“I want continuous progress reports on the assault,” the general tells Colonel Farris. He has approved Colonel Zwick’s the two-pronged attack plan: the direct assault to get Special Forces to the elevator shaft and the surprise descent down the mountain to give the Night Stalkers the chance to rappel down the silo walls.
The colonel has the phone to his ear. Putting a hand over the mouthpiece, he says, “Something strange, general. You better take a look.”
A technician punches a button, and the Big Board is filled with an aerial video shot from a helicopter. A spotlight illuminates a raging torrent of water surging down the mountain.
General Corrigan says, “What the hell is that?”
“We thought the bastards had blown the dam, but it seems one of our men opened the sluice gates,” Colonel Farris says.
“One of our men!”
“Well, not exactly, sir. That Air Force E-5, the maintenance man. He’s stranded Delta on top the mountain, and the water’s headed toward the silo.”
The general grinds his teeth. In his younger days, as a fighter pilot, he wore a plastic mouthpiece at night sleep to keep from crushing his molars into dust while he slept. “What the hell was he thinking?”
“Thinking? He’s just a sergeant.”
Professor Morton sits nearby in his wheelchair, listening. He coughs out a laugh and says, “Your erstwhile sergeant thought he could stop my missile with a squirt gun.”
The men and machines of Base Camp Alpha are massed on the perimeter. Wooden ammunition crates have been cracked open and emptied. For the tenth time, men check their weapons, clicking magazines into place again and again. Faces and hands are covered with camouflage grease. Engines rev on the great pieces of mobile armor, fouling the early morning air with diesel fumes.
Standing in the command tent, Colonel Zwick yells into his radio transmitter to Captain Clancy, still stranded atop the mountain. “Jackal, I’m sorry, but you’re on your own. We gotta kickoff without you.”
The battle begins with two gunshots.
Two expert Army marksmen — snipers by any other name — each with a night-scoped spotter and M24 rifle are ensconced in a camouflaged bunker dug into a raised bluff. They are two hundred meters in front of the base camp perimeter, nine hundred meters from the missile base sentry post.
Well within range.
In Desert Storm, each had confirmed kills at the magical thousand yard distance. Superbly conditioned in both body and mind, they can kill without their pulse rates topping fifty-five. Keeping it under the speed limit, they call it. Now, at a signal, they fire simultaneously. It takes nearly three seconds for the cra-ack of the rifles to reach the sentry post. By which point, both commando sentries are dead.
A moment later, four Abrams main battle tanks lurch down the gentle slope from base camp, cross a open field, then the access road, and finally tear through the perimeter fence of the missile base. Bradley Fighting Vehicles are close behind, fanning out toward the security building and the barracks. A mounted machine gun rakes the buildings, and commandos return the fire from dug-in positions.
Soldiers swarm through the woods, tearing apart commandos on the way to the elevator housing. The soldiers are well trained and well equipped. Some carry the new lightweight machine guns called SAWs. Others fire grenades from M-203 launchers attached below the barrels of their M-16 battle rifles. Some of the Special Forces platoons — Green Berets and Rangers — also carry Beretta 9 mm. pistols and combat knives. Their ammunition is virtually limitless. Reinforcements are ready if needed. It is not a question of whether the Army will take back the base, but how long it will take and how many — hostages, soldiers, enemy — will die.
The commandos are outnumbered and outgunned, but they gamely fight back, welcoming their own Armageddon. They are not stupid men. There was always an awareness that it would be easier to attack the sleepy missile base than to defend it. They are prepared to die, and that always makes for good fighting men. But still, they are not prepared for the ferocity of the onslaught. How could they be? Their training — mock battles, target practice and obstacle courses — was a fantasy camp for would-be soldiers. The men facing them now are hardened Special Op soldiers plus the armored cavalry, gritty professionals whose job is simply to make other men die.
It is one thing to lie comfortably in the prone shooting position on a range, adjusting the battlesight aperture on the M-16A2, rotating the windage knob just a tad, taking your time, exhaling, then zeroing in on a stationery target. One that doesn’t shoot back. It is quite another thing to have a horde of trained killers swarming at you from three directions, wanting nothing so much as to kill you and all your friends.
During the day and night of occupation of the missile base, the commandos have buried several dozen US MI 14 anti-personnel mines in the woods. They were stolen from the Denver Armory, surplus munitions dating from the 1950’s. Half don’t explode at all. The others explode harmlessly as the tanks crunch over them. Randomly placed “dragon’s teeth,” concrete blocks intended to break the tank’s tracks, slow the huge death machines, but do not stop them. Once past the obstacles, the tanks open up with their 120 mm. main guns, blasting holes in the fortifications constructed by the commandos. With each shell, dirt and debris splatters the men behind the barricades. As Special Op troops advance on foot, Bradley Fighting Vehicles spray the commando position with machine gun fire and occasional bursts from their Bushmaster 25 mm. cannons.
Still, the commandos fight like men possessed. Which, of course, they are. Possessed by the passion of their leader, possessed by a wishful belief in the Apocalypse, possessed by the desire to be more than the faceless nobodies they always have been.
And it all comes true. Just as Brother David said it would. They stand their ground, battle valiantly. They recklessly toss grenades in close quarters, for if you plan to die anyway, it is best to take the enemy with you. Some are decent shots, at least at close range, and they take down the occasional soldier.
And when the end is near, when they are outnumbered and nearly overrun, some charge forward with bayonets mounted, like ancient Biblical warriors. They die glorious deaths. The Hereafter, they know with all their hearts, will be nothing short of eternal bliss.
-52-
Rotate and Hold
Water overflows the spillway and pours down the mountain. Captain Clancy stands on the dam’s observation deck, listening to gunfire from the missile facility below.
Caged.
Crazed.
Missing the fight, the kind of fight he lives for. And would die for.
He stalks back and forth, pounding his fist against the deck’s railing. Knowing his mood, Clancy’s men give him distance. Oblivious, Jack Jericho works his survival knife into the latch of a storage locker at one end of the deck. Clancy stomps toward him.
“You stupid son-of-a-bitch! You horse’s ass worthless scum-sucking, shit-eating son-of-a-bitch.”
Jericho ignores the captain and cracks open the locker.
Which only makes the captain angrier. “Didn’t you know that big cock is cold launched?”
“Yeah, I know. I run the generator that compresses the propulsion gases.”
“Then what did you think? That you could drown the missile?”
Jericho digs a coil of heavy rope and a tool belt out of the shed. He tosses a couple of screwdrivers out of the belt, leaves two wrenches and a gas-powered stud driver in, then fastens the belt around his waist. “I thought I could foul them up, make that lunatic think it was a Biblical flood, Noah or somebody. I don’t know, I just thought I should try to stop them.”