Risky but still attractive. All other routes into Iran were indirect sea routes requiring weeks to negotiate by freighter and subject to seizure by multinational carrier task force groups operating in the Arabian Sea and Horn of Africa region. The Russians had been tempted by the ease and speed promised by daring the Bottleneck. They had decided to take their chances.
One thing that had encouraged the Russians was a six-mile gap in Iranian ground surveillance radar that their ferret aircraft had pinpointed during reconnaissance missions to study the feasibility of a military airlift into Iran. The Chinese-made End Tray and Ball Point radars — early warning systems optimized for tracking short-range ballistic targets such as missiles and low-trajectory aircraft — that the neighboring Iraqis used were fixed stations that overlapped fairly well across most of the border, affording reliable coverage. Here they didn't.
With the aid of Tupelov TU-98W Bearwolf electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft to confuse Iraqi radars farther north and south, and able pilots for the big Antonov AN-74 all-weather variant "Coaler" transports that were used to ferry in the loads, the plan was deemed workable. To provide further insurance, the Antonovs used regularly scheduled commercial Aeroflot shuttle flights between Moscow and Tehran as additional cover against radar detection.
The military planes would coincide their takeoffs with an early morning Aeroflot commercial run, flying close against the commercial jetliner across Black Sea border regions. Once inside Turkish airspace, however, the Antonovs would break free and continue on to their destinations. For added security, transponders identified the rogue military planes as commercial cargo aircraft, conforming to bogus flight plans.
The Russians had worked on the technique ever since the Americans had used something similar to it against them during the Reagan years, timing military surveillance overflights of Soviet North Pacific bases with scheduled passenger flights between Anchorage, Alaska and Seoul, Korea.
This particular run tonight followed the usual pattern. A few miles shy of the Iranian border, over southern Azerbaijan, the Antonov Coaler heavy-lifter slipped into the flight path of Aeroflot flight 889 out of Moscow and bound for Baghdad's Richard Cheney Memorial International Airport. Farther to the southwest, a TU-22PZ "Stripper" electronic countermeasures (ECM) aircraft waited to conduct covert electronic warfare operations against the Iraqi early warning radar fence.
As the two planes approached the border, the TU-22PZ turned on its active jamming. The Aeroflot flight slipped through the Iraqi radar screen, with its military shadow plane undetected. The TU-22PZ monitored the passage for awhile, keeping the corridor open for other Soviet air assets, then lumbered off to its base in Kharkov, its work done. As had been the case on the several other shuttle overflights, the Antonov then disengaged from beneath the Aeroflot passenger aircraft once it had passed the border.
The Antonov could now navigate on its own without great risk of detection, for here the mountains turned into a maze of great rifts bordered by steep, craggy massifs. Many of these high mountain passes were large enough for even an Antonov transport to navigate safely — if the pilot was alert, and skillful, and had luck on his side.
The Soviet air force had no difficulty finding pilots eager to accept the challenge, especially since the trip, though hazardous, was relatively short. The rift valleys only amounted to under fifteen minutes of total flight time. Once out of the maze, it was straight and easy going across the flat, unbroken reaches of the forbidding Iraqi desert. The way home was a safe, though longer route west, then north — the hazards existed on the inbound flight only.
So it was with this air resupply mission. Albeit with one important exception that the Russians did not know anything about.
Breaux knew all about it, though. And it had been what he had come to this desolate and forbidding mountain country to witness.
In only a few minutes Breaux and Rempt, who stood with their eyes alternately scanning the skies and fixed on the central flat panel screen of a tri-screen portable battlefield computer, would be certain whether the prize was within their reach or not.
The minutes ticked off. The computer screen remained blank; the digital portal to another world stayed dark, empty. Breaux again turned his gaze to the skies. He no longer needed the light-amplifying gear to detect the arriving aircraft.
Though flying without lights, the Antonov was cruising less than twenty feet below the tops of the ridges flanking the high rift valley within which the surveillance team had taken shelter. There was enough ambient light to see the airframe limned darkly against the flanks of the towering bluffs.
Breaux admired the skill of the Russian pilot. It was an impressive feat of precision flying. He would have liked to watch the planes just soar through the chasm like an immense pterodactyl, but the tactical computer's screen had come to life, and something more important had appeared, riveting his attention.
On the screen, the interior of the same Antonov that was now passing overhead was limned in shades of green and black. A procession of faces belonging to the contingent of soldiers onboard the aircraft seemed to move relative to the motion of the hidden camera onboard. Rempt was nodding his head.
"Beautiful," he muttered. "Fucking beautiful."
Breaux watched his face, transfixed with a perverse fascination.
"Absolutely fucking beautiful."
Rempt sickened him, especially since Breaux knew the source of the spook's glee. Onboard the Antonov was a surgically altered human, a cyborg. The man's name was Yevgeny Karlovich, and he had been forced to undergo a risky operation to graft sensing equipment onto his optic nerves.
Karlovich had been compromised in a monkey trap set by the CIA in Moscow and given a choice between a life sentence at the notorious Lefortovo prison or submission to the surgical procedure.
The nuclear physicist had developed a sex and drug habit that had been used to compromise him by field assets in Moscow. Nanotechnology had created a microminiature low-light camera and transmitter that could run by electrical impulses generated by the mitochondria of the nerve cells. It had been implanted in Karlovich's skull in the cavity called the stylo-mastoid foramen directly behind the eyes.
From that moment on Karlovich became the CIA's walking camera lens. He had been used extensively, and this was to be his final mission before deactivation. Karlovich had been promised asylum in Arizona and enough money to start his own insurance business under a new identity.
Far below, Breaux continued to watch, nauseated as much by this surgically altered monstrosity passing overhead, as by the unholy glee that Rempt exuded from every pore as he drank it in. Karlovich was following orders, feigning airsickness in order to be permitted to wander along the cabin for a while, transmitting back imagery of the plane's cargo in the process.
Now the physicist had reached the main cargo section. Clearly visible on pallets were tubular components in protective wooden casings, lashed down securely with tie-downs to bolts on the aircraft's deck. There were large military transport cases as well, many of these bearing the universal warning symbol for radioactive materials.
"Shit, look at that," Rempt declared. "There's no doubt about what the Sovs are flying in now. No doubt."
The downlink of imagery continued as the airframe transited the Elburz. But the transmission was brief. The plane soon navigated the rift valley and vanished into the night across the border into Iran. Moments later the silence of the night again descended across the isolated mountain barrens on the edge of nowhere.
"Let's —"
Rempt stopped in mid-sentence.
Something else was coming, something that hadn't been anticipated. Rempt quickly punched keys at the console of the mobile command station and let out a whistle. Breaux saw it there too, moments before they arrived — Mi-24 Hinds, two of them. Both mammoth gunship helicopters were heavily armed with rockets and automatic cannons.