Hogs #3 Fort Apache (13 page)

__PART
TWO___

II

SUGAR
MOUNTAIN

IN
IRAQ

25
JANUARY 1991

2230

T
hey
moved down
from the rocks so slowly
and carefully that Dixon felt as if he were walking backwards. He held his
submachine gun in front of him like a stubby balancing bar. Twice they stopped
because vehicles were approaching on the nearby highway; each time they retreated
back to the rocks, waiting until the trucks sped by.

Turk’s explanation that the mines were placed as part
of a pre-positioned defense scheme made sense. Logically, Dixon knew that if
that were true, the road itself wouldn’t be booby-trapped or mined. But twice
his foot slipped in the dirt and he felt an electric jolt in his muscles, sure
he was about to be blown up.

The door was metal, twice as wide as the front door to
a house and about half again as high. A truck probably wouldn’t quite fit
through, though Dixon wasn’t necessarily sure. The locking mechanism had both a
mechanical key and the combination – as well what seemed to be a trip wire that
Turk pulled Dixon back from.

He pulled out a small penlight flashlight to look it
over carefully. “This doesn’t look like anything I’ve worked on,” said the
demolition expert. “But my guess is that you cut it or fiddle with the key and
it sets off a charge. Maybe under there.” He pointed the flashlight at rocks
just above them. “Drop a little avalanche on you. Or there could be a charge
beneath us.”

Dixon put his hand on the steel door, feeling the
surface as if his fingers could somehow tell how thick the metal was behind it.
There were no straps, no bolts, just smooth metal.

“Safest thing to do is get back to the road there,
shoot up the lock and see what happens,” said Turk.

“You think that’ll do anything besides telling the
Iraqis we’re here?” Dixon said.

Turk thought about it. “Probably not. We might be able
to get through it with our C-4. Depends on how thick the door is.”

“Riyadh will probably want to bomb the site,” Dixon
told him. “I think we’re better off talking to them first. If we do anything,
the Iraqis will know we’re here. Maybe they empty the site before the bombing,
maybe they find us.”

“I ain’t arguing with you.”

Dixon took a step back. Turk caught him.

“Listen,” he said, pointing back in the direction of
the highway.

A low cough rasped against the hills. Dixon and Turk
sprinted up the road back into the rocks. They climbed a few yards up the hillside,
taking cover as a truck approached. Dixon watched from his crouch, expecting it
to speed past like the others.

But it didn’t. It stopped dead in the middle of the
highway, not ten yards from them.

It was a Mercedes truck, a simple cab in front of a
boxy back; nothing remarkable. A million similar trucks were driving in a
million similar places at that very moment, delivering a multitude of things to
a multitude of places.

But this one was here. Dixon had a clear line of
sight, and took the NOD from Turk.

The driver and his passenger were debating something.
Then the passenger got out of the truck. The two Americans hunkered against the
rocks as the man shone a flashlight across the darkened landscape to find the
path to the mountain entrance. Once he found it, he waved at the truck, which
followed slowly as he began walking toward the rock face.

When he reached the door, he bent over the lock. He
worked it very slowly. His back blocked Dixon’s view, but he could make out a
second panel behind the electronic lock; that one took even longer to deal
with. Finally the Iraqi bent over and pushed something with his foot; some sort
of metal lever had risen from the dirt.

But not even this opened the door. The man returned to
the panel and punched more keys before the door finally popped free. Gripping
the edge, the man pushed it open. A dull red light turned on inside.

“You get all that?” asked Turk.

“Oh yeah, I got it memorized,” whispered Dixon.

“Fuckers spent half their defense budget on locks.
Cheaper just to post guards.”

“Maybe they’re inside.”

“Yeah. Could be,” said Turk.

The man walked slowly to the back of the truck. He
came out with what looked to be a large suitcase.

“Door’s damn thick,” said Turk, examining it through
the NOD. “I don’t think we got enough C-4, unless I can figure out the weak
spot.”

After the soldier had been inside for quite a while,
Dixon realized he ought to time his disappearance; it might tell them how large
the facility was.

Or maybe not. He noted the time on his watch, then took
the NOD and looked at the driver, who was shifting nervously around in the cab.

Most likely the man had only a pistol, if that. They
could take him out easily; Dixon could, simply by lifting the MP-5 and firing.
He was ten yards away.

