In near-total darkness the fifteen SEALs sat facing one another across the cargo bay of the MC-13 °Combat Talon aircraft. The drone of the four turboprops had been steady and unchanging since they'd lifted off from San Vito thirty minutes before. The aircraft's crew chief had ducked his head into the cargo deck moments before to announce that they'd just gone feet-dry.
Murdock turned and glanced at one of the small, round cabin windows, but there was nothing at all to be seen outside. The night was as black as the bottom of the sea. Perhaps later, when they got above this crap, he would be able to see some stars. For now, though, safety lay in flying low. Somewhere down there in that darkness, he knew, was Albania… yet another tiny Balkan nation with a bitterly unhappy past.
Under the tyrant Enver Hoxha, the tiny country — only about the size of Maryland — had closed itself off from the rest of the world, a small and bankrupt hermit kingdom in some ways more paranoid about contamination from without than North Korea. A hard-line Stalinist, Hoxha had ended relations with the Soviet Union in 1960 when Khrushchev had demanded a naval base at Vlord. His close relationship with Mao's China had ended in 1978, as China drifted toward liberalization. With Hoxha's death in 1985, however, rule had passed to Ramiz Alia, who slowly had begun to open the country to the West, privatizing industry and carrying out economic reforms. It was possible that Albania's long, self-imposed exile was nearly over.
In the meantime, Operation Alexander was taking direct and highly illegal advantage of the near-primitive state of Albania's military, especially their radar and tracking networks. Despite the rhetoric of Hoxha's ultra-Communists, the vast majority of the tiny country remained undeveloped. It had exactly one city of any real size — its capital, Tirand — and one seaport, Durrds. Most of the land was mountainous and covered with pine forests, while twenty percent of the country's land area was coastal plain, swampridden, and infested with malarial mosquitos. The Albanian military consisted of a 40,000-man force of regulars, with another 155,000 in the reserves, but that included just one tank brigade and eleven infantry brigades. Their air force was equipped with old J-6s and J-7s, purchased years ago from the Chinese, and they had only three squadrons of those, a total of about thirty fighters. Murdock had read once that Hoxha's idea of defending his country against invasion — or against contamination by foreign ideas, which for him amounted to much the same thing — was to build thousands of small, round pillboxes along his nation's borders with Greece and what was then Yugoslavia, and along the seacoast all the way from Konispol to the Buna River. Murdock had heard that the thirty-seven-kilometer highway from Durrds inland to Tirane was lined with hundreds of bunkers that looked exactly like whitewashed igloos with gun slits.
Stone igloos, however, were no match for an invasion by the technological magic of late-twentieth-century America. The first invaders had been purely electronic, powerful jamming transmissions directed at coastal and inland radar installations by EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft flying off the Jefferson. Soon, the invaders took on a more tangible substance, racing in from the sea, going feet-dry less than five hundred feet above the salt marshes behind the Karavastasd Lagoon.
They flew in tight groups of four aircraft, three F-14 Tomcats protecting each Prowler, and as they penetrated Albanian airspace, they spread a blizzard of fierce electronic snow that jammed every radar from the airport at Tiran south to Berat. Albanian radar operators, both military and civilian, were used to near-constant breakdowns in an economy where new equipment was impossible to come by, and most simply logged the interference and ignored it. A few alerted superiors; a few of them actually wondered about the widespread breakdown. According to reports transmitted from circling Hawkeye early-warning radar planes, several flights of Chinese-made fighters were scrambled.
None of them found a thing.
Traveling at just below the speed of sound, the U.S. aircraft flew up the valley of the Devoll, across land that was empty for the most part of anything but mountains and pine forests. Behind them, traveling more slowly but still sheltered within their pattern of electronic jamming, came the night-black MC-130. North of the town of Gramsh, just before the mountains reared ahead into the twin peaks of Mali Shpat and Guri Zi, the Combat Talon began climbing, lifting up off the deck and grabbing for altitude.
The optimum height for HAHO operations was 30,000 feet.
"Ten minutes, Lieutenant!" the jumpmaster yelled back at Murdock. "Met report's still clear. Report for the target is low overcast, wind from the northwest at five. We have a go from Olympus."
Murdock nodded, then signaled to his men. "Stand up! Equipment check!"
Each man went over his own equipment, and then, when he was through checked the gear of the man beside him, looking for loose straps or releases, checking pack bodies, watching for Irish pennants — hanging lengths of tie-off cords — or improperly positioned gear. Murdock and DeWitt then personally went from man to man, giving each a final, all-over inspection.
They said little. With the Combat Talon now climbing to drop altitude, the men had all switched to bottled oxygen from their bailout bottles; their faces were completely encased in breathing masks and helmet visors that gave them the look of fighter jocks.
Fighter pilots never flew as burdened as these SEALS, however. Each man wore both his main parachute and his reserve on his back, with a bundle consisting of his rucksack, an inflatable raft, and his secondary equipment load in front, secured between his waist and his knees by a quick-release harness. His bailout bottle, the size of a small fire extinguisher, was strapped to his left side; behind that, secured to the side of his chute pack and to his leg, was his main weapon. For most of them, this was either an M-16 or an HK MP5SD3. Mac and Bearcat, however, were both carrying hogs — M-60E3 Maremont GPMGs — while Magic Brown sported a Remington Model 200 sniper's rifle and Doc and Rattler both were lugging HK CAW automatic shotguns. Four of the men carried M203 40mm grenade launchers attached to their M-16s.
Besides all of this bulky gear, each man carried numerous smaller packages and parcels — a HAHO compass on his left wrist; a digital altimeter on his chest above his ruck; a tactical radio; a secondary weapon — for most a 9mm Beretta pistol with an extended magazine; an inflatable life vest; an Eagle Industries Tac III assault vest with pockets bulging with extra magazines, chemical light sticks, first-aid kit, and hand grenades; rappelling gear and line; night-observation gear; knife; all of this worn over black nomex coveralls and heavy gloves. The temperature outside was something like thirty below, and frostbite of unprotected skin was a serious danger.
Besides the gear every man carried for himself, there was special equipment divided up among the team, mostly extra ammunition for the 60-guns, but including Higgins's HST sat-comm and KY-57 encryption gear, and batteries. Sixty pounds was the recommended equipment load for a combat jump, but each SEAL on the Combat Talon was packing at least one hundred.
Murdock went to each man, gave his load a tug or a pat to make sure it was secure, and tried to think of something light or encouraging to say. He didn't care for pep talks, and he knew his men didn't either. Still, it helped if they knew he cared.
"Doc," he said, shaking his head in mock despair. "What the hell is a noncombatant doing with a damned shotgun?"
It was an old joke. Theoretically, hospital corpsmen didn't fight and didn't carry weapons, but no SEAL was a noncombatant, no matter what his rating had been before he'd volunteered for BUD/S.
Doc grinned behind his mask and shrugged — a difficult maneuver under all that gear. "What the hell, L-T," he said. "Doc Holliday packed a shotgun, so I reckon I will too."