Soldiers and Marines Saga, page 41
This time the Green Giants were vectored straight through a huge mass of planes and helicopters fighting along the line of battle, three of them firing missiles at radar blips lit by their AWACS air controller. Their controller tersely reported they’d gotten two “probables.”
Initially Owens and his men were sent far beyond the border to go after a Russian AWACS radiating from inside Poland, but then their airborne controller turned them back towards the west to go after an unknown number of SU-27s their controller could see taxiing out of their concrete shelters and towards the runways of the East German airbase at Holzdorf. Yes, the signals radiated by American AWACs are so strong they can see vehicles and planes moving on the ground.
Ten Green Giant F-15s, including Owens, returned after bouncing the climbing SU-27s as they lifted off from Holzdorf. The Green Giants got Eleven of the SU-27s with their virtually simultaneous salvo of forty-eight Sidewinders. But hitting the SU-27s a few seconds too early, before they had cleared the SAM umbrella protecting the airfield, allowed the East German missile crews at Holzdorf to knock down two of the Green Giants.
Owens barely escaped and only because he instantly started firing flares and roughly jerking his F-15 from side to side as soon as the East German heat-seeking SAM missiles began to rise in pursuit of the Green Giants ahead of him.
****** SP3 Lamont Ruggles
Twilight on the first day of the war found Specialist Third Class Lamont Ruggles of Akron, Ohio and the 10th Airborne Division, a recent graduate of the division’s demolitions course, standing “at ease” in a line of paratroopers listening with rapt attention as Captain Morris explained tonight’s mission and what was expected of them.
Lamont listened intently as the captain explained they would be making a night drop on a lightly defended power plant in the Czech Republic and that, even though their objective is only to turn it off and occupy it, they are to blow it up and run like hell upwind if they are attacked. Upwind is the only way to run if it blows, Morris explained. It’s a nuclear plant.
This is going to seriously piss off some people, Lamont thought. I shouldn’t of let that goddamn Biggie talk me into this.
Every man in the hangar was a volunteer for a “dangerous mission involving a night drop into enemy territory” and will be automatically promoted at least one rank for participating. Lamont volunteered because his best friend and buddy, SP3 Rondell “Biggie” Williams decided to volunteer.
“Man, it’s the only way I’ll ever get promoted and get a few more bucks. You too, man.”
Captain Morris had the same reason for being there as Ruggles and Williams. He’d only been recently completed eighteen months of service and been automatically promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant. He intended to make the army a career and had jumped at the chance for an early promotion from first lieutenant to captain.
The men in the hangar could see at least ten other teams from the Tenth Airborne getting the same pitch from their officers. What they don’t know is that similar scenes were taking place in a number of other hangars on airbases all across West Germany.
Tonight, under the command of Major General David Shelton, NATO is jumping assault teams from its airborne divisions on to virtually every large Russian, East German, Hungarian, and Czech power plant its C-130s and Transalls can reach, all eighty-seven of them, including all of their nuclear plants. Once again, only Germans will be jumping into Russia and once again Poland will not be touched.
****** Lance Corporal Jimmy Montgomery
In an abandoned warehouse about twenty miles away Marine and Coast Guard swimmers were napping and talking in low voices as the sun began to go down. I’m one of them. In a few minutes we’ll begin putting on our wetsuits and readying our breathing gear and explosive packs. The door to the one toilet is off its hinges and there are old paint cans and rusty pipes pushed up against the walls.
Everyone is anxious and trying not to show it, particularly the guys on the teams who will have to come out of the water to place their charges. Those of us who need to use a latrine, and that includes me, go out back behind the hangar rather than walk through the incredibly foul smelling shit and toilet paper that has overflowed all over the floor of the latrine.
Helicopters are going to drop us upstream of the nine bridges that didn’t go down last night. Then we will swim down to them in the dark and try to blow them. All of us going tonight didn’t go last night but we are painfully aware that there is a big difference between tonight and last night. Tonight they’ll be expecting us is the thought in every man’s mind, including mine.
******
The helicopter carrying 19 year old Lance Corporal Montgomery clattered through the night rising and falling as it attempted to follow the terrain from its base to their drop off point about ten miles up the Elbe River from the bridge at the small East German village of Herstad.
