Clancy, Tom – Op Center 04 – Acts Of War

When he could hold his breath nn longer, he turned his face upwards and poked his mouth from the water. He sucked down air—and immediately lost it as something punched him hard in the belly.

TEN

Monday, 4:35 p.m.,

Sanliurfa, Turkey

Mike Rodgers began to doubt that the attack would ever materialize.

The assault of watermelon and manure that the Turkish Security Forces had warned about was probably a fiction. Rodgers’s sixth sense told him that the TSF had invented the warning in order to send Seden out here to observe them. Not that the colonel was a fraud. The colonel had asked his headquarters for aerial reconnaissance of the chopper. The request had been rushed through channels, and the Air Force was getting ready to launch a pair of F-4 Phantoms from a base east of Ankara. What Colonel Seden told Rodgers coincided exactly with the clandestine translation Rodgers had run.

Of course, the whole thing could be a setup, Rodgers thought with an intelligence officer’s natural and healthy skepticism. The TSF might just want to see how the helicopter and F-4s registered on state-of-the-art ROC equipment. Perhaps they’d report their findings to the Israeli military, with whom they had a partnership. In exchange for mutual naval support and continued upgrades of aging Turkish jet fighters, the Israelis would have access to Turkish air space. The two nations would also share intelligence. Knowing the capabilities of the ROC, Tel Aviv might deny Op-Center the freedom to use it there. Or conversely, they might press to have access to it. First, however, they had to know what it could do.

Not that any of this would change the way Rodgers conducted his business. To the contrary. There was nothing in the Regional Op-Center that Rodgers worried about Seden seeing. The general had erased the translated conversation the colonel had had with TSF headquarters, and the On-Line Mole program had been shut down before he arrived. The ROC capacities on view were sophisticated but not revolutionary. Indeed, Rodgers would welcome a report from Seden to his superiors that TSF secrets and military data were safe. That would make it easier to bring the ROC back into Turkey and get the facility into other NATO countries. As Rodgers had told Mary Rose while they waited for Seden to arrive, being informed enabled a team leader to craft an appropriate intelligence, military, or diplomatic response. It allowed a leader to feed the party line to an enemy or even to an ally. It was being caught by surprise that was dangerous.

And now they waited for the F-4s to report back. Though Colonel Seden had been offered the relatively comfortable driver’s seat up front, he graciously declined. He stood at ease and spent most of the time gazing out the front window. Only occasionally did he wander over to check the helicopter’s progress. Rodgers noticed that when he did he no longer looked vaguely put out to be there. His eyes were alert and very interested.

Because he is a loyal Turk, Rodgers wondered, or because he is not?

For her part, Mary Rose clearly wished that Seden would leave. Rodgers knew that she had other programs to test-run. But Rodgers had E-mailed her from his station and told her to wait. Instead of working, she brought up one of the war simulations Mike Rodgers kept on file for relaxation. In alarmingly quick succession, the young woman lost the Battle of San Juan Hill for Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders in 1898, helped El Cid bungle the siege of Valencia during the war with the Moors in 1094, and enabled the formerly victorious George Washington to be defeated by the Hessians at Trenton in 1776.

“That’s the value of simulations,” Rodgers told her. “It lets you appreciate how large the shoes of those giants really are.”

Seden watched Mary Rose fight the last battle during her “break,” and seemed vaguely amused. Then he turned. He happened to glance at the helicopter display on Rodgers’s monitor when the green screen began turning blue. The color was changing from the center out. The helicopter remained an orange silhouette in the center of the screen.

“General?” Seden said with real urgency.

Rodgers looked over. “Temp flux,” he said urgently. “Something just happened out there.”

Mary Rose turned around as the blue spread to the corners of the monitor. “Whoa,” she said. “Something that’s generating a lot of cold in a hurry. This grid is over a mile square.”

Seden bent closer. “General, are you sure it’s cold and not heat?” he asked. “Could the helicopter have dropped a bomb?”

“No,” Rodgers said. He was bent over the keyboard, quickly punching keys. “If it had dropped a bomb, the screen would have gone red.”

