Jake frowned. “What does that mean?”
Brendan cast his eye across the others in the room. “It’s not enough to just get her back and then go on as before.” He put his palms down on the table, and drew another breath. The others could tell this was about to be oratory of some kind. When he spoke again, he sounded deadly serious, and totally confident.
“For a year and a half, we’ve been doing nothing but getting by. We have no hope, no goals, no chance to do something positive, to contribute, to help. All we’re doing is staying alive. And that’s not enough for me. We’ve been squatters and survivors. I need you to be operators again. We’ve been reacting, it’s time to act.”
Todd, who had briefly looked distraught at the focus shifting from Kate, suddenly looked like he got it. “Bren’s right,” he said. “I’m in.”
Kwon still looked skeptical. “And supposing we do get this thing? What the hell do we do with it? Try to get it to Britain?”
“Yes,” Brendan said. “We get it to Britain. But one problem at a time, Sarge. One problem at a time.” He smiled, and Kwon couldn’t help but return it. “Okay. Now let’s get into the weeds on this one.”
They were planning what might be their last ever operation.
So they’d better make it a good one.
Land of the Blind
Camp Price - Team Room
About two hours into the planning session, Brendan’s radio went.
“Bren, Eli. I’m coming onto station now.”
Zack and Baxter were proving invaluable describing the interior layout of the Stronghold and the procedures by which it was guarded. And they’d made good progress on drawing a sand-table model of the walls and courtyard. But memory was fallible. They needed real-time intel.
Brendan stood and nodded at Zack. “On me.”
Zack rose and followed, and as the two trotted together across the courtyard to the TOC, Brendan gave him instructions. “Right now we’re about to get an excellent aerial look at Godane’s backyard. What I need you to do is narrate. Point things out on video. Tell me exactly what I’m looking at.”
The two of them pushed in through the open door.
Elijah looked up. “How close a look do you want, Cap?” Brendan pulled up a chair. “I’m up at my service ceiling now, and about two kilometers north.”
“I don’t give a damn if you mow the grass,” Brendan said. “As long as you stay out of small-arms range.”
Elijah turned back to his screen and controls. “That would be substantially higher than grass-mowing altitude.”
“Godane knows we’re here,” Brendan said. “He knows we know he’s there. Intel is everything now. We need a clear look at that compound and what’s going on in it. If they’re gearing up for another attack. If they somehow get their Predator in the air, to come Hellfire our asses. If they’re Alamo’ing up.”
But then his brow furrowed, and he turned to Zack. “They don’t have shoulder-fired missiles – right?”
“Negative,” Zack said.
“How do you know?”
“Because he asked me to find him some on our scavenging mission to Lemonnier. I didn’t.”
Brendan didn’t ask whether Zack had succeeded or failed in his real purpose. Either way, that was good enough. He leaned in to the screen. “Is that max zoom?”
“Affirmative,” Elijah said.
“Okay. Bring us down. There should be a good wide band that’s above small-arms range but that will get us the resolution we need.”
Elijah banked it around and started bleeding off altitude – 12,500, then 10,000, then half that. In another minute he was down to 1,500 feet.
“They’ll probably hear us at this altitude,” Elijah said. “But they don’t have a prayer of taking us down with small arms, AKs or MGs.”
Brendan nodded his approval and took the left-side controls for the sensor bundle and cameras. “On second thought,” he said, moving away and pushing Zack into place instead, then getting out a notebook and pencil. “You drive the camera. I’ll sketch and make notes.”
“Roger that,” Zack said, taking the controls. This wasn’t his first drone rodeo.
As Brendan got his first good look at the Stronghold, he noted the remnants and tatters of camouflage netting that still hung over some sections. But enough had rotted and fallen away that it didn’t obscure much at this point. They had good visibility into most of the interior.
