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  “I’m going to grab some rack,” Daminski said. “Get the section’s officer of the deck on the conn and station yourself as command duty officer. Call me if anything comes in on the ELF circuit.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Daminski walked forward to the tiny cubbyhole of his stateroom, shut the door, and sank into the narrow bed. He had been awake going on forty hours, since the flash message announcing the kickoff of the operation had come in on the sub broadcast. Daminski was exhausted, but he knew he was much too wired from shooting the cruise missile warshots to fall asleep.

  He pulled the letter from Myra from inside his shirt and read it again, the dogeared stationery proclaiming in her loopy handwriting that she loved him but was leaving him anyway.

  You are just too intense to live with … I can’t watch you run this house like you run one of your submarines.

  The children cry when you come home and laugh when you leave, and I can’t bear to see that anymore. Please get yourself some help, and when you are at peace, come back to us. But until then, don’t come home …

  Daminski put the letter back in his shirt and stared at the dimly lit overhead for a moment, but finally closed his eyes and tried to imagine the Javelins, what they were doing that very instant, gliding through the night at 650 miles per hour, a mere twenty feet above the ground, following the contour of the land, screaming in over the terrain of Turkmenistan enroute to General Sihoud’s hidden bunker.

  TURKMENIAN PLAIN

  SEVENTY-FIVE MILES WEST-NORTHWEST OF ASHKHABAD

  Commander Jack Morris missed his beard. It had been a ZZ-Top hairy thing, extending down his chest almost to his belly button. He missed his long hair as well, feeling odd every time he turned his head and didn’t feel the old ponytail dragging across his back. His shooters, the men of seal Team Seven, until just months before, had been a ragged-looking band of bikers, the Navy’s finest counterterrorist unit.

  The start of the land war against the UIF had changed all that, forcing the Sea/Air/Land commandos, the seals, back into regulation Navy uniforms and grooming standards.

  Jack Morris didn’t like that — —it interfered with unit integrity. The seals needed to feel different; there was something healthy about coming onto base looking like a truck driver and getting away with it — —it was a concrete sign that seal Team Seven was different than the rest of the Navy, and therefore better. One last time Morris ran his hands through his weirdly short hair and looked around the cargo compartment of the Air Force KC-10H/A transport jet, the plane illuminated only by a few dim hooded red lights.

  Unloaded, the KC-10’s interior was cavernous, but tonight it held two dozen tons of combat equipment and three augmented platoons of Team Seven, each platoon manned by thirty-three of the meanest sons of bitches in all of the U.S. armed forces. Or any armed force. Morris looked around him at the men— — almost without exception, they were all sleeping. In a way, that would be expected, since they’d been flying for what seemed like days, and it was well after midnight local time. But it was also odd, for these men were only hours from the biggest and hottest combat operation the team had seen since the bloody liberation of the USS Tampa two years before. Many of the men were not expected to return from the mission, and some who would return would leave parts of their bodies behind. Still, Morris thought, they would be in better shape than the UIF people in General Sihoud’s bunker complex.

  One of the aircrew from the flight deck came back into the cargo cabin and waved ten fingers at Morris— — ten minutes till they were over the drop zone. Morris heard the jet engines suddenly throttle up, their noise rattling his skull.

  The plane cabin tilted upward dramatically as the aircraft climbed. Morris unlatched his seat harness and stood, his muscles sore from the long jet ride. He stepped forward, leaning into the incline of the deck, tapping awake his sleeping executive officer, Lieutenant Commander “Black Bart” Bartholomay. As Bart’s eyes opened, Morris shouted “ten minutes” in his face. Bart stood and got the men into action while Morris headed forward. He entered a short narrow corridor at the forward end of the cargo bay, the doors on either wall leading to crew quarters, galley, and the head. At the end of the passageway Morris pushed open the door to the flight deck and squeezed in. The flight crew barely noticed him, the navigator/flight engineer knowing his purpose.

  “You sure we’re in the right place?” Morris asked. He’d been disappointed before by the Air Force, once having been dropped fifty miles south of the planned jump point, landing his platoon several miles offshore instead of on the beach.

