With Dalkimoni now disarmed, Breaux tried to yank open the passenger door but it was locked from inside and the lock mechanism damaged by bullet strikes. Reaching in with his hand, Breaux tried to pull the frozen inner latch, dodging the wickedly sharp blade of a spring-loaded knife that Dalkimoni suddenly pulled from his pocket and with which he now tried to slice off Breaux's fingers as he one-handed the wheel.
But the swaying, lurching path of the SUV made it impossible to play Japanese sushi chef with Breaux's hand and control the vehicle at the same time. Breaux was finally able to get a sufficiently solid grip on the latch so he could apply enough leverage to yank open the door.
Breaux was soon in the passenger seat, the passenger door banging open and shut as its damaged lock prevented it from securing against the wildly careening vehicle. Dalkimoni's knife went clattering out the driver's window as both men grappled for it. The fight for control of the SUV quickly degenerated into an ugly primal contest between two antagonists bereft of weapons, bereft of even the ability to use combat skills in the tightly enclosed space. It was now a clawing, punching, head-butting, body-thrashing, arm-wrenching brawl. A death match where grunts of struggle displaced words, and stabs of blinding pain replaced coherent thoughts.
In the end it was the SUV that decided the issue, and the human combatants who had to abide by its judgment call. Now Breaux's hands were on the wheel, now Dalkimoni's. And now again possession of the steering wheel changed once more. In the end, the four-by-four careened off the access road of the truck stop, fishtailed almost completely around, and crashed head-on into the concrete base of a steel electrical pylon located just off the highway.
The impact of the collision sent both men sprawling against the dashboard, roof and doors, badly cut and batiked with blood as the truck's airbags inflated. The main difference between them was that Dalkimoni had been knocked unconscious in the collision while Breaux still had his wits about him. Breaux figured that made him the winner by default as he dragged the dazed bomb-maker out of the wreckage by his feet.
By the time Breaux returned to the pumping station, Force Omega combat personnel had the area nailed down tight. Those Takavar who had not been killed in battle were seated in a line with their hands clasped behind their heads, watched over by Eagle Patcher teams with rifles pointed at their faces.
The wounded were either being treated by the team's medic or were already aboard the V-22, while the Raptor, which had found Breaux's detachment, flew a high-altitude security CAP overhead. Bandaged and bloodied, in many cases, most of the American volunteers had survived the engagement and were grateful to be alive. Later, they would be called heroes, but Breaux would see that those who started bragging about it would no longer be part of Omega.
As for the rest — friendly and unfriendly KIAs were lined up on the desert crust in the burnished copper light of dawn. The only difference between them now was that the friendlies were being zipped into vinyl body bags while the unfriendlies were dragged inside the empty pumping station's blockhouses. Worms, snakes and scorpions would soon have their way with them there.
By the time Dalkimoni came around he was securely handcuffed with cable-ties and under guard with the rest of the Iranian POWs. Breaux was over by the trucks where his counter-WMD people with special technical training and equipment were completing an assessment of the nukes.
They had come to the Mashdad presidential palace prepared to destroy weapons of mass destruction in place if necessary. The Eagle Patchers had carried into combat with them special demolition charges developed by DARPA that were supposed to be able to accomplish this job with minimal risk of environmental contamination.
The charges were part plastic high-explosive, part incendiary. They were phased detonation charges, designed to surround a nuclear or biological/chemical weapon in a cocoon of blast, intense heat and overpressure sufficient to vaporize even plutonium weapon cores and the most virulent weaponized biologicals known to exist in the arsenals of rogue nations.
The one problem was that they had never been tested in actual battlefield use, only in computer simulations. But there was a first time for everything.
As Breaux watched, the counter-WMD specialists were completing the placement of the charges on the nuclear weapons in all four of the captured trucks. The charges would be set for delayed time detonations to enable the helos to get clear of the blast with a radio-controlled backup available in case the timers failed to work.
This was possible but not probable — the best timing electronics had gone into the timers, and they were multistage, so if one chip failed, two more ICs backed each of them up. Everything was redundant. It would fly.
With the nukes rigged to blow, Breaux gave the orders for the team to deploy. As for the captured Iranian commandos, they were handed the keys to their vehicles and told what was about to happen. They had five minutes to put as much distance between themselves and the next Sodom and Gomorrah as they were capable of doing. The Takavar wasted no time in climbing into their SUVs and beating a path out of the pumping station, the wounded helped by those who had emerged from battle unscathed, the dead left behind without a second thought.
The sandstorm, which had abated, was again worsening somewhat. Yet now for the first time the V-22 pilot looked upon the shamal with equanimity, even something approaching welcome. The weather would help hide the multirole transport from Iranian air and ground patrols, he surmised. And the powerful blasts from the det charges would also keep the enemy guessing.
Within minutes, loaded down with SFOD-O personnel, the Osprey lifted off and translated to horizontal flight. The special-purpose charges detonated before the convertiplane had gotten more than a mile from ground zero.
On the horizon there arose a mushrooming pillar of fire and luminous, billowing cloud that reached up to momentarily eclipse the sun, or so at least it seemed. Satellite sensors in space would later determine that the fissile pits of Iran's Winged Bulls had been vaporized with only a few percentiles of radioactive fallout having leaked into the atmosphere. Most of the fallout was clean. That was considerably better than what Iran had planned for its Middle Eastern neighbors.
Inside the Osprey, Breaux looked down to where Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni lay hog-tied on the deck. The bomb-maker was the sole prisoner that Omega was taking back to Jordan with it. But Dalkimoni would not be turned over to the Army provost marshall at Drop Forge. Far from it. Breaux would make sure nobody there even knew about the prisoner. Dalkimoni's fate was to be a private matter, one that SFOD-O would handle as a special favor to a good friend.
The bomb-maker didn't know it yet, but in a few days a large containerized, climate-controlled shipping module would arrive on a Lufthansa flight into Tempelhof International Airport. The cargo would appear listed on the airline's manifest as a rare silverback gorilla destined for the internationally renowned Berlin Zoo.
The manifest would further inform customs officials that although the gorilla had been sedated for the stressful flight, the beast was still highly dangerous and not under any circumstances to be disturbed or provoked. At the airport, a team of expert animal handlers dispatched from the Berlin Zoo would arrive by truck and the cargo container be duly claimed. On the autobahn, however, the turnoff for the zoo would be bypassed and another one taken that would shortly bring the truck to BKA headquarters in Berlin. Here a grateful German cop would snap the cuffs on the savage who had killed his only joy in life.