Bloodbath Read online

  BLOODBATH

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  A Global Action Thriller

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  by

  David Alexander

  www.davidalexanderbooks.com

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  A handful of great men suffice to make the renown of a nation. —Napoleon

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Some place names and descriptions of locales, weaponry, and military procedures have been modified where necessary to suit the requirements of the narrative. And Breaux rhymes with throw.

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  Prolog

  A Clip Full of Hell

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  Chapter One

  Colonel Stone Breaux, far from the bayou country of Lafayette, Louisiania in which he was born, sat behind the wheel of the fast attack vehicle, freezing his cojones off, the plastic-bagged handset of a JTRS field radio clutched in one tactical-gloved hand.

  The patch on the upper right sleeve of his desert camo field jacket bore the horseshoe-shaped Greek symbol for omega on a shield crossed by a sword, down-flashing lightning bolts, and a trident clutched in the talons a rampaging American eagle.

  The unit's motto "A Clip Full of Hell" was stitched in gold across the bottom of the patch. It was the insignia of the elite US Army special operations brigade officially designated Special Forces Operational Detachment-Omega (SFOD-O) -- the first-in, last-out force of choice for special missions too hard and too important for the other guys to handle. In fact, there wasn't another unit fit to wipe Omega's dirty asses, and every butt-kissing grunt in the entire US military damn well knew it.

  In addition to being cold, Breaux was exhausted, his stamina and energy almost totally spent. Detachment Omega had been on the ground too long, and the cumulative effects had begun to tell. Breaux would be pulling his personnel out. He'd just radioed HQ for an evacuation aircraft.

  Four hundred miles to the southwest, inside Saudi, a V-22 Osprey convertiplane was already being prepped for takeoff at SFOD-O's Zebra Talon command center at Jauf, sister site to the detachment's forward operating base, code-named Drop Forge, near Amman in neighboring Jordan. Another Osprey configured as a tanker would refuel the V-22 after it got airborne, and then it would be on its way to pick them up.

  Too little sleep, too much adrenaline, too many Meals Rejected by Ethiopia, First Strike Rations and HOOAH! Bars, too much living on the edge, all of it had taken its toll on the troops. Breaux had seen evidence of combat fatigue in his personnel for the last few days, but hadn't noticed it in himself -- until just before, when he'd chewed out the rear-echelon pogue back at Jauf on the other end of the radio link for no good reason, stuck the fire hose down his throat and turned on the pressure. Yeah, he was losing it. His men were losing it. It was time to get the hell out.

  Breaux terminated communications with HQ on "jitters" and replaced the radio's handset, which was wrapped in a plastic baggie to keep out the incredibly fine-grained powdery stuff that was less sand than lunar dust.

  The dust of the largest Iranian salt-pan desert, the Dasht-e-Kavir, got into everything, and was as widespread in the rocky north as the sandy south. It sifted into automotive engines, into the bolt actions of the AKMS bullpups the team carried into combat instead of the disfavored M16 -- a weapon less than worthless in sustained desert ops -- it even worked its way into the minute crevices of the skin. Baggies on the radio, condoms over rifle barrels; you needed this stuff here.

  The sand was a hostile force, almost alive, almost part of the enemy's battle array. At its most benign it slowly enveloped the soldier in its suffocating embrace. But at times it could gather itself into the devastating storms called shamals by the Arabs. Such sandstorms struck without warning and almost always left destruction in their wake.

  In the course of the nineteen consecutive days that Omega Force had been playing in the sandbox, the company-strength detachment from Omega's brigade-sized manpower pool had been almost devastated by one such storm. Despite an early satellite warning of the storm's approach and the hasty lashing down of their desert patrol vehicles (DPVs), weapons and miscellaneous gear, they had been forced to spend a day digging themselves out like mummies emerging from a crypt.

  Iranian military patrols were another constant threat. SFOD-O had successfully played frag-tag with enemy units out on the desert, but there'd been some damn close calls. Even with overhead coverage from UAVs and TACSAT imaging satellites, the desert's many landscape features -- folds, crevices, wadis, gullies, dunes, caves, pillars, berms, dikes, canals, to name just a few -- made consistently reliable intel on enemy movements impossible.

