Chapter 26
Turkey/Georgia Border
“Range?” Clark asked. He was seated on the jump seat behind the two pilots, a nighttime panorama before them.
“Five nautical,” Ross called out from the right seat. She was wearing NODs, giving her the best view of their target. The distance wasn’t exact—there was no laser or radar ranging—but it was close enough for Clark.
“How far are they from the border checkpoint?”
Ross referenced her map display. They had identified two possible border-crossing points between Georgia and Turkey, and twenty minutes ago their quarry had chosen the southernmost of the two—probably because it was the smaller of the two checkpoints.
The road looped north around Kartsakhi Lake, and Ross had pointed out that they weren’t far from the tri-border junction with Armenia.
As if I needed more complications, Clark thought.
“I show the crossing point thirteen miles in front of our targets,” said Ross.
“And they’re going a mile a minute,” said Wheeler. “It’s going to be close. How do want to do this, Mr. Clark?”
Clark had seen this scenario coming: a race to stop the GAZ while it was still on Turkish soil. His thoughts hammered away at the tactical question: How to stop a speeding convoy, which included a ten-ton truck, with light weapons? Variables churned. Options were discarded.
“Doctor?” he said, turning to Ding. Chavez was standing directly behind Clark and had been following the entire exchange. The “doctor” bit had been going on for the last month—their private cue for a second opinion.
“No time for a proper ambush, and we’re short on firepower.
I say we stay high, pass them on the lake side.
We’d have to keep a good distance—no telling how many more SAMs they’ve got.
Once we’re in front, we land in the road and unload fast, then get the airplane back up in the air to keep it out of harm’s way.
The hard part’s going to be getting these guys to stop so we can engage. ”
“We have to disable the truck,” Clark said. “If we can do that, I figure the others will stop to defend it.”
“The question is, how?”
“We blow the road.”
Ding looked at Clark incredulously. “With what? We didn’t bring any C-4 or…Oh, no. Seriously?”
“No sense in letting them go to waste.”
Clark saw a humorless smile crease his son-in-law’s face. Which he took as acquiescence. He slapped Wheeler twice on the shoulder. “Can you put us in front of them in the next five minutes?”
A brief pause as Wheeler did the mental math. “Probably. But not a second less.”
“Do it.” Clark went aft and began briefing the plan.
As he did, the engine noise rose to a crescendo, Wheeler pushing the power to the redline.
Clark’s own tachometer held steady. His focused narrowed.
It might have been that he was getting older, but lately he found himself focusing less on the ramifications of his work than its fundamental execution.
Politics, strategy, fallout. Others in D.C.
could deal with that. Clark concentrated on the impact he and his team could have in a given moment.
The here and now. Which, when distilled so purely, often translated to how many men they could kill.
That question was about to be answered.
—
Touchdown was remarkably smooth, the little C-41 squeaking onto the two-lane road like it had been greased.
The landing was doubly impressive given that it had been performed lights-out, although Wheeler had donned his night vision gear for the approach.
Nothing would give away their position quicker than a set of aircraft landing lights.
For the same reason, all the aircraft’s navigation lights had been extinguished.
The airplane came to a stop after an astonishingly short rollout.
Wheeler left the engines running for a “hot unload.” Ross went aft, deployed the aft loading ramp, and all seven team members ran out into the night.
Ross raised the ramp and hurried back to her seat.
The entire exercise took ninety seconds.
Wheeler pirouetted the C-41 on the road, goosed the throttles, and soon they were airborne in the opposite direction.
Clark instantly began surveying his chosen battlefield.
The terrain was flat and almost featureless, farm fields in the distance.
The broad lake two hundred yards south was like a mirror in the night.
There was no high ground, so Clark looked for cover.
The roadbed was slightly raised, and he saw one advantageous position, a small roadside pull-off with a raised shoulder.
“That’ll be our southern firing position,” he said.
“Ding, Hyori, Toussaint—set up on the other side. Find the best cover within forty yards of the road. The rest of us will post up here.”
“Here they come,” Wu said, gesturing up the road.
Clark saw three sets of headlights in the distance, still miles away, but closing in fast. “Not much time,” he said.
He pointed to Bauer and Wu, who were carrying their secret weapons—each had one of the unused limpet mines from the Tartus mission.
“Fifty yards up the road.” Clark didn’t need to say more. They both ran off.
