The Weapon (18 page)

The teenager unfolded himself like a sulky deck chair. He stood in a wheel rut, unbuttoned, and began pissing, only slightly turned away. Dan and Henrickson moved a step farther off. Wenck and Carpenter were back at the hotel; he hadn't seen any reason to risk more men than he had to on this first trip in. Beside the lead vehicle, Kaulukukui stood with fists on his hips, peering around. The darkness cupped a steady chatter now, distant shrieks like women being murdered alternating with clicks and hisses Dan hoped were just insects.

The kid hitched up his pants and nodded to Oberg, whom he seemed to have fixated on as the leader. Then stepped through the green wall and was swallowed, not so much as a
swaying leaf marking where he'd been. The SEALs traded impressed looks.

Dan cleared his throat. “Jungle time, Monty.”

Henrickson looked aghast. “I told you,” Dan told him.

“I know, jungle—but I didn't think you meant,
jungle
.”

Oberg squished down the ruts toward them. His sweated-through olive-drab skivvy shirt clung to his chest, outlining his pectorals. “Commander? You two better stay here, is my recommendation.”

“Who's going to do the negotiating, Obie?”

“That's going to take time, sir. Could take a long time.” Oberg scanned the jungle again. “It'd be better if we scoped the situation. Set up the meet, do the psychology, find out their bargaining position. Then come back and bring you in as the VIP who closes the deal with their head man over a cup of tea. That'd be the smart way.”

Dan looked around, at the silent, noisy jungle, then directly up. The canopy had grown together above the ruts, showing only a transient gleam far above, as if it was a single enormous organism that quickly scabbed over even the cruelest incision. “All right, Teddy. We'll do it your way.”

He rubbed his head as the SEALs moved off after the Filipino. He said to Henrickson, “I hope that was the right thing to do.”

“Teddy's sharp. They train for this.”

Dan rubbed his head again. He checked his Seiko. Slapped gnats. They were tiny, but they bit above their weight class.

Far overhead, something mocked their thin whine. It grew slowly, though still far away. He shaded his eyes, and caught a glimpse as something raptorial passed slowly over.

“Drone,” said Henrickson under his breath, as if it could hear them. It banked slowly, then disappeared over the trees. The chain-saw whine faded.

He hoped Oberg didn't take too long.

 

A week ago he'd been sitting in his office. The Navy's riverine force, small boats to take wars up rivers and inland, had been disbanded after Vietnam. But somebody on the E ring
wanted the manual dusted off. It looked okay tactically, but he'd tabbed on scores of yellow stickies where new equipment and new surveillance and targeting capabilities might require updates.

Was the Navy getting serious about brown water operations again? It did occasionally. The Civil War, World War II, Vietnam. But in the intervals, the blue water strategists, the big-ship advocates, let everything learned at such expense wither away. Monitors, for example, had had to be reinvented to cover troop landings in the Mekong Delta.

He hefted the manual, tossed it on his desk and stretched, frowning. And as usual, after not updating it for twenty years, they wanted the rewrite by next month. Usually when you got an order like that you turned to and did the best you could. But it shouldn't be done that way. They should set up a development schedule. Run a CPX, a command post exercise, using the old procedures. Use the lessons learned to design a live joint exercise—Army craft from Fort Story, Marines from Little Creek, Air Force surveillance, Coast Guard shallow-drafts for inshore work. No service operated alone anymore. Maybe he could work an exercise in as part of the workup for a deploying amphibious group. That way they wouldn't need a major chunk of funding. It was always hard to push cooked spaghetti up a ladder, which was what trying to implement any kind of change from the bottom was like in the Navy.

On the other hand, he wasn't exactly on the bottom anymore. And that was TAG's business, to develop new tactics.

He pulled his keyboard toward him and booted up Word.

He was midstream in a memo when it occurred to him that maybe he could work through Blair. Riverine had always been low-tech, but maybe she knew of something that would make it high-tech. The easiest way to advance a project these days was to make part of it involve buying huge numbers of computers. That was the Navy's definition of stunning innovation—buying more computers.

“Or are you getting cynical?” he muttered.

His phone rang. “Lenson,” he grunted, phone in the crook of his shoulder, still typing.

“Dan? Oh, you're here. Step in a minute?”

His CO didn't seem to be ambitious for flag, which made him easier than most O-6s to get along with. Dan front and centered on the desk. “You called me in, sir?”

Mullaly leaned back. “Close the door, Dan. And sit down. What are you working on now?”

“The riverine manual, sir.”

“Almost done?”

“Well, sir, it's been twenty years since it was revised. And with the new emphasis on littoral operations in the CNO Guidance, the time's right to update. Only I think it needs more attention.”

As he explained Mullaly looked thoughtful. “Maybe so, maybe so. I might be able to find a hundred thousand for that. And we could get our reserve unit to run the exercise. Can you give me a memo?”

“On my screen, Captain.”

“Okay, new subject. Just got a call. Your Philippine mission's approved. The orders are on their way by courier.”

He took a second to re orient. Then felt his hands go numb. “We're talking—this is the hijack, right? On the freighter? For the Shkval?”

“A covert operation. In every meaning of the term. Including the legal one. Covert, clandestine, and deniable.”

“Covert,” Dan repeated. He was getting that old sinking feeling. He stirred, suddenly feeling trapped in the chair's padded embrace. “Uh, sir, I'm still not totally up to speed on the terminology. I understand what ‘covert' means. But what do you mean by ‘clandestine' and ‘deniable'?”

“I'll give you the official definition. A ‘clandestine' action is one sponsored so the operation itself is secret and concealed. A ‘covert' action conceals the identity of the sponsor. So it could be clandestine but not covert, or covert but not clandestine. But in this case, of course, it'll be both.”

