Furious, I started for the secure radio to call Paul and tell him this was just another in the series of games our command structure was playing on us. Halfway down the ladder I stopped. Dickie had a better idea. I’d play out this little charade as if I didn’t know any better and turn it into my own war game.
I probably had more unanswered questions than JSOC anyway. Like, how would my men perform during this complicated series of tasks? They were all good—but which ones would become great under the pressure of keeping to a tight combat schedule? Would any of them realize we weren’t doing this for real—and if they did, what would their reactions be?
I wanted to learn which of them I could order to do a job—even though it might mean their deaths. Being cannon fodder was part of the assignment. Every man who’d volunteered for SEAL Team Six knew he was expendable—from me, right down to the youngest kid on the team. This was an opportunity to test that resolve—to see which ones would play for keeps, and which ones would, at the last instant, hold back.
That’s what SEAL Team Six was all about, anyway—playing for keeps. Oh, sure, the goddamn technology of war was almost beyond comprehension—and it wasn’t just airrefueling or high-tech satellites either, anymore, but microburst transmitters and stealth aircraft and hundreds of billions of dollars invested in techno toys—laser-guided, shoulder fired missiles, computer-assisted antitank guns, “smart” bombs, and a whole collection of weapons that the assholes in the Pentagon were quick to tell you could think for themselves.
Today you could sit in a fighter, press a missile launch button, and kill an enemy twenty, thirty, forty miles over the horizon, watching his plane explode on a TV screen, just like the video games my kids played.
And yet, what it really came down to, after all the bullshit and the computers and the video, was the very basic question embodied by the bullet in my hand. Could one of my men look another human being in the eyes, then pull the trigger and kill that person without hesitating for an instant? In Vietnam, I’d discovered who could kill and who couldn’t in combat. But that was fifteen years ago, and less than half of SEAL Team Six had ever been in combat. So there was only one way to find out who’d pull the trigger, and who’d freeze—which was to play this thing out and see who did his job and who didn’t. War, after all, is not Nintendo. War is not about technology or toys. War is about killing.
Chapter 2
ENSIGN INDIAN JEW, THE POINT MAN, SIGNALED. HE WAS half Yakima and half Brooklyn, hence the moniker. I used to kid him about growing up spearing and smoking salmon up on the Columbia River—but never being able to find any bagels or cream cheese.
I squinted in the darkness, barely able to pick him out against the foliage in his tiger stripes and camouflage war paint. But I’d seen him put his hand up, palm flat. Now he was clenching his fist. Enemy ahead. I moved up the line slow and easy, the MP5 in my hand. We’d covered about six hundred yards, making a hell of a lot more of a racket than I wanted to. If the bad guys had pickets out or they’d deployed electronic sensors, they’d surely know about us. That was something we hadn’t had a chance to work on—moving in large groups. Usually, SEALs operated in squads of seven, or in 14-man platoons. Frankly, I was uncomfortable at having to move so many men in one group because of the noise. But it couldn’t be helped, I felt lucky we hadn’t been observed so far.
I drew abreast of Jew and knelt next to him. He was one of the best I had—a former enlisted man whose capacity to learn fast was boundless. Jew epitomized the future of Navy Special Warfare—SpecWar in Navyspeak. He was big, smart, tough, too handsome for his own good, and ingeniously adroit when it came to the deadly arts.
I pulled my NV out. I took a look. The blackness became oscilloscope green; the foliage turned dark against the brightness. Two hundred feet ahead I could see a chain-link fence about eight feet high with a yard of barbed wire coiled on top. Beyond were two warehouses, as well as three other low, barrack like buildings. There were no lights. So much the better. The grounds were unkempt—a lot of cover for us to move behind. It looked just like the satellite picture that was folded in my pocket.
I mimed a man with a rifle to Jew. Any sentries?
He shook his head. No.
I gave him thumbs-up. I pointed at him. I snipped the air with index and middle finger. I mimed peering out.
He nodded. He’d cut through the wire and do a fast sneak and peek. We’d wait.
He slithered forward, moving with a slow, practiced crawl until he melted into the underbrush. Like so many of my guys he was perfectly at home in the jungle. He was too young to have served in Vietnam, but he’d adapted well to SEAL training in Panama and Florida and was one of the best scouts the unit had.