The specifics of the plan had been conjured during the last minutes of the flight, fine-tuned by a team of professionals who weren’t afraid to speak up.
They were facing serious disadvantages for the kind of firefight that loomed.
They had come here straight from the Tartus mission, where they’d been geared for underwater ops.
They had light weapons—assault rifles and handguns—to engage a force that was twice their size and probably carrying more firepower.
They also didn’t have standard comms, having relied on the submersible messaging units in Tartus that were integral to the DPDs.
Altogether, it meant tonight would be old-school, a lot of shouting and hand signals.
Clark was concerned. But he wasn’t worried.
He had assembled a stellar team from around the world, the best of the best. And while they’d been together less than a year, Task Force 99 had gelled in ways that were hard to describe.
They worked as a unit, instinctively knowing where teammates were and what they were thinking.
Tonight, they would have the advantage of surprise.
Better yet, they had the advantage of experience.
As Clark knew all too well, however, the fog of war could steal any advantage.
Wu and Hyori began furiously digging holes in the roadbed, one on either side—thankfully there had been two trenching tools in their equipment load.
Their goal was to bury the limpet mines as deeply as possible beneath the tarmac.
This had nothing to do with concealment, but was an attempt to amplify the blast effect.
The next-generation maritime charges were shaped to detonate in a highly specific manner, pitting the forces of water against those of a steel hull.
Here, simply placing them on the road would have done little more than create a new pothole as the blast energy dissipated upward.
By burying the charges, however, their destructive force would be better channeled into damaging the road. Not potholes, but craters.
The digging wasn’t the only improvisation required.
Since the mines functioned on a timer, they could not be detonated on command at the optimal moment—when a vehicle was passing directly overhead.
The best bet, everyone had agreed, was to blow two large holes in the road moments before the convoy arrived.
If enough dirt and shrapnel went flying the lead driver couldn’t miss it.
With any luck, all three vehicles would grind to a stop, putting them in the middle of a withering cross fire.
“Remember,” Clark called out as he trotted toward the raised parking apron, “our primary objective is JC. He’s most likely in the box truck, so keep your fire tight to avoid the sidewalls. The other two vehicles are fair game.”
“Time?” Wu shouted from up the road.
Clark checked the headlights, wishing he had the range finder—they had brought one, but Ding was carrying it. Distance was maddeningly difficult to estimate at night. “Two minutes!” he called back.
Clark took a hack on his watch, a seemingly indestructible Victorinox analog. Fortunately, the timers on the mines were digital—a vast improvement from the mechanical egg timers he’d used during his early days as a SEAL, which were wildly unpredictable.
Moments later, Wu and Bauer dove into position beside Clark and Charlie.
The graded gravel shoulder provided a two-foot ridge above the surrounding terrain, decent cover as long as they stayed low.
Clark looked across the road and couldn’t see Ding and the others.
The hardpan earth looked hopelessly flat in the moonlight, but they’d somehow found concealment.
The headlights grew more intense, and soon Clark could distinguish between the three vehicles. He alternated between his NODs and a naked-eye view.
“No other cars in sight,” Charlie said, her SIG poised and her eye scanning through the optic.
“That’s a good thing.”
“Looks like the GAZ is in front,” she added.
“I’d rather it was in the middle so we could box it in, but you get what you get.”
The headlights became brighter, more defined. Clark kept checking his watch. If anything, he had called it too close. If the mines went off after the convoy passed, their only option would be to unleash on the tires and drivers, and hope that was enough to stop them.
“Should have set the timer to a minute forty,” he muttered.
“Maybe so,” she said, checking her own watch.
Half a mile out, Clark heard the engines, the big diesel of the GAZ dominating.
Half a mile, thirty-five seconds to go, Clark thought. Shit! “If the truck gets past the mines,” he called out, “open up!”
“Next time we should put a reference on the mines,” Charlie said. “A stick or something, so we know exactly where they are.”
He glanced over at her. Her eye was locked behind her glass and she was grinning.
“Yeah,” he deadpanned. “Next time.”
Clark shouldered his rifle.
The sound of the big diesel shook the night as it closed in on the IEDs. Clark no longer checked his watch. His attention was absolute. He felt a brush of wind on his left cheek. Instinct advised a minor crosswind correction, but at this range it hardly mattered.
The GAZ reached the mined portion of the road. Nothing happened. Clark’s reticle centered on the truck’s side window. His finger was pressuring the trigger when two explosions rocked the night.