by John Weisman
Rowdy’s voice came back strong. “We got fourteen hostile DOAs and one aircraft down, Loner. No friendly casualties.”
That was good news. And there was more: Bill Sandman reported that HIP One’s machine gun was operational, with two seven-hundred-round ammo containers secured adjacent to the doorway. Rowdy discovered a third box undamaged in HIP Two.
0751. Ritzik detailed a six-man crew to hide the corpses. He didn’t want them visible from the air. He was pleased to see his Soldiers handle the Chinese dead with respect. An hour ago they’d been fathers, sons, brothers. Now they were unwitting casualties of a shadow war, and their remains didn’t deserve to be mistreated. War, Mike Ritzik thought, is full of paradoxes, some far more difficult to grasp than others.
He watched for a few seconds more, then struggled back up to the crest of the ravine to find Wei-Liu. She was still where he’d left her. She sat, hunkered, her arms tucked around her knees, her face and neck still smeared with cammo cream, although it was obvious to Ritzik that she’d tried to remove it. She didn’t look happy.
“What’s up?”
“You just … killed them all … “ she said. Ritzik was not in the mood for clichés. “What’s your point?”
Wei-Liu started to say something. But Ritzik cut in first. “People like you think war is sterile,” he said, “because that’s the way you’ve seen it, on television. Oh, you see wounded kids. You see the casualties of suicide bombers. You see victims. God, how good television is at showing victims. But that’s not war. War is chaos. War is nasty stuff. It’s about killing people. Killing people and breaking things. War is not nice, Tracy. It’s not a computer game, or a movie. It’s horrific. It’s blood and pain and violence and confusion, and mistakes that cost lives and idiots issuing orders that get people killed. But when it comes down to the real nitty-gritty, war is about killing other human beings, before other human beings kill you.”
He looked down at her. “So, yes, we killed them all. What would you have me do? Declare a time-out? Ask them to leave us alone? Make ‘em promise not to tell anybody we were here and send ‘em on their way? For chrissakes, Tracy, we’re violating China’s sovereignty. That’s a bloody act of war. Can you imagine the consequences if one of us was captured?”
“I hadn’t thought about it in that way.”
Why the hell hadn’t she? She was a freaking high government official. She should have “thought about it that way.” Ritzik bore down on her. “Why not? After all, you had a hand in designing the sensors—and they’re the reason we’re here.”
“But that’s different.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is. The sensors are technical tools. They’re no different from a satellite, or the kind of SIGINT or TECHINT the National Security Agency gathers.”
“Except for one element,” Ritzik said.
“Which is?”
“Four people had to put their lives on the line to plant your so-called technical tools,” he said. “And in order to position them they had to violate China’s sovereignty. They had to infiltrate covertly.” He paused. “Just like we did.”
“But they didn’t come to kill—anybody. You did.”
“We didn’t come to kill,” Ritzik said. “We came to do whatever it took to get the job done,” Ritzik said. “We did what we had to.”
“But—”
“But what?”
“I don’t see how you can live with yourself.”
Oh, Christ. “The problem with people like you—”
Her eyes flashed. “What do you mean, ‘like me’?”
“I mean,” Ritzik said, “like you. Smarter-than-thous. Piled-higher-and-deepers. Diplomats. Scientists. Technocrats. Thumb-suckers. Head-shedders. Think-tankers. Pundits. Know-it-all journalists. Lobbyists. Political appointees. Congressmen. Senators. Highfalutin moral hypocrites, my father used to call ‘em. That’s what I mean. People like you. When there’s a crisis, people like you scream and yell and beg folks like me to fix it. Go after Usama bin Laden and wax his butt. Break into Saddam Hussein’s palace at Tikrīt and blow him into the well-known smithereens. Sneak into Bosnia, neutralize a dozen or so goons, and bring a Navy pilot back. Drop into the Bekáa Valley and dispatch Imad Mugniyah and the Hizballah high command. Track down Pablo Escobar and shoot the sucker dead. But no collateral damage, please. And no mistakes. Oh—and you can kill them, but don’t tell us about it, okay? None of that nasty stuff—because hearing about blood and death and pain might make us uncomfortable. And then, when it’s all over, and you’ve done your dirty jobs, please leave. Go back to your cage, or crawl under whatever rock it is that you headquarter.”