Once they get into the river, Montgomery and the six other Marines in Gunnery Sergeant Washington’s team of Marine swimmers will spend just shy of four hours of swimming downstream to tow their ninety-pound blocks of shaped explosive charges to the railway bridge on the other side of the village.
“Get ready,” the air force helicopter crew chief suddenly shouted. Then, after a pause of about twenty seconds, Jimmy’s team leader shouted “turn on,” and the Marines instantly turned the handles to start the six hours of air flow provided by the air tanks of their scuba gear rebreathers.
“Standby” the crew chief shouted unnecessarily as the darkened chopper suddenly descended and then about forty seconds later began to hover a couple of feet above the water.
Instantly the seven Marines stood up, shoved the breathing tubes of their scuba gear into their mouths, and got ready to jump into the dark water just as they had practiced dozens of times before.
This time it’s for real and Montgomery was pumped. He’d been trembling with excitement for some time. Damn, this is exciting.
“Get Ready…. Go.. Go.. Go” shouted Gunnery Sergeant Jason Washington, the Marine team leader who somehow survived two casualty filled tours as a grunt in the Third Iraq War. He’ll be the last one out the door.
Jimmy and the other Marines jumped with their M-16s and their precious ninety-pound cargo of explosives strapped to their backs. The explosive packs floated neutrally in the water during training and are supposed to float neutrally now.
As he went under the chilly water Jimmy’s first thought was “yuck.” The water is smelly. His second is one of great relief – his pack floats as if it is in suspended animation, it didn’t pull him down or towards the surface. And then, with a sudden sinking feeling he began frantically searching over his shoulder with his left hand, “My weapon, oh God. Oh there it is.”
It was an instinctive reaction. Losing his personal weapon is the most unforgivable of sins for a Marine. Then, as he had done so many times before in practice, he surfaced to find Gunny Washington and grab the long knotted team line attached to Gunny Washington’s waist.
****** Gunnery Sergeant Jason Washington
When he had counted another one thousand underwater strokes for the eighth time and thought he might be getting close to his objective, Gunny Washington gave the two jerks “stop” signal to the team so he could carefully surface for a look. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves while he took off his goggles. Then he let his head slowly break the surface without a splash as he had done so many times before in training and removed the wax ear plugs from his ears.
There! He could see the bridge partially silhouetted against the moon about half a mile further downstream.
Hot damn. The bridge is not lit and there are no lights shining on the water.
Washington could see and hear almost nothing else even though he spent the better part of a minute carefully looking and listening. All he heard was the very quiet sound of the moving river water. The only movement he saw was the flickering of lights from cars and trucks moving along the unlit river road about a hundred yards away.
He and his team were further away from the bridge than he expected. But so far so good. Without making a sound he slowly submerged. We’re good to go.
******
Tonight the timers on the shaped charges in the explosive packs are set for only twenty-five minutes—just long enough for the team to come out of the water place them and then quietly walk back to the river and swim clear. And this time two of the Marines on the team, Jay Golden and Jim Corcel, both recent graduates of the Marines’ elite sniper school and the only members of the team carrying M16s with night vision scopes, will haul out of the water about three hundred yards downstream and cover the string of explosive packages.
Anyone who tries to move the packages is going to be “it” in a fatal game of tag.
At exactly 3:11 on Washington’s waterproof watch the Marines began quietly surfacing under the bridge in the middle of the river. As instructed, they were going after the four big concrete bridge supports that were close to the water line on the west side, maybe ten feet beyond the river bank.
The Marines don’t know it, and probably never will, but those particular supports were carefully selected by the Mike Morton and the Detachment’s mission planners because they appeared to be the ones that would be the easiest for the Marines to blow and the hardest for the East Germans on the shore to defend.
Each of the Marines raised his water goggles to the top of their heads when Washington gave the two quick jerks and a pause and then two more quick jerks signal. Then they slowly and quietly surfaced. They watched intently for several minutes. Suddenly a match flared in front of them on the river bank about fifty yards upstream from the bridge. Holy shit.
Still towing their explosive packs and holding on to their loop on Washington’s line, the team responded to Washington’s “proceed” signal of six quick underwater tugs by quietly using their flippers to move towards the side of the bridge that loomed over them in the darkness.
