Ural Mountains in ’94? That battalion of Russian border guards dropped virtually on top of us!”

  “Yeah,” Pugh replied. “But we’re not out of the fire yet.” He touched the wooden frame of the pilothouse superstitiously.

  Antinov worked every knot he could out of the old diesel engine as the boat left the raging battle behind. On the stern deck, the GSR team sat in silence, most staring towards the site that had claimed one of their close-knit team and still held two men they had welcomed as their own.

  “They’ll make it,” Sefreid reassured his team.

  “They’re tough sons o’ bitches,” Pepper remarked.

  “Ridge deserved better,” Goldsmith said. Silence prevailed again.

  Gibbs, who was watching the battle through her scope, gave a commentary on the situation. “The marines are putting up one hell of a fight. The remaining Chechens are held back about three hundred metres, advancing only with the cover of their few remaining personnel carriers—those buggies have caused them hell,” she said.

  “The Roadrunners are built for this kind of fighting,” Lieutenant Beasley said, staring at the battleground now fading into the distance.

  “You wish you were there too?” Sefreid asked the marine.

  Beasley shook his head. “There were a few good men in Scot’s unit, but most of them were out of control. Many were involved with revenge killings of civilians in Iraq. The JAG Corps sent me there undercover to observe their methods. They can fend for themselves now.”

  “There were two Roadrunners, weren’t there?” Gibbs asked, still scanning with her sniping scope.

  “Yeah,” Chris Beasley replied.

  “I only see one now,” Gibbs said.

  “What’s that over there?” Jenkins joined the group at the stern deck and pointed to shore.

  “The boat that came ashore earlier!” Geiger replied, looking through field glasses.

  “She’s riding low—must be laden with theterium,” Gibbs said.

  “We’d better do something about that,” Jenkins said, turning to gather a weapon.

  “We may not have to,” replied Geiger.

  As Colonel Pugh’s boat turned about from shore in a wide arc, a seventy-three-millimetre shell from a Chechen BMP splintered the pilothouse in spectacular fashion, instantly killing Pugh’s second-in-command and shooting the commander himself into the air and overboard into the lake in a bloodied mess. Those on deck were shredded by shards of timber and metal, while those in the hold were concussed from the explosion.

  The shell left the engine unscathed—which con
tinued to increase revolutions and boat speed— but destroyed the piloting controls and locked the rudder in a mid-starboard position.

  “Wow!” Jenkins said as the boat started in a wide turn that would soon run it aground.

  “I don’t think we need to worry about the theterium any more,” Sefreid said as he looked through Gibbs’s scope.

  “Except if the Chechens get it,” Jenkins said.

  Zimmermann and Farrell came to the deck to find out what had transpired. The German looked like he was about to speak, but it was the marine, Chris Beasley, who took the opportunity.

  “Scot ordered a Tomahawk strike when the Chechens’ attack forced them to call the retreat,” he said quickly, ashamed at not having told the others earlier.

  “When is the impact?” Farrell asked.

  Chris Beasley checked his watch. “Less than twenty minutes.”

  The EU men exchanged triumphant smiles.

  “That’s one thing I love about you Yanks,” Farrell said. “If you can’t have it, you’ll be damned if anyone else gets it!”

  “I don’t believe it!” Geiger said, staring through the field glasses to the northwest of the battleground and a few kilometres inland of the theterium site.

  He’d sighted the face of Lachlan Fox, covered with dried blood and dust but still grinning. His brown hair was blowing about wildly in the wind and he looked like a madman invigorated by life on the edge as he sped from the gates of hell.

  Fox and Gammaldi had watched one of the Roadrunners get peppered by a squad of Chechens that had snuck up from behind. The driver and gunner had returned fire with their mini-gun and some deft manoeuvring that left their attackers dead, but their vehicle out of control. By the time Fox and Gammaldi reached the pair of marines, the vehicle had rolled onto its side and they were hanging dead in their harnessed seats.

  The two Australians unstrapped the bodies, which fell unceremoniously to the ground, then muscled the Roadrunner back onto its foam-filled tyres. Fox had tried to contact the GSR team again but they were too far out of range.

  Now Fox sat in the forward driver’s position, with Gammaldi in the gunner’s seat behind, and they were flying over the undulating terrain at nearly a hundred kilometres per hour, the speeding vehicle often lifting clear into the air for seconds at a time.

  Using the GPS screen strapped to the dash, Fox steered on the straightest possible course to Maragheh and the Ahman Research Centre.

  Scot cursed as the radio turned to static. He marvelled that the poorly equipped Chechens had had the wherewithal to bring electronic jamming equipment with them. The attackers, he was pleased to see, had been reduced to perhaps a third of their original size and were fighting from scattered positions in a haphazard way.

  Scot ignored the pot shots taken at him as he ran up the hillside to the main cave where he’d left his most trusted sergeant. What he saw there made him pale with rage, and he almost missed the hole made at the back of the dark cave. With growing realisation, he added the escape of the EU team to his diminishing situation.

  “We have to go, sir,” the corporal accompanying him said quietly.

  Scot knew the three minutes he had given Pugh to wait were up and he left the darkness of the cave to make for the boat. From his vantage on the hillside, he saw the vessel moving off without him, its deck a smouldering mess. It was not headed north to the pre-planned evacuation point; instead, it was heading slowly inland.

