The V-22 Osprey lifted vertically from the flight deck of the USS Eisenhower, a Nimitz class nuclear carrier standing off the Adriatic coast of southern Albania. At the Osprey's 60-foot translation altitude, the convertiplane's mammoth tilt-rotor engine nacelles pivoted forward to engage in horizontal flight mode. Now flying levelly at twice the speed of any chopper in anybody else's military, the V-22 ferried the Marine specwar detachment known as Cobra Force inland on a back-door recon. Like other covert missions conducted by the team, this too was to be a recon by fire.

Inside the V-22's passenger and cargo bay, the Marine they called Chicken Wire gave the two FNGs seated on the opposite bulkhead his best gimlet-eyed once-over. Damn, but they sure looked green.

The FNGs -- fucking new guys -- were to take the place of two Cobra Force team members killed in action on the elite special operations detachment's prior mission into Bosnia some weeks back. All these FNGs knew about war they'd learned from combat simulations, training exercises, crap like that, C.W. surmised. Still, they'd aced out dozens of other candidates who would have given their right nut to be part of the team.

Chicken Wire figured they'd do okay -- nobody was just seconded into the unit. You had to prove yourself worthy. More importantly, Major David Saxon, the unit commander, had to give the green light first, and Saxon was not an easy dude to bullshit.

Still, he wondered, do I want to trust my ass with these greenhorns?

Well, screw it. The fact was that C.W. trusted nobody but C.W. and Pauline, his true-blue Pig. C.W. kept Pauline, an M60E3 Maremont machine gun, tuned up like a Stradivarius violin. With a couple hundred rounds of NATO standard in Pauline's box mag, there wasn't any number C.W. couldn't play.

Chicken Wire was the team's squad auto weapon gunner, the SAW-man or the Pig Meister, depending on who you talked to. Most guys in the unit had a nickname, and like many another jarhead in the detachment, Chicken Wire didn't have a clue as to where his own had come from. He'd just been tagged with the handle one fine day during his basic at Camp Lejeune and had worn it ever since.

Not that he really had cause for complaint. Chicken Wire once knew a Marine they'd called Crazy Gonorrhea Face. He also knew a seven-foot black guy with muscles in his shit they called Pussy, but never to his face. Getting tired of staring at the FNGs, Chicken Wire leaned forward. He had a question for them.

"Yo -- either of you know a guy named Pussy?" he asked.

C.W. smiled, waiting for one of them to answer.

Cobra Force's official designation was MF-1, Marine Force One, a special operations detachment of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). It was trained in small unit warfare, counterterrorist ops - - in fact, counter-anything-you-got operations. Unofficially, the unit was called Cobra Force by its members and by practically everyone else.

Anything the Navy SEALs or the Army Delta Force did, the fighting leathernecks of Cobra Force did better, faster and smarter. What the hell, they were Marines, weren't they?

Cobra's mission was to deal with a problem that had been giving Marine tacair some major headaches lately over the craggy, tree-studded ridge lines and thickly forested valleys of southeastern Montenegro. The Serb regional missile commander known as Count Dracula was a hammered-down, tough-as-nails, shit-dipped sonofabitch who had been making things pretty rough for F/A-18 strike packages inbound for targets on the Macedonia-Bulgaria borders and the mission planners at EUCOM; he'd been up to his shenanigans for weeks. The air arm of the carrier battle group loitering off the coast of Albania had suffered unacceptable losses during the two week old Operation Eastern Star.

This was no small accomplishment. But all good things must come to an end, including Count Dracula's winning streak against NATO. The renegade Serb now lived on borrowed time. A cobra was fixing to bite him on the ass.

The president had made a special webcast from the White House to address the nation on what was happening and why the United States was committing ground troops to a foreign civil war for the first time since the Gulf War. His address put it in terms similar to George Bush's explanation fifteen years before: oil and jobs. And one more thing: the threat of global nuclear annihilation.

The resurgent Soviet Union had expanded into Bulgaria, and the Bulgarians had intruded into Macedonia. At stake were the strategic oil fields of the Black and Caspian Seas. These fields weren't that important to the United States, explained the president, but they were important enough to the European Economic Community for the EEC to risk unilateral action -- even if that meant baiting the Russian Bear on its home turf. If ESDI, the European Self-Defense Initiative combat force, struck out unilaterally, it could turn a limited regional war into a global conflict, and possibly lead to nuclear escalation.

The United States had only one recourse if it was to prevent this potential powder keg from erupting, and that was to use its high-technology weapons to roll back the Soviets and their Bulgarian allies before the neo-communist bloc swallowed up Macedonia, Montenegro and the rest of the Balkans.

After that the U.N. could step in and sort out the assholes from the harp players. This meant, however, that U.S. ground troops would be committed to the war. Such was the rationale behind Eastern Star.

The operation got off to a bad start, though, and Count Dracula was the main reason. When it commenced, the air war's first objective was to neutralize the SAM belt girding the southwestern approach to the Yugoslavian interior. The surface-to-air missile belt stretched in a broken line along a north-south axis, from its origins in the mountainous hinterlands to within a few kilometers of the Greek frontier.

CIA analysts had spent considerable time and taxpayers' money studying overhead imagery of the SAM belt from an Improved Crystal photointelligence satellite and from SR-71 Blackbird overflights in the weeks prior to the mission's launch. The intel take showed the belt was made up mostly of mobile SAM TELs -- transporter-erector-launchers -- with a small scattering of fixed sites mixed in among them.

Some of the SAMs were old SA-8s, which could be bypassed by flying in attack sorties at high altitudes, but many others were recent versions of SA-10s that couldn't be reliably dealt with by electronic countermeasures and high-envelope overflight tactics. Those SAMs had the range and navigational systems to home in on even air-dominance combat aircraft with lethal effectiveness.

