Jackson Day’s “Listen & Destroy” Mission In The Iranian Boondocks
In an earlier post (Die By Wire’s Wounded Warrior Hero: Sleepless Before The Mission), I wrote about the beginning of Jackson Day’s listen-and-destroy mission in the Iranian boonies. It offered you some background about him and his Iraq firefight history with heroine Mira Longbow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Northeast of Kuleh Sangi, Iran
Day struggled through the night, his sleep strewn with rocks, visions of Mira and the accusing faces of dead squad members who visited him in a set-piece nightmare that played over and over every night.
As he did each day since Al-Kut, Day spent his first waking moments apologizing to his men, promising justice. Moving past the accusing grimaces on their bloody torn faces had developed into its own ritual that allowed him to make it through the day.
He settled down in his rock tomb and monitored the house and the numerous minions who had arrived to prepare the house for visitors. The pain in his leg grew worse throughout the day. Inactivity did that.
Walter Reed Hospital’s physical therapists coached him through months of unmerciful pain. But penance for Al-Kut pushed him farther than they dared. When the therapist called for four reps at the quad machine, Day gave her twelve; when a half-hour session ended, he pushed through another hour. The faces of those who had died under his command compelled him through very excruciating, raw-nerved, slashing-broken-glass agony.
His physical therapy sessions gained a certain notoriety among a mostly female audience that appreciated a tall, broad-shouldered, aggressively fit Alpha male with a well-chiseled profile and six-pack abs.
Despite his phenomenal recovery, a steady stream of staff officers and physicians tried to quench his burning desire to return to active duty.
“You’re lucky to walk again,” said a senior surgeon who wrote a medical journal article on Day’s leg repair. “Don’t push your luck. Put your heart into the new training. You have a quick mind and an innate ability to understand how gadgets and computers work. I can’t guarantee what might happen in combat to all the metal patches you have.”
Cyberwarfare command had provided a modified Alienware laptop, a personal tutor and the promise of a promotion and cash bonus. But Day knew he would never spend the rest of his career in the glow of a computer screen.
Avenging the loss of his squad mattered more than life itself.
Upon his discharge from Walter Reed, the Army promoted him to master sergeant, transferred him to a new unit tasked with field testing future generation combat technologies. Day enjoyed the work and even earned an associate’s degree along the way.
But no matter what he did, he felt he had abandoned the men who had died under his command. Just thinking about that made his leg hurt worse.
* * * * *
Darkness gathered over the desolate VEVAK safe house.
The first convoy brought the buyer in a Toyota SUV. Using a Russian-built night vision monocular, Day counted seven armed guards in the back of a pick-up behind the SUV.
Next came the hawaladar in a Land Rover accompanied by two well-waxed Toyota Titan pick-ups, both packed with his security forces. One truck had a machine gun mounted in the rear.
Heavily armed men fanned out, swarmed over the tight confines of the narrow ravine.
The Iranian arrived last, riding in a convoy of five armored Suburbans. If the fragments of intercepted satellite phone conversations were correct, he had come to sell more of his country’s leading exports: misery, death, destruction and chaos.
Day would determine which instrument of terror would be sold, along with the buyer’s identity, and the hawaladar’s name.
Then he would kill them.
The eavesdropper trawled the house below, filling Day’s earpiece with a tangle of Farsi, Arabic with a Waziri Pashto accent, and something that might have been Ghazni Pashto spoken like a native of the Punjab.
Day understood little but the Pashto. Not that it mattered. A real-time satellite link fed everything from the eavesdropper to a room full of translators.
The little Day did understand, frightened him. Some new weapon created by Iranian and Pakistani physicists and financed by rich Wahabi Saudis who had bought the main components from U.S., German and French manufacturers. Day got the impression a prototype had been tested on a Turkish airliner in Holland.
Day failed to understand the weapon , but he did make out the names of more than a dozen international airports including the usual targets: JFK, Narita, De Gaulle, Heathrow, Schiphol, LAX, O’Hare, DFW, Hartsfield, Barcelona. Rio De Janeiro, Dulles, Boston, Milan.
Then the scrape and thud of chairs, a rustle of cloth and sharp shuffle of shoes on tile. The meeting had ended.
Showtime.
Out front, engines turned over, guards gathered, all wary, twitchy and hair-trigger alert.
Day pulled out his earpiece, tucked the touchscreen keyboard into its holster on the eavesdropper and activated the thermite destruction timer. He had two minutes before the awesome 5,000-degree flames reduced the ultra-secret device to vapors and ash.
Ignoring protests from muscles and joints immobile for so long, Day levered himself toward the jagged, pinched lips of the rock womb that had concealed him. Seconds later, a wan breeze carried a whiff of cigarette smoke.
Crap.
