Black Storm

Ex nihilo nihil fit
. For this book I owe thanks to Eric and Bobbie Berryman, Ina Birch, David R. Bockel, Michael Boffo, Steve Butler, Al Cantrell, Robert D. Collinsworth, Jim Cross, Randy Culpepper, Sandra Dangler, Chuck Dasey, Drew Davis, Clark Driscoll, William S. Dudley, Edward Eitzen, Marie Estrada, Art Friedlander, Carl E. Gantt, Joel Gaydos, Louis Guy, Katy Haddock, Sloan Harris, Edward Herbert, Ken Hoffman, David Howe, Bob Hudon, Marty Janczak, Bob Kelly, Josh Kendall, Neil and Beth Kinnear, Brian Knowles, Marty Martinez, Bill McClintock, Kelly McKee, David McNamee, Paula Mills, Ed Miralda, Pete Mitchell, James A. Mobley, Scott Mosier, Barry Nelson, Gail Nicula, Dana Osterhaut, Tony Osterman, Bill Pelletier, Tracey Poirier, Lenore Hart Poyer, Lin Poyer, Ian Pund, Clifton Pye, Tommy Rayfield, Dennis Reilly, Sally Richardson, Ray Ruhlmann III, Sandra Scoville, Michael Styskal, Stewart Upton, Caree Vander-Linden, W. A. Whitlow, George Witte, Neal Woollen, Pat Worsham, and others who preferred anonymity. Thanks also to HCS-4, the “Red Wolves,” to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare Center, the US Marine Corps Amphibious Reconnaissance School, the Eastern Shore Public Library, the Joint Forces Staff College, and Headquarters, US Marine Corps. As always, all errors and deficiencies are my own.

And when We decide to destroy

A nation, We first send

Warning to those

Who are given Abundance in this life

And still transgress; so that

The sentence is proven

Against them; then,

We annihilate them utterly.

—The Holy Qur'an, bani Isra'il 17:16.5

PROLOGUE: 0100 22 February 1991: The Saudi Desert

1. 18 February: Ministry of Defence, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

2. 19 February: The Northern Gulf

3. Ras al-Mish‘ab Special Forces Base, Saudi Arabia

4. ‘Ar‘ar, Saudi Arabia

5. 20 February: ‘Ar‘ar, Saudi Arabia

6. 21 February: ‘Ar‘ar, Saudi Arabia

7. 2100 21 February: ‘Ar‘ar

8. 21–22 February: The Saudi Desert

9. 0400 22 February: Western Iraq

10. 22 February: Western Iraq

11. 22 February: Western Iraq

12. 22 February: Western Iraq

13. 0500 23 February: Western Iraq

14. 0800 23 February: Western Iraq

15. 1200 23 February: Western Baghdad

16. Medical City Complex, Baghdad

17. 0100 24 February: Medical City Complex, Baghdad

18. 0200 24 February

19. 0300 24 February

THE AFTERIMAGE: 17 March: Maximum Biocontainment Patient Care Suite, US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, Maryland

16 May: Baghdad

TOMAHAWK DAVID POYER

READ ALL OF THE SPELLBINDING NOVELS BY DAVID POYER

0100 22 February 1991: The Saudi Desert

No one spoke after the helicopter lifted off. The engine noise overwhelmed all other sound, walling off each mind within the compass of its own skull. The deck shuddered, tilting as the pilot pulled into a bank. Beyond the door gunner, hunched over the pintle mounts for the machine gun, impenetrable night hurtled by as they gathered speed.

The desert winter was cold and rainy, the worst weather in thirty years. For days now a black overcast had sealed off the stars. It opened only to loose soot-smelling, dust-gritty rain over the half million troops who waited, scattered across the desert or cooped in gray steel out on the Gulf, for the word to attack.

The helo dropped, steadied, hurling northward barely a hundred feet above the sand.

Seven dark figures lay tumbled in the crew compartment, where they'd thrown themselves during the thirty seconds the Navy combat search-and-rescue Seahawk had touched down at the pickup point. It held no seats, just bare aluminum-walled space lit by faint green lights to port and starboard. The team's camouflage battle dress had no rank insignia, no unit patches. They lay on top of gear and rucks and weapons and each other, like some composite organism only dimly coming to consciousness of itself.

The pilot tilted his head back, peering beneath night vision goggles as a line of blue-white lights lifted over the horizon. The Tapline Road ran parallel to the border. Under the glare both lanes were filled with tanker trucks and tank transporters, all heading west. The headlights passed beneath the speeding aircraft and fell quickly aft. As darkness retook the world he pulled the goggles down again.

A weird topography of lime and black floated up. A dry undulating sea of sand and sand and sand, of barren ridges and blasted wadis. And, fleeing close above it, the haloed green exhaust flare, pulled from the deep infrared by the lenses and amplifiers of the goggles, of another aircraft.

The black helicopter ahead was an Air Force Pave Hawk bird. It had better avionics and weapons, including a sophisticated terrain-avoidance radar, but the HH-60 had better navigation. The pilot tracked the Pave Hawk through the goggles, rising when it rose, dropping when it dropped. When he had the rhythm, he said softly into the intercom, “Gunny, you on the line yet? Slap a cranial on him, Minky.”

