Eyes of the Hammer (The Green Berets) (6 page)

Riley sympathized with his senior noncommissioned officer. Powers looked like a not-so-gentle teddy bear sitting on top of a table in the back of the briefing room. "I know that, Top. I've already talked to Colonel Pike about it. But they didn't expect us to hit them in two places. Those guys who stopped you didn't know what was going on. We'll let the air police talk first and see what they have to say."

Powers shook his head, still irritated with the whole thing. He was glad Riley was doing the briefing on this one. Not only could the team leader speak quite well, but his name and appearance always surprised people when they first met him, and Powers liked watching the reaction. Riley himself was used to the surprise. His last name conjured up visions of a freckle-faced Irishman. At the very least, it was difficult to connect that name with the short, wiry Puerto Rican wearing the silver bar with two black dots indicating U.S. Army chief warrant officer.

Another strength of Riley's was that he exuded competence during briefings. It was hard to attribute to any one aspect of his appearance; it was the complete picture—the finely honed face, the piercing black eyes, the slim body that suggested a lot of power per pound. Most importantly, just the way he held himself.

Riley's demeanor was carefully cultivated. Standing only five foot seven inches and weighing a lean 145 pounds, Riley had learned long ago the importance of first impressions. The product of a brief marriage between a long-forgotten Irish father and a Puerto Rican mother, Riley had learned his lessons at an early age on the streets of the South Bronx. He'd discovered that if he looked tough, then most often he didn't have to actually prove it was true. But Riley also knew how to follow through when it was necessary.

Riley looked up as the door to the room swung open and Partusi called out "Attention!"

The air base commander, Colonel Albright, walked in, followed by his staff and the major in charge of the air police on post. Trailing the party limped Colonel Pike. The old-looking army officer was in charge of the Department of Defense's nuclear facility testing team in addition to the many other jobs he did as army assistant to the DCSOP- SO. Pike presently had four Special Forces teams working for him on the project, one from each of the active army Special Forces groups. The teams traveled to every Department of Defense installation that held nuclear weapons and tested how well the weapons were safeguarded. Pike made it a point to attend every team's outbriefing at the installations they had tested. Riley had never met a senior officer he respected more than Pike.

Pike was a legend in the Special Forces community. At the beginning of his army career, he'd been an enlisted man and served two tours with Special Forces in Vietnam. Because of the high quality of his performance of duty, he'd been recommended for officer candidate school (OCS) during his second tour. Passing the four-month "shake and bake" OCS course at Fort Benning, he'd been commissioned in the infantry and found himself back in Vietnam for a third tour, this time as a platoon leader with the 173rd Airborne.

As soon as possible, Pike had worked a transfer back to Special Forces. As commander of a recon team doing cross border operations into Laos, Pike had picked up his limp. During a difficult extraction he had been pulled out on the end of a rope hung below a Huey helicopter, a common practice when the terrain lacked suitable landing zones. During that particular mission, the inexperienced pilot had misjudged how far the Special Forces man was hanging underneath the aircraft and had run Pike into a stand of trees. Slamming into limbs and trunks, Pike had suffered several cracked bones, and his back had never been the same. Over the years the injury had become progressively worse. It hadn't, however, stopped him from becoming more involved in the cutting edge of Special Operations.

After Vietnam, Pike had continued on in his beloved Special Forces, eventually rising to command a battalion in the 10th Special Forces Group at Bad Tolz, Germany.

After that tour, he'd been with Charlie Beckwith during the birth pains of Delta Force. Riley had heard rumors that Pike had entered Tehran prior to the aborted raid to free the hostages, to relay intelligence out before the strike, and to be on the ground to help guide the force when it came. Pike's connections with some of the original members of Delta ran deep, and despite the years that had gone by since he'd last served with Delta, Pike still enjoyed a good working relationship with the men at Fort Bragg.

Pike's degenerating health, combined with an unwillingness to keep his mouth shut when he felt something needed to be said, had led to his failure to be selected for a Special Forces group command. Lacking that career ticket punch, he'd been passed over for promotion to brigadier general. Being the army gofer for the DCSOP-SO was Pike's last hurrah before being shuffled off to mandatory retirement. Riley felt it was a crappy way to treat a man who had given so much to the army and who was one of the most experienced and caring leaders he had ever worked under.

Pike gave a covert wink to Riley as the wrinkled old colonel lowered himself stiffly into a chair. Riley answered with a brief nod and a smile.

Riley turned his attention to the air force base commander, who was looking over the nine dirty Special Forces soldiers standing at attention in front of their chairs. "Haven't you gentlemen had a chance to get cleaned up and changed?" asked Colonel Albright.

Riley answered for his team. "No, sir. We needed the last couple of hours to get our notes together for this briefing. We'll take care of all that when we're done here."

The colonel nodded. "All right. Who's this Mister Riley Colonel Pike has been telling me about?"

Riley stepped forward. "I am, sir." Albright managed to hide his surprise at Riley's appearance.

The colonel moved to his seat and opened the proceedings. "Let's get on with it then. Major Baley, you first. Everyone else please take your seats."

Riley sat down as the cleanly dressed air force police major walked up to the podium.

The major cleared his throat. "Good morning, sir. I'll be briefing you on the results of the security test of our nuclear safeguards that was conducted last night. I'll start off with a brief description of the scenario that was set up. I'll then describe what happened and finish by giving you our recommendations for improving security. I'll be followed by Warrant Officer Riley from the 7th Special Forces Group, who will brief you on events from their perspective.