But were there others inside the truck or the
mountain?

The Iraqi reappeared from the bunker and trotted to
the back of the truck. He took an identical-looking suitcase from the back
before returning to the mountain.

“Boxes of candy,” said Turk. “For Sugar Mountain.”

“Yeah, Sugar Mountain,” said Dixon. “A big candy store.”

“We can take out the guy in the truck,” said Turk. He
lifted his silenced MP-5. “You think we should?”

The truck driver sat upright in the truck as if he had
heard them. He turned on the truck lights and a moveable spotlight mounted on
the doorway, playing it over the rocks. The two Americans ducked as the
spotlight swung in their direction.

Should they rush him? They could easily ambush his
companion when he came out.

 If he spoke English, they could find out what or who
was inside.

Maybe. More than likely, he didn’t speak English.

Hell, they could just go in and see for themselves.
Assuming it wasn’t booby-trapped.

Or that there wasn’t a guard below. The suitcases
could have been dinner.

Even if he did speak English and talk to them, what
could they believe? They could force him to walk ahead if they went inside,
force him to reveal any booby traps
—
but perhaps the people who had designed the structure
had anticipated that. Given the elaborate mechanism to open it, surely they
had.

Better to call in a bombing raid.

But what if they were bombing a gold mine?

Or a NBC, nuclear-biological-chemical storage site?

What if Saddam himself were inside? Now that would be
the kicker to end all kickers.

“Let’s get him,” said Dixon, rising as the light
snapped off.

“Hold on,” said Turk. “Here’s our candy man.”

The Iraqi shouted
—
it sounded like a curse
—
at the driver as the two
Americans ducked back behind the rocks. By the time they realized the shout
hadn’t been meant for them, the thick door had been swung back into place. The
truck was already backing onto the highway.

The Iraqi who’d gone inside ran to the cab, pulling
himself in as he continued to berate the driver
—
probably for turning on his
headlights. The driver slapped them off and hit the gas as soon as all four
wheels were on the hard pavement.

FORT
APACHE

25
JANUARY 1991

2350

T
hey were
louder
than hell, at least as far as Sergeant
Kevin Hawkins was concerned. But the two dark shadows growing in the southern
corner of the gray-black haze before him were the prettiest damn things he’d
ever seen.

Not quite, but damn Hawkins felt good about the AH-6G
Scouts as they came into the base. Fort Apache was open for business with its
own air force, to boot.

No slam on the Hogs. But they had to keep running
south to get ammo and gas. The Little Birds were his.

The lead AH-6G blinked. One of Hawkins’s men answered
with a recognition code, assuring the chopper crews that they had not been
overrun. The lead bird flew forward toward the strip.

The civilian MD 530 MG the AH-6G was based on was
itself a variant in a popular line of civilian and military utility choppers.
The latest version of the helicopter, the MD 530N, came equipped with a NOTAR
system which eliminated the rear rotor and made the small helicopter into one
of the most maneuverable aircraft in the world. Those versions were in short
supply in the service, however, and would never have been allowed up here.

But the AH-6Gs touching down on the Iraqi concrete
weren’t slouches. Each had a pair of .50 caliber machine-guns and seven-tube
70 mm rocket launchers mounted on their stubby wings, and featured
forward-looking infrared radar mounted under their chins. TOW anti-tank weapons
and mini-guns
—
not installed but packed in the helicopters’ small
holds
—
added additional firepower.

Hawkins trotted forward as the whirlies spun down,
hesitating long enough to make sure he knew where the tails were. He had once
seen a trooper get his face shaved by the back-end of a helicopter, and the
experience gave him a healthy respect for rear rotors.

“Captain Hawkins?” asked the pilot, pushing open the
door and pulling off his helmet. His night flying gear weighed several pounds,
and he was obviously an experienced flier
—
he had the bull neck that typically came from years
of working with the heavy sights.

“You Fernandez?”

“Yes, sir. Where do you want us?”

“We’ll unload you here. We’re working on a little
bunker and camouflage for you across the way,” said Hawkins, gesturing. “Won’t
be O’Hare.”

“Hey, I’m used to LaGuardia. Anything you can do.”

“How was your flight?”