That he was an ensign didn’t matter. In Six, officers and men were interchangeable. No caste system for us.
I edged back and signaled the men to drop. They disappeared into the darkness. I lay back and stared at the sky, listening for anything out of the ordinary. I perceived nothing. The silence was good. You could hear the jungle’s natural sounds—insects, birds, whatever, resuming their normal activities. I smashed something small and winged and sharp that had decided to take up residence on my earlobe. Moments passed.
Jew came back. “Nothing, Skipper,” he whispered. “A second perimeter line of wire fences by the barracks there.” He pointed to the southwest. “And the warehouses east of the barracks, just like on the picture. I heard some noise—maybe they’re having a few cold ones.”
I punched him with my elbow. “Nice job.” I took a recon photo from my pocket. I motioned to PV and an officer I called Lieutenant Cheeks because his jowly face looked like a squirrel hoarding acorns. The three of us huddled over the picture as I illuminated it with a red-lensed pencil light. I showed them what I wanted done. They nodded and gave me thumbs-up.
I circled wagons with my index finger. “Let’s go to work.”
We would move in four 14-man platoons. PV would go south with two of them, work around the perimeter, and cut through the fence closest to the barracks. He’d lead one of his platoons and hit the storage area, where we believed the hostage to be. The other—Cheeks’—would neutralize the barracks.
I’d take down the warehouse where the nuke was, with my platoon. The last platoon, split into two seven-man boat crews, would act as flankers. They’d sweep up any bad guys who got between us and the gate. As we withdrew, they’d join up with Cheeks’ platoon as the blocking force, shielding our escape north and east, back to the LZ.
I pulled the headset onto my head, securing it with a lightweight knit cap. Then I fitted the earpiece snugly inside my left ear, adjusted the filament microphone so it sat on my beard just below my lower lip, ran the wire down the back of my neck, passed it through a slit in the shirt, and plugged it into the Motorola. I pressed the transmit button for an instant and tsk-tsked twice into the mike—radio-talk for affirmative. I heard PV do the same thing. Then I heard Cheeks and Jew. We were all on line and ready to go. And if the bad guys had scanners on, we hadn’t given them very much to scan. At least not yet.
I swept my arm left, then right. The SEALs moved into the shadows. I moved forward, following the path Jew had left me, until I came to the chain-link fence. I found the slit he’d made, took my snips and enlarged it slightly, then pulled myself through.
Once on the other side I slipped behind some scrub, took out my night-vision glasses, and secured the strap tightly around the back of my head. I didn’t wear them all the time because they tend to narrow your field of vision when you’re moving. And they made me slightly top-heavy, but now, when I needed to see inside a darkened building, they’d give me a terrific advantage.
I had a look around. All clear. I moved out, the MP5 cradled in my arms as I scrunched across the ground, moving silently from tree to tree to take the best advantage I could of the natural cover. Scanned the perimeter. Clear—nothing. No muzzles pointing from any of the roofs. No signs of life at all. I liked that.
Fifty feet from the warehouse I flicked the MP5’s safety downward to full fire, rose into a semicrouch and ran to the cinder-block wall.
The building was perhaps a hundred and fifty feet by sixty, topped by corrugated metal roofing that sat on exposed metal trusses, which allowed air flow in the tropical heat. Back and front entrances were heavy, fifteen-foot-wide, sliding, segmented metal doors that sat in tracks. On the side was a two step, roofed porch and a metal, windowed door that led to some sort of office. There was light inside. On each side of the door were windows. In the left-hand one a rusting air conditioner wheezed and dripped water slowly, steadily, into a sizable puddle. That told me it had been turned on for some time.
I worked my way around the back end of the warehouse and snuck a look. It was all clear. I did a 360. Nothing. This was like stealing—no, this was better than stealing. I slowly edged up to the big, tracked door, moving a fraction of an inch. at a time so as to make no noise. There was a small space between the segments, and sucking ground like a snail, I approached slowly, slowly, and had a look-see. For all I knew the Ts inside had NV glasses, too, and I didn’t want ’em screwing with me.