  Breaux's combat savvy told him that his force's lucky streak couldn't last much longer. It was best to pull the troops out before the bovine excrement hit the whirling blades. Dead soldiers were no good to anybody -- except the enemy.

  Right now the desert was deceptively tranquil. Outwardly, it was another freezing night in the stony badlands of Iran between Tehran and Isfahan. But the sector bristled with Breaux's troops, hidden away in wadis, spider holes and in seams and crevices in the landscape. In full battle dress, augmented with cold weather gear, the forty-member special forces commando formation was deployed across a dozen miles of almost lunar desolation, tied together by secure radio and SATCOM links.

  With Breaux in command, the formation -- operationally designated B-Comm (B-Command) -- had been drawn from the ranks of the elite special operations brigade known variously as Detachment Omega, the Big Bad O, or simply Omega. Some called them O Shit, but weren't able to walk without support of crutches after taking that particularly liberty. Many called them Eagle Patchers because of their distinctive unit insignia. The detachment had been conducting special recon operations in the western desert for nearly three weeks, working in the nocturnal darkness accompanying a new moon and holing up during the day.

  Tonight's mission marked the culmination of B-Comm's patrol activities inside Iran. B-Comm was overdue for extraction. The rigors of conducting sustained operations in the hostile desert environment combined with the unit's dwindling rations supplies and lack of sleep alone made extraction imperative.

  The detachment would have been days gone already had it not been for Breaux's determination to stay until the mission's objectives had been fully met. One had been sent into Iran on a SLAM, or search, locate and annihilate mission. Breaux's brief had been to locate and identify the site of a plutonium refinement facility under construction in the Iranian desert a few hundred miles to the northeast of the Saudi Arabian border.

  The job had fallen to SFOD-O because of intelligence unearthed on Omega's last mission inside Yugoslavia. Breaux's mind filled with the images of fiery holocaust in the last hours of this previous military campaign. Most of his original force had been killed in the confrontation with the Soviet-loaned Spetsnaz troops serving Macedonian maximum leader, Grand Marshall Dawit Aleksandriu, who had styled himself as the second coming of Alexander the Great, and who still menaced regional stability despite the best troops sent to depose him.

  One involved party, the nameless intelligence agent -- he'd used the operational alias "Congdon" -- who had sent Breaux's men to their deaths, had probably been pleased at the outcome of the mission. The intelligence haul from Aleksandriu's underground lair had been a bonanza. It had pointed straight to the Middle East where weapons of mass destruction were being manufactured. Analysis of the intelligence was why Omega was here now.

  Breaux's thoughts jumped forward in time,
to the events of the past hour, during which he had led a team inside the Iranian installation to gather intelligence and emplace a special demolition charge to blow it up. The AH-1Z Viper gunship that was expected in minutes would raze surface structures, including the radio and guard towers, with Hellfire missile salvos and automatic cannon strikes, but its main purpose was to create a diversion to cover the Eagle Patchers' extraction by V-22 convertiplane at a nearby desert LZ.

  The AH-1Z stood no chance of inflicting damage to the buried portion of the deep underground facility, or DUF, which was sheathed in layers of stressed concrete and steel and impervious even to a low-yield nuclear strike. The DUF was too deep even for a B61-11 nuclear glide bomb to destroy with complete confidence in the results.

  Yet a nuclear strike would, in fact, take the base down. But this would be an explosion from within, not without. Breaux and his team had penetrated the base interior and implanted a Mk 54E SADM or special atomic demolition munition at its core level.

  The blast of the compact mini-nuke, carried in a camo-patterned H-912 transport container, weighing a little under 150 pounds, and packing a 1.5 kiloton blast yield (the "E" stood for enhanced), was calculated to shatter the foundations and implode the structure down around it, burying any residual radioactivity and hermetically sealing it beneath millions of cubic tons of rubble, wreckage and sand. Iranian patrols that had gotten in the way had been eliminated and hidden out of sight.

