Strike Force Delta (26 page)

But Ozzi's squad also had a secondary mission down here. Utilities used underground tunnels, and tunnels offered perfect hiding places to set up ambushes. Gunmen could pop up through a manhole, fire away, and then disappear again. Many of the city's utility tunnels began and ended here at Kuhada Circle. If the mooks were going to use them for dirty work, they'd probably try to either enter the tunnels here or use them as their means of escape.

Taking out the utility buildings could have been done by an air strike. But because the manhole covers were scattered all over the circle, it would have been almost
impossible for aerial bombs to get them all. That's why Ozzi's 1st IF was sent in.

Ozzi was armed with his short-stock M16; his Afghani allies were carrying AK-47s. The Zabul elders, the cousin of Tarik Aboo had assured them, were the tribe's equivalent of Special Forces; that's why Ozzi would be the only Ghost Team member accompanying them. It seemed like a good match. He could speak a little Arabic—not a year ago he was a systems analyst sitting in the smallest office in the Pentagon—and a couple of the Zabul fighters could speak English. Before jumping off, they'd also agreed on hand signals to be used in combat.

They blew up a half-dozen manholes in the first two minutes. It didn't have to be pretty: Two hand grenades down the spout usually did it, as the tunnels were old and for the most part were made of dirt. A few times his fighters wanted to go down into the tunnels and look for the defenders of Khrash, but each time Ozzi managed to diplomatically talk them out of it. There really was no need to be tunnel rats here, like in 'Nam. All they had to do was seal the tunnels from this end. That might be enough to trap a whole lot of mooks inside.

Another ten manholes were taken out before they reached Kuhada Circle itself. The first building they faced was the waterworks. It was a two-story squarish structure; built of typical red bricks, it looked like something built in the nineteenth century. It was unoccupied. There was a massive pipe and a huge control wheel running right next to the building. It seemed as simple an act as turning this wheel would shut off all water in the city. Ozzi instructed his Zabul friends to prepare four
explosive charges. Two would go on the pipe; two would go beside the building itself.

It took five minutes of skulking around, wrapping sticks of dynamite and laying fuse wire, but the building and the water pipe went up in a grand explosion. The
Psyclops
plane flew overhead just as the four blasts were going off and had to bank violently to the right to avoid getting caught in the fireball. Ozzi watched the plane go over, nearly lose its flight envelope, and then recover again, only to fly away. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Through the whole thing, the plane had continued broadcasting the earsplitting mimicry of a huge B-52 raid.

The telephone exchange building was just a few hundred feet on the opposite side of the circle. It was surrounded by a forest of telephone poles and wires. This, too, looked simple. Take out the poles, the poles rip down the telephone lines. End of phone service in Khrash.

Ozzi signaled for more explosives. The blast packs were prepared; Ozzi and the Zabul CO hustled them over themselves. Stretch out the fuse wire, connect the battery, and
bang!
The poles went down like redwoods, causing a series of miniexplosions on top of each pole leading right up into the city. It was like a string of firecrackers going off.

This brought a great cheer from his Zabul friends. The CO said to Ozzi: “Whole city. Busy signal now . . . .”

“Exactly,” Ozzi replied.

Two down, one to go.

They regrouped and made their way toward the last major building in the circle, the Khrash Electric Plant.

They were ready to give it the same treatment when suddenly long streams of tracer bullets cut through the chaotic night. Ozzi and the Zabul hit the dirt immediately. The stream of gunfire was not aimed at them. Rather, it was going across a marsh—and right into the neighborhood fifteen hundred feet away where Ozzi knew Hunn and his men were doing their thing.

Damn
. . . .

Ozzi didn't even think about it. He crawled as close as he could to the electric building and clicked down his NVG gear. The building was a three-story clay structure, almost tent shaped, surrounded by gaggles of wires and transmission poles. The strange thing was, Ozzi could see people moving around inside the building—carrying candles.
Candles?
he thought.
In an electric plant?

