static-line parachute jumps.
Briggs was going out first. He braced himself against the open door at the rear of the cargo bay, hands and toes outside. As the Bronco started its steep climb, Briggs found himself looking directly down into the security headquarters complex, a square three-story building surrounded by twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fences. Then, just before the Bronco reached the top of its climb, Briggs simply let himself fall through the opening.
He heard the roar of the twin turboprops at maximum continuous power only for a brief instant, and then he heard the wall of air-raid and emergency sirens from the base. The static line yanked his ‘chute out of its pack immediately. He heard the loud crack … whuumpp! of four other ‘chutes opening above him—very close above him. He looked up and saw Riza dumping air out of her ‘chute right away, trying to catch up with him. The three UAE commandos were doing the same, all attempting to land at the same time as their leaders.
By the time their ‘chutes opened, they were less than a hundred feet above ground—they barely had time to get their bearings before they had to steer their parachutes over the detention facility rooftop. Two of the Arab commandos missed the building completely, and Briggs’s and Behrouzi’s ‘chutes actually ran into each other as they maneuvered for their target. Briggs obviously had had a lot less recent practice in parachute infiltrations; he was drifting over to the edge of the rooftop so fast that he had to dump all the air completely out of his ‘chute from fifteen feet to make it to the roof. Behrouzi and her third Arab commando hit directly in the center.
“Are you all right, Leopard?” Behrouzi asked as she helped Briggs to his feet. He had taken a bad fall, landing heavily on his left leg, but he was on his feet and moving quickly.
“We lost two,” Briggs said to Behrouzi in reply, as he quickly clipped Simrad GNI night-vision goggles to their helmets.
Something was torn or sprained in his left knee, but he tried to ignore the pain.
“No, I directed them to land on the ground and secure the building,” Behrouzi said. Her GNI night-vision goggles and those of the commando with her were already on. “Keep alert—please do not kill them.”
“I’m hopin’ they don’t kill me,” Briggs said. “Let’s move!” It was too easy to breach the roof access door and make their way inside. The toughest resistance was on the second floor of the three-story building—all the Iranian guards on the first floor had retreated up to the second as the UAE commandos started their surprise assault; the majority of the Pasdaran guards were already stationed on the second floor.
Briggs didn’t care—if it moved, it died. He was not going to try to be neat or merciful.
The hallway was lit by emergency lights—those were shot out immediately. Briggs and Behrouzi then threw infrared Cyalume light sticks into the hallways, which would brightly light up the area only for persons wearing night-vision equipment. When Briggs confirmed that Behrouzi’s first two commandos would stay on ground level and would not stray into the line of fire, the killing began.
Briggs led the way, Behrouzi following with a Dragon twelve-gauge, twelve-round semi-automatic shotgun filled with breaching rounds, and the third commando following as rear security, carrying a suppressed MP-5 submachine gun. Trotting through the four corridors, his Uzi with its sixteen-inch suppressor fitted and loaded with thirty-round magazines of subsonic .45-caliber cartridges, Briggs gunned down anyone in front of him that was alive. He rarely needed more than two rounds to take down a guard—one shot to the chest, one to the head.
As he finished the second corridor, he heard shots coming from the next corridor to the left. He sprinted around the corner and saw a guard unlocking cell doors and firing a pistol into a cell, then moving on to the next cell. Briggs dropped the guard with a three-round burst from thirty feet. “Magicians!” Briggs shouted.
“Strike a pose!” He then checked the fourth corridor—all guards subdued. Behrouzi sent her Arab commando to guard the main stairway, and she and Briggs began checking each cell.
The cells appeared to be small dormitory-type rooms, remodeled to be prisoner and punishment-reprimand facilities. Usually it took only one shotgun blast on the top outwardly swinging hinge to crack and pull the door open. When Briggs, now with a Cyalume light stick around his neck, glanced into the occupied cell, he saw two men lying on the floor, facing away from the door, arms outstretched with only the middle fingers extended, and with one leg bent and crossed over the other leg, pointing at the other man in the cell next to them. That was Paul White’s unspoken code-sign for a friendly.
