Specter (26 page)

“I tend to agree,” Admiral Tarrant said, “as does my ops staff. You can rest assured that I'll include your opinions in my next communication with Washington.”

As they continued to discuss options, it struck Murdock what a monumental operation this actually was, a team effort involving some twelve thousand men aboard the seven ships of CBG 14, the pilots and ground crews of the Air Force Special Operations Squadron who would be responsible for inserting and recovering his men, the Delta team that would be hitting the hijacked aircraft at Skopje at the same time in order to avoid tipping off the opposition, and God alone knew how many thousands of other military and civilian personnel from Washington to Greece and back again who were working on this op, code-named Alexander.

Alexander, for the boy-king of Macedonia who'd conquered half the known world 2300 years before.

Murdock did not dwell on the thought that, while Alexander had been arguably the most spectacularly successful of all of history's conquerors and military figures, he had also died very young. . . .

At 1825 hours, the word came through at last.

Operation Alexander was go, and as originally planned.

The MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft, a Hercules especially augmented and equipped for this type of covert, deep-penetration mission, was waiting for them when they arrived at the Italian air base. Painted jet black, without identifying marks or insignia, it seemed to be a part of the night as the SEALs gathered up their parachutes and weapons loadouts and started filing up the huge aircraft's rear ramp.

They'd left the
Jefferson
to pursue her endless circles at Gyro Station, flying the COD on a short hop across the mouth of the Adriatic to San Vito. The MC-130, one of four deployed south from Rhein-Main, Germany, had arrived at San Vito just ahead of them and was already fueled and ready to go. Another, with a Delta team aboard, had already left on a roundabout route that would take it to Skopje.

Each man in the SEAL platoon had his own way of facing the possibility of death or injury or capture in the coming mission, from Doc's wisecracks to Mac's single-minded professionalism to the L-T's habit of going the rounds of his men, talking quietly with each. During the flight into San Vito, the Professor had been reading Polybius's account of the rise of the Roman Empire, of all things, while Roselli perused a dog-eared copy of last month's
Penthouse
. Holt, Nicholson, and Fernandez had exercised the warrior's historical ability to sleep anywhere, any time, while Frazier had quietly written a letter to his wife. Most of the rest had cracked jokes, told stories, or gone over their gear and weapons yet again.

ET1 Josip Stepano had not said much since the SEALs had left Salonika yesterday morning. He knew the L-T was worried about him, and he'd done his best to reassure Murdock that he was fine. But after completing all of his checks of personal gear, weapons, ammo, and chute, Stepano had done very little over the past few hours but think ... and remember. He wondered often just how much he had in common with the other SEALs of the Team, especially when it came to motivation.

The Navy SEALs had the reputation of being hard-hitting, hard-drinking, fast-living superwarriors—and for the most part the rep was a well-deserved one. SEALs themselves often claimed that their unit's acronym stood not for SEa, Air, and Land, but for Sleep, EAt, and Live it up. You couldn't live as close to the edge as SEALs did every day and not have a bit of wildness to work off once in a while. Still, it seemed sometimes to Stepano that his fellow SEALs were more concerned with their warriors' fraternity than they were with the old-fashioned concept of patriotism.

Stepano was a patriot in every sense of the word. He loved his adopted country as only one who has escaped the nightmare of tyranny can. In lighter moments he joked about his love affair with a government official's daughter, but those moments were rare, the memories of the state police pounding on his father's door that night too fresh and sharp. His session as interrogator with Vlachos had brought back some of those memories with a fresh and blood-bright clarity.

He was American now and fiercely proud of that fact. A citizen when he was eighteen, he'd joined the Navy three years later. Because of his language skills, he'd been granted special clearance after an exhaustive background check, and that had led him first to Navy Intelligence, then to the SEALs.

But a man could never entirely escape his roots, that deep-down sense of who he was and where he'd come from originally.

Maybe ... maybe what he and the others were going to do tonight would make some small difference in his homeland.

For Stepano, this operation had become intensely personal.

