by Tom Clancy
Cutter grinned as he reached for his coffee. It was time to smooth some ruffled feathers, he thought. “God, it’s nice to work with a real pro. Look on the bright side, Bob. We’ll have two full weeks to interrogate whatever turns up in the air net, and the insertion teams will have a much better idea of where they’re needed.”
You’ve already won, you son of a bitch. Do you have to rub it in? Ritter wanted to ask. He wondered what would have happened if he’d called Cutter’s cards. What would the President have said? Ritter’s position was a vulnerable one. He’d grumbled long and loud within the intelligence community that CIA hadn’t run a serious field operation in ... fifteen years? It depended on what you meant by “serious,” didn’t it? Now he was being given the chance, and what had been a nice line to be spoken at the coffee sessions during high-level government conferences was now a gray chicken come home to roost. Field operations like this were dangerous. Dangerous to the participants. Dangerous to those who gave the orders. Dangerous to the governments that sponsored them. He’d told Cutter that often enough, but like many, the National Security Adviser was mesmerized by the glamour of field ops. It was known in the trade as the Mission: Impossible Syndrome. Even professionals could confuse a TV drama with reality, and, throughout government, people tended to hear only that which they wished to hear, and to ignore the unpleasant parts. But it was somewhat late for Ritter to give out his warnings. After all, he’d complained for years that such a mission was possible, and occasionally a desirable adjunct to international policy. And he’d said often enough that his directorate still knew how to do it. The fact that he’d had to recruit field operatives from the Army and Air Force had escaped notice. Time had been when the Agency had been able to use its own private air force and its own private army ... and if this worked out, perhaps those times would come again. It was a capability the Agency and the country needed, Ritter thought. Here, perhaps, was his chance to make it all happen. If putting up with amateur power-vendors like Cutter was the price of getting it, then that was the price he’d have to pay.
“Okay, I’ll get things moving.”
“I’ll tell the boss. How soon do you expect we’ll have results ... ?”
“Impossible to say.”
“But before November,” Cutter suggested lightly.
“Yeah, probably by then.” Politics, too, of course. Well, that was what kept traffic circling around the beltway.
The 1st Special Operations Wing was based at Hurlburt Field, at the west end of the Eglin Air Force Base complex in Florida. It was a unique unit, but any military unit with “Special” in its name was unique by its very nature. The adjective was used for any number of meanings. “Special weapons” most often meant nuclear weapons, and here the word was used to avoid offending the sensibilities of those for whom “nuclear” connoted mushroom clouds and megadeaths; it was as though a change of wording could effect a change of substance, yet another characteristic of governments all over the world. “Special Operations,” on the other hand, meant something else. Generally it denoted covert business, getting people into places where they ought not to be, supporting them while they were there, and getting them out after concluding business that they ought not to have done in the first place. That, among other things, was the business of the 1st.
Colonel Paul Johns—“PJ”—didn’t know everything the wing did. The 1st was rather an odd grouping where authority didn’t always coincide with rank, where the troops provided support for the aircraft and crews without always knowing why they did so, where aircraft came and went on irregular schedules, and where people weren’t encouraged to speculate or ask questions. The wing was divided into individual fiefdoms that interacted with others on an ad hoc basis. PJ’s fiefdom included half a dozen MH-53J “Pave Low III” helicopters. Johns had been around for quite a while, and somehow had managed to spend nearly all of his Air Force career in the air. It was a career path that guaranteed him both a fulfilling, exciting career, and precisely zero chance at ever wearing general’s stars. But on that score he didn’t give much of a damn. He’d joined the Air Force to fly; something generals don’t get to do very much. He’d kept his part of the bargain, and the service had kept its, which wasn’t quite as common an arrangement as some would imagine. Johns had early on eschewed fixed-wing aircraft, the fast-movers that dropped bombs or shot down other aircraft. A people-person all of his life, Johns had started off in the Jolly Green Giants, the HH-3 rescue helicopters of Vietnam fame, then graduated to the Super Jolly HH-53, part of the Air Rescue Service. As a brash young captain he’d flown in the Song Tay Raid, copilot of the aircraft that had deliberately crashed into the prison camp twenty miles west of Hanoi as part of the effort to rescue people who, it turned out, had been moved just a short time before. That had been one of the few failures in his life. Colonel Johns was not a man accustomed to such things. If you went down, PJ would come get you. He was the third-ranking all-time rescue specialist in the Air Force. The current Chief of Staff and two other general officers had been excused a stay in the Hanoi Hilton because of him and his crews. PJ was a man who only rarely had to buy himself a drink. He was also a man whom general officers saluted first. It was a tradition that went along with the Medal of Honor.