“Six team leader on the line,” said a voice. “That you, sir?”

“Welcome aboard the Baghdad Shuttle, Gunny. Intel hasn't changed, ingress is the same, but we may need to make some last-minute decisions re primary versus alternate LZ. How about reviewing that with my right seater.”

A faint light clicked on, focused on an air chart. Across the lower quarter a dotted stripe zagged left to right, gradually angling down. North of it were a series of circles, carefully drawn in grease pencil. They grew denser and more closely spaced toward the top of the chart, where they overlapped.

The copilot's glove pressed a pencil point west of a blue-tinted scatter of lakes and marshland. It was covered by two of the circles, which marked the threat radii of antiair missile batteries. “We'll know a few mikes out if the primary's a go.”

The team leader said, “It better be a go, sir. You were at the briefing. We've got too far to hump from there as it is.”

“Well, we'll give it our best shot, Gunny. Just warning you there may be some turbulence en route. Tray tables in full upright position. You know the drill.”

“Just get us there,” said the team leader. “Sir.”

“Roger that,” said the pilot.

 

THE RECON
team leader was thirty years old. He'd grown up as an Air Force brat, moving here and there around the country until he enlisted in the Marine Corps at eighteen. Now he looked closely at the map, reviewing the route for the thousandth time in his mind. Turnaround and jump-off, Point Charlie, Point Delta, objective. In an hour and a half they'd be on the ground a hundred and forty miles inside Iraq.

The air war had been underway since the UN deadline expired on 17 January. The bombers had been pounding the Iraqis for four weeks now, starting with command and communications in Baghdad, then shifting to the ground forces dug in around Kuwait. Some intelligence sources said they were decimated. Others said Saddam's Republican Guard was dug in so deep the bombing barely scratched them. The fog and rain hadn't helped.

He'd seen what happened when you underestimated your enemy. Night after night on the airport perimeter in Beirut, that hot fall of '83, listening to the crackle of gunfire as the Syrians, Israelis, Palestinians, Hezbollah, and every other faction in the Middle East fought it out. Someone with a direct line to God had set the Marine Corps down in the middle of it. He'd thought the locals understood they were protecting them. Till he'd been awakened one October night by an enormous explosion.

The truck bomb had killed two hundred and forty-one marines, sailors, and soldiers.

You didn't underestimate Arabs. They were courteous. They were patient. It was only when you thought
they were finished that they became truly dangerous. Then they didn't care if they lived or died, as long as they could take you with them.

He stared into the darkness beyond the windshield. If he put on his NVGs, he'd see as well as the pilot. But it would be better to conserve batteries for the mission. For a second, fear pierced him, like a sharpened icicle jammed up his anus. He took a deep breath, reminding himself he had a good team and a solid plan. They'd briefed and trained, not as much as he'd have liked, but enough.

His own life didn't matter. Any justification for it had vanished in the blast of a shotgun a year ago. Bringing his men back was the only reason he still had to stay alive.

But no mission ever went as it was planned. And no one really knew what lay ahead in the dark, on the far side of the invisible line that separated the two armies built up over the last six months. Two massive forces, moving inexorably toward the final impact.

 

THE PILOT
asked the copilot for the next vector. He'd already forgotten the men in the cargo compartment. He was too wrapped up in flying thirty feet off the ground.

The two helos had taken off from the Allied base at Al Jouf on a false course, then angled north and picked the team up off a deserted stretch of road. So far, neither helicopter had come up on the radio. The Pave Hawk blinked its infrared position lights each time they went over a checkpoint. They'd preplanned and timed the routes in and out, routing them through or beneath blind zones in the coverage of the SA-8 and Roland sites. If they did it right, they'd finish the insertion without a single transmission.

Which would be eminently desirable, considering the French-and Russian-trained technicians who manned the
direction-finding sets, electronic intelligence posts, radar sites, and antiaircraft missile batteries ahead.

“Cougar, Red Wolf Two.”

“Roll to Indigo, Red Wolf Two.”

He snapped to the new frequency. “Red Wolf Two plus one, gate Tarzan, thence to xray kilo oscar papa, thence kilo uniform victor delta, charlie charlie mike papa, lima alfa uniform bravo. Read back, over.”

The distant AWACS bird, orbiting in great slow circles thirty thousand feet above the Gulf, rogered his presence and read back his intended flight path. Now they were safe from the hunters above the clouds, Air Force and Saudi F-15s, Navy F/A-18s, French Mirages, Italian and British Tornados.

Unless someone made a mistake.

He was worrying about that, about the friendly fire this war called “blue on blue,” when suddenly the Pave Hawk jinked violently. He hauled around too, just as a dune loomed out of the dark ahead and flashed past their rotor tips at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

Instead of rising, the two aircraft dipped even lower, into a wadi, and increased speed, flashing along barely twenty feet off the lightless desert.

