Locked On Part 1

Locked On.

Tom Clancy.

The Russians call their Kamov-50 helicopter guns.h.i.+p Chernaya Akula-Black Shark. The name suits it, because it is sleek and fast, and it moves with cunning and agility, and, above all, it is a supremely efficient killer of its prey.

A pair of Black Sharks emerged from a predawn fog bank and shot through the moonless sky at two hundred knots, just ten meters above the hard earth of the valley floor. Together they raced through the dark in a tight, staggered formation with their outboard lights extinguished. They flew nap-of-the-earth, following a dry streambed through the valley, skirting thirty kilometers to the northwest of Argvani, the nearest major village here in western Dagestan.

The KA-50s' contra-rotating coaxial rotors chopped the thin mountain air. The unique twin-rotor design negated the need for a tail rotor, and this made these aircraft faster, as more of the engine's power could then be applied to propulsion, and it also made these aircraft less susceptible to ground fire, as it reduced by one the points on the big machine where a hit will cause a devastating malfunction.

This trait, along with other redundant systems-a self-sealing fuel tank, and an airframe built partially from composites, including Kevlar-makes the Black Shark an exceptionally hearty combat weapon, but as strong as the KA-50 is, it is equally deadly. The two helos streaking toward their target in Russia's North Caucasus had a full load-out of air-to-ground munitions: Each carried four hundred fifty 30-millimeter rounds for their underbelly cannon, forty 80-millimeter unguided finned rockets loaded into two outboard pods, and a dozen AT-16 guided air-to-ground missiles hanging off two outboard pylons.

These two KA-50s were Nochny (night) models, and they were comfortable in the black. As they closed on their objective, only the pilots' night-vision equipment, their ABRIS Moving Map Display, and their FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared Radar) kept the helos from slamming into each other, the sheer rock walls on either side of the valley, or the undulating landscape below.

The lead pilot checked his time to target, then spoke into his headset's microphone. "Semi minute." Seven minutes.

"Ponial"-Got it-came the reply from the Black Shark behind him.

In the village that would burn in seven minutes, the roosters slept.

There, in a barn at the center of the cl.u.s.ter of buildings on the rocky hillside, Israpil Nabiyev lay on a wool blanket above a bed of straw, and he tried to sleep. He tucked his head into his coat, crossed his arms tightly, and wrapped them around the gear strapped to his chest. His thick beard insulated his cheeks, but the tip of his nose stung; his gloves kept his fingers warm, but a cold draft through the barn blew up his sleeves to his elbows.

Nabiyev was from the city, from Makhachkala on the sh.o.r.e of the Caspian Sea. He'd slept in his share of barns and caves and tents and mud trenches under the open sky, but he had been raised in a concrete apartment block with electricity and water and plumbing and television, and he missed those comforts right now. Still, he kept his complaints to himself. He knew this excursion was necessary. It was part of his job to make the rounds and visit his forces every few months, like it or not.

At least he wasn't suffering alone. Nabiyev never went anywhere alone. Five members of his security detail were bunked with him in the cold barn. Though it was pitch-black, he could hear their snores and he could smell their bodies and the gun oil from their Kalashnikovs. The other five men who'd accompanied him from Makhachkala would be outside on guard, along with half of the local force. Each man awake, his rifle in his lap, a pot of hot tea close by.

Israpil kept his own rifle within arm's reach, as it was his last line of defense. He carried the AK-74U, a cut-down-barrel variant of the venerable but potent Kalashnikov. As he rolled onto his side to turn away from the draft, he reached out and put a gloved hand on the plastic pistol grip and pulled the weapon closer. He fidgeted for another moment like this, then rolled onto his back. With his boots laced on his feet, his pistol belt around his waist, and his chest harness full of rifle magazines strapped to his upper torso, it was d.a.m.n hard to get comfortable.

And it was not just the discomforts of the barn and his gear that kept him awake. No, it was the gnawing constant worry of attack.

