Part 21 (1/2)
Major Naslin was glad to have finally reached his destination-the hills overlooking the Serb-held town of Spivak. Though the town was less than sixty miles from the artillery park, it had taken him hours to get into position. One reason for the delay was that the area was crawling with PROFOR units, and they had been forced to use the back roads and forest trails to reach their position unseen.
Then, on Hukan Rezak's recommendation, he had abandoned the Toyotas he had driven since leaving the bombed-out camp for half a dozen ex-Yugoslavian army Mercedes Unimog trucks. As the Bosnian had pointed out, the Unimogs were painted olive drab like the PROFOR vehicles and wouldn't be as noticeable as the desert tan pickups. Now, back under the trees of the wooded hillside, they were well camouflaged and impossible to spot from either the air or the ground. As he watched the town below, Naslin went over the plan in his mind. Rezak's information was that there would be some fifty or sixty thousand people in Spivak in the morning. That would make a good first killing for what would become known as the Day of Death. Of the seventeen rockets, he would send eight of them screaming down on Spivak, spreading their yellow death.
As soon as he had launched the rockets at Spivak, he would hitch up the Katusha launcher and tow it to Daniva, where another twenty or thirty thousand people would be gathered. Two volleys of three rockets should take care of them. Then, the last volley of three would be fired at Zubor and another twenty thousand Serbs or so would die.
By noon, well over a hundred thousand Serbs and Croats would be dead, not counting their children, and Bosnia would be well on its way to becoming an Islamic state.
When word of the fate of these towns spread, and the agents of Rezak's party were prepared to see that the word did get out quickly, the ensuing panic would clean thousands more of the infidels out of Bosnia. Fear of more chemical attacks would send Serb and Croatian refugees stampeding out of Bosnia back to their national homelands.
Naslin would rather simply kill them now and have done with it, but that wasn't possible with so few rockets. He knew that every able-bodied man who fled to the Serbian or Croatian territories would one day come back with an AK in his hand to try to retake Bosnia. But by the time they returned, the Islamic troops would be in place to protect the Muslims and they would die then.
Even with all he'd had to overcome since leaving Asdik's fortress, the plan would still work. All he had to do to bring this to pa.s.s was to keep out of sight of the UN patrols until the morning. He had been informed that UN aircraft would be less of a problem because another attack had been launched against Aviano that would cripple their ability to send ground-attack fighters over Bosnia.
Even so, Naslin had been told before that the air base would be shut down, and it hadn't happened. And since he still had several Strella missiles, he ordered that they be sent out to the sentries with instructions that they keep watch for any aircraft flying too close to their hideout.
MCCARTER WAS FLYING in Grimaidi's copilot's seat and manning the weapons in the nose turret as they approached the location Hunt Wethers had vectored them into. In the back, Hawkins was on the door-mounted Minigun while the others searched the ground below for their targets.
Bolan was on the radio to Aviano, where Katzenelenbogen was forwarding the latest tracking coordinates from the Farm's borrowed satellite. ”The Farm says they haven't moved.”
”d.a.m.n,” Grimaldi said as he nosed the Black Hawk even lower so he could look into the edges of the tree line. ”They've got to be somewhere down there.” The forest was thick here, and flying over it wasn't cutting it.
”There they are!” McCarter stated. ”Two o'clock, fifty meters inside the wood line!”
Stomping on the rudder pedal, Grimaldi snapped the guns.h.i.+p around to face the trucks. McCarter's hands were on the firing controls for the 25 mm chain gun, but he couldn't find a target. Nothing was mov-ing in the wood line, and no one was firing at them.
”Set it down,” Bolan told Grimaldi, ”and we'll go in on foot.”
”You sure?” Bolan nodded.
Going into a low hover, the pilot bled off his lift until the landing-gear wheels sc.r.a.ped the dirt. The instant he touched down, the Stony Man team, minus Hawkins, exited the chopper in an a.s.sault mode.
Grimaldi pulled the chopper back up in the air and kept both the nose turret and Hawkins's Minigun covering the trucks as the team fanned out. When no one shot at them, James and Manning ran toward the trucks. Once inside the wood, they found that the Toyotas had been abandoned.
”We've been suckered.” James sounded disgusted over the comm link. ”No one's here.”
The trampled earth and tire tracks around the two tan Toyota pickups told the story. The Iranians had met up with someone and had transferred the chemical rockets to other vehicles. And since the satellite's computer hadn't been told to be on the alert for a switch, it wasn't tracking the new trucks.
”Now what in the h.e.l.l do we do?” James asked. That question was on everyone's mind, and he had just been the first to voice it.