  “We got here somewhat roundabout. Commander — we had a few radar detects. This good enough for you?” The flight-suited crewman pointed out the navigation satellite readout and offered a chart up to Morris’s face. After a moment Morris grunted.

  “We’re doing the pop-up now. Commander. About time to get ready with your guys.”

  “Any sign of activity?” Morris asked, ignoring the officer’s warning. The Air Force “zoomies” knew what he meant, Morris thought — is anyone getting ready to shoot us out of the sky?

  “Nothing now. We’re clear.”

  Morris turned and left without a word and hurried aft.

  Within two minutes all three platoons of Team Seven were on their feet preparing their gear. The deck of the cargo jet remained inclined as it continued its rapid climb to 45,000 feet.

  While at altitude they would be vulnerable, Morris thought, checking his watch, wishing he were already in free fall instead of another piece of cargo in a damned Air Force jet.

  Morris pulled on his full face oxygen mask and checked the seal. When the men were ready, he nodded to the airman who opened a panel and depressurized the cabin. Almost immediately the compartment became frigid. Morris shivered and lied to himself that it was from the cold and not from fear. Morris checked his connection to his cargo crate — he and every seal would be tethered to a heavy equipment case during free fall and parachute descent. After an endless five minutes the loading ramp was unlatched and rolled slowly open. Only a few stars in the blackness showed through the gaping hole. Morris connected his Intersat scrambled VHF secure voice tactical radio to the boom microphone in his oxygen mask and spoke to his troops.

  “Listen up, assholes,” he said into his mike, “we’ve got damned little time in the drop zone. I want the DPV’s assembled in four minutes tops and we’re on the way. Don’t forget we’re doing this for one thing and only one thing — to bring back the head of one Mohammed al-Sihoud on a stick. Everybody got that? Let’s get off this bus and go.”

  Morris stepped to the edge of the ramp first and let his toes hang out over seven miles above the desert floor. Black Bart’s voice crackled in his earpiece.

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  Morris spent the time going over the mission in his mind, trying to visualize the main bunker compound in ruins, the security forces running in helpless circles, Sihoud in confusion, maybe trying to escape in a truck, the barrel of a seal MAC-10 automatic pistol in his nose.

  “Five seconds … two, one, go.”

  Morris jumped into the blackness.

  ASHKHABAD, TURKMENISTAN

  MAIN BUNKER COMPLEX

  HEADQUARTERS OF THE COMBINED ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED ISLAMIC FRONT

  From the outside the Main Bunker appeared to be a large mosque, no different from hundreds spread across the Islamic nations of the Arabian peninsula, Asia, and North Africa.

  Four high walls shaped the structure, a tall minaret tower rising out of the eastern wall, presiding over a square central courtyard. The western wall, toward the direction of Mecca, contained the sanctuary. Five times during the broiling hot spring day, the faithful of the Main Bunker would emerge into the courtyard in response to the calls to worship from the minaret, perform the ritual prayers, bowing down deeply in the direction of Mecca. Ritual cries of Allahu Akbar rang out over the courtyard, the combined voices directed heavenward proclaiming the greatness of Allah.<
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  Ten meters beneath the courtyard, below three meters of high-strength prestressed reinforced concrete and twenty centimeters of lead shielding, the upper level of the bunker began. The first sublevel contained the quarters for the lower ranking soldiers of the United Islamic Front of God’s Combined Armed Force. The next two levels were the junior and senior officers’ quarters. The third level housed the plush quarters of General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud, although General Sihoud spent little time there, instead commanding his armies from field command posts. The final level, thirty-five meters beneath the rocky terrain of southern Turkmenistan, was the headquarters area with its maps, computers, and communications consoles linked to the antennae arrays hidden in the minaret forty meters above.

  In the hushed and dimly lit headquarters deck, the Combined Air Force supreme commander and chief of staff to General Sihoud, Col. Rakish Ahmed, walked to the communications console set against the east wall of the bunker’s fourth sublevel’s tactical control room. Several junior men manning the console jerked to attention in their seats as Ahmed drew close and leaned over to see the displays.

