Strike Force Delta (23 page)

The two jets went down even lower, if that was possible; they reduced their airspeed, too. Now just a few blocks away from the huge ornate mosque, both planes put their noses up sharply and dropped four bombs each. This slow-motion lobbing technique resulted in all eight bombs—two tons of explosives—hitting the mosque squarely on its minaret.

The impact caused an explosion that turned night into day. An instant after that, there was another explosion, just as grand, just as bright. Then came another, and another. . . .

The bombs had found the huge stockpile of weapons and explosives hidden in the basement of the mosque by the Chief's men. Things started lighting off in a big way, this as the two planes rode right through the massive fireballs, turning this time to the east. The noise was incredible. The flames rising so high and being so concentrated, they created a mini–mushroom cloud.

When the smoke was blown away a few seconds later, not only was the Grand Mosque gone—every building within two blocks of it was gone, too.

Now the two planes, weighing slightly less, headed for the minor mosque located in the city's Old Quarter. This structure known as the Easter Moon Mosque was more than 300 years old; it was also filled with explosives and weapons, especially RPGs. The holy building received the same treatment as the first—four bombs from each slow-moving plane, two tons of explosives slamming into a dozen tons of the same inside. Another great explosion, another bright flash of light. Another mushroom cloud streaming up into the night. Another gust of wind, another peek at the destruction. As before, more than six blocks of buildings, including the three
century-old mosque, had been turned to searing rubble.

Still locked in the searchlights, the planes turned back to the west. The Red Star Mosque, also known as the poor people's mosque, was located in this part of the New Quarter of the city. It was here that the religious police had stored hundreds of gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel.

There was a storm of antiaircraft fire coming up at the two raiders now. What had looked like Dresden a few minutes before now looked like Baghdad, January 1991. The two planes pressed on, though, throwing four more bombs each into this third mosque, igniting all that fuel and creating a flash brighter than the two previous ones combined. This time there was a fireball that didn't dissipate. Fueled by all the gasoline and diesel, it spread a burning, napalmlike substance all over this western neighborhood, creating a small firestorm. As most of the buildings down here were made of wood, rather than stone—it was the poor section—the fire was quickly raging out of control.

Only then did the two planes, now free of their ordnance, finally accelerate and disappear over the mountains in the north, leaving the stunned people inside the city to assess the damage.

Three parts of Khrash were on fire. More than half the city's ammunition, explosives, and fuel was gone. Many of the top religious police commanders, caught inside the mosques, were dead.

All in less than three minutes.

Even to the most uneducated on the ground, it was quickly apparent this had not been done by typical Americans.

And that was
very
scary.

Red Curry was one of the bravest men Ryder Long had ever met.

Though Curry had flown jet aircraft before he joined USAF Special Operations as a copter pilot, he'd never piloted an aircraft like an F-14 before. First, he was Air Force and the F-14 was a Navy jet. Second, it was big and old. Third, these Iranian versions were big and old
and
just barely airworthy. It was all Ryder could do to keep his own beast in the air, and he'd had thousands of hours in jets. He didn't know how Curry was able to do it.

They were now circling Obo Field, draining off speed before coming in for a landing. The surprise bombing-raid run on Khrash, it being the first step in the team's final option plan, had been a success. But not without a price. The pair of Tomcats had been so overloaded with bombs, the strain on their engines, already in bad condition, had been close to catastrophic for both of them.

Just taking off from Obo proved to be a nightmare.
At thirty-five hundred feet, the runway held just the bare minimum of roll distance for an F-14 that
wasn't
carrying any bombs. As it was, both jets used every inch of the bumpy airstrip just to fling themselves off the Obo ridge and out into the turbulent air between the mountains beyond, praying all the way for some wind beneath their wings. It made taking off from a carrier seem like kid's stuff. Again, it had been a puckering adventure for Ryder—he couldn't imagine what it was like for Curry.