And over the next thirty minutes, while Eli piloted them in lazy circles overhead, Zack pointed out and Brendan made note of: fixed gun emplacements, static guard positions, roving patrols, supply and ammo depots, vehicle bays. He identified most of the above-ground buildings – supply sheds, tool sheds, grain storehouses – and pointed to the entrances that led to different parts of the underground complex, where most of the inhabited areas were.
He also pointed out the construction where they were raising the wall. It was about 70% in place by now.
“They were already behind schedule,” Zack said. “And now you’ve taken a significant bite out of Godane’s labor pool.” Both he and Brendan laughed at that, though Elijah didn’t.
Most of the time they were circling and reconnoitering, and particularly the last ten minutes, figures ran around on the parapets on the walls, pointing up at them and shouting – silently, on the video-only drone view. Brendan was surprised they didn’t take any potshots. But someone down there was smart and disciplined enough to know it would only be a waste of ammo.
“Those guard towers,” Brendan said, pointing out the six big structures at the corners of the outer wall. “I need a better look at the machine gun emplacements inside.”
Elijah hmm'd. “I don’t like going much lower.”
“Can you take it down to a thousand feet?”
“I’ll do you a deal. I can back off, drop down, then do a single pass – straight over, at our top speed. That should make the aircraft a tough target.”
“Done,” Brendan said. “Do it.”
Elijah brought them back around to the north, turned, dropped, and went into his final pass, blasting straight over the fortress heading south.
Brendan took the camera controls now. He put the nearest tower in his crosshairs and waited for it to get bigger. It did so pretty quickly.
“Wait, wait,” Zack said, pushing forward again.
“What?” Brendan said.
On the screen, they could see two al-Shabaab guys come bursting up into the tower from the interior stairs. They seemed to be carrying an object about the size of a big backpack.
Zack’s mouth opened again – but he waited another second for the scene to resolve. The object now appeared to be some type of field electronics.
“Pull up,” Zack said. “Pull out!”
When Elijah didn’t immediately respond, Zack actually reached around him and grabbed the joystick, yanking it all the way back and to the right.
Nothing changed on the video view.
“What?” Brendan said. “What the hell just happened?”
Now Elijah was manhandling the flight controls himself. Nothing continued to happen. On the video view, the tower passed out of the bottom of the screen, then the whole interior courtyard went by, followed by the wall on the other side – and then the greenery of the Galmudug bush filled the window. The Shadow was still heading south at its top speed.
Zack stood up straight, turned, and cursed. “Those sons of bitches! Goddammit.”
Brendan pushed his chair back, urgency bleeding away. He could tell that whatever catastrophe was happening had already happened.
Zack turned back around. “It’s a goddamned portable RF jammer.”
Brendan put his head in his hands. “I’m guessing you’ve seen it before.”
Zack looked at him with a very dark expression, his shoulders sagging. Knowing how limp this was going to sound even as he spoke, he said, “I forgot. It’s been a year and a half since I saw it.” He shook his head. “If it makes you feel an
y better, that thing got me kidnapped, and nearly killed.”
This didn’t make Brendan feel any better.
He was thinking: And now it might have just gotten all of us killed.
Elijah gave up on the controls. He said, “That radio jammer is now between us and the aircraft. If I’d been flying some other direction, I’d eventually pass out of its jamming range…”
Zack punched the wall and cursed loudly again. He’d fucked up.
Jake stormed in. He’d evidently heard the racket. “What? What’s going on?”
Brendan spoke first, so as to take the heat himself. He didn’t need Jake distrusting Zack anymore than he already did. “Our UAV. It’s currently winging its way to Madagascar. Non-stop.”
Jake shook his head.
Now both Triple Nickel and al-Shabaab had lost their UAVs.
Now they were all blind.
* * *
“The irony, I suppose,” Baxter said, having followed the general migration to the TOC, “is that they can theoretically follow it until it runs out of fuel and just pick it up off the ground. Then they’ll have both drones. And we’ll have both controllers.”
