Direct Action sts-4

by Keith Douglass

  These were not plain-vanilla helicopters. Both the Blackhawks and Chinooks had the same avionics suites, optimized for low-altitude penetration of hostile airspace: a forward-looking infrared system for night flying, in addition to the pilots’ night-vision goggles; a terrain-following/terrain-avoidance/digital ground-mapping radar; automatic target hand-off and digital automatic flight controls; radar and laser warning systems, infrared jammers, and chaff and flare dispensers to handle any missiles that might be launched at them; six-barrel 7.62 mm miniguns for the door gunners to shoot at anything else that might bother them; and several redundant precision navigation and communications systems. Both aircraft types had in-flight refueling probes, and the Blackhawks had pylons for extra fuel tanks or weapons.

  The task force was led by a dapper little major who sported a full mustache that wouldn’t do him much good with his next Army promotion board. He listened carefully while Murdock briefed the plan and then broke into a huge smile, visions of Distinguished Flying Crosses obviously dancing in his head.

  Besides a captain and two first lieutenants, the rest of the major’s pilots were warrant officers. While Army commissioned officer pilots had to follow career paths and only did three-year tours with their respective units, all the warrants did was fly. In a unit like the 160th, which was all volunteer and handpicked, the best pilots in the Army, that told.

  The warrants were the kind of people who enjoyed screaming over the treetops at more than a hundred knots in the dead of night, their only view through the green tunnels of their night-vision goggles. So of course they couldn’t wait to fly into Lebanon and get their asses shot off.

  In fact, like Murdock’s SEALS, the pilots nearly got into a fistfight after the major decided who was going to fly the mission and who would be backup.

  Unlike Air Force helicopter pilots, who sometimes acted as if the safety of their expensive aircraft was more important to them than accomplishing the mission, the pilots of the 160th were beloved by the SEALS, Delta, and Special Forces. All you had to do was point to a spot on a map and the 160th would take you there, and when you were done working, fly back through any kind of weather, ground fire, or the gates of Hell itself to get you out. They were shit hot, and bigger prima donnas than even the SEALS. They called themselves the Nightstalkers.

  And while the SEALs trained to take down the target, the Nightstalkers got busy. The National Security Agency had electronically mapped the location of every radar and antiaircraft system in Lebanon and Syria, and the pilots carefully plotted their route through the gaps and dead spaces. Satellite radar mapping gave them the exact radar images they would see in their scopes as they flew the route. Their computer planning system digitized satellite photographs and gave the crews a virtual-technology view of the route as seen through any of the aircraft windows. It could simulate daylight, night, and night-vision-goggle light.

  The pilots slept during the day and flew at night, skimming over the desert and through the canyons of the Chocolate Mountain range. They didn’t need Murdock and the SEALS. The helicopters were loaded with the equivalent weight of the vehicles and personnel they’d be carrying, and if one went into the ground only the crew would be lost. The 160th had lost more men in training than they had in Panama, the Gulf, Somalia, and other unmentioned places around the world combined.

  Then the Office of Technical Service showed up with the mission vehicles. The Shorlands armored cars were painted in Syrian camouflage with all details correct, even the extra smoke dischargers Murdock had requested.

  The Shorlands had the same general shape as the classic Land Rover, except the body was steel armor. The entire suspension and tires had been beefed up to take the extra weight. The Shorlands normally came with a machine-gun turret on the top, but it made the vehicle too high to fit in the back of a Chinook and had been removed. Even if they had kept the turret, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to work the gun; the entire compartment would be filled with explosives. The front lights were covered by heavy wire grills, and the bumpers were reinforced to take a heavy impact. Top speed from the four-stroke V-8 engine was sixty-five miles per hour. Being a British vehicle, it was right-hand-drive. Being good Americans, the SEALS were driven absolutely crazy learning to shift with their left hands.

