Tex uncurled himself from the bunk, standing to his feet. He stood almost an inch taller than Harry.
Back in his Marine years, Force Recon had nearly rejected him. Said he made too large of a target. After Afghanistan, no one had questioned the big man. They just left him alone.
“You stickin’ to the plan?”
Harry nodded slowly, turning to look him in the eye. “What do you think of Davood?”
“I had him in my demolitions class,” Tex replied, shrugging his shoulders. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“I understand.”
“He’s a good man with explosives,” the Texan said after a moment of silence. “One of my best pupils.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Good at the Farm and good in the field are two different things. He’s never been in the field.”
Harry stared keenly at his old friend. “I know. Do me a favor and keep him close…”
The two fast attack vehicles, or FAVs, as they were commonly called, were little more than heavily modified dune buggies. Heavily modified, because no commercially-produced dune buggy had ever come equipped with a fifty-caliber machine gun for the passenger. Each FAV could hold three people at maximum and was equipped with three machine guns and two small anti-tank rocket launchers
It could reach speeds of one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour on level ground. But where they were going, there wouldn’t be any level ground. Gideon turned away from the vehicles, back toward his men.
“Take off the rocket launchers, Yossi,” he ordered briefly, turning to the man that had been his driver in the Gaza Strip. “We don’t need the weight.”
Yossi Eiland responded with a grin. A small, stockily built man, the twenty-seven-year-old Jew had been a race car driver in France before emigrating to Israel and enlisting. He would be the driver of the lead FAV.
“Right away, boss.” He took the cigarette from between his lips and tossed it away, grinding it into the concrete pad.
Gideon turned to look at the rest of his men. There was Chaim Berkowitz, twenty-four years of age, their sniper. A tall, lean boy, his name meant ‘life’.
It couldn’t have been more inappropriate. Angel of death would have been more fitting. But he did his job. That was why Gideon had picked him.
The third team member was leaning over the FAV, already helping Yossi unscrew the launchers from their fastenings. His name was Nathan Gur. The youngest man on the team, he had gone into the Bekaa with Gideon the previous year, as part of a joint American-Israeli op.
None of his men were rattled by the short notice they had been given. They were accustomed to it, to the strain of laying on a mission in a hurry. Often they only had hours before a terrorist would change locations. The mood this time was actually relaxed.
All that would change soon enough…
Thomas Parker glanced at his watch. Five hours. He laid down his cleaning brush and picked up the scattered parts of his 7.62mm SV-98 sniper rifle, starting to reassemble the gun. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but it would do the job. Anything of American manufacture was out of the question.
He re-mounted the scope, brushing a fine layer of dust off the lens. Sand seemed to permeate everything.
The scope wasn’t standard-issue, it had come from an American lens manufacturer whose name had been carefully ground off the side. It gave him magnification up to 10x and night-vision capability. More than he needed, but with it, he had placed bulls-eyes at fifteen hundred yards.
It was the rifle he had carried into Azerbaijan. That was another reason he didn’t like using it.
Rising, he left the reassembled SV-98 on the bunk, and walked over to the window. Out on the runway, they were readying a fighter jet for take-off.
Thomas stood there for a moment, staring out into the desert, his eyes shadowed. Azerbaijan. Failure. He didn’t like to be reminded of failure. Of the men that had been left behind. Of the men he had let down. He could never let it happen again.
He returned to the bunk, picked up the sniper rifle, cradling it in his arms. It was a personal way of killing. You looked down the scope, you looked into the eyes of the man you were about to destroy. If he was the first man to die in an area, you saw him as he was, cheerful, determined, going about his life.
If others had gone before him, you saw the raw, naked fear in his eyes, the pallor of his face as he heard your rifle-shot ring out in the distance, speeding death his way. Messenger of destruction…
“Request permission for takeoff. Ident two-seven-one Lima.”
“Permission granted, two-seven-one Lima. You have go-mission clearance.” A brief pause and then Tower added, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”
“Thanks, Motel Six,” Tancretti acknowledged sarcastically, turning back to his work. He had a chopper to fly.
The strike team sat in the back, arranged in the order in which they would exit the plane. Tex was closest to the door. On the ground, he would take point. Hamid sat right beside him. Harry sat across from the two of them, followed by Davood. Thomas sat in the far back, the sniper rifle slung over his shoulder. He would provide rear security. They were dressed in desert camouflage, their faces painted a sandy brown.
Nothing on their clothes identified them as American, nothing about their weapons. They were clean, deniable.
Harry glanced out into the darkness as the chopper slowly began to lift off from Q-West, feeling adrenaline surge through his body. They were going. This was it. They were committed. The moment of truth, the writers called it. Perhaps.
He looked around at his team members. Their expressions were unreadable in the darkness, the face paint masking their eyes. Davood stirred at his side.
His dossier had said he’d never been deployed operationally before. Perhaps that accounted for his nervousness.
Or maybe not.
Truth? Another writer had said it was the first casualty of war. Harry was more inclined to the second opinion. But they were past the point of no return. They were going in…
Fifteen minutes later, a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft rose from a small military airfield north of Tel Aviv, heading west, across Syrian airspace, across northern Iraq, flying low to avoid detection by the American military radars. Destination: Iran…
Chapter Four
Major Farshid Hossein glanced at his watch, shading its luminous dial with his hand. It was time. They would come — now, when a man’s bodily functions were at their lowest ebb. They would be warriors of the night, the elite of their nation, highly-trained and motivated.
Their training would do them no good. They would be dead before they could even reach the ground. He and his men would kill any that survived.
The night air chilled him and he wrapped his uniform jacket tight around his body. All around him, mountains towered toward Paradise, some of them already capped with snow. Beyond them, to the northeast, the shores of the Caspian.
The pack of Marlboros was tucked securely in his shirt pocket. He wanted one, but didn’t dare. He knew from experience how far away the glowing ember of a cigarette could be seen, how it robbed a man of his night vision. He would need all of his faculties in the next few hours. He walked back to the TOR-M1. Its crew members were silhouetted in the pale glow of the late September moon.