by David Poyer
Donnie was sweating hard and feeling like crap. It was too fucking hot, for one thing. There wasn’t even air-conditioning in the bunkrooms. And no e-mail! For two weeks! He wasn’t like Oberg, buffed and toned in black T-shirts. That asshole loved this shit, out running before dawn, shooting all day long, evasive driving, learning how to fire RPGs. Obie knew motors, cars, give him that. But hand him a circuit board to fix, or a program to debug, see how he’d do.
Still blinking through the stars, Donnie realized somebody was yelling at him. Lenson. Oberg, running past in a crouch, was shouting, too. “Wenck! Quit daydreaming. Cover the stack. Cover the fucking stack!”
He leaned out, keeping his finger outside the trigger guard, and swept the yard. Two targets, one to Lenson’s left, the other above the moving stack of guys. Fuck fuck . . . buckshot or slugs? . . . he pulled the trigger and nothing happened. The fucking safety . . . he pushed it off and fired five times and hit nothing. He pulled back and fed in buckshot rounds. That worked better but he aimed high, not wanting to endanger the guys in the open, and the targets still didn’t go all the way down. Not until Oberg drew his pistol and double-tapped them one after the other, on the run, not even stopping to aim. Donnie squeezed his eyes shut. He’d fucked up again. Fuck!
It was enough to make you want to go back to sea.
Monty Henrickson had stuck close behind Oberg crossing the open yard, but his back prickled every time he heard Wenck fire. The kid was dangerous to everything but the targets. Monty was almost forty, neither as big nor as fast as the others, but to his surprise he liked this camp. It was stressful, but different from what he usually did, which was mainly mathematics, probability, and statistical analysis.
Still, was this where a doctorate got you? He should have stayed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’d have had tenure by now. Or gone with that offer from PRC, back when they were gearing up to go public. He’d have been a partner, counting his money in the tens of millions.
He caught a flash of Oberg’s backturned face, eyes bright blue as ammoniated copper, the strange radiating scars on his cheeks standing out like a Maori warrior’s. Then they were freight-training into the side of the house, Oberg cushioning him from the front as Carpenter’s bulk slammed into him from behind. Monty took high position.
“Flash,” Im yelled, the accent making it more like “Frash,” and they ducked as the pyrotechnic sailed in through the window.
Dan didn’t see any more outside targets. Hoping they’d gotten them all, he jammed five more rounds of buck into his magazine, then jumped to his feet. Don’t shoot till you’re sure of your target. The instructor had hammered that into them. The team was its own gravest enemy; in low light and the confusion of combat, it was all too easy to target your own. He flashed Wenck the follow-me signal.
They hit the house together as Im’s flash-bang went off, a hollow crack and a bolt of lightning so bright even not looking at it seared his eyes. Oberg, the breacher, kicked the door in and the stack went in after him, high-low-high, just as the instructors had kicked it into them; number one in sweeping center to right, two sweeping the left corner to center, three sweeping right corner to center, then the breacher buttonhooking in behind. The hours in the Glass House and the Corral were paying off.
“Break right, around back,” Monty yelled to Wenck, and shuffled forward in the combat crouch, taking the lead again.
Rit Carpenter went in last in the stack. Seeing Im roll right, Henrickson left, he hustled through and swept the interior with the muzzle of his shotgun. Why did Lenson always put him last? The bastard was still pissed at him about that mama-san in Pusan. What the fuck, who could fault a fucking white hat for knocking off a little young pussy? How was he to know the fucking Koreans had MPs patrolling the ceremonial grounds? So maybe sometimes he had to stop to catch his breath on the runs. At least he paid attention to what he was doing, unlike Wenck. Now there was a space cadet. Good enough at card-swapping when a piece of gear went down, but you could never count on him.
Rit had retired, but still thought of himself as Navy all the way. He’d qualified in Tiru, last of the war time “smoke-boats,” as their proud crews called them; had his “diesel boats forever” pin at home; he’d stood on her deck when they hauled down her commissioning pennant in Charleston. Went to Bonefish after that, then served the rest of his time in nukes, retiring off Batfish.
