Radiant Dawn

Copyright © 2000 Cody Goodfellow. All rights reserved.

Cover art by Scott Riggs

All accounts and characters described in this book are fictional. Any resemblance between the events and characters described herein and any actual event or person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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January 16, 1991.

Somewhere in the Tigris River Valley, Southern Iraq.

When it was all over, the eight of them waited in four spiderholes on the lip of the canyon, eight hundred yards away from and two hundred feet above the ruins of the objective. Chief Warrant Officer Nedick motioned to stand down, so they talked, like men in holes who have communicated only with hand gestures for fourteen sleepless, marching hours. Like men filling up smoky black air and desperate hours until a helicopter comes to exfiltrate them back to Bedrock in Riyadh, a helicopter now ninety-seven minutes overdue. They didn't talk about the mission.

"—blow your brains out at the top of the waterfall and the rocks in your pockets'll make you sink and nobody can ever say for sure…"

"—No, you dumb fucking hick, you can't just use cheap American beer to marinate bratwurst, or it's just gonna taste like hot dogs…"

"—and that dog, you know, that collie that's the mascot for Texas A&M? Jesus, but that's gotta be the most pampered fucking animal on the planet. Sirloin and eggs three times a day, and brushings, and even his own fucking car, for Chrissakes."

"Georgie, I do believe you want to be that dog."

Sgt. Storch liked sharing a hole with Sgt. Tuetagoloa, the SAW gunner. The Samoan's bulk would've crowded a hole twice as wide as this one and his stomach growled louder than bombs, but at least he didn't need to babble to feel safe. Still, when he looked at Storch, he seemed to be mentally covering him in a pineapple glaze and stuffing an apple in his mouth. All racial stereotypes aside, Tue's stare made Storch very uneasy.

Storch watched the guttering flames in the crater at the bottom of the canyon through the slitted screen of their hideout, licking his finger every once in a while to test the winds for a shift that would send the green-black clouds trickling out of the bunker their way.

Fourteen hours ago, they were dropped in the marshy hill-country of the Tigris river valley by an MH-60 Pave Low helicopter, and tabbed across twenty miles of bombed farmland to this site. From the get-go, it'd seemed like a goat-rope, a pure bullshit mission: a single bunker in the middle of nowhere nestled in an elbow of a box canyon that sacrificed all defensibility in favor of a dubious invisibility, isolated from military support where most chemical weapons compounds were right under the noses of an airfield or a Republican Guard barracks.

Arriving eight hours ago, they scouted the air defenses, two heavy recoilless guns and a SAM launcher, and took them out. Radioing in the air strike was a bust; the entire area for a two-mile radius was under an anomalous blanket of magnetic disturbance that blocked out even synthetic aperture radar, which could pick up an RC dune buggy on a bad day in Mexico City. Taking it on faith that the mission was still on, they'd painted the compound with laser pointers and waited. In less than ten minutes, they'd heard the planes, three F-111Fs diverted from a sortie on nearby Ad Diwaniyah, flying low enough they could probably hear Tue's stomach, and seen the laser-guided GBU-27 bombs gliding down the canyon to the target like they were on wires.

For his part, Storch was fucking glad they weren't going to have to get any closer. They goofed on the fireworks display and enjoyed an extra helping of their three-day rations, and some French field meals that Wachowiak traded for, and some whiskey-sweetened pemmican that Stauffer's wife made. At the time, they didn't think they'd be needing them. The Pave Low would be whispering in overhead any minute, and they were stoned on being alive and untouchable on the eve of the Mother of All Battles.

They were just starting to chew over the possibility that the helicopter wasn't coming when a man-mountain silhouette crested a craggy rockpile on the next hill, no more than eighty yards away. Sgt. Storch was the first to make it out against the smoky night sky. "Chief, I make a single, armed man at five o'clock, about eighty yards off!" he stage-whispered. Because no one seemed to be able to pronounce Nedick's name in haste, he was always simply Chief in the field. Nobody in the squad would go on record as saying they liked the man, but they trusted him with their lives more readily than they would their fathers or their gods. He motioned for silence, gestured for his men to be alert and to prepare to fall out if they were made.

Preston made a pile of their two hundred pound Alice packs and primed a block of C4 explosive on top of them, with a one-minute fuse ready to be set if they had to move to a new defensive perimeter. The rest of the squad turned and peered at the shape of a very big man atop the rocks, making no effort to conceal himself. He held a rifle across his shoulder and carried some sort of big case on the other. "Holy shit," Stauffer breathed.

"What do you see? What?"

"I think he's one of ours."

The big shadow stooped to heft something up alongside him. A rotund silhouette easily three times his size dangled from his arm. A third clambered up onto the rocks with what looked like a fifty-five gallon oil drum strapped to his back. The first one looked around for a moment, as if he was hiking in the Grand Canyon and sizing up a good spot for a midnight picnic, and then they were swallowed up again by the darkness as they made their way down the canyon wall, cutting a straight path towards the bunker.

"Two M16s on one of them, another has a Barrett sniper…third one looks like a flamethrower, or somethin'…" Preston mumbled as he scanned them. "All of 'em're carrying some kinda steel drums, like oil barrels with handles…They're wearing GI boots and flak jackets, all ripped up like they've been through the shit and back…No MOPP gear, no masks…one of 'em's wearing a helmet, says…'Spike Team TEX' on it…the other two're wearin' berets…black, maybe green…"

"Means shit," Wachowiak growled. "Saddam wears a fucking beret. Half the shit they have they bought from us. I say they're Republican Guard and we frag 'em."

"No…that's not right…" Stauffer said.

