"Am ID'ing an Iranian Pasdaran scout patrol, probably out on night ops. We're laying low and watching them roll by on the road. Wait one."
There was dead air as Lt. Frisky paused to check the image on his thermal scope against what he could see with unaided night vision.
"Enemy force strength is about forty troops. These guys are in two BTR-70s with a GAZ heavy scout vehicle up front. Be advised they're heading directly towards you."
Breaux didn't like what he'd heard. He figured that the explosions in the mountains had been noticed despite diversionary precautions. Still, this had been a possibility all along.
"Can you take them out?"
"Negative," Lt. Frisky answered right off. "We could try but I'd prefer not to go up against those BTRs with the two rocket launchers we have available."
Breaux acknowledged and issued orders. An ambush would be set up. It would be a kill basket with Lt. Frisky's patrol closing any rear exit. The main force element would take up positions at either side of the road — Breaux had kept his eyes open for good ambush sites along the route out of long habit — and had noticed a likely spot only a few hundred yards back.
Within a matter of minutes, the force had moved skillfully and silently to position its vehicles off and away from the desert road while men armed with small arms and rocket launchers, including the heavy Dragon and smaller caliber SRAW Predator, took up positions on either side.
The ground here sloped down from the road, which had been laid right across part of a large wadi. In bulldozing the road, the builders had simply built up an embankment for the asphalt surfacing. The earthworks sloped away into the hollow of the wadi on both sides.
Men armed with rocket launchers and automatic weapons could effectively position themselves to bring intersecting fields of enfilading fire and high explosive strikes down on a target in between without much threat to their own safety, since the fire lanes would be directed upward on the diagonal.
Once the ambush teams were in position, Breaux waited and watched, ready to issue the order to commence firing on the enemy troops. SFOD-O had to strike fast and score clean kills. It was imperative that they prevent the Iranians from reporting the contact via radio.
An unfriendly patrol was one thing, but Breaux's force would not survive direct engagement with a brigade-strength detachment, and such is what the Iranians would send out to comb the desert if an alert came in. It would include helos, APCs and a lot of troops.
In the visual field of the binocular night vision scope strapped to his head beneath his Fritz helmet, Breaux saw the unfriendly patrol emerge onto his event horizon.
"Safe fire until I signal," he reminded his unit commanders, whispering into his lipmike.
The enemy scout patrol continued to roll closer to the narrow end of the killbox. Breaux's right hand tightened on the trigger grip of his Predator anti-armor missile launcher and his pulse quickened. The moment to attack was drawing near.
But then, suddenly, the tactical picture changed.
The scout patrol, rolling into the jaws of the waiting trap like a bit of iron drawn irresistibly toward a magnet, stopped without warning. Its commander then stood atop the rear seat of the scout car and raised a pair of night-seeing binoculars to his face.
Holding the light-amplifying field glasses, he moved his upper torso to and fro, sweeping the binocs around in a wide arc. Like a pendulum swinging back, he began to return the binoculars to their starting point. With relief, Breaux watched him begin to lower the field glasses. He had seen nothing…
Breaux's judgment proved premature. In a second, as if to confirm something he had noticed earlier, the young Pasdaran captain again raised the light-amplification binoculars to his eyes and held them there for several long seconds. This time the binoculars were brought down abruptly. This time he had seen something that had convinced him not to move forward another inch.
Breaux watched with mounting alarm as the captain began issuing rapid-fire orders for the troops in the first BTR to emerge from the armored war wagon and fan out along the part of the road that spanned the wadi. Now Omega's commander suspected what the Iranian officer had seen to change his plans so drastically. Like Breaux, he too had noticed that the sides of the road were ideally sited for an ambush point and had decided to deploy a squad of crunchies to reconnoiter before the patrol continued along the road.
Breaux's mind whirled like the hard drive of a computer as he mentally processed options to deal with the emerging FUBAR situation. He selected the only workable option from his mental checklist and prepared to put the plan into action.
"Gusher, Crash. Don't answer. Listen. On my three count get on your feet and fire your rockets at the patrol. Gusher takes the scout car. Crash takes the first BTR. I'll take the second BTR." Breaux paused a beat, and the mental hard drive spun some more.
"All unit commanders, listen up — when you see us fire, give us two seconds to duck back down again, then open up with everything you got."
Breaux began counting down, from three to zero. On the final count, he jumped up, seeing Gusher and Crash do the same from their positions. Sighting the crosspiece of the SRAW's pancake scope on his target, he triggered the forty millimeter rocket projectile, feeling the launcher tube kick like a mule on his shoulder from the recoil of the back-blast, and hearing the whoosh of the rocket's contrail like a steam pipe had just burst next to his right ear.
Time slowed in the familiar way it does in the heat of combat, and Breaux's visual field turned into a kind of tunnel. Down the length of that tunnel he watched the warhead streak toward its target, then impact into the armored hull of the BTR in a devastating blast of flame and concussion that blew molten fragments of steel and fused, flaming debris out from the epicenter of the blast.
As the BTR burned up on the desert, Breaux's mind also registered the second and third impacts that marked Gusher and Crash's rounds hitting their targets. His launcher spent, he ducked down again, and heard the din of battle start up all around him. Picking up his AKMS assault rifle, Breaux joined its stuttering voice to the choir of death, quickly becoming aware that the unit had a pitched battle on its hands.
Troops armed with AK-47s were attacking the ambush teams from all sides, and it fast became obvious to Breaux that the rocket strikes, while incapacitating the mobile armored patrol, had far from destroyed it or stopped its ability to counterattack.
The Iranian vehicles were halted, and many enemy had been killed and seriously wounded in the surprise strike, but others were still alive and the unfriendlies had at least one big gun still operational.
Breaux's force was now taking casualties as Iranian regulars, clad in olive-drab fatigues, began to engage them on the ground. The ambush had turned into nasty close-quarter fighting in many places, with men trading automatic fire and throwing grenades at close range.
In some cases, the fighting got even closer than that. As ammo clips were bled dry in the heat of combat, the opposing forces resorted to hand-to-hand fighting and bayonet attacks. Breaux found himself engaged in one such confrontation as a big Iranian sergeant suddenly jumped over the roadbed and launched a deft martial arts front-kick at his AKMS as he was about to reload. The bullpup rifle flew from his hands and fell with a clatter in the darkness somewhere off to his left.
The sergeant immediately went into a defensive stance as Breaux drew the long, serrated knife scabbarded at his belt. The sergeant scoffed at this and said something in Iranian, gesturing contemptuously at Breaux to advance and try his luck with the knife.
Breaux continued to circle warily. As a martial arts expert he had pegged the sergeant's movements to the native Iranian martial arts style called Zur Khane.