  Ahmed scanned the computer screens in search of good news, and finding none, turned toward the Khalib — the Sword of Islam — Mohammed al-Sihoud, who stood in the center of the room with a displeased look on his face, his swirling white silk shesh robe flowing to the computer floor tiles of the command center, a colorful belt holding a remarkable long knife in an ornate scabbard on his hip.

  Ahmed saw Sihoud’s knowing glance, and wondered whether Sihoud had already guessed what was to be said. Ahmed had worked as Sihoud’s chief of staff for over a year, and the two men had learned each other’s minds well.

  General Sihoud was a striking leader, incredibly tall for one of Bedouin ancestry, with the expected dark skin stretched across startling unexpected Western features, his brilliant violet-colored eyes shining commandingly from his aristocratic face. Ahmed considered the bluish purple eyes for a moment, knowing that Sihoud was almost ashamed of them — they gave away the fact that his Bedouin roots were mixed with the blood of a White Russian. Sihoud’s paternal grandfather, though Russian, had been born in what was then the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, rising to the rank of general in the Red Army. General Tallinn had married a young Muslim girl named Raja Sihoud, had taken a post in Moscow, then returned ten years later with a young son. The general had been killed on the march to Hitler’s Berlin, leaving the son to grow up an anti-Soviet Islamic revolutionary.

  Named Yuri Tallinn, he changed his name to All Abba Sihoud, and had only lived to see his thirty-seventh year before being executed for crimes against the Soviet state. Mohammed al-Sihoud had been only seven years old when he watched the kangaroo court sentence his father to death.

  Now, thirty years after the Soviet bullet had passed through his father’s brain, Mohammed al-Sihoud found his eyes a liability, a reminder of what had been Russian, but to Ahmed the deep purple eyes made the leader that much more marked by the hand of destiny.

  Not that destiny was helping them now: it was beginning to look as if the tide of the war was turning, the offensive brown streaks staining the computer-generated maps on the oversize consoles on the west wall of the headquarters level, the brown symbolizing the armored forces of the Western, Coalition, the West’s three recent invasions into UIF soil.

  Their white-faced soldiers might soon march deeper into the heart of the United Islamic Front. There was only one way out of this, one way to stop the bleeding of the Islamic armies in the deserts, and that was to implement Ahmed’s plan, to use his plutonium polymer dispersion weapon, the Scorpion, and bring this war home to the leaders of the Coalition, the Americans. Ahmed wondered if Sihoud would welcome the missile or object to it. Although it would seem odd that the Khalib would spurn such a superweapon. General Sihoud continued to cling to a belief that the Islamic soldiers engaged in their holy jihad could still defeat the overfed soldiers of the Coalition without the marvels of high technology. But in this belief, Sihoud was mistaken. Perhaps it was he. Rakish Ahmed, who had let down the United Islamic Front in his failure to make Sihoud understand. Perhaps now was the time to bring Sihoud to the realization that a head-to-head battle with the Coalition could not be won.

  And there was the other matter on Ahmed’s mind, the reports coming in of a Coalition plot to kill Sihoud. Sihoud’s stubborn refusal to command from the bunker made him play into any Western plot to assassinate him — Sihoud’s own bravado might be the factor that got him killed.

  “General-and-Khalib, I’m worried about the Coalition invasions,” Ahmed said. “I’ve had a computer simulation run to project the near term outcome. I’ve been optimistic in my assumptions of our troop losses, fuel usage, and supply distribution. I’ve also projected that the Coalition’s supplies are held up and that their troops are poorly deployed. And the computer still shows the Coalition marching into Ashkhabad within the year.”

  Sihoud reached into his scabbard for his knife. He pulled the instrument out, a long shining blade below a beautiful pearl handle with at least a dozen precious gems shining even in the dim light of the command center. Sihoud, as he always did when deep in thought, ran his finger slowly along the edge, and there were times when Ahmed was amazed that Sihoud never cut himself.

  “A computer simulation,” Sihoud said. “As if an adding machine could capture the fighting spirit of our men. Rakish, you are too much the flying-machine technician, too little the field-soldier warrior.”