The only one who thought this was funny was Todd. He and Kwon had been last to arrive. Now they were all about to move back to the team room… when the big radio set on the other side of the TOC beeped. It was picking up an incoming transmission, on one of the unencrypted civilian channels.
Everyone froze.
Jake walked across the room, flipped channels, put two fingers down on the transmit bar on the desk mic, and leaned slightly over it.
“Receiving,” he said. “Send traffic.”
The voice that came back, speaking out across the TOC with perfect clarity and no delay or static, was like hearing the bogeyman given life and breath. Everyone there had heard enough of Godane’s YouTube rants to know it wasn’t the Emir himself. But it was definitely one of his thugs.
He had marginal English and a thick Somali accent. Worse, there was something about the way he spoke that was out of place in a Special Forces encampment. He sounded coarse, mean, thuggish – also uneducated, righteous, and incurious.
“Soldiers – we have your whore.”
And with that announcement alone, you could just about hear jaws grinding in the TOC. Only Jake didn’t visibly react. He had turned to marble.
“She is here with us, on her knees. Al-Sîf has the blade to her throat. Tell them. Tell them! Scream. Beg for your life!”
This was followed by perfect silence.
And that was enough to convince Triple Nickel that this shitbird was actually telling the truth. The Kate they knew and loved would much sooner have her throat slit than beg the likes of these guys for anything.
Jake pressed the transmit bar and said, “We believe you have her.”
“She will live only if the Emir gets his drone control.”
“We understand.”
“You come here. Tomorrow. At first light. Bring the control. You not here, the girl dies. But she not die right away.”
Jake took his two fingers off the desk mic and pressed them down on the tabletop beside it. In a perfectly normal voice, he said, “I’m going to kill you. Then I’m going to kill al-Sîf. Then I’m going to kill Godane. And I’m going to feed all your bodies to the dead.”
He then calmly moved his fingers back onto the transmit bar and said:
“We agree to your terms.”
* * *
Out behind the TOC now, the two commanders leaned in close to each other, in the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. Everyone else had gone back to the team room to resume planning. But Brendan needed a minute alone with Jake.
“This changes nothing,” Jake said.
“It changes our ISR resources.” Brendan meant their lost drone. And not only their ability to monitor Godane. It also meant that if that incoming herd sped up, or changed direction, they’d never know it – not until it rolled over their heads.
Still cool as marble, Jake said, “What do you propose to do? Lie down?”
Brendan knew he didn’t even need to answer that.
“You never give up,” Jake said. “You never back down. You don’t even let up on the throttle. This is going to happen with us going 110mph, blasting straight through – all the way to the end.”
Brendan just nodded.
That was Jake in a nutshell: blasting through problems, obstacles, and enemies head-on – by being more committed, more ferocious, more violent. By getting, and keeping, the initiative.
That was just how his team sergeant was wired.
And it was too late to get another one.
“Come on,” Brendan said. “We’ve still got fourteen hours to tilt the odds.”
Dark Night of the Soul
Camp Price - Brendan and Todd’s Hooch
Night. Perfectly pitch-black – until, instantly, it wasn’t, with the bright flash of incoming tracers, tearing the night to shreds, ripping through the structure all around him. Brendan leaps from his rack, and finds his rifle by touch. Now he needs to find his team radio – because he knows he’s got to organize the defense, and it’s got to happen now.
Breathless, heart hammering, he sticks his face out the door, head on a swivel, scanning from side to side, trying to generate some situational awareness. From the reports, he can tell some of the firing is his own guys. But not the majority of it. Not enough. They’re being hammered.
Fuck the radio, he thinks. He grabs his tactical vest full of mags, and makes for the wire. When he gets to the south sangar, he’s the last to arrive. He realizes all their guns are pointing outward, in 360-degree defense. They’re completely surrounded.
This is it. He knows it. This is going to be the final defense of Camp Price.
This is the end.
