by Bob Mayer
"Cruise missile?" was all Thorpe managed to guess as the rocket gained altitude and skimmed across the main deck of the platform twenty feet above the steel.
The roar of the supersonic missile washed across the deck and small black objects tumbled out as the nose cone exploded into several small pieces. The bulk of the rocket kept going.
"Cover your eyes!" Giles yelled.
Thorpe closed his eyes and pressed his hands against his ears tightly. Flash-bang grenades exploded all over the rig in a cacophony of thunderous sound and bright light. Even with his eyes closed, Thorpe was half-blinded as he opened them. His head rang with the echoes of the explosion.
He tapped Parker and pointed at the chopper as he screamed at her, "You want to stay or come?"
She stared at him blankly, indicating she didn't hear a word.
Thorpe pointed at the chopper, then simply grabbed her and pulled her with him. The team piled on board. As instructed, one of the pilots had been waiting with his dark visor down, so even though his copilot was blinded, he was able to still fly the aircraft. The mode of the delivery of the grenades had been a surprise, not their use. The chopper lifted.
As the members of SEAL Team Six surfaced next to each leg of the rig, they were greeted with the exploding satchel charges. Timers began ticking on the other charges placed all over the superstructure of the rig.
The Huey Thorpe was on headed straight to the west, where the rig's radar had told them a ship was hiding just over the horizon. They went past a Blackhawk full of Delta Force commandos, the men in each chopper staring at each other as they went by.
"They don't know what to do," Giles cheerfully said. "Their orders are to hit the rig."
"They'll hit the rig," Thorpe said. "They figure radar will keep us in sight."
"And it will," Giles agreed.
"They don't know if we have hostages on board, or even if there are any bad guys on board," Thorpe explained to Parker. It was something he and Giles had discussed when planning this operation. "For all they know, we could be good guys escaping."
Thorpe nodded to the front, where one of their men seated in the copilot seat was frantically radioing exactly that message to the ship they were flying toward. The man was doing a good job, sounding panicked and telling the ship they had some people on board who had been wounded in the escape.
Thorpe was watching the rig receding from them as Parker leaned out and filmed. Thorpe reached out a muscular arm and grabbed hold of her harness. She gave him a grateful glance as she learned farther out, trusting his strength to keep her from falling, and filmed what was happening on the rig.
The first helicopters were landing, disgorging commandos. Thorpe could well imagine the confusion as they faced twelve pairs of men with what looked like guns in their hands. It was going to be a mess. And as the number on the device in his hand flickered to zero, the confusion was greatly magnified as charges exploded. There were flashes on points all over the rig.
"There!" Giles said, pointing forward. A Coast Guard cutter was cruising through the water.
The Huey headed straight for the cutter, ignoring the radioed inquiries from the ship's bridge. Giles's man was acting hysterical, telling of wounded men and a desperate escape.
"See the back deck?" Thorpe asked Parker as he pulled her back in.
There were two vans tied down there, radio antennas bristling on the tops. They were just off the helipad on the rear part of the cutter.
"Yes," she replied.
"That's their C & C," Thorpe said. "They're airliftable vans that SEAL Team Six and Delta Force use for command and control."
"Goggles on!" Giles ordered.
Thorpe slipped a pair of clear plastic goggles over his eyes and pulled the charging handle back on the AK-74. He handed a set of goggles to Parker.
The Huey flared and then landed, the skids slamming into the metal grating. Four Coast Guardsmen with stretchers approached. Giles and his men leapt off and their superior firepower and training made short work of the four men. The door to one of the vans opened and two Delta Force commandos jumped out firing. The battle was pitched for a few seconds.
Thorpe fired carefully with his AK-74. The familiar sound of gunfire rang in his ears, muffled somewhat by the earplugs he had put in during the flight. After eighteen years of this, he knew he had to take care of his hearing.
He zeroed in on one of the Delta men and fired. The man's expression told him he had scored a hit. For good measure, Thorpe fired twice more, earning him a curse from the commando as the hard plastic rounds smacked him in the chest. The rounds, designed to be used in training scenarios such as this, still hurt when they hit at over five hundred feet per second.
