Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

He could hear Ghanbari breathe. The sound of his own heartbeat. Then there was a rumble. An undefined noise, far off, a sudden rush of sound.

The house began to tremble. The liquid in the tea glasses rippled and danced. The glasses began to rattle and fell over, spilling on the carpet. The house started shaking as if in an earthquake. Then the unmistakable whop-whop of a helicopter overhead, then multiple helicopters and the house began to shake even more. Through the windows they could see military vehicles racing on the road toward them, one after the other, kicking up storms of dust. Outside the window they saw one helicopter, then two, landing in the fields. The minute they touched down, Revolutionary Guards in camouflage uniforms piled out and began running toward the farmhouse, assault rifles ready to fire. There was so much noise and dust it was getting hard to see outside the windows.

With his free hand Scorpion tossed the cell phone to Ghanbari.

“If you want to live another minute, call Scale,” he shouted over the noise.

Haj Omran,

Iran

Scorpion hauled Ghanbari to his feet and over by the side of the front window as Revolutionary Guards deployed, weapons aimed. Keeping the pistol pressed against Ghanbari’s head just behind his ear, Scorpion watched as Ghanbari called.

“ Salam . This is Muhammad Ghanbari,” he said, shouting over the noise, and listened for a second.

“Is it Scale?” Scorpion whispered in his ear.

Ghanbari nodded.

“Give me the phone,” Scorpion said, pressing the muzzle of the ZOAF hard against Ghanbari’s ear. “Scale?” he said in English into the phone.

“Scorpion?” he heard a not unpleasant voice on the phone say. Peering through the window, he tried to see if he could spot Scale, but there were too many men and vehicles and too much dust.

“This is Scorpion. I believe we met in Begur. I want you to hear something,” Scorpion said, and fired.

The bullet exploded a gob of blood and matter from Ghanbari’s head, splattering the window and wall.

“Scale? That was Ghanbari. He’s dead,” Scorpion said into the phone.

“In a second, so will you be, you madar sag ,” Scale said.

“Oh no! Wait one second. Please. I’ll call you right back,” Scorpion said.

He peeked out the window one last time. A small man in camouflage BDUs, barely visible behind one of the vehicles, was holding a cell phone to his ear. It might be Scale, he thought. He had gambled everything that Scale’s normal human curiosity would have him wait the extra second or two. If he was wrong, he would die. He dived to the floor next to Ghanbari’s body. Using his own personal cell phone, he redialed Scale’s cell phone number. Scale answered immediately.

“Scorpion?” Scale said. “I have something I want you to hear. At- ” he started to shout, and Scorpion didn’t have even enough time to complete the thought about what Scale was shouting. “- esh ! Fire!”

The world exploded.

The ground shook, the walls of the farmhouse rattling and buckling in a hurricane of sound and force. There were multiple explosions coming one on top of another so hard and fast they were impossible to tell apart. An almost continuous roar, punctuated by the unearthly hum of vehicles and screams of men being obliterated by big 25mm depleted uranium rounds at a staggering thirty rounds a second. The explosions, some bigger every few seconds-those are the 105s, Scorpion thought-and the explosions of smaller shells at a rate of two per second from the Bofors 40mm autocannon, went on for what seemed like an hour, but by Scorpion’s watch lasted a little more than a minute. The firing was continuous and with pinpoint accuracy as the unseen U.S. Air Force gunship, too high and far away to be seen or heard, made its pylon turn so its weapons were kept precision-trained on the target.

He heard another massive explosion coming from the field behind the farmhouse. One of the helicopters blowing up, a rain of debris and shrapnel battering the farmhouse roof, a chunk of red hot metal tearing a jagged hole in the roof the size of a basketball and ripping through the floor less than a meter from Scorpion. There was a clatter as the second Revolutionary Guards helicopter tried to lift off. It got about ten meters into the air before exploding in a giant orange fireball that sent a wave of force and heat toward the farmhouse, washing over Scorpion on the floor. He crawled on the carpet to the other window, raised himself up and peeked out.

The AC-130U Spooky gunship had done its work from many miles away, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The force of some twenty-plus Revolutionary Guards military vehicles, trucks, and APCs, and more than a hundred armed men, were gone. All that was left were bits and pieces of smoking metal wreckage and parts of human bodies. There not only wasn’t anyone left, there wasn’t even a part of anything left, not even a portion of a human torso intact. The Air Force’s big gunship had been so high and so far away-no doubt still over the border in Iraq when it first fired-that none of the men killed had ever seen or heard it before they died. Yet the combination of the GPS-located cell phone Scale was using, targeted by Scorpion’s call, combined with the pinpoint accuracy of the Spooky’s AN/APQ-180 radar, meant that the enemy had been completely obliterated without a single round hitting the farmhouse where he was hiding.

Scorpion’s ears were ringing as he staggered out the farmhouse’s back door and into the field, covered with the still burning debris from the two downed helicopters. He walked past one Revolutionary Guard who was somehow still alive, although the bottom half of his body was missing. The two men looked at each other, the Revolutionary Guard’s eyes confused, and then Scorpion remembered he was in blackface and still wearing the floppy red costume of Haji Firuz. Maybe he thinks he’s hallucinating, Scorpion thought, suddenly realizing his cell phone was ringing.

“Flagstaff,” he said.

“Where are you?” Shaefer’s voice shouting over the sound of something very loud; probably a helicopter rotor, Scorpion thought.

“I’m in the field behind the farmhouse on the side toward the mountains,” he said.

“We’ll be there in five.”

“I won’t be hard to spot. I’m wearing red,” Scorpion said, walking past the smoldering rubble of the second Iranian helicopter, burning fragments starting small brush fires, and into the open fields.

A few minutes later he spotted the helicopter flying in from the direction of the Haj Omran border station. It was an Apache AH-64. He watched as it swooped down from the blue sky over the green slopes of the mountains. His cell phone rang again.

“Mendelssohn. We’re dropping you a harness.”

“The LZ’s cold, Top. You can pick me up,” Scorpion said.

“We want to stay high, in case any Bravo Golfs,” Bad Guys, “are coming down the road,” Shaefer said. He said something else but Scorpion couldn’t hear it because the Apache was almost directly over him. He could feel the push of the rotor wind flattening the grass as they lowered a harness on a line. When the line reached him, he pulled it over, got into the harness, and snapped the buckles closed.

He signaled a thumbs-up to the crew and immediately felt himself being hoisted high into the air, the sound from the chopper growing louder, and, as he rose up, the wind pressing against him, he could see the spread of burning debris like a scorched wasteland around the farmhouse. Rising higher, the rest of the town and the surrounding countryside was spread out below, untouched all the way to the highway. He looked up and saw Shaefer in BDUs and a crewman in the open hatchway waiting to bring him in.