“But what could have chilled so much air so quickly?” Mary Rose asked. “That’s gone down from seventy-eight to fifty-odd degrees. A cold air mass wouldn’t move in that fast.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Rodgers said. He consulted his meteorological database, then looked at a computerized geophysical chart. He called up a four-mile-square view of the region and asked the satellite to give him specific heat readings.

The helicopter was a step-five AHL—average heat level. That meant it generated a heat signature where the engine was one hundred degrees, plus or minus five. Anything at that heat level showed up orange on the monitor. Above it was a step-six red or a step-seven black. Below it was a step-four green, a step-three blue, a step-two yellow, or a step-one white, which was freezing.

According to the geophysical chart, the mean ground temperature of this region around the Euphrates was sixty-three degrees. That fell within the step-four levels they had been showing. Step three started at fifty-three degrees. Whatever was happening out there was pulling the temperature down at least ten degrees at a speed of forty-seven miles an hour.

“I don’t understand,” Seden said. “What is it that are we seeing?”

“A massive cooling around the Euphrates,” Rodgers said. “According to the anemometer simulation, that’s almost strong gale speeds. Are gales possible out there?”

“I’ve never heard of any,” Seden said.

“I didn’t think so,”said Rodgers. “Besides, a wind like that would’ve taken out the helicopter.”

“But if it isn’t air, ” Seden said, “what is it?”

Rodgers looked at the screen. There was only one explanation, and it made him sick to contemplate it. “My guess is it’s water,” he said. “I’m going to notify Op-Center. I think, Colonel, that someone just punched a hole in the Ataturk Dam.”

ELEVEN

Monday, 4:46 p.m.,

Halfeti, Turkey

As they swept along the Euphrates, Ibrahim had peered through the waves of heat rising from Mahmoud’s busy 20mm cannon. The ripples had distorted the reservoir and its mighty dam as their attack ravaged it.

The Syrian’s hands had been resting on the stock and trigger of the side-mounted machine gun. It hadn’t been time for him to act, so he’d watched chunks of stone explode inward along the center of the dam, chewed up by the barrage. Though Walid kept the chopper steady, Ibrahim kept his legs braced firmly on either side of the backpack, which lay between them.

As the helicopter flew over the dam, Ibrahim had seen one large piece of stone strike the dam engineer as he tried to surface. The blow probably hadn’t been enough to kill him, though that wouldn’t matter. In just a few moments the engineer would be dead.

The helicopter had come in low over the dam, and Walid swung it around sharply for another pass. As they’d flown toward the control house, Ibrahim had peppered the structure with fire from his machine gun. Though one Turk died in the doorway, Ibrahim’s task had not been to kill the occupants. It had been to keep them crouched under tables or chairs, away from the windows and from the radio. Walid hadn’t wanted anyone to see is which direction they were headed when they left. If they couldn’t get back to Syria, they wanted to get as close as possible before they were pursued.

In the back seat, Hasan was tossing out strips of aluminum to jam signals from the control house. At the same time he was monitoring military communications on a radio headset. If someone in the control house did manage to get a message out, perhaps by telephone, and they were pursued, the plan was to land the helicopter and scatter. Then they would make their way individually to one of two safe houses. The huts were located in southern Anatolia on the Syrian border, run by Kurdish sympathizers.

The helicopter had swung around for another pass. Once again Mahmoud’s powerful 20mm shells had slammed against the center of the dam. Shards of stone flew in all directions as the cannon fire pounded down. The attack wasn’t designed to weaken the dam. It was being used to create a foothold for the package between Ibrahim’s legs.

Now that the moment was nearly upon them, Ibrahim unzipped the backpack to make sure that everything was in order. He looked down at the four sticks of dynamite bound neatly in a pack with electrical tape. There was a timer hooked to an ignition cap on top. He ran his finger along each of the wires and fuses to check the connections. They were secure. The nails were also fast, the heads taped to the inside of the bag. The entire package would sit firmly in place when lodged amid the bullet-shattered stones.

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