by Tom Clancy
It had been an eventful and enlightening eighteen months to be sure, yet of all the missions he had run thus far, this one was arguably the most difficult--for multiple reasons.
Earlier in the evening, the wind speeds had been increasing, nearing the limit, and they shouldn't have jumped at all, but Mitchell wouldn't allow weather to stop them. No way.
So they had bailed out of a perfectly good C-130 and had made a hair-raising high-altitude, low-opening (HALO) insertion into the mountains just west of a town called Miranshah, where for the last three years the Taliban had established several bases of operations, including public offices--an act that had continually outraged the locals. The team had been given full drone support; otherwise, they were on their own until they rallied back on the pickup point one kilometer due east of their current position. They were dressed and armed like Taliban insurgents, save for the suppressors on their AK-47 rifles. Even Diaz was toting along a Dragunov sniper rifle instead of a silenced SR-25 or some of the other rifles she preferred.
For his part, Mitchell had offered his people the requisite sarcastic welcome to the tribal lands of Waziristan, the most hostile part of the entire country, a wild west ruled by local leaders or maliks (kings) who had either made deals allowing the Taliban to live and train within their territory or who had been coerced into making deals. Over the years, over two hundred maliks had been slaughtered trying to stand up to the Taliban.
Despite that legacy of death, Mitchell had no reservations about taking on the mission, especially when he'd learned about who was involved.
He maneuvered the drone to the farthest house, descended a few meters, centered the reticle and grid overlay, and whispered to himself, "Come on. Be there."
The drone hummed quietly. Mitchell's breath steamed. He sniffled, tensed, waited.
Abruptly, three brilliant green diamonds flashed in his HUD, along with three familiar names and their blood types. The diamonds zoomed in on the locations of each man in the house.
He'd found them! And he repressed the desire to shake a fist in the air.
Signals coming back from specially modified "Green" Force Tracker Chips under the skin of each man had allowed the computer to discern them as friendlies.
The GFTCs were part of a sophisticated and fine-tuned Identification, Friend or Foe (IFF) system that functioned much faster and more accurately than laser-based predecessors. Implanted chips were less cumbersome and more secure than external, radio-like identifiers. Additionally, the GFTCs were equipped with two security systems: (1) a DNA identifier so that the chips couldn't be used by enemies and still function, and (2) rolling encrypted signals to avoid enemy interception. Mitchell also had the command authority to update those rolling codes at his discretion.
The drone was beginning to get too close to the house, blowing snow from its roof, and Mitchell swore and guided it back to gain altitude.
The other individuals inside, four in all, were located via thermal infrared imagers and designated as "soldiers" with red numbered diamonds that also flashed and zoomed in on their positions. Mitchell could change those designations with a voice command override, should an enemy turn out to be a friendly or a civilian. "Target Three is Green," he might say.
Calming himself now, he flew the drone even higher, all of its data transmitted in real time over the entire network.
The drone picked out eight more targets, including a heavily bundled-up man posted outside each door.
They were only outnumbered three to one. Mitchell liked those odds.
"Ghost Lead, this is Brown," called the gunner. "I'm in position."
"Ghost Lead, this is Ramirez. I'm moving up. Almost there." The rifleman and communications expert aka commo guy had shivered through his words as he fought for breath.
The Cross-Com's security measures gave Mitchell and his teammates the luxury of using their own names over the radio, though he was identified as Ghost Lead in most cases. Sometimes he missed the old call signs, all starting with the same letter on an ODA team: Rockstar, Rapper, Rutang . . .
He took a deep breath. "Ghost Team, this is Ghost Lead. Check your HUDs. You can see our package of three is in the last house. Looks like we have twelve Taliban here. Note their positions. I'm sighting the first guard. Talk to me, Diaz."
Membership in the elite gun club better known as the army's Special Operations Forces was closed to women who wanted to participate in combat roles.
Therefore, Sergeant Alicia Diaz could not possibly be a Special Forces operator.
She could not possibly be crouched on a mountainside in Pakistan, peering down the scope of her rifle, about to whisper her report to her team leader.
But she was.
It had taken the open-minded leadership of the Ghosts brass to recognize that a woman who had won the Service Rifle category of the National Long-Range Rifle Championship at Camp Perry, Ohio, for an unprecedented two years in a row belonged on a Special Forces team, U.S. Army doctrine notwithstanding.
And Diaz wasn't the only female Ghost, either. She'd crossed paths with now Major Susan Grey, Lindy Co-hen, Jennifer Burke, as well as a few others. However, she was the only female marksman within the company, a distinction that had garnered her much respect.