The other man was down and Giles ordered his men forward. They ran across the deck. While Giles took one van, Thorpe took the other. He kicked open the door and edged in, muzzle leading. He paused as he saw a burly figure seated at a radio console. The man held a pistol to his own head.
"Take another step and I kill the hostage."
Thorpe laughed, lowering his gun. "Long time no see, Dan."
Sergeant Major Dan Dublowski lowered his gun. "Damn, who'd have thought the bad guys would hit our C & C?" He pointed at the radio. "You should hear the shit going on at the rig. You got some pissed-off workers who got hit by plastic bullets from the rescuers after being hit by the flash-bangs. Then the SEALs are screaming about the simulators you dropped in the water. They got two guys with busted eardrums."
"They'd be dead if we'd dropped full charges," Thorpe noted.
"Hey, I know that, you know that and now they know that," Dublowski said. "That's the purpose."
"What the hell was that missile?" Thorpe asked.
"Latest thing in special ops." Dublowski pointed at a console that had several TV screens mounted on it. "It's what you might call a pocket cruise missile. The technical dinks nicknamed it the Hummingbird. Not only can it carry a small payload, it also had cameras mounted, giving us a real time close shot of the target just before we hit it."
"Not real time enough."
"True, but that was due more to a screwed up plan than the equipment," Dublowski admitted. "The missile is retrievable. There's a chopper out there now tracking down its homing device somewhere to the west of the rig."
He walked to the door and stepped out, Thorpe following. Colonel Giles came walking out of the other van, a very upset navy captain with him, Parker filming it all. The captain had the distinctive gold insignia of the SEALs on his chest: an eagle clutching a trident with a muzzle-loader pistol and anchor superimposed; nicknamed a Budweiser, as it resembled that company's emblem.
"Goddamn it!" The captain's voice was loud. "This ship was outside the limits of the play of the problem. We thought we had real casualties being flown in here."
" 'Play of the problem'?" Giles repeated, giving a half-smile toward Parker and her lens.
"I knew you shitheads were going to do something like this," Dublowski said in a low voice as Giles and the captain continued their loud and angry discussion. At least angry on one side. To Giles this was a job, and he didn't get upset about a job.
"How'd you know?" Thorpe asked.
"When you insisted that no one, even those on this ship, have live ammo. At first I thought you were just being extra safe, but then I figured there was a purpose to your concern."
"How come you didn't tell him?" Thorpe asked, pointing at the irate navy officer.
"Because he's a jerk," Dublowski said. "We've been training with these SEALs for two weeks and they act like they shit ice cream. Since this operation was on water, he insisted that his people plan the mission. Our colonel didn't like the plan, but he had to bow to the CINC who agreed with dickhead there and gave OPCON to the navy. Plus," Dublowski added, "I don't like SEALs. Not after McKenzie and Omega Missile."
Thorpe knew the entire exercise had been set up three months previously to test Delta-Seal Team Six on joint operations. Obviously there was a lot
of work to be done. But that was the purpose. Giles's civilian security consulting company had received the contract to play the terrorist force seizing the oil rig. They'd been given quite a bit of latitude to formulate their course of action, which was actually unusual, given the military's tendency to want to make every exercise into a dog and pony show, especially when the congressional SOCOM—Special Operations Command—counter terrorist liaison, Lieutenant Colonel Lisa Parker, was allowed to be part of the play of the problem to see firsthand how it went—and report back to the Select Committee on Terrorism.
"What was the plan?" Thorpe asked.
Dublowski snorted. "Plan? Hit the rig with everything all at once and use the Hummingbird dropping flash-bangs to shock you at the last second. That was the best he could come up with. You didn't give us much choice with your time limit. The SEALs were pissed because their real plan for an oil rig is to cut into one of the legs and come up the hollow inside and hit them by surprise. Except the oil company who supplied the rig and time for this didn't exactly want them to do that to their equipment. Plus two hours wasn't enough time to cut through. So they had to climb up the outside. They knew they'd get waxed, but they hoped the Hummingbird and Delta coming in from all directions with choppers would give them a chance."
