Phoenix Sub Zero - Страница 3

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The start of the land war against the UIF had changed all that, forcing the Sea/Air/Land commandos, the seals, back into regulation Navy uniforms and grooming standards.

Jack Morris didn’t like that — it interfered with unit integrity. The seals needed to feel different; there was something healthy about coming onto base looking like a truck driver and getting away with it — it was a concrete sign that seal Team Seven was different than the rest of the Navy, and therefore better. One last time Morris ran his hands through his weirdly short hair and looked around the cargo compartment of the Air Force KC-10H/A transport jet, the plane illuminated only by a few dim hooded red lights.

Unloaded, the KC-10’s interior was cavernous, but tonight it held two dozen tons of combat equipment and three augmented platoons of Team Seven, each platoon manned by thirty-three of the meanest sons of bitches in all of the U.S. armed forces. Or any armed force. Morris looked around him at the men — almost without exception, they were all sleeping. In a way, that would be expected, since they’d been flying for what seemed like days, and it was well after midnight local time. But it was also odd, for these men were only hours from the biggest and hottest combat operation the team had seen since the bloody liberation of the USS Tampa two years before. Many of the men were not expected to return from the mission, and some who would return would leave parts of their bodies behind. Still, Morris thought, they would be in better shape than the UIF people in General Sihoud’s bunker complex.

One of the aircrew from the flight deck came back into the cargo cabin and waved ten fingers at Morris — ten minutes till they were over the drop zone. Morris heard the jet engines suddenly throttle up, their noise rattling his skull.

The plane cabin tilted upward dramatically as the aircraft climbed. Morris unlatched his seat harness and stood, his muscles sore from the long jet ride. He stepped forward, leaning into the incline of the deck, tapping awake his sleeping executive officer, Lieutenant Commander “Black Bart” Bartholomay. As Bart’s eyes opened, Morris shouted “ten minutes” in his face. Bart stood and got the men into action while Morris headed forward. He entered a short narrow corridor at the forward end of the cargo bay, the doors on either wall leading to crew quarters, galley, and the head. At the end of the passageway Morris pushed open the door to the flight deck and squeezed in. The flight crew barely noticed him, the navigator/flight engineer knowing his purpose.

“You sure we’re in the right place?” Morris asked. He’d been disappointed before by the Air Force, once having been dropped fifty miles south of the planned jump point, landing his platoon several miles offshore instead of on the beach.

“We got here somewhat roundabout. Commander — we had a few radar detects. This good enough for you?” The flight-suited crewman pointed out the navigation satellite readout and offered a chart up to Morris’s face. After a moment Morris grunted.

“We’re doing the pop-up now. Commander. About time to get ready with your guys.”

“Any sign of activity?” Morris asked, ignoring the officer’s warning. The Air Force “zoomies” knew what he meant, Morris thought — is anyone getting ready to shoot us out of the sky?

“Nothing now. We’re clear.”

Morris turned and left without a word and hurried aft.

Within two minutes all three platoons of Team Seven were on their feet preparing their gear. The deck of the cargo jet remained inclined as it continued its rapid climb to 45,000 feet.

While at altitude they would be vulnerable, Morris thought, checking his watch, wishing he were already in free fall instead of another piece of cargo in a damned Air Force jet.

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.

ASHKHABAD, TURKMENISTAN

MAIN BUNKER COMPLEX

HEADQUARTERS OF THE COMBINED ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED ISLAMIC FRONT

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.