Donovan just smiled and shrugged. “Same difference. It all ends the same way: with me having a good time.”
Brian laughed, as did the senior chief. At least he thought the gruff grunt was a laugh.
Unlike the enlisted men in the regular forces, most SEALs were college educated, but Brian was still surprised to have Newton make his way into a conversation. Especially since he knew that the senior chief had only spent a couple of years at a junior college. But Brian had learned early on that the distinction between college-educated SEALs and non-college-educated SEALs was a piece of paper.
“Five minutes to game time, boys. Be ready.” The voice of Lieutenant Commander Scott Taylor stopped the ribbing cold.
Brian’s sub-related nausea and nervous energy were forgotten as he, like each of the other thirteen men, went into battle mode and began the final preparations for their infil.
The platoon was calm, methodical, and cool. No one watching would ever have guessed the importance of the mission—code name Operation White Night—that they were about to embark on. It looked like just another day at the office. If going to the office could get you killed or start a war if you were caught, that is.
They weren’t just going deep behind enemy lines; they were diving right into a political shit storm without a proverbial paddle.
Donovan seemed to read his mind. He smiled as he lifted his regulator to his mouth. “Welcome to the Teams, kid. Now let’s go see what that crazy motherfucker is up to. And one more thing.” Brian looked up. “Don’t fuck up.”
That was the plan.
What was the worst thing that could happen? Brian winced. Probably not something he should think about right now.
“Hooyah,” Brian said with a nod before putting in his own regulator.
Mother Russia, here we come.
• • •
“Take five,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor called out.
Brian’s lungs were on fire as the platoon came to a stop in the small clearing. He immediately reached for a protein bar as he took a long swig from his hydration bladder. Adrenaline had kept him going for the first ten miles, but combined with the long swim in choppy water, the next five had been a struggle. Mile sixteen and he was still waiting for his second wind.
At least the spring storm that had made their swim something akin to moving through swirling concrete hadn’t followed them onto shore. The boggy marshes and melting ice of the Arctic tundra that awaited them at the coast had been bad enough without the addition of precipitation.
He supposed he should be glad it had been a balmy spring day of fifteen rather than the minus-forty it could be in winter. It had warmed up quite a bit from that even as they’d left the reindeer, shrubs, and sickly-looking birch trees of the tundra for the Siberian cedar that surrounded the mountains on the west side of the Polar Urals.
Glancing at his watch, he could see that it was still twenty-five at 2350 hours. By day it might even climb to forty-five. A veritable heat wave in the Komi Republic.
Brian assumed it was just a regular rest stop until he noticed Lieutenant Commander Taylor and the platoon operations officer talking with Ruiz, the lead communicator, aka the radioman or RTO. The terminology might be antiquated—radio telephone operator—but the acronym lived on. The RTO was easily identifiable by the antenna array on his back. The satcom kept him in contact with HQ, and like every other team member he also carried the handheld radio and headset for squad communications. Although each operator on the team had his specialty, unlike many other Special Operations units, SEALs were generalists, not specialists. Each man on the team could step in and do any job if called upon.
The LC didn’t look happy. Which wasn’t saying much. Lieutenant Commander Taylor hadn’t looked happy since he was handed this mission. He’d looked . . . focused. Intense. Determined. As if he’d just been given an impossible task that put his ass on the line. Which pretty much summed it up.
As the platoon commander and officer in charge, he was responsible for the success of the op. And even for the men of Retiarius Platoon, who were called on for the most covert, failure-isn’t-an-option missions, a recon op in Siberian Russia wasn’t going to be easy.
All they had to do was slip past Russia’s sophisticated Arctic Sea defenses of underwater satellites, drones, and robots (check), swim over two miles in the frigid waters of the Barents Sea, and land on a remote coast of Arctic Siberia (the Nenetsia region, for which there was a damned good reason no one had ever heard of it) without being detected (another check), hump twenty miles into the Polar Ural Mountains of the Komi Republic (three-quarters check), and locate an old gulag in the inaccessible wilderness that sat images showed might be being used as a secret weapons facility. Then they got to do it all over again on the way back.
And oh yeah, the whole time operate under the watchful eye of their team skipper back at the base in Hawaii, the top brass at Special Warfare Command Center in Coronado, US Special Operations Command in Tampa, Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, and POTUS—the president of the United States herself.
Thanks to a very powerful and secret new stealth drone that could evade Russia’s sophisticated antidrone technology, they were beaming live right now to the Situation Room in the White House just like the op undertaken by their now famous counterpart DEVGRU (aka SEAL Team Six) in their takedown of bin Laden.
If anything went wrong, they were screwed. Not only would they likely be killed, but only a month after an American fighter plane had gone off course during a training mission and been shot down in Russian-controlled airspace, killing two airmen and nearly starting a war, the Russian president had vowed to declare war on the US if there were any more “accidental” incursions. Unlike with the fighter pilots, however, their presence couldn’t be explained. No one strayed into this part of Siberia by accident.
