In the Afghan theater both the Soviets, the United States, and the Islamist third-party insurgents were developing the tools and stratagems of twenty-first century small-unit warfare. Afghanistan was the place where West met East and both met Mideast.
While America's attention was directed to Oliver North's actions in Latin America, the new face of subwarfare was showing itself far to the east, in the rugged mountains of this ancient battleground.
Here, both sides perfected the use of exotic weaponry such as Rempt had directed against the Neo-Soviets. Here grand deception and dispassionate manipulation of fighting cells became the first order of battle.
The pattern was familiar. Covert paramilitary teams would conduct clandestine missions. Later, other scalpel forces would be deployed to wipe out those teams so the knowledge of the events they had set in motion would be lost forever.
Compartmentalization would be airtight, but the multiplication of paramilitary cells in the war zone produced results similar to the wildfire spread of cancer cells in the human body. From that spook war in Afghanistan had emerged the Osama bin Ladens and the Hassan Ramad Ali's — the Mahdi and his cohorts in Al Qadr — of the new millennium's terrorist international, turning the United States' own secret warfare tactics against their creator.
Some of those nasty little backchannel combat campaigns begat dire consequences. The attack on the Golden Gate bridge by Ali's bloodthirsty Shadow Brigades in 2015, for example, had been one of them.
No. There would be no sanctuary in Turkey for Detachment Omega.
Not yet, at least.
The shamals came barreling in again like a freight out of hell. The weather worsened. This time Breaux welcomed the storms as part blessing, at least, because he suspected that a second Nightstalker attack wave would be coming in behind the first covert strike teams.
Detachment Omega marched on through the shamals. The unit humped mostly by night, halting only when weather conditions became so grave as to prohibit movement entirely.
The unit kept to the high ground as much as possible. More than once, the detachment had seen flash floods completely fill large wadis in a matter of minutes. There would have been no escape from such an inundation, at least not in time to save the team's vehicles, missile launchers and critical food and ammo supplies.
Nature wasn't their only adversary. Suddenly, in the midst of clearing away debris from a rock slide that blocked their line of withdrawal, Breaux's teams heard the sound of helicopter rotor blades somewhere slant range of them. Breaux signaled for vehicle drivers to kill their engines and for everybody to hit the dirt. The team's JLTVs were driven into any available hiding places, and the team hunkered down for cover, weapons at the ready.
They had heard and seen many helo overflights since their departure from the rebel sanctuary inside the Turkish border. The hunters were keeping up the pressure, intensively searching for the team. The first attackers had come in by helo, and while the next attack might come by land, the scalpel force would certainly use airborne patrols of some kind in an effort to track Omega's position.
As the team listened, waited and watched, the chugging and droning of the oncoming helos grew steadily louder. The sounds soon merged together into a single deafening roar. Somewhere, very close by and not too high overhead, the black helos were hovering, darting back and forth, listening and watching.
Like the other members of the unit strung out along the ridge-line, Breaux's fists tightened on the hand grip and underbarrel of his AKMS as he strained to catch every nuance of sound from above. The team would remain concealed if possible, but if they were fired upon, Breaux had ordered them to hit back and kill the helos with ground-to-air missile strikes.
This time the choppers began moving off, though. First one, then the other began to come off their hovers, and then the entire sequence reversed.
The steady, deafening roar of dishing rotors began to waver, to unravel into an echoing, chugging, pistoning turbulence that soon faded altogether. In minutes the helos had moved off and the threat had passed.
"You think they made us, boss?" asked Sgt. One Eyes.
"I don't know," Breaux replied. "If these guys didn't, then the next time, or the time after that, they will. We're living on the edge, here."
"I gotcha, boss."
Breaux had dispatched scout units to conduct security operations on the force's flanks. He checked with them via secure radio links. Had they detected any evidence of ground forces approaching?
"Negative," replied Cpl. Zappa. "We ain't seen nothing but sand, snakes and scorpions so far."
The same answer came from the two other buddy teams Breaux had out working flank patrol.
Breaux consulted his wrist chronometer. The liquid crystal digits told him that the team still had several hours of march time left before it would need to hole up with the dawn of day.
The colonel signaled his team to remount and move out again. Vehicle engines cranked to life and combat boots began crunching sand and gravel. Men and machines picked themselves up and once more began to march and roll and curse — straight-leg, mud-sucking infantry, doing what universal soldiers always did.
The Eagle Patchers had gone to ground as the sun beat down upon the desert. They moved out again once darkness fell. They had come down out of the mountains into the flat stony desert that lies amidst the Elburz and Zagros mountain ranges between the Turkish border and Teheran.
The Iranian capital city is nestled close to the middle of the spine of the Elburz range which cuts east-west across Iran's northern tier. Tehran was still several hundred miles to the southeast. Because of the inhospitable nature of the desert here, and the fact that it has few exportable natural resources except the vast salt deposits of a fossil sea, the region is sparsely populated.
Breaux believed the odds were still in SFOD-O's favor for an extraction from a dot on the Iranian Kavir Desert, the Dasht-E-Kavir, in Farsi called Manzariyah. The remote abandoned salt mine there was just within the maximum range of Marine Sea Stallions dispatched from Masirah Island off the eastern coast of Oman, known, because of its oven-like heat and tormenting flies, as "Misery" island.
Already Marine aviation teams were working at a makeshift airstrip on Masirah to ready the two CH-53E rescue choppers for the inbound flight. Technicians were making sure the helos cranked and that all major and backup navigational systems were working smoothly.
At the same time an AC-130H Spectre gunship was being readied in one of the airstrip's hangars. Spooky — as the AC-130H was fondly nicknamed — had the range and the firepower to take down security threats to the team's extraction, and also to protect the heavy lifters as they made a run for the Persian Gulf across the lower half of Iran with the US specwar personnel onboard.
Now, as the team began to cross the flat expanse of the open desert, the troops started noticing broken lines of craters covering the landscape. Breaux recognized these land features. They were holes in the earth created by the subsidence of the desert crust into an underground cavern system running beneath the ground.