  The Mercedes were big black sedans, with Syrian flags on the front bumpers and little lights to illuminate the flags at night. The sedans were equipped with the German GSG-9 protective detail package: armor, run-flat tires, fire-suppression systems, ram bumpers, sirens, and firing ports. In fact, they were almost identical to the cars purchased by the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, an act that he described in his book as getting him in Dutch with the chicken-shit SEAL brass. All true as far as it went, but the unmentioned part of the story was that the Mercedes were so spiffy, the SEALs of Team Six drove their official military vehicles out into town for nights of partying. That was a bit beyond the pale, and other C.O.s had been fired for much, much less.

  For the explosives that would fill the armored cars, the CIA provided the first production samples of Trinittroazetidine, or TNAZ. TNAZ was brand new, and projected to replace C-4 plastic as the special operations explosive of choice. It generated fifteen percent more energy, with twenty percent less volume and weight. With it, Murdock expected close to the equivalent of a two-thousand-pound bomb from each vehicle.

  Almost six weeks from the day they arrived in Niland, after a final live-fire rehearsal, the vehicles were loaded into the helicopters and everyone flew north to Edwards Air Force Base. There they began a movement that had taken weeks of work and enough classified message traffic to fill a room to arrange.

  The helicopters were loaded aboard four C-5B transports, and the entire force flew to Naval Air Station Sigonella on the island of Sicily. They landed at night, and the Chinooks were reassembled in enclosed hangars.

  The next night the helicopters took off from Sigonelia and flew onto the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington. They were immediately whisked down into the hangar deck. To make room for them, a squadron of the Washington’s F/A-18s had flown off to Aviano, Italy. The official statement was that they would support operations in Bosnia while the Washington made a scheduled port call in Haifa, Israel.

  In reality, the U.S.S. George Washington was making thirty knots for the coast of Lebanon.

  14

  Friday, November 10

  0000 hours, midnight Aboard the U.S.S. George Washington (CVN-73) Eastern Mediterranean Sea

  Third Platoon was waiting, enjoying the comfortable padded chairs of the ready room of the squadron they’d kicked off the ship.

  They were dressed in their Syrian camouflage uniforms and berets. The blouses were sized a little large to make room for Kevlar armored vests with ceramic plate inserts that would, hopefully, stop rifle fire. Two extra pockets were sewn inside the camouflage outer jackets to carry an MX-300 walkie-talkie and an AN/PRC-1 12(V) combination survival radio and homing beacon. They were leaving in half an hour, so everyone was wearing his Syrian load-bearing web gear filled with magazines and grenades. The Kalashnikov AKM assault rifles were lying across their legs. Everyone’s gear had been inspected. They were ready to go.

  None were wearing dog tags or carrying the military I.D. cards required by the Geneva Convention. There was no need. Considering how brutally the Syrian government treated its own people, they certainly weren’t going to go easy on American SEALs caught trying to blow up their one-hundred-dollar-bill machines. According to Amnesty International, the Syrians’ favorite interrogation technique was to sit you down on a box that rammed a red-hot rod up your ass. The only answer to that was to not let them take you.

  Murdock looked over the room. Professor Higgins was deeply engrossed in The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. He occasionally paused to poke Doc Ellsworth on the arm and cackle gleefully, “Two thousand, four hundred years and nothing’s changed! The shit is still the same!”

  Each time he did that, the Do
c’s pencil skidded across the crossword puzzle he was working on. He looked as if he wanted to amputate Higgins’s arm with his combat knife.

  Magic Brown and Razor Roselli were playing a game of chess on Magic’s travel board. Jaybird Sterling was doing a whispered color commentary on the match, as if it were a football game. Magic Brown, who had the intense powers of concentration of a master sniper, was delighted. Razor Roselli, more easily distracted, was getting angrier by the minute. Especially since his position was deteriorating alarmingly.

  Ed DeWitt and Kos Kosciuszko were giving the route map a last bit of study.

  The second eight were sitting around the periphery, left out, hoping someone would suddenly succumb to food poisoning. Failing that, if things fell apart on the ground, four of them would be going in with the extraction Blackhawks. They were all the reaction force there would be.

