Strike Force Delta (33 page)

And Ozzi was alone, lost and bleeding, once again.

The Chief had packed his bags hastily. He'd thrown some dirty clothes in one and as much money as he could grab in thirty seconds into the other. American dollars, some euros, a few gold pieces. He was worth a lot more, so he would be leaving a lot behind. But time was the important thing now. He'd been forced to move quickly.

All this happened just minutes after he'd been shot at on top of the Holy Towers roof and just minutes before the American had actually landed up there and hoisted their flag. Khrash was in flames around him. There were explosions going off every few seconds, and the tracer fire in the streets and the sky above was almost blinding. His men were in full retreat, just to get away from the chaos alone, and now the Chief didn't blame them. These Crazy Americans
were
devils and at last the Chief wanted nothing to do with them.

He knew Khrash would never be the same. No more privileges in the face of religious law, no more perverted sex trysts. Even if the Americans were somehow stopped this nightmarish night, the Chief did not want to live in rubble.

So he was getting out. Just he and his two bags of possessions. He was leaving a wife and 17 children behind.

His driver knew a secret way out of the city. It involved driving through the western part of Khrash, along a road that hugged the river, to a rough trail that ran to the southernmost point of the city limits. From there, an even rougher trail would carry them 15 miles to another bridge that was used only by the Iranian military—the typical ones, anyway.

If the Chief reached this outpost, he would be safe. Crossing this bridge and then going through a small opening between two mountains beyond would put him in the promised land of Iran by morning. It would be a rough journey, but that didn't bother the Chief. Getting out with his skin was the most important thing.

His driver was waiting for the Chief when he finally ran out of his quarters to the debris-strewn street. The Chief jumped inside the Land Rover, preferring the backseat. His driver had one more thing of value with him, taken from the Chief's blast-proof safe box at the blockhouse, his unofficial HQ deep in the Old Quarter. It was a package holding three CDs. On these CDs were the names of every person in the Qimnuz, 22,517 in all, with a notation beside each name measuring that person's loyalty to the religious police. About two-thirds were considered loyal; the rest, less so.

The Chief knew this list was extremely valuable, more so than his money and bling. Someday what was happening in Khrash would be avenged—maybe a lot sooner than people would think. That's just the way things went in this part of the world. Eventually the Americans would all be killed or go away and then old scores would be settled. Those few thousand people listed on the CDs as not considered loyal would be the first ones to pay the price. At the very least, he knew the
Iranian secret police would appreciate the information he would be carrying with him. It would make his life in the country next door that much easier.

They'd set out just as the Scramble helicopter was landing atop the Holy Tower. They got about two blocks when one of the F-14s came right over them, at practically rooftop height, dropping a bomb on a gun position just off the main square while firing its nose cannon at a target several blocks away. The huge jet screamed so close to the Chief's vehicle, he could have reached out and touched it. Then just as quickly, the jet was gone—and off they went.

It took a few minutes of steering around all the debris in the streets, as well as the bodies and the retreating fighters, for them to find the road that would take them down to the river. From there they would get on the river way itself—and that would lead them to their escape point. They could be out of the fighting completely in just a matter of minutes.

And that's where they were now. But even this side road was littered with burning debris. Wrecked vehicles and military equipment, the victims of the nonstop air attacks. Buildings on either side of the road were aflame. And again, there were bodies everywhere. And the noise of explosions going off was absolutely deafening.

The dirt road nevertheless brought them through one last large section of the city that was totally engulfed in flames. Once past these structures, though, they found themselves driving by a burning field. But from here to the river there was no other traffic or anything blocking the road.

They did pass small groups of the city's defenders along the way. All of these men were dazed and confused;
many were injured and bleeding as well. They were all leaderless, too, and at first sight of the Chief's well-known Land Rover they cheered, thinking finally someone was going to rally them to counterattack the Crazy Americans. But each time the cheering was extremely abrupt as the Chief's car approached them at high speed—and kept right on going. Not a wave, not a salute. Not a toot of the horn. Nothing.

The Chief didn't have time for them. He was getting out as fast as he could.

They finally made the river's edge and turned south. This roadway really was no more than a glorified trail, but the Land Rover had no problem negotiating it at full-out speed.

Though it was a rough and bumpy ride, the Chief was still able to look out on the river. To his great surprise, many parts of the surface were aflame. He knew that the ammunition and weapons boats had been expected in the city sometime during the night. Now it was apparent that these boats had been caught out in the open and sunk by the Americans. It was a frightening sight, all the burning water rushing by. No replacement weapons, no extra ammunition? The Chief was glad he left when he did.

When they reached the southern point of the city a few minutes later, unscathed, the Chief almost became giddy. The mountains were right in front of them now—just an hour or so from here and they would make the small military bridge downstream. Most of the fighting was behind them. Off to the left, the southern edge of the city, where the many warehouses were located, was still dark and uninvolved.

The Chief no longer wanted any part of that, either.
He was already thinking about his new life. Single, wealthy, connected, and possessing valuable information. Things might be pretty good for him, living in a ground-level
boit
in Tehran. He was getting tired of Afghanistan anyway.

These sweet dreams would last but a few seconds, though. They went around a bend in the trail—and found a huge hovering helicopter suddenly blocking their path.

It was if the aircraft materialized out of nothingness. How could it have flown in here so stealthily? The Chief didn't want to believe it was there at first. Only after he blinked his eyes several times was he convinced this thing was real. And that meant real trouble.

This helicopter was definitely not of the same type as had been attacking the city relentlessly all night. This one had two huge rotors, one at each end; it resembled a nightmarish flying banana. There were heavily armed men jumping out of its access doors and heading right for the Land Rover.

