"Yeah," MM1 Rich Bowman said from nearby. "Nothing like an Israeli air strike to turn a classy neighborhood into a dump."
Randall scanned the structure a moment more, taking in the chips, gouges, and craters in those massive stone walls. A sentry stood on the wall, cupping his hands as he lit a cigarette. A stiff wind was blowing in from the Med, twenty-five miles away, beyond the saw-toothed bulk of the Lebanon Mountains to the west. Somewhere in the distance, another sentry called out a challenge, and the grinding and rattle of an ancient truck rose from the dirt road winding up the hill to Al Kufayr. The scene was calm… but charged with hidden tension, a bomb with a fast-burning fuze.
He handed the binoculars back to Gallagher, and pulled his night-vision goggles down over his paint-blackened face. The goggles restricted his view somewhat, cutting off his peripheral vision, but they enabled him to see the pitch-black of a moonless, overcast night painted in vivid shades of yellow and green.
The three Navy SEALs lay on a ridgetop south of the compound. At their backs, the rest of Alfa Platoon, eleven more men in black combat dress, black face paint, and black wool watch caps crouched or lay in a wide perimeter, facing out in all directions.
Gallagher studied the walls a moment longer through the binoculars. "Okay. Everything looks just as advertised. I don't see a reason for an abort now."
"I concur, Wheel," Randall said.
"Yeah, let's take the sons of bitches down," Bowman added.
"Okay, as we rehearsed it, then. Plan Dagger. We secure the walls and main gate together. First Squad grabs the approaches and the main building, and sets overwatch on the road. Second Squad goes in and finds the packages. Let's do it!"
This is it, Randall thought, heart hammering beneath Kevlar vest and equipment-laden combat harness as he made his way back to the center of the perimeter, and signaled Squad Two to join him. This is what it's all been about….
They'd been practicing this op for six weeks, ever since word had come down from G2 that four of the Mideast hostages were being held in a couple of small rooms inside the war-torn Ottoman fort deep in the Bekaa Valley of southeastern Lebanon. They'd studied satellite and recon aircraft photos of the objective, including high-penetration IR shots that peered down right through the wood and straw or clay shingle roofs of some of the structures. They'd practiced with a mock-up of the fort on a sand table behind the SEAL Two barracks at Norfolk. Then they'd practiced in killing house mock-ups, first at Norfolk, and later at the big Special Operations Command compound at Fort Bragg. They'd practiced a dozen different possible scenarios and deployments; the one they were using now, Dagger, was one of three honed to perfection; the other two were in place as backups, should the unexpected turn up. The great and terrible Murphy was always very much a part of these operations, a god of war to be feared, respected, and placated with backup plans and assets held in reserve.
Unfortunately, Alfa Platoon had damned little riding in reserve.
Randall led the six men in his squad down the north face of the ridge, keeping to the black night-shadow of boulder and hillside. BMC Donald Hughes, QM1 Charles Goddard, GM1 Lawrence Kyzinski, GM2 Barry Neubauer, ET3 James McKenna, and MN3 Sidney James followed at ten-meter intervals, keeping well spread apart, moving silently into the gully south of the objective.
Kyzinski had point, moving ahead of the group with silent steps across the rocky ground. He stopped suddenly, hand held high. His fingers moved in the code SEALs used under silent op conditions—two men… armed… that way… twenty meters.
Randall had already slung his primary weapon and drawn his pistol, an H&K USSOCOM-issue .45, muzzle-heavy with its blunt sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. As he moved up to take position next to Kyzinski, he could make out the yellow-white-green shapes of two Palestinian sentries just ahead. "Starbase," he whispered into his needle mike. "Alfa Two. We've got two tangos. Taking them down."
"Roger that, Alfa Two," a voice crackled in his ear. "You are weapons free. Take 'em out."
Randall grimaced. He didn't like this op-to-HQ immediacy, didn't like the feeling that a bunch of stars and suits and prima donnas back in the Pentagon were literally looking down over his shoulder.
He exchanged hand signals with Kyzinski; he would take the one on the left, Kyzinski the one on the right. They crept forward, as silent as death.
A sudden flare of white light dazzled Randall's night optics. One of the Palestinians had just struck a match, and was cupping it to light the other's cigarette. Side by side, Randall and Kyzinski approached swiftly now, crouched low. At ten meters, Randall dropped to one knee, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger twice, a double tap, the soft hisses of his shots mixed with Kyzynski's quick one-two. One sentry coughed and groaned; the other looked startled and opened his mouth to scream, but only blood, black in the night-vision goggles, came forth. Both men collapsed in a huddle, bodies tangled with one another in a macabre embrace.
Kyzinski made sure both were dead with his Mark I dive knife; a covert op deep in enemy territory was no place for chivalry. Ahead, the ground rose steeply beneath the brooding walls, green-lit, of the fortress. "Alfa Two, two tangos down," Randall reported. South gully clear."
"Copy that, Alfa Two," Starbase said. The speaker had an annoying nasal twang to his voice. "We have IR traces on one sentry on the south wall and another in the southeast tower. You're clear to move in to Objective Nevada."
"Copy."
Idiots, he thought, as he started working his way up the slope. This was step-by-step micromanagement at its worst and, so far as Randall was concerned, a recipe for certain disaster.
"Where are these pictures coming from?" Gordon wanted to know. "I've never seen anything like this."
At the touch of a few keys on a keyboard, the technicians at the big display console could zoom in on any part of the scene being shot from overhead, with a close-up tight enough to pick out details of the SEAL Team's weapons, or the insectlike masks of their LI goggles. A touch of another key actually identified individual men by name and rank, or tagged others of the ghostly green figures as "Unknown, presumed hostile."
The camera view drifted slightly as he watched, but would occasionally recenter itself on the fortress from a slightly different angle, as though it were circling the compound counterclockwise. He didn't know of any spy satellites that could do that; most spysats passed overhead rather quickly, with, at best, five or ten minutes above the horizon. This camera seemed to be loitering somewhere in the sky overhead.
"Believe me," Goldman whispered, in response to his question, "you don't want to know."
But Gordon had already decided that the camera platform must be a high-stealth recon aircraft of some kind, rather than a satellite in orbit. The name "Aurora" flashed through his thoughts. There'd been lots of rumors lately of a whole new generation of reconnaissance aircraft coming on-line to replace the now-ancient technology of the U-2 and the remarkable Mach-3+ SR-71 Blackbird. Dubbed "Aurora" from a classified document mistakenly released to Congress and public scrutiny, the new aircraft were rumored to be so stealthy they were all but invisible, powered by a whole new type of propulsion plant that sounded more like magic than technology, and so black-project secret that their very existence would likely be denied for decades to come. Whatever they were called, it probably wasn't Aurora any longer.