“On your feet, guys,” Briggs said. “I’m here to get you out.”
The first cell he breached had Knowlton and McKay inside.
“Jesus—it’s Major Briggs!” Knowlton said as he helped McKay up.
“I’ve got him, Hal. He’s hurt bad.”
“Thanks for the flag outside,” Briggs said, handing Knowlton a pistol from a dead Iranian guard. He was off, checking more cells. “Follow me and stay close.”
The search was not pretty, and after a very short time Briggs wasn’t feeling too heroic. There were prisoners in the cells other than Madcap Magician members. Briggs did not kill them, just searched them to make sure they had no weapons, but even though—Behrouzi warned them in Arabic and Farsi not to leave the cell or try to run until they had departed, all of them bolted for the door as soon as Briggs and Behrouzi had left the cell, and they were gunned down by the UAE commandos guarding the exits.
They could take no chances with the lives of their own.
But the final tally heartened them all: nine Madcap Magician members well and rescued. Two more members had been killed by the Pasdaran guards; one more was critically wounded. The main captive missing was Paul White himself. “Carl, do you have any idea where the colonel is?” Briggs asked.
“No,” Knowlton replied. “He was separated from us right away.”
“Any idea if there are any others in this building?”
“I don’t know, Hal, sorry,” Knowlton said dejectedly. “I was unconscious most of the time, exhausted. I don’t know how many men made it after the attack on the Mistress, how many we lost …” Briggs quickly polled the other Marines, but they couldn’t be sure how many others had been captured or killed in the attack, either. Their best guess was that they had everybody. “I wasn’t able to make contact with the others or try to find anything out, Hal, I’m sorry …
“Forget it, Carl,” Briggs said. “We’ll search the entire building.”
But there was no time for that—one of Behrouzi’s UAE commandos ran upstairs to report that several heavy infantry vehicles were on the way. “Shit, it didn’t take long for them to organize a response.”
“Our best chance is on the road,” Behrouzi said. “We should try to steal a vehicle, try to make it out into the open countryside.
The Pakistan border is only a hundred kilometers east.” Briggs knew she was right—if they stayed in that building, they’d quickly be surrounded and chewed to pieces.
But as they ran outside, they immediately drew heavy-caliber weapon fire from the infantry vehicles. The commandos’ weapons were useless against the Iranian infantry—they’d brought weapons only for close-range work, not to shoot it out with infantry forces. “Back inside!” Briggs shouted. “We got no choice!
Just then, the first infantry vehicle began to sparkle, then jump, then it burst into flames—and seconds later, they heard the OV-IOD-NOS Bronco fly overhead. The UAE Bronco crew had not high-tailed it for home after dropping their paratroopers—they were burning most of their return fuel on covering their commando’s withdrawal. “Now’s our chance!” Briggs shouted. “Run for the hospital! We’ll try to-“
The night air suddenly erupted into an ear-shattering blast of gunfire. One of the heavy armored vehicles following the infantry forces was not a troop carrier—it was a ZSU-23/4 air defense vehicle. Its four 23-millimeter cannons fired at a rate of 3,000 rounds per minute, blanketing the sky with deadly radar-guided shells. The Bronco was shredded by the murderous gunfire, cut into pieces and burning long before it hit the ground. The commandos and the rescued hostages had no choice but to retreat back into the security headquarters building. Two UAE commandos and two Madcap Magician Marines stayed on the ground floor, ready to take out the rest headed up onto the roof. the first wave of attackers “One lousy rescue this is turning into,” Briggs said. All of the Madcap Magician Marines were now armed, and together they made a formidable force—but everyone knew their options were quickly running out.
“You came for us—that’s the important thing, Major,” Corporal McKay told Briggs.
“He’s right, Hal—if you would have waited, we’d be dead,” Knowlton said. “No one was talking, so we weren’t good sources of information; we knew the U.S. government wasn’t going to acknowledge us or try to make a deal for us. They were going to discard us right away.”
“We may still be discarded.”
“But at least we’re fighting.” McKay said. The Marine had broken fingers, swollen eyes, and could hardly
