Hell’s athletes

I have no idea – no idea whatever – whether or how much of this is true, or made up, or what. But here it is, for whatever it may be worth – it being from a website run by something called Bikesport, “Michigan’s largest road and triathlon store”. I kid you not.

I’m guessing that not all of the blogosphere has seen this yet. If it has and I was the last to hear about it, apologies. Thanks to Boris Kupershmidt for the link.

[EMBARRASSING UPDATE: It’s fiction, as commenter number two has just pointed out. Oh well. Maybe something approximately like what follows has been happening. Follow this link for the background to all this, which is definitely a story, if not anything like the story I thought it might have been.]

It’s a big night for Mike. He’s at work tonight. As I mentioned his clothing is wet, partially from dew, partially from perspiration. He and his four co-workers, Dan, Larry, Pete and Maurice are working on a rooftop at the corner of Jamia St. and Khulafa St. across from Omar Bin Yasir.

Mike is looking through the viewfinder of a British made Pilkington LF25 laser designator. The crosshairs are centered on a ventilation shaft. The shaft is on the roof of The Republican Guard Palace in downtown Baghdad across the Tigris River

Saddam Hussein is inside, seven floors below, three floors below ground level, attending a crisis meeting.

Mike’s co-worker Pete (also an Ironman finisher, Lake Placid, 2000) keys some information into a small laptop computer and hits “burst transmit”. The DMDG (Digital Message Device Group) uplinks data to another of Mike’s co-workers (this time a man he’s never met, but they both work for their Uncle, “Sam”) and a fellow athlete, at 21’500 feet above Iraq 15 miles from downtown Baghdad. This man’s office is the cockpit of an F-117 stealth fighter. When Mike and Pete’s signal is received the man in the airplane leaves his orbit outside Baghdad, turns left, and heads downtown.

Mike has 40 seconds to complete his work for tonight, then he can go for a run.

Mike squeezes the trigger of his LF25 and a dot appears on the ventilator shaft five city blocks and across the river away from him and his co-workers. Mike speaks softly into his microphone; “Target illuminated. Danger close. Danger Close. Danger close. Over.”

Seconds later two GBU-24B two thousand pound laser guided, hardened case, delayed fuse “bunker buster” bombs fall free from the F-117. The bombs enter “the funnel” and begin finding their way to the tiny dot projected by Mike’s LF25. They glide approximately three miles across the ground and fall four miles on the way to the spot marked by Mike and his friends.

When they reach the ventilator shaft marked by Mike and his friends the two bunker busters enter the roof in a puff of dust and debris. They plow through the first four floors of the building like a two-ton steel telephone pole traveling over 400 m.p.h., tossing desks, ceiling tiles, computers and chairs out the shattering windows. Then they hit the six-foot thick reinforced concrete roof of the bunker. They burrow four more feet and detonate.

The shock wave is transparent but reverberates through the ground to the river where a Doppler wave appears on the surface of the Tigris. When the seismic shock reaches the building Mike is on he levitates an inch off the roof from the concussion.

Then the sound hits. …

My guess is that this was why the rush to war took fourteen months, or whatever it was. They were getting all of this stuff good and ready and working nicely. If true – and something a lot like this must presumably have been happening – then very scary.

And you can’t help thinking: SH has been completely dead from day one. [But see the EMBARRASSING UPDATE above! SH is definitely still alive. The videos prove this beyond doubt. “We have crushed them … we are pounding them … this is American disinformation …” etc. etc. Oh well.]