Bottom line? You wanna be like me, then you better fucking learn math, and you better fucking learn it good. Because how the fuck can you plan missions if you can’t fucking add, subtract, multiply, and divide, not to mention do your fair share of algebra, calculus, and trigonometry. Got it? Good.
Now, like most SEALs, I don’t carry calculators with me. And so I crunched my numbers the old-fashioned way: pencil on paper. And the answer I came up with was that we had 1.96 hours of flying time left, and 1.2 hours until 0900, which as you will recall, was the optimum time for our hit, given the sun’s position and the condition of the target. That put us three-quarters of an hour in the debit column time-wise, and that was with a perfect flight—no head winds, no engine problems, none of the numerous possible screwups, fuckups, and mess-ups that the great nineteenth-century military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz lumped together as “the fog of war.”
I tapped Nigel on the shoulder. “Any way to gain some time, Nige?”
I didn’t care much for his response. Basically, we were flying this craft in overload as it was, and just getting to Naryndzlar was going to be a problem.
Oleg reached over and pulled the chart out of my hand. He peered at it, then stuck a stubby index finger on the creased sheet of paper. “There,” he said. “We should cut short the trip by flying northwest now, not circling around.”
I saw what he was getting at. My route had been circuitous, six legs in all, to avoid being spotted. Oleg’s was direct: only three legs. But it took us over two Azeri military installations. I brought the subject up to him.
He shrugged off any objections. “They will not pay attention,” he said. “They will not care about us.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I cannot guarantee,” he said, shouting over the wind and engine noise to make himself understood, “but Azeris in the past have not been effective militarily.”
Ashley nodded in agreement. “I concur with that part of what Oleg says,” she yelled. “Frankly, Dick, it would save us a lot of time. At least half an hour.”
I thought about it, handed the map to Nod, and showed him the new routing with my finger. Then I retrieved the GPS unit from my vest, unhooked it from its lanyard, and handed it to Nod. “Punch the new route into the GPS,” I mouthed, my words getting lost in the ambient noise.
Nod didn’t have to hear. He understood perfectly, gave me a thumbs-up, and went to work. Three minutes later, Nigel looked at the Magellan readout screen, and tally-fucking-ho’d the LAMA northward. Our time to ETA had just been reduced by two legs and twenty-seven minutes according to the little abacus that sits just fore of the bullshit detector and just left of the pussy-meter in my brain.
Plus, because we weren’t going to be heading up into the hills for a while, we could increase our airspeed. Which would save us another four minutes. That brought us into an acceptable Murphy range—just over fifteen minutes behind schedule.
0752. I radioed Pick, gave him the news, and got a roger-roger. He’d be taking off any minute now, and heading toward his target, thirty miles east of Naryndzlar. I put my head back, rested it against the metal firewall, and closed my eyes. I’ve learned over several decades of Warriordom that you grab rest whenever you can get it. So this was as good a time as any for a Roguish combat nap.
0832. A change in the way we were flying awakened me with a start. I opened my eyes. It had grown much colder, and I looked groundward. Our airspeed had slowed considerably—down to seventy-five, maybe eighty knots from the look of things, and the engine didn’t sound good.
We were climbing over a series of scrubby foothills, whose ridgelines rose perhaps fourteen or fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor. The air around the chopper had dropped into the fifties, and without the hatches, the wind chill made it seem twenty degrees colder than that. I looked over at Ashley, who was shivering.
I mouthed, “You okay?”
“It’s no worse than it was at SERE76 school,” she answered, her jaw shuddering as she spoke. “I’ll be okay.”
Now? Maybe. But it was going to get a lot colder when we hit the mountains. Well, Ashley was tough. She’d be able to take it. If not, well, she’d be cold. I glanced over at Oleg. His arms were wrapped around the document case, its strap running under his right epaulette. His head was back, his mouth was open, and he was snoring away, oblivious to the slipstream that was making a prop out of the waxed tip of his long, white mustache.
