by David Poyer
* * *
The team leader looked closely at the map, going over the route and the plan for the hundredth time in his mind. Turnaround and jumpoff, Point Charlie, Point Delta, objective. In an hour and a half they’d be on the ground a hundred and forty miles inside Iraq. Once landed, they’d link up with an advance party, exchange information, then start the mission. The turnover had to go fast. They’d be inserting close to powerful enemy forces enraged by being bombed for weeks without being able to strike back.
The air war had been underway since the UN deadline expired on 17 January. The Air Force and Navy had been pounding the Iraqis for four weeks now, starting with air defenses, command and communications nodes in downtown Baghdad, and then shifting to the ground forces dug in around Kuwait. Some of the briefers had said they were decimated. Others said the Republican Guard was dug in so deep the bombing barely scratched them. He knew the fog and overcast and rain hadn’t helped.
But he’d seen what happened when you underestimated your enemy. As a private, hot off the griddle at Parris Island. Night after night on the perimeter in Beirut, listening to the crackle of gunfire as the Syrians, the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Hezbollah, and practically every other terrorist faction in the Middle East fought it out. Someone with a direct line to God had set the Marines down on the airfield in the middle of it. He’d thought the locals understood they were protecting them. Till he’d been awakened one October night in ’83 by an enormous explosion.
The truck bomb had killed two hundred and forty-one marines, four of them his buddies.
You didn’t underestimate Arabs. They were courteous. They were proud. They were patient. It was when you thought they were finished, helpless, that they became truly dangerous. Then they didn’t care if they lived or died, as long as they could take you with them.
He stared into the absolute darkness ahead of the pilot’s outline. If he put on his NVGs, he’d presumably see as well as the pilot. But he wasn’t flying. It would be better to conserve batteries for when they were on the ground. For the mission. For a second he felt the fear course through him, pounding, tangible, like something sharp just under his heart. Then he turned away from it. He was trained for this. He had a good team. They had a solid plan. Good equipment. They’d briefed and trained, not as much as he would have liked, but enough. For a moment he felt more confident. Then the unease surged up again, making his mouth dry, his heart pound.
Because he knew no mission ever went as it was planned. And really no one knew what lay ahead in the dark, on the far side of the invisible line in the desert that separated the two massive armies built up over the last six months. Two massive armies, moving inexorably toward war.
* * *
The pilot asked the copilot for the next vector. He forgot the man behind him. He was wrapped in the hairy effort of flying thirty feet off the ground.
The Navy helo and the Pave Hawk had taken off from the Allied base at Al Jouf on a false course, then angled north and picked up the team off a deserted stretch of road. So far neither helicopter had come up on the radio. The Pave Hawk blinked its IR position lights each time they went over a check point. They’d preplanned and timed the routes in and out, routing them through or beneath blind zones in the coverage of the SA-8 and Roland sites that were still operational. If they did it right, they could finish the insertion without a single radio transmission.
This would be eminently desirable, considering the French- and Russian-trained technicians who manned the direction-finding posts, electronic intelligence posts, radar sites, and antiaircraft missile batteries between which they’d be flying.
“Cougar, Red Wolf Two.”
“Roll to Indigo, Red Wolf Two.”
He snapped to the new frequency and picked up. “Red Wolf Two plus one, gate Tarzan, thence to x-ray kilo oscar papa, thence kilo uniform victor delta, charlie charlie mike papa, lima alfa uniform bravo. Read back, over.”
The distant AWACS bird, orbiting in great slow circles thirty thousand feet above the Gulf, rogered his presence and read back his intended flight path. Now they were safe from the hunters above the clouds, USAF F-15s, Navy F-18s, German and Italian and British Tornados.
Unless someone made a mistake.
He was worrying about that, about what they called “blue on blue,” when suddenly the Pave Hawk jinked violently. He hauled around too, just as a dune loomed up out of the dark ahead and flashed past their rotor tips at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
Instead of rising the two aircraft dipped even lower, into a wadi. They were traveling barely twenty feet off the ground now.
