Still, the crews had their orders. They were not to turn back unless the weather made further flight impossible. Since this was not the case, the flight leader continued on toward the target. As the gun ships reached their objective, the crews turned on their recording equipment, including gun cameras, and prepared to strike.
The sandstorm that the Nightstalker gun ship sortie had pushed through also began to abate as the strike mission neared its final target initial points. Within minutes the night sky was clear again, and the terrorist encampment visible on their infrared head-up displays.
Now about a half-mile slant-range of the target, the encampment appeared almost identical to the scale models placed on sand tables that had been used to plan the mission. The primitive stone and mud-brick yurts were scattered here and there across a main compound, with several others on ledges of the adjoining mountain peaks.
Vehicles of various types, including some Land Rovers outfitted with TOW missiles, heavy machineguns and twenty-millimeter coaxial cannons, were also in evidence, most of them concealed under camouflage netting.
Apart from this, and a lone sentry spotted smoking a cigaret on a lonely, windswept hillside, there was no evidence of activity at the terrorist encampment at three hundred thirty five hours. The terrorists would all be asleep inside the buildings, except for the sentry, and he didn't count in the overall picture.
The Nightstalker flight leader had seen enough to convince him that the mission would go down without a hitch. He flashed the thumbs-up to his copilot and signaled two clicks over the comms net to alert the other members of the sortie that they were to move into their pre-planned attack vectors.
Now the helos split up and commenced the assault, the lead chopper acquiring the large central building that he was told would house an especially dangerous terrorist element. The death dot moved to the center of the crosshairs and the gun ship pilot triggered a salvo of missiles that came off the sides of the chopper in two flashing bursts. White smoke contrails snaked downwards, following the warheads to the points of impact.
The building went up in a ball of flame, and the pilot came off the vector, slewing the gun ship out of the rising toadstool of flame and destruction that belched up into the night.
Somewhere inside that pillar of fire were the vaporized remains of the approximately twenty to twenty-five terrorists who had been asleep in that no-longer-existent barracks building. The thought sobered the pilot, but only for a second. His most important thought was that he had scored a good kill, and that's what he'd been paid to do. The hazardous duty bonus he'd receive wouldn't hurt either.
He was also paid to die, which is what happened before his heart finished its next contraction as a TOW missile streaked in the helo's direction. The TOW had come up off one of the parked, camouflage-netted and apparently unmanned trucks scattered throughout the encampment.
Not having taken these out first was a tactical blunder, albeit an explainable one. After all, the vehicles were thermally neutral, showing no evidence of hot spots associated with warm engines, or even human operators.
The flight leader would be able to explain the error, but only in the afterlife, if there was one, because in the blink of an eye, the TOW's shaped-charge, proximity-fuzed warhead exploded amidships, vaporizing the helo into a million flaming fragments.
The flight leader and copilot were broiled in their seats even as they reached for the ejection levers. They should have thought about what might be concealed underneath those parked vehicles.
Warm bodies against the cold sand, thermally insulated from above, thermally neutral to slant-range TI detection.
Now, man-portable and vehicle-mounted anti-air was coming up at the gun ship sortie from every direction. Ass-kicker details had been placed throughout the compound in positions of maximum surprise and tactical advantage if met by an opposing force.
There had been no "terrorists" in the buildings, only empty bunks. Breaux had deployed his combat personnel and some of the hill tribesmen he could halfway trust throughout the encampment. He had smelled a stink brewing on the wind, and he had not been mistaken.
As salvos of deadly fire were traded and the ground shook under the impact of crashing flying machines and thundering missile strikes, Breaux thought back to the events of the past several hours.
A fierce shamal had closed in, subjecting the mountains to a mixture of wind-blasted sand and pounding hail that had gone on for hours.
During that time atmospherics had played hob with radio and SATCOM communications, but more than that was going on within the encampment. It started to become evident that under cover of the storm much of the insurgent force was moving off into the mountains, taking advantage of the storm's cover to hide their departure.
Breaux was about to go off in search of Rempt for an explanation when "Doc" Jeckyll, Omega's comms officer and chief technical, flagged him down. Jeckyll had gotten a momentary patch into surveillance satellite downlink. He had seen what had appeared to be a helo force approaching from the northwest. What's more, he didn't think it was only atmospherics that had ruined transmission. Jeckyll told Breaux that he thought they were being deliberately jammed.
Sensing an impending attack, Breaux issued immediate orders to the SFOD-O detachment. His forces were to grab their socks, drop their cocks and prepare to move out, overland if necessary.
Breaux explained that the extraction helos might not be coming and that they could be faced with a situation that called for SERE (search, evasion, reconnaissance and escape) procedures. But first he deployed the force in anticipation of a heliborne strike. It materialized quickly, but SFOD-O was ready to confront it and prevail using ground-to-air weapons.
Returning to the present, Breaux watched another unmarked black gun ship explode in the air and burst apart into a cascade of showering fragments. The team had done its work well. The sky was now clear of unfriendly air assets.
Breaux issued instructions for the team to mount up and move the hell out. Breaux would follow once he had gotten the skinny on one final matter.
As he suspected, Rempt's living quarters had been completely destroyed. The spook's yurt was a heap of smoldering wreckage. And in the midst of that wreckage, there were the charred remains of a man wearing the hill tribesman's attire that Rempt had affected.
The only thing was, Breaux was sure it wasn't Rempt. For one thing, the corpse had a broken nose. Right where Breaux had bashed it in with the steel toe of his combat boot two days before. Rempt had taken a powder. Breaux would bet his life on it.
Chapter Twelve
Detachment Omega rolled, walked and bitched on into the mountains, eventually crossing from Turkey into the Kurd country of Anatolia. The traversal of national borders was marked only by cursor position and numerical readouts on GPS displays.
There were no mile markers in these desolate borderlands, and no natural terrain features to mark the boundary lines. Just the arid hill country, the treacherous switchback road and the limpid blue stretched tight above them like a pastel plastic lid. Though Turkey was a NATO member, Breaux chose to avoid withdrawing the team through it for several reasons.
One, the covert kill-strike had come from the direction of Incirlik, and Breaux well knew that the southeastern corner of Turkey had been a spook haven since the earliest days of the Cold War.
Two, Breaux had suspected there might be trouble brewing ever since the clandestine operations in the Elburz Bottleneck.
He well knew the pattern of cold-blooded deception followed by spasmodic violence that could develop when black ops planning cells buried deep in the CIA's Directorate of Operations ran the show. The techniques had been developed and refined during the Reagan era in the midst of counter-Soviet operations in neighboring Afghanistan. Breaux knew them well, having served as a military adviser in low-intensity warfare and special weaponry to the Jamat-I–Islami Mujahideen faction in mountain enclaves near Spin Gar Bor, and he also knew the way the "black minds" in those cells at Langley thought — then, and now.