Somehow they made the liftoff, though, went over Khrash, dropped their pianos, and made it back alive. But now here was the hard part. Landing again, on the portable arresting wire setup that no one at Obo was really sure had been installed correctly. And it was Curry who was going to try to land first.

The problem was that while they had stolen the mobile arresting gear fairly easily, the damn thing didn't come with an instruction book. They had no idea how taut to pull the wire that would catch the jet's arrestor hook. The Spooks had tried to help, suggesting tension data they'd gleaned from the Internet, but it was all relative to stopping planes at sea, on carriers, not a few miles up, in Arctic-like conditions.

The first time they'd banged in at Obo, the cable had been pulled too tight—the Ghosts had guessed at the needed tension, and it had been too much. It nearly ripped the arrestor hooks from both Tomcats. Some of the tension had been relieved from the wire for their second landing, after hijacking the
Psyclops
plane, but it was still a guess on the right amount and it wound up being too slack. Both Ryder and Curry nearly wound up at the bottom of the next mountain over. Now they had put a new tension setting on it. But again, too much and
the plane would tear itself apart. Not enough and the plane would go over the cliff.

That's why Curry volunteered to land first, on the premise that as Ryder was the better pilot and the team's CO, he would be more needed should anything go wrong with the cable. This was a fatalistic decision if there ever was one—but that's how the Ghosts were operating these days. Most, if not all, believed that their days were numbered. In fact, some of the team members were so hardened by now, going out in a blaze of glory was not all that objectionable to them. This was just another occupational hazard, part of the price of being thought of as “America's terrorists.”

Besides, as corny and melodramatic and clichéd as it sounded, this one
was
personal. And to a degree, everyone in the team shared it. It was ironic that Li never thought of herself as one of them. Even the guys who'd only known her for the few days they'd all spent on the ship considered her as much a part of the Ghosts as Murphy. For the slime of Al Qaeda to take away such a beautiful creature was a crime against nature itself. That's why they were here, on the moon, ready to take back the pound of flesh.

That's why they knew if one, two, or all of them cashed in during this, their last mission, it would have at least been in pursuit of a very noble cause.

There weren't many better ways to go.

It took Curry three tries, but he finally managed to put his F-14 on the ground. The noise the portable cable setup made when his Tomcat's hook caught was so loud, Ryder heard it plainly even though he was flying several hundred feet above and riding on top of two very noisy
engines. Bouncing around his crash helmet, it was the most horrible grinding sound.

It was amazing the damn wire didn't snap, which actually would have meant big trouble for both of them. But the cable held and Curry was down, and even now the Ghosts were pushing his F-14 off the runway. With the horrible noise still echoing in his ears, Ryder put the nose of his own Tomcat to the ground and started his landing approach.

Again, this was his third time banging in at Obo, and as the first two had been a bitch, he couldn't help but wonder if this time something really would go wrong. But the good thing about such thoughts, like landing on aircraft carriers or at a shoestring base like this, was that everything was happening so fast that by the time you started worrying about it, it was over.

That's what happened now as Ryder fell out of the sky and slammed onto the broken runway, snagging the arrestor cable on the first try. The god-awful sound echoed again, and he was yanked to a stop from 120 mph—all in two seconds. Like having sex in a car wreck was how someone had once described tail-hook landings. For Ryder, this one featured only the car wreck.

But he was down and he was stopped and that's all that mattered. The Ghosts came out of the support buildings and pushed his plane off to the side as they had just done with Curry's.

But Ryder and Curry wouldn't be staying long this time, only until the last of the bombs were put on their planes and the last of their allotted fuel put into their tanks. Then they would be heading back to Khrash—there would be no attacking-at-dawn shit for them.

Everyone around Ryder was moving fast. People
were running everywhere. They'd all been briefed on the plan, the ominous-sounding final option. Three dozen people invading a whole city, with very little help? Would it work? Could it work? No one knew. And again, at the moment, no one really cared. They were going to do it, win or lose, for Li.