Israpil knew well that he was a prime target of the Russians, because he knew what they were saying about him-that he was the future of the resistance. The future of his people. Not just the future of Islamic Dagestan, but the future of an Islamic caliphate in the Caucasus.

Nabiyev was a top-priority target for Moscow, because he'd spent virtually his entire life at war with them. He'd been fighting since he was eleven. He'd killed his first Russian in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1993 when he was only fifteen, and he'd killed many Russians since, in Grozny, and in Tbilisi, and in Tskhinvali, and in Makhachkala.

Now, not yet thirty-five years old, he served as the military operational commander of the Dagestani Islamic organization Jamaat Shariat, the "Islamic Law Community," and he commanded fighters from the Caspian Sea in the east to Chechnya and Georgia and Ossetia in the west, all fighting for the same goal: the expulsion of the invaders and the establishment of Sharia.

And, inshallah-G.o.d willing-soon Israpil Nabiyev would unite all the organizations of the Caucasus and see his dream fulfilled.

As the Russians said, he was the future of the resistance.

And his own people knew this, too, which made his hard life easier. The ten soldiers in his security force, along with thirteen militants of the local Argvani cell-each and every one of these men would proudly lay down his life for Israpil.

He flipped his body around again to s.h.i.+eld it from the draft, moving the rifle with him as he tried to find some elusive comfort. He pulled the wool blanket over his shoulder and flicked the straw from his beard that came with it.

Oh, well, he thought to himself. He hoped none of his men would have to lay down his life before daybreak.

Israpil Nabiyev drifted to sleep in the darkness as a rooster crowed on the hillside just above the village.

The crowing of the rooster interrupted the transmission of the Russian lying in the weeds a few meters away from the big bird. He waited for a second and a third call from the rooster, and then he put his lips back to the radio attached to his chest harness. "Alpha team to overwatch. We have you in sight and will pa.s.s your location in one minute."

There was no verbal response. The sniper overwatch team had been forced to close to within ten meters of the edge of a cinder-block shack in order to get a line of sight on the objective, another one hundred meters on. They would not speak, not even whisper, so near to unfriendlies. The spotter just pressed his transmit b.u.t.ton twice, broadcasting a pair of clicks as confirmation that he'd received Alpha's message in his earpiece.

Above the spotter, higher on the steep hillside, eight men heard the two clicks, and then they slowly approached in the black.

The eight men, along with the two-man sniper team, were troops from Russia's Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, their Federal Security Service. Specifically, this team was part of the Alpha Directorate of the FSB's Special Operations Center. The most elite of all Russian Spetsnaz units, the FSB's Alpha Group were experts in counterterror operations, hostage rescue, urban a.s.sault, and a vast array of additional deadly arts.

All the men in this unit were alpinists, as well, though they possessed more mountain training than they needed for this. .h.i.t. The peaks behind them, toward the north, were much higher than the hills of this valley.

But it was the other training these men possessed that made them the ideal fit for the mission. Firearms, edged weapons, hand-to-hand, explosives. This Alpha team was composed of hard-core select killers. Silent movers, black operators.

Through the night the Russians had advanced slowly, all senses on alert despite the hards.h.i.+ps their bodies were forced to endure on the journey. The infiltration had been clean; in their six-hour insertion to their objective waypoint they had smelled nothing but forest and had seen nothing but animals: cows sleeping upright or grazing unattended in meadows, foxes darting into and out of the foliage, even large horned ibex high on the rocks of sheer mountain pa.s.ses.

Alpha Group were no strangers to Dagestan, but they had more experience operating in nearby Chechnya because, frankly, there were more terrorists to kill in Chechnya than in Dagestan, though Jamaat Shariat seemed to be doing its best to catch up to their Muslim brothers to the west. Chechnya was more mountains and forest, the major conflict zones of Dagestan more urban, but this location, tonight's Omega, or objective, split the difference. Wooded hills of rock all around a tight cl.u.s.ter of dwellings bifurcated by dirt roads, each road sporting a trench down the middle to drain the rainfall lower toward the river.