When their feet touched ground they each let go of Washington’s control line and spread out and, still wearing their flippers and black wetsuits, began slowly and quietly crawling the ten feet or so up the rocky embankment towards the big concrete column supporting the bridge. They were virtually invisible in the darkness.
The Marines reached the column, and were placing their packs around it, when there was a questioning shout off to their right. They ignored it just as they have been trained and kept right on working. After the Marines finished placing their packs and Gunny Washington moved from pack to pack and threw the switch on their timers. His men had already slithered backwards into the water by the time he finished.
Suddenly, and much closer, there was another shout and they could see a flashlight beam jerking up and down as someone began moving along the river bank towards them.
Sergeant James Corcel of San Bernadino was on the end of the line nearest the approaching flashlight. He, like Corporal Golden at the other end of the line had a special job and special weapon for just such a situation —a big silencer on the end of his M16 and low velocity rounds in its magazine. He backed slowly into the water and then, unlike the others who quietly slid all the way under the water and quietly swam away when they finished setting their charges, he waited.
The jerky flashlight came under the bridge and was played around until it suddenly focused on the dark packs against one of the big bridge supports. Corcel didn’t wait any longer. His M16 chattered and popped, and seemed to him to be terribly loud, as he sprayed a three round burst of low velocity rounds into the barely visible figure holding the flashlight not twenty feet away.
There was a thump and a muffled cry and the flashlight fell on to the rocky ground under the bridge with a clang.
Corcel slid deeper into the water until it reached his chest—and waited. He wasn’t supposed to wait. But he figured he had twenty minutes so what the hell, I might as well stick around and make sure so he fished a new clip out of the pocket of a pouch attached to his wet suit pocket and decided to wait ten minutes, and then swim like a sonofabitch before it blew.
He didn’t have to wait ten minutes. Almost immediately he heard more voices. They were obviously calling someone and shouting questions. This time Corcel could see several figures approaching with flashlights.
The new arrivals were cautious and calling, coming under the bridge and still about fifty feet away, when they saw the still-shining flashlight and the figure on the ground next to it and started to shout and point. Corcel gave them the whole magazine in rapid three round bursts. Then he slid under the water and dropped the now-empty M16 as he’d been instructed to do despite the Marine’s mantra of never giving up your weapon. He was pumped. Time to beat feet.
Eight minutes later he was swimming downstream as fast as possible on the surface when he heard the muffled boom of the explosion behind him.
****** Captain Morris
It was dark as Captain Morris, Ruggles, Williams, and sixteen other men, including an English-speaking German nuclear engineer, obviously a man with more balls than brains because this was his very first jump, stepped out of the door of the C-130 for a relatively high altitude jump on to the grounds of the Berghoff Nuclear plant. It was an important target because it was the main source of power for Prague, about one hundred miles to the southwest.
All of the attacks this evening were scheduled to occur at the exact same moment. So as soon as the last of Morris’s jumpers cleared the door the C-130 dove to pick up speed and seven minutes later another group of thirteen jumpers went out the door over a non-nuclear plant forty miles away on the outskirts of Alno. Because the second group was jumping at a much lower altitude, both groups were scheduled to hit the ground with almost the same time on target. At least that was the plan.
The pilots carrying Morris and his men didn’t know it but, if they get back safely, they will sleep all day and go out again tomorrow night. The next time they’ll be dropping men on to a couple of the Warsaw Pact’s oil refineries and pipeline pump stations.
Ruggles and Williams didn’t know squat about power plants. But Morris had been given a short course and three of the other jumpers were combat engineer NCOs who had completed a course in nuclear power stations from the perspective of how best to blow them up. The real expert, of course, was the brave German nuclear engineer.
Each nuclear station is different, and those in the Warsaw Pact countries are sometimes crude and dangerous, but all nuclear generating plants share the same vulnerable spots—their control rooms and their reactors.
To the absolute amazement of Morris and his men, who came down expecting and ready for a major firefight, the Czechs had not even turned off the outside lights or prepared to fight off intruders. Because their landing zone was so well lit most of the men were able to see well enough to land in the open area immediately adjacent to the building housing the control room. The only potential opposition, a security guard in a small wooden shack, ran off into the darkness without firing a shot when the dark shapes of the first jumpers began dropping out of the night.