The driver slammed on the brakes, which was probably the worst thing to do. It gave the hovering helicopter the time to finally set down on the trail, blocking any hope of speeding under it and getting away. The Chief now threw up, he was so scared. He screamed for his driver to open fire on the men. It was clear that this he did not want to do, but the Chief's screams caused him to take the AK-47 on the seat beside him and fire it out the open window at the black-uniformed soldiers.

At the moment this happened, the Chief bailed. He opened the door, grabbed his bags, and was out of the truck, this just as the first fusillade of return fire hit it. There was a storm of tracers, but also two pumped
grenades came flying through the night. They hit simultaneously and the Land Rover went up in a ball of flame, taking the hapless driver with it. In that moment of smoke and chaos, the Chief rolled himself through the grass and into the river.

The black-uniformed soldiers saw him but did little in the way of pursuit. The Chief felt lucky—for about a second. That's when the current caught him. He didn't know how to swim. He lost the bags in a second; the CDs were ripped out of his pocket an instant later.

He was quickly caught in a whirlpool that sent him round and round for a few terrifying seconds, long enough for the black-uniformed troops to make it to the riverbank. They could clearly see him, but none of them bothered to shoot. It was obvious he was drowning.

Water soon began entering the Chief's mouth. He turned to see that he was actually heading for a wall of fire. The conflagration that was burning away on the water's surface had reached this far up the river and was about to engulf him.

By fire or water, he was soon going to die, and the Chief knew it. That's why it was so strange that his last thoughts were not about his family or a flashing of his life before his eyes.

They were about the soldiers who had just killed his driver and were now watching him drown. They were obviously American; he could tell by the uniforms and their huge builds.

But what was so odd was the soldiers themselves.

He could clearly see their faces in these last seconds of life, lit up by the approaching wave of liquid fire.

Every one of them was a black man.

It was Delta Thunder.

Somehow, someway, Murphy had arranged for a Chinook helicopter from the USS
Reagan
, which was also cruising the Gulf, to pick them up and deliver them to this weird fight. A hell-raising low-level high-speed flight followed, and suddenly here they were.

The only caveat was that the Navy guys flying the Chinook would not get involved in the fighting. That's why they'd been dropped so far from town.

They formed up again and started marching along the riverbank toward the city. It seemed to them that half of Khrash was in flames, which was not that far from the truth.

They knew very little about what was going on exactly. They knew what Murphy knew up to two hours ago, that the operation had started and from the scrambled reports coming from the
Psyclops
plane things seemed to be going OK—or at least it hadn't turned into a disaster yet. They knew nothing, though, about what had been seen—or more accurately
not seen
—on Li's execution tape.

They'd made it a half-mile up the river when they heard an aircraft approaching, a helicopter. They were sure it was one of the team's Blackhawks, but the squad took cover anyway. It was a good thing they did, for as it turned out, it
wasn't
one of the three Superhawks.

To the astonishment of the Thunder team, it was a Bell-72 military copter. But not just any Bell-72. This was the same French B-72 helicopter that had left them high and dry in the border clearing back in Africa. None of them would ever forget what it looked like.

It flew right over them, traveling along the nap of the
river. Instantly every man in the eight-man Thunder squad raised his weapon to shoot at it, a natural reaction. But they were so stunned upon seeing it, and were still stunned now, that it was out of range before they could fully snap out of it. Soon it disappeared in the darkness.

That's when they all just looked at one another, the same expression on each man's face.

Did we really just see that? Was that really the same helicopter?

If so, what the hell was it doing out here?

Dave Hunn finally reached the place called Al Sharim. One of the highest points in Khrash, it was a berm about 150 feet in elevation, located a half-mile from the center of town. A rare, flattened-out part of the city, the area had once featured a soccer field and a park nearby. The berm itself faced west.

This was Hunn's IP. The goal of his charge through the heart of the city. He could clearly see the huge American flag flying from the top of the Holy Tower. He could also see the fires out on the river, and he could hear the copters and at least one of the F-14s flying somewhere overhead. But Hunn knew the fighting wasn't over quite yet.

What faced him now on the other side of the berm was the neighborhood of Hasha. It was made up almost entirely of truck garages, old factories, and junkyards, the worst of Khrash's grimy industrial section. Beyond this metallic wasteland was the city's western edge, where hundreds of hard-core Al Qaeda fighters were still theoretically holed up.

The plan had called for Hunn to switch tactics should
he ever find himself here, at his goal point, atop the Al Sharim berm. Going up against a lot of Al Qaeda fighters, with a junkyard for a battlefield, was just asking for trouble. There was a good chance some of the hard-core mooks were already in Hasha, hiding among the wrecked cars and abandoned buildings or at the very least booby-trapping the place. If Hunn and his men ventured into the grubby trash-strewn area, it was likely they would never come out.

That's why they were going to let someone else do the dirty work for them.

Hunn had about a dozen flares left. He stood atop the berm and looked behind him, past the rolling hills on the other side of the city's main gate, to the mountains beyond. Up there, somewhere, was Tarik Aboo's second cousin—or was it his third? Whatever, the guy was in charge of six 188mm artillery pieces and plenty of ammunition. Tarik had arranged for a 20-minute bombardment. As the artillerymen already had the firing coordinates for the Hasha neighborhood, it was simply up to Hunn to signal them by shooting off three flares. If they saw another three flares from Hunn about five minutes into the bombardment, they would know that they'd destroyed the target. At that point, they would extend their range so their shells would fall onto the west side of the city itself, where the Al Qaeda fighters had been taking their vacations from murder.