by Bob Mayer
ZEROFI
LOSTON
TLOSTO
TDEGRE
TWODEG
LPRESU
RTZERO
VEEXFI
WAYOUT
NWAYOU
ESTWOT
REESTH
MEDKIL
TWOONE
LONTIM
XXREPE
TVICLO
HREEMI
REEZER
LEDXXR
FIVEZU
EONEAI
ATONEA
NGONET
NUTESL
OMINUT
EFUELI
LUXXXX
RCRAFT
IRCRAF
WOEIGH
ATFOUR
ESXXAL
NGDEPA
Hossey's trained eye broke out the message from the six-letter groups. MESSAGE: NUMBER 05. Exfil on time, one aircraft lost on way out, repeat, one aircraft lost on way out, vicinity longitude 128 degrees 23 minutes, latitude 42 degrees 30 minutes. All presumed killed. Refueling, depart 0215 Zulu.
One aircraft, Hossey thought. Half the team and two pilots dead. Eight men. Hossey listlessly handed the message to Hooker, then sat down at his desk. He knew he should immediately forward the information to the SFOB, but he needed a few moments to let the reality of the loss sink in. They wouldn't find out who had been killed until the survivors landed here in three and a half hours.
Fort Meade, Maryland Friday, 9 June, 0200 Zulu Thursday, 8 June, 9:00 p.m. Local
Down the corridor in Tunnel 3, General Olson and his staff were celebrating the successful exfiltration of the Special Forces team and the completion of their exercise. All had gone well in the simulation; the mission had been a success.
In Meng's office, the emotions were much different. Meng looked at the message about the lost aircraft another time. This was real. Eight men were dead because of his manipulations. He wasn't sure what to do. It was only a matter of time before the curtain of his deception was torn asunder. Questions would be asked. Meng thought he could control the FOB relatively well for a while yet. The surviving Blackhawk would drop the rest of the team at Osan and then, after a debrief and some rest, fly back to Misawa and down to Okinawa. Meng wondered how well the cover stories would work that had been concocted in the oplan against the possible loss of a helicopter. Would they work against the people who had written them?
Meng considered the situation. The aviation detachment commander from the 1 st Special Forces Group was supposed to report the aircraft lost at sea during classified training. The FOB commander was supposed to back him up on that. The problem would come when someone at USSOCOM put two and two together and came up with five. Meng ran the scenario through his computer. The answer was that he had anywhere from thirty-six to seventy-two hours, with a statistical mean of forty-eight, before someone started asking questions.
Meng rubbed his eyes wearily. He had that much time before the walls came crumbling down. He prayed the attack had moved the Old Men, even if just a little.
USS Rathbume, Tatar Strait Friday, 9 June, 0200 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 11:00 a.m. Local
The ship's doctor finished examining and cleaning the wounds. He'd never seen anything like them. The tall, silent man who'd accompanied the patient into the infirmary had been uncommunicative so far.
"What the hell happened to you?" the doctor asked as the patient finally came out of his drug-induced unconsciousness.
Despite being fuzzy headed from the morphine and loss of blood, O'Shaugnesy managed a weak smile. "I tripped over my rucksack."
Devito smiled and turned to the doctor. "He got mauled by a bear. I've got him on morphine, last injection was one hour ago. He's been taking whole blood for the last two hours. We need you to finish rebandaging him and give him some more antibiotics. We're taking off in a little while to take him to Korea and get him into a regular hospital."
The doctor was just finishing those procedures when three other men, dressed in the same black outfits and carrying exotic-looking weapons, came into the infirmary. They looked at the tall man, who shifted his gaze to the doctor. "Well, Doc? What do you think? Can he take another four-hour chopper ride back to a real hospital?"
The doctor considered. The tall man definitely knew something about medicine, the doctor could tell from what had been done so far, and had probably made up his own mind about the answer to that question. He was most likely just asking out of professional courtesy.
"I think getting him to a hospital as soon as possible is the best treatment he can receive right now. I really don't have the facilities here to do much more for him. Whoever's been treating him so far has done a super job. I've done as much as I can do."
