by David Poyer
“What, Knobby?”
“Today’s my birthday. Forgot till now. Can you feature that?”
“Fucking way to spend your birthday, Knobby. On mission. Don’t get much better than that, does it?… Hey, operators. Today’s Swager’s fucking birthday.”
Catcalls and hoots. A grenade came arching and hit Swager’s chest. Teddy grabbed it and made sure the pin was still taped. “Goddamnit! Settle down! Smeg, what the fuck are you doin’ up there?” The SEAL, hammering out plastic with the butt of his M4, froze. “Leave that fuckin’ alone! We’re going high and cold. Besides, you screw with Dusty’s windows, he’s gonna beat my ass. He’s a mean little motherfucker and I believe he just might.”
More catcalls, obscene invitations to both Obie and the pilot. Teddy grinned. “You silly fuckers,” he whispered. The clamor of the rotors changed, from the flat whick-whick of zero pitch to a deep whum as Palladino poured on power. The deck lurched, and Teddy grew heavy as his sins. Then they were airborne, and the outlines of warehouses and tents swam past the open rear ramp. Past the squatting door gunner, straddling his weapon like a barstool cowboy on a mechanical bull. Teddy’s heart thumped, shaking his chest. His collarbone, hip, shoulder, didn’t hurt anymore. The fizz seethed in his blood.
Out of nowhere he remembered popping bad guys the night before. One ten-ring after another. Like falling plates at a pistol range. Payback was hell, all right. For the towers. The Pentagon. The bombed embassies. You’d never get them all, but sometimes you just had to thin out the cockroaches in the kitchen.
He wouldn’t be able to do this forever. But it was way better than making movie deals, than hitting the rocks in his 4Runner. Better than fucking starlets until they cried and tried to get to the phone by the bed. If he bought it, he’d die with the best toys in the world in his hands.
The aircraft banked. He caught another shadow behind them, then another and another against the stars: attack helos, escorting them. He took deep, slow breaths, slumped against vibrating aluminum, swallowing to clear his ears. Smiling under his pulled-up scarf as the lightless wind roared in.
23
In the White Mountains
THE Chinooks flew black. The only illumination was a faint radiance from up in the cockpit. Teddy saw now why Palladino hadn’t wanted them to kick out the windows for better visibility. There wasn’t any. Even with NVGs, the world outside was oblivion past the crouching tail ramp gunner. No stars. Overcast. No moon. The only light the comet of heat from an Apache riding herd. The freezing cold penetrated the icy aluminum. All the interior heaters were off; they diverted power from the engines. Maneuver buffet and updrafts threw them around until Teddy had to grope for the restraints with one hand, gripping his rifle drowning-tight with the other.
A perfect night for someone to slip away from a vengeful enemy who thought he had you surrounded.
The big Chinook could’ve carried all of Echo, if they weren’t limited in lift by the altitude. But for that reason, as well as that they were being inserted at different points, Echo Two was in this bird while Verstegen honchoed One in the other. Palladino had wanted to land twice, at different offset HLZs, but Teddy had convinced him to do it in one touchdown, with the squad pushing both up and down the trail. Since they had two OPs to cover, they’d decided at the rock drill back at Jaguar that O’Brien would take the first stop group, composed of the best shooters—Harley, Moogie, and Tore. Teddy would lead the backstoppers, with Doc and Mud Cat and Swager, a few hundred meters down the trail.
Unfortunately, the mission had come down so fast they didn’t have much beyond that single drill to run on. Usually, you preplanned code words and phrases the platoon would need during the op. Some identified specific geographic locations along the route to and from the objective. Others, locations or objects near or at the objective, rally points, or along the emergency evac routes. There might be different words for individual HVTs, types of enemy forces, weapons, equipment, or obstacles. Since the bad guys could be monitoring your freqs, experienced platoons changed codes for each op. At least they had a platoon standard terminology they could fall back on, and the usual hand and arm signals. An adhocracy, as Tatie called it.
But that was how SEALs trained. Take what you got and deal with it.
“End Zone in sight,” Palladino said over the IC. “Not exactly landing point size four, but I can hold the rear wheels there until you’re off.”