  Don Stroh and Paul Kohler of the CIA were dressed in Navy officers’ khakis and trying to look unconcerned.

  Murdock decided to get Sterling out of Razor’s hair. “Jaybird, come here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jaybird took the seat next to Murdock.

  “The CIA gave me some word I want to pass along,” said Murdock. “That woman in the villa in Port Sudan. She was wanted by the French. It seems that she went around Paris planting bombs. Used her kid for cover.”

  Jaybird’s expression didn’t change. “Thanks, sir,” he said. “But you know, even if she was just an Avon lady out showing her samples, I would have had to pop her anyway. We couldn’t take her along, and we couldn’t let her go. The politicians can make up all the rules they want, but we have to deal with the real world.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Just as well it’s all secret, ‘cause nobody else but us would understand.”

  Murdock was going to get out of the Navy if SEALs ever ceased to amaze him. He had no expectation of that ever happening.

  There was a knock at the door, and a White Shirt Landing Signalman Enlisted appeared in his safety vest, hard hat, and earmuffs. The shirt color indicated that he was one of those responsible for safety on the flight deck. “Ready, gentlemen,” he said.

  The first eight threw on their gear, while the rest helped out and gave them a last word of encouragement.

  Murdock grabbed Miguel Fernandez. “Stay close to the CIA guys. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “I’ll be there, sir,” Fernandez promised.

  Murdock shook hands with Stroh and Kohler. They wished him good luck.

  The SEALs followed the White Shirt down a passageway lit by red night-light. They went out the hatch and the flight deck was as dark as a cave, with only the silhouettes of the chained-down aircraft visible against the lighter horizon. The SEALs all put on their night-vision goggles, and the deck became a secret party that only the elect could see.

  The flight deck was bathed in the glow of infrared lighting compatible with night-vision goggles. Four big two-rotor Chinook helicopters were waiting on the edge of the deck, turbine engines screaming. A fifth sat motionless on one of the elevators in case any of the four went down. Thermal strips on the end of each rotor blade made a solid circle of light as they turned. Other discreet strips on the fuselages were the only anticollision precautions. There wasn’t a light showing in any of the aircraft. The flight deck crew were using infrared chemical light sticks instead of their usual illuminated wands to pass signals across the deck.

  The weather report had indicated a low-pressure area over Lebanon; a light drizzle was falling and the cloud cover was very low. A bigger storm was on the way, maybe a thunderstorm. From a SEAL’s perspective the weather was perfect, but Murdock had to defer to the helicopter pilots. They were willing. There would be few if any other aircraft flying, and the ground antiaircraft defenses would be accordingly relaxed. Unlike other aircraft, helicopters did not as a rule fly in non-visual flight conditions. The 160th’s helicopters were among the few in the world capable of doing just that, and would be entirely on instruments. Forward-looking infrared could see through cloud and rain to a certain extent, but night-vision goggles couldn’t.

  The SEALs split up and followed individual white shirts to their designated aircraft. Murdock and Roselli headed for the first bird, with a Shorlands armored car inside.

  Jaybird and Doc went to the second, which carried a Mercedes limo. Magic and Higgins went to the third, with the second limo. DeWitt and Kosciuszko went to the final Chinook, with the second armored car.

  As they approached the helicopter, Murdock and Razor passed through a shroud of hot exhaust air that smelled like burned kerosene. They climbed in the side door just behind the cockpit. The helicopter crewman looked like a huge insect with the twin tubes of his ANVIS-6 night-vision goggles protruding from his helmet. He secured the hatch and went down to his gunner’s window. He and his partner on the other side would be leaning out all during takeoff, giving the pilot helpful directions about any obstacles that might get in the way of the aircraft.

  The Shorlands armored car was chained to the floor. It had been backed in so it was pointed right at the rear ramp hatch for a quick drive-off.

  Murdock and Roselli strapped themselves into two jump seats on opposite sides of the fuselage near the front of the aircraft. They each had a headset plugged into the helicopter intercom system.