All those years at sea didn’t do much for your marriage. No kids, thank God. His last active duty had been at the Sub School in New London, training the latest and greatest. Then he’d picked up this job at TAG. At first it had been routine, riding the boats during exercises, grading them. Then they’d asked if he’d be interested in something more exciting. Something he wouldn’t be able to talk about. But hey, things had happened on patrol he couldn’t talk about, either.
He trailed Henrickson, keeping an eye over his shoulder the way they trained the Tail-End Charlie, and was rewarded with a popper that jerked up from behind a stack of barrels. He blasted it down first shot. “Try that on, Lenson,” he muttered. “Not too bad for an old bubblehead pussy hound, huh?”
Donnie got to the alley and almost shot before the shape moved and he saw it wasn’t a popper. Jeez, he’d almost blasted one of his own guys. He swept and was on it when a target jumped up. He slammed it down first shot and yelled “Take that, you sonofabitch!—I got it! I got it! Didja see that, Commander?”
“Good shot, Donnie. Real good shot. Now get in the house.”
Oberg inched up the stairwell one riser at a time, a foot off the wall, to keep a close round from richocheting into him, keeping his right hand free. The staff here liked to place their targets deep in the room, but from the oil rigs he’d cleared in the Gulf, once they knew you were on your way up the bad guys put somebody at the top of the stairs with a grenade. The only chance you had in a stairwell—no place to run, and no fragment cover—was to throw it back up.
If he ever had to take these overweight, overage techies and blackshoes into combat, he’d have to carry 80 percent of the load. He didn’t look forward to it, but it was pretty clear that was why they’d TAD’d Teddy Oberg to TAG Charlie.
Just as he’d figured, there they were, deep in the room. Only he guessed they’d guess he’d guess, and instead of taking the ones at the window first he swung and there it was, in the corner behind him. He blasted it down and ducked, swung, and took out the ones at the window. Then in one fluid motion he drew his pistol and scissored up and over the banister—if they had IEDs they set them at the top of the stairs—and dropped to a knee and took out two more poppers in a side room.
Behind him came rapid blasts as Im pumped extra rounds into the targets he’d already dropped. The little Korean didn’t mind shooting a bad guy again, just to make sure. Which Oberg thoroughly approved of. Once on the beach in Kuwait, when he’d gone in with the swimmer scouts to set up the diversion, a Republican Guard had stood up from a pile of bodies and tried to gut him with a bayonet.
“Clear!” he yelled down the stairwell. He heard them repeating it, passing it on till it reached the instructor outside.
He found the camera in the corner and gave it the finger, holding his black leather shooting glove up in a contemptuous salute.
Whalen was standing easy when they filed out, hands clamped behind him. Maybe he even looked pleased. Dan wasn’t sure, since he’d never seemed satisfied before. But they’d moved fast, done well. And it was the last day. Maybe the guy would let them go on a positive note. “So, seemed to go all right,” Dan said. “Didn’t it?”
“Team was pretty hot today,” Whalen said, nodding back. He stepped forward, hand outstretched. Surprised—he’d never offered to shake before—Dan lowered his shotgun and reached out.
From the sandbags behind Whalen, two black-coveralled instructors stood up with AKs. “Bap, bap, bap,” they shouted, imitating the high-pitched bark of 7.62 × 39s.
“You’re fucking dead, all of you,” Whal
en smirked. “Remember? Whistle to whistle. And I didn’t whistle. So your grade . . . let’s just say you crapheads aren’t as outstanding as you think you are. Always be ready. Never let down your guard. That’s when they’ll hit you. Believe me.”
Dan felt the guys tense around him. “Get fucking real,” Oberg muttered. “Fucking snakes,” hissed Wenck.
“Hang on to that combat mind-set,” Whalen went on. “Keep asking yourself ‘what if.’ You’re gonna fuck up, when the shit goes down. You just gotta keep going. Stay tactical. As long as you’re alive, you can fight. Maybe not save yourself, but if you put another bullet in a bad guy, maybe you save your teammate.”
Carpenter took a step forward. Dan grabbed his arm. “Just take it easy, guys. We’re done here; we’ll be back at TAG tomorrow, and do some real work.” To Whalen’s taunting grin he said, “Thanks for the warning, Instructor. I’m sure we’ll remember it long after your other lessons have faded.”