Ryder rolled up to the second support building. Curry's plane was already inside. Ryder jumped from his 'Cat and immediately began helping the Marine mechanics load more bombs onto Curry's dilapidated F-14, this while Curry himself was up in the cockpit hot-wiring his auxiliary oxygen system, which had taken a largecaliber round square on during their surprise attack on Khrash.

The miracle was that either F-14 was flying at all. Again, the Tomcat was the Navy's premier fighter-interceptor. Its job was to protect America's supercarriers from incoming aerial threats, be they enemy airplanes or missiles. But the team had done a field modification that even the Navy was somewhat reluctant to do. Starting around the time of the first Gulf War, the Navy began flying F-14s in the expanded role of dropping bombs as well as carrying out fleet defense. Some results were mixed, but when it happened, the F-14 Tomcat went from being a purely defensive aircraft to one adapted for offense as well. The Tomcats became Bombcats.

The two Iranian shit boxes carried rudimentary equipment that would allow them to perform this offensive capability. But it was only the minimum setup: just two hard points on each plane on which to attach five-hundred-pound bombs. The Ghosts had stolen
two dozen
of the mud movers from the Iranians and wanted to drop them all, and not just two at a time. So prior to the Khrash raid, Ryder, Curry, and a gaggle of the Marine
mechanics had jimmy-rigged a system that allowed the F-14s to carry up to 12 of the five-hundred-pounders each, hot-wiring a number of temporary hard points that could each drop bombs separately. All these wires and the Rube Goldberg devices that controlled them took time and attention during the bombing run, hard to do especially while getting shot at
and
trying to zero in on the target. But Ryder and Curry's raid on the dirty little city had gone surprisingly well and everything had worked. So now they were back to get bombed up and go again.

They were just hoisting the last two bombs onto Curry's jet when the chief of the Marine mechanics called Ryder out from under the F-14. He had some bad news. He and his men had looked over both fighter jets, and both were now unflyable.

“It's not the combat but the landings and the take-offs,” the chief mechanic told him. He explained that their most recent departure, with both jets insanely overloaded with bombs, had literally twisted the fuselages on both planes out of whack, the torque had been that severe. Rivets had popped near the tail section on both planes, their fuel tanks had sprung leaks, and some secondary interior wing systems were now all jammed up. As for the landings, the runway at Obo was not really “soft” asphalt or the relatively flexible surface of a Navy aircraft carrier. It was solid rock, with no give when many tons of airplane slammed into it, going 120 mph. The jets' landing gear were the victims here, the chief mechanic said. On both planes, there were cracks from the wheel wells right up the hydraulic extension and into the retracting gears. Any shock-absorbing
properties contained in the undercarriage were now nonexistent.

In the chief mehanic's opinion, the two Bombcats might be able to weather one more takeoff. But neither the gear nor the twisted fuselage would survive another arrestor hook landing.

Ryder heard him out but then just smiled. The guy was being sincere as hell, but he was missing part of the picture here.

“Don't worry about it, Chief,” Ryder finally told him. “Once we take off from here this time, we won't be coming back . . . .”

That the big
Psyclops
aircraft fit inside the third support building at Obo was just one more minor miracle of the operation.

Actually, the wingtips scraped the sides of the building's door going in, but a couple scratches on the paint job were the only result. This was where the big plane was hidden after its earsplitting low-level flight over Khrash. This was where it was now, as night was falling again.

J. C. Dow, Clancy, and the rest of the crew were huddled within the interior of the airplane, waiting, just like everyone else. They were more than 24 hours overdue returning to their home base at Abok, in eastern Afghanistan, and they were sure, officially at least, their airplane was considered “lost” by this time. Search planes had no doubt been dispatched to look for them—or their wreckage. But as their flight plan when they “disappeared” was more than 200 miles northwest of Obo, those search planes wouldn't start looking for them so
far off-course down here in the Qimruz, for at least another 48 hours. Whatever was going to happen with Khrash would have transpired by then—and they were going to be in the thick of it, by their own choice. So if the United States had already contacted their families to report them as missing, then maybe it was just a case of bad news being premature.