Even the front door was unlocked. They were prepared to blow it but Morris had the presence of mind to gently try the door knob as one of the engineers started to quietly mold a wad of plastic explosives to the door frame. It opened. Immediately, as planned, the eight men at the door charged in shouting.
A sleepy looking man with a mustache glanced up from his newspaper at the men with their blackened faces and their wicked looking weapons—and staggered to his feet with his mouth and eyes wide open in astonishment.
“Watch him,” Morris barked at Williams as he led the men into the shabby building.
The control room was easy to find. Morris tried the windowless steel door. It was locked. Again one of the engineers started to place a charge to blow it open. But Morris had a sudden flash of inspiration. He knocked briskly. A few seconds later there were muttered words on the other side and the door opened.
The three men and two women in white coats were absolutely stunned as the ferocious looking men with blackened faces poured into the room with their vicious looking weapons. They just stood there gaping with their mouths open and then quickly raised their hands in response to the threatening weapons and shouted commands. They don’t need to understand the words to know what the gestures mean.
“Who speaks English or Deutsche?”
“I speak little English,” said one of the women.
“I also speak English,” said one of the men.
“You have three minutes to totally shut the reactors down and take the plant off line,” Morris said. “If you do not do so immediately it will be very bad for you—we will blow the reactors with you standing next to them.”
Then, as if to emphasize the point, two of the engineers immediately began placing loaves of doughy plastic explosives against the control panels and sticking detonators in them.
That’s all it took to get things going. The English-speaking man began shouting orders and the white coats started throwing switches and turning dials while constantly looking at the blackened faces of the soldiers and explosives. The woman who spoke English began shaking and sobbing as she stood in front of an array of gauges.
“I will take us off line immediately,” the man said. “But it takes longer to shut down the reactors.”
“Make an emergency shutdown of all reactors” shouted the Czech-speaking German soldier after getting instructions from the nuclear engineer who had jumped with the assault team. He had followed Morris into the control room. The German said it in Czech but his intent was clear to everyone.
The technician standing at the console opened his mouth and started to say something. Then he nodded and went to a console. Within seconds a loud hooting siren began blasting and the lights flickered as an auxiliary power unit kicked in. The team had been warned this would occur, but it still upset them.
It was a little after two in the morning when the lights went out all over Prague. Two minutes later, at Morris’ “request,” one of the Czech technicians turned off the siren.
Initially Owens and his men were sent far beyond the border to go after a Russian AWACS radiating from inside Poland, but then their airborne controller turned them back towards the west to go after an unknown number of SU-27s their controller could see taxiing out of their concrete shelters and towards the runways of the East German airbase at Holzdorf. Yes, the signals radiated by American AWACs are so strong they can see vehicles and planes moving on the ground.
Ten Green Giant F-15s, including Owens, returned after bouncing the climbing SU-27s as they lifted off from Holzdorf. The Green Giants got Eleven of the SU-27s with their virtually simultaneous salvo of forty-eight Sidewinders. But hitting the SU-27s a few seconds too early, before they had cleared the SAM umbrella protecting the airfield, allowed the East German missile crews at Holzdorf to knock down two of the Green Giants.
Owens barely escaped and only because he instantly started firing flares and roughly jerking his F-15 from side to side as soon as the East German heat-seeking SAM missiles began to rise in pursuit of the Green Giants ahead of him.
****** SP3 Lamont Ruggles
Twilight on the first day of the war found Specialist Third Class Lamont Ruggles of Akron, Ohio and the 10th Airborne Division, a recent graduate of the division’s demolitions course, standing “at ease” in a line of paratroopers listening with rapt attention as Captain Morris explained tonight’s mission and what was expected of them.
Lamont listened intently as the captain explained they would be making a night drop on a lightly defended power plant in the Czech Republic and that, even though their objective is only to turn it off and occupy it, they are to blow it up and run like hell upwind if they are attacked. Upwind is the only way to run if it blows, Morris explained. It’s a nuclear plant.
This is going to seriously piss off some people, Lamont thought. I shouldn’t of let that goddamn Biggie talk me into this.
Every man in the hangar was a volunteer for a “dangerous mission involving a night drop into enemy territory” and will be automatically promoted at least one rank for participating. Lamont volunteered because his best friend and buddy, SP3 Rondell “Biggie” Williams decided to volunteer.
“Man, it’s the only way I’ll ever get promoted and get a few more bucks. You too, man.”
