A country that five years before was barely on the map, a two-bit ex-Soviet republic, but was now the center of a thirty-nation confederation of Muslim states. The uniting of the Islamic states had taken almost five years, yet in that time the Western intelligence agencies seemed caught by surprise that it had happened, believing until it was too late that the Muslims still hated each other even more than the West. In this, the spooks had been as wrong as they had been in the months before the fall of the Shah’s Iran.
And as history proved once more, there was no limit to what a single determined man could do. The twentieth century had seen one dictator after another take the reins of power and threaten the world, but most paled next to Mohammed al-Sihoud, the dictator of the United Islamic Front of God. Sihoud had made Turkmenistan his hub territory, the UIF’s capital the city of Ashkhabad, where the Combined Intelligence Agency, now paying very close attention, indicated he had been for the last two days.
There in a concrete reinforced bunker on the northern city limits of Ashkhabad, General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was about to get a very nasty surprise. The operation’s name, “Early Retirement,” was appropriate. Never before in the century had a world war against a dictatorship been conducted by a concerted attempt to assassinate the dictator. This war was to be different.
Executive officer Kristman joined Daminski at the chart.
Both men studied the tracks of the Javelin cruise missiles for several quiet moments. Kristman spoke first.
“Think this is going to work. Skipper?”
“I don’t know, Danny. Probably depends on the seal team commandos. We’re just insurance.”
“At least we got to shoot something at that bastard.”
Daminski nodded, knowing what Kristman meant. In the last ten months of the war, the work had been done by ground troops of the Army and the Marines while the glory had gone to the Navy and Air Force fighter pilots. Meanwhile the surface and submarine navies had paced the seas restlessly, effectively useless against the massive and deadly combined land forces of the United Islamic Front.
“I’m going to grab some rack,” Daminski said. “Get the section’s officer of the deck on the conn and station yourself as command duty officer. Call me if anything comes in on the ELF circuit.”
“Yes sir.”
Daminski walked forward to the tiny cubbyhole of his stateroom, shut the door, and sank into the narrow bed. He had been awake going on forty hours, since the flash message announcing the kickoff of the operation had come in on the sub broadcast. Daminski was exhausted, but he knew he was much too wired from shooting the cruise missile warshots to fall asleep.
He pulled the letter from Myra from inside his shirt and read it again, the dogeared stationery proclaiming in her loopy handwriting that she loved him but was leaving him anyway.
You are just too intense to live with … I can’t watch you run this house like you run one of your submarines.
The children cry when you come home and laugh when you leave, and I can’t bear to see that anymore. Please get yourself some help, and when you are at peace, come back to us. But until then, don’t come home …
Daminski put the letter back in his shirt and stared at the dimly lit overhead for a moment, but finally closed his eyes and tried to imagine the Javelins, what they were doing that very instant, gliding through the night at 650 miles per hour, a mere twenty feet above the ground, following the contour of the land, screaming in over the terrain of Turkmenistan enroute to General Sihoud’s hidden bunker.
Commander Jack Morris missed his beard. It had been a ZZ-Top hairy thing, extending down his chest almost to his belly button. He missed his long hair as well, feeling odd every time he turned his head and didn’t feel the old ponytail dragging across his back. His shooters, the men of seal Team Seven, until just months before, had been a ragged-looking band of bikers, the Navy’s finest counterterrorist unit.
The start of the land war against the UIF had changed all that, forcing the Sea/Air/Land commandos, the seals, back into regulation Navy uniforms and grooming standards.
Jack Morris didn’t like that — it interfered with unit integrity. The seals needed to feel different; there was something healthy about coming onto base looking like a truck driver and getting away with it — it was a concrete sign that seal Team Seven was different than the rest of the Navy, and therefore better. One last time Morris ran his hands through his weirdly short hair and looked around the cargo compartment of the Air Force KC-10H/A transport jet, the plane illuminated only by a few dim hooded red lights.
Unloaded, the KC-10’s interior was cavernous, but tonight it held two dozen tons of combat equipment and three augmented platoons of Team Seven, each platoon manned by thirty-three of the meanest sons of bitches in all of the U.S. armed forces. Or any armed force. Morris looked around him at the men — almost without exception, they were all sleeping. In a way, that would be expected, since they’d been flying for what seemed like days, and it was well after midnight local time. But it was also odd, for these men were only hours from the biggest and hottest combat operation the team had seen since the bloody liberation of the USS Tampa two years before. Many of the men were not expected to return from the mission, and some who would return would leave parts of their bodies behind. Still, Morris thought, they would be in better shape than the UIF people in General Sihoud’s bunker complex.
One of the aircrew from the flight deck came back into the cargo cabin and waved ten fingers at Morris — ten minutes till they were over the drop zone. Morris heard the jet engines suddenly throttle up, their noise rattling his skull.
The plane cabin tilted upward dramatically as the aircraft climbed. Morris unlatched his seat harness and stood, his muscles sore from the long jet ride. He stepped forward, leaning into the incline of the deck, tapping awake his sleeping executive officer, Lieutenant Commander “Black Bart” Bartholomay. As Bart’s eyes opened, Morris shouted “ten minutes” in his face. Bart stood and got the men into action while Morris headed forward. He entered a short narrow corridor at the forward end of the cargo bay, the doors on either wall leading to crew quarters, galley, and the head. At the end of the passageway Morris pushed open the door to the flight deck and squeezed in. The flight crew barely noticed him, the navigator/flight engineer knowing his purpose.
“You sure we’re in the right place?” Morris asked. He’d been disappointed before by the Air Force, once having been dropped fifty miles south of the planned jump point, landing his platoon several miles offshore instead of on the beach.
“We got here somewhat roundabout. Commander — we had a few radar detects. This good enough for you?” The flight-suited crewman pointed out the navigation satellite readout and offered a chart up to Morris’s face. After a moment Morris grunted.
“We’re doing the pop-up now. Commander. About time to get ready with your guys.”
“Any sign of activity?” Morris asked, ignoring the officer’s warning. The Air Force “zoomies” knew what he meant, Morris thought — is anyone getting ready to shoot us out of the sky?
“Nothing now. We’re clear.”
Morris turned and left without a word and hurried aft.
Within two minutes all three platoons of Team Seven were on their feet preparing their gear. The deck of the cargo jet remained inclined as it continued its rapid climb to 45,000 feet.
While at altitude they would be vulnerable, Morris thought, checking his watch, wishing he were already in free fall instead of another piece of cargo in a damned Air Force jet.