by Steve Alten
Rising.
Falling.
Hills of water toss her insides about. She vomits seawater, then closes her eyes, her head pounding, her body shivering from the cold. The sound of circling fighters grows louder.
And then she is moving.
Rocky looks up, disoriented. Am I being rescued? She blinks hard, her mind unable to grasp what her eyes are seeing.
The tire is caught in the wake of a great beast, its dark, imposing head plowing the surface somewhere up ahead. The brutish silhouette is circling, and now she can see what looks like its eyes, glowing crimson beneath an enormous wake that washes over the monster’s face.
Oh my God …
The mountainous bow wave tosses the surviving crewmen of the Ronald Reagan from their rafts, their limbs flailing like those of surfers thrown by a breaking wave.
High above, an air wing organizes. Four fighters plunge toward the monster, each enraged pilot intent on slaughtering it. Eight JDAM missiles launch as one, the wave of projectiles homing in on the brute’s exposed back.
From the creature’s spine, a dozen surface-to-air missiles zoom skyward, blasting apart the Joint Strike Fighters in the blink of an eye—even as the evening sky erupts with the metallic whine from two antimissile guns, positioned behind the sea creature’s head like horns on a devil. A sheer wall of steel—four thousand 20-mm shells—meet the JDAMs head-on.
Rocky instinctively ducks, registering the heat from the explosions as she shields her eyes from the inferno.
The remaining fighters race out of range, clearly outmatched.
Unchallenged, the steel nightmare laps its killing field one last time before disappearing beneath the waves, leaving little more than a ripple.
Rocky presses her face against the cold surface of the helicopter wheel, her shattered mind screaming a single thought.
Goliath …
Like a tortured animal in a trap, she is gripped by a wave of anger. Purple lips whisper the cursed name of Gunnar Wolfe, her voice rising until she is yelling like a banshee, screeching her venom into the deepening twilight.
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do.”
—Helen Keller
“I have no regrets. I acted alone and on orders from God.”
—Yigal Amir, assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
CHAPTER 2
2 October 2009
State College, Pennsylvania
The main campus of Pennsylvania State University and its bordering town of State College lie in the Nittany Valley, a serene countryside of flowing hills, rural neighborhoods, outdoor malls, and dairy farms, enveloped by the mountains of central Pennsylvania. The name “Nittany” comes from the Indian words meaning “protective barrier against the elements,” and may have originated from the tale of a mythical princess, “Nita-Nee,” who led her people to safety within the Pennsylvania valley. Upon her death, Mount Nittany itself is said to have risen to mark the princess’s grave.
Gunnar Wolfe shuts down the lime green tractor and stares at the mountain range stretched out before him on the distant northeastern horizon. The fading afternoon sun has bathed the sloping landmark in shades of purple.
Closing his eyes, he draws in a deep, intoxicating breath.
The serenity of the mountains soothe Gunnar’s soul as the sea once had, long before it had become a battlefield. Resting his arms on the wheel, his chin on his forearms, he gazes at the hills, imagining them to be a series of majestic tsunamis, their cresting fury threatening to wipe out the valley—and what little sanity his existence has been clinging to over the last seven years, four months, ten days, fourteen hours … .
Gunnar had grown up on the dairy farm back when its borders encompassed more than a hundred acres. He and his cousins had milked the cows by hand back then—sixty pure Holsteins—each animal twice a day. Looking back, he sees it as a happier, simpler time—long before his father had purchased the milking machines—long before his mother had died. Gunnar closes his eyes, refocusing his mind, this time counting the years since the accursed drunk sophomore had run into her as she walked home from church.
Twenty years, three months, sixteen days, two hours … .
During his years in prison he found he could not remember her face, but then he had returned to the farm, and the memories came rushing back.