"The exercise was set up to be as realistic as possible. To help accomplish this we borrowed eighty sets of MILES equipment from the army at Fort Drum. MILES stands for multiple integrated laser engagement system. Basically what it is, sir, is a laser emitter that is attached to all the weapon systems. When each system is fired using blank rounds, a laser beam is sent out wherever the weapon is aimed. All our personnel and vehicles involved in the exercise had harnesses on that could pick up these laser beams. A hit on a person is indicated by a loud beeper going off on the harness. A hit on a vehicle sufficient to disable it is represented by a flashing yellow light going off on top of the vehicle and a loud tone being sounded on the intercom system inside. We had all our personnel at the weapons storage facility and ready line equipped with this gear.

"Our first indication of trouble came at 0126 ..."

Riley tuned out the major and mentally reviewed his own presentation. The man was doing his best to make his organization look good, which was to be expected. Riley tuned back in as the major wrapped up his presentation.

"Sir, overall I feel our men did a good job. We do have some areas we need to work on. First, we are going to revise our reaction SOP to cover the possibility of multiple attacks. However, I must point out, sir, in all fairness to the lieutenant in charge of the reaction platoon, that it is extremely unlikely that a terrorist organization would be able to mount two attacks on the scale we experienced last night.

"Additionally, the attackers used army ID cards and a military vehicle to gain admission onto post. Again, this would be very difficult for a terrorist organization to accomplish.

"As a further recommendation, we are going to increase the number of surveillance checks we do on both the post perimeter road and the storage facility perimeter road. Sir, pending your questions that concludes my briefing."

Colonel Albright looked at his air police commander in surprise. "That's all you have, Major?"

Major Baley shifted his feet nervously. "Yes, sir."

"All right, Major. You can sit down. Mister Riley, let's hear what you have to say."

Riley walked over to the podium. Typical briefing for the air force, he thought to himself. Try to make things look as good as possible. It didn't look as though the post commander had bought off on it, though. But the colonel would have to decide for himself.

Riley sorted out his notes while Partusi pulled out a schematic of the air base mounted on cardboard and placed it on an easel. Partusi extended a collapsible pointer and stood at parade rest next to the easel, prepared to point during Riley's presentation.

"Sir, I will first brief you on our perspective of the operation as it was conducted. Then I will highlight some areas, with our recommendations, that we believe your people ought to focus on to help improve weapons security.

"To conduct this mission we recruited eighteen members of the local army National Guard to act as guerrillas for us. We recognize we used a larger force than expected but our instructions from the Department of Defense were to create a worst-case scenario. Due to your post's proximity to the Canadian border, we feel it is quite possible that a terrorist organization may be able to infiltrate by vehicle across the border and attack here, so the number of personnel that participated last night is not improbable.

"We trained our guerrillas for two days in the Adirondack State Forest near Meacham Lake. We received intelligence regarding the physical layout of the post and guard activities from a civilian worker who has access to all areas of the post. She provided us with detailed descriptions of everything we asked for. We drew up our plan based on this intelligence and on building information we found in the Plattsburgh Chamber of Commerce."

Riley looked up. "I don't know why they're there, but a complete layout of the nuclear weapons storage facility is on record in the Plattsburgh County clerk's office. Although it doesn't detail the security setup, it does greatly facilitate planning a mission. Anyway, to continue. We recruited the civilian who owns the Harley-Davidson dealership that is adjacent to your south fence to assist us. Utilizing his van, the diversion force arrived at the..."

Riley proceeded to factually relate the events of the target hit. He'd done many briefings like this before. He could see that his audience was listening carefully. They usually did. Commanders' ears tended to perk up when anything regarding nuclear weapons was discussed. In all truthfulness Riley had to admit that the Plattsburgh Air Police had done a pretty decent job and had a good setup. Unfortunately, they had to realize that decent and good didn't cut it when you could get a nuke stolen. Riley finished his narration of events with both raiding parties being stopped.

"You may have noticed some difference in our account of events and the air police's account. Most of that is due to the excitement and the darkness. However, it is important to note that your guards were not aware we were inside the storage facility until we were departing. We were not driven off. Rather, we were leaving of our own volition, having completed what we set out to do. That team's mission was to draw in your reaction force. It succeeded in doing that.

"We did have some trouble with a couple of the National Guardsmen playing the game with the MILES equipment. Two of them were hit and their indicators went off as we departed the storage facility. Both failed to 'play dead or wounded' until I forced them to. I apologize for that. However, we were fortunate to have these men give up their free time to participate in the exercise.

"None of the attacking personnel at the flight line were hit. Those people stayed long enough at the aircraft to simulate the amount of time they would have needed to remove one of the nuclear warheads there. We—"

"Excuse me." An air force lieutenant colonel in a flight suit raised his hand. "I hate to burst your bubble, mister, but I believe that would have been much more difficult than you think. I'm the squadron commander for those aircraft that were on the flight line. I had my head crew chief brief me this morning on how long it would take to safely remove one of those bombs. It was quite a bit longer than the amount of time you spent there. Almost twice as long."

Riley nodded. "Sir, the key word there is safely. I believe your crew chief was giving you data regarding how his crews remove the warheads without damaging the aircraft. The method we would have used, had we done so, would have involved some damage to the aircraft."

The squadron commander wasn't going to give up so easily. "I know you probably don't understand all the technicalities, but you just can't mess around with one of those warheads. You go indiscriminately cutting some of the umbilicals to the aircraft and you could damage the warhead also. There are certain safety devices installed to prevent such a removal."

God, how I love pilots, Riley thought. Able to fly above it all and never get their hands dirty. Know everything there is to know, too. This guy probably watches Top Gun every night, he thought sourly. He patiently replied, "Yes, sir. I understand that. However—"