by James Cobb
“That could kill several birds with one stone,” Castilla agreed.
“The Canadian government’s resources are stretched very thin across their arctic frontier,” Klein continued. “I suspect they’d be quite content to have us tidy up this little question for them. If there isn’t an anthrax problem, then what they don’t know can’t hurt us. If there is a problem, then we can bring in the Canadian prime minister for the development-of-resolution phase.”
Castilla nodded. “I think that will be an acceptable compromise. You mentioned a joint Russian-American team. Do you think that’s advisable?”
“I suspect it will be unavoidable, Sam. They’ll want to be hands-on with anything that concerns their national security, past, present, or future. As soon as we inform Baranov that we are initiating an investigation of the crash, I’m willing to bet he’s going to insist on there being a Russian representative with our people.”
Castilla tossed back the last of his whisky, making a face at its bite. “That brings us to the next big question. Are the Russians giving us a square count on this? We know they sure as hell weren’t on the Bioaparat incident.”
Klein didn’t answer for a protracted moment. “Sam,” he said finally, “whether he answers to a czar, a premier, or a president, a Russian is a Russian is a Russian. Even post-Berlin Wall, we are still dealing with a nation where conspiracy is instinctive and paranoia is a survival mechanism. Right now, I’m willing to wager you a bottle of this good bourbon that we are not being told the whole story.”
Castilla chuckled under his breath. “Wager not taken. We’ll work to the assumption that an alternative agenda will be in play. It will be up to your people to discern just what it is.”
“I already have a couple of good primary ciphers in mind, but I may have to pull in at least one outsider specialist to back them up.”
The President nodded. “You’ve got your usual blank check, Fred. Pull in your team.”
Chapter Four
Huckleberry Ridge Mountain Warfare Training Center
Throughout the morning, small-unit war had raged across the alpine meadows and forested slopes of the Cascade range. Rock scuffed, devil’s club burned, and with their camo face paint streaking with sweat, Jon Smith and the other three members of his trainee fire team dropped into cover behind a rotten fir log.
The ridge crest lay perhaps fifty yards beyond and above their position in the tree line, up an open slope dotted with ghost-pale snags and shaggy with low brush cover. Just beyond that crest would be another open slope and another tree line and, just possibly, another fire team similar to their own. Another group of classmates designated for the day as part of Red Force, the enemy.
Nothing moved save for a few dried grass stems in the hint of a breeze. Smith, his eyes fixed on the ridge crest, began to struggle out of his rucksack harness. “I’ll be back in a minute, Corporal. I want to see if we might have some company over on the far side.”
“What do you want us to do, sir?” His assistant team leader, a gangly young paratrooper from the Eighty-second Airborne, inquired. He and the other two members of the combat patrol lay spaced out in the forest duff beside the log.
“Just sit tight,” Smith replied, distracted. “There’s no sense in anyone else breaking cover.”
“Whatever you say, sir.”
Smith slithered over the top of the log. With his rifle resting across his forearms, he began to belly-slither up the slope to the crest. He’d already plotted his crawl path through the open terrain, a weaving course that would take best advantage of the deepest brush clumps and largest downed logs to maximize his concealment.
Smith took his time, mentally projecting and plotting each inch of the crawl, down to how his movements would affect each individual overhanging branchlet and twig. A hunting python would have created a greater disturbance as it oozed to the ridgeline.
Objective achieved. He held the high ground, and the far side of the ridge opened out below him. More brush tangles, more storm-stripped logs, and another line of evergreens, deep sun shadows puddling beneath their low-set branches. Hugging the earth, Smith eased the SR-25 out ahead of him. Flipping the protecting lens caps off the telescopic sights, he wormed forward a final foot, clearing his firing arc.
His weapon was something new since the last time he had served with the Teams. A creation of master gunsmith Eugene Stoner, the SR-25 was referred to as a tactical sniper’s rifle. Scope sighted and firing the 7.65mm NATO cartridge through a semiautomatic action, it fed from a twenty-round box magazine. Possessing considerably more range, accuracy, and stopping power than the conventional assault rifle, the SR was also light and handy enough to be carried as a primary weapon, at least for a man of Jon Smith’s size.
Over the past couple of weeks Smith had become fond of the potent brute and had been willing to put up with the extra carrying weight and barrel length in the field, amiably arguing the SR’s finer points with his fellow trainees. Now he intended to put its qualities to use.
Slowly Smith tracked the sighting reticle across the tree line at the bottom of the ridge. Any potential target would presumably be as concerned with concealment as he was.
Once upon a time, in a more chivalrous day, stretcher bearers, medics, and military doctors had been classified as noncombatants. They were barred from carrying weapons and participating in active combat, yet they were also shielded by the theoretical Rules of Warfare, rendering them invalid targets on the battlefield.
But with the coming of asymmetrical warfare there had also come a new breed of enemy, one who obeyed only the laws of savagery and who viewed a Red Cross brassard only as an excellent target. In such an environment the Marine motto of “Every man a rifleman” became a matter of necessity and common sense.
Smith completed the first scope sweep without result. Swearing silently, he tracked back. Those bastards had to be down there somewhere.