"Let's take him on up, guys."
The doctor wondered where these men were going, and where they had come from. But he had a feeling he really didn't want to know.
Trapp supervised as they carefully loaded O'Shaugnesy onto the bird. The cleanly dressed naval officer who had met them when they landed was nowhere to be seen. Trapp expected as much. He climbed on board. The refueled Blackhawk lifted into the sky and turned to the southwest.
FOB, Osan Air Force Base, Korea Friday, 9 June, 0545 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 2:45 p.m. Local
Hooker and Hossey watched the Blackhawk touch down and roll toward the hangar. The cover story had already been released by the aviation detachment commander at Misawa Air Force Base in Japan. In fact, the U.S. and Japanese navies and air forces were presently conducting a search for survivors in the location where the helicopter supposedly had been lost.
In the hangar, with the doors shut behind it, the Blackhawk rolled to a halt. The ambulance crew, which Hossey had called, ran forward as the cargo doors opened. They loaded O'Shaugnesy onto a stretcher for his final ride to the hospital.
Hossey ticked off the faces in his mind as he watched the men offload: O'Shaugnesy, Trapp, Devito, Reese, Lalli, and Smith. Both Mitchell and Riley, he thought. Goddamn, not both. Which sparked a new thought in the colonel's mind: I'm going to have to see Mitchell's wife and tell her. He didn't look forward to that.
He looked at the dejected, beaten faces of the six who had made it home. Hossey walked over to Trapp. "What happened, Jim?"
Hooker edged up next to the two of them, forestalling Trapp's reply. "Sir, why don't we wait until we're in the isolation area and get some hot coffee and food."
Hossey nodded. As always the sergeant major made sense. The group walked across the hangar to a van. The team loaded their gear on board, and Hooker drove them and the pilots to the isolation area.
Hooker had dismissed the communications men, and the only ones now in the room were the six team members, the two pilots, and Hooker and Hossey. In the center of the operations center was a large table; on it were the maps Team 3 had used to plan the mission.
After the team members and pilots grabbed a cup of hot coffee, Hossey stood up to begin the debrief. "My first concern is what happened to the other aircraft." He turned to the chief pilot. "Where did they go down, how, and is there any chance of survivors?"
Hawkins leaned over the map and pointed. "They went down somewhere along here."
Hossey winced as he saw that it was over land. Hopefully, there were no identifiable pieces left, which also meant that the team members wouldn't be identifiable. He berated himself sharply in his own mind for such a coldhearted thought.
Hawkins continued. "We were flying up a draw, following it into the Changbai Mountains, where we figured we'd punch over the top, then drop right down and sprint for the sea. C.J. was leading me by about a hundred meters. You've got to remember that we were all under goggles." Hawkins described what had happened and his suspicions as to cause.
When he was done, it was Hooker who repeated the question nearest to Hossey's heart. "Do you think there might be survivors?"
Hawkins' answer was blunt. "No. That thing exploded as far as I could tell. We weren't too high up, probably eighty feet AGL. I
f it had just been an engine failure, C.J. probably could have autorotated into the trees. But an explosion, with all that fuel we had on board. . . ." Hawkins shook his head. "I did a sweep back across where they should have gone down and all I could see was a fire under the trees."
Hossey asked the next question that had to be asked from the point of view of mission success. "What about wreckage? Do you think it will be identifiable?"
Hawkins was exasperated. Didn't these idiots understand what he was telling them? 'The damn helicopter blew up, sir. There probably aren't enough pieces left to figure out what the hell type of aircraft it was, never mind identify its source."
Hossey hung his head. Trapp spoke for the first time. "What are you going to do about the wreckage, sir?"
Hossey looked up. "What do you mean, what am I going to do?"
"You're not going to check on it? There still could be somebody alive back there."
