Kazemi shook his head. “NO, sir. Everything else seems normal. There have been no reports of disturbances. But all our secure phone and telex links routed through the main building are down.”
Taleh reached for the sidearm on a footlocker beside his cot and buckled it on. He looked up at his aide. “Order the Komite to send a patrol to Khorasan Square. I want a full report. Prepare a repair detail at the same time. If our communications have been knocked out somehow, I want them back up in short order!”
“Yes, sir.”
“In the meantime, place the headquarters force on full alert. Post the troops yourself, Farhad. I want nothing left to chance, is that understood?”
The captain nodded again. “Yes, sir.” He hesitated. “Should we break radio silence to contact the assault division HQs directly?”
Taleh pondered that briefly. The final preparations for SCIMITAR were entering a critical stage. Without secure links to his far-flung units, the odds of catastrophic confusion or delay multiplied greatly. On the other hand, a sudden surge in military radio traffic now was bound to draw unwelcome attention from the American and Saudi intelligence services.
NO, he decided, he would not act prematurely. He would not be goaded into a mistake by ignorance. He shook his head. “Not yet, Farhad. I need more information first. Send out those patrols!”
NEMESIS force, near central Tehran Thorn hung on tight as Pahesh threw the big truck around another corner at high speed, narrowly missing a black 4x4 tearing past in the opposite direction. He caught a momentary glimpse of bearded men wearing green fatigues when their headlights swept across the other vehicle. “Who were those guys?”
“Komite,” the Afghan answered grimly.
Thorn nodded. The Iranian authorities were starting to wake up. He checked his watch. “How much further?” he asked.
“Not far. Perhaps two kilometers.”
An enormous flash lit the night sky ahead of them to the west, out near the Mehrabad International Airport. “What…” Pahesh started to ask. A rolling thunderclap silenced him.
“Our missiles,” Thorn shouted into his ear. The leading edge of the Navy’s Tomahawk strike had arrived.
There were more flashes now, spreading across the horizon and marching closer and closer to the center of the city. Tehran’s antiaircraft batteries suddenly cut loose, spewing shimmering curtains of fire into the air. Pieces of steel shrapnel from the shells they were firing began clattering down across roofs and streets. Amid the din, Thorn could barely make out a high-pitched rising and falling wail. The city’s air-raid sirens were going off.
Followed closely by the other four trucks, Pahesh turned left onto a wider street. Five hundred meters ahead, the road opened up into a large public square. On the south edge of the square, the satellite towers soaring above a building surrounded by barbed wire identified the main Tehran telegraph Office.
Oh, shit, Thorn thought, that’s on the target list. He leaned toward the Afghan…
Hit squarely by a Tomahawk carrying a thousand-pound warhead, the telegraph office vanished in a searing white flash. Shattered chunks of concrete and mangled pieces of metal flew outward from the center of the blast, crashing down across the square and smashing into the other buildings nearby. The ground rocked wildly under the impact.
Pahesh slammed on the brakes.
Mounds of rubble from damaged apartment houses and hotels blocked most of the street. Many of the buildings around the square were already ablaze and the fires were growing fed by ruptured natural gas lines.
The Afghan leaned out through his open window, already reversing as he waved the other trucks back toward a narrow side street leading north.
Five minutes after the last Tomahawk cruise missile detonated over Tehran, Delta Force teams were advancing cautiously up both sides of the wide north-south thoroughfare locals still called Roosevelt Avenue. They were leapfrogging forward in pairs, using doorways and parked cars for cover. Two hundred meters behind the first assault teams, Hamir Pahesh’s trucks ground forward slowly with their headlights off. More U.S. soldiers advanced beside the vehicles ready to act as a reserve or to block any Iranians coming up from the rear.
Thorn turned his head when Diaz ducked into the doorway behind him.
“Still no reaction?” the noncom asked quietly.
“Not a peep.” Thorn scanned the area ahead again through his night vision goggles. He could make out a large part of the embassy now. Barbed wire laced the top of the brick wall that surrounded the compound. There were no lights showing behind any of the windows in the upper floors of the chancery building. The Amjedeih soccer stadium bulked to the east, right across from the embassy complex.
He frowned. It was too damned quiet.
His lead teams were drawing close to Taleghani Avenue an east-west road that intersected Roosevelt and formed the embassy compound’s southern border. He planned to blow straight through the wall there, attacking north to clear the complex from bottom to top. Time constraints robbed the NEMESIS force of any hope for further tactical subtlety. The more time they spent driving around through Tehran’s awakening streets, the more time the men inside Taleh’s headquarters had to prepare their defences.
“One Alpha, this is Tango Seven Bravo. Movement on the wall, near the southeast corner,” one of the forward teams reported over the radio.
Rifle shots rang out suddenly, joined a second later by the staccato chatter of a light machine gun. A parachute flare soared high overhead and burst into incandescent splendor with a soft pop, spilling light across the area.
Thorn and Diaz dove for cover. Machine-gun rounds ripped down Roosevelt Avenue, blowing shop and car windows inward in a hail of flying glass. Someone behind them starting screaming.
The sound of gunfire rose in volume. Delta Force troops armed with M16s and HK21 light machine guns were shooting back now, aiming at the muzzle flashes winking from atop the embassy’s brick wall. An M203 launcher mounted under an M16 went off with a hollow thump, propelling a fragmentation grenade toward the Iranian defensive position.
It exploded right on target, throwing deadly fragments through a wide circle. The Iranian guns fell silent.
Thorn jumped to his feet, waving his troops forward. They had to do this fast. Delay only aided the enemy. “Move out!”
He and Diaz led twelve men in a rush across Taleghani Avenue toward the wall. When they were halfway across, another Iranian machine gun opened up, firing from a position near the embassy’s main gate.
“Christ!” Thorn felt a slug rip past his face. He threw himself forward onto the pavement. Men all around him were falling hit and badly wounded or dead. Diaz dropped prone beside him, calmly hunting for targets through the scope attached to his M16. Another heavy machine gun burst hammered the street and sidewalk, gouging fist-sized holes out of the concrete and asphalt.
“Can’t stay here, Pete!” the sergeant major yelled to him. “We get pinned down… we get killed!”
Thorn nodded. He craned his neck to look behind them. Doug Lindsay’s sniper teams were smashing their way into the shops and homes fronting Taleghani, but it would take them time to set up and provide covering fire. The same went for Major Witt and the reserve teams he’d stationed back by Pahesh’s trucks. Wonderful.
He belly-crawled over to one of the bodies sprawled on the street. The dead soldier had been carrying an AT-4, a one-shot disposable recoilless rifle, slung across his back. Basically just a fifteen-pound tube with a cone- shaped flare on the back end and a ridged muzzle, the AT-4 was a Swedish-made weapon designed to knock out light armored vehicles and bunkers. It fired an 84mm round that could penetrate up to 420mm of armor. Two men in every assault team carried one.
Working furiously, Thorn tugged the weapon off over the dead man’s shoulder and peered through the night vision scope attached to it, sighting toward the main gate. Come on, you bastards, he thought grimly, let me see you.
The Iranian heavy machine gun fired again, sending a stream of bullets slashing right over his head. A trooper behind him moaned and then fell silent hit several times.
Thorn shifted his aim to the center of the dazzling flashes and squeezed the AT-4’s trigger.
WHUMMP. The enemy fighting position vanished in a cloud of flame and smoke.
