Soar (8 page)

Yates listened, then grinned. “No problem you say? Oh, I
do
like that, Colonel. I like that very much, sir.” There was another pause. Then Yates roared, “Anything you need from the States, old buddy? Don’t forget: I’m traveling at government expense—weight is no problem.” He laughed. “That’s easy,” he said. “You got it.” He rubbed a big paw over the top of his shaved head and looked at the wall clock he’d already set to Almaty local time. “I’d say by zero five hundred hours your time.” He paused. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Day
after
tomorrow, Colonel, see you.
Sau bol, sau bol,
Talgat—b’bye, b’bye.”

Yates slapped the receiver down. “Shep,” he said, “see how the system works? We don’t need to go to Congress and beg for no stinking foreign aid. We don’t need any damn striped-suit diplo-dinks negotiating for us. We don’t got to hijack anything, either. We got ourselves a plane, a pilot, some ammo, local duds, and all it’s gonna cost us is a kid’s shirt, a couple of cases of great bourbon, and a pallet load of Pampers.”

“Not to mention the suitcase full of cash.”

“Hell, yes. The well-known suitcase full of cash. The
expediter. Hoo-ah!”
Yates stood up, extended his big hand, and high-fived the first sergeant. “Is this a great friggin’ country or what?”

“Hoo-ah,
a great friggin’ country, Sergeant Major. God Bless America.” Shepard gave Yates a quizzical look. “But why did you ask for the Russian uniforms. And how come you didn’t tell him about the Rangers?”

Yates plucked a tiny, well-worn copy of Sun-Tzu’s
The Art of War
from the breast pocket of his BDU shirt and brandished it in Shepard’s direction like a talisman. “The Master says, ‘Use deception to throw your enemy into confusion,’ Grasshopper. We were on an open line, Shep. People listen in on open lines. And I want anybody listening to
believe we’re headed for Afghanistan. Besides, if Talgat knew we were bringing a security force, he’d realize we had something serious going on.”

“Talgat’s no dummy, Rowdy. The minute he sees that C-5, he’s gonna know.”

“By then,” Yates said, stowing the book, “the Big Suit at the White House will have put the fix in at the Kazakh presidential palace and we’ll be slicker than deer guts in a pine forest. Besides, we’ll have all them young pecker-wood Rangers making a cordon sanitaire around us, so who’s gonna complain?” He stood up and rapped his scarred knuckles on the desk. “Remember the holy trinity, Shep: speed, surprise, and violence of action.” The sergeant major unsheathed his marker, flourished it like a sword, and thrust at the legal pad, drawing a quick Z through a trio of items. He scanned the remainder of his to-do list. “That leaves sixteen for Zorro. How you coming, Sancho Panza?”

“I think you’re mixing your characters.” Shepard flipped through half a dozen sheets of paper. “Okay: I finally located the chutes, masks, and O-two prebreather units,” he said. “There are two dozen RAPS
¹⁰
out at Marana the CIA was saving for some black op. Two tandems, sixteen masks, and sixteen double-bottle units. The Air Force bitched and moaned, but SECDEF has the juice, and they’re already on the way. ETA is about fifteen hundred. Then we have to get the chutes out to the rigger’s shed and go over ‘em before we repack and stow.”

Yates’s head bobbed up and down once. “Get Curtis, Goose, Marko, Tuzz, and Dodger on it. They’re gonna be
jumping the damn things; they might as well make sure they’re sound.”

“Wilco, Sergeant Major.”

“Equipment?”

“Good to go equipment-wise: Russian Kirasa-5 tactical vests. Everybody already has GSG-9
¹¹
boots. I’ve got French Nomex coveralls, Russian web gear, and Bulgarian AKs. We can’t use MBITRs,
¹²
so I found fourteen secure CipherTac satellite-compatible radios. They were made for a Kraut contract. They’ll work with our duplex system and the satcom chips, so the comms are good to go. And the Chinese claymores are up at Dam Neck—they’ll be here by close of business today.”

“Hey, asshole,” Yates growled, “we never close. Remember that.” He swallowed the last of the sweet coffee. Departure was scheduled for twenty hundred hours—not enough time, he worried, to get everything done.

At least, Rowdy thought, they’d be comfortable on the trip over. The big C-5 was one of the Air Force’s SOLL-II, or Special Operations Low Level II aircraft, capable of landing, unloading, and taking off under complete blackout conditions. It was coming in from the 436
^th
Airlift Wing at Dover, Delaware. The plane’s upper deck had reclining seats for seventy-three, as well as a galley and real heads. That beat the canvas strap benches, piss tubes, and chemical buckets on the C-130s they usually flew.