In near-total darkness the fifteen SEALs sat facing one another across the cargo bay of the MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft. The drone of the four turboprops had been steady and unchanging since they'd lifted off from San Vito thirty minutes before. The aircraft's crew chief had ducked his head into the cargo deck moments before to announce that they'd just gone feet-dry.

Murdock turned and glanced at one of the small, round cabin windows, but there was nothing at all to be seen outside. The night was as black as the bottom of the sea. Perhaps later, when they got above this crap, he would be able to see some stars. . . .

For now, though, safety lay in flying low. Somewhere down there in that darkness, he knew, was Albania ... yet another tiny Balkan nation with a bitterly unhappy past.

Under the tyrant Enver Hoxha, the tiny country—only about the size of Maryland—had closed itself off from the rest of the world, a small and bankrupt hermit kingdom in some ways more paranoid about contamination from without than North Korea. A hard-line Stalinist, Hoxha had ended relations with the Soviet Union in 1960 when Khrushchev had demanded a naval base at Vlorë. His close relationship with Mao's China had ended in 1978, as China drifted toward liberalization. With Hoxha's death in 1985, however, rule had passed to Ramiz Alia, who slowly had begun to open the country to the West, privatizing industry and carrying out economic reforms. It was possible that Albania's long, self-imposed exile was nearly over.

In the meantime, Operation Alexander was taking direct and highly illegal advantage of the near-primitive state of Albania's military, especially their radar and tracking networks. Despite the rhetoric of Hoxha's ultra-Communists, the vast majority of the tiny country remained undeveloped. It had exactly one city of any real size—its capital, Tiranë—and one seaport, Durres. Most of the land was mountainous and covered with pine forests, while twenty percent of the country's land area was coastal plain, swamp-ridden, and infested with malarial mosquitos. The Albanian military consisted of a 40,000-man force of regulars, with another 155,000 in the reserves, but that included just one tank brigade and eleven infantry brigades. Their air force was equipped with old J-6s and J-7s, purchased years ago from the Chinese, and they had only three squadrons of those, a total of about thirty fighters. Murdock had read once that Hoxha's idea of defending his country against invasion—or against contamination by foreign ideas, which for him amounted to much the same thing—was to build thousands of small, round pillboxes along his nation's borders with Greece and what was then Yugoslavia, and along the seacoast all the way from Konispol to the Buna River. Murdock had heard that the thirty-seven-kilometer highway from Durres inland to Tiranë was lined with hundreds of bunkers that looked exactly like whitewashed igloos with gun slits.

Stone igloos, however, were no match for an invasion by the technological magic of late-twentieth-century America. The first invaders had been purely electronic, powerful jamming transmissions directed at coastal and inland radar installations by EA-6B Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft flying off the
Jefferson.
Soon, the invaders took on a more tangible substance, racing in from the sea, going feet-dry less than five hundred feet above the salt marshes behind the Karavastase Lagoon.

They flew in tight groups of four aircraft, three F-14 Tomcats protecting each Prowler, and as they penetrated Albanian airspace, they spread a blizzard of fierce electronic snow that jammed every radar from the airport at Tiranë south to Berat. Albanian radar operators, both military and civilian, were used to near-constant breakdowns in an economy where new equipment was impossible to come by, and most simply logged the interference and ignored it. A few alerted superiors; a few of them actually wondered about the widespread breakdown. According to reports transmitted from circling Hawkeye early-warning radar planes, several flights of Chinese-made fighters were scrambled.

None of them found a thing.

Traveling at just below the speed of sound, the U.S. aircraft flew up the valley of the Devoll, across land that was empty for the most part of anything but mountains and pine forests. Behind them, traveling more slowly but still sheltered within their pattern of electronic jamming, came the night-black MC-130. North of the town of Gramsh, just before the mountains reared ahead into the twin peaks of Mali Shpat and Guri i Zi, the Combat Talon began climbing, lifting up off the deck and grabbing for altitude.

The optimum height for HAHO operations was 30,000 feet.

“Ten minutes, Lieutenant!” the jumpmaster yelled back at Murdock. “Met report's still clear. Report for the target is low overcast, wind from the northwest at five. We have a go from Olympus.”

Murdock nodded, then signaled to his men. “Stand up! Equipment check!”