She had joined the army to prove that she could perform as well if not better than any man in any situation. Those were strong words, and she had done everything within her power to back them up. Admittedly, she'd been taken down hard during her combatives training, and there was that incident in Kabul back in '05 when she'd almost been knifed to death, but she had learned to use cunning to compensate for her size.
The fact remained that when Sergeant Alicia Diaz was lying on her belly and clutching her rifle, she was the queen of the battlefield, and they would all bow willingly--or unwillingly--as these men were about to do.
"Ghost Lead, this is Diaz. I'm in position. I have your first target."
The captain's reticle floated over the guard at the last house, and his IWS sent an automatic request to Diaz's HUD to take out that target.
She held her breath, ready to fire.
The perfect sniper is 100 percent certain he will hit the target before he squeezes the trigger. He is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Yet in all her years of practice, being that certain still eluded Diaz. There was always 1 percent of doubt. Just one, but it was there, reminding her that she was just a twenty-eight-year-old tomboy from a ranch in Lubbock, Texas. She was just a girl who liked to play with guns. Hell, it seemed like yesterday that she was aiming at tin cans on fence poles, aggravating her brothers because she'd outshoot them every time.
And the strange thing was, it never got old. The same thrill she'd felt as a teenager still gripped her heart every time she got behind a weapon and sighted a target.
However, the thrill now was tempered by a healthy dose of fear; because if she missed, the entire operation could go south in a heartbeat.
She studied her target. He was seated and had fallen asleep on the job. Awake or asleep, he'd never know what hit him. He had an AK balanced across his knees, his head lowered. Her angle was perfect so that the round would not penetrate the house after traversing his skull.
Diaz had considered the wind speed and direction, automatically displayed in her HUD. She had her range, which was decreased by the specially modified 7.62 mm subsonic ammunition she fired to dampen her rifle's report. She'd already accounted for the force of gravity, the bullet drop.
This was the math every good sniper knew, not unlike the math they'd tried to sell you in high school: "Hey, kids, if you ever become an Army Special Forces sniper, you'll need this stuff." Perhaps they would have had more luck gaining students' attention if they had framed it like that.
And this was the math that had cost Diaz most of her romantic relationships with men. She could never tell them what she actually did in the army, and the lies never added up.
Besides, what man in his right mind would want a craz
y woman like her, who would kite off on a whim to Europe to learn foreign languages when she wasn't shooting bad guys? Most of the men she had dated wanted a woman who was into pizza, beer, and sports, not a woman who watched PBS on TV.
But this was the math. And all of her calculations were, at the moment, complete.
Her reticle floated over the target and froze. Perfect head shot.
Her trigger finger came down slowly, gracefully, followed by a muted thump and puff of smoke.
The round struck the guard's head, took most of it off, and left him slumping sideways. No piece of him had struck the door. Even Diaz couldn't believe she'd killed him so cleanly.
"Nice," said the captain. "That's one."
"Stand by," she said, hearing the voices of her brothers like she always did when trying to take aim:
"Come on, girly girl, shoot it! Bet you'll miss!"
I don't think so, Carlos.
"She ain't going to hit it."
Watch me, Tomas. Just watch me.
The second guard had stirred and was now looking up. Diaz didn't have much time. She checked the readings in her HUD, adjusted her aim, and found the guard's head.
Her brothers were screaming now.
And the round cut loose from her rifle.
The guard joined his comrade, spilling blood onto the snow, dying silently.
"Last one," said the captain.
"I have him," answered Diaz.
"Brown, Ramirez, stand by to move," warned the captain.
"She ain't getting this one," said Carlos.
"Maybe," said Tomas. "She ain't missed one yet!"
A gust of wind ripped over the mountain, blowing snow across Diaz's field of view. She cursed and readjusted her position.
Particles of ice had gathered on her scope. She wrenched her microfiber cloth from a pocket and quickly cleaned the lens, then settled back into position.
"Diaz, what are you waiting for?" called the captain. "Come on."
"Wind burst. Stand by."
She could barely hold the rifle steady. Snow cut across her cheek, and her lips were sore and chapped.
In came another gust, and the guard was shaken awake. He rose, yawned, extending his arms in the air, then leaned forward, glancing up to the next house to spot his dead comrade in the snow.
Diaz sighted him, gnashed her teeth, and willing herself into a being of pure steel, frozen, unmoving against the wind, she squeezed the trigger.
TEN
NORTHWEST WAZIRISTAN
AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN BORDER
JANUARY 2009
Staff Sergeant Jose "Joe" Ramirez had his eye on the remaining guard, whose head snapped back as he tumbled to the snow. The last thing that had gone through the guard's mind was 7.62 mm long, weighing 21.8 grams, and Ramirez gaped over Diaz's outstanding shot.