There! A minute movement at the base of that cedar. A head had tossed, maybe shaking off one of the endemic yellow jackets. Now Smith could just make out the outline of half a camoed face, peering around the tree trunk.
A couple of meters away, the outline of a second well-camouflaged form snapped clear in Smith’s mind, stretched out beneath a brush tangle. There’d be more members of the fire team, but these two would have to do. He’d already stayed fixed for too long. They’d be hunting for him as he’d been hunting them. Time to hit and git!
The man behind the cedar was the harder shot. Smith would drop him first. The sighting crosshairs jumped back to the doomed soldier’s forehead, and Smith’s finger tightened on the trigger.
The Stoner crashed out a single shot, but the only thing that lanced downrange was an invisible pulse of light. Keyed by the noise and recoil of the blank cartridge, the beam from the laser tube clipped beneath the rifle’s slender barrel licked out, tagging the sensors on the targeted man’s MILES harness.
MILES, the Multiple Integrated Laser Exercise System, was the U.S. Army’s means of keeping score in its grimly realistic war games. A dazzling blue strobe light began to flicker beneath the cedar tree, declaring to the world that someone had just “died.”
There was a convulsive movement beneath the adjacent brush pile, and Smith shifted targets, firing a three-round raking burst. A second strobe light announced a second termination.
Smith rolled back from the ridgeline. Good enough for government work. Now to get out…
The forest line below him exploded in automatic weapons fire, and blue MILES strobes behind to blink in the tree shade.
He had taken too long! Someone had circled in behind the rest of his patrol! Smith crouched up, trying to regain situational awareness. The firefight seemed to be raging in the forest directly below him. He could go laterally along the ridge and disengage…No, damn it! That was his team down there!
Breaking cover with his rifle lifted, Smith ran downslope toward the tree line, trying to dodge and weave. A squad automatic weapon rattl
ed out a long burst, and the light on Smith’s MILES harness blazed on; the audial warning proclaimed him a dead man.
Smith drew up, thoroughly disgusted with himself.
The blank fire ended, and a man emerged from the trees: the same noncom who had worked with Smith on the long rappel. He’d been one of the instructor/observers monitoring this phase of the day’s exercises. “You’re all dead, Colonel,” he yelled. “Let’s break for lunch.”
It would be a ranger’s lunch: a Hooyah energy bar and a long swig of tepid water from a hydration pack, the slayers and the slain collapsing to rest side by side beneath the trees.
Nor was it “rest” in a pure form. Such a concept was alien to the program. Weapons and equipment had to be cleaned, ammunition pouches reloaded with more blank cartridges, maps studied, and critiques received on the morning’s drills. But it was a chance to unhelmet and unharness and sit in the shade, an opportunity to ease burning lungs and aching muscles for a few precious minutes. A luxury, but one Smith refused to enjoy.
Grimly he spread a poncho out on the forest floor, not for himself but for the SR-25. Breaking out his gun-cleaning kit, he began to knock down the rifle, removing the powder residue from its components. He’d fired only the two shots, but it gave him something to do while he raged at himself.
The ranger instructor crossed to where Smith sat cross-legged on the poncho, and took his own seat on a nearby log.
“Would the colonel care to tell me how he fucked up, sir?”
Smith stabbed a loaded cleaning rod down the SR’s barrel. “I failed to watch my back, Top. While I was fixated on the target on the far side of that ridge, I let the Red Force elements come in behind me. It was stupidity, just plain stupidity.”
The noncom scowled and shook his head. “No, sir. You’re missing it. It was something more stupid than that. You didn’t let your troops cover your back, or cover their own.”
Smith looked up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you didn’t use your team, sir. You didn’t deploy them into overwatch positions; you just told them to stay put. You might have been able to get away with that with an experienced noncom as your assistant team leader. He’d have set up a defense perimeter automatically, without having to be ordered. But you had a green kid with you who assumed his superior officer was supposed to be doing all the thinking. You didn’t take your troop quality into consideration. That was your second mistake.”
Smith nodded his agreement. “What else?”
“You could have used another set of eyes up with you on the ridge. You might have acquired your targets faster and been out of there faster.”
Smith didn’t consider arguing the points. You didn’t argue when you knew you were in the wrong. “Points all taken, Top. I blew it.”
“Yes, sir. You did. But it was the way you blew it…” The sergeant hesitated. “Begging the colonel’s pardon, but may I speak off the record?”
There was a formality in the ranger’s voice, the kind often used by a noncom when bringing a potentially sensitive subject up with a superior.
“I’m here to learn, Top.”
The instructor studied Smith out of thoughtful, narrowed eyes. “You are an operator, aren’t you, Colonel? The real shit, not just a pill roller getting his ticket punched.”
Smith stalled, lightly oiling the dismounted bolt of his rifle, considering his answer.
Covert One did not exist. Smith was a member of no such organization. Those were absolutes. Yet this grizzled Special Ops trooper would no doubt be a master at seeing through bullshit. Likewise, Smith had come here to learn, especially about himself.
“I’m telling you that I’m not, Top,” he replied, selecting his words carefully.
The ranger nodded. “I get what you’re saying, sir.”
