Grayman Book One: Acts of War

by Michael Rizzo

6

  From the closed files of Lawrence Henderson:

  18 January, 2019.

  Things continue to progress on our accelerated schedule—not exactly as projected, but Dee seems to compensate happily.

  Tactical Team One starts to resemble a real team, barely three weeks since they were first thrown together. Much of that is thanks to Ram. Dee was right about him, in ways that even I couldn’t see in the beginning.

  It started when he began to open up, to reach out to the others. Burke first—teaching him that unique fighting style of his. The two start training together, and Burke himself seems surprised how fast he improves (considering he didn’t think he had anything to improve on). But more important, the two function together like they’ve been a team for years.

  The rest of Team One started taking notice of the synergy between the two—both in sim and in livefire training—about a week later. They’re still skeptical, not only of the program but the idea that such a diverse and marginal selection of operators can function with the coordination Datascan demands. All of them are big-ego professional warriors and suitably full of themselves, and all have somehow failed out of their own teams despite impressive skills. But Ram is the one who starts pulling them in, starting with his version of close-quarters combat (that Manning is quick to name “Ram-Fu”). He stays cool against their attitude and reaches out with amazing diplomacy: he validates them, appreciates their individual skills, encourages them to share what they know. Then he shows them how it all can be put together, how they don’t have to re-learn anything. He teaches them to do what they do, only better. He teaches them how to read and control an opponent, to “ride” a fight.

  One by one, they start to play. To train together—really together.

  21 January.

  Richards takes the post (and the promotion), though he’s very tight-lipped about his reasons for doing so. Sadly, he begins paying for his hesitation almost immediately. His first team has already gelled itself without the benefit of a commanding officer, and this hardens their attitudes against a man they see as a starched uniform or a desk warrior. The brief histories that Burke and Ram have with him only make this worse (though it’s never spoken of, not even within the camaraderie of the team—as far as the rest know, none of them have ever met Richards before).

  Richards will have to go far to earn more than uniform respect. Worse, the team naturally look to Burke and Ram for leadership. (Secretary Miller referred to them as the “terrible twosome” over brandy one evening, unfortunately with Richards present.) And after Burke and Ram, Datascan is in charge. It makes Richards appears superfluous, a figurehead CO. And Richards is well aware of it.

  22 February.

  It’s Tetova that first encourages them to train almost exclusively in the armor, to get used to the weight. It turns out that Ram’s somewhat unique fighting style—the short economy of motion and the use of bodily momentum—adapts well to the suits. Burke adds to it from his own CQD expertise, discovering creative ways to make the trauma-plating work in a close fight: to put real hurt on anybody who tries to attack, to make them hit plate or to hit them with plate. (This actually compensates for one of his own complaints about the ICW: traditional CQD uses the soldier’s rifle as a blunt weapon, but the ICW is plastic and its mass is mostly behind the shooter’s hand, making it a poor club.)

  Abbas worries about how the suit might become a liability, how the extra weight and hand-holds can give an opponent an advantage. Ibrahim chimes in with the Judo he’s played. Ram shows them Aikijujutsu and Chinese “fast wrestling.” They adapt.

  Within a little over a month, they’ve neatly designed a unique and impressively effective close-combat training program for going hand-to-hand in full armor.

  26 February.

  The team now gets to train out-of-doors—we isolated a challenge course at Quantico for them to use—high security, minimal prying eyes. It gives them more room and a wider variety of terrain than what they can get in the “Basement.” The fresh air has interestingly mixed effects.

  Burke is the first to complain about the overall strain on the joints from huffing in the suit. But then Manning comes up with some creative suggestions on ways to use the suit’s pair of auto-rappellers to get around. “Like Spiderman,” Ibrahim agrees with the joy of a child. Within a week, the obstacle course has taken on a whole new flavor: armor suits are flying through the air, slinging themselves over barriers on their lines like human yoyos. The team starts to look like some kind of professional extreme stunt troop, gleefully trying to outdo each other (especially Manning and Ibrahim, the most kid-like of the bunch) in creating graceful and complex acrobatic maneuvers. Dee generates an arsenal of new combat algorithms just for using the rappellers.

  1 March.

  Ibrahim—who is another non-fan of the ICW—starts playing with better ways to sling it, to grip it. Requests for design changes get sent back to Doctor Mann’s R&D team. Mann is not quick to respect the wisdom of soldiers over PhD engineers, but his resident “interface guru” Doctor Parry sides with the troops—she has a soft spot for Major Burke, it appears—and she gets Mann to improve his listening skills.