Plus, the C-5’s cargo bay was huge. If they had to, they could check and repack all the chutes in the belly of the Galaxy. It might be awkward working around the pallets, but it could be done. Rowdy shook himself out of his stupor.
What the hell had Shep said about Chinese claymores? “Shep?”

The first sergeant said, “Yo?”

“Chinese claymores?”

“Coming from Dam Neck.”

“Good. Pack three or four blocks of Semtex, too.” Semtex was the old Soviet-bloc equivalent of C-4 plastic explosive. Originally made during the Cold War in Czechoslovakia (for which reason Rowdy liked to say it was great for canceling Czechs), it was durable, malleable, and stable. And forensically, it would leave behind no indications that those who’d employed it were Americans.

Shepard made a note. “Roger that.”

Rowdy glanced up at the clock, thinking again how there’s never enough effing time. He had to scramble one of Delta’s six-man 1ST—intelligence support teams—to run the tactical operations center at Almaty. And he still had his research to do. The unit kept case study files on operations running all the way back to World War II. Colonel Beckwith had insisted on maintaining the case studies—and they’d always proved valuable in the past. Rowdy wanted to look at some thirty-year-old SAS operations in Oman. The geography was roughly similar to the Tarim Basin—except for the huge Tian mountain range ringing the Western Chinese desert. He pulled the reading magnifiers off his nose and stuck them in his pocket. “Be back in about half an hour.”

“Gotcha. I’m just about finished with the comms.”

“Good. You get hold of any RPGs?”

“Not yet. I sent Bill Sandman to dig ‘em up. All he could find was LAWs.”

“Crap.” Yates scratched a large spider bite just below his sunburned ear. “I’ll take care of it. I think I know where I can lay my hands on a dozen or so.” He chicken-scratched the acronym on his legal pad. “What about IR strobes?”

“Got ‘em.” Shepard gave the sergeant major a wicked grin. “One less item on my list.”

“And one more on mine. Now, if the sons of bitches at Langley ever give us some of their precious intelligence, we might be able to get this show on the road.”

“Knowledge is power, Sergeant Major.”

“If we don’t know where to look we’re going to be running around that desert in circles with our dicks in our hands—and right now the latest poop is eight hours old.”

“Loner said he’s got it covered.” Shepard used Ritzik’s call sign.

“Loner’s dealing with all those sharks in Washington,” Yates growled. “I’ll believe it when I’ve got real-time satellite images downloading on my laptop, and no assholes from Langley deciding what I can receive and what I can’t.”

“Amen to that.”

“When’s Mickey D supposed to arrive?”

Gene Shepard scratched his head and consulted his note pad. “Mick? Fourteen hundred at the latest. He’s bringing the strobes.”

“Primo.” Chief Warrant Officer Michael Dunne was a chopper pilot who worked out of the SOAR at Fort Campbell. For the past six months he’d been working closely with Ritzik’s Sword Squadron to help merge the Delta shooters and the Task Force 160 aircrews into a seamless, unified operation. He’d been brought in by Ritzik, who had first worked with the young warrant officer during cold-weather combat-readiness exercises in the Sierra Nevada, three weeks after Ritzik had been pulled out of Afghanistan in March of 2002.

Because the ops had been so rough in Afghanistan, Ritzik had pushed hard to change the SOAR’s training parameters. The 160
^th
had gone to Afghanistan using by-the-book training guidelines: pilots were not required to fly in visibility
of less than two miles and a ceiling of less than five hundred feet. But combat had forced the SOAR to deliver SpecOps troops in zero-zero conditions: zero visibility and zero ceiling (not to mention unpredictable downdrafts, crosswinds, and wind shears).

Back at CAG, Ritzik argued that unless a unit trained the way it would fight, the training was essentially useless. Delta trained that way. So did most SEAL units. Ritzik maintained that SOAR’s pilots wanted to push the training envelope, but that a cabal of play-it-safe desk jockeys in the Army chief of staff’s office was holding them back, afraid of losing one of SOAR’s multimillion-dollar MH-53E aircraft. Ritzik took his case to the three-star who ran JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command—at Fort Bragg. The result was an experimental, three-week, balls-to-the-wall, high-altitude training session under brutal weather conditions, sleep deprivation, and scores of zero-zero landings in rough terrain. It was during those twenty-one days that Ritzik and Rowdy Yates concluded WO-2 Michael Dunne was the best damn chopper pilot they’d ever seen.