It was obvious these people could see and hear Hunn's assault about a quarter-mile away. There was a .50 caliber machine gun set up on the third floor of the electric plant—it was the one doing all the firing. But Ozzi also observed other mooks setting up more weapons on the first and second floors. These firing positions were also aiming at Hunn's attack.

This was all Ozzi had to see. He told the Zabul to stay in place and keep low. Then he pulled out the other weapon he was carrying in addition to his M16. It was a 25.4mm Czech-built naval-load flare gun.

He loaded one of his huge cartridges into the gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The cartridge exploded from the barrel, rode a short arc, and landed practically on the back door of the electric plant building. Everyone inside the building saw the bright green glare, and after
much rushing about, a number of those weapons previously pointing north at Hunn were now pointing at Ozzi and his troop.

The mooks quickly opened fire on them, but Ozzi kept shouting to his guys to stay down, stay cool, and hold their fire. And they waited. Thirty long seconds while the flare burned and the men in the power plant continued shooting at them.

Then came the noise they'd been waiting for. The rumble of rotor blades, the high whine of its supercharged engines.

It was one of the three Blackhawk helicopters. And it came in shooting.

One of the precious Hellfire missiles went right over Ozzi's head. It went through the back door of the power plant and detonated somewhere inside. The building went up like it was made of matchsticks. A huge ball of flame, followed by a tremendous explosion. Ozzi yelled for his guys to still keep their heads down, as they were soon pummeled by a rain of flaming debris.

The helicopter banked hard, came back around, and opened up with its forward-pointing cannons. They tore into the rubble for five long seconds before the copter once again pulled up hard and then fluttered away into the night.

Ozzi then stood up and yelled, “Let's go!” The Zabul leaped from their positions and charged the power plant, guns blazing.

Their attack was ferocious and loud, as it was supposed to be. But it lasted only as long as it took Ozzi and his men to reach the building. When the smoke cleared,
they realized there was nothing left of it but a pile of sizzling rubble.

Ozzi yelled to the Zabul to stop firing. The destruction of the power plant was so complete, there was no way anyone inside could have survived.

Ozzi turned to his two lieutenants and shook hands with them.

“Get the flag,” he told them. “That was easy.”

Ryder had 8 bombs left.

He'd taken off from Obo with 12 under his wings. Two of them helped Kennedy's guys get into the Old Quarter. One had hit a blockhouse on the edge of the same neighborhood—a place Murphy had tagged as a police interrogation headquarters. Another smashed into an ancient bell tower, just a few blocks from the center of the city. There must have been more than bells inside, though, as it went up like a box of matches.

All this happened during his first 5 minutes over Khrash. Now the battle was nearly 10 minutes old and already approaching a sort of critical mass. Ryder had spent the last few minutes buzzing the city, holding on to his bombs until needed and using his cannon sparingly. At the moment, his part of the plan called for him to fly low and create as much noise as possible to add to the substantial commotion the
Psyclops
plane was already making. He would do this by climbing very high over the city, then putting the Bombcat into a heart-stopping dive, kicking in the afterburner and breaking the sound barrier on his way down. Each time he did this, he had to use all his muscles to pull the plane back to level, rocketing over the center of the city, usually
cracking the sound barrier once again. The pair of sonic booms, traveling at approximately the same speed, arrived at approximately the same time, shaking the ancient city right down to its last bloody nail.

At one point, he flew in formation with the strange
Psyclops
plane, going right over the center of the city and watching the mooks scatter below. But what the EC-130 was putting out over its loudspeakers was so intense, Ryder found the sound waves actually rattling the rivets in his beat-up F-14. It got so bad, he had to peel off and get away from the racket.

He then returned to his own buzzing spree, on several occasions flying down the wider streets of the dirty little city no more than 50 feet off the ground. He was flying so low, some unusually brave mooks still stuck up on the roofs by the Chief's defense plan were
shooting down
at him.

