by John Weisman
“Arrival at Changii in twenty-six hours—that would be about noon tomorrow local time.”
Which, Ritzik understood only too well, would give the Chinese six hours of daylight in which to go hunting. And those hours were precisely the same time frame Ritzik had planned to use to begin his exfil. Events had progressed well beyond the SNAFU range. They were now in the TARFU zone, where things are really messy.
“Mr. Secretary.”
“Major?”
“Any news about whether or not we’ll be vulnerable during the infiltration stage?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Are the Chinese capable of intercepting our launch aircraft?”
“Let me look at my notes.” There was a pause on the line. Then Rockman said, “Nick said there are three bases in the region with fighter aircraft.”
“Hell, Mr. Secretary, I can see that much on my imagery. I need to know whether or not they’re going to scramble when we break out of our scheduled flight plan.”
There was another pause. “Nick’s people can’t say one way or the other.”
“Can’t or won’t, sir?”
The irritation in Rockman’s voice was palpable. “Does it really make a difference, Major?”
There were five seconds of silence while Rockman waited for Ritzik to reply. When he didn’t, the secretary said, “You keep me posted, son.” Then the phone went dead.
11
20 Kilometers Northeast of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
1230 Hours Local Time.
TWO OF RITZIK’S RANGERS dressed in Kazakh Special Forces uniforms towed the big white Yak up to the warehouse. Umarov himself directed the tug to position the plane so the fuselage would block any view of what was being loaded. Then he waved the Rangers off with a flourish and a wink. As they cleared the aircraft, Doc Masland, Ty Weaver, Gene Shepard, and Rowdy Yates, all dressed in airport worker’s overalls, emerged from the warehouse to muscle an auxiliary power unit under the nose of the plane. Weaver uncoiled the thick rubber electrical cable and attached the business end to the power pod just fore of the plane’s nosewheel assembly.
Yates said, “Contact,” and hit the APU generator switch.
Masland and Weaver pushed a wheeled stairway up to the side of the aircraft. Shepard climbed the steel treads, opened the forward hatch, and disappeared inside. Fifteen seconds later, the plane’s interior lights came on.
Ritzik scampered up the stairway. “Shep—let’s get the shades drawn, and then you start removing seats and install the prebreathers.” He looked down the long, narrow single aisle. “I think two rows on each side will do it. You agree?”
The first sergeant squinted aft. “Should be enough. If not, I’ll pull a third.” He made his way rearward, racked the exit door lock to his left, and dropped the aft stairway, testing it after he heard it thwock onto the apron.
A welcome stream of cool air wafted through the stuffy aircraft. Shepard came forward. “Amazing how strange yet familiar this thing is,” he said. “Like one of those tofu entrées they say tastes just like chicken.”
“Chicken Kiev, maybe.” Ritzik tapped an overhead luggage bin. “The Yak-42’s a doppelgänger of the Boeing 727. It was built during the height of the Cold War when we weren’t selling planes to the Soviets. So one of their most senior aircraft designers—a guy named Alexander Yakovlev—managed to get his hands on a 727 for a few weeks. He reverse-engineered the design, and built his own version.”
“No shit.”
“No shit.” Ritzik heard noise forward. He watched as Talgat hulked through the doorway, blocking the light.
The Kazakh said, “The Yakovlev is a beautiful design, is it not?” He stood aside as Shepard eased past him, smiling.
“Just what the doctor ordered.” Ritzik settled onto an armrest. “When is Shingis due?”
“My cousin? I told him thirteen hundred.”
“Good.”
Umarov said, “So, Mike, what is the story?”
“I’m going to need you to crew the plane,” Ritzik said.
“Crew?”
“Shingis will fly. You’ll crew.”
“Just the two of us?”
Ritzik said, “Talgat, sometimes less is more.” The Kazakh scratched his head. “I do not understand. How can less be more?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Ritzik said. “It means I want to keep it in the family.”
“Ah—idiom.” Umarov took his cigarettes out of his breast pocket, tamped one on his watch, and lit up. “Sometimes fewer personnel is more efficient than many. ‘Less is more—keep it all in the family.’ Now I understand.”