“That’s neither fair nor the truth.”
“The truth? The truth is exactly what you just said: ‘I don’t see how you can live with yourself.’ The answer is, I live with myself very well. I like what I see in the mirror when I shave. The problem isn’t me, Tracy. It’s that people like you consider what I do to be uncivilized. Unseemly. Antisocial. Trust me: it makes people like you hugely uncomfortable to be in the same room as people like me.”
“That hasn’t been my experience.”
“Oh, really. How many soldiers do you know, Tracy?”
“How many piled-high-and-deepers do you know, Major?”
He really didn’t have time for this BS. Not now. He turned on his heel and started toward the crest of the ridge. “Currently? One. Which is a sufficient statistical model to substantiate my case, so far as I’m concerned.” He turned and pointed toward the truck. “We have carved you out a little time now. Maybe you should start work.”
23
125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0758 Hours Local Time.
RITZIK WATCHED, SO infuriated he was shaking, as WeiLiu picked her way around the vegetation, descending carefully toward the ravine floor. “Workmanlike attitude, Mike. Workmanlike attitude.” He repeated the mantra half a dozen times aloud, hoping it would calm him down.
Sure, perhaps he’d overstated the case. But not by much. The core of what he’d said was sadly true. Between the demands for politically correct, zero-defect missions and the realities of the twenty-four-hour Internet and television news cycle, there was very little a Special Operations unit could accomplish without being scrutinized, second-guessed, and micromanaged by a laundry list of individuals, organizations, government agencies, and chain-of-command factotums.
Christ, in Afghanistan some IWS—idiot wearing stars—from Tampa had seen a digital picture in a postaction report and was so outraged by how native the Special Forces operators had gone that he ordered all the SF troops in Afghanistan to shave their beards and cut their hair so they’d look more “military.” The asshole didn’t care that his order caused hundreds of shooters, who’d worked like hell to blend in with their Afghan surroundings, to become Obvious American Targets. But that was par for the course. In fact, these days, the formal postaction mission analyses that were invariably conducted by SOCOM’s by-the-numbers staff to ensure that “proper doctrine” had been followed were closer in gestalt to colonoscopies than they were to any sort of previously established military procedures.
Which was why the current acronym around the Combat Applications Group for a SOCOM staff review was BO-HICA, which stood for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. And you didn’t want them finding any polyps, either. Polyps—even benign ones—could prove terminal to your career.
During the Second World War, they hadn’t second-guessed Henry Mucci and his Sixth Ranger Battalion. Mucci’s bosses had simply turned him loose and told him to get the job done any way he could. An order put like that, Ritzik knew, gave a commander flexibility, the freedom to lead from the front, and the luxury of occasional failure on the way to victory. It allowed an officer to employ individualism, initiative, and audacity. Today, those character traits were likely to get you a letter of reprimand. Of course, Mucci didn’t have CNN war tarts, Fox News Scud studs, Sunday-talk-show second-guessers
, or al-Jazeera to worry about either. Or for that matter, an Army chief of staff who thought buying new berets was more important than buying bullets.
But then, this was the new Army. The Army of One (although precisely one what was manifestly unclear). This was the Army in which three soldiers who were lured across the Macedonian border, and who surrendered to Serb irregulars without firing a shot, were actually awarded three medals each—citations for giving up without a fight. Colonel Mucci must have been spinning in his grave over that one.
And a few years later, Johnny Vandervoort, CENT-COM’s commander, had led—if you could actually call it leading—the campaign in Afghanistan from the manicured safety and four-star comfort of MacDill Air Force Base, half a world away. It was another sorry military first for the Army of Washington, Grant, Patton, Merrill, and Beckwith: war by speakerphone.
