David Alexander
Bloodbath
A handful of great men suffice to make the renown of a nation.
Prolog
A Clip Full of Hell
Chapter One
Colonel Stone Breaux, far from the bayou country of Lafayette, Louisiania in which he was born, sat behind the wheel of the fast attack vehicle, freezing his cojones off, the plastic-bagged handset of a JTRS field radio clutched in one tactical-gloved hand.
The patch on the upper right sleeve of his desert camo field jacket bore the horseshoe-shaped Greek symbol for omega on a shield crossed by a sword, down-flashing lightning bolts, and a trident clutched in the talons a rampaging American eagle.
The unit's motto "A Clip Full of Hell" was stitched in gold across the bottom of the patch. It was the insignia of the elite US Army special operations brigade officially designated Special Forces Operational Detachment-Omega (SFOD-O) — the first-in, last-out force of choice for special missions too hard and too important for the other guys to handle. In fact, there wasn't another unit fit to wipe Omega's dirty asses, and every butt-kissing grunt in the entire US military damn well knew it.
In addition to being cold, Breaux was exhausted, his stamina and energy almost totally spent. Detachment Omega had been on the ground too long, and the cumulative effects had begun to tell. Breaux would be pulling his personnel out. He'd just radioed HQ for an evacuation aircraft.
Four hundred miles to the southwest, inside Saudi, a V-22 Osprey convertiplane was already being prepped for takeoff at SFOD-O's Zebra Talon command center at Jauf, sister site to the detachment's forward operating base, code-named Drop Forge, near Amman in neighboring Jordan. Another Osprey configured as a tanker would refuel the V-22 after it got airborne, and then it would be on its way to pick them up.
Too little sleep, too much adrenaline, too many Meals Rejected by Ethiopia, First Strike Rations and HOOAH! Bars, too much living on the edge, all of it had taken its toll on the troops. Breaux had seen evidence of combat fatigue in his personnel for the last few days, but hadn't noticed it in himself — until just before, when he'd chewed out the rear-echelon pogue back at Jauf on the other end of the radio link for no good reason, stuck the fire hose down his throat and turned on the pressure. Yeah, he was losing it. His men were losing it. It was time to get the hell out.
Breaux terminated communications with HQ on "jitters" and replaced the radio's handset, which was wrapped in a plastic baggie to keep out the incredibly fine-grained powdery stuff that was less sand than lunar dust.
The dust of the largest Iranian salt-pan desert, the Dasht-e-Kavir, got into everything, and was as widespread in the rocky north as the sandy south. It sifted into automotive engines, into the bolt actions of the AKMS bullpups the team carried into combat instead of the disfavored M16 — a weapon less than worthless in sustained desert ops — it even worked its way into the minute crevices of the skin. Baggies on the radio, condoms over rifle barrels; you needed this stuff here.
The sand was a hostile force, almost alive, almost part of the enemy's battle array. At its most benign it slowly enveloped the soldier in its suffocating embrace. But at times it could gather itself into the devastating storms called shamals by the Arabs. Such sandstorms struck without warning and almost always left destruction in their wake.
In the course of the nineteen consecutive days that Omega Force had been playing in the sandbox, the company-strength detachment from Omega's brigade-sized manpower pool had been almost devastated by one such storm. Despite an early satellite warning of the storm's approach and the hasty lashing down of their desert patrol vehicles (DPVs), weapons and miscellaneous gear, they had been forced to spend a day digging themselves out like mummies emerging from a crypt.
Iranian military patrols were another constant threat. SFOD-O had successfully played frag-tag with enemy units out on the desert, but there'd been some damn close calls. Even with overhead coverage from UAVs and TACSAT imaging satellites, the desert's many landscape features — folds, crevices, wadis, gullies, dunes, caves, pillars, berms, dikes, canals, to name just a few — made consistently reliable intel on enemy movements impossible.
Breaux's combat savvy told him that his force's lucky streak couldn't last much longer. It was best to pull the troops out before the bovine excrement hit the whirling blades. Dead soldiers were no good to anybody — except the enemy.
Right now the desert was deceptively tranquil. Outwardly, it was another freezing night in the stony badlands of Iran between Tehran and Isfahan. But the sector bristled with Breaux's troops, hidden away in wadis, spider holes and in seams and crevices in the landscape. In full battle dress, augmented with cold weather gear, the forty-member special forces commando formation was deployed across a dozen miles of almost lunar desolation, tied together by secure radio and SATCOM links.
With Breaux in command, the formation — operationally designated B-Comm (B-Command) — had been drawn from the ranks of the elite special operations brigade known variously as Detachment Omega, the Big Bad O, or simply Omega. Some called them O Shit, but weren't able to walk without support of crutches after taking that particularly liberty. Many called them Eagle Patchers because of their distinctive unit insignia. The detachment had been conducting special recon operations in the western desert for nearly three weeks, working in the nocturnal darkness accompanying a new moon and holing up during the day.
Tonight's mission marked the culmination of B-Comm's patrol activities inside Iran. B-Comm was overdue for extraction. The rigors of conducting sustained operations in the hostile desert environment combined with the unit's dwindling rations supplies and lack of sleep alone made extraction imperative.
The detachment would have been days gone already had it not been for Breaux's determination to stay until the mission's objectives had been fully met. One had been sent into Iran on a SLAM, or search, locate and annihilate mission. Breaux's brief had been to locate and identify the site of a plutonium refinement facility under construction in the Iranian desert a few hundred miles to the northeast of the Saudi Arabian border.
The job had fallen to SFOD-O because of intelligence unearthed on Omega's last mission inside Yugoslavia. Breaux's mind filled with the images of fiery holocaust in the last hours of this previous military campaign. Most of his original force had been killed in the confrontation with the Soviet-loaned Spetsnaz troops serving Macedonian maximum leader, Grand Marshall Dawit Aleksandriu, who had styled himself as the second coming of Alexander the Great, and who still menaced regional stability despite the best troops sent to depose him.
One involved party, the nameless intelligence agent — he'd used the operational alias "Congdon" — who had sent Breaux's men to their deaths, had probably been pleased at the outcome of the mission. The intelligence haul from Aleksandriu's underground lair had been a bonanza. It had pointed straight to the Middle East where weapons of mass destruction were being manufactured. Analysis of the intelligence was why Omega was here now.
Breaux's thoughts jumped forward in time, to the events of the past hour, during which he had led a team inside the Iranian installation to gather intelligence and emplace a special demolition charge to blow it up. The AH-1Z Viper gunship that was expected in minutes would raze surface structures, including the radio and guard towers, with Hellfire missile salvos and automatic cannon strikes, but its main purpose was to create a diversion to cover the Eagle Patchers' extraction by V-22 convertiplane at a nearby desert LZ.