Oceans of Fire Read online

  The Bedouin stared down, his face hidden by dark sunglasses and a headscarf. “Aleiku salaam.”

  The old man jammed a thumb against the face of the former dictator emblazoned on his T-shirt and held up his forefinger in a “He’s number one!” gesture. The Bedouins nodded as the man and his flock of goats moved down the road.

  McCarter muttered beneath the folds of his scarf. “Bloody, goat-shagging…” He tapped his camel on the withers with his switch. “Hut! Hut! Hut!”

  The camel groaned and lurched into motion. The men of Phoenix Force spread out and back to either side in a five camel arrow formation. Dust devils danced as the late-morning wind whipped the fringe of the Nafud Desert. The Hijaz Mountains loomed off to the west. Phoenix Force wove its way through the low hills and rock formations and plodded sedately toward its target. The land here wasn’t quite desert, but it was too far from the mountains to receive their water. There was water here, but it was underground. The sudden burst of green palm trees shimmering in the distance identified the oasis.

  The Jaspari clan controlled this oasis and a string of five more in this corridor between the mountains and the desert. This was one of their smaller holdings. For centuries it had been little more than a watering stop for caravans skirting the Nafud. There were three wells and a little small-scale date farming, mostly for local consumption. At any given time about three to four hundred men, women and children of the Jaspari clan occupied the small brown compounds of clay and brick huddled among the palm trees.

  Rafael Encizo grinned under his scarf as they approached. “Looks quiet.”

  The rest of Phoenix Force groaned. Special Forces operators were surprisingly superstitious. In any language there were no worse jinx words in the Special Forces lexicon than “Looks quiet.”

  McCarter spoke into the mike strapped to his throat. “Phoenix One to Stony Base, what do you have on the oasis?”

  Barbara Price came back. “No movement, Phoenix One.”

  “Repeat, Stony Base. No movement?”

  In the War Room in Virginia, Barbara and the entire Farm team were watching the proceedings from a powerful imaging satellite. “Phoenix One, I have approximately fifty camels in the corral. Six parked civilian vehicles. Some goats and chickens wandering around underneath the trees. No human movement. No hostiles visible.”

  “Well.” Manning loosened the ropes that bound his weapons and gear into rolled carpets. “It’s getting close to noon and its a hundred degrees and climbing. Traditional desert tribesmen take a siesta right about now and wait for the noon prayer. Then they take another siesta and wait for the heat to die down in late afternoon.”

  Encizo was grinning from ear to ear. He could smell the ambush on the wind. “Looks quiet.”

  Price spoke quickly across the link. “Phoenix One, I have movement.”

  “What kind of movement, Base?”

  “West side of the compound. Two men are removing some kind of awning from a small courtyard. It looks like—Phoenix! Mortars in the courtyard! Two of them! Hostiles are deploying inside the compound!”

  “Hut! Hut! Hut!” McCarter whipped his switch across his camel’s haunch and the beast burst into a sprint. He heard the double thud of tube noise as the mortars lobbed their shells high into the air. The men of Phoenix Force spread apart, looking for shelter among the rocks. McCarter threw himself off his mount and jammed himself behind a tombstone-size rock as a high-explosive shell detonated thirty yards behind him. He instantly rose and yanked his weapon roll from his mount. The camel honked and bolted away. McCarter threw off his robes and drew his Barrett M-468 rifle.

  Hawkins spoke across the battle link. “I make it 81s.”

  McCarter had been fired at by mortars on every continent and had learned their tube noise well. “No, mate. Those are Com Bloc 82s.” Not that one millimeter of tube girth was going to make much difference. “Stony Base, this is Phoenix One. I need an estimate of enemy strength.”

  The two mortars in the compound thudded again in unison.

  Price didn’t sound pleased by what she was looking at. “Two hundred to two hundred and fifty estimated, Phoenix One. Do you want extraction?”

  Calvin James spoke across the line. “We’re looking at reinforced company strength.”

  “Base, can you give me a civilian count?”

  “No civilians visible, Phoenix One.”

  The mortar rounds pounded into the rocks and filled the air with black smoke. Another double thud told McCarter two more had taken flight from the compound. McCarter flicked up the ladder sight on his grenade launcher. “Phoenix Flight! What is your ETA?”