Teddy had the helo’s IC jacked into one ear and his 300 in the other. “LZ in sight,” he passed to the others, then clicked back to the pilot. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Done it before. Uphill a quarter of a click and you’re at the crest of the ridge.”
“The trail runs along the ridge?”
“Ask the goats where the fucking trail goes. I’m just looking at what they gave me at the two shop. When you unass, make sure your guys don’t get turned around and head toward the front of the bird. I’m gonna be hanging my dick out over a ravine, pressing my rear wheels into the slope. Capisce?”
Teddy wasn’t sure he liked this. “You sure this is an achievable, Dusty?”
“Only Z up here. Rest of it’s either straight up or down, or too narrow to go in on. Plus I want to be where I can’t get hit by these downdrafts. They come over the ridgeline and curl down. We get caught in one of those, it’s trouble. We got major power constraints, and that’s a two-thousand-foot drop.”
“Can you do a pass first? See if there’s anybody down there? This is an active ratline, right?”
“I got FLIR on it. No movement on the ridge.” FLIR was the Chinook’s forward-looking infrared night vision, sharper and longer-ranged than the goggles. “A low pass’ll just wake ’em up. Trust the intel, Chief.”
“Trust the … fuck that! I want eyes. I don’t want to insert if there’s anybody—”
“In and out, Oberg. It is what it is: in and out.”
Teddy finally rogered. Blind wasn’t how he liked to go in. But this was a hasty mission. He splayed five fingers; six sets of NVGs looked back like the glowing orbs of lorises from the jungle night. And time crawled by.
“One minute.”
He gave his guys one finger. Sixty seconds to being on the ground, in Pakistan, where they weren’t supposed to be. Nobody said anything. Or maybe it was just inaudible over the engines, spooled up to max power to keep them aloft in this insubstantial air.
“Thirty seconds.”
He flashed back to the Fenteni assault, where Sumo had gotten zipped. The guys crammed into the narrow box of a SH-60. Everybody coated in a buttery film of sweat like so many hotcakes.
Pineapple-flavored chewing gum.
They got us stone, babe.
Cold sweat broke all over Teddy’s body. He couldn’t do this. Not again. He let the terror build, then grabbed it. Turned it a hundred and eighty and there it was. The Buzz, bigger than he’d ever felt it. Blazing down every nerve, sheathing every bone with invincibility, every muscle with ten times his normal strength. Just like Superman.
“Concentrate and live,” Teddy said into the 300. “Fuck up and die. Hooyah!”
“Hooyah!” It went down the interior of the helo.
The fuselage canted in a tight turn. Bodies leaned on bodies. Floated, grew heavy, then light. The turbines roared. Something rattled past along the outside, as if they were in a submarine and someone were dragging chains over the hull. Stones, whipped up by the rotorwash. The rear gunner, leaning out over the ramp, peering down into what still seemed like complete darkness. “Fifteen feet. Ten. Clear back here. Five—”
The whole aircraft jarred, the rear wheels slamming into granite in the dark. “Go,” Palladino said, but Teddy’d already ripped the headset off, tripped the restraints, and jumped to his feet.
The ramp went the rest of the way down, and he ran toward howling darkness and a sudden chaos of wind. Grit and driven snow bit his face. He slammed into the rear gunner, caromed off someone else. They knotted, then broke
free.
He dropped two feet, stumbling under a hundred and forty pounds of ruck and weapons as they plunged into knee-deep snow that prostrated the shadow ahead of him full length on the ground. For a confused frozen instant that seemed infinitely long, he wondered how he could see.
Agonizing light flared in his goggles. He doubled over, screaming, and snatched them off, squinting as the moisture on the surface of his eyeballs froze.
A magnesium-bright flare burned like a midnight sun directly above, driven sideways by the howling wind even as it hovered. As it declined, it outlined everything on the slanted mountainside with unendurable clarity. The chopper, cemented onto the slope by the downward thrust of blurring rotors. Its blunt cockpit, the insectile refueling probe extending over an abyss that plunged into darkness without end. In its anal maw Teddy caught the startled, uptilted face of the rear gunner, the glare glinting off his faceplate like a single bright eye. The outlines of two SEALs, one gripping a handhold above the ramp, the other folded over his midriff. And farther in, behind him, the backturned goggled visages of the side minigunners. The very scuffs on the aluminum flooring glittered, so harsh and intense was the light.