A cold autumn breeze clears the tractor’s exhaust, bringing with it the smell of hay and manure and, atop them, the indefinable air-flavor of the coming of a long Centre County winter. The leaves have already begun turning, welcoming back the Penn State alumni, whose presence on the eve of a football weekend is already clogging Routes 322 and 26 with thousands of family campers. For the next forty-eight hours, the Nittany Lion fanatics will overrun the secluded campus town, choking the restaurants and blitzing the bars as they frolic along College and Beaver Avenues, reliving the best years of their adolescence, back when the object of getting drunk was to have fun, rather than to dull the senses just to ease the pain of adulthood.
Happy Valley. Gunnar loves State College the way he loves the coziness of a fireplace and quilt on a snowy day. Something about the town has always made him feel safe. Perhaps it is the campus itself, a haven of students nestled within a mountain valley—a place where the memories are good, the pressure limited to studying for exams, or working on Pop’s farm, making sure the heifers have all been fed.
Or maybe it’s that State College is about as far as one could be from the ocean, from Special Ops, and from Rocky Jackson.
The thought of his ex-fiancée causes the bile to rise to Gunnar’s parched throat. Restarting the tractor, he grinds the ancient gears and shifts the plow into first.
Four more rows. Forty-eight minutes. Two thousand, eight hundred, and eighty seconds … .
Gunnar finishes a row and turns, aiming the rickety bucket of bolts in the direction of the barn. Cutting the dried fields yields the hay they will need for the cows’ feed mix, enough to get them through the looming winter. Years, months, hours, days … there are no days off for the dairy farmer. Dawn greets Gunnar each morning in the milking parlor, where he cleans the cow’s teats with an iodine-and-water solution before hooking each animal up to the milking machine. It takes the machine five minutes to drain a cow’s udder. If organized right, the five machines could finish the entire herd in just under two hours. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty … one hundred and twenty cows, each cow producing six gallons of milk a day. Six gallons, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four … the collected milk runs through an FDA-approved tube directly into a temperature-controlled tank, to be transferred to a refrigerated tanker truck that delivers the product to any one of several local processing plants. Milk the cows twice a day, then keep them moving from one grazing field to the next, supervising six and a half hours of their eating and drinking, all the while maintaining a strict breeding schedule for each member of the herd.
Gunnar is thankful for the busy days, the work helping to keep his mind off alcohol. He had never been much of a drinker, not during his college years, and never during the Army’s Special Forces training. I will keep my mind and body clean, alert, and strong, for this is my debt to those who depend upon me.
Hooah.
It was only after leaving prison that he had turned to booze.
Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer … if your self-identity should happen to fall … ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall …
A year of living on the streets, a year of waking up in his own piss and vomit. Hitting bottom and lying in it, still full of anger and guilt, he had finally found his way back to his father’s farm. Two months in a treatment center, a lifetime commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous, and a busy schedule had allowed him to piece together an existence, one day at a time. But the hurt was still there, always festering just below the surface.
The irony of his life is somethin
g Gunnar Wolfe grapples with daily.
I will live my life, one day at a time …
As a child, Gunnar had always been afraid of challenges. An introvert, he rarely allowed himself to compete in sports, though laboring on his father’s farm had developed his physique beyond those of his peers. While his father encouraged his only child to follow in his footsteps, his mother pushed him to get more out of life. She encouraged him to read, and bought him a steady supply of inspiring adventure stories. She drove him to a gym and hired a trainer. She enrolled him in karate and pushed him to play high school sports, where he earned All-State honors in football and basketball.
Slowly but surely, the blossoming adolescent began to come out of his shell.
It was the tragedy of his mother’s death that ultimately changed Gunnar’s life. Two weeks after the funeral, the eighteen-year-old Penn State freshman announced that he was switching majors, from agriculture to engineering. Harlan Wolfe, upon learning of his son’s “blasphemous” decision, threatened to cut off all tuition money, prompting Gunnar to join Penn State’s ROTC program, affording him the opportunity to live on campus.