While Ritzik and his people had been freezing their asses off in the mountains, COMCENT and his staff worked regular hours. Somehow, the guys with stars on their collars managed to get in their eighteen holes on MacDill’s PGA-grade golf course. Somehow, their aides always roused them in time for an early set of tennis before the daily conference call to Bagram Air Base. And while Ritzik and the rest of his team ate roasted horse anus and grilled sheep’s brain, the generals went off to dinner at Bern’s steak house, where the wine list ran thirty or so pages of fine print.
Ritzik wasn’t resentful about the disparity of lifestyle. Rank, after all, has its privileges. And he’d actually grown perversely fond of roasted horse anus after the first month or so. What he took exception to was the vacuum of leadership and loyalty demonstrated by his Florida hibernation. COMCENT was remote, aloof, and distant—both literally and figuratively. To those who actually prosecuted the war he was far more an abstract concept than a flesh-and-blood combatant commander.
The problem was compounded further because Johnny Vandervoort was not in his heart or soul a man o’ warsman, but a manager of war’s men. Oh, he was a talented manager; a decent if stiff and standoffish peacetime general well-versed in flowcharts, PowerPoint presentations, and systems analysis. He even had a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Pennsylvania. But he was absolutely the wrong man in the job of war fighter. Because this new kind of warfare, Ritzik understood, needed a Grant—a doer—motivated to succeed by private demons, not a McClellan—a ponderer—who preferred even-keel, slow-paced stability to the uncomfortable, rushed tumult of warfare.
0801. “Workmanlike attitude, Mike. Workmanlike attitude.” Ritzik climbed the crest of the ravine, took a few seconds to appreciate the brilliantly blue sky, then faced west. He looked longingly at the mountain range in the distance, frustrated by the way things were going. If there were two choppers in the area, there’d be more. But from where were they coming? And how many?
He pulled the retaining flap from the radio on his vest, reached down, and for the eighth time in two hours switched frequencies to try to contact Almaty. “TOC, Loner.”
He was amazed to hear Dodger’s voice reverb into his earpiece. “Loner, this is the TOC.”
Ritzik excitedly pulled a marker and a notebook out of his cargo pocket. “Sit-rep, TOC. We’ve been running in circles out here with no eyes, no ears, and a bunch of hostiles chasing our behinds.”
Dodger’s voice came back five-by-five. “You can think that if you like, Loner, but from what we saw, we suggest you change your call sign.”
“To what?”
“Tommy.”
“Come again?” Ritzik didn’t have time for this nonsense.
“Tommy.”
“Come again?”
“Tommy. Because for a bunch of deaf, dumb, and blind guys, you sure play a mean pinball.”
“Compliment accepted. Now stop kissing my ass and give us what the hell we need before the damn comms screw up again.”
0802. Sam Phillips climbed into the HIP’s cockpit and plunked himself down next to Mickey D. “Hi. I’m Sam. Rowdy Yates says you actually fly these things.”
“That’s why he’s a sergeant major. He’s always right.”
Sam said, “You ever fly one like this? A HIP?”
“Once,” the warrant officer said. “During a training course on former Soviet equipment. About three years ago.”
“No kidding.”
“Flew an MI-24P gunship, and a HIP. Except it wasn’t this model. This is a HIP-H—a hot-and-high. It’s a second-generation aircraft, configured for high altitude and hot climate. I flew the C version. First generation. A lot more basic.”
“All HIPs look alike to me,” Sam said. “How do you tell?”
“First-generation HIPs had their tail rotors on the starboard side,” Mickey D said. “These newer ones have theirs to port.”
“I’ll remember that,” Sam said, impressed. “Use it when I play Trivial Pursuit.” He toyed with the cyclical handle.
“You ever want to fly choppers?”
“Moi? No way. I hate flying. Besides, helicopters are far too complicated. Y’know, kinda like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. I could never do that. But I drove a T-72 tank, once.”
Mickey D turned toward the spook. “Why? Were you in the Russian Army?”
Sam gave the pilot a bemused look until he realized his leg was being pulled. “A guy I knew ran a mechanized infantry battalion,” Sam said. He pointed toward the snowcapped mountains to the west. “About a hundred miles that way. In Tajikistan. A lieutenant colonel. He let me drive one of his tanks for a couple of hours.”