Their instructor disappeared; maybe he sensed his last prank hadn’t made the impact he’d hoped for. Or maybe it had. The rest of the staff slapped them on the back, congratulated them on finishing. “Wolf’s Den for beers all around,” one said.
“Gee, really? We weren’t allowed in there before,” said Wenck, grinning like a third-grader just allowed up into the treehouse club.
“Well, you are now.”
His guys looked to him. Dan shrugged; they’d earned it, but he’d leave after a token appearance. He didn’t drink anymore. A GrayWolf pickup braked in a murk of yellow dust. He was unslinging his gear, tossing it into the bed with that of the others, when a voice called, “Commander Lenson?”
“Yeah?”
“Got a helo coming in for you.”
A high-pitched drone, a fat black speck drawn swiftly against the sky. A small Hughes. He frowned. “I’d rather stay with my team—”
“Special invitation. Don’t think you want to turn it down.” The instructor waited until he gave a reluctant nod, then wheeled and hand-signaled the aircraft.
Double-timing along its roads before dawn, or being trucked between fields of tall corn, he hadn’t grasped how huge Camp Bandit was. Or rather, that Bandit itself was only a puzzle-piece of a far larger entity. The Hughes hurtled over ranges and cornfields, bunkers and barracks. A sports complex with a baseball diamond, and football and soccer fields. More cornfields, then another entire compound with the same green steel-roofed shooting houses as Bandit. Gray and green smoke roiled up, tracers sparkled as troops in unfamiliar uniforms maneuvered through what looked like an entire village.
He leaned to tap the copilot’s shoulder. “Is this all GrayWolf?” Dan yelled.
“Oh, yeah. And a lot more.” They climbed, and as the man swept his arm from one corner of the horizon to the other, Dan realized it was all one whole, green expanses of corn and soybeans isolating dozens of camps, compounds, ranges, and what looked like housing developments but probably weren’t. Aircraft were practicing touch-and-gos on a grass strip. Graders and ’dozers were cutting roads through the fields, raising dust as they cleared land for new construction. The Hughes swept over acres of concrete prefabs surrounded by sparkling new concertina, cornered by guard towers: a prison.
His skin crawled. GrayWolf wasn’t a camp. It was an empire.
Twenty minutes later they squatted in a roiling cloud. He scrambled off to be greeted by a gray-haired Hispanic in the black coveralls and black cap with the wolf’s head. The man said nothing, just checked his name tag and motioned for him to follow.
The low building was no different in its bland anonymous no-style from the lounge-and-office back at Bandit. Green prefab walls. Russet steel roofing. You saw buildings like it at U.S. bases overseas, or in industrial parks in small towns. Contractor-built cubic, furnished with heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning in hundred-thousand-square-foot buys. The wolf’s head by the door was discreet. Three gray Expeditions were parked to the side. But the name on one of the parking signs focused his attention.
The air inside was cold and dry, as if they were in the Montana mountains instead of the muggy South. They went down a corridor floored with gray industrial-grade carpet. To either side, men worked at computers in spartan offices. Dan didn’t see any women.
“Lenson. Come on in. Coke? Ice-cold Heineken?”
Since Torgild Schrade had been two classes ahead of him, they hadn’t had much to do with each other at Annapolis. Dan had read about him now and then over the years, but they’d never met again. After a brief stint in uniform, Schrade had gone into cell phones, where he’d made a lot of money; then into politics, where he hadn’t done nearly as well. In person, he wasn’t quite as tall as Dan. He wore the same black battle dress as his employees, but the wolves’ heads on his shoulders were silver. His thin lips were curved in a mocking smile. His black hair was buzzed short, with a widow’s peak. He looked more like a hawk than a wolf, with deep-set eyes, an almost Arabic nose, shining white capped teeth, and a double-handed handshake whose warmth belied the penetrating gaze of those dark eyes. His bare steel desk was not just clean, but waxed to a shine. But the walls of his office were painted concrete block. Without waiting for an answer Schrade rooted two diet Dr Peppers from a fridge, tossed Dan one, waved at a sofa. “I didn’t know you were with us until yesterday. Was looking over the pre-grad reports and saw your name.”