Although there were plenty of higher-ups in the government who would only be too happy to go to war with Russia and put Ivanov in his place—including the father of one of the pilots killed who happened to be a four-star general in the Joint Chiefs of Staff—President Cartwright wasn’t one of them. After the debacle in Iraq with WMDs—or rather lack thereof—she wasn’t going to act without proof. Lots of proof. Which was why they were here.
But even if they did find evidence that Russia was up to something, Brian wasn’t convinced that Madam President would have the balls—figuratively speaking—to do anything about it.
For years Dmitri Ivanov had been thumbing his nose at the rest of the world, violating airspace, seas, treaties, and just about everything else with impunity. He was like the coworker at the office party who drank too much and everyone stood around watching nervously, hoping he didn’t do something that crossed the line so they’d have to deal with him.
Whether Ivanov would actually go through with his threat of war, Brian didn’t know. But he wouldn’t put it past the crazy bastard. Russia’s economy had been in the shitter for too long, and the people were beginning to rumble.
What strength Russia had was in its military, and Brian suspected there was little Ivanov wouldn’t be willing to do to hold on to power and save face. Even if he eventually lost the war, he could cause the US a lot of damage in the meantime.
And if Ivanov really did have some kind of doomsday weapon as intelligence seemed to suggest? He could blow them all back to the Dark Ages and even the game. It was one way to shift the balance of power.
Yes, Lieutenant Commander Taylor had reason to be worried with so much at stake, but so far everything had proceeded as planned. However, if his expression was any indication as he conferred with Ruiz and Lieutenant White, that was about to change.
Word of what was going on spread Brian’s way in the form of SO3 Travis Hart. In other words, the only special warfare operator third class other than Brian, and the man who’d been the lowest on the totem pole before he joined. Hart had been the happies
t man in the world to see his face.
“We lost Sauron,” Hart said in his thick Mississippi accent, referring to the Sentinel stealth drone nicknamed for the powerful eye in the sky from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Travis was a country boy through and through. He drove a truck, listened to Kenny Chesney, wore nothing but roper boots and Wrangler jeans held up by belts with big, shiny buckles when they weren’t on duty, and had probably held a gun before he could walk. He was also the platoon’s best sniper.
Hart was about as far from Brian’s liberal California upbringing as you could get. Yet there was something instantly likable about his simple “God, Country, Family” beliefs, and he and “Jim Bob” (Travis’s code name) had become surprisingly close in the three weeks since Brian joined the team. Nothing brought men closer than shared pain, and being the FNG on the Teams was all about pain in its many unpleasant forms.
Before they left, Brian had been stuck with a bar bill for three hundred and fifty dollars at Hulas, their favorite local hangout in Honolulu. How nine guys—he was the designated driver until the next poor bastard FNG came along—could drink that much in Coors Light, he didn’t know.
Coors Light was the beverage of choice for most SEALs. So much so that Brian had heard of a team who’d claimed to be the Coors Light Parachuting Team when questioned in bars about the presence of so many big, fit guys hanging out together. Hell, it was better than Chippendales dancers, which Donovan had claimed once—offering Hart up to the ladies to prove it.
But dancing like a stripper and being stuck with the bar bill was all part of the drill. Hazing—like surviving the infamous BUD/S training course—was how you proved you belonged.
“What happened?” Brian asked.
Problems with technology weren’t uncommon with new, top-of-the-line, not-far-from-experimental technology—Team Six wasn’t the only team who got to test out the new toys—and drones were prone to losing communications and occasionally crashing. Brian hoped that wasn’t the case here or someone was going to lose his ass.
Hart shrugged. “Don’t know. Ruiz said it suddenly cut off. They’re on the satcom trying to find out what happened, but the connection is crap.”
The poor radio connection didn’t surprise him. Distance and topography could wreak havoc on even the best communication systems. Even if they weren’t in Siberia, the trees and mountains like this could put them in a black hole.
Five minutes turned into ten as Lieutenant Commander Taylor went over to confer with the senior chief. You would think it would be the other way around, but the dynamic between officers and senior enlisted petty officers, who were often grizzled veterans with the most experience, could be tricky. Especially when both men were stubborn, proud, and natural leaders.
The exchange of words didn’t take long and Senior Chief Baylor came over to relay what had obviously been decided. “Gather up, boys. We’re heading out.”
“Going old school, Tex?” Donovan asked.
“Looks like it,” the senior chief responded with a quirk of his mouth.
“You don’t seem too disappointed by our unexpected complication.”
“Not having some recently graduated Ivy League liberal analyst who’s never seen the outside of a cubicle second-guess the way I scratch my ass? Damned straight.”
The men laughed, but they all knew that despite the freedom from oversight, they also wouldn’t have Sauron to alert them to company in the area.
Brian didn’t let it bother him. Crap always went wrong on ops. It was the one truism you could count on.
For the next four miles they moved as quickly as their night-vision goggles allowed in the thick brush and dense forest. According to Brian’s GPS they were less than a mile away from their target when they stopped again.
He was close enough to Lieutenant Commander Taylor to hear him ask Ruiz, “Anything?”
Ruiz shook his head. “It’s a brick out here. Should I try the sat phone?”
The LC shook his head. “Not unless we need to. We don’t want to risk doing anything that could give us away.”