I let my eyes get accustomed to the interior. It looked quiet enough. The place was empty except for some 50-gallon drums piled along the wall to my left, and what looked like a three quarter ton Army truck parked close to the tracked doors opposite where I was. There was a scaffolding around the outer wall perhaps ten feet up, six or seven feet below the ventilation break where the walls stopped and the roof began.
Sitting on a wood pallet close to a door under which a crack of light escaped was a wooden crate about the same size a 2,000-pound bomb came packed in. That had to be the nuke.
Something was … not right. It was too quiet. I crushed my face into the hard ground to get a better look. It was impossible they’d leave the jewels unprotected, unless they didn’t know what they’d taken.
No way. It was a trap. Had to be a trap. I waited. Plotted. Schemed. Laughed silently at these assholes. It was a game of patience. It all came down to patience: would I move first, or would they.
I knew they were in there. I could sense ’em. Almost smell ’em. I controlled my breathing, slowed my whole system down the same way I’d done when I’d learned I could sit on the bottom of Norfolk harbor for three and a half minutes at a stretch during UDT training.
Oh, the fucking instructors—they loved me when I ran that game on ’em.
During E&E—evade and escape—training, they’d make us play hide-and-seek. They’d dump us in the water and then put boats out to search for us. It was like shooting fish in a barrel—you can’t swim fast enough to get away from boats with lights, and you gotta surface to breathe. To make it more interesting (and to give us some added incentive), the instructors usually pounded the crap out of you when they caught you, and they were tough sons of bitches, too.
So I cheated. That’s what E&E’s supposed to be about, anyway. I lost ’em by swimming like a bat out of hell until I was just off the slip of the Kiptopeake-Norfolk ferry—on the far side, so the ferry would come between them and me. Timing was everything. I waited until the ferry got real close, then made a lot of noise in the water. When they caught me in the lights. I dove. I swam underwater about thirty yards to the slip and sucked mud while the ferryboat docked, sitting on the bottom holding on to a filthy, greasy piling with the big screw churning eight feet above my head chunka-chunkachunka. Then I came out of the water, checked to see if the instructors were anywhere close. They weren’t. So I chucked my mask and fins, climbed up over the port side of the stern onto the ferry, stole a set of mechanic’s overalls out of a locker, and walked right out onto the dock. Nobody noticed I was barefoot.
I studied them as they crisscrossed the harbor, searching for me for about half an hour. Then I ambled off the slip, bought a quart of beer with some change I found in the coveralls, came back, and drank almost all of it dockside. Then, when I was good and ready, I whistled and waved ’em over. I let them watch as I drained the last of the beer and tossed the bottle into the harbor. Oh, they loved me for that. I don’t know what made ’em madder—that I got away, or that I bought beer and didn’t share it.
Something moved. Behind the drums. Something back there. I waited. Looked intently at the truck. Something there, too. One or two in the back, muzzles protruding just over the back gate. M16s probably. Combat-scoped? Maybe. Just inside the door I heard a scrape-scraping. Just a little something—the shifting of a foot or a rifle butt on the door. I froze. No breathing. Chunka-chunka-chunka. Wait the sons of bitches out.
Only after some minutes did I withdraw the way I’d come, silently, inch. by inch, careful not to leave tracks behind. I made my way around the side of the warehouse, did another 360. It was still clear. I slid myself along the wall to the window with the air conditioner, went under it, around the two-step porch, removed my goggles, and let my eyes adjust to the night again. Then I peered inside.
A middle-aged man with dark skin, dressed in a bulky, short-sleeved sweatshirt and greasy khaki trousers sat behind a desk facing me. He was wearing wraparound plastic shooter’s goggles—a giveaway that this was Memorex, not real—and he wrote intently in a spiral notebook with the stub of an old pencil, his thick lips moving as he formed the words. A bottle of Bud sat sweating at his left elbow. A blue steel .45 automatic lay next to it. He looked up from the page, ran a hand over thinning, kinky, salt-and-pepper hair. A broad face. A nose that had been broken too many times. Slit, yellowed eyes. Maybe fifty-five or so. Powerful, workingman’s hands that were obviously uncomfortable with the pencil.