* * *
The assistant team leader was huddled close to the vanishingly dim green light in the crew compartment, a coverless, dog-eared, cola-spotted paperback book held four inches in front of his eyes. He was leaning against the med kit, which he carried along with the usual weapon and 782 gear. He wasn’t thinking about the mission now, though. The turbines howled, the fuselage swayed, G forces pressed him against the bulkhead, but he didn’t react. He wasn’t even there. He was in the Caribbean with Dirk Pitt, three hundred feet beneath the sparkling sea.
* * *
“Thirty seconds to the gate,” said the copilot, who was simultaneously kneeboarding his map, working the GPS, and plotting each waypoint on the Tacnav display, a green screen in the middle of the instrument panel. The pilot risked a quick glance, then jerked his eyes back to the ground as it rose again, as if the land itself was reaching up to grab and stop them. He blinked sweat out of his eyes, wishing he could see more clearly. Through the goggles the hurtling desert floor was blur and shadows, boiling with the random energy of amplified photons. He blinked again and squeezed his eyes shut, then popped them open and hauled hard on the collective as, beside him, his copilot sucked in his breath involuntarily.
If they hit one of those dunes, they’d never have time to realize they were dead.
* * *
At the rear of the crew compartment, the naval officer squirmed upright. He’d lain quiet for the first few minutes, trying to get control of his breathing. Feeling the others around him, pressed against him, feeling the hardness of the Hechler and Koch nine-millimeter under his legs.
Now he rolled over and pushed himself upright. An arm’s-reach away the port gunner craned down, looking into the blast of wind and noise and darkness, as if darkness itself was solid and came blasting through at them. The air was icy cold.
What the hell am I doing here? he asked himself. He’d served in the Gulf before, but as the exec of a missile frigate. He should be twenty miles offshore, navigating a destroyer through Saddam’s minefields toward a naval gunfire support position. What was he doing with his face smeared with green and black camo paint, carrying a submachine gun and grenades and an eighty-pound pack?
He touched the various pieces of equipment lashed and clipped to his load-bearing gear. Night vision goggles. Gas gear. Canteens. Knife, flashlight, magazine pouch, compass, everything ranger-corded so he couldn’t lose it in the dark, no matter how clumsy or how sleep-deprived he got. They’d only had a day to train. Just enough time to get thoroughly confused.
If they found what they were looking for, he’d have to destroy it. In the hard flat pack in his thigh pocket, and in his head, he had all he needed to do that.
He felt sick as he remembered what else he carried. Information that, if the Iraqis should ever find it out, would compromise the entire Allied war plan: the details of the massive amphibious assault that would finally liberate Kuwait.
He hoped the men around him were good. Because as far as he could see, he was only going to be a burden to them until they got to the objective. Once they did that, once they got there, he was pretty sure he could do what a very angry four-star general had ordered him to do.
If they could get there alive.
* * *
“Penetration checklist rechecked complete,” the copilot said over the intercom.
The pilot lick
ed his lips but didn’t answer. He squatted the helicopter even lower, shaving the last inches away between the terrain and the hurtling aircraft’s belly. Now all light was gone. Neither sky nor desert yielded the faintest luminosity. Even through the goggles, the only illumination was the jittering, fanlike glow of the Pave Hawk’s engine-heat two hundred meters ahead.
“Wadi coming up. Tarzan gate, twenty seconds.”
The “Tarzan gate” was a low-lying ravine, or wadi, that snaked across the border leading west to east. Border-crossers could use it as a tunnel under the Iraqi ground radars.
But only if you flew low enough. He pushed the cyclic forward even more, fighting his way down closer to the earth. The earth was safety. But it was also mortal danger.
“There’s the entrance,” said the copilot, and at the same moment the Pave Hawk swerved. The pilot moved the stick slightly and the twenty-one tons of helicopter and crew and passengers, lying silent and motionless behind him, swung onto the new heading and tracked down the looming escarpments, down through the blowing darkness, the clatterslam of their rotating blades carrying far out over the night-shrouded land.