So far it seemed that the Americans' plan was working. The confusion throughout the city was huge. Traffic jams, people running through the streets, antiaircraft fire being shot off wildly, causing tons of spent shells to fall back onto the city and sometimes onto the gunners who had just fired them. It was all so persuasive Ryder himself had to resist the temptation to glance upward every once in a while just to make sure a flight of B-52s wasn't up there somewhere.

He could see many fires below him, much smoke, and a real beautiful sight: many small American flags flying from buildings in the eastern part of the city. The flags were Murphy's idea, and it was a good one. It looked like a wave of America's red, white, and blue was slowly engulfing the city.

So this was how they were going to do it. What was
the best way to get Jabal Ben-Wabi? By killing every mook in Khrash and hoping he was among them.

They still had a way to go, though. And it was inevitable that someone in Khrash would figure out that a massive bombing raid wasn't coming. What would happen then was anyone's guess. But so far, so good.

All of this excitement was doing something else, too. It was preventing Ryder from thinking about the Ghosts of Li and his wife, and all the personal stuff that had been tearing him apart ever since this mission began. It was all still there. All the flying and strafing and buzzing and bombing was just a diversion from these disturbing thoughts. And like everything that was repressed, he knew he'd have to deal with it sooner or later. But in this case, it would be preferably later.

It was on one of his buzzing runs that Ryder noticed somehow a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. It wasn't coming for a weapon of any kind. It was more like the light for an acetylene torch.

The strange part was that he'd spotted it in the southern part of the city, a place where absolutely nothing was happening at the moment. No fighting, no confusion. Nothing.

Very weird.

He swung out extra wide this time and rocketed over where he'd spotted the light. It was actually coming from an unblocked window in one warehouse that sat among a sea of warehouses.

It was strictly on instinct or maybe a whim, but he turned again and laid one of the five-hundred-pound bombs right through the window of the place. It went up like a fireworks factory. In seconds a huge fireball was rising in the sky above the southern part of the city.

“Damn,” he whispered to himself. “I wonder what that was?”

There were a dozen intersections leading to the center of Khrash. Crowded with shops, bazaars, and apartment buildings, these crowded crossroads possibly made the most perfect defensive position an army could want in an urban combat setting.

By their very nature, intersections offered fields of interlocking fire. Two weapons were all that was needed to cover four streets. Double that number, with a gun at every corner, and passing in any direction became impossible. Plus, an observer stationed in any building on the four corners could see attackers approaching from any of four directions.

There was a particularly wide intersection in the Old Quarter, just down from where the Eastern Moon Mosque had been destroyed. At the moment, this intersection was bristling with weapons; many of the fighters that Kennedy's 2nd Delta had chased out of the mosque's neighborhood had regrouped here, and indeed they had set up heavy weapons on every corner.

That's why Kennedy had signaled for the strike force's one and only pair of tanks. Within five minutes of his making the call, the two T-72 monsters smashed through the wadi and came rumbling through the hole in the Old Quarter's wall.

Both were now heading for the intersection.

The man they called the Chief was sweating bullets. He, too, was at the intersection, huddled behind some of the flimsiest barricades imaginable, several dozen of his fighters on hand and psyched that he was in their midst.

This was no place for him to be, though. He was much too important to actually
see
combat. Never mind risking getting wounded—or worse.

Yet here he was . . . and not by choice.

After he'd recovered from the surprise of the air raid by the two Bombcats earlier in the evening, the first place the Chief wanted to go was the area around the Eastern Moon Mosque. All indications were that the holy building might have been one of their targets, and he had to see for himself the destruction the two shit-box airplanes had caused, if any. There was so much equipment, ammunition, and rifles stored inside the mosque that if the building was damaged, which at first he'd doubted, his intention was to gather as many of his men in that area as possible and recover anything of value they could find. Up to that point he, too, had been fooled into thinking the Americans would never directly bomb a mosque.

It had been a grave mistake, for once he arrived on the scene, he saw that not only was the mosque and everything in it gone, but the six blocks of houses and several secondary weapons storage places around it were gone, too. The Chief couldn't believe it.