  Pugh swam to the rocky bank where he clung for a full minute to catch his breath. He swore black and blue that he would tear strips off Major Scot if the marine managed to live through this. He tried to pull himself up out of the water but the edge of the shore was just too high to raise his injured bulk effectively.

  He turned to check his boat’s position, confident that his men could get her underway again, but at that moment the heavily laden vessel crushed his body to a pulp against the shoreline as it ran aground.

  Scot missed the collision, dodging to avoid the shots being fired at him. A bullet tore his ear almost clean off; it dangled from the lobe from the side of his head. He yanked the extremity from his body and tossed it to the ground.

  “Kill ’em, kill ’em all!” he yelled, and sprayed a squad of oncoming Chechens with fully automatic fire from his M16.

  The marines either side of him added to the blaze and the surviving Chechens fell back to form a small group of their own, no more than a dozen. The marines took cover in the main cave.

  The two Tomahawks Scot had ordered ploughed into the theterium hill and encampment a second apart, collapsing the cave systems forever and rocking the ground with incredible force.

  The theterium deposit reacted to the sudden heat and force as expected, and became a molten mass that sank into the sands of Iran before hardening into the water table not far below.

  Major Scot lay crushed under a pile of rubble, staring towards the lake where the resourcers’ boat had run ashore, unharmed by the strike and accessible. It was the last sight he would take in. He closed his eyes.

  The German nuclear device—a simple fission explosive—detonated five seconds before the third Tomahawk struck. The Tomahawk vaporised harmlessly in the heat wave of the initial nuclear blast, which travelled for a five-kilometre radius before being sucked into the sky in the form of a giant mushroom cloud, taking with it hundreds of thousands of litres of water and tonnes of sand and rock.

  The theterium site could never be utilised again.

  The flash ripped through the dark evening sky. Every member of the EU/GSR team ran to the stern deck in time to see the mushroom cloud plume on the horizon. A few minutes after the water level retreated, a metre-high swell rocked against the boat.

  Fox was checking the Roadrunner’s open petrol tank when the sky lit up.

  “She’s empty all right—” He cut himself off, staring open-jawed at the explosion. Neither he nor Gammaldi doubted what they were seeing. The mushroom cloud was lit from within, the molten particles that made up its mass glowing like a billion fireflies.

  “Do you think we’re safe?” Gammaldi asked, watching the growing cloud.

  “We’ve covered a good sixty kilometres. It seems like a small tactical nuke,” Fox said, surprising himself by his recall of information he’d learnt at the Academy.

  “What do we do now?” Gammaldi asked, still entranced by the sight.

  Fox was examining a map he had found in a steel box at the back of the Roadrunner. “We walk to this train line and hop on a rail car heading north to Maragheh. If there isn’t one, we walk the whole way. It’s not far.”

  “Hey, I’m on holidays, I’ve got nothing but time.” Gammaldi took the GPS system and walked off in the direction of the tracks.

  Time … Fox thought, standing still.

  “Actually, I don’t think time is on our side yet,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Gammaldi asked, turning to eye him.

  “By now the Dragon would have been armed with the pod we discovered,” Fox said. “And the deadline’s almost up.”

  “Why wouldn’t the Chechens have used it as security on the site to force the US or whoever to stay away?”

  “There’s the catch: it takes seven days to reload and charge,” Fox said.

  “And that’ll be…” Gammaldi looked at his watch.

  “Less than eight hours from now,” Fox said, looking at his own.

  “What the hell can we do?”

  “Farrell interrogated a technician at the old control centre. He told him the controls were moved outside Chechnya to a safe location,” Fox said, his mind racing. “Somewhere Ivanovich could retreat to.”

  “The island in Venice?” Gammaldi said.

  “No, that’s too easily overwhelmed, he’d want something mobile.” Fox thought about it. “It would have to be big—the controls require an enormous power supply.”

  “A truck?” Gammaldi asked. “A big semi with a generator?”


  “Probably not. The antenna would be huge, far too tall to drive around or conceal. More like a battleship’s mast really.”

  Something clicked in Gammaldi’s brain; Fox could see it in his face.

  “What?” Fox said.

  “Somewhere he’d hidden before,” Gammaldi said, the beginnings of a smirk on his face. “Back at the island, there was a yacht with a satellite dish on the stern deck.”

  “Lots of boats have sat dishes,” Fox said, playing devil’s advocate.

  “Yeah, but this sucker was the size of a VW.” Fox looked at his friend. Over his shoulder the blooming mushroom cloud formed a surreal back-drop, lit by the setting sun.

  “Care to see Venice again?” Gammaldi said.

  “Al, again I … I’m amazed.” Fox shook his head in disbelief at the hypothesis his friend had put together during their hard run to the train tracks.

  PART THREE

  59

  MARAGHEH

  IRAN

  Sefreid had organised for a truck to meet their boat at the dock they had left a mere eight hours ago. During the trip to the Amahn Research Centre, the worst of the injured were treated by a physician Eric Gunther had thoughtfully sent along. The weary GSR and EU team members passed the half-hour truck ride in reflective silence.

  None of them doubted what they had seen. They knew there was only one type of weapon capable of such a display of destruction.

  At the research centre the GSR pilots were waiting at the end of the runway, the engines of the Gulfstream running. Eric Gunther was nowhere to be seen.

  “He’s due back soon—had to go to Cairo for some sort of conference,” the captain of the Gulf-stream informed Sefreid as he entered the cockpit.

  “Okay, head off anyway. The UN medical compound at Tabriz. They’ll be expecting us.”