Day froze. The thermite timer counted down. Light flared to the right of his rock coffin. Then a cigarette flared less than ten feet away. Day raised the AK-47. Hesitated. Gunfire would send the men below into flight faster than his strategy required. He had the recording, but had to kill the participants.
Strategy never survives the first encounter of the enemy.
From down below, orders were barked, preparations were made. Failure loomed.
Improvise!
What would keep the main participants in the house longer?
Putting the AK aside, Day opened his pack and pulled out a mass of TV remotes, each one duct-taped to a garage-door opener. All the EFPs he had planted the previous day could be detonated by radio frequency or the infrared signals from the amped-up TV remotes.
Day pulled out number fourteen. That matched up perfectly with the location marked on the map in his head.
When in doubt, create a diversion.
With the thermite ticking down just inches from Day’s feet, he pressed the button.
Nothing.
Crap!
As an icy calm ran through his veins, Day checked off the options: dead battery, transmitter malfunction, jammer in operation, weak signal from being buried in a pile of fucking rocks.
More voices from below. More cigarette smoke. Less time.
He worked his arm up through a crevice. Prayed. Pressed the button.
Nothing.
He prayed harder, pressed harder, held the button down longer.
The ground finally shook.
Down below, one of the Iranian-made Explosively Formed Penetrators, exploded. The EFPs the Iranians had supplied to the Taliban to kill Americans now launched a hypersonic jet of vaporized copper heated to more than 20,000 degrees and traveling eight miles per second. The jet could slice a hole through an M-1 main battle tank like a white hot nail through butter.
Then the slug-like copper projectile hurtling at 6,000 feet per second slammed through all the melted metal and armor, spraying lethally liquid metal.
The men and vehicles parked nearby stood no chance.
Using the distraction, Day raised his AK-47 and shot the jihadi with the cigarette.
“If I can smell you, I can kill you,” Day said quietly. Pushing the grenade launcher and AK-47 ahead of him Day had nearly reached the mouth of his little cave when the rocks began to shift.
All of them. All around him.
Day scrambled.
Not fast enough.
A stone fist clenched his right knee with a white-hot grasp that shot up his leg.
Oh God!
Fighting back the nightmare images of Al-Kut, Day tried to pull himself free. He cleared the pain from his mind. Focused on the coming few seconds when the boulders around him could all come down. Mere seconds before the thermite just inches away from his foot would ignite and turn the nearest flesh and bone to ash. He pulled and jerked his leg. Nothing.
Desperate, Day slid the AK-47 along his leg, muzzle end down. The iron sight dug into his flesh. Day ignored that too. Jammed the muzzle deeper and deeper, he forced it under the rock that pinned his knee to the earth.
He levered the stock, felt the stony vise ease its grip. He labored harder. Other boulders shifted. Dust and stony debris showered down on his head.
Now or never. All or nothing.
Shoving the Shmel-M and his pack ahead, Day steeled himself against new pain to come. Then he leaned on the AK-47’s stock shoved it upward. After a lifetime in Hell, the knee slipped free.
Day scrambled desperately.
The rocky grotto imploded.
Thermite lit up the night.
Pain propelled Day forward.
Into a hail of gunfire.
The thermite lit up the night and attracted a hail of automatic weapons fire. Day lay flat, frantically searching for the remote he had configured to detonate all of the EFPs simultaneously.
In seconds, his hand closed around an opener with a thin block of wood duct-taped over the button. He whipped it out, ripped off the tape and tripped the remaining twenty-two EFPs.
Payback time!
Explosions rocked the ground like an artillery barrage. Gunfire ceased. The ancient landslide that had formed Day’s hiding place turned into a deadly landslide, wiping out men, vehicles. Two massive boulders smashed through the fortified walls of the house.
Day grabbed the Shmel-M, loaded a thermobaric round.
Thermobaric explosives operate the same way that dust can blow up a grain elevator or a bakery, the same way a leaking gas line can fill up a basement and leave half a block of rubble. Instead of blasting something from the outside like regular explosives, thermobarics vaporized the explosive into a cloud then ignited it — turning the target into one big bomb that blows itself up.
Down below, shouts and orders came; survivors reorganized. Time raced again.
As Day aimed the Shmel-M at the nearest boulder hole, he thought of Mira Longbow and prayed some of her skill would guide him now.
He fired.
With a modest whump! the thermobaric dispersed the fuel powder. Almost simultaneously a huge wave of pressure thudded into Day’s chest. Finally, the flames.
The roof canted insanely; the house knelt to the right.
Day reloaded, fired into what remained of the structure. Seconds later, the house pancaked.
Day reloaded with a high-explosive round. The explosion splintered the roof remains and fed oxygen to the flames inside.
Day reloaded with an incendiary round to make sure the splinters and debris burned completely.
Day reloaded a final time with a high-explosive round he placed among the only guards still standing.
Then he ran like hell.