The soldiers had dropped their three-day packs a kilometer back, removing from their bodies everything save for tools of war. Now they moved with supreme stealth, low crawling through the pasture just above the village and then bounding in two-man teams through a corral. They pa.s.sed their sniper team at the edge of the village and began darting between the structures: a feed shed, an outhouse, a single-family dwelling, and then a baked-brick and tin-roofed tractor shed. As they progressed, the men eyed every corner, every road, every black window, with their NODs-night observation devices.

They carried AK-105 rifles, hundreds of rounds of extra 5.45x39-millimeter cartridges in low-profile magazine chest rigs that allowed them to lie flat on the ground to hide from either a sentry's eyes or an enemy's gunfire. Their green tunics and green vests of body armor were smeared with mud and covered with gra.s.s stains and wet with melted snow and the sweat of their exertion, even out here in the cold.

On their belts, holsters held .40-caliber pistols, the Russian Varjag model MP-445. A few also carried suppressed .22-caliber pistols to muzzle guard dogs with a hushed 45-grain hollow-point admonishment to the head.

They found their target's location, and they saw movement in front of the barn. Sentries. There would be others in nearby buildings; some would be awake, though their alertness would suffer at this time of the early morning.

The Russians made a wide arc around the target, cradling their rifles and crawling on their elbows for a minute before going to their hands and knees for two minutes more. A donkey stirred, a dog barked, a goat bleated, but nothing out of the ordinary for early morning in a farm village. Finally the eight soldiers spread around the back of the building, four groups of two, covering predetermined fields of fire with their Russian rifles, each weapon topped with an American EOTech holographic laser sight. The men peered intently at the red laser aiming reticle, or, more specifically, at the piece of window or door or alleyway that the red laser aiming reticle covered.

Then, and only then, did the team leader whisper into his radio: "In position."

If this had been a regular hit on a terrorist stronghold, Alpha would have arrived in big armored personnel carriers or helicopters, and airplanes would have rained rockets on the village while Alpha leapt from their APCs or rappelled to the ground from their transport helos.

But this was no regular hit. They'd been ordered to attempt to take their target alive.

FSB intelligence sources said the man they were after knew the names, locations, and affiliations of virtually all the jihadist leaders.h.i.+p in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia. If he was picked up and drained of his intelligence value, the FSB could deal a virtual death blow to the Islamic cause. To this end, the eight men who crouched in the dark twenty-five meters from the rear of the target building were a blocking force. The attackers were on their way, also on foot and moving along the valley from the west. The attackers would, if the real world bore any resemblance to the op-plan, lead the target into the trap set at the back of the barn.

The op-plan was hopeful, Alpha Group decided, but it was based on knowledge of militant tactics here in the Caucasus. When ambushed by a larger force, the leaders.h.i.+p would run. It was not that the Dagestani and Chechens were cowards. No, courage they possessed in spades. But their leaders were precious to them. The foot soldiers would engage the attackers, manning outbuildings and sandbagged bunkers. From there a single man with a single weapon could hold off an entire raiding force for the time it took the leader and his close protection detail to flee into impenetrable mountains that they would likely know as well as they knew the contours of their lovers' bodies.

So the eight men of the Spetsnaz blocking force waited, controlled their breathing and the beating of their hearts, and prepared to capture one man.

In the administrative pouches of their ballistic plate carriers, each operator on the mission carried a beige laminated card with a photograph of the face of Israpil Nabiyev.

To be captured by these Russian Special Forces and have your face match the photo of the man they sought would be an unenviable fate.

But to be captured by these Russian Special Forces and have your face not match the photo of the man they sought would be even worse, because these Russians needed only one man in this village alive.

The dogs were the first to react. A growl from a large Caucasian sheepdog started a chorus from other animals around the village. They had not alerted to the smell of the Russians, because the Spetsnaz men masked their scents with chemicals and silver-lined underwear that held in body odors, but the dogs sensed movement, and they began to bark in numbers that spared them from the .22 pistols.

