“Delta force en route, sir,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs informed the President.
“Good. May God protect them and any innocents on the ground.”
“Very charitable of you, sir.”
Mitchell watched a map in the Situation Room as a triangle blip denoted the progress of the two foxtrot copters as they invaded the sovereignty of Egypt.
“Notify the Egyptian ambassador. Tell him we are invading his airspace. Note time and date and then sequester him till this op is over.” The President repeated those words the way his National Security Advisor had suggested 10 minutes earlier after the Egyptian ambassador was seated in the Roosevelt room supposedly awaiting an audience with the President.
“Yes, sir.” Charles Pickering said, picking up his phone to carry out the President’s orders. He didn’t like it; the Egyptian ambassador was an official guest of this country. Stopping him from contacting his homeland was a grievous act of non-diplomacy. Still, for the safety and security of the mission underway, there could not be a chance of leaks on the Egyptian side. In fact, at the end of the day, however it came out, the Egyptians would be glad they were not responsible for any mission compromises. They then could register formal complaints at the U.N. and save face with the Arab street.
Bridgestone and Ross had made a bad decision. They should have left Salinda dead or dying in her room, along with just enough evidence to point anyone in the direction of the desert. But as hard-assed as they were, she was still a woman, albeit one who had plotted against the United States and seduced one of our Diplomatic Security officers over to the other side. So now, here they were, driving an old Datsun with her in the back seat covered in a sheet, unconscious and stinking from the vomiting caused by the intense pain of losing her right pinky. They cauterized her hand and she was alive. They even took the pinky with them in a Styrofoam cup with ice from the fridge. It was a small percentage play, but if their hare-brained scheme worked, she could be in Kuwait City in two hours and there they might be able to reattach it. The fingernails would probably grow back.
They were heading towards the safe house with her; first to check and make sure she was telling the truth and, more importantly, to “light it up” for the laser range finders on the Cobra Attack helicopters. Bridgestone rationalized his decision not to terminate her by reasoning that having her alive would prove valuable if somehow she managed to lie through all the pain they had inflicted on her and lead them down an erroneous path. Time would tell.
On board the copter, real-time satellite images were coming out of its printer. The squad commanders on each chopper had identical printouts and were working a Telestrator, the same kind of device used on NFL football broadcasts to draw diagrams over the footage of the game. The difference was that they were drawing attack plans over satellite imagery of the 300-yard square patch of Egypt where, according to Bridgestone and Ross’ fresh intel, the ambassador was being held. The two inbound forces were talking over an encrypted satellite link while simultaneously, eight thousand miles away, in a secure room at the Pentagon, other combat controllers and commanders were doing play-by-play and color.
The target area was the abandoned Maghra oil refinery on the northwest edge of the desert. Many of its buildings and pipes were sandblasted down to flat smooth surfaces through years of neglect, leaving it to face the brunt of sandstorms and drifts. Satellite infrared reconnaissance had identified warm bodies out at 100 meters from the main complex. These were perimeter guards ready to alert the terrorists about any threat. Surely, they had radios or cell phones. There were a few heat-generating spots in the main complex warding off the cold desert night. Foxtrot Alpha’s FLIR spotted a vehicle moving towards the complex about three miles off. They made note of it. If it became a factor, they would kill it with a Hellfire missile that the armament officer had assigned to the target by laying the cursor over it and locking it into his targeting computer. Unless the vehicle went underground or found cover, which was doubtful in this terrain, the Forward-Looking Infrared Radar and computer would keep track of it and warn him if it closed to within 500 meters, the effective range of any shoulder-fired missile at the low altitude they were flying.
In the Datsun, Ross grabbed the laser and pulled himself halfway outside the passenger window. Using it like a pen, he laser-lit the roof of the Datsun drawing a rough triangle symbol. It only took 30 seconds for the armaments officer to register the symbol as the friendly sign used by his squad members.
“Captain, I’ve got Ross and Bridgestone. Traveling towards target one in a vehicle two-and-a-half miles out.”
“Good. We’ll extract them with us.”
At 1000 meters out Foxtrot Bravo launched a drone that was mounted on hard points between the struts. It glided down 100 feet from the copter; its silent drive engine then kicked in and it sped ahead of the copter. On board the copter, Specialist First Class Neumann flew the drone from a joystick and monitor display. When he got to within 200 yards of the refinery, he engaged the EMP switch. Immediately, all radio, cellular, and any other electromagnetic radiation was blocked from an area about the size of a 300-yard umbrella directly below the silently hovering drone. It was the same kind of electro-magnetic pulse type jamming device that was used when senators or VIPs visited war zones where improvised explosive devices could be remotely detonated by cellular or radio control. The Presidential detail also carried this type of device to stop would be assassins from getting real-time telemetry or data on the President’s exact whereabouts. Now the group holding the ambassador in the refinery was blind and their forward scouts were unable to signal them.
The Apache Longbows went down to the deck and switched on NOE. Utilizing the Nap of the Earth, terrain-hugging software, the pilots became passengers as the computer-guided copter cruised over sand dunes and gullies at 90 knots at 25 feet. Using infrared, the co-pilot turned on his “see and shoot” helmet array. A M230 Chain Gunon a gimbaled mount under the nose of the helicopter now copied every move of his head. The heads-up display on his visor was in infrared mode. He just lined up his reticule by moving his head and trained the gun in on whatever he had in his sights. A red button to the right of the center of his collective control was the trigger. If he held the button down, he could fire 300 rounds per minute. Tapping the button released a 50-round fusillade of flesh/metal tearing 30 mm slugs, which he now did five times as he walked the fire in on the four life forms revealed on his ever-changing horizon. All of the bullets en route created a temporary curtain of white hot lines trailing towards the target.
To the doomed lookouts at the forward post, there was only the sudden percussion of 250 heavy white-hot bullets slamming into and shredding them and everything around them. They never heard or saw the black copters approach.
On the co-pilots HUD, all he now saw were cooling pieces of bodies and glowing hot holes where the bullets either lay embedded cooling in the night air or starting small fires where they met something material. What a few seconds earlier were four distinct heat signatures, was now a mess of green dots and clumps.
“Target neutralized,” crackling over the pilots headset, was the only epitaph the dead men, who they were now zooming over, would ever get. Foxtrot Alpha flared up at 100-feet and held off at 50-yards, its co-pilot picking off random targets in the compound, while Foxtrot Bravo went in for a strut jump. Hovering four feet from the ground as the men piled out 50 yards from the main building 20 seconds later, Foxtrot Bravo was 12 feet off the roof as five repel lines sprang out from each side. A door gunner training his counterbalanced 7.62 mm mini-gun down onto the roof to clip anybody trying to stop the deployment.