Struggling Writers discussion

Prologue
On April 12, 2003 elements of the 26th MEU (SOC) were ordered into Northern Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. By 18 April the unit joined coalition forces in the vicinity of Mosul, in northern Iraq. The mission of the MEU was to promote stability in the region and eliminate any remaining Iraqi forces still loyal to Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party regime.(1)
Soran, Iraq
15 APR 2003

Saddam Hussein, President of Republic of Iraq and the Chairman of Revolutionary Command Council, had purchased the RT-2PM Intercontinental Ballistic Missile from a Russian General late in 2002. It was a last ditch attempt to finally make Iraq a nuclear armed nation and perhaps stave off the invasion promised by the Americans with nuclear retaliation against Israel or the allied forces staged in Kuwait.
The Missile System was composed of a single warhead with a five hundred and fifty kiloton yield warhead perched on top of a three stage solid propellant rocket launcher. The missile and erector unit were mounted on a gigantic fourteen wheel MAZ-7310 heavy truck.
General Olaf Baskov, the officer who sold the system to Saddam, was in command of the 19th Rocket Division of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces located at Rakovo, Khmelnytskyi Oblast. The general had been contacted by various middlemen and offered fifty million dollars for the sale of an operational mobile nuclear missile system.
The general had dreams of retiring to Lake Lucerne and had wrongly assumed that the political, societal and economic turmoil that had become the status quo since the breakup of the Soviet Union would provide him sufficient cover to sell off the ICBM for a hefty profit without anyone being the wiser.
Once purchased, the launcher was placed on a railcar to the Black Sea port of Odessa, where it was partially disassembled, containerized and loaded aboard a cargo ship bound for Turkey. There the containers were loaded on to several semitrailers and shipped to Iraq via the border crossing at Habur Gate.
Saddam had always planned to threaten nuclear retaliation against an invasion. Once the disassembled missile system arrived in Baghdad, Saddam had a team of engineers attempt to reassemble the beast and get it ready for launch. However, damage to the electronic launch system had prevented it from ever becoming combat effective. As the threatened invasion drew nearer, Saddam became paranoid that the invaders would find the missile and lend Bush’s warmongering the credibility he so urgently sought.
Therefore, he asked his old enemies, the Iranians, to hide the launcher for him, but it had broken down in route and could not be fixed, at least by the military mechanics they dispatched. Per Saddam’s personal direction, the huge vehicle was dragged off the road with a T72 tank and buried by two bulldozers and a bucket loader.
The calamity caused by a multipronged invasion provided Colonel Stal the cover he needed to act. Shortly after the “coalition of the willing” began an overwhelming rout of Iraq’s poorly supplied conscript army, Stal hired a local earth moving company from Soran to uncover the missile system.
At first the owner of the company balked when approached by the strange looking foreigner regardless of his ability to speak Arabic. Colonel Stal was six foot four inches tall, bald, with piecing blue eyes and a face scarred in an ambush by a Mujahedin’s bullet during the Soviets invasion of Afghanistan.
But the foreigner had shown him a letter signed by Saddam himself, demanding under penalty of death, that he be given whatever assistance he required. Better still, the man offered to pay him in British Pounds that he displayed with a magician’s flourish from a metal sided briefcase.
The excavator had begun working long before dawn removing a small hill of hard packed, sun baked sand a short distance off Route 3, the road that lead from Mosul, through Soran to the Iranian Border. At day break, Colonel Stal arrived at the excavation site at the head of a convoy of semi-trucks and a large mobile crane that must have been hired in Mosul as Soran has nothing like it.
Knowing that Americans could readily descend upon the group via helicopter or parachute, Colonel Stal had stationed six well-trained anti-aircraft personnel at what he determined to be key air avenues of approach in and around the site of the excavation. Closer in, he set up a defensive perimeter of three 12.7 mm heavy machine guns on elevated ground surrounding the dig site.
It took most of a day to uncover the launcher. Many of the fourteen huge tires were flat, so it could not be moved, but he was certain the man was not interested in the transporter, but rather what sat atop it. He had asked the man what it was and was told it was a missile launcher.
Over the course of the morning, an army of roughhewn Iraqi militia men began arriving―although they wore uniforms, they were unlike the typical Iraqi soldier. These men were older, more muscular and all had beards or moustaches. Some of them had exotic weapons rather than the standard AK-47 and AKMs the traditional army carried. And they barked orders at the workers in such a violent and profane manner that they feared for their lives.
Eventually, the missile system was uncovered enough for a team of specialists that arrived with the convoy to begin dissembling the missile so the crane could load the pieces onto semitrailers.
***
A surveillance satellite over flight had discovered the launch system and an unarmed drone was launched. Once the target had been tentatively identified, a targeting cell had notified the Task Force Viking Commander, who in turn ordered the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (26th MEU).
The MEU Commander misinterpreted the intelligence estimate regarding enemy forces; otherwise he would have given a company size element the mission. Instead, he issued a FRAGO to his organic Recon Platoon to conduct a reconnaissance in force along Route 3 to the vicinity of the Iranian Border.
Fifteen minutes after receiving the FRAGO, the seventeen man Reconnaissance Platoon commanded by 1st Lieutenant James McElroy Jr., launched in a CH-53 Super Stallion Helicopter. The large helicopter approached the target in a Nape of the Earth flight pattern, hugging the terrain with the help of a sophisticated terrain following / avoidance radar system.
The helicopter was just two hundred feet off the ground traveling at approximately 150 knots when the first SA7 launcher achieved primary missile lock against the heat signature generated by the giant aircraft. This allowed the rocket to fire and arc towards the target at a rapidly accelerating speed that would top out at over twelve hundred miles per hour if not stopped by impact.
The 2.6 pound high explosive warhead collided with the starboard exhaust manifold and exploded, rupturing the crew compartment and showering the occupants with aluminum shrapnel. Another firer aimed his SA 7 skyward and launched his deadly missile at the wounded aircraft, thus insuring its demise. The second warhead found the port side exhaust manifold. This time molten shrapnel impacted the left sponson housing one of the three hundred gallon fuel tanks and the aircraft was engulfed in flames as it plummeted earthward. There were no survivors.

Ho, ho, ho, and Merry Christmas, Tim!
Recognize me?

Whoo! What a page, Tim! Not exactly mainstream writing, and your vocab is sometimes hard to comprehend!. But I always love new, different things. This piece of science-fiction was intriguing. Iraq...American president...nuclear attack...all interesting themes and aspects I caught up on. What i really liked was the applied research on this. Your strong point is describing the ammunition to a clear-cut maxim. I couldn't see any faults, but maybe that's because i'm an amateur at the genre. Two, the tension and action that drove the pressure of the story was exactly on point. You delivered action and that spunk of fear into the story, which side would win the invasion. I praise the last sentence! And instant drawback. I went like [what?!] when i saw that ending.


Overall, I really liked it. Continue writing, if you can!

~Signed Your Secret Santa

James, I presume?

Yeah, most people think that about the ending of Chapter One. It's now called Triple G, because Good Guy With A Gun is too on the nose. It will go on Amazon on Feb 1st, unless one of the thirty or so agents I pinged decides to represent it. Thanks for the post. I'm still reading your book, but it's progressing.