* * *
At the very back of the compartment, the youngest member of the team held tight to the butt of the Glock he’d stuffed into his cargo pocket after the preloading inspection, after the brass turned away. He was sweating all over. He’d moved away from the team to drop his trousers twice as they waited at the pickup site, and now his guts rumbled and he knew he had to go again. It was the lousy raghead water. That and the shitty food, the Pak rice and the lettuce they trucked down from the Bekaa. He shouldn’t have ate that lettuce. Everybody knew they shit right on the lettuce to make it grow, that was their fertilizer, goddamn it, goddamn.
Once they hit the ground he’d be out in front. He was the scout. The point. Everybody’d be depending on him. If he fucked up, they’d get blown away. It was desert down there. Not all that different from Montana. Not as rocky, they said. Sand and gravel. He’d have to be real fucking sharp. The Gunny and the Staff would be on his ass. This was the first time he’d ever been in combat. Fucking ragheads. He hoped he got to score. God, come on, let me score.
His hand found the butt of the Glock again, and his finger lightly touched the trigger safety.
* * *
“Mark, the border,” said the copilot, over the intercom so the gunners and their passengers could hear.
The pilot grunted. He was down to twenty feet now, and totally fixated on not flying into the ground. Flying into that granite cumulus. Voiding that ground-contact warranty. Gluing the shadow to the airplane. You couldn’t beat the low altitude flying record; the best you could hope for was a tie. Jokes, his brain feeding back jokes so he didn’t actually have to think about how close death was. It had happened to several crews, using the goggles. You didn’t have any depth perception at all with them, just light and shade and the blurry speckling seethe of amplified light. An H-60 made a hell of a big hole.
The Pave Hawk swung hard left and tracked up a side wadi, the bluff edges closing in, then rose, rose, as the land climbed; and he pulled the collective and climbed too, following, then suddenly popped up over a rise, and went right over a Bedouin camp about ten feet up. He only realized what it was after they were past, retrieving from memory the conical tents a fraction of a second before they rocketed over them, a sparkle of gun-flashes dotted among them. The Bedouin gypsied back and forth over the border. Some were Iraqi, others Saudi, most pretty much independent of both sides, as far as the briefers had said. Like all the Arabs were supposed to be, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousins against the infidel.
The pilot hoped he never went down out here. He was Jewish.
A brilliant flash jerked his head around. A climbing flame rose majestically out of the dark. He ignored it, knowing it probably didn’t have a lock-on. So did the gunners, the machine-guns stayed silent. The border Arabs had Strelas, but they didn’t know how to use them. It was hard to get a lock-on in the dark, and they’d fire blindly, without waiting for a fire-acquisition tone. True to form, the glare wavered, then fell aft and at last plunged downward to lose itself again in the chalk-dust and sand-cloud plume the two low-flying helicopters were dragging across the desert floor behind them.
The Air Force chopper was getting too far ahead. He couldn’t lose sight of it. They needed two birds in case one went down. Pushing the cyclic forward as he added power, he breathed very slowly in and out, and with tiny, nearly imperceptible movements of the stick threaded the hurtling needle of night.
* * *
The communicator rolled himself awkwardly upright, like a beached walrus, humping the weight of his ruck and the radio and batteries and ammo slowly up the back of the aluminum column that enclosed the landing gear shock absorbers, till he could sit upright. Rifle and radio, if you had those you could get through just about anything. Defend yourself with one, save yourself with the other. Call in fire. Call in air support. Call in exfil if things went to shit.
He couldn’t get over how cold it was. Nothing like Texas. Seemed like the coldest place he’d ever been.
The vibrating darkness reminded him of Liberia. The float where everything had gone to shit, and they’d gotten called back even when they were steaming home and suddenly it had all gone down, and they’d had to go in as another African country slid down the toilet into rebellion and war.
He squeezed his eyes closed and saw the map of the RV point. And made himself relax and go over it all again, how they were going to make the rendezvous, the passwords, the identifiers.
Somewhere in there, thinking about it, the radio man went to sleep.