This meant that the SAMs could not just simply be bypassed but had to be taken out, reduced to slag. The Navy felt it had just the thing to do the job. In addition to the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM), the Navy had begun fielding the upgraded SLAM-ER (Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response) missile just before the hostilities began. Both cruise missiles were accurate and deadly standoff munitions.

In the predawn hours the fleet began launching inbound TLAMs and SLAM-ERs at SAM installations in the Macedonian belt. At first light, the Improved Crystal orbital imagery and Blackbird spy plane missions brought in new pictures from which battle damage assessments were compiled by the intel staff at EUCOM. By midday more missiles were again inbound.

After three consecutive days of standoff attack, the SAM force was decimated. But decimated was not the same as destroyed. Some SA-10 64N6 "Tombstone" installations, the most advanced SAM battery type the enemy was fielding, remained untouched. A Fata Morgana of missiles, one minute the batteries were there, the next they weren't.

The intel people surmised what was happening: The SAM commander knew his shit backward. He had trained his personnel to move rapidly and exploit the many rifts and defiles of the countryside in order to hide the mobile TELs carrying the SAMs. It was like a group of highly intelligent cockroaches on a kitchen countertop scurrying for cover when the light came on. There was only one way to take out Count Dracula, and that was to land a recon force on the ground.

That mission, according to Brigadier General "Patient K." Kullimore, had Cobra Force's name written all over it. Unlike others in the MEU, Kullimore's handle matched his personality. Patient K. was not one to charge into action or send any of his men into a meat grinder without first running the numbers. Kullimore was a technician, dedicated to mastery of the digital battlefield, and a tactical innovator. He would never use a sword when a scalpel would do. Patient K. judged Cobra Force the right scalpel for the job. SACEUR and the Joint Chiefs backed him up, and Cobra Force got itself a mission.

The Osprey's approach to the landing zone jarred Chicken Wire awake. He'd been nodding off, dreaming about a Russian stripper he'd once dated named Svetlana. He remembered one of the FNGs telling him to go fuck himself after he asked about the guy named Pussy, but that was all. Now C.W. shook the cobwebs from his head as the convertiplane's monster paddle blade prop-rotors slanted upward and the V-22 transitioned into standard helo mode as it slowed over the clearing in the rugged mountain country.

Navigating by means of forward-looking infrared imaging, the pilot dropped the Osprey's underbelly to within a few feet of the high mountain meadow that was its destination, but kept the rotors dishing.

Minutes later, Cobra Force and its gear was on the ground and the Osprey was rising straight up like a freight elevator to transit from the LZ.

Once in theater, the team formed up and mud-checked its equipment, including the ITDs, or integrated tactical displays, strapped to their heads under their Fritz helmets.

The ITDs incorporated night vision imaging with digital graphics linked to small tactical computers carried on the team's webbing. The ITD system could also uplink to Defense Department satellites and unmanned air vehicles, and to surveillance and control aircraft like AWACS and JSTARS.

Cobra Force marched out of the LZ with color-coded moving map displays overlaying the monochrome low-light imagery of the surrounding terrain. The maps were keyed to Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and had the unit's mission route already programmed in. Waypoints, indicated by circles, highlighted Objectives Victor, Whiskey, X-ray and Yankee amid the complex of hills and crags, ravines and valleys.

Analysts at NPIC, the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, guessed that these were the most likely places Count Dracula might be holing up between SAM launches. Cobra Force's job was to hunt for the Count's TELs, and destroy them in place. The same Osprey that had ferried the unit into the op zone was ready to fly back in and pick up the team once the mission was accomplished.

But Chicken Wire didn't like the way it felt. His grandfather had been a Marine on Iwo Jima, and from what C.W. remembered about what he'd been told, this country was a lot like Iwo. Only it wasn't an island, was considerably more forested and was way farther west of Japan.

Same type of broken topography, though, hills and gullies and ravines. In short, the ideal place for an enemy to hide in and, if need be, defend.

The experts didn't know shit from a hole in the ground. Seeing the terrain from an air-conditioned office was a hell of a lot different than seeing it with your dick plowing a furrow in the mud. Chicken Wire figured there could be more demons lurking beneath the surface than just the caves that the techs and wonks figured some of the TELs were being moved into for shelter.

It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility for there to be tunnels and bunkers sunk inside those hills too, chock-full of troops. Hell, you could hide a division in this countryside if you kept it well-hidden underground.

C.W. had brought that up during pre-mission briefings, but had been shot down. No indications of deep underground facilities were found. Where you had DUFs you also had to have ventilation shafts, access roads, comms transmitters. Where you had those you had TEMPEST -- transient electromagnetic pulse emanations -- and plenty of IR leakage.

But there wasn't zip to indicate any of this in the ops zone. Not a millivolt of TEMPEST, not a thousandth of a degree of radiant heat energy that didn't come from Mother Nature herself. Chicken Wire still wasn't convinced. The so-called experts had been wrong plenty of times before. They sure as hell could be wrong again. As far as he was concerned, C.W. would go on the assumption that they were wrong this time too.

Until he was convinced of the contrary, Cobra Force's Meister of the Pig would keep a tight grip on his M60 GPMG and consider anything that moved a potential threat, including the wind. Somewhere out there, maybe real close, Count Dracula's TEL crews were dug in, waiting for daybreak and their orders to move out and set up shop in this rugged hill country.

Cobra Force knew the name of the game was to drop the hammer on Count Dracula before the renegade Serb commander found them himself. Each member of the unit had a gut feeling that before their 48-hour mission time ticked down to zero, one or the other would happen. Heads Cobra, tails Dracula. Like the outcome of every mission, it could all hang on the toss of a coin.

Copyright © 2001 by David Alexander