Then Ali set up his bike on its stand, facing parallel to the beach.
Once they were all in the boat, Ali said, “Wait.” He took his place behind the fifty caliber gun and said, “I need incendiary rounds.”
The gunner said, “Every tenth round is incendiary.”
Ali fired a long burst into his machine. The force of the two hundred ninety grain bullets made the five hundred sixty-four pound bike jump back and fall. The incendiary bullets exploded the gas tanks, and the bike burst into flames.
Ali turned away. “Those bastards won’t get my bike.”
66. Persian Gulf
Wayne Duncan radioed headquarters, “We have our four passengers, one with severe burns on his left leg. Will need immediate treatment. We’re heading for rendezvous with chopper.”
With calm seas, the objective was to put distance, at least twelve miles of distance, from the Iranian coast. The RIB was soon skimming over the water at fifty knots an hour.
The answer to Duncan’s call came immediately. “You have several Iranian fast boats coming your way. We’re getting you some help. We have asked the Dulles to turn around.”
Steaming at an average of thirty-five knots, the Dulles was a considerable distance from Lt. Duncan’s boat, but not yet through the Strait, when it received its new orders. Captain Brian Navarre directed the Officer of the Deck to make haste toward a point that intersected the SEAL boat’s extraction route. Then he went down to the Combat Information Center. There he met with his Tactical Action Officer and ordered him to activate the SPY-1/AEGIS, also known as the “the Shield of the Fleet,” the world’s most advanced naval surface ship combat system, designed to handle air, surface, and subsurface threats, able to perform search, tracking, and missile guidance functions simultaneously with a track capacity of well over one hundred targets at more than one hundred nautical miles.
The TAO pointed out the numerous fast boats leaving Bandar Abbas and Abu Musa Island. More worrisome was a pair of combat helicopters, also from Bandar Abbas, that were closing in on Duncan’s boat.
Duncan received a warning that two Iranian helicopters were heading to intercept him before he could see them. His boat was fast, but he couldn’t possibly outrun aircraft. He stayed on course toward his rendezvous point. The fifty-caliber machine gun was his heaviest weapon, and he made sure that it was ready.
Kella and Steve were part of the boat’s baggage. Steve put his hand on his pack frequently checking that the CDs were still there. Kella could see that he was fidgety, that he wanted to do something.
“It’s almost over,” she said. “You’ll have that information in the right hands when we get on a real boat.”
“Ship, ship,” he corrected her automatically and, watching the actions of the crew, he moved to stand near Duncan to look down at the computerized screen. He spotted a multitude of dots moving toward the center. “What are those?” he asked.
“Fast boats. They have mostly light armament. However, some of these are IPS-16s Paykaaps, torpedo and missile boats. Everybody wants to come to the party.”
* **
Al Costantini had never flown a mission quite like this before. He had been flying for the Night Stalkers, Task Force 160, for eighteen months and had a well-deserved reputation as a skilled and fearless helicopter pilot earned through twenty missions. He had infiltrated, exfiltrated, and supplied spec ops teams into denied areas--where there were no defined lines of combat. But he couldn’t count the retrieval of CIA operatives from a fast moving SEAL boat as one of his experiences. This time, he was operating from one the Naval Task Force’s staging points, a barge off Manama
He had been told: “Urgent, time-sensitive requirement, by order of the highest levels of the government.”
Maybe to explain why another more experienced pilot had not been tapped on the shoulder for this mission. He wasn’t sure whether to be honored or whether he was considered an unfortunate substitute. He had little time to ponder the philosophy of the mission. Thirty feet above the water and answering to the call-sign of “Sea Bat,” he was skimming over the Gulf in his MH-47 Chinook, a dual rotor chopper with air-refueling capacity made for night missions, within a couple of hours after he and his crew received orders. The technical aspects of the challenge didn’t bother him. He was confident in his flying skills and in his crew. However, the more information he was fed about the interest of hostiles in his operation, the less he liked it.
* **
“Take evasive action!” Duncan shouted to his coxswain. “Torpedo on the way!
“Get down, and hang on,” he shouted at Steve. Duncan himself was strapped into his command seat.
At thirty feet, they could see the surface track of the torpedo. As it neared the SEAL boat, the coxswain steered smoothly but decisively to sharp starboard. The torpedo sped past the boat with a slim five foot margin.
* **
Targeting the torpedo boats that the Iranians had fielded, Navarre directed his TAO, “Fire for effect.”
67. Tehran: Mousavi’s Office
Mousavi, chessboard on his desk, had demanded to be in direct communications with the IRGC Navy commander in Bandar Abbas. He was monitoring the conflict closely. Learning that the torpedo boats had been destroyed, Mousavi shouted into the conference phone, “By the grace of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, eliminate the boat carrying the spy. Do what you have to do. Request air strikes if you have to. If you can’t conduct the battle from Bandar Abbas, I’ll ask your minister to get someone who can.”
He then called Hashem Yazdi. “Hashem! The American Spy. What happened? He’s now on the waters of the Gulf, and our