“Piece of cake, once I got it off the ground. We’re a
bit heavy,” said the pilot. He turned back to his controls, which were arrayed
around near state-of-the-art multi-use screens, and finished securing the
helicopter. “Shit, how much runway you got here?”

“At the moment, just under a thousand feet. Iraqis
left it so smooth we don’t even have to patch it.” Hawkins pointed toward the
far end, where six of his men were laying out metal grids that had been
parachuted in a few hours before. “We’re extending it. I should have fifteen
hundred by the morning, maybe the afternoon.”

A frown flickered across the pilot’s face; he knew
that wasn’t long enough for a C-130 to land.

“Hey Captain!”

Hawkins turned and saw Sergeant Gladis running toward
him. Gladis was moving quicker than the helicopters had.

“We got something from Team Ruth you got to hear,”
said the communications specialist. “Their radio’s breaking up big time, but
you’re going to want to talk to Leteri or Captain Dixon yourself.”

“Leteri? Where’s Winston?”

Gladis shook his head. “You want to talk to them
yourself. They stepped in a mountain of shit.”

“Good shit or bad shit?”

“Both. Very big shit. A mountain of shit. They’re
calling it Sugar Mountain, but it’s stinking shit.”

AL
JOUF

25
JANUARY 1991

2350

T
he
position was
vulnerable, certainly.
He was definitely over-extended, with only a wire-thin defensive chain; if his
perimeter were pierced, he would sustain heavy casualties. His opponent was
crafty, fortified, and exceedingly cool.

But Wong could tell that the deep penetration of his
bishop on his opponent’s right flank had left the black commander off-balance.
The Caro-Kann defense was ordinarily a solid one, fighting white for control of
the middle and often, though not necessarily, shifting the balance of power
from the attacker to the defender. And certainly the man behind the chess
pieces, Sergeant Curtis, was a worthy opponent, a veteran not only of the
Special Forces but Army chess wars. But he had stumbled on the last move, nudging
his knight forward unimaginatively and leaving his queen to be guillotined. He
made the only available move now, pushing his queen to the far side of the
board
—
a concession that she was toast.

“Check,” said Wong, pulling his knight forward.

“Damn,” said Curtis.

Wong nodded thoughtfully. Curtis had no option but to
take the knight with his bishop; the queen would then be taken by Wong’s
bishop. Besides the exchange, a strategic hole in black’s defenses would be
opened, leaving the entire side ripe for onslaught.

“You out-commandoed me, huh?” said Curtis, initiating
the sequence.

“I was inspired by the setting.”

“Another game?”

“Of course,” said Wong.

If King Fahd was a scorpion-infested, third-rate
trailer park, Al Jouf was a burned-out VW microbus in a sand trap. Still, there
was no amenity like chess, and even at the Pentagon it was difficult to find an
opponent both competent and worthy. So when a runner came to summon Wong to see
Colonel Klee, he got up with something that actually approached regret. Surely
the only reason Colonel Klee wanted to see him at this hour was that he had
agreed to entertain his request to be shipped to Washington. Wong consoled
himself with a promise to look up Curtis again.

But Wong’s transfer was the furthest thing from Klee’s
mind, a fact Wong realized when he approached the colonel’s command bunker and
saw that fully half the commander’s officers were already inside.

“Wong, about time,” growled the colonel. Glowering at Klee’s
side was the ubiquitously ignorant Major Wilson. “Look at these images.”

A bleary-eyed lieutenant passed what seemed to be a
fifth-generation copy of a satellite photo to him. Wong’s first impression was
that he was looking at a pimple on a walrus’s nose.

He kept that, as well as his more graphic second
impression, to himself.

“Yes,” he said finally, giving it back to the
lieutenant.

“Well?” asked the colonel.

“A storage facility. Unmanned. High-value-asset facility,
limited access, high-grad protection. The viewing angle is particularly poor,
which is quite surprising, actually, given the performance specification of the
satellite’s . . .”

“You get that from a ventilation pipe?” asked Goodson.

“Of course, there are infinite possibilities in a
theoretical sense, and I have to base my assumptions on a best-use thesis,
meaning that my theory is based on the facility being fabricated in a manner
best suited for its intended use, though as we all know . . .”

“The bottom line, Wong,” said the colonel.

