The pilots slept during the day and flew at night, skimming over the desert and through the canyons of the Chocolate Mountain range. They didn’t need Murdock and the SEALS. The helicopters were loaded with the equivalent weight of the vehicles and personnel they’d be carrying, and if one went into the ground only the crew would be lost. The 160th had lost more men in training than they had in Panama, the Gulf, Somalia, and other unmentioned places around the world combined.
Then the Office of Technical Service showed up with the mission vehicles. The Shorlands armored cars were painted in Syrian camouflage with all details correct, even the extra smoke dischargers Murdock had requested.
The Shorlands had the same general shape as the classic Land Rover, except the body was steel armor. The entire suspension and tires had been beefed up to take the extra weight. The Shorlands normally came with a machine-gun turret on the top, but it made the vehicle too high to fit in the back of a Chinook and had been removed. Even if they had kept the turret, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to work the gun; the entire compartment would be filled with explosives. The front lights were covered by heavy wire grills, and the bumpers were reinforced to take a heavy impact. Top speed from the four-stroke V-8 engine was sixty-five miles per hour. Being a British vehicle, it was right-hand-drive. Being good Americans, the SEALS were driven absolutely crazy learning to shift with their left hands.
The Mercedes were big black sedans, with Syrian flags on the front bumpers and little lights to illuminate the flags at night. The sedans were equipped with the German GSG-9 protective detail package: armor, run-flat tires, fire-suppression systems, ram bumpers, sirens, and firing ports. In fact, they were almost identical to the cars purchased by the first commanding officer of SEAL Team Six, an act that he described in his book as getting him in Dutch with the chicken-shit SEAL brass. All true as far as it went, but the unmentioned part of the story was that the Mercedes were so spiffy, the SEALs of Team Six drove their official military vehicles out into town for nights of partying. That was a bit beyond the pale, and other C.O.s had been fired for much, much less.
For the explosives that would fill the armored cars, the CIA provided the first production samples of Trinittroazetidine, or TNAZ. TNAZ was brand new, and projected to replace C-4 plastic as the special operations explosive of choice. It generated fifteen percent more energy, with twenty percent less volume and weight. With it, Murdock expected close to the equivalent of a two-thousand-pound bomb from each vehicle.
Almost six weeks from the day they arrived in Niland, after a final live-fire rehearsal, the vehicles were loaded into the helicopters and everyone flew north to Edwards Air Force Base. There they began a movement that had taken weeks of work and enough classified message traffic to fill a room to arrange.
The helicopters were loaded aboard four C-5B transports, and the entire force flew to Naval Air Station Sigonella on the island of Sicily. They landed at night, and the Chinooks were reassembled in enclosed hangars.
The next night the helicopters took off from Sigonelia and flew onto the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington. They were immediately whisked down into the hangar deck. To make room for them, a squadron of the Washington’s F/A-18s had flown off to Aviano, Italy. The official statement was that they would support operations in Bosnia while the Washington made a scheduled port call in Haifa, Israel.
In reality, the U.S.S. George Washington was making thirty knots for the coast of Lebanon.
14
Third Platoon was waiting, enjoying the comfortable padded chairs of the ready room of the squadron they’d kicked off the ship.
They were dressed in their Syrian camouflage uniforms and berets. The blouses were sized a little large to make room for Kevlar armored vests with ceramic plate inserts that would, hopefully, stop rifle fire. Two extra pockets were sewn inside the camouflage outer jackets to carry an MX-300 walkie-talkie and an AN/PRC-1 12(V) combination survival radio and homing beacon. They were leaving in half an hour, so everyone was wearing his Syrian load-bearing web gear filled with magazines and grenades. The Kalashnikov AKM assault rifles were lying across their legs. Everyone’s gear had been inspected. They were ready to go.
None were wearing dog tags or carrying the military I.D. cards required by the Geneva Convention. There was no need. Considering how brutally the Syrian government treated its own people, they certainly weren’t going to go easy on American SEALs caught trying to blow up their one-hundred-dollar-bill machines. According to Amnesty International, the Syrians’ favorite interrogation technique was to sit you down on a box that rammed a red-hot rod up your ass. The only answer to that was to not let them take you.
Murdock looked over the room. Professor Higgins was deeply engrossed in The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. He occasionally paused to poke Doc Ellsworth on the arm and cackle gleefully, “Two thousand, four hundred years and nothing’s changed! The shit is still the same!”
Each time he did that, the Doc’s pencil skidded across the crossword puzzle he was working on. He looked as if he wanted to amputate Higgins’s arm with his combat knife.
Magic Brown and Razor Roselli were playing a game of chess on Magic’s travel board. Jaybird Sterling was doing a whispered color commentary on the match, as if it were a football game. Magic Brown, who had the intense powers of concentration of a master sniper, was delighted. Razor Roselli, more easily distracted, was getting angrier by the minute. Especially since his position was deteriorating alarmingly.
Ed DeWitt and Kos Kosciuszko were giving the route map a last bit of study.
The second eight were sitting around the periphery, left out, hoping someone would suddenly succumb to food poisoning. Failing that, if things fell apart on the ground, four of them would be going in with the extraction Blackhawks. They were all the reaction force there would be.
Don Stroh and Paul Kohler of the CIA were dressed in Navy officers’ khakis and trying to look unconcerned.
Murdock decided to get Sterling out of Razor’s hair. “Jaybird, come here.”
“Yes, sir.” Jaybird took the seat next to Murdock.
“The CIA gave me some word I want to pass along,” said Murdock. “That woman in the villa in Port Sudan. She was wanted by the French. It seems that she went around Paris planting bombs. Used her kid for cover.”
Jaybird’s expression didn’t change. “Thanks, sir,” he said. “But you know, even if she was just an Avon lady out showing her samples, I would have had to pop her anyway. We couldn’t take her along, and we couldn’t let her go. The politicians can make up all the rules they want, but we have to deal with the real world.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Just as well it’s all secret, ‘cause nobody else but us would understand.”
Murdock was going to get out of the Navy if SEALs ever ceased to amaze him. He had no expectation of that ever happening.
There was a knock at the door, and a White Shirt Landing Signalman Enlisted appeared in his safety vest, hard hat, and earmuffs. The shirt color indicated that he was one of those responsible for safety on the flight deck. “Ready, gentlemen,” he said.
The first eight threw on their gear, while the rest helped out and gave them a last word of encouragement.
Murdock grabbed Miguel Fernandez. “Stay close to the CIA guys. I’ll call you if I need you.”