Caught in the middle of a nasty fire-fight before its objective, Boogie was pinned down on the desert by Iranian defense cadre. Earlier on, in the surprise attack by Takavar forces, the unit had received its baptism under fire, and its men were in no mood for gratuitous heroics. All they wanted now were results, and the only casualties they were willing to accept were the enemy's.
And so nobody complained about Angry Falcon air support stealing the glory when the choppers were called in to soften up the enemy's defenses. This they did speedily, rocketing and shooting up the installation with their nose cannons and missiles. Within a short span of time the target objective was reduced to a mass of blazing ruins.
Boogie then moved in to secure the area. Omega Force encountered small arms fire, savage in some parts of the base, but not on an order of magnitude that the invading force was not well-equipped to handle.
Now Boogie hived off into separate squads of mechanized and straight-leg ground patrols. The armor rushed in ahead of the foot troops, plowing 25-millimeter cannon fire, heavy MG salvos and LAW and TOW rocket strikes into enemy gun emplacements and Iranian armor. The AH-1Z helos continued to circle, shooting up the steel pylon supporting the base radio mast and sending the antenna dishes clustering its upper tier crashing to the ground. The choppers also shot up the upper floors and rooftop of a large building that was being used as a sniper nest by Pasdaran defenders.
Because of the stiff opposition, the teams were not able to secure the compound for the better part of an hour. Then they fanned out to complete their recon by fire. Yet here too, they discovered nothing.
Here too, the installation had turned out to be a dry hole.
The nonmilitary vehicles, mostly high-end SUVs, flew the flags of the Union of People's Fedayeen of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Revolutionary Command Council, the latter defined by the Iranian Constitution as the supreme legislative and executive authority of the state. Anyone daring to attempt to stop the motorcade would have been shown a pass signed by the highest ranking members of Tehran's ruling elite. The rights of a holder of such a pass could not be dismissed, and the name of the questioner would have been taken down for later investigation by MISIRI and the inevitable punishment which would follow such an investigation.
But there had been no opposition on the road, and the vehicles that made up the motorcade ate up the miles. Driving hard, they reached their destination shortly before sunup.
Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni saw to his relief that the truck convoy had arrived before him exactly as planned. The bodies of those who would not have the honor of martyring themselves for the holy cause were scattered on the ground. This too, had been expected. The others, the Trusted Ones, had done their work swiftly and well — as they had been trained to do.
Dalkimoni emerged from the rear of the air-conditioned limousine and stepped toward the men who were waiting in a small semicircle, prepared to greet him. They had built a fire in an old oil drum, burning trash to make a wan flickering flame adequate to warm their hands against the receding night's chill.
Dalkimoni smiled as he approached them, opening his arms to enfold the first of the men at one end of the crescent, and embrace him as a brother in arms. Soon, he thought, as he moved to the second man in line, they would all be going to a place where such contrivances would no longer be necessary.
With luck, many others would forever join them there.
Breaux had flagged down one of the assault force's JLTVs and ridden the almost half-mile distance to the building that had been assaulted by C-Detachment. With a screech of tires, the son-of-a-Hummer rolled down the steeply graded ramp, soon disgorging the strike force's commander in the midst of the underground car park.
The place, which had been in semi-darkness at the time of the fire-fight, was now well-lit with sodium-arc lamps — part of the gear the American forces had brought along — powered by taps applied to the building's electricity. The truck and the bloodied corpses of the Iranians who had defended it, stood out in stark detail, grimly lit by the harsh blue-white glare of the portable lamps.
Breaux was quickly briefed by the unit's leader and then had a look around for himself. As he surveyed the corpses strewn around the captured truck, Breaux had no doubt that the men who his force combatants had surprised here had been about to embark on a covert behind-the-lines mission of some kind.
The Israeli uniforms and weapons that they ported alone bespoke this fact. The truck was found to have had mechanical difficulties, which explained its presence in the garage.
Inside the truck's cargo area, they found mounts on floor and ceiling for cargo that would require strong cushioning against the shock of rough desert road transport. There was no manifest of any kind found inside the truck's cab or on the persons of the corpses to describe what this cargo might have been, though.
All that Breaux knew for sure was that men had been prepared to die here, rather than surrender, and this fact told him that the cause for which they'd martyred themselves had to have been of great importance to them. The truck told him more as well. His mind flashed back to the road beyond the Elburz, flashed back to the team's undercover work in Germany earlier in the mission, flashed back to the high meadows of the Swiss Glarner Alps. There was surely a connection between this truck and the Bonn-Karachi truck convoy route. But what exactly? That question didn't yet have an answer.
The findings of the team equipped with NBC agent sniffers confirmed Breaux's growing fears, however. The sniffers showed heavy traces of chemical toxins and radioactivity clinging to the interior of the cargo bay. The truck had contained something extremely deadly and, to judge by the fittings in the cargo bay, fairly large and bulky. Breaux thought that there weren't too many things that fit that description — besides a bomb.
Breaux had a difficult choice to make.
He now suspected that there had been other trucks, containing a dirty hybrid nuclear device that had left the presidential palace for the same destination or destinations. But the unit's safety window was beginning to close. It was time to withdraw from the presidential palace. Satellite imaging showed a large contingent of VII Brigade reserve troops on its way to stage an assault to take back the palace.
Detachment Omega could not permit itself to be trapped here. The invasion's personnel requirements had been calculated to be sufficient to storm and secure the Mashdad presidential palace. The force could not prevail in a siege situation with as many troops as the Iranian military chose to throw against it.
The V-22 Ospreys that were to evacuate Detachment Omega were already in flight from Oman. The convertiplanes, which had refueled over the Persian Gulf, had a current ETA of fifteen-plus minutes. Breaux's teams were already forming up in the compound, ready to embark on landing. Breaux had his orders: they were to evacuate along with the rest of his hard-chargers.
But as the final V-22 came in to pick up the troops, Breaux issued entirely different orders. A platoon-sized detachment of hand-picked volunteers was to fly toward the highway in the Osprey with Angry Falcon AH-1Z support. It was to search for any large trucks it found similar to the one in the underground car park and destroy them after warning the drivers to evacuate. If capture seemed immanent, the American troops were to blow the aircraft and themselves up rather than surrender to the Iranians. Breaux and his volunteers had now also found a cause worthy of martyrdom.
Jubaird Dalkimoni walked to the first of the four trucks to inspect the precious cargos each carried onboard. He actually needed only two of these big lorries; the others were for backup in the event that the first two failed for some reason to perform as expected. Yet a fifth truck had malfunctioned, and its cargo offloaded to one of the present vehicles, he had learned; but this possibility had been anticipated, thus the redundancy built into the plan.