The Hammer of God

by Tom Avitabile

  In fact, Ross was thinking exactly the opposite. This woman was tougher than most men, but he and Bridgestone were prepared to kill her. She was deemed an enemy combatant by the NCA. And when the National Command Authority speaks, non-coms like them are paid to listen. Neither of them had any identification on them, and no one would be able to make a connection between them and the USA. They were totally on their own. If caught, they could at best be declared mercenaries. They were truly ghosts.

  Bridgestone forced Salinda’s head right so she could see her right hand as Ross placed his foot over her ear so she couldn’t look away. He then produced a pair of pliers and grabbed her middle fingernail with it. He gave it a tug as he tried to convince her to talk.

  “We can do this twenty times if you stay conscious, Salinda. Then we can wait and start snipping off bits of each finger for a few hours. Oh, and look, here’s some adrenaline.” He produced a syringe. “A shot of this and even the pain of having your genitals removed with a hacksaw wouldn’t knock you out.”

  She made her first human sound, muffled as it was through the now saliva-soaked gag.

  “By Allah’s will, you are going to talk. You are going to talk, now or later. You are going to talk, all in one piece, or in pieces. But, Salinda, you will talk.”

  Her middle finger nail pulled back and tore off with ease. She stiffened and gurgled through the sheet.

  “This could take a long time, Fasol,” Bridgestone said to Ross.

  At 19:00 hours, the chopper’s radio squawked. “Target Alpha located. GPS downloading. Mission is a go. Repeat. Go.”

  The twenty men scrambled into the helicopters as the big hoses that kept the turbines going from the support truck on the apron were disengaged. Within 30 seconds of the alert message, Foxtrot Alpha and Foxtrot Bravo, the mission code name identifiers for the teams of MH60s and AH64-D Apache Longbows, were wheels up and out.

  “Delta force en route, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs informed the President.

  “Good. May God protect them and any innocents on the ground.”

  “Very charitable of you, sir.”

  Mitchell watched a map in the Situation Room as a triangle blip denoted the progress of the two foxtrot copters as they invaded the sovereignty of Egypt.

  “Notify the Egyptian ambassador. Tell him we are invading his airspace. Note time and date and then sequester him till this op is over.” The President repeated those words the way his National Security Advisor had suggested 10 minutes earlier after the Egyptian ambassador was seated in the Roosevelt room supposedly awaiting an audience with the President.

  “Yes, sir.” Charles Pickering said, picking up his phone to carry out the President’s orders. He didn’t like it; the Egyptian ambassador was an official guest of this country. Stopping him from contacting his homeland was a grievous act of non-diplomacy. Still, for the safety and security of the mission underway, there could not be a chance of leaks on the Egyptian side. In fact, at the end of the day, however it came out, the Egyptians would be glad they were not responsible for any mission compromises. They then could register formal complaints at the U.N. and save face with the Arab street.

  Bridgestone and Ross had made a bad decision. They should have left Salinda dead or dying in her room, along with just enough evidence to point anyone in the direction of the desert. But as hard-assed as they were, she was still a woman, albeit one who had plotted against the United States and seduced one of our Diplomatic Security officers over to the other side. So now, here they were, driving an old Datsun with her in the back seat covered in a sheet, unconscious and stinking from the vomiting caused by the intense pain of losing her right pinky. They cauterized her hand and she was alive. They even took the pinky with them in a Styrofoam cup with ice from the fridge. It was a small percentage play, but if their hare-brained scheme worked, she could be in Kuwait City in two hours and there they might be able to reattach it. The fingernails would probably grow back.

  They were heading towards the safe house with her; first to check and make sure she was telling the truth and, more importantly, to “light it up” for the laser range finders on the Cobra Attack helicopters. Bridgestone rationalized his decision not to terminate her by reasoning that having her alive would prove valuable if somehow she managed to lie through all the pain they had inflicted on her and lead them down an erroneous path. Time would tell.