The Dagestani sentries at the front of the barn looked around, a few waved flashlights in bored arcs, one yelled at the animals to shut up. But when the barking turned into a sustained chorus, when a few of the animals began howling, then the sentries stood, and rifles were brought to shoulders.

Only then did the thump of the rotors fill the valley.

Israpil had fallen asleep, but now he found himself up, standing before fully awake, moving before fully aware of what, exactly, had roused him.

"Russian choppers!" someone shouted, which was plain enough at this point, because Nabiyev could hear the thumping rotors across the valley and no one save for the Russians had any helicopters around here. Israpil knew they had seconds to flee, and he gave the order to do just that. The leader of his security force shouted into his radio, ordered the Argvani cell to grab their rocket-propelled grenade launchers and get into the open to engage the approaching aircraft, then he told the two drivers to bring their pickups right up to the front door of the barn.

Israpil was fully alert now. He thumbed the safety down on his short-barreled AK and moved toward the front of the barn with the weapon at his shoulder. He knew the sound of choppers would resonate in the valley for another minute before the Russians would actually arrive overhead. He'd spent the past two decades ducking Russian helos, and he was an expert on their abilities and shortcomings.

The first truck arrived at the front of the barn thirty seconds later. One of the guards outside opened the pa.s.senger door and then leapt up into the bed behind. Then two more men opened the front door to the barn, not twenty feet away.

Israpil was the third man out the door; he'd taken no more than two steps into the early-morning air when the supersonic cracks of small-arms fire erupted nearby. At first he thought it was one of his men shooting blindly into the dark, but a hot, wet slap of blood against his face dispelled him of that notion. One of his guards had been shot, his ripped chest spewing blood as he heaved and fell.

Israpil crouched and ran on, but more bursts of gunfire erupted, tearing through the metal and gla.s.s of the truck. The military commander of Jamaat Shariat saw muzzle flashes in the road next to a tin shack some twenty-five meters up the hill. The man standing in the truck bed fired a single shot of return fire before he tumbled off the side and down into the muddy ditch in the center of the road. The incoming gunfire continued, and Nabiyev recognized the reports as several Kalashnikovs and a single Russian PPM light machine gun. As he turned, he was showered with sparks from copper-jacketed bullets impacting the stone wall of the barn. He ducked lower and crashed into his protection detail as he shoved them back into the barn.

He and two others ran through the dark structure, shoved past a pair of donkeys tied on the western wall, making for a large window, but an explosion stopped them in their tracks. Nabiyev pulled away from his men, ran to the stone wall, and peered out through a wide crack that had been torturing him with a draft throughout the night. Above the village, hanging over the valley, two helicopter guns.h.i.+ps arrived on station. Their silhouettes were just blacker than the black sky, until each fired another salvo of rockets from their pylons. Then the metal beasts were illuminated, the streaks of flame raced toward the village ahead of white plumes, and earthshaking explosions rocked a building a hundred meters to the west.

"Black Sharks!" he called out to the room.

"Back door!" one of his men yelled as he ran, and Nabiyev followed, although he now knew his position would be surrounded. No one would crawl for miles to hit this place, as he was now certain the Russians had done, only to forget to cut off his escape route. Still, there were no options; the next rocket salvo could hit this barn and martyr him and his men without allowing them the opportunity to take some infidels with them.

The Russians at the back of the barn stayed low and silent in their four groups of two, waiting patiently while the attack commenced up the hill and the Black Sharks arrived on station and began dispensing death through their rocket pods.