Each man went over his own equipment, and then, when he was through checked the gear of the man beside him, looking for loose straps or releases, checking pack bodies, watching for Irish pennants—hanging lengths of tie-off cords—or improperly positioned gear. Murdock and DeWitt then personally went from man to man, giving each a final, all-over inspection.

They said little. With the Combat Talon now climbing to drop altitude, the men had all switched to bottled oxygen from their bailout bottles; their faces were completely encased in breathing masks and helmet visors that gave them the look of fighter jocks.

Fighter pilots never flew as burdened as these SEALs, however. Each man wore both his main parachute and his reserve on his back, with a bundle consisting of his rucksack, an inflatable raft, and his secondary equipment load in front, secured between his waist and his knees by a quick-release harness. His bailout bottle, the size of a small fire extinguisher, was strapped to his left side; behind that, secured to the side of his chute pack and to his leg, was his main weapon. For most of them, this was either an M-16 or an H&K MP5SD3. Mac and Bearcat, however, were both carrying hogs—M-60E3 Maremont GPMGs—while Magic Brown sported a Remington Model 200 sniper's rifle and Doc and Rattler both were lugging H&K CAW automatic shotguns. Four of the men carried M203 40mm grenade launchers attached to their M-16s.

Besides all of this bulky gear, each man carried numerous smaller packages and parcels—a HAHO compass on his left wrist; a digital altimeter on his chest above his ruck; a tactical radio; a secondary weapon—for most a 9mm Beretta pistol with an extended magazine; an inflatable life vest; an Eagle Industries Tac III assault vest with pockets bulging with extra magazines, chemical light sticks, first-aid kit, and hand grenades; rappelling gear and line; night-observation gear; knife; all of this worn over black nomex coveralls and heavy gloves. The temperature outside was something like thirty below, and frostbite of unprotected skin was a serious danger.

Besides the gear every man carried for himself, there was special equipment divided up among the team, mostly extra ammunition for the 60-guns, but including Higgins's HST sat-comm and KY-57 encryption gear, and batteries. Sixty pounds was the recommended equipment load for a combat jump, but each SEAL on the Combat Talon was packing at least one hundred.

Murdock went to each man, gave his load a tug or a pat to make sure it was secure, and tried to think of something light or encouraging to say. He didn't care for pep talks, and he knew his men didn't either. Still, it helped if they knew he cared.

“Doc,” he said, shaking his head in mock despair. “What the hell is a noncombatant doing with a damned shotgun?”

It was an old joke. Theoretically, hospital corpsmen didn't fight and didn't carry weapons, but no SEAL was a noncombatant, no matter what his rating had been before he'd volunteered for BUD/S.

Doc grinned behind his mask and shrugged—a difficult maneuver under all that gear. “What the hell, L-T,” he said. “Doc Holliday packed a shotgun, so I reckon I will too.”

Murdock moved to Stepano, standing next in line. “You okay, son?” was all he could think of to say.

“I am fine, Lieutenant,” the Serb said. “Do not worry about me. Kick ass and take names!”

“That's the spirit, Steponit,” Roselli called. “We're gonna hop and pop tonight!”

They were ready.

“Okay, people,” Murdock said, shouting so that all of them could hear. “The weight's going to be the critical factor. Remember, if any of you pop your canopy and find yourself descending at more than eight meters per second, reach down and jettison your secondary gear. Just let it go. I'd rather do without the equipment than have to do without the man. You read me?”

“Loud and clear!” “Roger that!” “Affirmative, L-T!” the voices chorused back.

“DeWitt and I both have strobes. Watch for them when you're going in and guide on us. If you don't see us, for whatever reason, aim for the midpoint of the lake, right opposite the castle if you can manage it, then make for the beach below it. If you end up too far north or south, or if, God help you, you overshoot and touch down on the mountain somewhere, get down the best you can and rally at the castle. If you undershoot, well, I sure hope you've brushed up on your Albanian.” When their laughing stopped, he added, “You might try
‘Me falni,'
which I'm told means, ‘I am very sorry I fell out of the sky and killed your cow.”'