  On board the copter, real-time satellite images were coming out of its printer. The squad commanders on each chopper had identical printouts and were working a Telestrator, the same kind of device used on NFL football broadcasts to draw diagrams over the footage of the game. The difference was that they were drawing attack plans over satellite imagery of the 300-yard square patch of Egypt where, according to Bridgestone and Ross’ fresh intel, the ambassador was being held. The two inbound forces were talking over an encrypted satellite link while simultaneously, eight thousand miles away, in a secure room at the Pentagon, other combat controllers and commanders were doing play-by-play and color.

  The target area was the abandoned Maghra oil refinery on the northwest edge of the desert. Many of its buildings and pipes were sandblasted down to flat smooth surfaces through years of neglect, leaving it to face the brunt of sandstorms and drifts. Satellite infrared reconnaissance had identified warm bodies out at 100 meters from the main complex. These were perimeter guards ready to alert the terrorists about any threat. Surely, they had radios or cell phones. There were a few heat-generating spots in the main complex warding off the cold desert night. Foxtrot Alpha’s FLIR spotted a vehicle moving towards the complex about three miles off. They made note of it. If it became a factor, they would kill it with a Hellfire missile that the armament officer had assigned to the target by laying the cursor over it and locking it into his targeting computer. Unless the vehicle went underground or found cover, which was doubtful in this terrain, the Forward-Looking Infrared Radar and computer would keep track of it and warn him if it closed to within 500 meters, the effective range of any shoulder-fired missile at the low altitude they were flying.

  In the Datsun, Ross grabbed the laser and pulled himself halfway outside the passenger window. Using it like a pen, he laser-lit the roof of the Datsun drawing a rough triangle symbol. It only took 30 seconds for the armaments officer to register the symbol as the friendly sign used by his squad members.

  “Captain, I’ve got Ross and Bridgestone. Traveling towards target one in a vehicle two-and-a-half miles out.”

  “Good. We’ll extract them with us.”

  At 1000 meters out Foxtrot Bravo launched a drone that was mounted on hard points between the struts. It glided down 100 feet from the copter; its silent drive engine then kicked in and it sped ahead of the copter. On board the copter, Specialist First Class Neumann flew the drone from a joystick and monitor display. When he got to within 200 yards of the refinery, he engaged the EMP switch. Immediately, all radio, cellular, and any other electromagnetic radiation was blocked from an area about the size of a 300-yard umbrella directly below the silently hovering drone. It was the same kind of electro-magnetic pulse type jamming device that was used when senators or VIPs visited war zones where improvised explosive devices could be remotely detonated by cellular or radio control. The Presidential detail also carried this type of device to stop would be assassins from getting real-time telemetry or data on the President’s exact whereabouts. Now the group holding the ambassador in the refinery was blind and their forward scouts were unable to signal them.

  The Apache Longbows went down to the deck and switched on NOE. Utilizing the Nap of the Earth, terrain-hugging software, the pilots became passengers as the computer-guided copter cruised over sand dunes and gullies at 90 knots at 25 feet. Using infrared, the co-pilot turned on his “see and shoot” helmet array. A M23 °Chain Gunon a gimbaled mount under the nose of the helicopter now copied every move of his head. The heads-up display on his visor was in infrared mode. He just lined up his reticule by moving h
is head and trained the gun in on whatever he had in his sights. A red button to the right of the center of his collective control was the trigger. If he held the button down, he could fire 300 rounds per minute. Tapping the button released a 50-round fusillade of flesh/metal tearing 30 mm slugs, which he now did five times as he walked the fire in on the four life forms revealed on his ever-changing horizon. All of the bullets en route created a temporary curtain of white hot lines trailing towards the target.

  To the doomed lookouts at the forward post, there was only the sudden percussion of 250 heavy white-hot bullets slamming into and shredding them and everything around them. They never heard or saw the black copters approach.