Captain Morris had the same reason for being there as Ruggles and Williams. He’d only been recently completed eighteen months of service and been automatically promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant. He intended to make the army a career and had jumped at the chance for an early promotion from first lieutenant to captain.
The men in the hangar could see at least ten other teams from the Tenth Airborne getting the same pitch from their officers. What they don’t know is that similar scenes were taking place in a number of other hangars on airbases all across West Germany.
Tonight, under the command of Major General David Shelton, NATO is jumping assault teams from its airborne divisions on to virtually every large Russian, East German, Hungarian, and Czech power plant its C-130s and Transalls can reach, all eighty-seven of them, including all of their nuclear plants. Once again, only Germans will be jumping into Russia and once again Poland will not be touched.
****** Lance Corporal Jimmy Montgomery
In an abandoned warehouse about twenty miles away Marine and Coast Guard swimmers were napping and talking in low voices as the sun began to go down. I’m one of them. In a few minutes we’ll begin putting on our wetsuits and readying our breathing gear and explosive packs. The door to the one toilet is off its hinges and there are old paint cans and rusty pipes pushed up against the walls.
Everyone is anxious and trying not to show it, particularly the guys on the teams who will have to come out of the water to place their charges. Those of us who need to use a latrine, and that includes me, go out back behind the hangar rather than walk through the incredibly foul smelling shit and toilet paper that has overflowed all over the floor of the latrine.
Helicopters are going to drop us upstream of the nine bridges that didn’t go down last night. Then we will swim down to them in the dark and try to blow them. All of us going tonight didn’t go last night but we are painfully aware that there is a big difference between tonight and last night. Tonight they’ll be expecting us is the thought in every man’s mind, including mine.
******
The helicopter carrying 19 year old Lance Corporal Montgomery clattered through the night rising and falling as it attempted to follow the terrain from its base to their drop off point about ten miles up the Elbe River from the bridge at the small East German village of Herstad.
Once they get into the river, Montgomery and the six other Marines in Gunnery Sergeant Washington’s team of Marine swimmers will spend just shy of four hours of swimming downstream to tow their ninety-pound blocks of shaped explosive charges to the railway bridge on the other side of the village.
“Get ready,” the air force helicopter crew chief suddenly shouted. Then, after a pause of about twenty seconds, Jimmy’s team leader shouted “turn on,” and the Marines instantly turned the handles to start the six hours of air flow provided by the air tanks of their scuba gear rebreathers.
“Standby” the crew chief shouted unnecessarily as the darkened chopper suddenly descended and then about forty seconds later began to hover a couple of feet above the water.
Instantly the seven Marines stood up, shoved the breathing tubes of their scuba gear into their mouths, and got ready to jump into the dark water just as they had practiced dozens of times before.
This time it’s for real and Montgomery was pumped. He’d been trembling with excitement for some time. Damn, this is exciting.
“Get Ready…. Go.. Go.. Go” shouted Gunnery Sergeant Jason Washington, the Marine team leader who somehow survived two casualty filled tours as a grunt in the Third Iraq War. He’ll be the last one out the door.
Jimmy and the other Marines jumped with their M-16s and their precious ninety-pound cargo of explosives strapped to their backs. The explosive packs floated neutrally in the water during training and are supposed to float neutrally now.
As he went under the chilly water Jimmy’s first thought was “yuck.” The water is smelly. His second is one of great relief – his pack floats as if it is in suspended animation, it didn’t pull him down or towards the surface. And then, with a sudden sinking feeling he began frantically searching over his shoulder with his left hand, “My weapon, oh God. Oh there it is.”
It was an instinctive reaction. Losing his personal weapon is the most unforgivable of sins for a Marine. Then, as he had done so many times before in practice, he surfaced to find Gunny Washington and grab the long knotted team line attached to Gunny Washington’s waist.
****** Gunnery Sergeant Jason Washington
When he had counted another one thousand underwater strokes for the eighth time and thought he might be getting close to his objective, Gunny Washington gave the two jerks “stop” signal to the team so he could carefully surface for a look. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves while he took off his goggles. Then he let his head slowly break the surface without a splash as he had done so many times before in training and removed the wax ear plugs from his ears.
There! He could see the bridge partially silhouetted against the moon about half a mile further downstream.