In Gunnar’s sophomore year, his old high school coach urged him to try out for football, the lonely teen surprising everyone by earning a spot as a fourth-string tight end. By his junior year, he had moved up to second string, his last-minute touchdown catch against Michigan State helping the Nittany Lions to another bowl appearance.
It was also during his junior year that Gunnar attended the U.S. Army’s Airborne School. ROTC training was nothing compared to his first taste of true Army discipline. For three long weeks he endured hours of seemingly endless running and calisthenics, the grueling exercises sandwiched between the finest parachute training on the planet.
Gunnar hated heights. Static-line jumping from a C-141 into eleven hundred feet of total blackness was more frightening beforehand than fearsome in the doing. His relief after the fifth and last jump was almost embarrassing.
By summer football camp of his senior year, Gunnar was a different person. Gone was the last trace of the timid farm boy, in its place—a focused athlete with a warrior’s mentality. The coaches noticed, too, promoting the two-hundred-and-forty pound walk-on to the first-team, awarding him a full scholarship. Though Penn State would fall short of a repeat Rose Bowl appearance, Gunnar would receive second-team all-American honors, and was considered by many pro football scouts as a second- or third-round draft pick.
The NFL would have to wait.
Four years after his mother’s death, Gunnar Wolfe stood in uniform at his graduation, prepared in body and mind to attend the sixteen-week Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC, Second Battalion, Eleventh Infantry Regiment) at Fort Benning, Georgia. Coach Joe Paterno filled in for Gunnar’s estranged father, Harlan, who stubbornly refused to attend the ceremony.
The Infantry Officer Basic Course is designed to produce the world’s best infantry lieutenants. In essence, it is a war-fighting course, every aspect of training intended to prepare the newly commissioned officer for combat. IOBC training has zero tolerance for anything less than a total physical and mental commitment to excellence.
“Wolfe, you can’t coast through life-and-death decisions! Shit or get off the pot! Is that understood?”
“Roger, Sergeant Gardner!”
Sixteen weeks. One hundred twelve long days of being tired, wet, and hungry. For Gunnar, it was just a preview of to what lay ahead.
Ranger School.
It takes a special breed to make it in the United States Army’s Special Forces, and the Rangers are considered the junkyard dogs of the SOF community. Masters of special light infantry operations on land, sea, and in the air, their origins can be traced back to the early 1670s, when the Rangers of Captain Benjamin Church helped end the Indian Conflict of King Phillip’s War. Years later, five hundred Rangers, known as Morgan’s Riflemen, fought under George Washington. Their cunning and deadly aim with the rifle inflicted great losses on the British troops, making them the most feared corps of the Continental Army. The motto, “Rangers lead the way,” was coined during World War II, shortly after D-day, when a general wanted to know who the tough guys were. When the men responded, “Rangers, of course,” the general uttered the now-famous reply, “then lead the way, Rangers!”
For Gunnar, Ranger School turned out to be the most intense “withholding” training he had ever endured, “withholding” referring to the total lack of adequate water, food, and sleep. Over the next sixty-one days he endured and survived freezing temperatures, mental exhaustion, and physical exertion that was often beyond the point of abuse. He lost twenty-five pounds of muscle and fat from his already-trimmed physique, but successfully maintained a positive attitude, even though his fellow officers and enlisted Ranger schoolmates were decimated by flu, hypothermia, broken ankles, twisted necks, worn-out tempers, and a simple loss of intestinal fortitude, ironically assisted by surreptitious low doses of cholera.
Upon graduating from “hell,” Ranger-Qualified Gunnar Wolfe reported to his first assignment as a platoon leader with the First Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Eighty-second Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Over the next two years he would lead his men on a half dozen successful training missions all over the world.
It was during a routine free-fall parachuting exercise that he would impress the man who would soon become his surrogate father.
The military employs two types of parachutes, both different than those used in recreational sky-diving. Troops use the classic round chute with a static-line deployment, the Army trusting its troops with a weapon, but not with the steering of a parachute. Attached to the plane, the parachute opens the moment the trooper jumps, allowing for almost no free fall, little error, and even less maneuverability, with a hard landing to boot.