Which was why within a minute and a half after he’d spoken with Ritzik from Rockman’s office, Yates put in a call to the SOAR and had Dunne TDY’d to Bragg on a SECDEF Priority One.

Yates’s draft op plan called for Mickey D to accompany the main contingent to Turkey. That way he could be briefed on the operation’s problems and add his input to the solution. At Diyarbakir, the CIA’s air base in southeastern Turkey, Ritzik and his people would pick up the last of their supplies, then fly on to Almaty, Kazakhstan.

In Turkey, Mickey D would rendezvous with an unmarked, unscheduled transport from Fort Campbell, which he’d ride to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. From there, he and a four-man Task Force 160 aircrew would fly the radar-defeating
covert-ops Black Hawk chopper that was co-cooned in the transport to an old Soviet paratroop-battalion command post at Tokhtamysh, within twenty-five miles of the Chinese border. There, they’d install fuel bladders that would triple the chopper’s range, and wait for the signal to exfiltrate Ritzik’s unit. The two dozen battery-powered infrared strobes Dunn was bringing with him would allow Ritzik to guide him to the LZ without using conventional lights.

Yates started for the door. “I gotta get out of here.” Halfway, he stopped cold. “Oh, crap—I forgot the RPGs.” Yates plucked up the handset and punched a series of numbers into it. “Keep me posted.” He looked up at the twenty-four-hour clock above the door. “Christ Almighty, we’re running out of time, Gino. I wish Loner’s ass was here with us, not up in D.C. playing with the suits. I don’t like working in a vacuum.”

SECDEF
LOOKED UP
from his meeting notes and switched off the limo’s right-rear reading light. He scribbled a telephone number on a Post-it, swiveled toward Ritzik, and handed it to him. “That’s my cell-phone number—the one my wife uses.” Rockman cracked a self-conscious grin. “She calls it my electronic leash. I pick it up—no one else.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now you have it. It’s not a secure line, so be careful what you say. But you call me with an inventory—everything you need—within two hours, and I’ll see that it gets to Fort Bragg, or wherever else you want it sent, by the end of the day.”

“Roger, Mr. Secretary.” Ritzik memorized the number then rolled the Post-it into a ball and swallowed it. His head was spinning. The logistics were overwhelming—and there were already strictures on what he could and could not do. Before they’d left the White House, the president arranged for saturation satellite surveillance of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which would be up and on-line within sixteen hours. The pictures would provide Ritzik real-time
intelligence about how the CIA people were being held, and where they were being taken.

That was the GN—the good news. The bad-news list was much longer.

BN-1 was the fact that there’d be no time for rehearsal. Whether it was hitting the Modelo prison compound in Panama to free an American national who’d operated an anti-Noriega TV station at the behest of the CIA, or going after terrorists holed up in Iranian-built barracks in Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley, Delta would work with the techno-wizards from CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) to build a full-scale model of the target and practice assaulting it until the operational wrinkles were ironed out. There’d be no rehearsal time for Xinjiang, which would increase the chances that Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame would insinuate himself into the proceedings from the get-go.

BN-2 was that they’d be going in sterile. That meant no U.S. equipment. From bulletproof vests to boots to web gear, to the very weapons and ordnance they carried—none of it could be traceable back to the United States. There was some sterile equipment at Fort Bragg. But most of it was going to have to come from CIA, which maintained a warehouse full of non-American gear for its paramilitary units. From previous experience, Ritzik knew that CIA didn’t like to share its wealth—whether it was information or gear. Even when the poor sons of bitches who’d been snatched were Agency people.

Which brought up BN-3: secure comms were going to be a problem. Delta had several tactical multichannel systems that allowed Ritzik to communicate with a forward base, as well as Washington if necessary, no matter where in the world he might be. But since they’d be operating with sanitized
equipment, most American-made systems were out of the question.

Christ, what a mess. Ritzik hoped Rowdy Yates was making progress, because he obviously wasn’t.

He looked up. They were crossing the Memorial Bridge. Ahead, Arlington National Cemetery lay spread out in front of the limo. Ritzik could see up, past the rows of white grave markers, to where the Lee House stood. He never failed to stop at Arlington when he passed through Washington. But there would be no time on this trip.