Hot damn. The bridge is not lit and there are no lights shining on the water.
Washington could see and hear almost nothing else even though he spent the better part of a minute carefully looking and listening. All he heard was the very quiet sound of the moving river water. The only movement he saw was the flickering of lights from cars and trucks moving along the unlit river road about a hundred yards away.
He and his team were further away from the bridge than he expected. But so far so good. Without making a sound he slowly submerged. We’re good to go.
******
Tonight the timers on the shaped charges in the explosive packs are set for only twenty-five minutes—just long enough for the team to come out of the water place them and then quietly walk back to the river and swim clear. And this time two of the Marines on the team, Jay Golden and Jim Corcel, both recent graduates of the Marines’ elite sniper school and the only members of the team carrying M16s with night vision scopes, will haul out of the water about three hundred yards downstream and cover the string of explosive packages.
Anyone who tries to move the packages is going to be “it” in a fatal game of tag.
At exactly 3:11 on Washington’s waterproof watch the Marines began quietly surfacing under the bridge in the middle of the river. As instructed, they were going after the four big concrete bridge supports that were close to the water line on the west side, maybe ten feet beyond the river bank.
The Marines don’t know it, and probably never will, but those particular supports were carefully selected by the Mike Morton and the Detachment’s mission planners because they appeared to be the ones that would be the easiest for the Marines to blow and the hardest for the East Germans on the shore to defend.
Each of the Marines raised his water goggles to the top of their heads when Washington gave the two quick jerks and a pause and then two more quick jerks signal. Then they slowly and quietly surfaced. They watched intently for several minutes. Suddenly a match flared in front of them on the river bank about fifty yards upstream from the bridge. Holy shit.
Still towing their explosive packs and holding on to their loop on Washington’s line, the team responded to Washington’s “proceed” signal of six quick underwater tugs by quietly using their flippers to move towards the side of the bridge that loomed over them in the darkness.
When their feet touched ground they each let go of Washington’s control line and spread out and, still wearing their flippers and black wetsuits, began slowly and quietly crawling the ten feet or so up the rocky embankment towards the big concrete column supporting the bridge. They were virtually invisible in the darkness.
The Marines reached the column, and were placing their packs around it, when there was a questioning shout off to their right. They ignored it just as they have been trained and kept right on working. After the Marines finished placing their packs and Gunny Washington moved from pack to pack and threw the switch on their timers. His men had already slithered backwards into the water by the time he finished.
Suddenly, and much closer, there was another shout and they could see a flashlight beam jerking up and down as someone began moving along the river bank towards them.
Sergeant James Corcel of San Bernadino was on the end of the line nearest the approaching flashlight. He, like Corporal Golden at the other end of the line had a special job and special weapon for just such a situation —a big silencer on the end of his M16 and low velocity rounds in its magazine. He backed slowly into the water and then, unlike the others who quietly slid all the way under the water and quietly swam away when they finished setting their charges, he waited.
The jerky flashlight came under the bridge and was played around until it suddenly focused on the dark packs against one of the big bridge supports. Corcel didn’t wait any longer. His M16 chattered and popped, and seemed to him to be terribly loud, as he sprayed a three round burst of low velocity rounds into the barely visible figure holding the flashlight not twenty feet away.
There was a thump and a muffled cry and the flashlight fell on to the rocky ground under the bridge with a clang.
Corcel slid deeper into the water until it reached his chest—and waited. He wasn’t supposed to wait. But he figured he had twenty minutes so what the hell, I might as well stick around and make sure so he fished a new clip out of the pocket of a pouch attached to his wet suit pocket and decided to wait ten minutes, and then swim like a sonofabitch before it blew.
He didn’t have to wait ten minutes. Almost immediately he heard more voices. They were obviously calling someone and shouting questions. This time Corcel could see several figures approaching with flashlights.
The new arrivals were cautious and calling, coming under the bridge and still about fifty feet away, when they saw the still-shining flashlight and the figure on the ground next to it and started to shout and point. Corcel gave them the whole magazine in rapid three round bursts. Then he slid under the water and dropped the now-empty M16 as he’d been instructed to do despite the Marine’s mantra of never giving up your weapon. He was pumped. Time to beat feet.