Dan cleared his throat. “Uh, Mr. Schrade—”
“Tor, Dan. Just Tor. We played lacrosse together, remember? You’re at TAG now, huh?” He didn’t wait for answers. “What do you think of the tactical course? Instructors okay? Facilities? Training?”
“It was demanding. Right now I can’t think of a thing to change, uh, Tor. It’s not really my area of expertise. The instructors seem on top of things.”
“Why’s TAG sending us people for tactical training, Dan? I always thought of it as more like the Navy’s think tank. Not what we think of as operators.”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Tor.” He thought of adding, and if I did, it’d be classified, but this seemed petty—Schrade had deep roots in the spec ops community—so he didn’t.
“I’ve been hearing about you now and then. Sounds like a rocky career.”
Dan sat forward on the sofa. “It’s had its ups and downs. Like yours, I guess.”
Schrade chuckled. They studied each other. “Ever heard of Skip Froelinghausen? General Froelinghausen?”
Dan tensed. He’d heard the name, from his boss in the West Wing, associated with the shadowy group of advisers who’d turned around the war in Bosnia. “Heard of him. He with GrayWolf now?”
“No, no, but we move in the same circles . . . we’re doing well out here. As you probably picked up, flying over. It’s a growth industry, private military contracting. The way the administration’s been downsizing our regular military. With your wife’s help, I might add.”
Schrade paused for his reaction, but Dan didn’t rise to it. He just took another slug of fizzy black chemicals and waited.
“The Navy’s most highly decorated officer. People I know, know what you’ve done. A warfighter, but a thinker, too. Titanium balls, when the warning lights all go red. But it seems like the ‘sea lords’ are not that impressed with you.
“You get the Medal, but only because the Army put you in for it. You get the rank, but you’re not fast-tracked for promotion. It’s like, you’re the go-to when there’s some high-stakes off-the-net issue nobody else wants to own up to. But then you get stashed when it’s over, and all the knife scars get makeup smeared over them.”
“I’m not sure I’d agree with that,” Dan said. “Several flag officers have shown some confidence.”
“Maybe on a personal level you get a compliment, but how’s that translate into your career? Is it going to get you to flag level? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s your goal, isn’t it?”
“Not really, Tor.”
“Stars are not your goal?”
“No.”
>
“Well, I think that’s good. Because to the ones who’re wearing them, you come across as the kind of guy they need in war time but would just as soon not have making them look incompetent, otherwise. So why should they ask you into the tent?”
Schrade gave him a chance, went on when he didn’t speak. “I’m asking ’cause that’s the model we like very much here in the PMC world. You know? The kind of lad who can bring things off even when they don’t look particularly promising. One who can handle situations out there at the toasty edge of deniability, the ones the brass hats can’t deal with by throwing money at General Dynamics. What makes you happiest about your Navy time, Dan? The people, right?”
“Sure, the people . . . and the sea.”
“What’s been your best assignment? What you enjoyed most?”
“Destroyer command.”
“Well, we can’t offer that. Though we can get you to sea now and then, with the riverine folks. Might be opportunities there. You’ve got your twenty years in? So you’re effectively working for half pay now, right? Since you’ll get the retirement the day you take off the uniform. We can offer you the chance to make some money. No, a lot of money. You’d like some of the things we’re doing. Programs that’ll use your talents.”
One thing you learned in the military was that courtesy paid; the man your boss set you against today might be your boss himself tomorrow. “Well, I appreciate the offer, Tor. But you might want somebody more like one of my men. Teddy Oberg, maybe. Not that he’s looking, but—”
“I know Teddy and respect him. He’s a real operator. But management skills, that’s where we’re short-handed. And contacts—we always find those useful.”
Suddenly Dan understood. “My wife.”
Schrade cocked his head; the half-smile sharpened. “Actually I didn’t mean Blair, but it’s intriguing you bring her up. She’s definitely a player. Not a major one right now as far as we’re concerned, not where she’s at. But she’s got the possibility of becoming one. Not in this administration—for obvious reasons. But I could see Blair filling a big job one day.” He shrugged. “But that’s down the road. Right now I’m interested in the people you know. And not just in the United States. We’re doing a lot of work training foreign militaries. Foreign contractors, too.”