“Sounds cool.”
“It was better than cool. I got to crush two cars driving on the training course. It was like being in a Die Hard movie.” Sam scratched his chin. “Funny thing: in the late eighties, I spent about eighteen months and about half a million tax dollars trying to convince a certain … group of people to let me photograph the inside of a T-72. It never happened. And then, all of a sudden, when I least expected it, I got an invitation to drive one.”
“You get your pictures?”
“All I wanted,” Sam said. “Of course, when I sent them off to Langley, no one was interested anymore.” He paused. “But that didn’t matter. Because you know what it cost me? Three bottles of vodka. Ten bucks’ worth of booze—and a two-day hangover.” He looked at the instrument panel and tapped the radio. “Hey, this thing work?”
“Dunno,” Mickey D answered. “I don’t do Chinese—neither does anybody on the team. So I didn’t bother to check.”
“I do a little Chinese,” Sam said. He saw the dubious expression on Mickey D’s face. “Well, enough to read a menu, anyway.”
“Read a menu, huh?” Mickey D examined the instrument console. “Wow—nothing but steam gauges,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Everything in this cockpit is analog. The chopper I usually fly is all glass.”
Sam tapped the wraparound windshield. “This looks like glass to me.”
“I’m talking display,” Mickey D said. “At the SOAR, our MH-47Es have TV screens—four of them. Everything is digital—attitude indicators, hover page, radar altitude hold.
You can even upload data from a laptop—flight plan, navigation, comms—and it’s all in front of your nose instantaneously.”
“You’re speaking a language I don’t understand,” Sam said.
“Not like Chinese, huh?” Mickey D flipped a trio of switches. Sam watched as a series of lights flickered to life on the instrument panel. The pilot took a headset from the deck between the seats, wiped the blood and brain matter off on his anorak, and pointed the big plug at a jack on the console. “R-842 high-freq radio,” he said, smacking the plug home. “Two-to-eight megahertz. Range is about a thousand kliks in good weather and no mountains.”
“Take a listen.” The pilot handed the bulky apparatus to Sam. He pointed. “That’s the transmit button. If you understand enough to read a menu maybe you could order us some takeout.”
0806. “Rowdy—
Loner. Meet me at the truck.” Ritzik scampered down to the ravine floor. He saw Sam Phillips through the HIP’s windshield and waved at him to join them. He watched as the CIA officer’s index finger pointed straight up, indicating “wait a second.”
Sam pulled the headset off. “Thanks.”
“No prob.” Mickey D watched as the spook sidled out of the cockpit. “So, what’s on the menu?”
“Trouble.” Sam jumped out of the hatch and jogged to where Ritzik stood. He jerked his thumb toward the HIP. “You’re about to have company,” he said.
“I know.”
“How?”
“I finally reached the TOC in Almaty. They have satellite imagery.”
Sam nodded. “What’s the story?”
“Chinese are coming out of Kashgar. Two aircraft: a HIP and a gunship. According to what Dodger told me, the original flight was three transports and two gunships—run by some Special Forces general out of Beijing. Obviously he’s holding one of the gunships back.”
“From the chatter, they’re making good time,” Sam said. “They’re not holding anything back.”
“You heard them?”
“On the radio. Mick got it working.”
“What are they saying?”
“You gotta understand I pick up about every third word,” Sam said. “But the gist of it—at least I think so—was they think two of their choppers were attacked by a large terrorist element. They’re going to use the first two choppers to draw the enemy out, and use the second HIND to flank the tango position and attack from the rear.”
“I think—” Ritzik pressed his right hand against his earpiece. “Come again?” He listened intently. “Roger that, Shep.
“We’ve got more company than expected,” he said. He looked at Sam. “Your IMU pal Mr. Mustache is coming back, too.”
All the color drained from Sam’s face. For an instant his eyes went dead—the face of a serial killer. And then he looked at Ritzik, smiling as cold a smile as Ritzik had ever seen, and said, “It’s my natural charm. He can’t stay away.”