* * *
The copilot sat tensely in his padded seat, plotting the fixes and trying to keep his hands from shaking. He wanted a cigarette, but he knew he couldn’t have one. The ground flashed by too close for him to look at. So he didn’t, just kept his eyeballs pressed to the map and then the Tacnav, trying to keep his jitters under control and mainly succeeding.
An hour went by that way, and nothing changed except that they were now a hundred miles inside Iraq. The fuel onboard gauge dropped gradually as they headed northeast, threading between two SA-8 sites and then swinging due east to pass the Roland battery at Mudaysis. The ground maybe getting a bit flatter, less cut by wadis. The relief going away, going flat into what looked like meticulously graded gravel or sand.
What he found really terrifying out here was the emptiness. On and on and nothing living, no vegetation, no trees, not the smallest stunted bush. As if death itself had moved over this empty terrain. Some immense evil in the shadow of which nothing could live. Occasionally a tone in their earphones signaled the edges of a missile envelope, the invisible brushing fingers of a fire-control radar. But each time they heard it the Pave Hawk had already turned away, and they banked to follow and the deadly whine faded.
* * *
The sniper was from South Carolina. He’d rolled aboard folded over his rifle, tucking the separate hump of the scope into the angle in his gut, protecting the zero. He’d shot it in every day during the lockdown. Day or night, he could put a bullet through a man’s eye socket at two hundred meters. The nine-mils were okay for close quarters, but you could reach out and touch someone with the 5.56.
Like he had at Khafji. When the Iraqi armor had come through, and they were surrounded in the deserted town.
The colonel had climbed out of the tank in his natty greens and black beret like Saddam himself. And from atop a building overlooking a shabby square the sniper had put the crosshairs down on him. He’d taken one more click for the wind, taken a slow breath and half let it out, and then slowly squeezed the trigger and shot him and then shot the three other officers who sat frozen in the staff car, a moment before talking to the man whose skull had suddenly opened like a grisly tulip in front of them, the enlisted boys recovering and diving for cover but the staffies just sitting there with their seat belts still buckled, looki
ng around in alarm as he killed them one after the other, a downhill shot so he held a little high, just above their heads, and when they were crossed off he’d gone back to the tank and shot the colonel again just to make sure till he rolled off his still-seated perch on the frontal armor and fell facedown into a long sky-streaked puddle-rut filled with the rain that had fallen all that day.
He hadn’t felt much about it. The man was a soldier. If he didn’t want to get his ass shot, he shouldn’t have put on the uniform and invaded somebody else’s country.
Rifle tucked protectively along his side, he stared out into the passing night.
* * *
At 0150, the whole desert ahead suddenly turned to white fire. It outlined the lead helicopter with a rapidly growing halo of brilliant light. The pilot could see its rotors going around.
He hauled into a hard bank, his goggles flaring into a solid blinding brilliance as the light kept increasing. He pushed them up, close to panic, and saw the light pouring down across the desert as the fire climbed toward the sky. For a moment he couldn’t tell what it was.
“It’s a fucking SCUD,” breathed his copilot.
“Tag the waypoint, god damn it, tag it now. Intel officers love that shit.”
A wall of tracers rose suddenly and all at once out of the black desert, blazing toward and then over them. They were huge, brilliant, but the pilot could barely see them. Dazzling afterimages chased themselves across his blinded retinas, fear chased itself through his hands. They were ZSU-23s. A four-barreled, twenty-three-millimeter son of a bitch with a dish radar on a tank chassis, and for every one of those huge balls of tracer there were three in between that weren’t. If they got him locked up on radar, he was dead. He popped chaff but knew it might not help.
Out of control, the helicopter lurched to starboard, rotor tips clawing toward the sand.
* * *
The National Guard major lay with her eyes fixed on the overhead, trying not to throw up. She’d felt sick since they took off. She hated helicopters. She didn’t think this was going to work. She’d said so over and over. A squad of grunts, on foot, trying to stop what a mad dictator had had years and billions to prepare? What the CIA said it couldn’t find, and the Air Force said it couldn’t attack? It was ludicrous. It wasn’t the way the Army she knew operated. These people were insane. Totally unconnected to reality.
