Here, late in the last century, two Marine Corps Sea Stallion helicopters crashed together on dust-off after the abortive attempt to free the American hostages from the US embassy in Tehran was abruptly canceled.
The NSA had then utilized the "Rice Bowl Scenario" to good effect in order to protect secret assets that an extraction of US personnel would have compromised. The embassy hostages were never intended to be freed — the NSA had projected that the mission would end in embarrassing failure, seriously undermining the incoming Reagan administration's foreign policy effectiveness.
It therefore had to be stopped. Cold.
On this night, decades later, the scenario would be used again in the service of other clandestine operational ends.
As the scenario played itself out, the two Soviet helicraft pitched wildly toward one another, moving so quickly that the action was almost missed in the midair explosion and blossoming fireball that immediately followed the collision.
The bluffs flashed with intense, hellish light, as sparking from the collision ignited fuel lines, and even the protective circuits in the advanced false-color aperture GEN-IV night vision devices used by the strike force did not totally protect the hidden watchers from the blinding glare of NVG bloom-out effect.
A split-second behind the detonation flashes, the blast wave followed, booming and echoing back and forth across the walls of the steep chasm like peals of unearthly thunder.
As the fireball continued to burn in midair, spinning, whirling chunks of pulverized, vaporized wreckage cascaded downward to the flat of the valley floor, there to join the debris field of smoldering fragments of the destroyed Antonov in a memorial to covert death.
Soon the last of the echoes of man-made thunder died away, leaving only the crackling and popping of the flames burning in the ash-filled cauldron of the arid valley. The hidden watchers were silent for a moment, and then, emerging from concealed crevices amidst the south wall of the bluffs, there arose a chorus of hoarse cheers from the throats of the hill tribesmen.
As the mostazafin shouted, they aimed their Kalashnikovs at the stars and fired off bursts of automatic fire into the air.
Breaux felt a crawling repugnance. The tribesmen had nothing to celebrate. They had played no part in the drama. They had risked nothing, done nothing, been nothing to the mission. His only desire now was to get the hell out of this place, and as soon as possible.
Breaux gave the order for the teams to pack up their gear and move back to their staging area where an Omega security detail was keeping an eye on the perimeter. Rempt was already overseeing a team of Peshmerga who were packing his specialized spook gear into the same MIL-SPEC-hardened carrying cases in which it had been carried into the mountains.
The teams now began to file from their hiding places and march toward the staging area. Here, the vehicles that had formed the team's transport convoy were taken from the two large desert wadis in which they had been parked and kept well-concealed under roving guard patrols throughout the duration of the operation in the hills high above the desert.
Because of the strong probability of Iranian intervention, the convoy would split up and take pre-planned routes toward the cross-border regions, across which they would dart to the mission's hideouts inside Turkey.
Before moving out, however, Breaux ordered a mobile scout platoon to strike out a mile ahead of the main motorized force and act as an advance warning detail. If Breaux's pickets saw evidence of enemy movement across the line of advance, they were to report back to Breaux immediately and new plans would be made.
Breaux issued final orders, gave the scout platoon a head start, and then signaled the convoy to get rolling. Lights out, the vehicles pushed out across the desert, into the moonless blackness of the night.
Chapter Ten
In fact, the covert action in the Elburz mountains had not gone unnoticed by the Iranians. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if it hadn't been detected by Pasdaran mobile ground forces, or even by civilian outposts in the desolate borderlands.
To the covert planners, the noise and flash of the explosions had posed a calculated risk. The risk had been reduced by the apparently accidental detonation of an oil well at the nearby petroleum fields of Siphan Dagi, in southeastern Turkey, at approximately the same time as the destruction of Soviet airframes was taking place in the Elburz tablelands. But the risk couldn't be removed entirely.
Still, the deception had worked, and it had worked effectively. The mysterious detonations that preceded the ignition of the well (its source would never be conclusively determined) sending immense contrails of flame and smoke geysering high into the atmosphere were heard hundreds of miles away, across the vast Iranian salt desert in the key military outposts at the provincial capital, Tabriz. The oil explosions had masked the triple aircraft kills so well that nothing about the true action in the Elburz was suspected by indigenous forces.
Consequently, no tripwire military response had been mobilized to investigate the strange thunder and lightning in the mountains. Mobile troops were occupied elsewhere, conducting normal night operations. Instead, the mission was compromised by pure chance.
A lone Iranian motorized patrol making its way across the desert simply happened to see a remote series of flashes from a direction other than that of the blasts at Siphan Dagi.
Had the patrol not been in its precise position on the desert at that precise moment in time, it might have missed the flashes, but it was and so it hadn't.
"We've just observed evidence of an attack," the patrol leader had radioed to base.
"No, you are mistaken," he'd been informed. "A major oil well fire is burning across the border in Turkey. This is certainly what you have seen."
"Impossible," the patrol leader replied. "What I saw came from an entirely different direction — in the Elburz."
"You mean what you think you saw." The voice of the base commander fell silent a moment while he thought things over. "Is there continued activity?"
"No. Nothing more."
"Then resume patrol."
"Sir, I — "
"You have your orders, captain. Obey them."
And the Iranian captain did as ordered. Except not quite in the way he had been instructed by his superior officer. He knew old Manoucheher as a drunken slob who buggered sheep in his drunken off-hours, at least so went the rumor. He also knew that he had seen what he had seen and heard what he had heard, and fuck Manoucheher on a camel's ass.
The captain knew the desert landscape quite well, having conducted many an exercise and patrol by day and by night across an area encompassing hundreds of square miles.
He was aware that the most passable routes away from the Elburz ran roughly east-west and were not far from his current position. Further, in this part of the Iranian desert, motorized travel for any distance needed to keep to the road, further limiting the search area.
He would deviate his patrol just far enough to avoid charges of dereliction of duty, yet neatly circumvent the major's orders. With any luck, he would come upon something of interest. Something that might lead to the action he had so long craved.
"Boss, company's comin'."
Cherokee, which was Lt. Frisky's scout patrol, had just reported in. Cherokee had been conducting its flank security operations about twenty miles ahead and to the southwest of the main force element, staying off the road and stopping periodically to reconnoiter.