So much—he had time for the one thought, as he jerked himself up and goose-stepped forward through the snow—so much for the advantages of night-vision technology.
The aircraft tilted forward at the same moment as the clatter of Kalashnikovs erupted above them. As the flare traced an arcing afterimage that burned green across the black sky, the aircrew snapped into their weapons. The port minigun searched, steadied. It fired one short, droning burst. No tracers; tracers pointed both ways.
The engines labored harder, rotors pulling air. Grabbing the wind, torquing it beneath milling blades inches from slanting stone. The forward half of the craft swung as if on a string hung from infinite space. A gap appeared beneath the rear wheels.
A second shadow appeared under the laboring, slowly rising Chinook. The two angled away from each other. Teddy stared, stumbling backward, unable to make out what was going on.
The flare guttered and went out, a cherry-red spark falling away into the howling darkness below, as a blazing thing howled past trailing a billowing white cloud. It flew over his head and disappeared into the Chinook’s right turbine exhaust.
The world came apart into orange flame. Teddy was deep in the snow, hands over his head, as debris came hissing and whacking down all around. The flames penetrated the white with harsh, flickering yellow.
Concentrate and live. Fuck up and die.
He forced thought through noise and flame like molasses through a pinhole. Either a MANPAD or an RPG. And by the way it had homed into the engine, a man-carried portable antiaircraft missile.
Why hadn’t anyone figured that the enemy would leave their own OPs to guard the escape route their HVTs planned to use? And that the operators guarding that route, in a world where everyone knew Americans dropped from the sky in helicopters, would have Stingers?
“Ambush front!” he screamed.
He exploded out of the snow and, with one backward glance, saw a second flaming meteor pass just over the rotor hub of the flaming, falling helicopter.
Tearing his gaze away as Chisel 03 spun away into the darkness, shedding parts and great gouts of tangerine flame, he charged up the mountain, screaming and shooting. From the snow around him burst other shapes like whales surging from the deep. They shook snow from their weapons and oriented on the threat. Teddy noted muzzle flashes ahead and from the right flank, both at higher elevation than the ground Echo Two occupied. They were square in the kill zone. Their only defense was ferocious attack. “Kill the motherfuckers!” he shouted. He hasty-slinged and dropped to a solid kneeling position and fired out a magazine, the heavy rifle bucking into his shoulder with each squeeze of the trigger, aiming below the gunflashes.
“Magazine,” he shouted, and rose and charged uphill again over snow covering loose scree as Moogie, at his right hand, went to full auto. Another flare ignited above them. He’d never felt so naked. Kill zone. Exit the kill zone. Rifle grenades whonked out, flashing along the ridge. His thighs burned. He fired again, on the run, powering up the last few yards to stumble over the lip of a rise. A windy darkness opened around him. A crest. His boots caught on something, and he tumbled into a shallow trench.
A form rose up, shaggy and dark, and embraced him with a hoarse shout. The flare wavered and dropped, the last glint dying red as hot embers. In total darkness once more he lost thought in the mindless immediacy of hand-to-hand, face-to-face, breath-to-breath. A struggle too close for any weapons but hands and knife. The other was strong and he fought but not for long. Not with a steel edge slashed across windpipe and jugular.
When his enemy groaned and slumped and his final breath rattled, Teddy rolled away, wiping the thin-bladed Glock on his thigh. His belly and upper legs were warm with the other man’s blood. It felt good. He groped for his rifle and couldn’t find it. Then remembered, and pulled up his NVGs.
His weapon blurred into shape and presence two yards beyond his enemy’s outflung arm. Past it another SEAL swayed locked with a second fighter. As Teddy scrambled for the rifle, a hand rose and dropped and they split apart. One fell; the second staggered on for two steps before also drooping, as if melting into the snow.
A respite while he lay full length, gripping the weapon and freezing his lungs with each labored breath. His legs burned. His head swam. He gagged and a little vomit came up. He spat it out and crammed snow into his mouth and sat up warily, rifle mounted, taking stock past the lit circle of the scope.