Hossey rubbed his head as he considered the problem. "Now that we have a good fix on location, I'll have the SFOB run satellite imagery on the next pass over, which will probably be in a couple of hours. There's not much else we can do right now." He turned to Hooker. "Finish the debrief while I contact the SFOB and give them the grids for the crash site."
Fort Meade, Maryland Friday, 9 June, 0600 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 1:00 a.m. Local
Meng sat at the master console. Tunnel 3 was quiet. The SFOB staff was down to only a watch officer. All that was left for the USSOCOM people to do was the debrief the next day. Meng had sent Wilson home with instructions to handle that tomorrow. He looked as a new message from the real FOB appeared on his screen. He transcribed the location of the crash and sent a request next door to the NSA for the imagery to be forwarded to the FOB. There was no sense in alarming the FOB commander, Meng reasoned, by not answering this request.
FOB, Osan Air Force Base, Korea Friday, 9 June, 0717 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 4:17 p.m. Local
Hossey looked over the faxed imagery with Trapp. The resolution and quality were unbelievable. Even so, the remains of the helicopter were hard to distinguish. The only reason they knew it was the location where the helicopter had gone down was because of the burn marks. There was no large piece of wreckage, just a few burned fragments barely visible through the trees. If that had happened before landing, then no one could have survived, Hossey knew.
He looked up and addressed Trapp. "Tell me again what you told me after the debriefing."
Trapp had pulled the colonel aside, fifteen minutes ago, at the conclusion of the debriefing, and he had clearly been agitated. "Sir, we're kissing those guys off too easy. That pilot was under goggles and all he saw was the initial explosion. I watched something go down in flames into the trees, but I don't think it was big enough to be the whole bird. Maybe something blew off it and the rest of the bird came down intact."
Now, Trapp looked at the colonel. "I'm sorry, sir. After seeing this I guess I was wrong."
Hossey rubbed the stubble of growth that had grown on his chin over the past thirty-six hours. "I'm not sure, Jim. I'm just not sure. What about the radio, either SATCOM or 70? Did the guys on the other bird have that?"
Not totally trusting the SATCOM, the detachment had made a private agreement with Hossey. Unknown to the SFOB, Team 3 had carried an extra radio, the Special Forces standard high-frequency PRC70, on the mission.
They had carried it in fear that the SATCOM might be cut off for whatever reason, most particularly if they weren't exfiltrated on time. If the SATCOM channel was shut down, Hossey was supposed to have the DET-K commo people set up a high-frequency base station and monitor an emergency guard net.
The team was to use the PRC70 only in emergencies, and only after they weren't receiving any more messages on the SATCOM, or if the messages received on the SATCOM lacked Hossey's authenticator. The 70 had been the team's ace in the hole against a loss of the primary means of communication.
The plan had been Riley's idea and Hossey had agreed with the team sergeant's reasoning. It was always good to have an alternate means of communications. Now Hossey wanted to know what had happened to that radio.
Trapp looked embarrassed. "We torched it, sir. We burned everything at the pickup zone before getting on the helicopters. You know we were briefed to get rid of everything to reduce the weight. Riley and Mitchell had figured that if we made it on the helicopters we wouldn't need that stuff anymore."
Hossey shook his head. That had been a mistake. He looked at the pictures again. "I guess it doesn't matter now anyway."
Everything here was shutting down. The Blackhawk crew would spend the night, then fly back to Misawa to link up with their support element there. O'Shaugnesy would remain in the hospital another week before being transferred back to the States for further care. Hossey ordered the remaining members of Team 3 to go up to Yongsan and stay on post for the next few days. He had already fed them the oplan cover story.
Jim Trapp had volunteered to accompany Hossey on his next task. They would drive up to ChunChon the next morning to inform Mitchell's wife of his death. None of the other people lost had been married, as far as Hossey knew. Hooker had reported that Chong had had a local girl in Seoul with whom he'd been close, and volunteered to break the news to her the next day.
Hossey wrote out his last message to the SFOB, then transmitted it. Immediately afterward, the commo equipment was broken down and they started loading up for the ride back up to Seoul and home.
