The preferred SEAL method of entering highly hostile territory is a HAHO jump. They'll jump out of a airplane at 30,000 feet, pop a chute, and float 30 miles to their LZ, then do their whole sneaky bastard thing. It's extremely effective, unless of course the country being snuck into has been setting up to defend against Israeli airstrikes for 20 years. With Iran, that simply wasn't an option from any direction, they weren't unaware that the US had invaded Afghanistan two decades prior. The entire country bristled with AA.
Of course, that's only the preferred method if you don't have pilots who specialize in low-altitude insanity. Staos and I were going to fly in from Dubai at about 50 feet above the waves, fly through Iran at about 75 feet above the dirt, drop an 8-man team of shooters into the reservoir just out of town without even slowing down, then buzz a few towns on the way out of the country, dodge the Caspian Sea portion of the Iranian navy, then land in Baki, Azerbaijan.
The shooters would sneak and steal their way into Tehran, wait for the signal while taking pictures, then slaughter their way through as many of Allah's chosen as possible when we got the signal. They'd be working in the same area as several other SF and SOF teams, and the chances of having a friendly-fire incident always goes up when those guys start calling in airstrikes.
PMCs, if they even have the capability, make damned sure that they don't accidentally splash a Coalition squad when airstrikes are called in. On the reverse, we don't always have those neat little IR strobes that mark us as friendlies. Also, they don't always let us know that cruise missiles are inbound, and one particularly unlucky PMC had lost an entire 8-man force when a SEAL team had targeted a bomb factory and didn't know the mercs were in the area.
PanamaJack's team met up with me in Iraq. We hadn't worked together in a while, but it's always cool to see old friends. His team is one of the more lethal teams in the company, they've got a reputation for shooting first, hitting the target, then shooting again just to make sure. Definitely the people we wanted to send in first, I'd pick up Wut?'s team in Azerbaijan and be ready to deploy them as backup if things really went south.
We took off just after dusk, and reached the Iranian shoreline just as night really fell. I'd been assigned a copilot for this op, Staos had finally gotten certified to our standards on multiple-engine aircraft. He was another guy who'd come from the website, and had spent years battling a heroin addiction. He'd beaten it eventually, and had come looking for us when we started getting famous.
Night flying is a boring exercise for everyone but the pilots. Especially when we're flying over Iran, which is a boring place to fly over anyways. Even at our stupidly low altitude, we didn't see much that shone in the night. Occasional huts were lit up, but on the whole, we were flying in darkness, past darkness. Just the way I liked it, to be sure.
Four hours of low-level flying after we cross the shoreline, I let the troopers know that we were about to fly over the drop point. This was going to be the hairy part, they'd leave a plane going 150 miles an hour over a lake at night low enough that their chutes would really only slow them enough to not skip across the surface of the lake like stones.
The cabin radio started blasting The Clash's Rock the Casbah, the green light went on, and mercs started the invasion. Eight men, with a week's worth of supplies, jumped out of an airplane flying 175 miles an hour only 75 feet above the water.
I turned the plane to follow the valley out to the coast. It would take us about 20 minutes to get there, and we weren't done with the dangerous portion of the flight.
If I get seen, we're going to have to make sure that they dont't think we dropped off a team. That means carnage on a serious scale.
"Make ready the port-side cannons!"
"Aye, Cap'n. "
My jumpmaster, an older Shogun named Mike, opened and secured the gun windows on the pilot's side of the airplane. We now had a pair of GM-134 miniguns and a 20mm cannon that used to be attached to a Messerschmitt aimed out the port side of the airplane. All were computer-controlled, aimed by the comms guy sitting behind me and staring at a pair of IR feeds. The miniguns were paired together, the cannon could be aimed somewhat independently if necessary.
"Mr. Torpido, let me the know the exact second we get spotted. We're about to hit the coastal areas, and we're going to be noticed."
They knew all this, and they knew that I knew that they knew, but decorum has to be maintained. One of the lessons of leadership is that leaders should always appear to be in charge, and I'm the pilot, which makes me the leader.
I always wanted to be a pirate, though.
I couldn't fly any lower, and with the troopers out of the building and the fuel load where it was, I was flying as fast the engines would haul us. We roared past first one lit house, then two more, then we were in the city.