  Long before the bodies might have been found, the base would go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah.

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  Breaux's reflections were shattered by a series of hi-lo tones in his earbud.

  "Magic Dog, be advised that arrival of Lynch Pin is imminent. Repeat. Lynch Pin imminent."

  "That's affirm," Breaux said back. "Out."

  Breaux now no longer needed the remote voice to inform him of the approach of the two aircraft. His pulse quickened as he heard the sounds that harbingered their arrival.

  It began as a distant rumbling just a decibel or two above the audible threshold. Then it became a steady chugging, distorted by weird harmonics. Seconds later the two aircraft appeared as false-color aperture imagery in Breaux's thermal view field, the smaller, nimbler dragonfly shape of the AH-1Z Viper gunship darting in ahead of the larger, wider V-22 tilt-rotor, now in heliplane mode.

  The ghost ships skimmed incredibly low across the surface of the desert, scudding like wraiths through the moonless blackness of the cold, arid night. Above the site of the Iranian NBC installation the two ships parted company. The AH-1Z took up a position several hundred yards from the base and hovered there while the V-22 broke toward B-Command's rendezvous point and LZ.

  There was no communication from either ground or airborne personnel. Although they had secure radio links, the teams would continue to follow EMCON procedures and maintain radio silence. Both groups, the Osprey and Vipers supplied by Marine aviation, had their orders, both had been briefed on the OPPLAN, and both knew the parts they were expected to play.

  The AH-1Z continued to loiter low above the ground. Waiting. Waiting. Hanging and waiting.

  Breaux held the wireless remote-detonation unit in one tactical-gloved hand while he input the nuclear gold code necessary to arm and trigger the SADM at the small keypad on the face of the unit, watching a line of asterisks appear on the small LED panel.

  Authorization approved, flashed the panel, a few moments later. Proceed to detonation countdown?

  Breaux nodded at Top Sgt. Death who was seated beside him in the dune buggy and Death put shooter's plugs in his ears. Breaux did the same.

  Breaux pressed the return key.

  Detonation countdown initiated. Mark.

  Breaux watched the numerals flash across the screen as the countdown sequence went from ten to zero in as many seconds. The mini-nuke was set with a backup timer in case remote detonation failed.

  At the zero mark nothing happened for another second or two as the ignition processor in the dull gray steel canister chewed on stop bit number X-789B-00-5, then accepted it as valid, and began the ignition sequence. The nuke dutifully obliged, and shaped charges imploded a core of plutonium to critical mass, causing a nuclear chain reaction enriched by a tritium booster.

  Breaux heard a dull rumbling beneath the earth, then felt the first shock waves radiating outward from the blast in the desert's bowels. The DPV's chassis shook and the lights around the base perimeter were suddenly extinguished.

  There was no visible blast. The force of the explosion was contained and encapsulated within concrete and earth, but the concrete blockhouses, steel antenna pylons, barracks buildings, Quonset huts and other structures on the surface trembled as if struck by a severe earthquake. As they began to implode, then disintegrate, Breaux heard the shouts and screams of terrified Iranian troops caught amid the devastation.

  Their terror would be intense, though mercifully brief. At that moment, the AH-1Z Viper began firing Hellfire missiles into the epicenter of the blast zone. Now there was flame, now there were explosions, now death strode forth from hell as a reaper of souls. As the missiles struck, seeding the earth with toadstools of flame, the gun ship circled the kill zone, pouring down twenty millimeter automatic cannon fire, glowing red tracers streaking into the molten mass of burning lava to which the base had been reduced.

  "Man, that was some awesome shit," Sgt. One Eyes observed.

  "Top, we're out of here," Breaux told First Sgt. Death, and the DPV swept away into the night, toward the distant LZ, leaving a cloud of dust behind it.

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  Across the desert Force Omega personnel were breaking cover. They fell back toward the extraction LZ from hide sites and lookout posts spread out along a circular perimeter a mile in circumference.