Curtis Hansen and Gene Shepard pushed onto the aircraft, holding a small metal toolbox. Umarov brightened at the sight of Shepard’s face. “Sergeant Shepard,” he exclaimed. He grabbed the trooper in a tight embrace and kissed him on each cheek. “Assalamu alaykim.”
“Waghalaykim assalam—and upon you, Colonel.” Shepard extracted himself from Umarov’s grip. “This is Staff Sergeant Hansen.”
The slightly built Soldier ran a hand through his thinning blondish hair and said, very carefully, “Assa-lamu alaykim, Colonel,” then reddened self-consciously at Umarov’s delighted expression.
Shepard hefted the toolbox. “Excuse us, Colonel.” The pair headed aft, retrieved a pair of socket wrenches, and began to unbolt the rows of seats over the aircraft’s wings.
The Kazakh watched them. “Less is more,” he said. “Right?”
“Colonel Umarov,” Shepard said, “in this case, sir, less is actually less.” He looked at the puzzled Kazakh and grinned.
1332. Ritzik was squatting beside the pair of six-man portable oxygen prebreathers, which were secured against the aircraft’s midbulkhead, as Ty Weaver and Bill Sandman wrestled the ten-foot-long metal mold up the rear stairway. He looked up. “Set it on the starboard side.”
“Nautical today, ain’t we, Loner?” Sandman’s voice reverberated in the narrow fuselage.
The two men walked the smooth pan forward until it cleared the rear bulkhead. Then they flipped it over and jammed it between the windows and the innermost seats.
“Where are the tie-downs?”
Weaver said, “I’ll get ‘em.”
“Do it now—I don’t want to be airborne and find we’ve left’em behind.” “Wilco.”
1337. Rowdy Yates climbed the rear stairway to find Ritzik, a checklist in his hand, inspecting the prebreather. “You beat me to it,” the sergeant major said.
“I was bored.” Ritzik watched as Yates rummaged through the forwardmost luggage bins until he found the aircraft’s safety-display items, took both lengths of demonstration seat belt, clipped them together, and stuffed them in his left cargo pocket.
“Collecting souvenirs?”
“I’m gonna need these later and I don’t want to have to go looking for ‘em.”
“If you say so.” Ritzik tapped the prebreather consoles. “Looks as if they survived the flight over. No visual flaws. The valve stems are all straight. None of the screws are backed out. And the gauge is showing eighteen hundred psi.” He paused. “How’s the lady?”
“Asleep, finally,” Yates said. “Out like a light.”
“Good. The less time she has to worry, the better.”
Yates said, “Loner, I’m worried about her.”
“We don’t get no vote, Rowdy. Our job is to take her in so she can do her job.”
“Hoo-ah, boss. But do us all a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Get a friggin’ diagram out of her before we wheels up. Just in case she croaks at some point, I want to be able to at least take a crack at disarming the sucker if we have to.”
“Makes sense to me.” Ritzik turned the shutoff valve five and a half turns counterclockwise, then squinted at the second gauge on the prebreather faceplate. “Reducer gauge is holding at forty psi.”
“On the money.”
“Yup.” Ritzik stood up. “Get the third unit and
secure it as close to the cockpit as you can.”
“What third unit?”
“Don’t shit me, Rowdy.”
“Major, we brought two six-man prebreathers. Twelve people—twelve hoses, twelve couplers.”
Ritzik said, “Then we’re screwed. You’ve read the tables. Each of us needs a full hour on O-two before we depressurize the aircraft and switch to the portable units.”
“So?”
“Count, Rowdy, count.”
Yates looked up toward the aircraft ceiling. “Oh, Keerist. Fourteen, Major.”
“That’s not including Talgat and Shingis. We need sixteen hookups.”
“Oh, Christ. I must have had a major brain fart yesterday.” Yates rubbed his scalp. “I really screwed this up.”
“How many O-two sets do we have?”
“Sixteen sanitized units—and two walk-around bottles for Talgat. I got sixteen double tanks from Marana, Major. I brought ‘em all, because I knew I’d need O-two for the lady and Mickey D—prebreathing and descent.” Yates spat into his plastic cup. “We can rig something for Talgat by using the plane’s internal O-two system.”
“Maybe.” Ritzik glanced toward the nose of the plane.