  Murdock checked his watch. The second hand ticked over and, exactly on time, the cyclic pitch of the rotors increased, the fuselage shook, and they took off. The Chinook lifted straight up about twenty feet, then lurched to the left to clear the flight deck. Once they were out over water the bird picked up more height and speed.

  Murdock sat back and accustomed himself to the peculiar feeling of going forward, up and down, and side to side all at the same time that made helicopter travel so interesting.

  They made landfall, crossing a sparsely populated section of the Lebanese coast between Byblos and Jounie. Murdock looked out the window over his shoulder and saw only a blank wall of green through his goggles. He could almost hear the treetops scraping on the bottom of the helicopter. He and Razor took off their life preservers, since instead of crashing into the water and flipping over and sinking, now the only danger was the helicopter hitting the ground and exploding into an enormous fireball.

  A short while later the helicopter pitched upward as the terrain-following radar led it up the slope of the Mount Lebanon range.

  As they gained altitude, the turbulence rattled the Chinook around. They hit an air pocket, and the helicopter dropped like a rock. Murdock automatically put his head between his legs in the crash position. Then they were flying again, and Murdock straightened up to see Razor Roselli grinning maniacally at him. Through the goggles he could make out Razor carefully mouthing the words, “Kissing your ass good-bye?”

  The cockpit chatter through Murdock’s headset became busier. An E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft from the carrier was providing regular reports on all the air traffic in the area, which aside from an occasional passenger jet and an F-15 combat air patrol over northern Israel, was nonexistent. The helicopters were just listening, and would not break radio silence even to talk to each other except in an emergency. They were also carefully monitoring their radar-warning receivers for any indications of hostile sets. The receivers gave off a tone when any radar energy hit the aircraft. There was just a regular chirp in their headsets as the AWACS radar swept over, but they were going so low and so slow it was doubtful that even the E-2 with digital signal processing could get a return off them.

  They rattled between the peaks of the mountain range, and then lurched down the slope toward the Bekaa Valley.

  The main highway of Lebanon led from Beirut on the coast over the mountains to Damascus, Syria. But a branch of that headed north along the entire Bekaa Valley, to Homs in northern Syria. That highway went right past Baalbek, and Murdock wanted to get on it south of the city.

  Dirt roads led from the villages along the slope down onto the valley highway. The helicopters were going to land al
ongside one where there was enough room to set down and they would be out of earshot of the nearest village, a little place called Majdaloun, population 610.

  “Five minutes,” the pilot said over the intercom.

  “Roger,” said Murdock.

  Razor Roselli unstrapped himself from his seat and carefully made his way to the armored car. He inched through the narrow gap between the vehicle and the fuselage, and squeezed into the right-hand driver’s door.

  Murdock went all the way down to the rear ramp of the helicopter. When they landed he’d walk around and check the ground, take a little look around, then guide Razor out. He braced himself next to the crew chief stationed at the ramp, and plugged his headset into the intercom jack.

  He could hear the strain in the pilots’ voices as they headed down. The copilot was watching the ground through the forward-looking infrared. The FLIR was mounted on a chin turret in the front of the helicopter. The copilot could swivel it around, and the image was projected on a cockpit panel display. He was giving directions to the pilot, who was flying the helicopter. The pilot couldn’t see a thing outside, so he kept his eyes locked on the instruments. “Trees on the right, we’re drifting right.”

  “Roger.”

  “Fifty feet.”

  “Come back a bit, we’ve got a boulder right in front of us.”

  “Roger.”

  Murdock glanced at the crew chief. The man was trying to look nonchalant, and not succeeding. Murdock cocked his AKM and kept the barrel pointed at the floor. A helicopter’s vitals were all above the fuselage, and it would be professionally embarrassing to accidentally shoot a hole in them.

  “Okay, you’re on.”

  “Twenty feet.”

  “Hold it steady.”

  The Chinook came to ground at a slight tilt, and then leveled off as all the wheels touched down.

  The crew chief dropped the ramp. Murdock took off his headset and charged out into a cold rainy Lebanese night.