  Ahmed gestured toward the oversized monitor repeater above the computer console, the map on it showing North Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia, the territories of the United Islamic Front of God, now under attack from the invading forces of the American and European armies. The Coalition had invaded the western shores of Morocco in North Africa. A central invasion force had obtained a foot hold on the Sinai Peninsula and within weeks would target Cairo. A third force had come ashore in the southeast on the southern coast of Iran, the preinvasion bombing so violent that much of southern Iran’s civilian population was wiped out, including Rakish Ahmed’s own town of Chah Bahar.

  Rakish Ahmed knew of this war crime personally — —he had been in the town to see to defenses along the coast, and at the Khalib’s invitation had stopped at his home to see his wife and young son. An hour after his arrival, the Coalition bombers had arrived, bombing the town into dust, killing Ahmed’s family, nearly killing him too. The episode had shaken him severely, his sleep filled with nightmares, his days spent fighting off memories.

  The Coalition forces would come, Ahmed thought. Their objective was to drive toward Ashkhabad. Toward Sihoud.

  * * *

  “Khalib, we do not have the force for a three-front counterattack. We have material problems. The Japanese tanks and trucks and self-propelled artillery are excellent weapons — if they have fuel. The Firestar fighter jets have engine problems, they throw turbine blades — and what good are the most sophisticated electronics in the air if the airplanes are unable to fly? We have severe supply problems — supplies of every nature are short. We will barely be able to keep the men in the field fed. Our battle deaths cannot be replaced by young recruits. The Coalition is starting to bomb the refineries. The sky is growing black with oil fires. In six months our tanks and planes will begin to run out of fuel.”

  Sihoud ran his finger slowly along the knife’s edge.

  “So you believe ova jihad — now just begun — is hopeless,” he finally said in his melodious voice. For a moment Ahmed considered not the words but the voice itself, the voice that had mesmerized the leaders and peoples of the nations of the Islamic world, had in spite of their animosities forged them together into a solid formidable confederation. A confederation that had nearly united central Asia, North Africa, and all of Arabia; the consolidation had continued with the invasion and occupation of Chad and Ethiopia, both campaigns taking less then four weeks. But Sihoud’s expansion had stumbled badly in the invasion o
f India. Chad and Ethiopia had taken the world by surprise, the media confused by propaganda from both nations that the sizable Muslim populations of the two countries had invited Sihoud in. The same illusion could not be maintained for the crossing into India. The Indians had fought bravely and appealed loudly to the West, and the West had finally decided to take a stand. The Indian adventure, rather than expanding the UIF, had instead united the Western Coalition and brought American, British, and German weapons to bear against Sihoud, and there was no way that Sihoud, even with his unique charisma, could stand up against that.

  It took Ahmed a moment to realize that General-and-Khalib Mohammed al-Sihoud was looking at him intently, waiting impatiently for an answer.

  “I am sorry, I was thinking. What was your question?”

  “Rakish, you tell me of the problems of the world and you expect me perhaps to wave this knife and make them all go away.” Sihoud fixed his violet eyes on Ahmed’s for a moment, the dark swirling irises drilling into Ahmed’s, as if looking for a character flaw. “You are a pilot, a scientist who deals with numbers and pieces of metal. I am a foot soldier and I deal with the hearts and souls of men, fighting men. We are here to defend our claim to the continent, not to fret about oil reserves and turbine blades.”

  “General, it is never easy to acknowledge that a battle or a war might be lost.” Rakish chose his words carefully, knowing that to anger Sihoud could mean demotion, perhaps even removal from a war he wanted to fight and needed to fight. “But I have a plan involving the use of a new weapon developed in our Mashhad weapon test lab, a weapon I designed but did not tell you about out of fear that it might fail.” Sihoud’s eyes, always so calm, came up to Ahmed’s, his expression naked, malevolent. Ahmed continued. “Imagine for a moment the power of a weapon that would humble a nuclear bomb. A weapon that would not even need to be used to stop the Coalition. A bomb so terrifying that if we just threaten to use it, would cause Washington to withdraw Coalition forces from UIF soil. But I suggest we do not just threaten to use it. I recommend we deploy it as soon as——”