Occasional bursts of fire stitched the dark. Whoever had fired the missile had pulled back, slightly upslope still, and to the right. They’d overrun an advanced fighting position, that was all. He tried to remember the terrain. The pass was flanked by ridges that were the top of the mountain proper. Both ridges were narrow and steep, stony blades jutting out of the snow. The bigger was to the west. That was where they’d planned to set up the OP.
Teddy burst up and sprinted, then sank beside one of the men who’d fallen. A partially unwrapped turban. A dark cape, spread over the snow.
The next sprawled form was the squad leader, O’Brien. But he didn’t respond to a shake. When Teddy rolled him over, he saw the muj Vaseline had killed had managed to nearly saw the SEAL’s head off. Teddy eased him back down. Then changed his mind, rolled him up on his side in front of him, and braced the SR on the dead man’s ribs. He put his eye to the scope.
Green flashes outlined moving forms amid the blowing snow. He aimed carefully and fired. One dropped and stopped moving.
Whoever else was out there stopped firing. In the lull he hit the tac circuit. Moogie, Mud Cat, and Doc answered up. Doc said he didn’t think Harley and Tore had made it out of the chopper. Teddy remembered the swaying forms, outlined by light. Swager didn’t respond. Not him too? Teddy thought. Shit; down three shooters before they’d even set foot on the mountain. They put together a count and got eight on the opposing team.
“We really stuck our head in the fucking hornets’ nest,” Moogie said gloomily.
A spark in the dark, and a bullet snapped close to his head. A deeper boom than the AKs made arrived an instant later. Fuck, did one of the mujs have night vision? If so, this’d be a different ball game. Whoever was up there, they were a different story from the ragged Taliban they’d rolled up in the valley. Black turbans. Capes. The Fifty-Five Brigade? No plan survives contact with the enemy. As the muj fired again, another man rolled in beside Teddy. He had his pistol half drawn when Swager yelled into his ear, “Radio’s fucked. I can hear you, but I can’t transmit.”
“Yo, just follow me.” Teddy went back to the circuit. “Anybody see movement?”
“Nothing here.”
“No movement.”
“Obie, d’you see Vaseline?”
“He’s down hard, Doc. Got his head cut half off. All hands: These guys are pure shooters. May be the double-nickel
brigade. They had to be right at minimum range on the Strelas, or whatever they hit the bird with. Where’s my electron fucker? Moogie?”
“I think I’m off to your right.”
“See if you can get Verstegen, or the other bird. Or Boss Man, if you can.”
Boss Man was the code name for the AWACS, the big eye in the sky that saw all and knew all. Or was supposed to, anyway.
“It’s not going so good. I’m not getting a lot of cunt juice out of these batteries.”
“Keep trying. If One can fall back toward us, we’ll box these guys in, both ends of the pass. I’m gonna move up to you. Me and Swager and Mud Cat will cover. Cat, got the pig? Didn’t leave it on the bird?”
“She ain’t no pig. Gentle Lady’s layin’ here with me, Obie.”
“Good. When we lay down cover, everybody else fire a 203, then fade back behind us and push hard over to the left. Maybe a hundred meters, there’s a ridge. Get up there and dig in, then maybe we can get gunship support.”
Disengaging under fire was an immediate action drill they’d all practiced hundreds of times. Except maybe Swager. Teddy slapped the new guy and they burst up together, or rather, staggered. The deceptively smooth snow disguised uneven rock and they fell again and again. He saw the others ahead and angled to the side. Another flash, another bullet, even closer. They had to get the play under way before the shooters above tried to flank them. He hoped they didn’t have mortars. But tough to imagine anybody lugging mortars up here. He dropped and rolled and yelled, “Cat. Locked and loaded?”
“Right here, Chief.”
“Any joy on One?”
“Haven’t got ’em yet. Still trying.”
Screaming figures appeared out of the flying snow. Black shapes flickered above them like accompanying demons, and Teddy blinked before realizing: the capes, whipping in the wind. For thirty seconds the SEAL line was a blaze of burst fire. All four attackers sank into the snow. Teddy slapped in another magazine and looked to reacquire, but there were no more targets. Just motionless, prone blobs and the green-black seethe of night vision.