Eight minutes later he was swimming downstream as fast as possible on the surface when he heard the muffled boom of the explosion behind him.
****** Captain Morris
It was dark as Captain Morris, Ruggles, Williams, and sixteen other men, including an English-speaking German nuclear engineer, obviously a man with more balls than brains because this was his very first jump, stepped out of the door of the C-130 for a relatively high altitude jump on to the grounds of the Berghoff Nuclear plant. It was an important target because it was the main source of power for Prague, about one hundred miles to the southwest.
All of the attacks this evening were scheduled to occur at the exact same moment. So as soon as the last of Morris’s jumpers cleared the door the C-130 dove to pick up speed and seven minutes later another group of thirteen jumpers went out the door over a non-nuclear plant forty miles away on the outskirts of Alno. Because the second group was jumping at a much lower altitude, both groups were scheduled to hit the ground with almost the same time on target. At least that was the plan.
The pilots carrying Morris and his men didn’t know it but, if they get back safely, they will sleep all day and go out again tomorrow night. The next time they’ll be dropping men on to a couple of the Warsaw Pact’s oil refineries and pipeline pump stations.
Ruggles and Williams didn’t know squat about power plants. But Morris had been given a short course and three of the other jumpers were combat engineer NCOs who had completed a course in nuclear power stations from the perspective of how best to blow them up. The real expert, of course, was the brave German nuclear engineer.
Each nuclear station is different, and those in the Warsaw Pact countries are sometimes crude and dangerous, but all nuclear generating plants share the same vulnerable spots—their control rooms and their reactors.
To the absolute amazement of Morris and his men, who came down expecting and ready for a major firefight, the Czechs had not even turned off the outside lights or prepared to fight off intruders. Because their landing zone was so well lit most of the men were able to see well enough to land in the open area immediately adjacent to the building housing the control room. The only potential opposition, a security guard in a small wooden shack, ran off into the darkness without firing a shot when the dark shapes of the first jumpers began dropping out of the night.
Even the front door was unlocked. They were prepared to blow it but Morris had the presence of mind to gently try the door knob as one of the engineers started to quietly mold a wad of plastic explosives to the door frame. It opened. Immediately, as planned, the eight men at the door charged in shouting.
A sleepy looking man with a mustache glanced up from his newspaper at the men with their blackened faces and their wicked looking weapons—and staggered to his feet with his mouth and eyes wide open in astonishment.
“Watch him,” Morris barked at Williams as he led the men into the shabby building.
The control room was easy to find. Morris tried the windowless steel door. It was locked. Again one of the engineers started to place a charge to blow it open. But Morris had a sudden flash of inspiration. He knocked briskly. A few seconds later there were muttered words on the other side and the door opened.
The three men and two women in white coats were absolutely stunned as the ferocious looking men with blackened faces poured into the room with their vicious looking weapons. They just stood there gaping with their mouths open and then quickly raised their hands in response to the threatening weapons and shouted commands. They don’t need to understand the words to know what the gestures mean.
“Who speaks English or Deutsche?”
“I speak little English,” said one of the women.
“I also speak English,” said one of the men.
“You have three minutes to totally shut the reactors down and take the plant off line,” Morris said. “If you do not do so immediately it will be very bad for you—we will blow the reactors with you standing next to them.”
Then, as if to emphasize the point, two of the engineers immediately began placing loaves of doughy plastic explosives against the control panels and sticking detonators in them.
That’s all it took to get things going. The English-speaking man began shouting orders and the white coats started throwing switches and turning dials while constantly looking at the blackened faces of the soldiers and explosives. The woman who spoke English began shaking and sobbing as she stood in front of an array of gauges.
“I will take us off line immediately,” the man said. “But it takes longer to shut down the reactors.”
“Make an emergency shutdown of all reactors” shouted the Czech-speaking German soldier after getting instructions from the nuclear engineer who had jumped with the assault team. He had followed Morris into the control room. The German said it in Czech but his intent was clear to everyone.
The technician standing at the console opened his mouth and started to say something. Then he nodded and went to a console. Within seconds a loud hooting siren began blasting and the lights flickered as an auxiliary power unit kicked in. The team had been warned this would occur, but it still upset them.
It was a little after two in the morning when the lights went out all over Prague. Two minutes later, at Morris’ “request,” one of the Czech technicians turned off the siren.