 

THE ASSISTANT
team leader, twenty-eight years old, from Farmingdale, New York, was huddled close to the vanishingly dim green light in the crew compartment, a coverless, dog-eared, cola-spotted paperback held four inches in front of his eyes. His lips held a cool curve, lopsided, almost ironic, even though he wasn't thinking anything amusing. He was leaning against the med kit, which he carried along with the usual weapon and 782 gear. The turbines howled, the fuselage swayed, G forces pressed him against the bulkhead, but he didn't react. He was deep in
One Hundred Tips for Making Your Small Business Work
. The chapters had titles like: Focus on Service.
Automate Your Bookkeeping. Hire the Person, Not the Position. He was memorizing it, a page at a time. His lips moved silently, still tilted in that faint amused curve.

 

THIRTY SECONDS
to the gate,” said the copilot, who was simultaneously kneeboarding his map, working the GPS, and plotting each way point on the TACNAV display. The pilot risked a quick glance at the screen, then jerked his eyes back as the ground rose again, as if the land itself was reaching up to stop them. He blinked sweat out of his eyes, wishing he could see more clearly. Through the goggles the hurtling desert floor was blur and shadows, boiling with the random energy of amplified photons. He blinked again and squeezed his eyes shut, then popped them open and hauled hard on the collective as beside him his copilot sucked in his breath involuntarily.

If they hit one of those dunes, they'd never have time to realize they were dead.

 

BACK IN
the crew compartment, the naval officer lay motionless for the first few minutes, trying to get control of his breathing. Feeling the others around him, pressed against him; feeling the angles of the Heckler and Koch nine-millimeter under his legs. Watching the door gunner, who craned down, looking into the blast of noise and darkness and icy wind.

What the hell was he doing here? He should be miles offshore, navigating a destroyer toward a naval gunfire support position. What was he doing with his face smeared with camo paint, carrying a submachine gun and an eighty-pound pack? Would he ever see his daughter again, or the woman who'd asked him once, one cool night in a darkened garden, if he thought they could make a life together?

Instead he'd put the Navy first. As he always had. Ahead of his ex-wife. Ahead of his daughter. But maybe
he'd been making a mistake all along. Institutions knew no gratitude. But they needed people to blame when things went wrong; and all too often, he'd been the nearest bystander.

He touched the equipment lashed and clipped to his load-bearing gear. Night vision goggles. Gas mask. Grenades. Canteens. Knife, flashlight, magazine pouches, antitank weapon, compass, everything dummy-corded so a man couldn't lose it in the dark, no matter how clumsy or sleep-deprived he got.

If the team found what they were looking for, his mission would be to destroy it.

But now he struggled to sit up, feeling suddenly sick as he remembered what else he carried: not as gear or maps, but in his head. The Iraqis were set up to repel an amphibious invasion, a Marine Corps assault from the sea. But that threat was a sham. If Saddam ever realized that, he could wheel his forces south. Blunting, and maybe even stopping, the impending Coalition assault across the Kuwaiti border.

He hoped the men around him were good. Because as far as he could see, he was only going to be a burden until they reached the objective. Once they did that, he was pretty sure he could do what a very angry four-star general had ordered him to do.

If they got there alive.

 

PENETRATION CHECKLIST
rechecked complete,” the copilot said.

The pilot licked his lips but didn't answer. He squatted the helicopter even lower, shaving the last inches away between the terrain and the aircraft's belly. Now all light was gone. Neither sky nor desert yielded the faintest luminosity. Even through the goggles, the only illumination was the jittering, fanlike glow of the Pave Hawk's engine heat two hundred meters ahead.

“Wadi coming up. Tarzan gate, twenty seconds.”

The “Tarzan gate” was a low-lying ravine, or wadi, that snaked across the border. Border crossers could use it as a tunnel under the Iraqi ground radars. But only if you flew low enough. He pushed the cyclic forward even more, fighting his way nearer to the earth. The earth was safety. But it was also mortal danger.

“There's the entrance,” said the copilot, and at the same moment the Pave Hawk swerved. The pilot tilted the stick slightly, and the twenty-one tons of helicopter and crew and passengers swung onto the new heading and tracked down the looming-up escarpments, down through the blowing darkness, the clatter-slam of rotating blades carrying far out over the night-shrouded land.

 

AT THE
very back of the compartment, the corporal held the butt of the Glock he'd stuffed into his cargo pocket after the preloading inspection. He was twenty-four, an E-4, the youngest man on the team. This was his first recon combat patrol, and he was trying with all his might to not crap his trou. He'd dropped them twice as they waited at the pickup site, but now he had to go again. It was the lousy raghead water. That and the shitty food, the Pak rice and the lettuce they trucked down from the Bekaa. He shouldn't've ate that lettuce. Everybody knew the fucking Ay-rabs shit on the fucking lettuce to make it grow, goddamn it, goddamn.

The other guys had worked together before. They had their own, like, code words. They acted like he was shit. But once they hit the ground he'd be out in front. The scout. The point. If he fucked up, they'd all get blown away. His lips drew back from his teeth and in the dark and noise he panted hard, trying to turn fear into hatred. Fucking ragheads. Smelly goat-fucking Ay-rack-ee motherfuckers. He hoped he got to score. God, come on, let me score.

His hand found the butt of the Glock again, and his finger lightly stroked the trigger.