McCarter's jaw was set. ”I'll be b.l.o.o.d.y well d.a.m.ned to h.e.l.l and back if I know. Unless the Bear can pull another one of his b.l.o.o.d.y rabbits out of his b.l.o.o.d.y hat, we're b.l.o.o.d.y well screwed.”
Bolan was on the horn to the Aviano CP and gave Katz the bad news. After talking for a moment, he pulled out his map and turned to McCarter. ”Katz says that he thinks they're going to hit three towns not too far from here.” ”Show me.”
Bolan's finger traced an arc covering the three po-tential targets. ”He's saying that it's going to be Spi-vak first.”
”That's his hunch?” McCarter asked.
Bolan nodded.
With the exception of Hawkins, who was the new kid on the block, all of the Phoenix Force commandos had worked off of Katzenelenbogen's hunches for years and knew that they were usually better than hard intel. ”You want to go with it?” McCarter asked again. ”I can be there in twenty minutes or so,” Grimaldi said, cutting into the conversation as he glanced at his nav screen.
”Let's do it,” Bolan said.
The teton was loaded back on the Black Hawk and headed west as fast as the beating rotors could carry it.
Stony Man Farm HUNT WETHERS was working overtime trying to find what had happened to the Iranians. The vehicle switch had taken him completely by surprise, and he wasn't a man who liked surprises.
Operating on Katzenelenbogen's hunch, he was focusing on the area within a twenty-mile radius of the town of Spivak as the primary target. It was a gamble to put all of his efforts in just that one area, and if Katz was wrong about his prediction of the target, a lot of people would die. But there were those times when you had to go with a hunch, and this was one of them.
Using the borrowed satellite yet again, as quickly as he could identify them, he was marking the vehicles of the PROFOR units. Then, by telling the satellite to ignore all of the marked vehicles and only show him the ones he hadn't yet tagged, he was working his way through all of the traffic in the search area. He wasn't sure exactly what he was looking for, but he knew that he'd recognize it when it flashed on his monitor.
After tagging all the PROFOR units he could find, he marked all the buses and trucks in the belief that it would be unlikely for the Iranians to want to drive to their targets in something big and clumsy. They would want four-wheel-drive rigs if possible, or at least something that had good cross-country mobility.
With that done, he started to look for anything he had missed on the first go-around. He pa.s.sed on sin-gle vehicles, figuring that since the Iranians had stayed together since leaving the camp, they'd be do-ing that now. It was an a.s.sumption, but in this business a.s.sumptions had to be made or nothing would ever be done.
The satellite's radar showed him a group of vehicles that was registering as being Mercedes Uni-mog trucks. The versatile four-wheel-drive German trucks were used all over Europe by both the military and civilians. There was no way for him to tell if these were from a UN unit or a group of civilians. Their location, however, was suspicious. According to the radar, they were cl.u.s.tered in a tight group in-side the tree line of a hill overlooking the town.
When that was all he could come up with, he uplinked to Katzenelenbogen in Aviano.
”I've got a group of vehicles that look out of place,” he reported. ”According to the computer, they're Mercedes Unimogs, but I can't tell if they're military or civilian. Anyway, they're hiding under the trees, and I had to use the radar to find them.”
”Even in Bosnia,” Katz replied, ”vehicles usually don't hide under the trees unless they're trying to hide from somebody. It might be a long shot, but they're hiding in the right area, so they're worth tak-ing a closer look at. I'll pa.s.s this on to the team.”
”And I'tl keep on looking,” Wethers said as he signed off.
Bosnia MAJOR NASLIN HEARD the sound of the Black Hawk's rotors long before the chopper appeared. Any helicopter flying over Spivak was his enemy, and this close to his victory, he wasn't going to let anything stand in his way.
”Use the missiles!” he shouted. ”Bring that helicopter down!”
Fearing that the chopper might have radioed his position to other UN forces, Naslin raced for the Uni-mog that had the Katusha launcher hitched to the rear.
”Start the truck!” he yelled to his sergeant.
He knew that there would be even more Serbs in Spivak when the polls opened in the morning, but the town was already packed with them as it was. He wanted the greatest kill he could get. But as it was said in the holy Koran, G.o.d didn't promise any man tomorrow, so the time to do his work was al-ways today.
”What are you doing?” Hukan Rezak shouted. ”They will see you if you drive out there.”
”I am going to kill Serbs for you.”
EVEN THOUGH the previous target had been a dry run, Grimaldi was taking no chances as he came up on the new target Katz had just called in to them. He came in along the back side of the wooded area, fast and low.
”Keep a sharp eye out, guys,” he called to the team in the back.
From his observation post in the rear of the chopper, Gary Manning saw the puff of smoke as the Strella was launched from the wood line.