“No, McKay, I can’t.
“Get up, sir, and see what’s going’ on,” McKay said, and the young Marine offered his back—probably the only part of his body not broken—as a footstool. Knowlton clapped the young soldier on the back, then painfully climbed up to peer out the window, pulling himself up onto the wall by the bars on the window to avoid putting his full weight on the kid’s back.
The window was open but covered with metal louvers, so he could see only a few slivers of open sky outside. Still, it was enough: “I see searchlights,” Knowlton reported. “Jesus, hard to believe anyone on this planet uses antiaircraft searchlights anymore …
I see a SAM lifting off north, looks like a Hawk, missile flying southwest … there goes a second Hawk … no secondaries, no flashes … third Hawk lifting off … still nothing.” He climbed down off the Marine’s back. “Somebody’s out there, dammit. I think … I hope it’s one of ours He pulled off his T-shirt, painfully ripping off the scabs and loose flesh from his burns.
He tore a long strip of white cloth from the bottom of the T-shirt, then removed his trousers, tore a long strip off each pant leg, and began knotting the three pieces of cloth together.
“What are you doing, sir?”
“Trying to create a flag for whoever’s out there,” Knowlton said.
“If they see it, they’ll know where to look for us.” He ripped a piece of reinforced trim from the T-shirt’s collar, tore it into thin strips, and tied that to the louvers so it could not be seen from the cell; then he stuffed the trousers and T-shirt pieces out the window through the louvers. It was hard to tell from inside the cell that anything was hanging outside. Knowlton stepped off the Marine’s back. “Thanks, McK-“
Just then the cell door burst open, and two guards entered. They jabbered excitedly in Farsi, and pulled Knowlton across the room and up against a wall. They then kicked McKay in the rib cage, sending him writhing in pain into the corner. They yelled at both of them for a few moments. Knowlton held up his burned hands to defend himself as best he could, but they saw his burns and decided they had seen enough and departed. They did not even think to look up at the window.
“Jesus Christ, those motherfuckers,” Knowlton cursed as he rushed over to the young Marine. He looked bad, but no worse than he had with Knowlton standing on his back looking out the window. He lifted the Marine up and propped him up in the corner so he could breathe easier. “You okay, McKay?”
“The name’s J. D., sir,” the Marine said, with a weak smile. “I’m not feelin’ very military right now.”
“I hear ya,” Knowlton said. “Me neither. You breathing okay, J. D.?”
J. D. clasped his broken ribs with his bent, twisted fingers.
“For now,” he said. “I just hope the beatin’ was worth it.”
ABOARD THE OV-IOD-NOS BRONCO ATTACK PLANE “Down to twenty bundles of chaff, Major,” the weapons officer reported in Arabic on interphone. “Twenty-five kilometers until we reach the shore.”
Riza Behrouzi swore to herself, then replied in Arabic, “I won’t argue with the results, Lieutenant Junayd— we’re still alive.
Just make sure it stays that way.”
“Yes, Major,” Junayd replied. “Eighteen kilometers to go.” As bad as it was up in the cockpit, the young gunnery officer thought, it would be even worse for the five poor souls back there.
The Bronco’s threat warning receiver was beeping well before they crossed into Iran’s territorial waters; the first long-range radar at Chah Bahar picked up the Bronco 100 miles into the Gulf of Oman, and they started their descent to get under radar coverage then. At fifty miles, even though they were flying less than 600 feet above the dark waters of the Gulf of Oman, the radar had picked them up once again; at forty kilometers, the first L-band Hawk acquisition radar was detected, and a few miles later they detected the Hawk’s X-band target illuminators. That’s when they decided to go down to fifty feet, using the AN/AAS-36 Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera and the radar altimeter, which measured the altitude between the belly of the plane and the surface directly below, to keep from crashing.