  “I’m airborne, twenty minutes from your position. Do you want extraction?”

  They were in the middle of nowhere. The enemy had vehicles and could quickly ride them down in the open terrain. They were twenty minutes from extraction, and Phoenix Force was outnumbered fifty to one. McCarter was ex-SAS. There was only one thing to do.

  “Base, we are counterattacking. Phoenix Flight, request shock and awe on arrival. Will pop blue smoke.”

  Jack Grimaldi’s voice came over the thud of rotors. “Affirmative, Phoenix One. Phoenix Flight inbound.”

  McCarter rose from his rock. “Gary, give us covering fire! Phoenix, by twos! Go! Go! Go!”

  McCarter and James began to fire short bursts toward the compound as Encizo and Hawkins raced forward. McCarter tracked men through the 4x magnification of his SUSAT optical sight. Men in khaki uniforms were spilling out of the compound like a kicked-over anthill. A volley of brass shells tinkled on the rocky ground as McCarter bowled men down as fast as he could swing his sights from target to target. Off on the right Gary Manning’s Dakota Longbow rifle fired with slow, methodical precision.

  “Empty!” McCarter roared.

  “Go!” Encizo shouted.

  McCarter rose, clawing for a magazine as James fired his rifle dry. The two men charged forward. Encizo and Hawkins dropped into rifleman’s crouches and began popping off shots. The Phoenix Force leader slammed in a fresh magazine and shot the bolt home. The sheikh’s men had matching uniforms and AK-47s, but they were clearly street fighters and insurgents rather than soldiers. Three hundred yards was the practical limit for most men armed with a Kalashnikov rifle. The range was five hundred and most of the enemy gunners weren’t using the sights of their rifles. All fired long bursts that sent most of their shots high and wide of their targets. Encizo and Hawkins could see their enemies’ eyes through their optical sights. Nearly every shot was a kill. Many of the sheikh’s men were trying to use the trees of the oasis for cover. They very quickly learned that the pulpy trunk of a palm was no defense at all against a full-metal-jacketed 6.8 mm rifle bullet.

  Tree pulp flew as did the torn and pulped tissues of the men behind them.

  McCarter and James ran past their teammates.

  The Cuban rose with his rifle smoking. “Empty!”

  “Go!” McCarter and James dropped, firing as Encizo and Hawkins leapfrogged their position and reloaded. Mortar rounds detonated behind them as they charged underneath the tube artillery’s deadly arc. The problem was, now that they were in the dead open, they had to depend on their armor and accuracy to save them. The enemy still had hundreds of men firing a hailstorm of lead in their direction.

  “Empty!”

  “Go!”

  McCarter and James ran forward reloading. The two, two-man fire teams took turns firing and charging as they plunged straight into the jaws of the serpent. The serpent began spitting fire. RPG-7 rocket teams rose up from cover and rocket-propelled grenades hissed from their launchers. The football-shaped grenades shrieked past, trailing smoke from their rocket motors. Phoenix Force was well within their five hundred meter range, but they were four men out in the open. They could literally step out of the incoming antitank weapons’ path and let them pass by to detonate in the rocks a hundred meters behind them.

  “Empty!” Hawkins shouted.

  “Go!” M
cCarter crouched. The enemy was now in range of their M-203 grenade launchers. Enemy riflemen were crouched around the low, stone-pile wall surrounding one of the wells, and they were taking time to aim their rifles. McCarter flicked his sight to three hundred meters and pulled the M-203’s trigger. The weapon belched pale yellow flame in the sunlight. The fragmentation grenade landed within the stone ring a second later and detonated like a whip cracking. Men screamed as shrapnel shredded them. The Briton lowered his muzzle and began rapidly firing his rifle. He expended his twenty-eight rounds into human flesh and rose.

  “Empty!”

  “Go!” Hawkins knelt and his grenade launcher thumped. Jagged bits of metal borne on wings of high explosive hissed through the palm trees, killing and maiming as the grenade detonated. Encizo’s rifle fired burst after burst into the enemy positions. By the second well a weapon spit fire in the long sustained fire of a light machine gun. Hawkins could tell by the firing signature it was a Russian-made PK, firing the 7.62 mm Russian high-powered rifle round.

  “Empty!” Encizo broke into a run.

  James dropped into a firing crouch. “G—!”