  On the co-pilots HUD, all he now saw were cooling pieces of bodies and glowing hot holes where the bullets either lay embedded cooling in the night air or starting small fires where they met something material. What a few seconds earlier were four distinct heat signatures, was now a mess of green dots and clumps.

  “Target neutralized,” crackling over the pilots headset, was the only epitaph the dead men, who they were now zooming over, would ever get. Foxtrot Alpha flared up at 100-feet and held off at 50-yards, its co-pilot picking off random targets in the compound, while Foxtrot Bravo went in for a strut jump. Hovering four feet from the ground as the men piled out 50 yards from the main building 20 seconds later, Foxtrot Bravo was 12 feet off the roof as five repel lines sprang out from each side. A door gunner training his counterbalanced 7.62 mm mini-gun down onto the roof to clip anybody trying to stop the deployment.

  “Eight kills, 35 seconds into breach, and no sign of counterattack,” the Captain manning the console reported to the room in the Pentagon. He was watching an array of monitors that showed him every feed of video and GPS data. He had seen the action of the gunners much the same as they had through their HUDs.

  “Good, then the bastards don’t even know they are under attack. This might just work,” Pickering said.

  ?§?

  As if that comment was heard a third of the way around the world, an explosion rocked the building and blinded most of the heat-sensitive night scopes.

  “What the hell was that?” the squad commander yelled into his helmet-mounted tactical radio mike.

  “Jonesy tripped a booby trap wire, but he felt it. There was a delay and he was able to get to cover. No one hurt.”

  “All units, go, go, go!”

  Their presence no longer a secret, the men were turned loose to enter, interdict, and neutralize the enemy with all due haste. They moved with lightning speed. Three-shot bursts from their MP-5s crumpled startled terrorists who didn’t have the benefit of night vision goggles. Each trooper had memorized the face of the two high value targets believed to be in this complex — the ambassador and Jamal. One they wanted to save, the other they wanted to boil in oil, but were under orders to retrieve for his intelligence value.

  The great unknown here was the number of bad guys in the center of the building. The metal roof and pipes made it impossible for the infrared to get an accurate reading. They could be facing one hundred armed men or two night janitors wielding mops. The fighting became intense as they neared the center of the complex. It turned out that some of the terrorists were in fact equipped with night vision goggles. Two squad members were being pinned down in a hallway from a night-vision-capable gun at the far end of the hall. One motioned to the other and, on the count of three, they flipped up their night vision sets and threw a flare into the hall. As soon as it lit off, they were up and firing, guided by the same intense light that was blinding the goggled terrorists. It only gave them a one-second advantage, but when you are the best of the best of the United States military and qualified to brag about it every month, one second can be the enemy’s life expectancy — which it proved to be.

  Two operators were equipped with infrared scopes/vision assist. That meant they could literally see through walls. They saw the outlines of two armed men lying in wait behind an overturned desk. Seeing no one else, like a hostage, they simply chucked a grenade into the room. The blast flattened the desk against the wall along with the two men. Overall, the resistance was sporadic with no real counteroffensive. By neutralizing their lookouts, the captors weren’t expecting a raid and they certainly weren’t alerted before the choppers hit.

  A flash-bang grenade went off down the hall and three troops ran to it. They were into the room before the sound stopped echoing off the walls. Tied to a chair, his ears bleeding and rolling his head side to side to ward off the pain, was the ambassador. Jamal and two others were writhing on the floor in the immediate aftershock of the blast. Two troops put themselves in front of the ambassador, shielding him with their bodies, their guns trained outward. Another operator put a round each into the heads of the other two men in the room. Jamal was wire-tied and brought to his feet.

  The troopers started to assemble in the room. Fifteen of them surrounded the ambassador and Jamal and started leading them out of the building. Two operators were down. Luckily, Kevlar vests protected their vitals, but both suffered leg wounds.

  Not taking chances, the 15 stopped at an obvious ambush point before the exit of the building, lobbing five grenades into the area as they all took cover. Grunts and moans accompanied the explosions. Two scouts went ahead to clear the way. A few shots rang out, all U.S. weapons, as the scouts made sure no one was playing possum.