  That victory won, Burke slickly broaches the subject of laser-sighting their conventional sidearms (like Ram’s) and a selection of common assault weapons so that Dee can oversee targeting and fire control. Parry gets it approved with her usual skill at logical argument (“backup” weapons might be needed in unforeseen circumstances), and the team is overjoyed to get the option of other (more familiar) weapons to play with.

  On a side note, the sentry systems catch Burke impulsively stealing a kiss from Doctor Parry (he thought he had her in a corner out of sight of the optics). While he didn’t get a chance to do anything more than that, she certainly didn’t resist his advance, and the two have been eyeing each other like hormonal teenagers ever since.

  Abbas, meanwhile, has been experimenting with the armor design on the side, using one of the onsite shops and a few of the more geekish armor-techs to cut up and reassemble a few of the discarded earlier prototypes. The dig for Doctor Mann is that a few of Abbas’ “Frankenstein” suits actually move better that the current online prototypes, and with no real loss in protection. Burke immediately requested a “light” model, mostly—he says—so they can move in public settings without totally looking like spacemen, and Abbas’ unofficial design team starts cranking out very good ideas.

  These all get coolly ignored for a week by Dr. Mann, who still appears reluctant (or offended) to take any advice from “grunts” with no letters after their names. Richards, however, trying to show some investment in “his” men, makes a case to General Collins, who goes straight to his old friend SENTAR CEO Ben Northgate, and Dr. Mann starts having to get used to stuffing his ego. New prototypes are put into production.

  As for Ram, his role continues to be to sort of hold it all together, to make them all feel like they’re part of something. He’s a good listener, good at drawing the men out, making them talk. He’s patient, available, non-judgmental, and is as equally accepting of Manning’s gung-ho redneck jingoism as he is of the simmering jaded theo-racial rage of Ibrahim and Abbas. Even Tetova (it turns out that Ram shares his appreciation for good potato Vodka) starts to talk about his family, his life before and after Beslan, something his records insist he’s never done with anyone (not even under chemical). He’s even surprisingly civil to Richards.

  Burke may be ranking officer of the “twosome,” but it’s quickly becoming clear who’s really “leading” this team. And Burke doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

  We’ll see if this continues to play out as predicted. Live games start this week.

  12 July.

  Four and a half months of wargames—live scenarios against a variety of Spec-Ops opponents—have passed impressively so far, occasionally with truly surprising results. The tactical bible of urban combat gets rewritten in nothing flat, as the old standards get thrown out in the
face of the new technology. (That sounds like a good sound-bite—I’ll have to remember it.)

  In fifteen ops, “terrorist targets” embedded in buildings and houses were taken out with awesome speed and accuracy as armor suits simply advanced into their fire and cut them down.

  (Tetova pushed that point particularly far in Urban Game 5 when he decided to forgo using his ICW and just charged in and physically “beat down” his targets using the modified hand-to-hand, all the while their live-fire ammo is hammering him to minimal effect. He took seven good hits—otherwise sure kills—and came away with bruises and a very mild rib fracture. Ibrahim took the inspiration and ran in to join him, the two later smugly claiming that they’d exceeded mission expectations by “capturing alive” a number of “high-value targets.” Ibrahim also remarked that he felt very much “like Superman” in the process.)

  Some targets found themselves neutralized by shots that hit them accurately through walls. Others were taken from cover by impossibly accurate sniper angles (“There was no way they could have known where I was in there!” one of the Marines involved later protested). Still others got to experience the shock of armored troops dropping in through the ceiling right on top of them on auto-rappel lines.

  The best came in the so-called “high-density” scenarios, where the targets were hiding in or fleeing through crowded “civilian” areas—simulated markets, city streets, hotels, schools. They got an intimate demonstration of how well Dee can visually track them, and how efficiently an ICW can pick them off out of a mass of human “cover.”

  22 July.

  Ram has successfully completed every training module in the current syllabus. He’s absorbed and demonstrated proficiency for what would otherwise be at least five years of training in less than nine months. Still, General Collins wasn’t impressed until he saw the comparative scores of the other Group One test candidates. Ram was as good or better (sometimes significantly) in every test (except the sniper course, but he actually did better than he himself would have admitted—he didn’t suck, in other words—and he did qualify).

  However, because of the pervasive reluctance to give much respect to the VR training at this stage, Ram’s “graduation” goes unmarked, uncelebrated by either ceremony or even simple verbal recognition from his superiors. Ram, for his part, doesn’t seem particularly offended. In fact, he never pauses in his personal training obsessions to celebrate himself. He doesn’t even tell Burke.

