A thick wooden platform covered the top of its hull; this created an area large enough to carry all five of the unit’s helicopters with little room to spare. The barge moved about by means of two tugboats, and from the air or to the uneducated eye, it could have passed for a scow. A crew of six part-time CIA-paid seamen kept the barge afloat.
The freighter docked with the vessel and painstakingly unloaded the five helicopters. It was about one hour before sunrise when this operation began, and the fog drifting up from the mouth of the Gulf was getting thicker. Together, the mist and the dim light gave the unloading operation some much-needed natural cover.
The entire unit pitched in getting the choppers onto the platform and back under wraps. They were under orders to handle the aircraft “as if they were handling eggs.” One of many sticking points of the operation was the maintenance of the choppers. The Army Aviation guys knew a little bit about fixing the Russian machines. Plus a dozen air techs from Seven Ghosts Key had come along for the mission. But between them, they could fix only small problems such as frayed wires, bum generators, blown fuses, and the like.
If anything major went wrong with one of the choppers—if a critical part failed or broke—the mission would be doomed.
One hour after getting the choppers stowed away, Smitz called a meeting in the barge’s tiny chart room.
All of the principals drifted in. They were tired, dirty, anxious. Delaney, still pale, asked why the barge didn’t have a swimming pool. No one laughed, least of all Smitz. Always earnest, the young CIA officer especially didn’t appear to be in the mood for any jokes now. In fact, he’d seemed to have aged ten years during the five-day voyage. His beard was erupting, his hair was tousled. He was wearing a tattered pair of Army fatigues. He certainly wasn’t sporting the schoolboy look any longer. He was now one of them.
“You’re all finally going to get your wish,” he began soberly once everyone had arrived. “Though it’s not how I imagined it, this is what you’ve been waiting for: ‘the motherfucker of all briefings.’”
There was a round of tired, mock applause as Smitz laid out a long piece of paper that had scrolled out of his NoteBook’s printer. It was about three feet long, six pages in all. It was crowded with text, maps, photos, crude illustrations, and code-word lists. It looked very unimpressive.
“These are our operational orders,” Smitz said, examining the document. “They were just sent by my office. Why it took so freaking long, I’ll never know. But here they are. Here’s what they want us to do.”
He flattened out the length of paper and held it in place with help from some empty soda bottles found in a nine-year-old bag of trash. He indicated the first photograph on the document. It was a satellite image of a very deep valley surrounded by some very high mountains. There were a half-dozen buildings lining one side of what looked to be a perfectly straight two-lane asphalt highway. One of these buildings looked like a Western-style ranch.
“We’re attacking Arizona?” Delaney quipped.
Again, no one laughed.
“This is a site located somewhere in the Suhr-bal in northeast Iraq,” Smitz began, using a chewed-on pencil as a pointer. “It has no known name. However, it is about two hundred klicks from where we are now. Six buildings in all. One appears to be a barracks. One is a very smoky factory.”
“A hole in the wall,” Ricco said. “So what?”
“Well, it’s an ingenious hole in the wall,” Smitz said. “Look at this building. It’s large enough to be a hangar. And notice this roadway. It appears to begin and end nowhere. But it’s just long enough to handle both heavy cargo planes and jet fighters.”
“An airport in disguise?” one of the Army pilots asked.
“That’s the thinking,” Smitz replied.
He pointed to the high mountains.
“Look at the topography of this place. Everything around it is at least 2500 feet high. The angles of these peaks are so sharp this place is likely to be covered in shadow for most of the daylight hours.”
He pointed to the factory-like building.
“And no one has any idea what this place does, what it makes, if anything. But those three stacks seem to be belching out some kind of black smoke on a continuous basis.”
Smitz paused for effect.
“Bottom line: Some people in my office believe the ArcLight gunship operates from here.”
Those gathered pulled in a little closer. They were now studying the satellite photo with renewed interest.
“So the highway is a runway, the mountains provide the shadows to hide in, and the factory smoke obscures the airplane when the shadows don’t,” Norton said. “Someone kept his thinking cap on for this one.”
“That’s the guess,” Smitz confirmed. “This place looks innocent and unimpressive. But whoever built it went a long way to make it nearly impossible to get a good satellite read on it. Or even a U-2 flyover.”
He indicated the long ranch-style building. It looked a bit like Motel Six, back on Seven Ghosts Key.
“Note this structure,” Smitz said. “Some people in my office believe the plane’s original crew is being held here. Going in and getting them out is what Team 66 has been training for.”
He pointed to an even larger building further down the “highway.”
“This might or might not be a hangar,” he said. “It’s big enough to house—or hide—a C-130. Whether that’s its function or not, my office isn’t sure. And note what could be AA gun emplacements.”
He pointed to several dark spots in the lower hills surrounding the base. If they were AA gun or missile sites, they were in the correct position to provide the valley with maximum air defense coverage—unless something was coming in real low.
Smitz took a moment to collect his thoughts. There was no talk among the men gathered. Just a grim silence and the gentle rocking of the barge.
“OK then,” Smitz began again. “That’s the target. Now here’s the plan….”
The men gathered even closer around the chart table.
“After the place has been reconnoitered,” Smitz said, “we will determine the most opportune time for the raid. We’ll go in as one. The Hinds arrive first, ride in low, and take out the AA threat. Then they will sweep the area of ground opposition. The Halos will land and half the guys from Team 66 will crash the prison building, eliminate any opposition, and free the original crew.
“The rest of the Marines will go to the hangar, hopefully find the gunship inside, and secure it. By that time”—he turned to Norton and Delaney—“you two will have landed and—”
Delaney quickly began waving his hands.
“Whoa!” he said. “You want us to land? Shouldn’t we be providing the air cover?”
“Under usual circumstances, yes,” Smitz replied. “But there are two things you have to do on the ground. First, as senior officers for the mission, it’s up to you two to appraise the situation inside the prison building, whether it’s good or bad. But more important, you have to get on board the ArcLight and determine its flight capability.”
“Well, how long will we have to do that?” Delaney asked innocently.
“About ten seconds,” Smitz replied without even looking up. “You’ll have to very quickly determine whether you can fly the thing out of there or not. If you can, then you will load everyone aboard, abandon the choppers, and get the hell out of there.”
“What if we can’t fly it out?” Norton asked.
Smitz took a breath. “Well, then we put everyone on the choppers, wherever they will fit, and take off. We leave explosives inside the ArcLight, blow it up before leaving. Should that not work, you guys use your choppers’ weapons on it. Fuck it up to the point of never flying again.”