“And ‘deniable'?”

“That means you'll have orders, but they'll never leave my safe.”

“Unless we get into trouble?”

“Dan. There's no way the Navy could ever be connected with what essentially's an act of piracy.” Mullaly gave him a moment, then added, “So, we all clear?”

“Not quite, Captain. What I'm hearing is that if things go to shit, we're out there in the wind.”

“Not if we could help you, pick you up—that's not what I mean. There'd be forces on tap. Secure comms throughout. But if the cover blew off—no.”

Dan came to a seam in the logic and cleared his throat. “I get that, sir. But another question. My team. They'd just be following my orders, right? They wouldn't know whether I was off on my own, doing something out of bounds.”

“Well—not necessarily.”

“Will they see these orders?”

“No.”

“Then as far as they know, there
are
orders. Even if later, the government announces there never were any.”

Mullaly touched his fingers together. “I follow you. In that case, yes, I could probably cover them. As far as any court-martial proceedings, their pensions, insurance and so forth.”

Dan added the unspoken part of this chain of reasoning:
But not you
. “Well, sir, all that aside, and I have more questions along those lines, let's slow down a minute. On the action itself. I passed along that idea mainly because Teddy Oberg surfaced it. I don't believe I actually recommended we pursue it.”

“True. You didn't. I didn't, either. You don't ‘recommend' things like that. You just put them in a list of options and pass it along. But Higher likes it.”

“Uh, what other options did we pass along?”

“Basically it was do this action, or torpedo or otherwise sink the freighter, or wait for the spooks to come up with something better than what they tried in Moscow.”

“Which could take a while.”

“Longer than whoever's driving this train can wait,” Mullaly said. “They ran several iterations of the sink-the-freighter idea, but it always came out with too many worst-cases.”

Dan could see that. “Uh, do we know specifically who Higher is?”

Mullaly hesitated. “It's SecDef level.”

“The SecDef, sir? Or just his office?”

“Well, I assume it'll be his signature on it. What's the difference?”

He let that go for now. “Do they actually understand what we'd have to do, sir? We're talking about seizing a ship on the high seas. Then scuttling it. I don't have a problem with seizing these weapons. The fewer of these things some people have the safer we all are, themselves included. But the team would be at risk. And as you say, if the news the Navy was in that business got out—”

Mullaly pointed a finger. “Mind if I talk? Commander?”

“Sorry, Captain.”

“I'm sensing an argumentative mood, but I'm not sure I see the reason for it, frankly. Your people can be tasked with covert missions, when required. We agreed on that?”

“Yes, sir. That was made clear when you gave me Team Charlie.”

“Well, that's what you're being ordered to carry out.”

Dan sat gripping the armrests. Finally he got out, “Sir, I know I'm not responding with much enthusiasm. But I can't pretend to be gung-ho about this. It's illegal, and it could be very dangerous for my people.”

“Really? You've made a career out of crossing the line. In ways that, frankly, a lot of senior people didn't think was warranted by your orders. True or false?”

“Those were situations where there was no other choice.”

“You had another choice: obey your orders.”

“When they were stupid orders? Not to be non-Joint, sir, but that sounds like Armythink to me. I thought the Navy had a different tradition. Right back to Nelson and his blind eye.”

“You're not Nelson,” Mullaly said. “But my point was, you've crossed the line before. This time, you're going to do it to carry out an officially assigned mission.”

Dan tried to think it through. This was no time to get angry. No time for emotion. He reached for that clear cold detachment he sometimes reached in extremis, and maybe got a little of it. Because he'd made it his business to carefully read the regulations and rules of engagement that covered what Team Charlie could and could not do. Unlike the movies, you didn't get orders for a secret operation on a self-destructing tape. He'd read National Security Decision Directive 286, and the requirements for covert action notification and approval by Congress. “Well, sir, I'll look forward to reading those orders. When they come in. Did the oversight committee get prior notice?”

“You're better off if they don't. Sensitive contacts have been made, with groups we're not officially speaking to. The fewer people know, the less chance of leaks while you're in the field.”

“But that's part of the oversight process.”

“By law. Correct. And those entities will be informed in the proper manner. Which is all they're entitled to, and all you need to know.” Mullaly pushed back his chair and got up; Dan rose, too. His CO nodded, his manner cooler than when Dan had come in. “The courier will be here this afternoon. Start setting up your transportation and getting your guys notified. Remind them: close hold. As far as their families are concerned, this is just another SATYRE exercise.”

He nodded again; Dan stood by the door. But for some reason he didn't want to leave, as if leaving meant it would all happen, and if he stayed, maybe it wouldn't. “I'd feel better if we had some sort of cover story. Just in case it really does go wrong.”

“My advice is, don't waste time worrying about it,” Mullaly told him. “You're just going to have to hang your butt over the edge. As you've done before. Now put that riverine shit on the back burner and get your team ready to go.”

Crouched, letting his eyes adapt to the dim beneath the trees, Oberg bent to check the Glock in his leg sheath. The knife, not the pistol—a heavy-duty thin-blade he'd used in Iraq to cut truck tires off their rims. It was sturdy and lightweight, and he could sharpen it with a file. Then he straightened, and followed Sosukan's black tee. He kept his gaze moving between the trees, probing the shadows. He didn't trust this guy, and wasn't sure he trusted the people who'd sent him to them.

The Filipino was MNLF. And the Moro National Liberation Front was supposed to have made a truce, or at least a temporary cease-fire, with the Manila government. So far, so good. But when an insurgent group compromised, it had a way of splintering. An op was only as good as its intel, but on this one, they didn't have Team intel.