"We were the bad guys. We weren't supposed to give you much choice or a chance," Thorpe said.
"Yeah." Dublowski sighed. "Well, we'll be hashing this one out for a while."
Thorpe looked at his old friend. He hadn't seen Dublowski in a couple of years—since the Omega Missile escapade in Louisiana. The two of them went back a long way. Long before that episode they'd served together in Desert Storm on a SCUD-buster team that had gone all over western Iraq searching for the elusive rocket launchers. Last Thorpe had heard, Dublowski had been overseas in Germany and everyone involved in Omega Missile had been scattered to the four corners. He hadn't known Dublowski had "gone behind the fence," working for Delta again, but Thorpe also knew that Delta tended to drag people with Dublowski's experience back in for more tours whether they wanted to or not. Once in the Force, always in. At least for everyone but himself, Thorpe conceded. He was the exception to the rule.
Dublowski looked older than his forty-seven years. There was a slight nervous tic under the skin near the sergeant major's left eye that Thorpe didn't remember seeing before; a certain lack of focus to the older man's eyes that Thorpe found strangely familiar.
"How have things been?" Thorpe asked.
"They've sucked."
"What's the matter?"
"Terri's gone."
Thorpe blinked. Terri was Dublowski's daughter. The last time Thorpe had seen her, she'd been fourteen years old with pigtails and dressed in coveralls, running around the backyard at the Dublowski's house in Fayetteville, outside Fort Bragg. But almost four years had passed since then.
"What do you mean, gone?"
Dublowski walked over to the ship's railing. His eyes were focused on the sea. "After Louisiana, I was stationed with Special Operations Command Europe, in Stuttgart. Staff puke work while I recovered from some knee surgery and, as you know, getting me as far away from the States as they could. She was a senior at the high school there. One Friday night two months ago she went out with some friends and she never came back."
Thorpe didn't know what to say, so he remained silent, waiting for the rest of the story.
"Her friends said the last they saw her—as best they can remember, since most of them had been pretty drunk—was she said she was leaving, going home. They'd all been out in one of the preserves in the Black Forest, drinking and partying.
Dublowski looked at Thorpe. "She didn't like to drink and she didn't do drugs. She went out with those people because there were only so many kids in her class. But when she saw how bad it was getting, she must have left. We'd talked about it. I'd told her that her mom or I would always come and get her no matter where she was, no matter what had happened, if people were drinking or doing drugs. But she must have thought she could walk back to post. It was only about two miles to the gate.
"Shit, I don't know. That's guesswork on my part. We called the MPs, but they said the kids had gone off post and they'd have to check with the Polizie. The MPs didn't seem to believe me. The Polizie didn't really give a damn about some American kids.
"It's different over there now, Mike. Now that the Germans are no longer worried about the big red machine rolling through the Fulda Gap, they don't want us. The Polizie weren't too concerned about some American family member being missing. I made the MPs call in CID, Criminal Investigations Division, but there was no sign of foul play, so CID couldn't really do anything. As far as everyone was concerned, Terri just ran away. Hell, we even got investigated by Social Services to see if maybe we had been abusing her and that had caused her to leave."
"You haven't heard from her?" Thorpe asked.
Dublowski's voice was insistent. "She didn't run away, Mike."
Thorpe had known Dublowski a long time, but he also knew that even a parent couldn't tell what a kid would do.
"Something bad happened to her," Dublowski said in a low voice. "I know it and Marge knows it. I don't give a shit what anyone says, she wouldn't have run away. Everything was going right for her. She was accepted into college back here in the States, exactly the school she wanted. She was all excited about it and planning to come back in the fall. She was happy. We were happy."
Thorpe remained silent, dark, troubling images floating to the surface of his memory.
"Marge took it bad. Still is," Dublowski said. "She's been on medication ever since. Won't come out of the house."