There. That's the line.
I realized I was holding my breath. I hadn't been this on edge for a long time. I took a deep breath. We'd be fine.
"Shit! They know we're here. Radio just lit up like a Christmas tree!"
"Alright boys, we're on Plan B. have they launched any airplanes yet?"
"No, but Command says the military comms just went crazy."
"Fuck it. Plan C, everyone."
I wrenched us into a hard left turn. We had to go downtown, to make some noise. We couldn't let them know we'd dropped a tactical team in the resevoir outside town.
"Mr. Mike, make something important blow up. Preferably something that will really piss them off."
"Cap'n, your choices are the Parliment building or Khomenei's mosque."
"Mr. Mike, drop the bomb on the mosque, if we can hit it."
The original plan had been to fly low and fast out over the coast and go to Azerbaijan. The backup to that was to fly out a different way, still going to Azerbaijan. The backup to that was to make it look like an attempted assassination of someone really important. Subtlety is key in our business, but the best way to cover up an infiltration is to do something insanely obvious, and make it look like an accident.
Strapped to the back wall of the cargo hold were two 100-quart Rubbermaid coolers, solidly wrapped in five rolls of duct tape. Inside them, we'd stacked 99.5 gallons' worth of C4 blocks, and topped them off with a 3-minute delayed fuse and a parachute. Much like jump troopers in WWII, the chute was static-lined to the plane. Unlike the jump troopers, so was the fuse.
Technically, the closure rate for a ground target is the same whether the aircraft is 50 feet off the ground or 5,000. The calculation is rather simple: One aircraft, traveling at 225 miles an hour relative to the target, should release a chute-retarded package pretty much right over the target. Chutes go straight down, after all.
It helps when the target is lit up brighter than anything else in the city. The bombs got kicked out 3 seconds apart, I made a hard turn to the north, and firewalled the throttles. The coast was now 12 minutes away, the bomb would go off in three.
We'd just left Tehran's airspace when the sky lit up. We'd have to wait for the news cameras to show up to see what we'd hit, but a pair of coolers full of over 350 pounds pounds of exploding Composition C-4 each were bound to make a dent in whatever it had landed on.
It also makes a amazing distraction.
For the next 9 minutes, we flew lower than anyone sane would try. My eyes were throbbing, I'd been wearing wide-angle NVGs for six hours. We finally hit the coast, and I told my copilot to take us the rest of the way while I searched for some painkillers.
That was when the tracers found us. A ragged line of holes went through the starboard side of the aircraft and a matching set appeared in the top of the plane. I reflexively dove for the deck.
"What the fuck just shot us?"
"Patrol boat. Starboard side, 400 yards."
"KILL IT!!"
"Aye!"
Staos pulled the plane into a hard port turn. We could sink most boats, bet we had to be turning to port to do it. Another burst rippled our way, some of it hit the plane. I tried to stand up, but the plane was at too much of an angle, and I bounced off the wall and into a jump seat.
Damnit, why's my leg hurt so bad? I must have fallen into something.
I heard Kahlan scream.
Fuck, I hope she's OK.
Then the turn was completed, and Torpido jammed the firing button down. A standard GM-134 minigun has the barrels zeroed, meaning that all of them are aimed at the same place. When HM had first talked with me about making our C-47 into a Spooky, we'd decided to have the miniguns adjusted so that the six barrels would hit each point and the center of a 2-MOA star. At the 600 yards from us to the patrol boat, that meant a pattern about 12 inches across.
Holy shit are those loud.
A third-party observer would have seen twin bars of light reach across the distance between the plane and the boat. To me, looking out the window from a jump seat, it looked like fireflies gently floating out to the boat. The boat captain just saw a spray of death headed his way at 2,800 feet per second, and died befoe he realized what it was.
Torpido walked the miniguns' fire down to the waterline, back to the stern, then up and off the bow. He'd kept the cannon tracking the cabin, filling it with fire and death. The lights on the boat went out almost immediately, then the boat stopped in the water.
"Soren, the boat's toast."
"Good."
What's wrong with my ears? My voice sounds funny.
"Soren?" I heard a girl call. "SOREN!"
Fuckin' NVG migraine, I can barely see anything.
"Shit! He's been hit!" a man's voice said.
Who?
Then things went black.
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