“Wait here.” He rose and headed toward the cockpit. “Shingis—”
He emerged sixty seconds later, his face grim. “They don’t have oxygen.” He anticipated Yates’s question: “The units are shipped from Germany. They’re on back order. And this particular aircraft is used on short-haul flights—they stay below ten thousand feet. So they don’t bother to keep the system charged.”
Yates cocked his head, incredulous.
“Hey, this is Kazakhstan. The flight safety regs are a little more flexible here.”
“I guess they are.”
“Bottom line,” Ritzik said. “We cut two people.”
“Loner—”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No, sir, I do not.” Yates spat into his cup. “But having two less jumpers creates its own set of problems.”
“I know, I know.” Ritzik’s mind was racing. The situation was already edge-of-the-envelope dangerous. Offset HAHO jumps—high-altitude, high-opening operations in which the aircraft does not overfly the drop zone—were incredibly risky maneuvers. At altitudes above twenty-five thousand feet, ice can actually form on the parachute canopy, affecting its performance and response. Weather data is essential—the wind’s direction and velocity are critical in determining the infiltration route.
In training, every element of a HAHO jump was broken down and double-checked. Safety was paramount. And even when all the bases were covered, jumpers still died. Twenty-seven thousand five hundred feet was almost six miles up. The temperature was well below freezing. The air was thin. Hypoxia—lack of oxygen—could cause a jumper to become careless, or even pass out. The “stick” could leave the aircraft imprecisely and the jumpers could get tangled up. Chutes might foul, reserves misdeploy. Communications could go bad. Wind shears, crosscurrents, and thermals might scatter the jumpers over a hundred square miles, or run them into the ground at forty miles an hour. And that was under optimum conditions: well-supervised jumps in clear, mild weather, with red or purple smoke grenades to indicate wind direction, and safety officers to scrub the jump if the ground wind speed exceeded eighteen knots.
Tonight, they’d be jumping blind.
Intelligence was virtually nonexistent. Ritzik still had no idea whether or not fighter aircraft were capable of intercepting the Yak from the three air bases in his target area because the CIA hadn’t told him what the Chinese tactical capabilities were. He was unsure about the current location of the PLA’s Special Operations troops. Worse, he had no idea how big a force General Zhou Yi was bringing.
Then there were the physical hurdles. Wind currents and speed: uncertain. Obstacles: unidentified. Amount and origin of potential air turbulence: unknown. LZ: hostile. Friendlies on the ground: none. Charlie Foxtrot potential: very high.
Finally, there were the immutable laws of physics to contend with. The maximum sustainable load for a Ram Air parachute is 360 pounds. If a chute is subjected to excess weight, the cells can stress and the canopy may begin to disintegrate. So, every round of ammunition, every piece of equipment has to be tallied: the chute, the reserve, and all the accompanying web gear; the weapons and ammunition; the combat pack; the body armor, load-bearing vest, and two canteens of water; the uniform; the cold-weather gear; the helmet, oxygen mask, and boots; the O2 bottles, hoses, and regulator, as well as the GPS navigation, night-vision, chest-pack computers, and communications equipment. All of it, when combined with the jumper’s weight, couldn’t total more than 360 pounds.
The loss of two jumpers meant less total weight on the ground. The part of the equation that bothered Ritzik most was that they’d be carrying fewer rounds of ammunition and a reduced amount of ordnance. Which weakened one-third of the SpecWar trinity. Any degradation of firepower would result in diminished violence of action, which in turn would shrink Ritzik’s chances of success.
It was time to recalibrate.
1447. Ritzik, Bill Sandman, and Ty Weaver were gathered in a knot, staring at the streaming satellite video of the convoy. Rowdy Yates joined them and poked his finger at the screen. “See how they’re stopped?”
He squinted over the top of the magnifiers perched on his nose. “The third truck—number 4866—that’s the one with the prisoners and the device. Look how they’ve got it surrounded.” His finger tapped the plastic screen surface. “Three tangos with weapons on each side. And the driver—he’s standing just ahead of the cab; his weapon’s pointed down, but the sumbitch has his hands on it. And they’ve got another five people at the rear.”
Ty Weaver looked at the column of vehicles. There were six heavy trucks and three boxy SUVs. He tapped the image of the Toyota 4x4 that was parked fifty yards out in front of the ragged column. “That Toyota’s consistently been the point vehicle since the satpix started coming in. The big enchilada’s riding in it, too.”
