Chapter 71
SOMEWHERE OVER IRAQ
THE convoy materialized out of the darkness as the Black Hawk crested a dune.
Coleman was no stranger to flying nap-of-the-earth, but even by special operations standards, the pilots were low. At one point, the flight had crossed over a Bedouin encampment, and Coleman had sworn the helicopter had nosed up in order to clear the tents.
He couldn’t see the altimeter from where he was seated, but Coleman didn’t think they were much higher than fifty feet above the sand.
Though much degraded from its pinnacle prior to Operation Desert Storm, the clusters of air defense radars that kept watch over Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia could not be ignored.
But neither could the undulating sand dunes that were notoriously difficult to see under night vision goggles.
Or the Bedouin encampments dotting the desert.
“Target dead ahead, sir. Permission to engage?”
The question voiced over the Black Hawk’s intercom system was directed to Coleman, but he knew it wasn’t just the lives of his assaulters that rested on his answer. Turning, he leaned closer so that Hurley could hear him over the ambient engine noise.
“That’s it,” Coleman said, pointing toward the vehicles snaking along the highway. “Last chance.”
“Execute,” Hurley said without pause. “He knows not to be in the first two vehicles.”
Coleman admired the spook’s decisiveness, but Hurley’s answer did not alleviate the burden of command that had settled on his shoulders.
There was only one way to take down the convoy while minimizing the risk to his frogmen.
The SEALs knew there was the potential of a friendly embedded in the trucks, and while difficult, the men could handle sorting hostages from captors.
The two security trucks were a different matter.
“Flight, this is Spartan 6,” Coleman radioed. “Execute, execute, execute.”
He gave the order three times as per standard operating procedure to ensure there was no confusion, but the assault began the moment the first execute crackled across the airwaves.
The lead Black Hawk’s nose pitched violently upward as the pilot brought the helicopter to a hover abeam the convoy’s security vehicle.
An instant later what looked like a pair of red tentacles licked out from the Black Hawk and undulated across the first two trucks.
The minigun opposite Hurley spooled to life and 7.
62mm rounds streaked toward the convoy’s trail vehicle at a rate of almost fifty per second.
Ricochets shot into the air at odd angles, resembling bottle rockets careening skyward.
Judging by the state of the targeted vehicle, the majority of the rounds were hitting home.
The truck’s tires erupted, smoke poured from the engine block, and glass shattered.
The vehicle rocked on its shocks as the crew chief poured another burst into the frame.
Then the minigun fell silent.
This was because death of another sort was descending upon the beleaguered convoy.
Green forms flowed across the open terrain toward the now-halted convoy.
As per the plan he’d painstakingly briefed, the helicopters containing the assault team had used the distraction offered by the miniguns to land and discharge their deadly cargo.
Coleman’s frogmen fired as they moved. Their smooth and steady advance was a thing of beauty.
The sort of tactical ballet that could only be achieved by spending thousands upon thousands of hours practicing close-quarters battle drills in shoot houses and flat ranges.
His SEALs made dealing death on the move look easy.
In another handful of seconds, the lead assaulters would reach the trucks, and this would be over.
Everything was progressing according to plan.
“Spartan 6, this is Grip 23.”
Coleman frowned.
The transmission was from the C-130s and had come across the air-to-air frequency. The pilots were supposed to maintain radio silence until he announced that the convoy was secure.
Something wasn’t right.
Coleman turned the radio selector switch to the UHF air-to-air radio and keyed his mic. “Go for Spartan 6.”
“Roger, Spartan 6. We just had a pair of fast movers conduct a flyby. They looked like F-15s, over.”
Coleman stared at the radio as he processed what had just been relayed. “Are they ours?”
“Unknown. Couldn’t see the tail markings, but I don’t think so. They were definitely conducting a visual inspection of us. Makes me think they didn’t know who we were either, over.”
Coleman was about to reply when something else demanded his attention.
Twin fireballs.