Captain Mitchell barked his order to move out, and Ramirez and Sergeant Marcus Brown sprang up from the snow like thawed zombies and charged toward the houses.
It felt good to run. For a while Ramirez thought his legs and a few other more important parts were going to freeze and crack off.
They reached the door of the farthest house, and Ramirez dragged what was left of the guard's body out of the way so that he and Brown could position themselves on either side of the warped wooden door.
Captain Mitchell would join them in a minute, while Diaz was booting her way through heavy snow to reach her secondary position.
The houses were only about four meters apart, so if they made any serious noise, the Taliban guys next door were sure to come out--or at least begin writing letters to their homeowners' association complaining about the noisy neighbors firing all those guns. This was the part about being a Ghost that frustrated Ramirez. If they could just blow the other two houses while simultaneously raiding the last one, they'd only have four bad guys to deal with. However, most of the really fun explosives tended to be a little noisy, and the team was supposed to get in and out without drawing attention. If they could change their name to Big Loud Badasses, they could awaken the pyromaniac in every operator. He'd even pitched the idea to a few colleagues who'd smiled, said they liked the name, and told him he was a fool.
As a kid growing up on the streets of North Hollywood, California, he'd had ample opportunity to get into trouble and develop a taste for blowing things up.
But it hadn't gone down that way. Not at all. His parents had immigrated from Mexico and had held fast to the old ways. He couldn't relate to them or to the kids running the streets. So he retreated into himself, got into ham radios, and talked to people all over world.
During high school he flourished on the ever-growing Internet but lacked the social skills to have any close friends. By the time he graduated, he was part of a hacker community that, well, got him into a little trouble. Petty stuff, initially, but his "skillz" soon implicated him in a case of identity theft that left him staring into the eyes of a North Hollywood detective, Ms. Roberta Perez, who took him under her wing, got him off of some serious charges, and suggested that he join the army before he did something even more stupid.
Perez's brother Enrique was in the army, and he sat down with Ramirez to explain that the military wasn't just for people who couldn't hack it in society like Ramirez had thought.
Ramirez wouldn't lie and say that the army didn't have its share of dummies and criminals (like most government-run organizations), and he had encountered a few of those exceptional individuals during boot camp. But his time in boot was life altering. His drill sergeant, Paul "Papa" Montgomery, had taken a liking to him, and, after driving him to within an inch of death, Montgomery had practically ordered Ramirez to apply for Ranger School.
Long story short, he was accepted and served two tours right here along the border and had already won the Purple Heart and a Silver Star--all while working on his undergraduate degree in history.
And then some administrators at Officer Candidate School got the bright idea to offer him a desk job.
Were they kidding? They'd advertised it like a promotion, even hinted that he was getting a little old for the battlefield. He was now only thirty-one.
Ramirez had tried to be polite, saying what an honor it was to be offered a desk job after engaging in some of the most exciting, adrenaline-pumping operations known to mankind. Yes, what an honor it would be to replace ink-jet toner cartridges and squint at applications files stored via outdated software instead of thwarting the efforts of those who wanted to terrorize and control others.
All right, so maybe he wasn't exactly polite. His wiseass attitude and keen sense of humor were the products of years of living in the field and contending with the great ironies of life. The high school introvert had finally grown up.
It was Lieutenant Colonel Harold "Buzz" Gordon himself, a member of one of the first Ghost teams and now a legend, who had rescued Ramirez from the world of simulated wood grain and stress balls. While some called Gordon "the old man," Ramirez was more fond of "O-G," not for "Original Gangsta" but for "Original Ghost." Lieutenant Colonel Gordon, the O-G, was a man of impeccable taste and unparalleled foresight, in Ramirez's humble opinion.
And Ramirez felt certain that Captain Mitchell had picked him for this mission because of Gordon's recommendation and because of his Ranger experiences in the region. Ramirez was intimately familiar with the people and the terrain. While his Dari and Pushtan weren't bad--never as good as Diaz's--his Arabic was pretty impressive. He even knew a little slang that could incite some folks.
He glanced over at Marcus Brown, who, despite being a burly African-American rising some six feet four inches, appeared lean and white, his face half obscured by his breath.
Seeing how intense Brown was made Ramirez want to lower his weapon and start unzipping his fly--but he thought better of trying to get a laugh now. Sometimes he took the humor too far.
The captain stole his way toward them, then hunkered down behind Ramirez as Diaz, with her mild Texas accent, cut in over the rad
io, "Ghost Lead. I'm in my secondary. Good to go. Waiting for you."
They were seconds away from initiating the raid, and in his mind's eye, Ramirez went over the interior of the house one more time.
The structure was rectangular, single-story, just a thousand square feet if that. The door was positioned on the left side, forcing them to move deep into the house, past a partitioning wall to get to their package.