Alpha Group had positioned two of their men to secure their six-o'clock position, to keep an eye out for any mujahideen or armed civilians moving up the hill through the village, but the two-man team with that duty did not have line of sight on a small cinder-block shack just to the southeast of the easternmost pair of Spetsnaz operators. From a dark open window the muzzle of a bolt-action rifle inched out, aimed at the nearest Russian, and just as the back door of the barn opened, the bolt-action rifle barked. The Alpha Group man was. .h.i.t in the steel plate on his back, and the round knocked him forward onto his chest. His partner spun toward the threat and opened up on the cinder-block shack, and the rebels escaping out the back of the barn had a moment's warning that they were stumbling into a trap. All five Dagestanis entered the open s.p.a.ce behind the barn with their fingers on their triggers, Kalashnikov rounds spraying left and right, peppering everything ahead of them in the dark as they stumbled through the doorway.

One Spetsnaz officer took a chunk of copper-a hot, twisted fragment from a 7.62-millimeter ricochet off of a stone in front of him-directly into his throat, tearing through his Adam's apple and then severing his carotid artery. He fell backward, clutching his neck and writhing in his death throes. All pretense of a capture mission disappeared in that moment, and his men returned fire on the terrorists in the road as more mujahideen gunmen poured out of the doorway of the stone barn.

The leader of Nabiyev's security detail s.h.i.+elded him with his body when the Russians started shooting. The man was. .h.i.t within a second of doing so, his torso riddled with 5.45-caliber rounds. More of Nabiyev's men fell around him, but the team kept up the fire as their leader desperately tried to get away. He dove to the side, rolled in the dirt away from the barn door, and then climbed back up to his feet while blasting the night with his AK-74U. He emptied his weapon while running parallel to the wall of the barn, then stumbled into a dark alleyway between two long tin storage huts. He had the sense he was alone now, but he did not slow his breakneck sprint to look around. He just kept running, amazed that he had not been hit in the same fusillade of bullets that had raked through his men. As he fled, he banged against both of the tin walls, and he stumbled again. His eyes were fixed on the opening twenty meters ahead; his hands struggled to pull a fresh magazine for his rifle from his chest rig. His rifle, its barrel blisteringly hot from his having just fired thirty rounds through it at full auto, steamed in the chilly morning.

Israpil lost his balance a third time as he seated the magazine and pulled back the Kalashnikov's charging handle; he fell all the way to his knees now, the rifle almost tumbling out of his gloved hands, but he caught it and regained his feet. He stopped at the edge of the tin storage shacks, looked around the corner, and saw no one in his path. The automatic gunfire behind him continued, and the sound of booming explosions from the helos' rockets impacting the hillside beat against the valley walls and bounced off them, each salvo a.s.saulting his ears numerous times as the sound waves moved back and forth through the village.

The radio on the shoulder strap of his chest harness squawked as men shouted to one another all over the area. He ignored the communications and kept running.

He made his way into a burning baked-brick house lower on the hill. It had taken a Russian rocket through its roof, and the contents of the one-room home burned and smoldered. There would be bodies in here, but he did not slow to look around, he just continued on to an open back window, and once there, he leapt through it.

Israpil's trailing leg caught the window ledge, and he tumbled onto his face outside. Again, he struggled to stand up; with all the adrenaline pumping through his body, the fact he'd tripped and fallen four times in the past thirty seconds did not even register.

Until he fell again.

Running on a straight stretch of dirt alleyway one hundred meters from the stone barn, his right leg gave out and he fell and tumbled, a complete forward roll, and he ended up on his back. It had not occurred to him that he'd been shot by the Russians at the barn. There was no pain. But when he tried again to climb to his feet, his gloved hand pushed on his leg and it felt slick. Looking down, he saw his blood flowing from a jagged hole in the threadbare cotton. He took a moment to stare at the blood, glistening from the firelight of a burning pickup truck just ahead. The wound was to the thigh, just above the knee, and the s.h.i.+mmering blood covered his camouflaged pants all the way down to his boot.

Somehow he made it back to his feet again, took a tentative step forward using his rifle as a crutch, and then found himself bathed in the brightest, hottest white light that he'd ever known. The beam came from the sky, a spotlight from a Black Shark two hundred meters ahead.

Israpil Nabiyev knew that if the KA-50 had a light trained on him, it also had a 30-millimeter cannon trained on him, and he knew that in seconds he would be shahid. A martyr.