  Foxtrot Alpha circled and secured the area as half the team boarded Foxtrot Bravo. Then Alpha landed as Bravo kept guard. That’s when the Datsun approached the LZ. Instinctively, the men boarding the copter trained their guns on the vehicle.

  “They’re friendlies!” the squad commander shouted. “Hold your fire!”

  Everybody laughed when Ross and Bridgestone came out of the car.

  “Shit, Ross, we almost blew your fucking heads off!” an operator yelled.

  “Bullshit. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a bull stopped to fuck a cow.”

  “What’s that?” the squad commander asked as Bridgestone and Ross carried the wrapped body from the back seat towards the copter.

  “Salinda. I didn’t want to dispatch her in case we still needed info.”

  “What are we supposed to do with her now?”

  “Could make Jamal more talkative if he sees she’s at risk.”

  “Okay. Get her on board and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  They clamored aboard the craft as it lifted off.

  As soon as they were on board they unwrapped the sheet revealing Salinda, Jamal saw her. He was shocked, but his situational awareness clicked in. He looked to his right and saw the open door of the chopper. He bolted up, jumped on Salinda, and grabbed her in his wire-tied hands, rolling with her out of the open door. Their bodies fell more than 200 feet and broke on a rocky ledge below.

  “Ah, shit!” a disgusted Ross said as he tossed the severed pinky out of the same door.

  “They got him.”

  A small smattering of applause broke out around the Sitch Room following the Captain’s announcement.

  “Casualties?” the President said quieting the room.

  “Two leg wounds, non-life threatening.”

  “Thank God. Enemy killed?”

  “Sir, give us some time to debrief first,” the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs said. “It will all be in a report in the morning.”

  “Thank you all. Good work. Hank, I think those men earned some shiny hardware tonight.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  ?§?

  After-action jitters were a phenomenon that most battle-hardened commanders had seen. The adrenaline rush of combat and intense mental alertness often had residual effects once the nervous system calmed down. So Jonesy vomiting into his helmet was to be expected. He took some ribbing for it, but not from three of the men who were also looking a little green around the gills. Within two minutes, four troopers upchucked their guts into their Kevlars and were lying on the floor of the chopper.

  R
ealizing that something else had to be going on here, the commander keyed his tactical radio. “Oasis this is Foxtrot Alpha, inbound. Possible chemical or bio contamination. Men nauseous and vomiting. Request bio-hazard and antibiotics.”

  The Squad commander then checked all of his men on the copter. He heard Foxtrot Bravo report three men vomiting on it. He broke out the antibiotics and ordered all of his men to dose themselves. Retracing their movements, he tried to figure out what these men had been exposed to.

  Hiccock’s phone rang. “William, get on SCIAD now!” the voice on the other end said.

  Hiccock scanned his eye and opened the network from his desktop. The voice on the phone was Quan Li, a research scientist out of Cal Tech on assignment in Diego Garcia. He was stationed at a listening station for Pave Paw West, a launch detection satellite in geo-synchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean. He was an Element member of SCIAD because he had led the way on critical mass research in heavy water reactors and held the highest clearance.

  To: n

  From: #E: Li

  Re: Huge spike in Egyptian desert.

  17:32 GMT Sensor readings of › 10.5 and ‹ 14.2 rads/meter recorded from source at 34 lat 134 long….

  That’s all Hiccock had to read. He printed the document, picked up the phone, and pressed “POTUS.” But the President of the United States was not behind his desk. The switchboard picked up.

  “Yes, Doctor Hiccock.”

  “Chief of Staff, please.”

  “Hold on.”

  “Reynolds.”

  “Ray, it’s Bill. I got something hot here and I need to inform the president.”

  “Come down.”

  Bill was out the door grabbing the printout on the way. He ran to the elevator and agents surrounded him.