The first helicopter carried Avery and the Sideshow unit, who rode out the jarring flight in silence. The second Mi-8 was a more heavily armed gunship variant, equipped with six rocket launch rails, and carrying a platoon of sheep-dipped Delta operators from B Squadron’s Echo Troop. If necessary, the gunship would provide air support, and the Delta soldiers were there for backup, so that if things went south, the CIA insertion element would not be cut off and abandoned in the middle of Tajikistan. If all went according to plan, the Delta platoon would remain on stand-by for the duration of CRIMSON RETRIEVAL and not be required.
Before departing, Avery and Poacher’s team attended a final briefing with the JSOC team, allowing the spec ops troops to get a good look at their faces and uniforms, to avoid misidentification and a blue-on-blue, in case a firefight broke out at the TCIDC plant.
Well past the Afghan border, the land inside Gorno-Badakhshan became vast and open, and the beat-up looking Mi-8s provided adequate cover for the insertion. A couple of goat-herding peasants watched the helicopters pass by overhead, but did not think anything unusual of it, taking the aircraft to be Tajik army troops on maneuvers. Even if they were alarmed, these peasants were no supporters of President Rahmon and would not report the sighting to the GKNB, not they would even have the means to do so, if they so desired.
Lieutenant Colonel Arkin’s render-safe unit had been pre-deployed from Bagram to a forward operating base in northwestern Afghanistan, with a dozen MH-60 Black Hawk, MH-6 Little Bird, and AH-64 Apache helicopters. The Apaches carried a full assortment of Hellfire and Hydra 70 rockets, enough firepower to toast a small ground army. From their forward operating base, the JSOC render-safe troops were just a thirty-five minute flight to the TCIDC factory, which was located approximately eighty-five miles past the border. Additionally, the air force had F-16s in the sky, ready to offer further support if needed, as well as waiting to receive the command to level the processing plant.
No one was concerned about the Tajik air force, such as it was, which consisted of a scant eight hundred troops, fifteen helicopters, and two transport planes, but if the Tajiks somehow caught wind of the violation of their airspace, Russian Air Force MiG-29s would be put into the air from their base at Gissar or from neighboring Kazakhstan, and that was a worry to the American pilots and aircrews.
21:48. Avery and Sideshow deployed from the Mi-8 about eight kilometers from the target site. They didn’t want to go in closer than that, so as to avoid being potentially spotted or heard by any guards on the pre-heater tower. Besides, eight klicks was an easy enough hike for them.
As Avery’s team covered the rest of the way on foot, the helicopters settled down at their waypoint, eight kilometers away from the target. This was a grass plain, concealed on the south side by low mountains, twenty-five miles from the nearest village, and three miles from the nearest road. Here, the CIA flight crews, all former army aviation or air force veterans with combat experience, shut down their engines and threw camouflaged netting over their aircraft, while the Delta troops established a defensive perimeter and stayed on the lookout. Then the pilots stayed fixated to their comms, waiting to hear word from the insertion element or the command center at Bagram, where Matt Culler anxiously monitored the unfolding operation, listening for updates and radio transmissions.
A full moon and stars filled the night sky, casting a glow over the land below, and making night optics unnecessary for the CIA insertion element. They walked in a loose diamond-shaped patrol formation, with Avery and Poacher in the front, Reaper and Flounder on the flanks, and Mockingbird bringing up the rear, with about eight feet between each man.
Avery carried his M4 in front of him, with five spare magazines. While three of the Sideshow operators opted for suppressed HK 416 5.56mm assault rifles, Heckler & Koch’s upgraded version of the M16/M4, Reaper instead carried a Heckler & Koch MSG-90 7.62mm sniper rifle. Each man also carried a holstered Mk .23 SOCOM pistol. Any killing was likely to be done close quarters, but since they were going in alone, against superior numbers, and were twenty minutes away from their Delta backup, they wanted to be prepared and so they packed heavier firepower. In addition to which, Flounder carried an explosives kit, and Mockingbird and Poacher both had AG-C 40mm grenade launchers attached under their rifle barrels.
They walked in silence, with Avery or Poacher occasionally using hand signals to communicate to the men behind them. They maintained a steady pace, making better timing than anticipated; slowing down only when it became necessary to traverse the steep hills that sporadically rose up from the ground.
There was barely any sound around them, other than an occasional bleating goat, chirping crickets, or the sound of the wind carrying past them. Along the way, they encountered no one else, but spotted the occasional fox or rabbit, which either fled or stopped to observe them cautiously from a safe distance. Most of the villages here are centered in the valleys, where there is fertile soil and water, not on the flat, arid plains the team now hiked over. The temperature had dropped to forty degrees, cold but not frigid, and their digital camou fatigues kept them comfortable and warm.
22:50. When they were within a mile, the cement factory slowly took shape in the distance against the dark of the night. Easily discernible were the silhouettes of the tall pre-heater tower rising up from the ground, with the shape of the Ka-226 perched atop the landing pad, and the remix silo standing high above the hilltops, near the rock quarry, along with the glow cast over the land from floodlights and from the moon and the stars above.
Here the team paused to sweep the terrain through their binoculars or scopes and look out for any roving patrols. There were none. The only signs of life were those of the two men lingering on one of the high scaffoldings on the pre-heating tower. As they CIA element drew slowly nearer, and Reaper scanned the location through the scope on his MSG-90, he spotted the AK-47 rifles in the hands of the men in the tower, plus two long RPG-7s leaning upright against the railing. The men looked of Turkic/Central Asian descent, with hard, weathered faces, and dressed in native garb.
The five American operators approached from the south, from over the hills and in the direction of the mouth of the kiln. This is a one hundred meter long, rotating tube, six meters in diameter, into which the raw materials from the rock quarry are fed from the pre-heater tower and then heated to a thousand-plus degrees as the load passes down the length of the tube. At the opposite end, the resultant slurry then passes through a cooler and onto a long conveyor belt inside the mill building.
They would breach the facility through the kiln. This would be the quietist method of entry, long as nobody inside turned on the oven and incinerated them, assuming the infrastructure even functioned as a working cement factory and wasn’t simply a façade. The previous thirty-six hours of aerial surveillance, contrary to Cramer’s intelligence reports over the past year, indicated that the plant did not appear to be in the business of actively producing cement, not even to maintain the charade of its cover.
The aerial surveillance also indicated there to likely be at least sixteen people present, including the HVTs and the prisoner, Aleksa. It was unknown how many people had been on-site before the Predators and satellites started watching and were therefore unaccounted for. It was a fairly large building, three stories high, and they didn’t know the layout of the interior, only that, unlike the exterior, it likely did not resemble a cement mill. There must have been some type of living accommodations inside, since this was the second night Cramer and the others spent here. The hardest part would be locating Aleksa inside without alerting the enemy to their presence.