Now it was the instructor’s turn to pause in thought. “If you were an operator,” he went on finally, “I say that you’ve worked solo a lot.”
“What would make you say that?” Smith inquired cautiously.
The ranger shrugged. “It sticks out all over you, sir. In a lot of ways, you’re good. And I mean damn good. You’ve got all your personal moves down solid. I’ve rarely seen better. But they’re just your moves. You kept trying to do it all yourself.”
“I see,” Smith replied slowly, replaying the morning’s exercises in his mind.
“Yes, sir. You forget your people and you forget to think for your people,” the noncom continued. “That setup you ran on the ridge this morning probably would have worked just fine for one man, but there was more than one of you. I don’t know exactly what you’re doing in this man’s Army, Colonel, but whatever it is, it’s making you forget how to command.”
Forgetting how to command? That was a stark assessment for any officer-a brutal one, in fact. Could it conceivably be a valid one?
It was a startling thought, but it was entirely possible, given the peculiarities of his career path.
USAMRIID was not a conventional Army unit. The majority of its personnel were civilian, like his late fiancée, Dr. Sophia Russell. Directing a research project at Fort Detrick was more akin to working in a major university or a corporate laboratory than in a military installation. It was a peer-among-peers environment that required tact and a mastery of bureaucracy more than a command presence.
As for that other peculiar facet of his life, by the very nature and structure of the job, mobile cipher agents frequently operated alone. Since being drawn into Covert One in the aftermath of the Hades crisis, Smith had worked with a variety of allies in the field, but he had not borne the burden of being directly responsible for them.
It was one thing to make a bad call and get yourself killed. It was quite another when that failed call caused the death of someone else. Smith understood that. There had been a time in Africa years ago, before Covert One, when Smith had made such a failed call. The personal reverberations and pain of that decision lingered to this day. It was one of the things that had diverted Smith into the rarified world of medical research.
He slid the oiled bolt back into the SR’s receiver. Had that move been a form of cowardice? Possibly. It would be something to take a long and hard look at.
“I see what you mean, Top,” Smith replied. “Let’s say that particular requirement hasn’t come up with me recently.”
The instructor nodded. “Maybe so, sir, but if you keep wearing those oak leaves, it will. You can bet your ass on it.”
Or someone else’s.
Smith was still pondering the instructor’s words when an alien sound intruded into the forest quiet: the muffled purr-growl of a powerful two-cycle engine. A camouflaged all-terrain vehicle appeared through the trees, tearing up the trail from the Huckleberry Ridge base camp.
The young female soldier braked the ATV to a halt in the grove short of the mountain warfare class. Dismounting, she jogged toward them.
Smith and the ranger sergeant got to their feet as the courier approached.
“Colonel Smith?” she inquired, saluting.
“Right here, Corporal,” Smith replied, returning the salute.
“A call came in for you at base camp, sir, from the officer of the day at Main Post.” She produced a piece of white notepaper from the breast pocket of her BDUs. “As soon as possible you are to call this phone number. He indicated it was very important.”
Smith accepted the slip of paper and glanced at it. That was all that was required. The number was one that Smith had long ago committed to memory. It was not so much a phone number now as an identifier and a call to arms.
Smith refolded the paper and stowed it in his own pocket, to be burned later. “I’ll need to get back to the fort,” he said, his voice flat.
“That’s been arranged for, sir,” the courier replied. “You can take the quad down to base camp. They’ll have a vehicle waiting for you.”
“We’ll take care of your gear, Colonel,” the instructor interjected.
Smith nodded. It was l
ikely he wouldn’t be back. “Thanks, Top,” he said, extending his hand to the noncom. “It’s been a good program. I’ve learned a great deal.”
The sergeant returned the solid handgrip. “I hope it’ll help, sir…wherever. Good luck.”
The highway leading down to Fort Lewis snaked through the forested foothills of the Cascades, passing a series of small towns undergoing the economic conversion from logging to tourism for their sustenance. The sixth-largest Army post in the United States, Fort Lewis served as the primary staging facility to America’s defense commitments in the North Pacific and as the home base for the Army’s cutting-edge Stryker brigades. Scores of the massive eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles could be seen occupying the post motor pools and rumbling down the access roads to the firing ranges.
The fort also served as home for the Fifth Special Forces Group, the Second Battalion, Seventy-fifth Rangers, and a squadron of the 160th Special Aviation Regiment. Thus, the members of the base cadre were well acquainted with the requirements and necessities of covert operations.
The officer of the day didn’t ask questions when Smith checked in at the headquarters building. He had been advised to expect this sunburned and bearded stranger in sweat-stained camouflage. He had also been ordered by the highest of authorities to grant Jon Smith every possible assistance.
In short order, Smith found himself seated alone in a headquarters office with a secure communications deck on the desk before him. He dialed the contact number without consulting the note he had been given. On the East Coast of the United States a phone rang in a facility the public believed to be a private yacht club in Anacosta, Maryland.
“Yes.” The answering voice was a woman’s, toneless and crisply professional.
“This is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith,” he said with careful deliberation, not for the human at the far end of the circuit but for the voice identification system that would be monitoring the call.