  27 July.

  Burke gets to regret his criticism of the so-called “9-11” sim, when we demonstrate how a team of Tacticals can drop onto a passenger jet in flight, using their lines to lower them from a pursuit ship, latch onto the hull, carefully vent cabin pressure, then surgically cut down all of the onboard terrorists by shooting them through the fuselage before blowing their way in and securing the plane. It’s the most dangerous exercise to date—the risk of fatalities being high despite adding parachutes to the gear—but the team comes off of it looking like they’ve just been on a carnival ride.

  31 July.

  After their fun in the air, we abuse them in the desert. And we make them walk: eight miles over loose rocky terrain in 123 degrees (hot enough that their infrared won’t help). Worst case: no air support, no satellite eyes. Dragging the mass of their armor chasing an enemy that’s specifically lagging to draw them into a preset kill-box, a classic pin down and pick off. And the Marines playing the Taliban are using live ordnance.

  The scenario is the bane of our ground forces: You get led into open ground, no cover, and get hammered by mortars that make you grab ground. And while you can’t move, you get whittled away by snipers.

  The Marines think it’s a joke: The suits are slow, big targets. But then Dee shows them how well it can shoot: The ICWs pick the majority of the incoming mortars out of the air, then those “easy targets” just wade forward into enemy fire, “scoring” the Marine team with 25mm sim-grenades launched with accuracy that would impress NASA. It’s over in thirty seconds.

  1 August.

  It must be noted that the “targets” in all of the scenarios to this point were not informed in advance about exactly what they would be facing. And it’s Captain Ram who first broaches the obvious concern, during the VR review of the previous day’s mission:

  “What happens once we do this publicly,” he asked with that cool, calculating intensity he has, “and they get a sense of us? Won’t they… adapt?”

  I catch Collins get a little tense at that, but Richards nodded like he actually agreed with Ram. Maybe there’s a bridge to be built here after all.

  19 August.

  Richards went to work with his general friends, passing simulated “intelligence” on the Tactical Team’s capabilities—not complete, not at first—to let the “enemy” try to prepare. Also, some of the soldiers that had been so easily humiliated in the prior games were encouraged to come back and share their experiences.

  They did many of the obvious things:

  They tried using RPGs (and got a demonstration of how an ICW can cut them out of the air).

  They tried roadside bombs. In each test game, Dee successfully sniffed the bombs before any of the suits got within the critical range that the kinetic energy of the blasts would do significant damage to the soft tissue under the armor (though Abbas sourly complained of a nasty bruise on his right buttock when he wandered a bit too much into the “kinetic radius” of one—at least he got the satisfaction of tracking the bombers by scanning for residue: the poor GI’s who’d set the trap got their door kicked in that night by a rather irritated suit of battle armor who was still having trouble sitting comfortably).

  They tried suicide vests (in a least seven different scenarios before they figured out that the Terahertz scan does “see” through clothing) and got bomb-netted—which apparently stings a bit even without a live explosive involved.

  They tried a dirty bomb (and got unexpectedly jumped with the “simulated material” an hour before they thought the exercise was starting).

  And biologicals (Dee had adequate containment teams ready after the “carriers” all got picked off—then the team got to take their first decon shower in armor—Manning said he felt like he was going through a car wash, but he seemed to be enjoying himself).

  So far, so good.

  But then today General Hussein proposed a particularly dangerous scenario to the group. It’s been forwarded to Dee and the SENTAR R&D team for review. I can understand the reasons for wanting to run such a test, but given the high risk factor, I’ll be honestly surprised if it gets approved.

  20 August.

  Addendum to previous day’s entry: Despite both Colonel Richards’ and Dr. Mann’s strong protests, Dee agreed to the parameters, even to the point of allowing the “opposition” to field a significantly powerful live charge.

  22 August.

  A day that will go down as a seminal event in the peculiar history of Mike Ram:

  The team got dropped without brief into a simulated open suburban landscape at the Bragg combat range. The scene was in many ways reminiscent of the high-risk routes in and out of the Iraqi Green Zones, though the team was not given any sense of what to expect. They were simply dropped on an empty piece of roadway and told to head toward the city-set with caution. The fact that they were loaded with live ammo told them this was a free-fire.

  Their angular advance put Captain Ram ahead of the body of his team and on their right flank as they followed the road in a spread, staggered skirmish line. Whether his position in formation was simply coincidence, or how much Dee calculated what would happen next, it hasn’t indicated. In any case, Ram was the first one to scan the car by several seconds: a battered full-sized fossil-banger sedan roaring full-out down the street in the general direction of the advancing team.