Thorpe remembered Dublowski's wife. A small, quiet gray-haired lady who had suffered his long absences with grace and a smiling face. She'd lived through her husband's combat tours, but Thorpe could well imagine that something happening to Terri was a vulnerable area, one she had never been prepared for. He knew firsthand the devastation a career in Special Operations could have on a family and it was the biggest reason he had taken—tried to take—early retirement after Louisiana.
"Is anyone checking into it?" Thorpe asked. "Maybe she's back in the States. Maybe she got . . ." He paused as Dublowski gave him a look that froze his words, then the sergeant major's face crumpled and tears formed at the edges of his eyes. That startled Thorpe more than anything.
"I'm sorry, Mike, it's just that everyone always says, hey, she'll turn up one day. Everything's all right." His voice was harsh. "Well, it isn't. And it won't ever be. Something bad happened to her and nobody cares."
They both looked up as they heard a helicopter. The Huey was cranking up to head back to the rig. Giles was waving for Thorpe to come.
"Hey," Thorpe said, putting a hand on Dublowski's back. "I'll talk to you at the debrief."
Dublowski shook off the tears and got his voice under control. "I'm not staying for that. I have to go back to Bragg immediately. My commander will take the debrief."
"Well, then I'll see you at Bragg in a week," Thorpe said.
Dublowski wiped a sleeve across his eyes and straightened up, the professional soldier returning. "What are you coming to Bragg for?"
Thorpe reached out and touched the US ARMY sewn above Dublowski's right breast pocket. "I'll be back in uniform, doing my time."
"You're shitting me. I thought you retired."
"I thought I did too, but Department of the Army disagrees. I took the early out that was so graciously offered me, but it turns out that I wasn't eligible, even though the officer who signed the paperwork said I was."
"Hell, I think they just wanted to get rid of you after all the shit you've been involved in," Dublowski said.
"You got that right," Thorpe said. "I guess by the time the papers hit some pencil pusher's desk in the Pentagon, they decided I still owed Uncle Sam some time to get my money."
"Anyway, I've got to finish out a couple of tours in the reserves, which means I have to get what the reserves call a good
retirement year. So for this year, I've got an ADSW tour for sixty days coming up at Bragg."
"ADSW?"
"A reserve term. Active duty, special work."
"What about Lisa?" Dublowski asked. "And Tommy?"
Thorpe looked at his watch. "They're gone."
"Gone?" Dublowski's face showed his confusion and growing outrage. "She left you after you got off active duty? I thought—"
"She didn't leave me," Thorpe said. "Listen, I'll talk to you when I get to Bragg."
"Where are you going to be?" Dublowski asked.
"That's up to the guy who handles reservists for SOCOM," Thorpe said. "Your guess is as good as mine."
Dublowski pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to Thorpe. "Marge and I aren't listed, but here's my home and work numbers. Give me a call when you get in town."
"Will do," Thorpe said. He shook hands and walked to the chopper and got on board with Giles, Parker and the other men who worked for Giles. Thorpe looked out the side as they lifted. Dublowski was still standing at the railing, gazing out at some far point on the horizon.
"What's wrong with Dublowski?" Giles asked, ever the watchful commander, looking out for his men. He had saved Thorpe's ass on more than one occasion, including getting him this job to occupy his time. Giles also knew Dublowski from Desert Storm.
Thorpe kept his eyes on the figure at the railing. "His daughter disappeared in Germany."
"Disappeared?" Giles asked.
Thorpe shrugged, not from uncaring but from ignorance. "I don't know the exact story. I'll find out when I go to Bragg and talk to him."
"Tell Dan he needs anything, call me," Giles said.
"Right, sir."
"You need anything, call me," Giles said, poking Thorpe in the chest.
"Haven't I always?"
"No."
Thorpe forgot for a second about Dublowski. "Maybe you won't want to hear from me."
"You guys think you're indestructible. You're not. Call me if you need help. Tell Dan that too."
Thorpe looked past Giles and noted that Parker was watching them both, her forehead furrowed. Thorpe quickly looked away. He spent the rest of the flight in contemplative silence, which was immediately disrupted when they landed at the staging area on shore.