  He rocked back as he took three trip-hammer blows to the chest. He reeled on his heels a moment trying to bring his weapon to bear, and a second burst knocked him flat on his back.

  “Phoenix Two down!” McCarter snarled. The Briton lifted his grenade sight for the light machine gun by the well. Manning’s sniper rifle boomed from two hundred meters back and the machine gunner slumped over his smoking PK with his skull cracked open like an egg. McCarter swung his weapon onto the third well and looped his grenade for the gunmen huddling in its cover.

  Encizo pounded up to James, who lay on his back gaping, stunned, into the desert sky. He’d taken five rounds into his solar plexus, but the ceramic trauma plate of his armor appeared to have survived the high-power rifle hits of the machine gun. And so, subsequently, had Calvin. Encizo had taken hits on his own armor more times than he cared to remember, and it still felt like being kicked by a mule.

  He rolled James prone and shoved his rifle back into his hands. “Shoot!”

  He ran on as James began to fire.

  McCarter knelt, shouting into his mike and firing his rifle at the same time. “Stony Base! Enemy Sitrep!”

  “Enemy forces taking massive casualties, Phoenix One! Reduced by estimate one-third!”

  That still left well over a hundred enemy fighters, and Phoenix Force was running out of ammo. “Empty!”

  McCarter rose and reached for his second-to-last magazine.

  Hawkins jumped to join him as Encizo and James kept firing prone. James’s voice was hoarse across the link. “What now? Fix bayonets?”

  McCarter ignored the remark while a part of him knew it just might come to that.

  “Empty!” Encizo shouted.

  McCarter hurled himself prone. AK bullets were kicking up sand and dirt all around him. “Down! Pop blue smoke!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Five men!” Sheikh Harith Jaspari was incensed. He waved a gigantic dagger in one hand and an AKSU automatic carbine in the other. “You retreat before five men!”

  Thamud Fazran cringed before the sheikh’s wrath. He had been a volunteer fighter against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Fazran had survived the intense street fighting in the battles for Fallujah and Mosul. He had followed the black banner against the Christian crusaders. He was a veteran ambusher, and the ambush they had planned seemed like a very good idea. They had every advantage. Two days ago they had been warned that a small group of western special operatives might try to infiltrate the oasis or set up an observation post. They’d been warned it was very possible they might try to kidnap the sheikh. Fazran didn’t know who the sheikh’s secret benefactor was but the information they had provided was priceless. Just six hours ago they had been warned of a five-man camel caravan that seemed to have sprouted from the desert itself.

  Fazran knew such information could only have come from a satellite.

  He had been well pleased. Too many times as a foreign fighter in Iraq he’d been forced to fall back and flee before the superior firepower of the American and British soldiers. This time the numbers and firepower were on his side. The sheikh had given with an open hand and supplied Fazran and his men with everything they needed. He’d bought brand-new Russian rifles and the latest generation of RPG rocket launchers. A pair of 82 mm mortars had been flown in along with a trained Syrian mortar team. Above all they had the priceless gift of surprise. The plan was perfect. Overwhelming such a small enemy force in the open would be easy. Prisoners would be taken. Fazran had flushed with pleasure at the thought.

  It had been two years since he had cut off a westerner’s head with a knife. The room was set and the video camera ready.

  But now…

  “Sir, I think it best if we evacuate you from here and—”

  “Go!” the sheikh cried. “Kill the nonbelievers! Separate their heads from their bodies and let their entrails be the feast of hawks!”

  Fazran ran from the sheikh’s parlor. Outside everything was screaming and confusion. Men were plastered behind the walls or in doorways of the compound. Other men hid behind the vehicles or lay cringing behind palm trees. The slaughter was appalling. The dead lay everywhere. Even in the confusion Fazran was horrified to see that well over two-thirds of the casualties seemed to have been taken with a single shot. The mortars were firing way off target, more than a hundred meters behind the enemy. The mortar team was safely ensconced in the courtyard. Fazran looked around for the mortar forward observers and saw both two-man teams lying dead. The observers’s binoculars were shattered as were the heads of the observers who had looked through them. The men on the cell phones who had directed fire lay dead beside them.

  Fazran crouched in the doorway and took stock of the enemy. He saw four fighters out in the scrub approximately three hundred meters away. They had dropped prone and were using the optics on their weapons to maximum effect.