"They die away and are reborn; recurrent,
as are the passing seasons."
Sun Tzu: The Art of War
14
Western Slope, Changbai Mountains, China Thursday, 8 June, 2155 Zulu Friday, 9 June, 5:55 a.m. Local
The explosion of the number 4 external fuel tank blew the flaming pod away from the helicopter and sprayed the entire top right side of the aircraft with pieces of metal. The shrapnel tore through the turbine engines, simultaneously causing both engines to fail.
C.J. felt a total loss of power as he was trying to regain control of the wildly careening helicopter. He had three seconds from the initial explosion before the Blackhawk hit the trees, and he utilized that scant time as best he could. Automatically he brought the cyclic all the way up to its stops while pushing the cyclic forward to level the aircraft. With the loss of hydraulics, the stick responded sluggishly. The Blackhawk hit the trees nose down and rolled to the left. Bones cracked in C.J.'s right hand as he made a final desperate effort to keep the aircraft from flipping over before impact.
The aircraft tore through the thick tree cover and came to a halt on the ground. The combination of the original forward speed of ninety knots and the sudden drop in altitude produced a collision that crumpled the left front of the helicopter. Shattered glass, twisted metal, and foliage filled the cockpit.
On impact all the occupants of the cargo bay were thrown forward in a pile. Buried under the bodies of the rest of the team, Riley lay still until the helicopter came to a rest. He could feel the others stirring as they tried to get up. He heard someone in the front screaming in pain, but his first priority was to get himself untangled, then get a door opened and his people out before the helicopter exploded. Riley could smell jet fuel leaking. As soon as that fuel touched part of the hot engine, the helicopter would burst into flames.
In the confused darkness, it was Comsky who got the right cargo door open. Using all the strength in his short, powerful body, he wrenched the door off its rollers and shoved it aside. Then he proceeded to get people out by the expedient method of picking them up and throwing them through the open door. Olinski, Hoffman, and Chong were propelled out the door. He looked next at Riley, who signaled that he was all right.
Riley turned to help Mitchell, who was trying to tear through the wreckage and free the copilot. The pilot, in the right front seat, was trying to unbuckle his copilot but was able to use only one arm. The copilot was in bad shape. The whole left front of the helicopter was pressed against his seat. Blood was spla
ttered about—a darker color than the flat gray of the interior paint.
As he leaned over the copilot's seat and tried to unfasten his seat belt, Riley saw something that turned his stomach. The front instrument console had been twisted back by the impact and had torn into the copilot's legs. Jagged metal had cut his thighs to the bone, pinning him to his armored seat. Riley could see the white bone against the console's edge.
Riley slid back and grabbed Mitchell by the shoulders. He pointed at the copilot's legs and then at the flowing fuel. He shouted at both Mitchell and the pilot. "Get out! He's a goner. We can't get him out in time before it blows. GO! GO!"
Riley shoved Mitchell toward the open cargo door, where Comsky waited patiently. With one large paw, Comsky grabbed Mitchell and hauled the team leader out. Riley saw that Hoffman had climbed back into the helicopter during all this and was hammering away at something in the rear of the cargo compartment.
"Get out!" Riley yelled at Hoffman. He didn't know what Hoffman was doing, but he didn't have time to find out. Fuel finally reached the hot engine exhausts and burst into flames. Instantly, the entire left side of the helicopter became an inferno. Riley clambered away from the flames as the copilot screamed in agony. The pilot paused in his door on the way out. Looking back at Riley, he pointed with his right hand. Riley quickly understood and nodded. The pilot rolled free out of the right front door.
Riley held himself steady in the right cargo door, ignoring the flames licking at his feet. He drew his 9mm pistol, aimed quickly, and fired twice. Then he jumped out, closely followed by Hoffman, who was cradling something in his arms.
Comsky, Chong, and Mitchell were dragging Olinski away from the burning helicopter as Riley and Hoffman caught up with them. The pilot was fleeing off to their left. They were thirty meters away when the helicopter exploded.