Storch tried to read details in the dwindling forms and kept his gun leveled. Tue set the SAW on its bipod pointed at the men. "This smells like bullshit," he said.

"What the fuck're they doing? That place is full of fucking gas," Stauffer said.

"They seem to know what they're doing," Chief grumbled. "Their mission is to get melted inside, that's their lookout." Resentment colored his tone, and Storch knew he was too busy wondering who'd gone over his head to even want the intruders dead just now. Wondering why anyone would knowingly walk into certain death—unless there wasn't any gas, and the reason they were here wasn't at all what they'd been told.

"They looked like mercs," Stauffer said. "We're supposed to be the only Americans this far east. If they were Special Forces, we'd have heard about it, right?"

"Maybe they're SAS, or the fuckin' Australians. Shit, maybe they're Delta," Wachowiak said. "Fuckin' spooks."

"What?" Stauffer scoffed. "Those guys looked older than our dads! And that one guy was like two Tues. They're mercs, and they're probably working for the Iranians."

"How do you figure that?"

"Who else would want to go in there? They were at war with the Iraqis for eight years, and you know Saddam gassed 'em. They want his secret recipe, or something."

"Russians," Tue growled. "Russians been supplyin' 'em for years, lot more'n us. They sold 'em something, they don't want it dug up by the UN."

Storch yawned and rubbed his eyes. "Maybe they are working for us, like Wachowiak said. Maybe it's for our own chemical warfare program."

"Then why weren't we briefed, Sergeant?" Chief barked.

"Because we're not supposed to be here, sir. Our ride's overdue. Shit, maybe they called for us to be left out here to assist and just forgot to tell us about it, but I don't think so."

"What are you suggesting, Sergeant? That they could be a threat?"

"Sir, they didn't trust us to know about it beforehand, so whatever they're here to do isn't just about cleaning up. They're here to get something. And if they didn't trust us before, d'you think they'll trust us to keep our mouths shut after we see it?"

"Zane, we're not grunts. We are Green Berets."

"And what the hell are they?"

"Spike Team Texas," Preston mused. "Didn't they call Green Beret raiding squads Spike Teams in Vietnam?"

"Do any of you still have them?" Chief snapped.

Wachowiak answered. "They're just outside the ruin now, sir. They're—oh shit, they're going inside! They don't have MOPP suits or anything! They're fucked!"

"Then they're not our problem anymore," Chief grumbled, and bit into an apple. The subject was as dead as the three interlopers were, by now.

They waited, rediscussing the best way to grill bratwurst and overpampered college mascots for fifteen minutes, nobody mentioning the men who'd just appeared out of the desert and vanished into a ruined chemical weapons plant and certain death.

Storch was prepared not to say anything about it when he got back, and knew the others would do the same. More than anything else, the importance of image had been driven into their heads from the day they set out from Fort Campbell in Kentucky. When this war went public the following morning, it would be the most watched television event in the world, perhaps in history. Special Forces units had been forced to fight harder to get into this war than they ever would in it, against the prejudices of the Joint Chiefs and the CINC and Stormin' Norman himself; against the media, who wanted only things people could watch over dinner in their wars; against Pentagon spin doctors who thought elite strike teams tarnished the cherished American myth of the citizen soldier, trading his briefcase or his pitchfork for a rifle in times of trouble abroad. The Green Berets had struggled for something they hadn't been allowed to earn since they'd lost it in the unholy Brobdingnagian clusterfuck of Vietnam: the admiration of the American people. It didn't matter that this mission would, officially, never have happened. Hinky ghost stories about phantom A-teams slipping into their theater and stealing their thunder would not be welcomed, if they were taken seriously at all.

They were still talking desperately about nothing when the entire canyon seemed to rise a few inches on a titanic bubble of force, then fall back into place. A tremendous, dull throbbing stirred the sand beneath their feet, subsided. Rockslides poured down the walls of the canyon. Fresh gouts of heavy, half-liquid smoke gushed out of the split facade of the bunker. Storch braced himself against the wall of the hole as Tue trained his SAW platoon gun on the ruin below.

"What the fuck was that?" several of them, all at once.

"Unexploded ordnance, maybe a power source of some kind," Chief said, his voice tight. "CIA and USAMRID both said everything inside gets cooked. The air itself was on fire, in there."

"What if it's a reactor? What if there's fucking plutonium down there?" Wachowiak demanded.

"You got some place to go?" Storch snapped. "Tie down your suit, get your atropine kit ready and shut the fuck up."

"Omigod," Stauffer gasped. "Pres, Donny, look at the front of the compound. I think I got movement."

Wachowiak tilted his goggles back down over his eyes. "What, I got movement too, Ted. It's called fire. It's whiting out your goggles."

"No, look through it, there's something—"

Storch heard the first shots, rolling over the hills at their backs on the chill wind. Three single, tentative cracks, dry and flat, like sheets of sandstone clapping together, but close enough to leave no doubt who the targets were. Storch clearly saw pebbles leap within arm's reach of his hole.

"We're compromised! Abdul's at six o'clock!" Before the words were all out of his mouth, the rest of the squad was turned to face the shots, rifles at the ready, Stauffer's sighting forgotten. Stauffer, Wachowiak and Preston cranked up the gain on their goggles, their faces cadaverous in the green witch-glow from the displays. Tue dragged the cover of their hide back and shouldered the SAW, while Gagliardo knelt down at Chief's feet to try the radio again, scanning through all bands several times a second. "St. Bernard, this is Pit Bull One Three, we're taking fire from an unknown opposing force, requesting exfil soonest—" He got only sandstorms of static.