“Dry and secure storage facility,” he said. “Originally
for inert materials by design. Weapon-wise, I would say it is suited for chemicals,
but the Iraqis have demonstrated such ill-informed planning that it could be and
probably is for biological assets.”

“Give him the description of the door,” the colonel
told the lieutenant, who passed a piece of yellow paper to him. The paper was
an intelligence briefing describing a combination mechanical and electrical
lock on an over-sized but non-vehicle entry in a natural-feature-enhanced
bunker facility.

Pretty much what he’d expected. The Iraqis showed a
consistent lack of creativity.

“So?” asked Goodson.

Wong rolled his eyes and proceeded to the front of the
bunker, where a large pad sat on an easel. He drew a big circle, then the small
roadway, and what had to be a passive ventilation pipe.

“Our key features are the lack of a substantial air-exchange
mechanism and the narrow aperture of the doorway,” he started. “The locking
mechanism clinches it. It was designed for chemicals or perhaps small-scale valuables
such as diamonds, though it would now be a prime candidate for the Iraqi
dispersal program. I would suspect some agent on the order of anthrax. My
reasoning is not complex. The use of existing geographical features to enhance
storage systems dates to the Neanderthal period, and thus parallels are
naturally hazardous. Still, we have the benefit here of a paper written in 1978
by no less an authority than . . .”

“All right, I’m convinced,” said the colonel. “God
damn it, five hundred people must have missed this. Is Wong the only officer in
Saudi Arabia who knows his ass from a hole in the ground?”

“That would be his ass from a ventilation pipe,”
quipped one of the officers.

Everyone, even the colonel, laughed.

Except Wong.

“If I may move on,” Wong continued, clearing his
throat. “The configuration of this site, which I assume we are here to target,
will present some very unique challenges for whoever is tasked to hit it. I
assume that it was not detected during infrared surveillance, from which we may
make several deductions, two in particular. First, that it is not continually
manned, which of course we know since the ventilation system is so small, but
confirming evidence is occasionally useful, if only for morale.

“There is no heat in the exhaust,” Wong added for the
men at the side who weren’t quite keeping up. “It would have been very obvious.
Second, there is probably a thick layer of natural material between the surface
and the interior. I predict that the space for the pipe will be found to have
been drilled, as unlikely as that sounds to the uninitiated. There will be
basically two avenues of attack, the ventilation system and the front door.
Going through the front door, of course, has its drawbacks, since it is both
thick and protected by several man-lethal devices, more commonly known as booby
traps. We don’t know what types, though we can make some guesses, including at
least two families of chemical derivatives undoubtedly modeled on the KK-37B facility
in the Ural Mountains. . .”

“Hold that thought a second, Wong,” said the colonel.
“How about the vent? Can we get a smart bomb down it?”

“The shaft is not sufficient for a Paveway series
weapon to fly down,” said Wong. “Nor will the vent serve as a sufficient
fissure-point for an attack, if my guess as to its construction is correct. The
probability of the heaviest weapons in the series being effective can be
measured in the range of ten to the negative one-hundredth power. Some would
argue for a repeating attack pattern, taking advantage of wave harmonics to
enhance the destructive value. There are additional alternatives, but beyond
what I have said, my discussion would involve possibilities outside the
code-word clearance of anyone in the room.”

Wong was thinking specifically of an attack by
GBU-24/B Paveway III laser-guided bombs, 4,700-pound monsters capable of taking
out even the hardened-aircraft shelters Yugoslavia had built for Saddam. The
captain’s opinion was classified not because of the bombs
—
fairly
well-kept secrets themselves
—
but because of the way they would have to be used to
have any chance of penetrating the rock.

The others didn’t quite appreciate that, however,
responding to Wong with a variety of predictable curses and mutterings. It was
exactly the sort of rumble from the rabble he had put up with all his life. It
was the price one paid for being Wong.

“I like the front door, myself,” said the colonel.
“But I know what Riyadh’s going to say. You sure the door is booby trapped?”

“Without a doubt,” said Wong.

“Anyway around it?”

“Given enough time, there is always a way.”

“We don’t have time,” said the colonel. “They want it
hit by dawn, one way or the other. All right, get me Riyadh on the line. Sit
down, Wong
—
someone get him some coffee. Wait,” added the colonel as an assistant
flew to the door. “Better make it decaf. I’d hate to hear him on a caffeine
buzz.”