Strike Force

The first figure handed his rifle over to his comrade, then quickly removed his helmet, revealing the angry face of a rather young black man. He stepped over to Buzhazi and grasped him by his jacket, pulling him toward him until they were face to face. Buzhazi’s men moved as if they were going to help him, but backed away when the other armored figures shifted their weapons to a more threatening port-arms position. “I’ll tell you who I am, Buzhazi,” the black man spat. “I’m the guy who swore if I ever found you alive I’d twist your head right off your shoulders with my bare hands, orders or no orders to the contrary.”

“Briggs,” Buzhazi gasped. “Harold Briggs, the American commando and leader of the Tin Men. I thought so.” Hal’s face was a mask of pure rage. “You still mourn your woman, even though she died as a spy serving her people, trying to assassinate me.”

“Go ahead, Buzhazi. Say one more word to me. Give me a reason to rip you limb from limb.”

“Sir, let’s get the hell out of here,” the second figure said.

Briggs tossed Buzhazi out of his hands and into the arms of his men surrounding him. “The message is, General,” Briggs said, “that you asked for our help, and you got it. If it was up to me, I’d shove you headfirst into the sand up to your ankles and call it self-defense. But General McLanahan seems to think you have the ability to turn this country around. Personally I think he’s insane, but he thinks differently.”

“Tell him thank-you from my men and myself.”

“He can hear everything you say and has been monitoring this battle, and he will continue to monitor what you’re doing from now on,” Briggs said. Buzhazi’s eyes drifted up to the sky as if he was searching for the eyes watching them. “He convinced a lot of very powerful people that you were going to bring down the theocratic regime and help stabilize the region. If he’s found wrong, he will be extremely embarrassed, and I will take great pleasure in removing the source of that embarrassment — you.”

“He shall have no fear — the theocracy will die, or I shall,” Buzhazi said. “Iran is done sponsoring death and destruction in the name of the religion of peace. If I am successful, I shall pursue peace with the rest of the world — Arab, Westerner, Zionist, Asian, and European, as well as Persian, I swear it. Again, I thank you for your help.”

“We’re done helping you, General — we’re outta here,” Briggs said. “Your promises don’t mean shit to me — only your actions matter. Make sure no one tries to follow us east of this place, or we’ll come back and finish the Pasdaran’s job.”

“No one will follow you, I swear.”

“Better pray that’s so, General. If you have any friends in the regular armed forces who aren’t friends with the clerics, I suggest you give them a call and get them out here to give you a hand against any other Pasdaran forces who might try a counterattack. And I’ve got one more promise for you, General: The next time I come back here, it’ll be to finish the job — on you.” With that, the four figures ran off, and in the blink of an eye were gone — last seen jumping over the walls of the compound and bounding across the farmlands to the east.

“Those were the American armored commandos you called, sir?” Mansour Sattari asked breathlessly. “But that is impossible! You called them just last night! How could they have gotten out here so quickly?”

Buzhazi stood dumbstruck for a few moments, then shook himself out of his shock and smiled. “I would imagine that’s the secret east of here they don’t wish to share,” he said. “No matter. The Americans did the impossible, and they have delivered to us a miracle and turned the tides in our favor. Now it is time to push forward and take the clerical regime down once and for all!”

It took the team thirty-seven minutes to run twenty miles east of the Khomeini Library — they attracted a lot of incredulous stares from farmers and townspeople, and Hal Briggs was sure there were going to be some frantic phone calls to local gendarmerie, but they continued on without any interference. For safety, they changed their main battery packs for fresh ones before moving into the target area — their batteries were almost depleted, and it would not be prudent to have to defend their destination area with spent batteries installed. Eight miles west of the Kavir Buzurg dry salt marsh and three miles north of a smaller dry lake bed, on the very western edge of the Dasht-e Kavir wastelands, they came across a stretch of paved construction highway in the center of a narrow valley. There were dozens of natural gas wells along the road, and Hal remembered passing a large industrial complex several miles back that had to be the natural gas processing plant for these wells.

In the center of the highway, just east of a bend, sat their objective: an XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane, the “magic carpet” that took them from Dreamland to north-central Iran in less than two hours.