Sandman stared at the tiny figures on the screen. “Which one is he?”
Weaver’s finger found a small figure pacing between the second and third trucks. “From the way he’s moving I think he’s making a phone call.”
“Bullshit.” Rowdy Yates laughed. “How the hell can you tell he’s making a call by how he moves?”
“Don’t believe him,” Sandman said. “We saw the asshole take a phone out of his pocket and punch a number into the keypad.”
“Get the number, too, did you, Bill?” “It was a 1-900 sex line, Sergeant Major. Same one you always call.”
Yates spat into his cup. “Bite me, First Sergeant Sandman.”
Ty Weaver said, “Do you believe they have coverage out there—cell towers and everything?”
“Why not? Anything’s possible these days,” Ritzik said. “Hey—look.”
He turned his attention to the screen. Two guerrillas were dropping the rear gate. Three others stood, muzzles pointed toward the rear of the truck. The two who’d dropped the gate climbed inside the covered truck bed.
As the Soldiers watched, they saw three figures thrown out onto the hard sand. The trio caromed between the guards like pinballs as they were punched, butt-stroked, and kicked mercilessly.
Ty Weaver said, “I thought you said there were four prisoners.”
Ritzik’s eyes narrowed. “There are.” He paused. “Or, there were.” He cast a quick glance at Rowdy Yates. The sergeant major’s somber face reflected the same nasty conclusion Ritzik had come to. The tangos were killing Americans—and the rescue element was still on the ground in Almaty.
Ritzik’s voice took on an urgent tone as he wrenched his eyes away from the sight of the prisoners being beaten. “Clock’s ticking, guys. What’s the plan?”
Rowdy Yates looked past Ritzik and stared at the screen. All he felt was fury. White-hot and murderous. But he’d learned over the years to temper his anger and channel
his rage; to use those searing emotions constructively in order to give himself a psychological and tactical edge over his enemy. Which is what he did now. Coolly, Rowdy shifted focus and scanned a screen on which flickered an infrared image of the north end of the lake. His voice was dispassionate. “Can’t really know for sure until we’re on the ground, Loner. Too many unanswered questions about the site. How high’s the causeway wall? How deep’s the water? How close together will the vehicles be? Right now it’s one of those generic keep-it-simple-stupid ops.”
He reached past Sandman, swiped a legal pad off the folding table, and drew a rough diagram. “They’re coming north. They turn west over this bridge”—he brought his marking pen up—“and we’re set up on the far side of the causeway.” Rowdy paused. “Snipers execute—suppressed—and bring the column to a stop before they can react. We claymore wherever we can. Hopefully kill a bunch of ‘em before they’re able to get out of the trucks. Those we don’t claymore, we create a fatal funnel, and we hit ‘em.” His expression hardened as he drew overlapping fields of fire. “Hit ‘em hard. Kill ‘em all.”
Weaver tapped the 4x4 on the screen. “If I take out the big enchilada’s driver first, it’ll stop ‘em dead in their tracks.”
Sandman wagged his head. “Negatory, Ty. You’re not listening. They’ll just be coming over a bridge—moving slow because they’ve just had to negotiate a tight left-hand turn. You and Barber take out that back truck first, just as it hits the west end of the bridge—that way they don’t have an escape to the rear. You guys wax both the driver and whoever’s riding shotgun so there’s nobody alive in the cab.”
“Good catch, Bill,” Weaver said. “Makes sense.”
Rowdy agreed. “You let the 4x4 with Mr. Big go past.” He looked at Sandman. “You and Tuzz deal with Mr. Big from the flank, okay? And disable but don’t destroy.”
“La big enchilada or the 4x4?”
“Don’t be a wiseass,” Rowdy snorted. He dribbled tobacco juice into his plastic cup and wiped his lower lip. “You snipers will take out the front truck right after you’ve hit the rearmost vehicle. That’ll bring ‘em all to a stop—they’re on a narrow causeway with marsh on both sides here.” He drew his marker across the page. “Then, as soon as the trucks are stopped, Goose and Doc, Shep, and Mickey D and Loner and me, we’ll deal with anybody in trucks one, two, and three. And we’ll claymore wherever we can.”