Good. I extracted the secure cellular from my pocket, snuck another look at Oleg to make sure he wasn’t watching me, then punched up the first of the numbers in my head. It rang twice, and was picked up.
I said, “Sit-rep,” then I plugged my right ear with my index finger so I could hear what was being said on the other end.
I hung up after thirty seconds, called a second number, and more or less repeated the performance. My third call was to Jacques Lillis, and the fourth to Ricky Fewell. The news was all good: the targets Steve Sarkesian planned to hit had all been hardened against attack. Jacques Lillis’s people had identified the TIQs in Paris, and were watching ’em closely. MI-5, the British security apparatus, was waiting in London to pounce on the Iranians Ali Sherafi had sent to hit our embassy there. The oil company HQs were being protected, and the FBI had been alerted. Bottom line? Within six hours, Steve Sarkesian’s nets would all be scooped up—and the sumbitch would be out of business.
No, that’s not quite accurate. He’d be dead. I switched off the phone and slipped it back into my pocket, glancing over to make sure that Oleg was still snoring. He was.
With the other problems solved, I could pay attention to our situation. I tapped Nigel on the shoulder and asked for a sit-rep.
It wasn’t good. “There’s a flutter in the engine, Gov,” he said.
Well, I knew that already. You could hear the goddam thing struggling. “Will she make it?”
He shrugged, keeping both hands on his controls. “I dropped speed, but it’s a real fight, and we haven’t begun to climb yet.”
I looked over at Nod, who was mirroring Nigel’s every move, flying the fucking LAMA by osmosis. “How we doing’?”
Nod came out of his trance, hit the Magellan’s “on,” switch and when the screen came alive, handed the gizmo to me.
I peered at the readout. We were about forty minutes out, as far as I could guesstimate, due east of Naryndzlar. Below us was a narrow, winding river that made a ninety-degree turn south, then flowed down a more or less northwest to southeasterly course. I grabbed the map and the GPS unit from Nod, laid the map over my legs, balanced the Magellan on my right knee, and tracked our progress with my right index finger.
I looked down at the sequence on the small GPS screen. Yup. We were flying over Mughanly now. Next town to the west should be Kurdlar. After Kurdlar, we’d reach the mountains—the outer edge of the Caucasus range, and things would start to get hairy. I reached for the Magellan to double-check.
Which was when Oleg came out of a nightmare with a series of snorts and starts, his body shaking like a big wet bear. Inadvertently, he swatted Ashley with his big fat Ivan elbow, sending her body up against mine, and the Magellan careening off my knee. The position finder bounced once on the deck plate, knocking the double-A battery cover off. Digger shoestring grabbed the batteries as they rolled toward the hatchway. I hit my quick-release shoulder harness and went for the GPS. I swooped forward to scoop it up just as Oleg smacked into Ashley again. Her foot connected with my injured knee, and I reacted badly, kicking the fucking Magellan out of the chopper.
I thought about going after it, because that’s how stupid I had just been. I fell back onto the bench, secured myself with the safety harness, and looked down ruefully at the lanyard that should have been attached to the Magellan. I looked over at Oleg. He was back asleep, oblivious to what he’d done, his mustache fluttering in the slipstream, a small line of drool coming out of the corner of his mouth. Digger O’Toole, who has a very sarcastic stre
ak in him, rolled his fucking eyes skyward, held the batteries in his palm, and proffered them toward me without saying a word.
He didn’t have to. I used sign language to tell him he was a number-one sort of guy, which brought an uneven, malevolent grin to his pasty Mick face.
And Nod didn’t make me feel any better by telling me that we could probably fly visual from here on, because the course was pretty much due westerly. Hey, I’d fucked up, and I knew it. But there was nothing to do but keep moving forward.
0847. Twenty miles to go. And then, there it was: the high Karabakh Khrebet ridge, looming in front of us like a big fucking wall. The narrow road we were following disappeared into a tunnel. Doom on us, because we didn’t have that luxury. We were gonna have to muscle our way over the goddamn ridgeline meter by meter and come out on the far side without crashing.