  Dropping prone would be their downfall.

  “Sadiq!” Fazran sought out his right-hand man and found the burly Bedouin huddled beneath a low wall of piled stone firing his AK blindly over the top. Fazran dived behind the wall as a bullet whined off the lip. “Sadiq! The enemy has halted! They are prone in the open! I will direct the mortars and then lead the counterattack! Take twenty men and put them in the vehicles. Flank the enemy!”

  “Yes!” Sadiq rolled up to his feet. “It will work!”

  “Good, take two of the RPG teams and…” Fazran trailed off as plumes of blue smoke began to drift into the sky around the four enemy fighters and from a point two hundred meters behind them in the rocks. He couldn’t understand why they would announce their locations, clearly marking themselves….

  “Sadiq!”

  The men turned and looked. “Marking smoke! Commander I—” Sadiq’s head burst apart as a .338 Lapua Magnum rifle round took him from the rocks six hundred meters west.

  Fazran threw himself behind the wall and a second sniper shot cracked stone an inch above his head. He became aware of the sound of rotors and looked around wildly for the aircraft. To the north he saw a rapidly moving rooster tail of dust and sand tearing toward the oasis. Sheikh Jaspari stepped into the doorway shouting and waving his weapons. “What are you doing, Thamud! Must I kill the Americans myself! I—”

  The sheikh’s jaw dropped in horror as death rose up from where it had been hugging the deck and came screaming scant feet above the palm trees. Across the globe it was every insurgent fighter’s worst nightmare made manifest.

  The gunships had come.

  Fazran tackled the sheikh through the door as hell erupted.

  NO SAUDI OFFICIAL would allow a combat flight from Israel over Arabian airspace. Nor would any Saudi general order an attack on a member of the Saudi royal family, however distant or embarrassing that member of the family might be. Allowing foreigners to use Saudi military assets would be equally unthinkabl
e.

  However, the Farm had a few friends and a card or two they could play.

  At the same time Phoenix Force had been rerouted to Saudi Arabia, a civilian C-130 freighter had flown nonstop from Virginia to the Saudi Red Sea port of Al Wajh. Its cargo manifest declared it was carrying a civilian “pleasure helicopter.” Markers had been called in and there had been no problem with customs inspections. At 4:00 a.m. that morning, in the dead of night, a helicopter had emerged from the fat belly of the C-130 like a dragonfly emerging from the ponderous round husk of its larval stage.

  There was nothing civil about its appearance, and pleasure was not its business.

  Dragonslayer unfolded its rotors, spread its stub wings and thundered into the purple predawn desert sky searching for prey.

  It was helicopter like no other. It had been built up from a civilian airframe but it had been optimized for exactly such missions as it flew this morning. Its avionics and electronics were of the very latest generation but were a hodgepodge of both U.S. and European suites. With its stub wings attached it could carry any NATO weapons fit. With a different set of wings and a modular fire control refit it could carry Russian or Chinese weapons systems with equal facility.

  Dragonslayer was Stony Man Farm’s ugly surprise for those who thought they were untouchable in their own territory.

  It was a beautiful morning for flying.

  Jack Grimaldi burned across the sere scrub a mere ten feet off the deck. He noted the plumes of blue smoke and prone forms of Phoenix Force to the west as they fired into the oasis. He swung wide and approached from the north. His first priority was the mortars. Phoenix Force was stopped in the open and if the gunmen behind the tubes could get their fire coordination correct, Phoenix Force was going to be lunch meat in another few seconds. The Stony Man pilot popped up off the deck and palm trees whipped about in his rotor wash as he rose over Sheikh Jaspari’s compound.

  Dragonslayer’s weapons this day were French. An Egyptian arms dealer in Qus had been convinced to ship them across the Red Sea to Al Wajh in crates marked Auto Parts. Jack Grimaldi was a red-blooded American boy and he really didn’t care that much for French politics in recent years. That didn’t stop him from kissing their women, drinking their wine or eating their cheese. He had no complaints whatsoever about using their weapon fits. The French had invented the helicopter gunship concept during their colonial war in Algeria. U.S. gunship design had long ago outstripped theirs, but French aircraft weapon systems continued to be well thoughtout.