Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [28]
As the chopper descended, the orb of the sun was reflected in the dark cockpit windshield. Mustafa was blinded for a moment, but he could hear the drone growing louder.
"What are they doing?" he wondered aloud.
When the sunlight finally rolled off the windshield, Mustafa saw what they were doing. He saw, but there was nothing he could do about it.
The helicopter had cleared the trees and was flying directly toward the center of the dam. He saw a man raise the machine gun so that it was pointed in his direction, On the pilot's side of the helicopter, the rotary cannon was pointed lower.
"They are out of their minds!" Mustafa yelled.
The Turk turned and started running back the way he'd come. The helicopter was less than two hundred yards away and moving in fast. He could feel the gun on him. He felt it the way any battle-seasoned soldier felt danger, by God whispering into his ear and fear tightening his groin.
Without breaking his stride, Mustafa suddenly threw himself to his right, toward the water. He hit it hard and his boots quickly filled with water. But even as he'd jumped he'd heard the machine gun spit death. As he brought his knees toward him and struggled to undo the laces, Mustafa thanked God for having spoken to him.
His lungs ached as he worked on his shoes. His eyes were open, and he saw the bubbly trails of the bullets as they slashed around him. A few came perilously close, and Mustafa gave up on the shoes. He swam to the wall of the dam, dug his fingers into the spaces between the stones, and crept up the sloping side. He stopped just below the surface and lay with his belly against the wall. He heard the muffled roar of the guns as the helicopter bore down. The dam shook beneath him, but at least he felt safe here. He wondered how his coworkers were doing. The fire didn't seem directed at them, and he hoped they were all right. He also hoped that the men in the helicopter didn't make a second pass. He didn't know what they hoped to accomplish with this attack, and he began to fear for the security of the dam.
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