Although the navy and Naval Special Warfare Command used layers and layers of encryption software, satellite phones—if they could get a signal out here with all the trees and mountains—could be vulnerable.
So no drone and no communications. This was getting better and better. That they were light on comms gear already was due both to the long swim and the hike in difficult terrain where every ounce counted, and to wanting to minimize any signals that might give them away.
But communications or no communications, it wasn’t as if command could do anything if there was trouble. There weren’t going to be any Blackhawks coming to get them. They were the cavalry.
Lieutenant Commander Taylor nodded as if he’d planned for the setback. He probably had. SEAL commanders had contingencies for contingencies. “Looks like we’re on our own. I’m sure some of you are going to be disappointed not to be seeing yourselves replayed over and over on the screen later.” He sent a knowing look in Donovan’s direction.
“Ah, hell, you mean I trimmed up for nothing?” Donovan said, tugging at the short beard he wore.
“Mix in a mirror next time,” Brandon Blake—Donovan’s best friend and former BUD/S buddy—interjected. “You look like a caveman.”
Long hair and beards (aka “relaxed grooming standards”) were a theme for men in special mission units like Team Nine. It helped them blend for clandestine ops.
“Yeah, well, Hollywood and Geico commercials will have to wait,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor said dryly. He looked back at the men. “We go in slow and quiet—go dark on comms. Donovan and Blake will do a quick recon, and if it looks clear, we’ll proceed as planned. Any questions?”
Silence. They’d all been well briefed. When they reached the camp, they were to break off into two squads. Navy Squad under the command of Lieutenant White would investigate the dilapidated wooden barracks building that had housed the workers sixty-odd years ago, while Gold Squad under the command of Lieutenant Commander Taylor would investigate the heavily fortified concrete command building and attached mess hall, where most of the satellite activity had been detected.
Navy and Gold. The LC had obviously gone to Annapolis.
Brian had assumed that Senior Chief Baylor would go with Lieutenant White, as White was the junior officer, but the senior chief was going with the lieutenant commander—as was Brian. That probably wasn’t a coincidence.
But if the senior chief resented having to watch over the FNG, he didn’t show it. Although showing emotion wasn’t exactly something Senior Chief Baylor seemed to do a lot of. “Stony” was putting it mildly.
The platoon started forward, moving much slower this time and communicating only when necessary by hand gestures. No talking wasn’t unusual, but it was rare they didn’t use sounds—tics, tweets, or others—to communicate. The LC wasn’t taking any chances.
About a half mile from target, they intersected with the dirt “road” and the rusted train tracks that had once connected this camp to Vorkuta, the coal-mining town that had been built around one of Russia’s most notorious gulags, Vorkutlag, and its hundred and thirty-two subcamps.
Overgrown with brush and trees, the muddy surface marked by deep potholes that were filled with water and enormous rocks, the road looked as though it hadn’t been used since the camp was abandoned in the ’60s. It would have taken a tank to go through here. But one hadn’t. Tree limbs would have been broken, and there would have been some sign of tracks in all that mud.
Brian saw the two officers exchange a glance. There was no other visible road into the camp. They’d thought that when they got close enough and were able to look under the trees blocking the sat images, this one would show evidence of tracks.
Brian hoped to hell this wasn’t another Iraq WMD goat fuck, but the hairs on his arms
were buzzing.
Donovan and Blake had gone ahead to scout. They returned as the rest of the platoon reached the outskirts of the camp and gave the all-clear sign.
Lieutenant Commander Taylor gestured forward with his hand and then held up two fingers. The two seven-man squads broke apart. Lieutenant White and the rest of Navy Squad skirted the camp to the west toward the barracks. Brian followed the lieutenant commander and the senior chief east to the former command center. In addition to the two leaders and Brian, Gold Squad consisted of Donovan, Ruiz, Hart, and Steve “Dolph” Spivak.
Spivak’s nickname had been easy to figure out. He was a beast. The physical specimen in a team of guys in top condition, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Dolph Lundgren, the actor who’d played the Russian foe of Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky movies.
Like Brian, Spivak spoke a handful of Slavic languages. But when Brian had tried to talk to him in Russian, Spivak turned that icy blue gaze on him and told him—in English—that when he wanted to practice he’d find his Ukrainian grandmother, but in the Teams they spoke “fucking red, white, and blue American.”
Roger that. Brian wasn’t dumb enough to comment on “American.” He knew a setup when he heard one.
Brian’s senses flared and locked in that position as they moved toward their entry point. Christ, it was quiet. Too quiet. There was an eerie stillness to the air. It was the dead of night, but surely there should be some sound of animals? Birds? Leaves rustling?
The hair at the back of his neck stood on edge. His pulse quickened as he scanned the area in front of him and the shadowy contours of the camp buildings began to take shape.
Even through the lenses of his night-vision goggles, they loomed hauntingly before them like a concrete ghost town, a lifeless, austere relic of bleak Communist Russia. Hundreds of these forced labor camps had sprung up in the Stalin years—four hundred and seventy-six by one count.
God, what must it have been like to be sent here? Jail was bad enough, but being a prisoner in a Siberian gulag took bad to new levels.
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