Ahmed had too little faith.
The night before, Sihoud had had a dream, a dream of conquest. Angels from heaven had fought beside him, one telling him he would rule all of Asia and all of Africa, that the infidels were to be cast into the seas. No part of the dream portended any threat. Sihoud felt it down to the marrow of his bones. The only thing that mattered at the moment was deploying and firing the Scorpion plutonium missiles with their cargo of death, the wages of sin, delivered by Allah’s agent on earth. General Sihoud.
Ahmed still stood there with the radio handset plugged into one ear. “We shot missiles at the aircraft. General. None of them hit — the plane was too far away. General, I have a U-10 truck waiting for us and a Firestar at the airstrip—”
“Stop. If the plane was so far away that our antiaircraft missiles could not reach it, it must have been very distant. How far away was it?”
“About a hundred kilometers, perhaps slightly more.”
“A hundred kilometers. And these paratroopers will have a long walk ahead of them. Did your radars show any parachutes?”
“No, sir, but—”
“Colonel, come with me.”
Sihoud led Ahmed to a partitioned corner of the room and snapped his fingers. An attendant brought two cups of steaming tea. Sihoud sipped the brew and stared through the steam at Ahmed, his eyes now showing some compassion.
When he spoke his resonant voice was quiet, even gentle.
“Colonel Ahmed, Rakish, my friend, you are thinking about your wife and son, are you not?”
“I’ll always think about them, but that has nothing to do with this bunker being threatened.”
“I wonder. Rakish. I wonder whether losing your family and your home has made you think you might lose me too. I assure you that will never happen.”
As Sihoud talked Ahmed’s mind wandered … 200 meters down a utility-access tunnel there was a U-10 truck waiting for him and Sihoud, and four kilometers further south a Firestar fighter was being pulled from a hangar, fueled, and warmed up, all on Ahmed’s orders. As chief of staff he was also responsible for Sihoud’s security, and that part of the job was almost the toughest. Because Sihoud was fearless to the point of foolhardiness. The man really did believe he was invulnerable — a dangerous self-deception. And if Sihoud did not want to be protected, there was little to be done until the worst happened. Perhaps then he would listen.
Ahmed decided to keep the U-10 truck and the Firestar waiting and ready. While Sihoud continued to talk Ahmed pulled out a machine pistol in a leather holster and strapped it on over his fatigues. The heavy feeling of the weapon made him feel better, and for a moment he was able to relax. Now Sihoud was asking about the Scorpions.
“The Scorpions, Colonel. How will we deliver them and how soon?”
Ahmed had been waiting for the question. He knew Sihoud would not like the answer but then neither did he.
“Delivery by aircraft will not be possible. The air force fighters are fully occupied here and in any case their range is too limited to cross the Atlantic. Commercial airliners are no good — their parts have all been used to keep our squadrons of fighters in the air, and the mechanics are all at the fronts. I have considered hijacking an airplane and landing it where we could load the missiles but that would betray the operation. The transport of the missiles must be kept absolutely secret.”
Sihoud suspected that Colonel Ahmed’s plan must be unconventional indeed for Ahmed to brief him this way.
“Finally, sir, the unit’s launch must not be detected, an other reason air deployment is out of the question. The American air-traffic control system is sophisticated and an unidentified aircraft that drops a piece of cargo that then goes supersonic would be immediately detected”
Sihoud nodded as the colonel continued. Ahmed’s American education annoyed him, even at times like these when it would help their purposes. Ahmed had been trained by the U.S. Air Force back in the days of the Shah, and had studied engineering at a so-called prestigious university in the American Northeast. Ahmed claimed to have studied his American military counterparts and know their weaknesses.
Of course, so far that had not helped them avoid the devastation brought about by the Coalition. Sihoud decided to hurry Ahmed along.
“Fine, Colonel. No air transport or delivery. What is your alternative?”
“The Hegira, Khalib. We can bring the missiles close to the U.S. coast and fire them from the sea. The Americans will be caught by complete surprise.”
Morris watched as Lt. Buffalo Sauer sighted in on the U-10 utility truck’s front left tire, a tough shot since the truck was doing about twenty miles per. A moment later the silently fired bullet hit the rubber and blew the tire apart. The U-10 swerved, almost lost control, then slowed and stopped. Two soldiers climbed out and shouldered their weapons while staring at the offending wheel. There was a brief argument until one nodded and walked to the rear of the vehicle for the spare. He bent over to find the tire iron and was dead before he could straighten up. Ensign Dobbs’s blade having sliced his throat open. The other soldier was still looking at the tire when Chief Hansen and his knife dispatched him.
Hansen carefully lowered the body to the sand. Neither man had made a sound in dying. Hansen was cleaning his knife blade with a rag from the truck when the truck’s radio clicked to life, the quick syllables of Arabic blasting out of it. Hansen pulled out his MAC-10 machine gun, checked the hush-puppy silencer and fired into the radio console. The unit disintegrated, the desert was again silent.
Morris checked the horizon in each direction for signs of other security troops. The northern perimeter of the tall mosque was open and deserted. The outskirts of the city approached near the southern perimeter, the houses and streets quiet. Morris pointed at Cowpie Clites, who walked to the electrified fence, strapped on heavy rubber gloves, and tested the fence wire with a hand-held meter. It was dead, the western perimeter crew done with the work on the high-voltage transformer. Clites produced a pair of bolt cutters and cut a large hole in the fencing, then stepped back. Morris waved his men in, where they took up positions surrounding the mosque less than 200 yards away.
Morris checked his watch. He had timed their insertion to the second, and so far had been right on schedule. The teams had abandoned the DPVS two miles west of the bunker and had crept silently the final distance, going slowly to eat up the contingency time. The plan called for impact of the Javelin cruise missiles just as the men entered the fence of the compound. If the missiles came too early, survivors, perhaps Sihoud himself, could get away clean. If the Javelins took their time and arrived too late, it would leave the seals exposed, lying on the sand waiting for the cruise missiles to come, their discovery by UIF troops meaning immediate execution.
Or worse, imprisonment and interrogation.
Morris did not trust cruise missiles. They had a nasty tendency to get lost or fall short or get shot down. Sometimes all three at once. If the operation had been Morris’s to plan he would have saved the Javelins for the next war and gone in now, MAC-10s blazing. But some admiral in the Pentagon wanted to share the action with the black-shoe Navy and had ordered the firing of the missiles from hundreds of miles away at sea. Morris bit his lip, knowing that expensive toys were sexy to the brass, but the only thing that won wars was an infantryman with a rifle, the concept taken to its extreme with the seals, where infantryman and rifle were replaced with commando and compact-silenced machine gun.
He strained to hear, wondering if the slight whine was his blood rushing in his head or the noise of the Javelins. The whine grew louder, fuller, the sound of high-speed turbofan engines. Jet engines. He trained his night-vision monocular to the sky and thought he saw the airframe of one of the missiles climbing to the sky, starting its pop-up. Only seconds to go now, he thought.