Sgt. One Eyes acquired the Hip in the TOW's sights and triggered the round. The wire-guided missile sped upward, hissing and spinning on its curved stabilizer fins, spooling out a black fiber optic cable. The helo began to jink, but One Eyes trimmed attitude and course. Seconds later he had scored a kill on the chopper. It exploded in midair, raining wreckage and burning fuel slicks down on the ground.
The helo was out of commission, but the mechanized Pasdaran patrol was rapidly closing with the DPV. Breaux felt the tension lessen somewhat as Death highballed the small, fast vehicle across the mined section of desert road, past the concealed places where Sgt. Mainline's crew waited in ambush. From behind his thermal spotter scope, Mainline watched the Iranian column roar into the kill basket, not suspecting that the road was mined to blow the ground out from under them.
"On my signal," Breaux said over the radio net. "Wait… wait… Now!"
Gunnery Sgt. Mainline flipped a switch on the main control panel, activating the electrical ignitors that would blow the detonator caps screwed into the blocks of C-4 arranged in a rough rectangular pattern around the roadbed. Mainline had checked the circuits twice and once again. He was sure everything was good to go. He wasn't proven wrong by events.
In the near-silence the night was rent suddenly by a flashbulb-popping series of magnesium-bright, quick-pulsating strobes. Light travels faster than sound, and the explosions still had to earn their miles. Moments later the rolling boom and echoes of multiple explosions rumbled like thunder across the arid desert landscape.
Enemy troops shouted in pain and uncomprehending horror as the ground supporting them gave way and they and their war machines were swallowed up, tumbling thirty feet down into the cavern where secondary explosions from the burning vehicles boomed and thudded violently up into the rain of falling rubble. For a few long minutes the earth seemed to be vomiting up its fiery guts.
When the fireworks died down, and the screams of the dying subsided, Team Fang mounted up their DPVs and bolted away from the flaming havoc they had unleashed upon the enemy.
Sgt. Mainline hollered praise to the Lord for creating the US Army, and this time nobody was about to stop him.
Breaux and his crew arrived at the LZ to find that most of his units had already boarded the Osprey. Others still on the ground were busily stripping classified gear from their vehicles, carrying what they could take with them onboard, and blowing the rest with demo charges.
Breaux's team gathered up code books, personal gear and weapons, and tossed grenades into the DPV. The explosions in the night would give their position away, but their situation was compromised anyway by now.
The V-22 pilot leaned out the flight deck window, waving Breaux over.
"Let me know when we can take off, sir, and we're out of here."
"Won't be long, captain."
The convertiplane's twin engines were upturned in helicraft mode, the rotors spinning and the engine warm. The multimode transport was ready for immediate dust-off.
Breaux took a head count. Only Sgt. Mainline's Team Fang was missing. Where the hell were they?
The sudden sound of approaching vehicle engines made those standing guard train their weapons in its direction. Breaux looked out into the night and lowered the barrel of his AKMS. It was the last DPVs with the four Team Fangers inside them.
"Shake your asses," he shouted at the latecomers. "Grab your gear and blow the rest. You know the drill."
"Yes sir!" Sgt. Mainline yelled back. "Man, I love the Army! Shit, the Army's better than any pussy I ever ate. Every day's a good day in the Army. Every night's a party. The latrines in the Army smell better than a sixteen-year-old virgin's cunt. God bless the Army!"
The team knew the drill backward. Within two minutes time the DPV was a burning hulk and its former passengers had joined the rest of B-Comm inside the waiting Osprey.
"Come on, get this bird airborne," Breaux shouted at the pilot, who flashed him the OK sign. The V-22's copilot immediately raised the rear hatch and the convertiplane ascended straight up into the night.
Flying nap of the earth, ten minutes off the LZ, the tilt-rotor aircraft took fire from something out on the desert, but it was now moving too fast to be accurately taped by small arms bursts and there was no more incoming after that.
Only when they returned to Jauf did ground maintenance crew notice the pattern of bullet punctures just inches from a critical part of the Osprey's left engine nacelle. In the end it had been a closer call than anybody had realized.
Book I
Valiant Venom
Chapter Three
At the Berlin bureau headquarters of the Weisbaden-based German Federal Criminal Police Agency, the Bundeskriminalamt, otherwise known by the acronym BKA, which is the rough (but by no means exact) equivalent of the American FBI, they called Helmut Mauthner "Starsky" and his partner Karl Voss "Hutch." The two cops cultivated the association — Mauthner was a Bavarian with the dark hair, ruddy face and swarthy build of a mountain gnome, while Voss, whose lineage was Tyrolean, had blonde hair and a fair complexion — earning a reputation for playing it fast and loose on the job.
Today, on a windswept day in early October, with Mauthner behind the wheel of a blue Volkswagen Golf electric and Voss slouched in the green vehicle's passenger seat with his sneaker-shod feet propped on the dash, the cops were sitting on a stakeout on a residential street between the Pariser Platz and the left bank of the Spree river. It was a neighborhood of cheap housing that had sprung up from the rubble-strewn wasteland formerly in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Since the influx of refugees from the East after unification, the neighborhood had become a magnet for Berlin's growing population of foreign immigrants from the Balkans, Eurasia and the Middle East.
For the most part, and despite periodic outbreaks of neo-nazi skinhead violence, the denizens of the quarter lived harmoniously. But civil unrest and ethnic tensions were not what had brought Starsky and Hutch to the neighborhood. They were one team in three that was staking out a group of new arrivals to the vicinity. These newcomers had been brought to the attention of the BKA when a kilo-weight package of Semtex plastic explosive had been discovered by a DHL courier making a shipment to a neighborhood grocer when the shipping carton had accidentally opened before delivery.
Checks with Immigration and Interpol had disclosed that the grocer's cousin, a man named Farouk Al-Kaukji, had recently arrived from Damascus, Syria and was staying on a thirty-day visitor's visa. Al-Kaukji, who was missing his right arm and part of his right leg, had a history with Interpol that went back several years. Thus he had been watchlisted at Berlin Tempelhof Airport and the BKA notified of his arrival. Al-Kaukji was a bomb-maker for the radical faction of Islamic revolutionaries led by former Allah's Bloody Sword and Swift Death to All Unbelievers leader Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni.
Dalkimoni, who had long since broken with his early affiliations and become a free agent called Abu Jihad, had employed Al-Kaukji's services on several occasions, especially in bombs used to down jetliners, a specialty of Al-Kaukji's. The combination of Al-Kaukji and a kilo of Semtex added up to the possibility that Berlin was once again becoming a major terrorist bomb assembly entrepot.
Chief of Counter-terrorist Operations at the Berlin bureau of the German BKA, Inspector Max Winternitz had ordered a team to put the grocery under twenty-four hour surveillance. Another team began following Al-Kaukji as he emerged from the grocery and went about his daily rounds.
On the first day of the stakeout, the BKA team positioned behind the window of an Indian restaurant across the street from the grocery saw a late-model black Mercedes sedan pull up in front of the store. The Mercedes was driven by a stocky, goateed man who was later identified as one Farid Housek, a naturalized German originally from the Egyptian capital city, Cairo.