Somehow, in his exhausted and wounded heart, Brendan knows they are going to go down fighting to the last man. Like the three hundred at Thermopylae, ODA 555 will die heroically and gloriously, laying down their weapons only when their dead hands release them. But there will be no follow-up battles of Salamis or Plataea, where Xerxes, or in this case Godane, will get his comeuppance. There will be no heroic legend to pass down through the ages, no comic books or movies about the fall of Camp Price.
No one will ever even know.
Now Brendan can hear the screams of the wounded – the enemy at first. But then he hears a shout of pain from inside the wire, one that is way too familiar.
And he knows they can’t afford to lose anyone.
He ducks down to reload, the incoming rounds snapping the air over his head like a flag in a gale, and the wooden edge of the sangar turning to splinters from the fusillade. He gets a new mag seated, moves over one position, flips his selector switch to full-auto, and pops again. Now he is lighting up the night, burning off 625 rounds per minute. He’s dry again in less than three seconds, and drops back down.
Now he hears another scream, a different voice this time.
They’re all surrounded – and they’re all going to die.
He reloads – but can’t bring himself to pop up again. He feels everyone looking to him for a solution. And he hasn’t got one. There isn’t one. He drops his rifle, wraps his elbows around his knees – and covers up his ears with his hands.
He does this so he can’t hear the screams of his men – crying for help, dying.
The wall behind collapses from the weight of incoming, and he tumbles back through it, falling through open air… and it’s twenty feet to the ground, not ten, because he’s actually fighting on the walls of Godane’s Stronghold…
* * *
Brendan sat up in his rack. Both he and the thin sheet over him were completely soaked with sweat, like both had been dunked in a pool.
As he sat there motionless, letting his breathing come back under control, against his better judgment he gave his doubts and fears free rein. For just a few minutes. In the dark and silence, no one would see them.
The dream had faded. His men weren’t dead.
But they probably soon would be.
Alone now, in the dark, Brendan thought the unthinkable. He knew that these men he was charged with leading were not superheroes. They were extraordinarily smart, skilled, committed, well-trained, and resilient soldiers. They had a very special and hard-won skill set – including unparalleled language, cultural, and political skills, used in their primary roles as teachers and mentors, doing unconventional warfare and foreign internal defense.
In terms of pure warfighting, they could all move and shoot, they were very solid tactically, and they had extremely good small-unit infantry and CQB skills.
But they weren’t gods.
Not even Jake was.
They weren’t like the unstoppable assaulters and snipers of Delta or Seal Team Six. In terms of pure resolve and combat effectiveness, they weren’t even quite like the regular SEALs. If nothing else, you could tell from the way Army Special Forces ran the selection course – the cadre instructors were actually trying to keep guys in the program. Whereas the more elite spec-ops forces weeded out everyone they could possibly pummel into quitting. But SF coached, they mentored, they did what it took to get good men through the program – because they were needed in the field. At the end of the process, they had supremely committed and well-trained soldiers.
But not gods. No, they were all too mortal.
Brendan shook his head. Seventy to one… Only Jake wasn’t daunted by the odds they were going to be facing in just a few hours.
The terror of the dream falling from him, but not that of the coming battle, Brendan got up, toweled himself off, put on a t-shirt and flip-flops, and stepped out into the cooler air outside. He could immediately see there was a light still burning in the team room. When he walked over and stepped inside, he found it was Jake, drinking a mug of coffee and going over the mission plan again. He was also wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers – and the light from the desk lamp was glinting on the aluminum fittings of his leg.
When he looked up, Brendan said, simply, “This is going to work – right?”
Jake exhaled. He looked like a different man in his reading glasses, which he rarely wore in front of the others. He took them off and leaned back. He said: “There are no guarantees in this line of work, Captain Davis. The only thing I can tell you is: if Kate dies… if you go down… or the others on this team fall… odds are I’m already dead. That’s all I can promise you.”
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