  All but one six-man team.

  Team Fang remained in position on both sides of a stretch of desert blacktop. The team's orders were to remain there and cover the withdrawal of the main body of B-Comm. Team Fang would be the last SFOD-O personnel out of the op zone.

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  Breaux held onto the roll bar of the DPV as Sgt. Death highballed the souped-up and heavily armed road racer across the undulations and declivities of the desert surface. Death followed the track of a GPS unit that had the waypoints to the rendezvous point already programmed in.

  Across the desert, other teams making up B-Comm were doing likewise. At the LZ, the V-22 had set down with its huge engine nacelles and giant paddle-blade prop-rotors tilted up in helo mode, ready for a rapid takeoff. Its rear loading ramp was lowered. Pilot and copilot scanned the horizon through NODs, the copilot standing at the base of the ramp and carrying an M-249 Minimi SAW charged and fed from a 7.62-millimeter box mag, just in case things got hairy.

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  Mobile detachment VI of the 12th Battalion of the Ali Khamenei Division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, was stationed at a lonely outpost in the desert not far from Omega's strike zone. The motorized contingent had been on a routine night patrol trawling for smugglers which had been using the route to run contraband into Turkey along the northwestern Iraqi border north of Amadiya when it heard the rapid, pulsating booms of multiple explosions.

  Its commander, Captain Yahya Shah, had radioed headquarters for orders and to request support. Both were immediately given. Shah's contingent was of company strength with Shah and three other men in a scout car and the rest of the unit in two BTR-70s, each BTR containing a platoon-strength element. Several of Shah's men, including Shah himself, were equipped with Belgian copies of the Litton binocular M-912A night vision goggle, Gen-III-class gear, and the best night vision equipment the Iranians possessed.

  With the arrival of another company from battalion HQ imminent, Shah judged his own small force sufficient to reconnoiter the source of the blast and issued orders to roll toward it.

  If nothing else, his troops could establish an observation post near the epicenter of th
e blast. If it had been a military strike, they could then spot for artillery and aircrew, even other follow-on mechanized forces.

  If it turned out to be an attack, his force might then play a more active role.

  He was hopeful that it would be the latter.

  Chapter Two

  From his seat in the AH-1Z Viper's front cockpit, the gun ship's weapons systems officer or WSO (Whizzo) gazed down upon a landscape of utter devastation.

  The gunner had fired off virtually every last round of ordnance the helo had carried into combat -- minus a small reserve of armor-busting Hellfire missiles, unguided Zuni rockets and a few thousand rounds of twenty mike-mike depleted uranium (DU) cannon rounds for the return trip back across the fence into the land of the Sheiks and the home of the rich.

  Hovering several hundred yards slant-range of the target, the gun ship was now lighter by nearly a ton as it hung above the burning witch's cauldron, swaying in the air as the snake driver -- seated in the second cockpit above and behind the gunner's capsule -- used cyclic and collective pitch controls to compensate for the powerful thermal updrafts generated by the conflagration.

  The helicrew's OPPLAN called for transiting from the attack site once it had visual confirmation that the target had been neutralized and cover the withdrawal of the special forces unit in theater. The snake driver was about to beeline for the RV point when his WSO warned him of trouble.

  "Moose, hold off on the transit," Marine Airman 1st Class Johnny Costanza advised over cockpit interphone, "I've just received an Urgent Arrow priority alert."

  The snake driver eased back on the cyclical pitch control stick, causing the pitch of the AH-1Z's dishing main rotor to change from the thirty-degree cant for forward locomotion to a flat, horizontal rotation for stationary flight. At the same time he eased back on the collective to slow the revolutions of the tail boom rotor. The helo stabilized into a low hover some twenty feet above the desert crust.

  Urgent Arrow was the code phrase for battlespace intelligence derived from the Global Hawk long endurance UAV that had been tasked to overfly the op zone and transmit near-real-time and real-time tactical intelligence to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, from which the operation was remotely coordinated.