Which result was not guaranteed, because the chopper was in rough shape, and vibrating badly. Nigel really had his work cut out for him now. He was up to it, though, hunched over the controls, his hands and feet planted firmly on sticks and pedals, the neck-band of his Russkie uniform wet with sweat, even though the air was close to freezing.
And then suddenly, his head turned toward me, his face contorted with the stress. “I can’t hold it, Gov—gotta set ’er down or we’re history.”
I gave him an absolute negatory. I didn’t fucking care if we crash-landed on the goddam plateau at Naryndzlar. But if we set the LAMA down now, we’d never fucking get airborne again. I knew it, and so did Nigel, even though he chose to disregard the message in his gut.
“Just fly the fucking thing, Nige—”
“Aye, aye, Gov.” His face showed new determination. Like all SEALs, Nigel knew he had to produce when the odds were all against him. Like all SEALs he knew he had no choice other than TO KEEP GOING. He’d just needed to get a little encouragement from someone else who was in the same boat—or chopper—as he was.
And so, newly dedicated to the battle, he flew not only by skill, but also by SHEER WILL and SHEER DETERMINATION. He kept us moving ahead, forcing the chopper higher and higher even though the LAMA was disintegrating as we climbed. Yet, it didn’t matter. Why? Because we were ATTACKING, and in that mode, we’d take our fucking chances. More to the point, we’d keep going toward our objective.
0904. The chopper’s airspeed was only thirty-five knots now, and dropping. I could hear the engine begin to consume itself as we strained up the fucking Karabakh ridgeline, not more than fifty, forty, thirty yards above the scruffy treetops.
I didn’t want to hit the trees. I really didn’t want to hit the trees.
And then, and then, and then, Nigel crested the ridge, and we saw what was beyond it.
I felt the way Moses must have felt as he looked down on the Land of Canaan. Below and to the west lay a narrow, fertile valley. It was completely clean and green, no more than a kilometer wide, and totally hidden from the outside world.
It was like being on another planet. No shear. No crosswinds. Tranquil air. And pastoral bliss: cattle and sheep grazed peacefully below. I saw three—no, four—small farms, with postage stamp–size vegetable patches. It was as if we’d flown into a time warp.
The valley hadn’t been on the map. Not the one I was using anyway. Maybe if we’d had a tactical pilotage chart, I would have seen it. But we’d been using a commercial map—and the scale was just too big to pick this place up.
I peered over Nigel’s shoulder. To the north, a small lake on a northeast/southwest axis fed a series of mountain streams running off southward.
We progressed up the valley for three, maybe four kliks. The green disappeared, replaced by the gray-brown scrub of the Karabakh. I saw the road that would take us to Naryndzlar, and pointed it out to Nod, who nodded, tapped Nigel on the arm, and hand-signaled that he should drop down and follow it. The land got uneven, and desolate once more. We’d left Eden—and were in the mountains once again.
0909. New air currents started to affect the chopper. We got hit by crosswinds, blowing us off course even at our pitiful altitude. Nigel fought the controls, keeping us steady. We maneuvered about six kliks south of Syrchavand, where Pick was circling. I scanned the skies but couldn’t see anything in the bright morning light. Suddenly, we were buffeted by a nasty wind shear. That’s the mountain air for you: unfuckingpre-dictable.
The chopper dropped sixty feet in half a second, giving us all a bit of a shock. Then Nigel banked away and found smoother air. He regained altitude, and came around a right-hand bend above the road. Off at two o’clock I saw a trio of oil storage tanks. Once, they had been camouflaged to match the vegetation. Now the green, gray, brown, and tan paint had mostly chipped away and the tanks sat unused, huge rusting hulks.
Oleg came alive. He pointed at the tanks. “Red Army built those,” he growled.
I looked over at him. “Nice work,” I said sardonically. I don’t think he got it. So I turned my attention toward more important things. Like the condition of our aircraft. The LAMA’s engine was still vibrating, but not as badly as it had been as we’d crested the ridgeline.