Like most heroes, he was grossly ordinary. Only five-six and a hundred thirty pounds, he looked like any other middle-aged man picking up a loaf of bread in the base exchange. The reading glasses he now had to wear made him look rather like a friendly suburban banker, and he did not often raise his voice. He cut his own grass when he had the time, and his wife did it when he didn’t. His car was a fuel-efficient Plymouth Horizon. His son was studying engineering at Georgia Tech, and his daughter had won a scholarship to Princeton, leaving him and his wife an overly quiet house on post in which to contemplate the retirement that lay a few years in the future.
But not now. He sat in the left seat of the Pave Low helicopter checking out a bright young captain who, everyone thought, was ready to be a command pilot himself. The multimillion-dollar helicopter was skimming treetops at a hair under two hundred knots. It was a dark, cloudy night over the Florida panhandle, and this part of the Eglin complex wasn’t brightly lit, but that didn’t matter. Both he and the captain wore special helmets with built-in low-light goggles, not terribly unlike what Darth Vader wore in Star Wars. But these worked, converting the vague darkness ahead into a green and gray display. PJ kept his head moving around, and made sure that the captain did the same. One danger with the night-vision gear was that your depth perception—a matter of life and death to a low-level flyer—was degraded by the artificial picture generated by the masks. Perhaps a third of the squadron’s operational losses, Johns thought, could be traced to that particular hazard, and the technical wizards hadn’t come up with a decent fix yet. One problem with the Pave Lows was that operational and training losses were relatively high. It was a price of the mission for which they trained, and there was no answer to that but more training.
The six-bladed rotor spun overhead, driven by the two turboshaft engines. Pave Low was about as big as helicopters got, with a full combat crew of six and room for over forty combat-equipped passengers. The nose bulged at various places with radar, infrared, and other instruments—the general effect was of an insect from another planet. At doors on each side of the airframe were mounts for rotary miniguns, plus another at the tail cargo door, because their primary mission, covert insertion and support of special-operations forces, was a dangerous business—as was the secondary role they practiced tonight, combat search-and-rescue. During his time in Southeast Asia, PJ had worked with A-1 Skyraider attack bombers, the Air Force’s last piston-engine attack aircraft, called SPADs or Sandys. Exactly who would support them today was still something of an open question. To protect herself, in addition to the guns the aircraft carried flare and chaff pods, IR jamming and suppression gear ... and her crew of madmen.
Johns smiled within his helmet. This was real flying, and there w
asn’t much of that left. They had the option of flying with the aid of an autopilot-radar-computer system that hedgehopped automatically, but tonight they were simulating a system failure. Autopilot or not, the pilot was responsible for flying the airplane, and Willis was doing his best to keep the helicopter down on the treetops. Every so often Johns would have to stop himself from flinching as an errant tree branch seemed certain to slap against the chopper’s underside, but Captain Willis was a competent young man, keeping the aircraft low, but not too low. Besides, as PJ knew from long experience, the top branches on trees were thin, fragile things that did nothing more than mar the paint. More than once he’d brought home a helicopter whose underside bore green stains like those on a child’s jeans.
“Distance?” Willis asked.
Colonel Johns checked the navigation display. He had a choice of Doppler, satellite, or inertial, plus the old-fashioned plotting board that he still used, and still insisted that all his people learn.
