from the target. You will use the two fast attack vehicles to get in position. The plan is relatively simple: make a surgical strike, rescue Dr. Tal, eliminate the Iranian communications facilities and proceed to the extraction zone.”
“What about the other archaeologists?”
“You won’t have room in the extraction helicopter,” the general replied, watching Laner closely. “Your mission is to get
Gideon never even blinked. “Understood, sir. I’ll go assemble my team.”
“Right, director. I understand. Good-bye.” Harry replaced the TACtical SATellite phone in his shirt pocket and walked back to the barracks, Kranemeyer’s last words ringing in his ears.
They were going to need a lot more than luck if they were going to survive the next few hours. He pushed open the door. Tex was lying back on one of the bunks, apparently asleep.
A moment passed, then he opened one eye, gazing carefully at Harry.
“Where’s the rest of the team?” Harry asked, looking over at his friend.
“Over at the hangar. Reloading the equipment in the Huey. What’s going on?”
Harry walked over to his locker, pulling out the equipment he would take with him. “I just talked with Kranemeyer,” he said finally. “We have go-mission.”
Tex uncurled himself from the bunk, standing to his feet. He stood almost an inch taller than Harry.
Back in his Marine years, Force Recon had nearly rejected him. Said he made too large of a target. After Afghanistan, no one had questioned the big man. They just left him alone.
“You stickin’ to the plan?”
Harry nodded slowly, turning to look him in the eye. “What do you think of Davood?”
“I had him in my demolitions class,” Tex replied, shrugging his shoulders. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“I understand.”
“He’s a good man with explosives,” the Texan said after a moment of silence. “One of my best pupils.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Good at the Farm and good in the field are two different things. He’s never been in the field.”
Harry stared keenly at his old friend. “I know. Do me a favor and keep him close…”
The two fast attack vehicles, or FAVs, as they were commonly called, were little more than heavily modified dune buggies. Heavily modified, because no commercially-produced dune buggy had ever come equipped with a fifty-caliber machine gun for the passenger. Each FAV could hold three people at maximum and was equipped with three machine guns and two small anti-tank rocket launchers
It could reach speeds of one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour on level ground. But where they were going, there wouldn’t
“Take off the rocket launchers, Yossi,” he ordered briefly, turning to the man that had been his driver in the Gaza Strip. “We don’t need the weight.”
Yossi Eiland responded with a grin. A small, stockily built man, the twenty-seven-year-old Jew had been a race car driver in France before emigrating to Israel and enlisting. He would be the driver of the lead FAV.
“Right away, boss.” He took the cigarette from between his lips and tossed it away, grinding it into the concrete pad.
Gideon turned to look at the rest of his men. There was Chaim Berkowitz, twenty-four years of age, their sniper. A tall, lean boy, his name meant ‘life’.
It couldn’t have been more inappropriate. Angel of death would have been more fitting. But he did his job. That was why Gideon had picked him.
The third team member was leaning over the FAV, already helping Yossi unscrew the launchers from their fastenings. His name was Nathan Gur. The youngest man on the team, he had gone into the Bekaa with Gideon the previous year, as part of a joint American-Israeli op.
None of his men were rattled by the short notice they had been given. They were accustomed to it, to the strain of laying on a mission in a hurry. Often they only had hours before a terrorist would change locations. The mood this time was actually relaxed.
All that would change soon enough…
Thomas Parker glanced at his watch. Five hours. He laid down his cleaning brush and picked up the scattered parts of his 7.62mm SV-98 sniper rifle, starting to reassemble the gun. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but it would do the job. Anything of American manufacture was out of the question.
He re-mounted the scope, brushing a fine layer of dust off the lens. Sand seemed to permeate everything.
The scope wasn’t standard-issue, it had come from an American lens manufacturer whose name had been carefully ground off the side. It gave him magnification up to 10x and night-vision capability. More than he needed, but with it, he had placed bulls-eyes at fifteen hundred yards.
It was the rifle he had carried into Azerbaijan. That was another reason he didn’t like using it.
Rising, he left the reassembled SV-98 on the bunk, and walked over to the window. Out on the runway, they were readying a fighter jet for take-off.
Thomas stood there for a moment, staring out into the desert, his eyes shadowed. Azerbaijan. Failure. He didn’t like to be reminded of failure. Of the men that had been left behind. Of the men he had let down. He could never let it happen again.
He returned to the bunk, picked up the sniper rifle, cradling it in his arms. It was a personal way of killing. You looked down the scope, you looked into the eyes of the man you were about to destroy. If he was the first man to die in an area, you saw him as he was, cheerful, determined, going about his life.
If others had gone before him, you saw the raw, naked fear in his eyes, the pallor of his face as he heard your rifle-shot ring out in the distance, speeding death his way. Messenger of destruction…
“Request permission for takeoff. Ident two-seven-one Lima.”
“Permission granted, two-seven-one Lima. You have go-mission clearance.” A brief pause and then Tower added, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”
“Thanks, Motel Six,” Tancretti acknowledged sarcastically, turning back to his work. He had a chopper to fly.
The strike team sat in the back, arranged in the order in which they would exit the plane. Tex was closest to the door. On the ground, he would take point. Hamid sat right beside him. Harry sat across from the two of them, followed by Davood. Thomas sat in the far back, the sniper rifle slung over his shoulder. He would provide rear