A light rain was falling on the morning of April 16 when Gunnar and his fellow students boarded the C-130 to begin the first in a series of bad-weather parachute-training exercises. Colonel Mike “Bear” Jackson was the commander overseeing Gunnar’s regiment—his job—to instruct Special Ops Forces to free-fall in rough weather conditions using ram-air canopies, rectangular quasi wings far more maneuverable than the ungainly troop chutes, and possessing significant forward speeds.
Of all training activities, Gunnar hated parachute jumping the most. He had lost control of his bowels during his first jump back in Airborne School, and had never taken to the idea of free-falling in storm clouds from thirteen thousand feet.
Gunnar’s best friend, Bill Raby, was first up. An experienced jumper, Raby made the fateful decision to leave his jump position to offer another Ranger a final word of encouragement. Buffeted by high winds, the transport dipped, causing Raby to stumble. Before anyone could react, the commando’s pilot chute caught on the hydraulic lift, loosened, and was immediately sucked into the tailgate’s gaping opening. As Gunnar watched helplessly, his friend was lifted off his feet like a rag doll, the powerful airstream flinging him facefirst against the hydraulic lift before yanking him clear out of the plane.
Unconscious, entangled within his parachute’s suspension lines, Bill Raby hurtled toward the earth like a ground-seeking missile, his speed quickly accelerating to more than 150 miles per hour.
Colonel Jackson was on his feet when he was pushed aside by Gunnar Wolfe, who leaped out of the plane as if he were Superman. Soaring headfirst in a steep vertical dive, the former farm boy-turned-human projectile flew after Raby at a death-defying speed, intent on saving his friend’s life or dying in the process.
Plunging through rain that felt like thousands of stinging bees, Gunnar adjusted his trajectory, aiming for that speck in the lead gray distance he prayed was his friend. At 9,000 feet, the tumbling object became the unconscious commando. At 3,500 feet, Gunnar reached out and caught the man, then fumbled as he attempted to pull the cut-away handle that would disconnect Raby’s main chute. As the main chute released, the drag pulled the pin on the res
erve chute.
Gunnar fell away, pulling his own rip cord as Raby’s canopy blossomed open—a mere 650 feet from the ground. Moments later, the two student commandos found themselves knee deep in mud on a pig farm, two miles east of the drop zone.
Hooah.
Gunnar’s high-speed heroics not only saved Raby’s life, but forever bonded him to Colonel Jackson. He was the type of warrior Jackson wanted under his command. Brave. Compassionate. Patriotic. A true leader.
In other words, everything the Bear had always wanted in a son.
Under Jackson’s watchful eye, First Lieutenant Gunnar Wolfe was assigned to lead Second Platoon, Charlie Company, the First Ranger Battalion’s top company. Here he learned the art of demolitions and explosives, as well as advanced hand-to-hand combat.
Two years with First Battalion was followed by the Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) course. Another six months spent completing Q (Qualification) Course at Fort Bragg, immersed in guerrilla-warfare training. Four months later, the Bear had him, on orders, transferred to SCUBA School in Key West, Florida, where he learned the art of military SCUBA diving. Then it was on to Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL (BUDS), to go through formal SEAL training.
“What is it you want, Wolfe?”
“Sir, I want to do whatever it takes to protect my country and her interests abroad.”
It soon became obvious to all that Colonel Jackson was grooming his young protégé to be the ultimate soldier—the ultimate killing machine.
A broken ankle forced the Bear’s “cub” to take a much-deserved leave. Laid up in Key West, the former engineering major resumed work on a design for a remote submersible he had toyed with at Penn State, a fast, stealthy two-man vessel that could be used to transport SEALS deep behind enemy lines. Computer tests on Gunnar’s designs impressed his superiors. Patterned after the contours of a hammerhead shark, the vessel was not only “theoretically” capable of advanced maneuvers, but speed to boot.