When the first Hawk launched at twenty-five miles, it was like a nightmare come alive. The cockpit crew could actually see the missile lift off, its bright rocket-motor plume clearly visible on the horizon. They could see the bright yellow arc as it described a powered, semi-ballistic flight path through the sky. The pilot punched out chaff, racked the Bronco into a tight right turn using max back pressure on the control stick to get the tightest turn—but the Hawk followed. A second Hawk went up, followed by a third. The Iranian missile crews knew that the attacker might evade the first missile, but doing so greatly reduced the attacker’s speed, which made it likely that a second or third missile could claim a kill. The pilot set the radar altimeter warning bug to thirty feet; Briggs, Behrouzi, and the three UAE commandos in the cargo bay heard almost constant warning tones as the pilot edged lower and lower, trying to evade the missiles.
When the pilot banked hard, the radar altimeter completely broke lock, the warning horn sounded constantly, and the commandos all feared that it would be the last sound they’d hear before crashing into the sea.
“All chaff expended,” the gunner reported. They would be going in completely unprotected now.
Every hard bank threw the cargo bay occupants harder and harder against their harnesses, but each jarring move made Behrouzi smile. “They are working well,” she said to Briggs, motioning toward the cockpit. The noise level was very high in the Bronco’s cargo bay because they had removed the small rear door before takeoff—it would make it easier to do what they needed to do once they got over the Iranian naval base. “I think they do better than I.”
Hal Briggs was smiling, too, but his smile was just a facade—inside, his guts were twisting with worry, doubt, and downright fear. Had he made the right decision? He hadn’t expected to involve the lives of six other soldiers on this mission—and he certainly didn’t expect to involve Riza Behrouzi.
In his fantasy, he envisioned doing a HALO (High-Altitude, Low-Opening) parachute jump, solo of course, his trusty Uzi his only companion; he’d land on the rooftop of wherever the prisoners were being kept, blast his way inside, rescue the hostages, steal a cargo plane, dodge enemy fighters on the way out, bring them all back alive, be the hero, and fall blissfully into Riza’s waiting arms.
Well, this was reality: he was leading six strangers right into the well-prepared and well-armed clutches of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s army. They were still five minutes from reaching landfall, and already they were heavily under attack. Worse, he still didn’t know where the hostages were—or even if they were here in the first place!—and he had no idea how he was going to get them out. Stupid. Dumb. Asinine. If he survived this, Wohl was rightly going to kick his ass into the next century—or shoot him, if his rash actions caused the deaths of any of his men.
“How are we doing, Lieutenant?” Behrouzi called up front to the weapons officer. “Was that three Hawk missiles you evaded?”
“Yes, Major,” the weapons officer replied.
“Very good,” Behrouzi said in Arabic, her smile just as strong and as mind-blowing as always—it was more than enough to distract even Hal Briggs. “Expect a second volley in a few seconds and be sure to destroy it with the Sidearms.
If it does not come up, prepare for a Rapier or ZSU-23 radar. I don’t wish to swim to our target tonight.”
“I’ll do my best, Major—ah, damn you … my God … there!
Shoot!” the weapons officer shouted. The commandos in the cargo bay could hear the threat warning receiver beep, and the Bronco entered another impossibly tight break to evade another missile launch. But moments later they heard a loud fwooosh! from the right wing as the first Sidearm antiradar missile left its rail, and a few moments later, the threat tone abruptly ended.
“Very good, Captain,” Behrouzi called up to the pilot, smiling even more broadly, wishing that she could be watching the pilot’s actions as he fought to outmaneuver these Iranian missiles. “Keep up the good work. Let me know when you have the prison complex in sight.” The weapons officer’s response was choked off by another hard break, this time to the left, followed by another Sidearm launch. “What was that, Lieutenant? Another Hawk?”
The weapons officer was completely flabbergasted—here he was, fighting for his life, just milliseconds from getting a missile in the face or crashing into the sea, and a senior government intelligence officer, an assistant to the commanding general and the son of the Emir of Dubai, was making conversation! “That …
Allah preserve us, climb! … That was a Rapier J-band Blindfire radar, Major.”
“Ah, very good, the Iranians made a mistake,” Behrouzi said gleefully. “They activated their short-range air defense systems too soon. Did you get it, Lieutenant?”
