While they were going over contingencies the keypad blinked and the carrier confirmed the launch of the helicopters. Murdock tapped out an acknowledgment and informed them he was switching both his sets over to UHF voice. “Any questions?” Murdock asked his SEALS. There were none. “Okay,” he said. “Razor and I’ll meet you all back here.”
43
Murdock and Razor crept slowly along the rocks. The mortar fire was still dropping up near the road, but at a much slower rate.
The wind was whipping; it was bitterly cold. Murdock guessed that the temperature was in the teens and dropping, with the wind chill making it much worse. Their pace wasn’t fast enough to keep them warm. Murdock thought about sitting in the ocean at Coronado during Hell Week, the surf washing over him and the instructors saying that they couldn’t come out until someone quit. He hadn’t quit then. He told himself that it had been much colder then than now.
He and Razor reached the dome of rock that had been so much trouble to cross earlier. Then the mortar fire stopped suddenly, and all they could hear was the wind.
Murdock turned to look at Razor through his NVG. Razor nodded. The mortars had ceased fire because the Syrian commandos had reached the road.
The dome was a handy obstacle. The SEALs unscrewed the fuses from two Russian M75 frag grenades and replaced them with two push-pull instantaneous booby-trap fuses. While no handyman worth his salt would ever be without duct tape, no SEAL would be caught dead without the military equivalent: olive-green ordnance tape, also known as hundred-mile-an-hour tape.
With Murdock holding onto him, Razor edged out onto the dome. When he came to the limit of Murdock’s reach, he locked his legs, bent over, and taped a grenade to a smooth, dry portion of the rock surface.
Murdock pulled him in, and Razor taped the second grenade a little closer to the edge. As they backed away from the dome, Razor carefully unspooled the hundred-pound test fishing line he’d attached to the pull rings of the fuses. Murdock took one line, Razor the other.
They spread out among the rocks and settled down to wait.
44
As they flew over the treetops, the Blackhawk crew and the SEALs heard a range of different chirping sounds in their headsets.
“We’ve got radars,” the Blackhawk copilot announced somewhat redundantly. He consulted his display. “I’m reading Flat Face, Dog Ear, Gun Dish, and Spoon Rest. They’re all over the place.”
He’d given the NATO code name for a range of Russian radar systems. Flat Face was a surface-to-air missile or antiaircraft-gun acquisition system. Dog Ear was an early-warning radar associated with the SA-13 short-range missile system. Gun Dish was the radar atop the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled antiaircraft gun system. Spoon Rest was a surveillance radar, and the most dangerous because it could pick up low-altitude targets.
“Anything coming from the higher elevations?” the pilot asked.
“Two Gun Dish,” the copilot replied.
“Shit,” was all the pilot said.
Since they were skimming over the treetops, the radar would have to be higher and radiating down in order to pick them up. But the crew was somewhat comforted by the fact that most Russian radars weren’t good at picking targets out of ground clutter.
But as the second Blackhawk, flying in trail of the first, swept over some trees, a string of green tracer bullets came floating up right in front of it.
The pilot turned away from the fire. It wasn’t easy at such low altitude. Too hard a turn and they would be crashing into the trees. When they steadied out, the pilot realized how it had happened. Someone on the ground had fired at the lead helicopter, or at least the sound of the lead helicopter. But it was going so low and fast that it was already gone by the time he brought his weapon to bear. Unfortunately, the second Blackhawk was just in time to receive the fire. The pilot solved the problem by moving up in echelon with the lead Blackhawk.
The ZSU-23-4 was a small tracked vehicle with a rotating turret mounting four water-cooled 23mm rapid-firing cannons. Atop the turret the Gun Dish radar spun around, searching for targets. When it locked onto one, the Identification-Friend-or-Foe system electronically interrogated it. If the target was a foe, the gunner slaved the turret onto the radar track, the computer provided a solution, and the guns fired.
The Gun Dish radars on the early ZSU-23-4’s had had trouble picking targets out of ground clutter at altitudes below six hundred feet. But in later models, notably the ZSU-23-4M, the Russians had introduced radar modifications to reduce that problem.
When the Syrians had put their forces in Lebanon on alert, several ZSU-23-4’s had taken up station in the western foothills of the central mountain range. As it happened, one of those vehicles was high enough to be right on line with the Blackhawks’ flight path as they came across the coastline and over the western plain. The dish antenna atop its turret stopped spinning and pointed west, wobbling slightly.
A continuous tone sounded in the crew headsets of the lead Blackhawk.
“Gun Dish lock,” the copilot called out.
The pilot instantly swung into a gentle S-turn and thumbed a button on his stick. Chaff cartridges were ejected from tubes in the fuselage. The cartridges burst open and filled the air around the helicopter with distinct clouds of thin metallic strips.
The S-turn caused the Blackhawk to disappear within the chaff clouds that showed up on the Gun Dish radar as separate and distinct targets. The radar lock was broken. The Gun Dish tried to decide between the slowly dissipating chaff clouds, but couldn’t. By then the terrain elevation had changed and the Blackhawks were safely back in ground clutter.
When the steady tone in their headsets stopped, Miguel Fernandez and Red Nicholson caught each other’s eyes across the cabin and smiled weakly.
45
Murdock thought he heard movement on the other side of the rock dome. Yes, there it was again. All it took was one man to slip on a little loose rock, or one piece of equipment to swing free.
He could imagine the Syrians contemplating the dome. Would it stop them, or would they have the balls to try it in the dark?
Razor’s voice came over the radio net. “This is Two, contact imminent.”
Then Jaybird’s voice. “You need help?”
“Negative,” Razor ordered. “Stay put. And everyone keep off the net unless it’s an emergency. We’re going to need to talk over here.”
A string of acknowledgments from the rest of the SEALs followed. The MX-300’s were all set on low power, so with luck the transmissions weren’t carrying past the mountain ridge. Not that the Syrians could be listening in on the encrypted messages. Murdock was worried about them getting a fix on the location of the transmissions. But it took a long time for any army to work that kind of information through its various levels of command.
Murdock heard metal knock against rock. The sound seemed to be coming from the side of the dome. So the Syrians were giving it a try. And they were doing a good job keeping quiet too. It wasn’t easy moving over rock in the darkness. If they were a little less competent, he might be able to get an idea of the size of the force on the other side.
Then the sound of hammering started up at the dome. It culminated in a clear metallic ringing that carried far in the night air.
Razor’s whispered voice came up on the net again. “If that wasn’t a piton, then I’m not an E-7.”