  “Incoming!” he yelled over his link, locking on target and calling for an emissions scan, though he’d already assumed the outcome long before the gas-spectrum confirmed ammonium
nitrate and diesel. “Car bomb!”

  His fellows all opened up with their ICWs, but the “enemy” had prepared and hardened their rolling IED with enough homemade armor at the front-end to resist both the standard 5.56 caseless rounds and the issued frag and breaching grenade loads. The whole point of the exercise was to give the team a threat they couldn’t just stand up to and stop—they would have to scatter and dive for whatever cover they could. But that wasn’t their instinct anymore. They’d gotten too used to the relative invulnerability of the suits. So they initially ignored Dee’s orders to run for it and stubbornly peppered the car’s layered plating to zero effect.

  But then Ram, who hadn’t even bothered trying his ICW, racked it and immediately went for his insane sidearm, all the while running forward, paralleling the road. This put him even further ahead of the rest of the team at the point when the car whipped past him at a good forty-five miles an hour. But he had already opened up on it, emptying his clip in just under four seconds. And despite being more than forty yards away from a rapidly moving target, he scored every shot.

  The first two rounds cracked the engine (which had been armored in front but not from the side—whether Ram really had time to figure that out is unclear) and sent the drive train grinding. The next two hit the front tire and hub, shattering the rotor assembly. The next three punched through the driver’s door and “killed” the simulated suicide driver (a modified animatronic crash dummy set to keep the vehicle gunned and pointed straight). The car jerked and spun and dipped on the crippled front wheel, dug into the tarmac and flipped. And flipped. The drums of ANFO packed in the back seat ruptured, spraying their contents through the cab and out the shattered windows as the car kept tumbling through and past the rest of the team as they finally decided to get the hell out of the way and grab ground, failing to detonate because the triggering device had been dislodged.

  The car eventually settled on its roof, and Ram’s last round (kind of a ballistic “fuck you”) pierced clean through the gas tank, and either sparked the gas or ignited the fertilizer mix directly. And the car blew. But not anywhere close to what was intended.

  The load of homemade explosives in back seat would have been lethal if it had blown within forty yards of any member of the team (Dee had kept control of the detonator, just in case, though Ram’s impulsive defiance made that moot). But the thorough spilling spread the explosive media, took the majority of it away from the chain reaction of the detonator (where the burning gas simply set fire to it). So mostly, it was a spectacular boom, a fireball more Hollywood than tactical.

  Still, even the diffused explosion threw the Team like a child kicking toy soldiers (it looked spectacularly bad—there was little left of the vehicle itself), but the worst of the injuries were bruises and sprains (Ibrahim got clobbered by a flying tire, a story he continues to tell over beers).

  But much more significant: no one reviewing the event is ever going to forget the spectacle of Captain Mike Ram killing a car-bomb with that big silly fetish gun of his. It’s been done before, of course, but usually by a full checkpoint squad unloading with everything they’ve got—certainly not one man with a theatrical pistol. It’s utterly ridiculous, like something out of a bad action movie. But the son of a bitch actually did it, and he did it with style.

  22 September.

  We’ve run twelve scenarios in the last two weeks. The team is getting tired, punchy, but they’ll have to get used to this, because they’ll see worse when the big one comes down. The “opposition” continues to be creative, however futile.

  The latest set of exercises got the Team out into the real world for tracking games Becker named “Get Lost”—kind of a Hide-and-Seek with no boundaries, more of a test for Dee than the men. And once we got approval for Dee to have access to SatCom SkyEyes, it found all three-dozen targets within a week—one particularly resourceful SERE instructor got himself lost in the Canadian wilderness: he lasted a full day longer than the two that got caught on a beach in Brazil, but I doubt he had nearly as good a time playing.

  Meanwhile, four more “teams” are now through Sim Training and ready for livefire.

  24 September.

  The games have been impressive enough to get the international players ready to accept “limited” operations against real targets.

  Collins would have dropped the team in the Gulf months ago, but there’s still concern about this looking like a US game, especially in such a touchy region. Hussein thinks we need a stronger local presence on any teams we field there, though Kudziyev threw it back as having the potential to look like another “token Muslim puppet army”. Sharavi jumped in with a proposal for a “joint operation” with his people. Hussein returned fire, asking how it would look if our first operation was with the Israelis.

  So Richards offered the NATO Union Theater as “neutral ground,” suggesting that both the Israelis and Iraqis agree on a target and throw in “parallel support” to make the operation look as joint as possible. Sharavi agreed without hesitation, and Hussein agreed to consider the option “conditionally”—as close to an ideal solution as we’re likely to get at this point, though Richards still looks like he’s doing something he finds morally offensive, even when he’s doing good work.