I dropped back down onto my haunches and withdrew to the underbrush cover where I’d left the platoon. I briefed the squad leaders about the ambush. Everybody had night-vision equipment. They’d hit the doors simultaneously, working opposing fields of fire so they wouldn’t shoot each other. One squad would go left and high, working the truck and catwalk, the other would mirror—left and low, taking down the oil drums and opposite catwalk. I’d take down the guy in the office and come out by the nuke.
I pressed the Motorola’s remote transmit button that was clipped to my vest. The radio could be used either in an onoff mode, or switched to continual transmission. “One set,” I whispered.
I heard PVs voice. “Two set.” The hostage snatch team was in position.
Cheeks checked in. “Three set.” Barracks sweepers were ready.
“Four set.” Jew’s blocking force was primed.
I looked at my watch. We’d been on the ground for fortyseven minutes. The operation was scheduled to last ninety, so our four choppers were already in the air, being refueled, and just under three-quarters of an hour away from touchdown. That gave us a slim, but acceptable, margin for error. I turned the Motorola on. “Six minutes. Then go.” Plenty of time to set up.
I gave hand signals and watched the squads move out. They knew their jobs. Each had become a superb shooter over the past five months. We didn’t train with regulation targets at SEAL Team Six. We used three-by-five-inch. index cards pasted onto silhouettes. You had to be able to hit the card with a double-tap—that is, two shots in rapid succession—whether you were coming out of the water with the stainless Smith & Wesson .357 magnum pistol, or breaking through the hatch of a hijacked airplane with the Beretta.
Right-handed, left-handed, one-handed, two-handed, we shot in every conceivable manner. In fact, I didn’t care how my guys shot, just so long as they hit tight, man-killing groups every single time. No concentrating on fancy angles or head shots. Those techniques are what you see in movies, not Six. We used heavy loads that would knock terrorists down no matter where we hit them. Head, chest, arm, leg—it didn’t matter. In sniping—at ranges of six hundred and eight hundred yards—we were still a little behind the curve. But overall, my shooters were better than any in the world today, including Delta’s much publicized pistoleros.
I knew PV was in position. Six of his shooters would
take out the bad guys holding the hostage; the others would clear any remaining terrorists. He had two medics with him in case the hostage was injured or hurt. Cheeks’ two squads would hose the barracks if the tangos inside got restless. My guys had a somewhat tougher job. They’d have to set up and blow the doors, then hit the ambushers in the dark, while I took out the guy in the office. After that we’d have to figure out a way to move the nuke back to the LZ—or render it unusable.
The digital timer on my watch was running. It showed one minute forty seconds elapsed. I was just under the air conditioner now, cool water dripping onto my shoulder. It felt good. My mind’s eye had a picture of the tango behind the desk. I’d catch him in the chest. The Beretta was in my hand, ready. In my earpiece I could hear PV, Cheeks, and Indian Jew’s breathing on the open lines. They could probably hear me, too.
A minute fifty. Four minutes, ten seconds to contact.
Suddenly automatic weapons fire broke out to the southwest. At the same time I heard PVs voice: “Shit—early contact, early contact—everybody go.”
There was no time to lose. I rose, swiveled, and kicked the door just below the handle.
It burst inward. The dark man in the sweatshirt was already standing, pistol in his hand, as I came through low, Beretta in a two-handed grip. Before he could react I hit him with half a dozen shots in the chest. I fired so quickly the 9mm sounded like a submachine gun.
The loads punched him back against the wall. His .45 went flying. A dark stain spread from the center of his chest. I ejected the clip and slapped a spare, from a mag-holder taped to my right wrist, into the Beretta’s rubber-clad grip.
I looked up as I heard two explosions in rapid succession behind the office. The other two squads had initiated.
I grabbed the spiral notebook and did a cursory search for documents. There were three manila files in a desk drawer and I took them, too, rolling them and stuffing them into the cargo pocket of my fatigues. I hit the office lights to get my eyes ready for the NV goggles. I took out the SATCOM and told JSOC we’d initiated contact early, and to expedite the snatch. Four minutes may not seem like a lot of time, but on a hot LZ it’s an eternity.
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