Lieutenant Wolfe raised his head above the boulder, checking right. Flames danced and flared in the night a few hundred yards up the road, and by the uncertain light he could see the other Iranian armored vehicles beating a hasty retreat.
At his signal, the ten SEALs emerged from the shadows at the base of the hill, crossed the gravel road, and jogged south across the narrow beach. Their remaining two CRRCs were waiting for them in the shadow of an outcropping of boulders.
The Combat Rubber Raiding Craft was the SEALs' legendary rubber duck — a Zodiac-style inflatable boat fifteen feet long and six feet wide, weighing in at 256 pounds. Each Cyclone-class patrol boat possessed ramps at the stern for hauling them onto the fantail. All they needed to do now was reach the Sirocco.
Together, the SEALs shoved and manhandled the two rubber ducks off the sand and into the surf, then crowded on board. In seconds the men at the sterns had fired up the fifty-five-horsepower outboards and put their helms over. In moments more they were motoring clear of the beach, headed for open water.
A CRRC had a total mission range of about sixty-five miles, but that kind of endurance wouldn't be necessary tonight. The two PBCs were only a couple of miles out, and closing. At a full throttle they would reach their rendezvous in another six minutes.
Wolfe allowed himself a last look back at the beach, where flames continued to leap from the stricken BMP. He could see the shadowy forms of soldiers reaching the beach now. They'd only just escaped.
But he wouldn't allow himself to relax… not yet.
"Sir!" a technician yelled, the word cutting through the sibilant and self-congratulatory cheers.
That, Garrett thought, sounds like more bad news….
It was. "Missiles! Missiles incoming!" A beat passed in shocked silence. "Sirocco reports two Exocets inbound! They're targeting the Cyclones!"
"Jesus Christ!" Admiral Forsythe snapped.
Abruptly, the atmosphere inside the Pentagon basement communications center chilled. Radar reports coming back from both the Firebolt and the Sirocco showed a pair of sea-skimming missiles hurtling toward the PCBs at 700 miles per hour. Evidently, these were the MM40 variant — fired from a ship or a coastal defense battery rather than an aircraft.
Exocets were antiship missiles, French-built but exported to dozens of nations, including Iran. Each was eighteen feet long, carried a seventy-five-pound high-explosive warhead, and had a range of just over forty miles.
"Sirocco is firing chaff," a technician reported. "Firebolt firing chaff. Missiles now fifteen seconds out… twelve seconds… "
Among their other weapons, the PCBs mounted M52 decoy systems that fired chaff canisters designed to fool the active homing radar of cruise missiles such as the Exocet.
One of the Fire Scouts, heading out to sea and climbing fast, revealed the scene. The two patrol boats, their propulsion plants glowing white on the infrared image, were turning sharply to starboard, away from the coast. A pair of bright white stars appeared from the upper right corner of the screen, streaking low across the water with the speed of a bullet. One, apparently, had been successfully decoyed by the chaff, swinging wide and flashing off the left-hand side of the monitor.
Chaff decoys could not promise a hundred percent protection, however. They merely lengthened the odds of a hit. The second Exocet ignored the decoy and slammed into the right-hand patrol boat, engulfing the craft in a searing flare of light.
"Oh, my God!" someone in the room said softly.
For a long time after that no one spoke.
Wolfe saw the flash on the southern horizon, heard the sharp bang of the missile's detonation long seconds later. Swinging their tillers over, the two CRRCs motored rapidly across the choppy water toward the pillar of flame shooting up into the night.
This had always been a possibility — a worst-case scenario discussed and rehashed during the training phase of this op. The Cyclones were not stealthy, and would be seen by hostile shore defenses. The only question was how long their discovery could be delayed by Navy Electronic Countermeasures, or ECM, and the elements of surprise and shock.
Minutes later the two CRRCs approached the scene of the disaster. Sirocco had been hit. She was dead in the water now, heeled far over to port and down by the stern. Flame and orange-shot clouds of greasy smoke continued to boil from her afterdeck, and from the sea itself as fuel oil on the surface caught fire. Wolfe could see several men in the water, swimming to get clear, while others still on deck wrestled a pair of lifeboats similar to the CRRCs into the oily sea.
Despite the possibility that the Iranians would loose another volley — or that ammunition stores on the burning craft might explode—Firebolt was laying alongside, upwind of the sinking vessel. Wolfe could see wounded men being handed across from the stricken boat's deck to the second patrol boat.
"There," he said, pointing. Two sailors were struggling in the oily water fifty yards away. "Get us over there."
EM1 Brown adjusted the tiller, and the CRRC swung onto its new heading, bumping a little with the swell. Moments later they pulled alongside the two life-jacketed sailors and hauled them up onto the CRRC's gunnel.
Sirocco continued settling into the sea, her list increasing until at last her superstructure hit the water and she lay fully on her port side. As Firebolt and the rubber boats pulled back, the stricken vessel continued to roll, exposing her keel above the oily swell.
Within another five minutes she was gone.
With the last of the swimmers rescued, the two SEAL CRRCs were quickly hauled onto Firebolt's fantail, and the remaining PBC got under way once more.
On board, Wolfe and the other SEALs sat anywhere there was a clear bit of deck. With double her normal complement on board, Firebolt was heavily laden, and there wasn't much free space.
Wolfe pulled back the Velcro strap hiding the luminous dial of his dive watch and frowned. Mission time was 2315 hours Zulu, but Iran's time zone was three and a half hours ahead of GMT, which meant it was 0245 local. Local sunrise at this latitude wouldn't be for another two hours, but the eastern sky was already showing a touch of predawn glow. With the Iranians aware of their presence, and the time to daylight fast running out, Wolfe was beginning to feel like a particularly large and vulnerable target.
Thunder rolled in the sky, and the SEALs looked up. A pair of aircraft howled low overhead. For a moment Wolfe's thoughts froze, trapped by the certainty that those must be Iranian F-4s.
But Iranian aircraft would be coming out of the north, not from the southeast. Unless these two had circled far around and out of their way, they must be U.S. strike fighters off the Kitty Hawk, arriving at last. And Night Rider was still out there, too, somewhere, flying CAP to keep the bad guys off the surviving PCB's tail.
The border threading through the Straits of Hormuz, separating Iranian waters from those controlled by Oman and the United Arab Emirates, lay perhaps ninety miles to the southeast, a three-hour run for the Firebolt. Technically, they already were in international waters, or would be in a very few minutes, but there were numerous islands in this area belonging to Iran, and many had a naval or coastal defense presence.