“Two miles, zero-four-eight.”
“Roger.” Willis eased off on the throttle.
For this training mission, an honest-to-God fighter pilot had “volunteered” to be trucked out to the boonies, where another helicopter had draped a parachute over a tree to simulate a genuinely shot-down airman, who had in turn activated a genuine rescue-beacon radio. One of the new tricks was that the chute was coated with a chemical that fluoresced on ultraviolet light. Johns did the copilot’s job of activating a low-power UV laser that scanned ahead, looking for the return signal. Whoever had come up with this idea deserved a medal, PJ thought. The worst, scariest, and always seemingly the longest part of any rescue mission was actually getting eyeballs on the victim. That was when the gomers on the ground, who were also out hunting, would hear the sound of the rotor and decide that they might as well bag two aircraft on the same day.... His Medal of Honor had come on such a mission over eastern Laos, when the crew of an F-105 Wild Weasel had attracted a platoon of NVA. Despite aggressive support from the Sandy team, the downed air-men hadn’t dared to reveal their position. But Johns had coldly decided not to go home empty, and his Jolly had absorbed two hundred rounds in a furious gunfight before getting both men out. Johns often wondered if he’d ever have the courage—lunacy—to try that again.
“I got a chute at two o’clock.”
“X-Ray Two-Six, this is Papa Lima; we have your chute. Can you mark your position?”
“Affirmative, tossing smoke, tossing green smoke.”
The rescuee was following proper procedure in telling the chopper crew what sort of smoke grenade he was using, but you couldn’t tell in the dark. On the other hand, the heat of the pyrotechnic device blazed like a beacon on the infrared display, and they could see their man.
“Got him?”
“Yep,” Willis answered, and spoke next to the crew chief. “Get ready, we have our victim.”
“Standing by, sir.” In the back the flight engineer, Senior Master Sergeant Buck Zimmer—he and the colonel went way back together—activated his winch controls. At the end of the steel cable was a heavy steel device called a penetrator. Heavy enough to fall through the foliage of any forest, its bottom unfolded like the petals of a flower, providing a seat for the victim, who would then be pulled back up through the branches, an experience which remarkably enough had never quite killed anyone. In the event that the victim was injured, it was the job of Sergeant Zimmer or a rescue paramedic to ride it down, attach the victim to the penetrator, and take the elevator ride himself. That job sometimes entailed physically searching for the victim, often under fire. It was for this reason that the people who flew the rescue choppers treated their crewmen with considerable respect. Nothing so horrifies a pilot as the idea of being on the ground, with people shooting at you.
But not this time. Since it was peacetime and safety rules applied, training or not, the pickup was being made from a small clearing. Zimmer worked the winch controls. The victim unfolded the seat-petals and hooked himself securely aboard, knowing what was to follow. The flight engineer started hoisting the cable, made sure that the victim was firmly attached, and so notified the flight crew.
On the flight deck, forward, Captain Willis immediately twisted the throttle control to full power and moved upward. Within fifteen seconds, the “rescued” fighter pilot was three hundred feet over the ground, hanging by a quarter-inch steel cable and wondering why in the hell he’d been so fucking idiotic to volunteer for this. Five seconds later, the burly arm of Sergeant Zimmer yanked him into the aircraft.
“Recovery complete,” Zimmer reported.
Captain Willis pushed his cyclic control forward, diving the helicopter at the ground. He’d climbed too much on the extraction, he knew, and tried to compensate by showing Colonel Johns that he could get back down to the safety of the treetops very quickly. He accomplished this, but he could feel the eyes of his commander on the side of his head. He’d made a mistake. Johns did not tolerate mistakes. People died of mistakes, the colonel told them every goddamned day, and he was tired of having people die.
“Can you take it for a minute?” Willis asked.
“Copilot’s airplane,” Johns acknowledged, taking the stick and easing the Sikorsky down another foot or so. “You don’t want to climb so much winching the guy in, not with possible SAMs out there.”