This filled him with pride.

He exhaled, prepared to lift his rifle up to the big Black Shark, but then the b.u.t.t of an AK-105 slammed into his skull from directly behind, and everything in Israpil Nabiyev's world went dark.

He awoke in pain. His head hurt, a dull ache deep in his brain as well as a sharp pain on the surface of his scalp. A tourniquet had been cinched tight high on his right leg; it stanched the blood flow from his wound. His arms were wrenched back behind him; his shoulders felt as if they would snap. Cold iron cuffs had been fastened on his wrists; shouting men pulled him this way and that as he was yanked to his feet and pressed against a stone wall.

A flashlight shone in his face, and he recoiled from the light.

"They all look alike," came a voice in Russian behind the light. "Line them up."

Using the flashlight's beam, he saw he was still in the village on the hill. In the distance, he heard continued, sporadic shooting. Mopping-up operations by the Russians.

Four other Jamaat Shariat survivors of the firefight were pushed up to the wall next to him. Israpil Nabiyev knew exactly what the Russians were doing. These Spetsnaz men had been ordered to take him alive, but with the dirt and perspiration and beards on their faces and the low predawn light, the Russians were having trouble identifying the man they were looking for. Israpil looked around at the others. Two were from his security detail; two more were Argvani cell members he did not know. They all wore their hair long and their black beards full, as did he.

The Russians stood the five men up, shoulder to shoulder, against the cold stone wall, and held them there with the muzzles of their rifles. A gloved hand grabbed the first Dagestani by the hair and pulled his head high. Another Alpha Group operator s.h.i.+ned a flashlight on the mujahideen. A third held a laminated card next to the rebel's face. The photo of a bearded man looked back from the card.

"Nyet," said someone in the group.

Without hesitation, the black barrel of a Varjag .40-caliber pistol appeared in the light, and the weapon snapped. With a flash and a crack that echoed in the alleyway, the bearded terrorist's head jerked back, and he dropped, leaving blood and bone on the wall behind him.

The laminated photo was held up to the second rebel. Again, the man's head was pulled taut to display his face. He squinted in the flashlight's white beam.

"Nyet."

The automatic pistol appeared and shot him through the forehead.

The third bearded Dagestani was Israpil. A gloved hand pulled matted hair from his eyes and smeared dirt off his cheeks.

"Ny-. . . Mozhet byt"-Maybe-said the voice. Then, "I think so." A pause. "Israpil Nabiyev?"

Israpil did not answer.

"Yes . . . it is him." The flashlight lowered and then a rifle rose toward the two Jamaat Shariat rebels on Israpil's left.

Boom! Boom!

The men slammed back against the wall and then fell forward, down onto the mud at Israpil's feet.

Nabiyev stood alone against the wall for a moment, and then he was grabbed by the back of the neck and pulled toward a helicopter landing in a cow pasture lower in the valley.

The two Black Sharks hung in the air above, their cannons burping at irregular intervals now as they ripped buildings apart and killed humans and animals alike. They would do this for a few minutes more. They would not kill every last soul-that would take more time and effort than they wanted to expend. But they were doing their best to systematically destroy the village that had been hosting the leader of the Dagestani resistance.

Nabiyev was stripped to his underwear and carried down the hill, through the loud and violent rotor wash of an Mi-8 transport helicopter. The soldiers sat him on a bench and handcuffed him to the inner wall of the fuselage. He sat there sandwiched between two filthy Alpha Group men in black ski masks, and he looked out the open door. Outside, as dawn just began to lighten the smoke-filled air in the valley, Spetsnaz men lined up the bodies of Nabiyev's dead comrades, and they used digital cameras to photograph their faces. Then they used ink pads and paper to fingerprint his dead brothers-in-arms.

The Mi-8 lifted off.

The Spetsnaz operator on Nabiyev's right leaned in to his ear and shouted in Russian, "They said you were the future of your movement. You just became the past."