0913. We proceeded west through the narrow valley, the jagged Karabakh mountains towering above us on either side. Nigel had dropped us low, flying a mere hundred feet above the narrow, blacktop (actually it was browntop) road below. He pulled up slightly over Vanklu, giving us a look at the old church. Vanklu was only four kliks from Naryndzlar.
I got on the radio, told Pick we were on final approach, instructed him to launch the jumpers, and made sure I got a “roger-roger.”
0914. Nigel banked into an oblique turn. The hotel was dead ahead, sitting atop the ridge. But running parallel with us, right along the north side of the ridge, ran a half-dozen high-tension power lines. They came out of the mountain, ran for about two kliks, supported by huge steel towers anchored onto the mountain side, then disappeared once more into the Karabakh. The power lines hadn’t been on my fucking map either.
You couldn’t see the towers or the lines from the hotel. But they would sure as shit fuck with my jumpers, who were flying in from the northeast. I was reaching for the transmit button on my radio when Pick’s voice echoed in my ear. “Jumpers away,” he told me.
It would be easy to say that they were fucked. But in point of fact, they weren’t—nor would they be. Because I make sure that all the men under my command train for situations like these. The operational budget for today’s SEALs is only 14 percent of what the Navy gets for its SpecWar forces. The biggest chunk of change goes for (of course) administration. Then comes equipment. Training is at the bottom of the totem pole. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Maybe that’s why SEALs are leaving the Navy in record numbers these days. My shooters, however, still get saturation training. I bend the rules—even break ’em if necessary—to make sure they can HAHO and HALO under the very worst of conditions, because that’s the way they’re gonna have to do it for real. Do the powers that be try to screw with me? You bet. But fuck ’em. My men are more important than some apparatchik with stars on his sleeve. So I’ve taken my guys through high-tension power lines. And forced ’em to make the kinds of hairy, last-minute adjustments that Mister Murphy drops on us at the worst of times. And because they’ve been through my Roguish crucible of pain, and forged themselves on my Warrior’s anvil, they will survive to fight, no matter what the odds, or the situation.
But there was no time to ruminate about how good my Warriors are right now. Why? Because Nigel had the LAMA’s nose up, and we were climbing the ridge. The hotel was getting closer, closer, closer.
As I peered through the windshield making my final mental calculations Ashley managed to smack me in the face as she shrugged out of her overalls. I deflected her elbow on the second pass, but she’d already caught me hard enough to make my eyes water. WTF—was she related to Boomerang?
0916. We limped in from the east, the sun at our backs, performed a pretty smooth admin flare for an aircraft in our condition, and dropped cleanly
onto the number-one chopper pad on the south side of the hotel, 250 yards from the main entrance and 100 yards from the big hangar. There was no one within a hundred yards as Nigel shut down.
Even before he did, Digger was outside, his submachine gun up and ready. Nod hit the deck, too, standing at attention as Oleg climbed out, turned, and held his hand out so that Ashley could take it.
I rolled out of the chopper’s port side into the brisk morning air, and inhaled a deep breath of exhaust fumes, so happy to be alive that I wanted to kill someone. I made sure all my equipment was ready to go, started the stopwatch, then withdrew my suppressed USP, held its muzzle down, close to my right leg, and headed for Oleg and Ashley, who’d already started toward the hotel entrance.
21
00:00:25 THEY HADN’T BEEN EXPECTING US—WHICH was the whole idea. I could see the byki and hotel staff scrambling, confused. Oleg paid no attention. Just like the general he was, he hadn’t waited until Nigel had shut down to climb out. He clambered from the starboard hatchway and adjusted the document case so it hung out of the way. He helped Ashley out, and then, like an old, dangerous Russkie bear, he wrapped his big left paw around her shoulder, and the two of them began to march in lockstep unison up the long macadam path toward the hotel.
00:00:31 My SEALs had to move fast to catch up. Once they did they fanned out in a diamond pattern around Oleg and Ashley, just like Alpha Team bodyguards. They carried their MP5s suspended horizontally around their necks, fingers indexed just above the trigger guards.
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