“At night you’d expect more guns than SAMs.” Willis was right, sort of. It was a hard call. And he knew the answer that would come.
“We’re protected against small-caliber guns. The big ones are as dangerous as SAMs. You keep it closer to the ground next time, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Other than that, not bad. Arm a little stiff?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It might be the gloves. Unless your fingers fit in just right, you end up gripping too hard, and that translates back into the wrist and upper arm after a while. You end up with a stiff arm, stiff movements on the stick, and sloppy handling. Get yourself a good set of gloves. My wife makes mine for me special. You might not always have a copilot to take the airplane, and this sort of thing is tough enough that you don’t want any more distractions than you gotta have.”
“Yes, sir.”
“By the way, you passed.”
It wouldn’t do to thank the colonel, Captain Willis knew. He did the next best thing after flexing his hand for a minute.
“I got the airplane.”
PJ took his hand off the stick. “Pilot’s airplane,” he acknowledged. “By the way ...
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ve got a special job coming up in a week or so. Interested?”
“Doing what?”
“You’re not supposed to ask that,” the colonel told him. “A little TDY. Not too far away. We’ll be flying this bird down. Call it Spec-Ops.”
“Okay,” Willis said. “Count me in. Who’s cleared to—”
“In simple terms, nobody is. We’re taking Zimmer, Childs, and Bean, and a support team. Far as everybody knows, we’re TDY for some practice missions out on the California coast. That’s all you need to know for now.”
Inside his helmet, Willis’s eyebrow went up. Zimmer had worked with PJ all the way back to Thailand and the Jolly Green days, one of the few enlisted men left with real combat experience. Sergeant Bean was the squadron’s best gunner. Childs was right behind him. Whatever this TDY—temporary detached duty—assignment was, it was for-real. It also meant that Willis would remain a copilot for a little while longer, but he didn’t mind. It was always a treat flying with the champion of Combat Search and Rescue. That was where the colonel got his call sign. C-SAR, in PJ’s lexicon, it came out “Caesar.”
Chavez traded a look with Julio Vega: Jesucristo!
“Any questions?” the briefer asked.
“Yes, sir,” a radio operator said. “What happens after we call it in?”
“The aircraft will be intercepted.”
“For-real, sir?”
“That’s
up to the flight crew. If they don’t do what they’re told, they’re going swimming. That’s all I can say. Gentlemen, everything you’ve heard is Top Secret. Nobody—I mean nobody! —ever hears what I just said. If the wrong folks ever learn about this, people will get hurt. The objective of this mission is to put a crimp in the way people move drugs into the United States. It may get a little rough.”
“About fucking time,” a quiet voice observed.
“Okay, now you know. I repeat, gentlemen, this mission is going to be dangerous. We are going to give each of you some time to think about it. If you want out, we’ll understand. We’re dealing with some pretty bad folks. Of course”—the man smiled and went on after a moment—“we got some pretty bad people here, too.”
“Fuckin’ A!” another voice said.
“Anyway, you have the rest of the night to think this one over. We move out at eighteen-hundred hours tomorrow. There is no turning back at that point. Everybody understand? Good. That is all for now.”
“Ten-Hut!” Captain Ramirez snapped. Everyone in the room jumped to attention as the briefer left. Then it was the captain’s turn: “Okay, you heard the man. Give this one a real good think, people. I want you to come along on this one—hell, I need every one of you—but if you’re not comfortable with the idea, I don’t want you. You got any questions for me?” There weren’t. “Okay. Some of you know people who got fucked up because of drugs. Maybe friends, maybe family, I don’t know. What we have here is a chance to get even. Those bastards are fucking up our country, and it’s time we taught ’em a little lesson. Think it over. If anyone has any problems, let me know right away. If anybody wants out, that’s okay.” His face and tone said something else entirely. Anyone who opted out would be seen by his officer as something less than a man, and that would be doubly painful since Ramirez had led his men, shared every hardship, and sweated with them through every step of training. He turned and left.
