Breaux's team might have been conducting training exercises in the hills, but its true purpose was to carry out a strategic reconnaissance of the area. It was believed by the CIA that borderlands of the Elburz were being used as a secret conduit for weapons and embargoed weapons-manufacturing materials.
The Soviets were ferrying in the stuff in a very risky manner. The Eagle Patchers' job was to take advantage of the opportunity to fuck them up.
Rempt inhaled deeply. Taking the last drag on the Russian nonfilter cigaret for all it was worth, he flicked the butt into the stiff wind blowing off the nearby ridge line. The spook, actually a covert operations contractor to the Defense Department and CIA whose actions could be denied if deniability happened to be deemed prudent, exhaled the thick gray smoke through his nostrils and spat onto the dusty ground. He turned to Breaux.
"Let's go, partner," he said.
Breaux stared at Rempt. He did not like the spook (neither did any of the men, who called him "REMF" — rear-echelon motherfucker — as often to his face as behind his back) and trust was a term that had no meaning with respect to any intelligence personnel Breaux had ever encountered. Rempt was the CIA liaison with indigenous forces in the region.
A career Arabist, Rempt had been shuttling around across the length and breadth of the Middle East for nearly three decades, much as Kim Philby had done in a previous era. Virtually all belonging to Rempt's type had a Lawrence of Arabia complex, and Rempt was no exception.
He spoke all the major languages and dialects of the region fairly fluently. When in the field, Rempt sported a kaffiyah and burnoose and carried a short-barelled AKS autorifle slung over his shoulder and a dagger in his belt.
Breaux nodded his assent but said nothing else. He was ready. The small group of Kurdish rebels — the Peshmerga or "Fellows in Arms" — and Eagle Patcher commandos occupied four-wheel drive vehicles, quads including tactical Rhinos and DPVs, that though battered were as able along the rutted narrow mountain roads as were pack mules. The reconnaissance team would be led by Rempt who would also act as translator and mission coordinator.
Breaux had no intention of letting the spooks "coordinate" his mission beyond a certain point, however, and he knew full-well that in the field, Rempt's claim was tenuous. In the first place, General Patient K., SFOD-O's commander, would see to it that the Chief of the Army spoke the necessary benedictions to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
In the second place, if Rempt started getting too bossy, Breaux would simply frag the fucker. He would then report the unfortunate demise of Beltway defense contractor and rent-a-field-agent Rempt in an enemy ambush. It would then be with Breaux like it had been with Major Strasser in the film Casablanca — a question of whether Rempt had either "hung himself" or was "shot trying to escape."
The windswept ridge was chosen as the ideal surveillance point for the main force element. The rest of the detachment was strung out along the ridge line on a roughly two-mile front. The 4WD vehicles had been parked in natural hiding places and covered with camouflage netting, sand and rocky debris to shield them from aerial surveillance.
The hide sites would not have to hold up to scrutiny for very long. The mission would last little more than a few hours. It would be the waiting against darkness and cold, fighting off fatigue in the monotony of these desolate hills, until the moment to act arrived, that would be the hardest part.
They would have to be fully alert then, for those few minutes. After that the opportunity window would shut tight and what they had come to do might be impossible the next time around. The shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles ported by the combined teams were for defensive purposes, and only to be used as a last resort. This was a recon mission, not an assault.
Far away from that lonely, desolate hill country in the Elburz, a Soviet adviser named Major Lavrenti Ogarkov scanned another distant horizon as he smoked a French Sobranie cigaret, which he preferred to native Russian brands. He then looked toward his men, who he had permitted to fall out around the nearby circle of two-and-a-half ton trucks near the desolate landing strip.
The Spetsnaz troops were well-trained and expertly drilled. Even at ease, they looked precisely like what they were — soldiers, and superb ones too. Curse the mudozhovaniki, the shit-mouths, back at headquarters for wasting such soldiers as mere truck-loaders, Ogarkov thought.
The Spetsnaz commander idly consulted his wristwatch. Time yet. Plenty of time to go until the expected cargo plane arrived. Again, he turned his attention to the desert barrens surrounding him.
The sere wasteland looked out across the Syrian Desert and into Saudi Arabia. Beyond was Jordan, then Israel and the Med. In time, war would break out here, and the newly reborn Soviet Union would be in it for keeps.
The major continued to smoke. There was an iron logic to it all, but moreover, an iron inevitability. Ogarkov waited and watched, imagining a string of Soviet victories from the Persian Gulf clear to the Med, and the glory to be won in the coming fight.
At a little past 0400 hours they came. The stillness of the desert and hills had been broken only by the keening of the wind and the distant baying of jackals, wolves and other night predators. Now another sound began to creep into the night.
A man-made sound.
The sound began as a low rumble originating at a point far to the northeast. Soon it began to swell and surge. There was no mistake. The planes were coming.
Not that there had been doubt from the first. The team was not relying merely on its eyes and ears to sense the approach of its quarry. An array of compact battlefield computing and electronics equipment handled that part of the job.
High overhead, invisible to the naked eye, parked in geosynchronous low earth orbits, a three-platform array (or constellation as the techs at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, from which they'd been launched, referred to them) of TACSAT ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) photoimaging micro-satellites run jointly by the Pentagon and CIA, kept their sensor arrays trained on a swath of territory on the earth below.
Equipped with the ARTEMIS hyperspectral imaging spectrosocopy payload, TACSAT was capable of delivering on-demand, real-time space-based tactical surveillance imaging and intel for the warfighter. Streaming multspectral data from the TACTSAT array was immediately available to the team's mobile command center on the ground and, via encrypted over-the-horizon crosslink to mission-dedicated MILSATCOM space network platforms.
Breaux had been scoping the aerial ballet of planes navigating the treacherous airspace of the Bottleneck for some time via his combat ruggedized MIL-STD-810F and IP65-compliant BattleTRAC tablet PC linked to Omega's mobile battlefield workstation network, observing the well-coordinated aerial circus act by which the Russians were facilitating their convoy over hostile airspace.
On the Washington Beltway, they called it "flying the Elburz Bottleneck," the most direct route from the large military transshipment entrepot at Kharkov, New Soviet Ukraine, about three hundred miles northeast of Moscow, to various offloading points in Iran.
Direct yes, but only in terms of it being the shortest distance between two points. In every other respect, the route was extremely risky, requiring an overflight of approximately eight miles of Iran-Iraq borderland in the Elburz mountain chain — the so-called Bottleneck.