The northern deserts of the Middle East were once submerged beneath a prehistoric ocean that shrank back to create the Caspian Sea to the northeast, the Mediterranean to the west and the Persian Gulf to the south, as well as numerous rivers and lakes in between.
It wasn't just oil that flowed underneath the desert, it was water too. It flowed in rivers and pooled in huge cisterns trapped in sandstone aquifers. The team was probably crossing a cavern system through which one such underground river flowed, emptying into the Gulf via caves on the distant coast beyond the Zagros range.
Before long, the unpredictable weather again turned sour on the unit. It was at 0130 hours, in the midst of a sudden shamal, that one of Breaux's reconnaissance patrols reported in with an alert.
"Boss, we got some girl scouts coming on bearing Hotel Bravo-Niner. I make it a motorized company. Couple of Bimps and a truck full of rag head crunchies. They've picked up our trail, no doubt of it."
"That's a roger," Breaux said back. "Maintain visual contact. Report back every ten."
"I copy that. On it."
Breaux keyed off his comms.
A little later, Breaux got another message from his scouts.
"Boss, they've halted. Something's up. I don't know what yet, though."
"Keep scoping them out. When you get a handle on what they're up to, get on the horn."
"Yessir."
About five minutes passed, and then the team's pucker-factor skyrocketed. Aircraft were again heard vectoring in. The sounds were different this time. It wasn't the rotor noises of smaller choppers — the black gun ships that had hit and chased them before — they now heard. It was a single heavy lifter, sweeping in at higher altitude. Something about this made Breaux especially alert, though he couldn't say exactly why. There was just a foreboding that something was wrong. Real wrong. A minute later, Breaux learned he'd been more than merely paranoid.
"Boss, it's a Harke that's coming and if my eyes don't deceive me there's a daisy cutter hanging off the bottom."
"Say again."
"A daisy cutter, boss. A BLU-82 complete with US markings. No shit."
"Damn, I knew some shit was about to go down."
Yeah, Breaux thought. It was possible. This was Iran. There were tons of weapons left over from the Shah's reign and Ollie North's chickenshit guns-for-hostage dealing in the mid-eighties, stuff that even survived eight years of meatgrinder warfare with Iraq. Yeah, it was possible, alright.
Breaux issued immediate instructions to his patrols and then to the rest of the detachment over the secure radio net. Breaux ordered the unit was to grab as much gear, ammo and weapons as possible and leave the vehicles behind. They were to rappel down into the craters in the desert crust and take cover in the subterranean cavern system on the double.
Vehicle doors slammed, boot leather beat ground, men shouted and cursed as they unfurled ropes and hastily unshipped rappelling gear, scrambling to evacuate the surface before all hell broke loose. It all took minutes and felt like hours, but by the time the Harke came thundering overhead, beating the air with its huge main rotors, the last US soldier was grabbing his helmet and biting the dirt on the hard cavern floor.
High overhead, some bad shit indeed was about to happen.
The ton-and-a-half worth of fuel-air explosive — a conventional bomb the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — was cut loose from the helo at the top of the aircraft's flight ceiling. It plunged to earth, detonating about sixty feet above ground, subjecting a football stadium-sized area to an air burst and firestorm rivaled only by a subkiloton nuclear blast.
Forty feet underground, the caverns in which the US special forces had taken refuge shook and tremored, and portions of the cavern ceiling gave way, burying soldiers alive under tons of fallen debris. Above, at ground zero, the detachment's JLTVs were completely incinerated and the missiles and ammo stores left behind cooked off in the midst of the larger inferno. Gouts of fire whooshed down into the craters like the flaming breath of dragons, searching for human prey. More casualties were taken as men too close to the crater shafts were badly burned. All of them were shaken up like flies in a matchbox as the ferocious onslaught pounded with all its might against the cavern roof.
When the tremors subsided, Breaux gathered the stunned survivors together, shouting and slapping those who were too dazed to function back into reality. His men needed their wits about them, and fast. Breaux feared that the opposition force — and he was not entirely certain of its identity at this point — might send in combat troops after dropping the hammer on them.
Which is exactly how it went down.
Commando forces were soon fast-roping from transport helos and rappelling into the cavern system after their blast-shocked quarry. It was a platoon-strength contingent, armed with AK-class automatic rifles and the light, box-fed machineguns called squad automatic weapons by infantry soldiers.
The attackers had the advantage of shock and surprise in their favor and they had fallen on a force still dazed from the effects of the walloping bomb strike. The shock tactics were effective and in the first few seconds of the assault the invaders took still more casualties among Breaux's beleaguered troops. But the American combatants soon rallied and their rage at the enemy drove away every other concern. Breaux's troops hit back with savage counterattacks that first blunted the assault and then turned the tide of battle. In the brief but bloody underground battle, the Americans steadily whittled down the assault forces to a stub, shooting and grenading most of the enemy and bayoneting the rest until the cavern floor ran with blood and the air of the tunnels was close with the stench of cordite and death.
When the hellaceous fire-fight was over, Breaux examined the unfriendly KIAs. They wore Iranian regular army battle dress and carried natively manufactured AK variants. The enemy was now a known quantity. They had been attacked by Iranian forces, not paramilitary black operatives out of Incirlik. This meant that they had either evaded the scalpel teams or that the dogs had been finally called off. The distinction was hardly a cause for celebration — dead was dead, no matter who killed you.
And now Detachment Omega had to find a way to its extraction zone without motorized transport and most of its ammo and food stores. The strike team still had its radios, battlefield PC and tactical geolocation gear, but even if these continued to function, they weren't reliable deep underground. A safe exit from the cavern system would need to be found without benefit of sophisticated positioning devices.
Stripping their dead of dog tags, burying friendly KIAs beneath cairns of stones, and bandaging the wounded, the SFOD-O detachment now navigated the cavern system by magnetic compass and NVG-enhanced visual reconnaissance. The idea was to keep due east, in the direction of the planned extraction site at Masiriyah.
The notion of following the underground river down to the coast, suggested by Sgt. Hormones, was nixed by Breaux who pointed out that at least fifty miles of hard going lay ahead. Even if they made it to the Gulf coast, it was doubtful a seaborne extraction from there was doable. No, the team would stick to the original extraction plan and try to carry it out. That was their best, and probably their only, shot.
Hours later, after a forced march with only a single rest break, the Eagle Patchers came to another rock chimney that led up onto the floor of the desert.
Breaux sent a five-man recon squad roping up the chimney to scout the perimeter and determine whether it was secure or not. Once topside on the desert crust, night-seeing binoculars were brought into play and the squad scanned the four compass points for signs of unfriendlies in the vicinity.