Morris pulled on his full face oxygen mask and checked the seal. When the men were ready, he nodded to the airman who opened a panel and depressurized the cabin. Almost immediately the compartment became frigid. Morris shivered and lied to himself that it was from the cold and not from fear. Morris checked his connection to his cargo crate — he and every seal would be tethered to a heavy equipment case during free fall and parachute descent. After an endless five minutes the loading ramp was unlatched and rolled slowly open. Only a few stars in the blackness showed through the gaping hole. Morris connected his Intersat scrambled VHF secure voice tactical radio to the boom microphone in his oxygen mask and spoke to his troops.
“Listen up, assholes,” he said into his mike, “we’ve got damned little time in the drop zone. I want the DPV’s assembled in four minutes tops and we’re on the way. Don’t forget we’re doing this for one thing and only one thing — to bring back the head of one Mohammed al-Sihoud on a stick. Everybody got that? Let’s get off this bus and go.”
Morris stepped to the edge of the ramp first and let his toes hang out over seven miles above the desert floor. Black Bart’s voice crackled in his earpiece.
“Fifteen seconds.”
Morris spent the time going over the mission in his mind, trying to visualize the main bunker compound in ruins, the security forces running in helpless circles, Sihoud in confusion, maybe trying to escape in a truck, the barrel of a seal MAC-10 automatic pistol in his nose.
“Five seconds … two, one, go.”
Morris jumped into the blackness.
From the outside the Main Bunker appeared to be a large mosque, no different from hundreds spread across the Islamic nations of the Arabian peninsula, Asia, and North Africa.
Four high walls shaped the structure, a tall minaret tower rising out of the eastern wall, presiding over a square central courtyard. The western wall, toward the direction of Mecca, contained the sanctuary. Five times during the broiling hot spring day, the faithful of the Main Bunker would emerge into the courtyard in response to the calls to worship from the minaret, perform the ritual prayers, bowing down deeply in the direction of Mecca. Ritual cries of Allahu Akbar rang out over the courtyard, the combined voices directed heavenward proclaiming the greatness of Allah.
Ten meters beneath the courtyard, below three meters of high-strength prestressed reinforced concrete and twenty centimeters of lead shielding, the upper level of the bunker began. The first sublevel contained the quarters for the lower ranking soldiers of the United Islamic Front of God’s Combined Armed Force. The next two levels were the junior and senior officers’ quarters. The third level housed the plush quarters of General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud, although General Sihoud spent little time there, instead commanding his armies from field command posts. The final level, thirty-five meters beneath the rocky terrain of southern Turkmenistan, was the headquarters area with its maps, computers, and communications consoles linked to the antennae arrays hidden in the minaret forty meters above.
In the hushed and dimly lit headquarters deck, the Combined Air Force supreme commander and chief of staff to General Sihoud, Col. Rakish Ahmed, walked to the communications console set against the east wall of the bunker’s fourth sublevel’s tactical control room. Several junior men manning the console jerked to attention in their seats as Ahmed drew close and leaned over to see the displays.
Ahmed scanned the computer screens in search of good news, and finding none, turned toward the Khalib — the Sword of Islam — Mohammed al-Sihoud, who stood in the center of the room with a displeased look on his face, his swirling white silk shesh robe flowing to the computer floor tiles of the command center, a colorful belt holding a remarkable long knife in an ornate scabbard on his hip.
Ahmed saw Sihoud’s knowing glance, and wondered whether Sihoud had already guessed what was to be said. Ahmed had worked as Sihoud’s chief of staff for over a year, and the two men had learned each other’s minds well.
General Sihoud was a striking leader, incredibly tall for one of Bedouin ancestry, with the expected dark skin stretched across startling unexpected Western features, his brilliant violet-colored eyes shining commandingly from his aristocratic face. Ahmed considered the bluish purple eyes for a moment, knowing that Sihoud was almost ashamed of them — they gave away the fact that his Bedouin roots were mixed with the blood of a White Russian. Sihoud’s paternal grandfather, though Russian, had been born in what was then the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, rising to the rank of general in the Red Army. General Tallinn had married a young Muslim girl named Raja Sihoud, had taken a post in Moscow, then returned ten years later with a young son. The general had been killed on the march to Hitler’s Berlin, leaving the son to grow up an anti-Soviet Islamic revolutionary.
Named Yuri Tallinn, he changed his name to All Abba Sihoud, and had only lived to see his thirty-seventh year before being executed for crimes against the Soviet state. Mohammed al-Sihoud had been only seven years old when he watched the kangaroo court sentence his father to death.
Now, thirty years after the Soviet bullet had passed through his father’s brain, Mohammed al-Sihoud found his eyes a liability, a reminder of what had been Russian, but to Ahmed the deep purple eyes made the leader that much more marked by the hand of destiny.
Not that destiny was helping them now: it was beginning to look as if the tide of the war was turning, the offensive brown streaks staining the computer-generated maps on the oversize consoles on the west wall of the headquarters level, the brown symbolizing the armored forces of the Western, Coalition, the West’s three recent invasions into UIF soil.
Their white-faced soldiers might soon march deeper into the heart of the United Islamic Front. There was only one way out of this, one way to stop the bleeding of the Islamic armies in the deserts, and that was to implement Ahmed’s plan, to use his plutonium polymer dispersion weapon, the Scorpion, and bring this war home to the leaders of the Coalition, the Americans. Ahmed wondered if Sihoud would welcome the missile or object to it. Although it would seem odd that the Khalib would spurn such a superweapon. General Sihoud continued to cling to a belief that the Islamic soldiers engaged in their holy jihad could still defeat the overfed soldiers of the Coalition without the marvels of high technology. But in this belief, Sihoud was mistaken. Perhaps it was he. Rakish Ahmed, who had let down the United Islamic Front in his failure to make Sihoud understand. Perhaps now was the time to bring Sihoud to the realization that a head-to-head battle with the Coalition could not be won.
And there was the other matter on Ahmed’s mind, the reports coming in of a Coalition plot to kill Sihoud. Sihoud’s stubborn refusal to command from the bunker made him play into any Western plot to assassinate him — Sihoud’s own bravado might be the factor that got him killed.
“General-and-Khalib, I’m worried about the Coalition invasions,” Ahmed said. “I’ve had a computer simulation run to project the near term outcome. I’ve been optimistic in my assumptions of our troop losses, fuel usage, and supply distribution. I’ve also projected that the Coalition’s supplies are held up and that their troops are poorly deployed. And the computer still shows the Coalition marching into Ashkhabad within the year.”
Sihoud reached into his scabbard for his knife. He pulled the instrument out, a long shining blade below a beautiful pearl handle with at least a dozen precious gems shining even in the dim light of the command center. Sihoud, as he always did when deep in thought, ran his finger slowly along the edge, and there were times when Ahmed was amazed that Sihoud never cut himself.