by John Weisman
Ritzik sat where he’d been ordered, his eyes scanning the small office. He played with his ID badge and was still looking at it when the thick wood door eased open and Secretary of Defense Robert W. Rockman, carrying a well-worn brown document folder tucked under his arm like a football, entered the room.
Ritzik snapped to his feet and turned toward the doorway. “Mr. Secretary.”
“Major Ritzik. How good to see you again.” Rockman gave him such a genuine, wide smile Ritzik could make out the gold crowns in the back of the man’s mouth. “Let me just toss—” He dropped the folder onto the wing-chair cushion, advanced to Ritzik, and pumped the younger man’s hand. “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice.”
As if he’d had a choice. “Good to see you again, too, sir.”
It wasn’t the first time they’d met. Back in 2001, Ritzik—then a captain—had been a part of Task Force 555, a joint Special Operations unit that had put Delta operators, CIA paramilitary personnel, and British SAS shooters inside Afghanistan weeks before the announced start of the ground and air campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Triple Five’s mission had been both clandestine and critical. First, to organize and synchronize the ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks who formed the core of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Second, to serve as “force multipliers,” providing weapons and training for the indigenous Pashtuns in the south. And third, once the campaign started in earnest, to use their SpecOps abilities for sneaking and peeking—getting close to the enemy without being seen—to provide real-time targeting information for American pilots and “light up” al-Qaeda and Taliban troops and equipment with their self-contained, handheld, state-of-the-art laser target designators.
Ritzik’s twelve-man First SFOD-D Troop Hotel—four three-man squads—had been inserted into northern Afghanistan by Task Force 160 chopper on September 21, ten days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By chance, Ritzik and two of his Delta troopers had been ten miles outside Almaty, the Kazakh capital, on September 11, assigned to a JCET—Joint Combined Exchange Training—mission, schooling the Kazakh Special Forces in counterterrorist tactics to be used against the IMU and other extremist groups. Within twenty-four hours, they’d been joined by nine of their colleagues, and just over a week after that, they’d fast-roped out of an MH-53E Pave Low Special Operations chopper onto the lunar landscape of the Panjshir Valley.
Ritzik and his group had finally been extracted—under protest, let the record show—in March 2002. Twelve days later, after he’d been cleaned up and allowed to decompress a little, Ritzik was flown to Washington, where Rockman, the no-nonsense SECDEF, had offered him a newly created position on his staff: special assistant to the secretary for counterterrorism.
Respectfully but unequivocally, Ritzik declined. Not because he wouldn’t be able to make a difference as a staff officer, but because he honestly believed he’d be of greater benefit to the nation back at Bragg. Mike Ritzik understood his duty to be the business of making war, not making policy. And passing on the lessons he and his men had learned through six months of hard combat—their defeats as well as victories—would make his Army all the more effective in achieving its fundamental goals on the battlefield. So, despite Rockman’s entreaties and the promise of rapid advancement, Ritzik stood his ground, convinced he was better off returning to Bragg than taking an E-Ring office at the Pentagon.
That had been more than two years ago. He’d spent the intervening time commuting between the CAG and Fort Campbell, Kentucky, headquarters of the Special Operations Air Regiment’s Task Force 160, known as the Night-stalkers. It had been Ritzik’s assignment to fuse the SOAR pilots and crews seamlessly with Delta, to make sure that the multiple snafus that had taken place in Afghanistan did not repeat themselves elsewhere.
Now he’d been summoned to see SECDEF once more—without the faintest idea why.
“We have a serious problem,” Rockman said by way of terse explanation.
“Sir?”
“In Western China. A lousy situation with huge political consequences and unreal time constraints. When I was asked to fix it, you’re the one I thought of first.” Rockman’s lined face grew dead serious. “Take a seat, son, and I’ll explain. We’re due at the White House in an hour and a half.”
Robert Rockman had served as both White House chief of staff and secretary of defense long before Mike Ritzik had entered West Point. Rocky, as he was called in the press, was now in his mid-seventies. He’d been brought back from a successful business career by Pete Forrest to revitalize a military that had been both demoralized and marginalized during the 1990s. Rockman had been low-profile for the first few months of the administration, working the way he preferred: quietly, without publicity. But after 9/11, Rocky had become the reluctant but highly effective public face of America’s worldwide war against terrorism.
The long hours and seven-day weeks had taken their toll. Ritzik saw weariness in the secretary’s bearing. But he understood enough not to mistake fatigue for apathy. Rocky was a tough old bird, as insightful, astute, and shrewd a political operator as he’d been during his younger days. After four and a half minutes of the SECDEF’s monologue, Ritzik also had to admit that the man knew how to brief. There were no wasted words, no hyperbole, no polysyllabic bureaucratese.
The way Rockman laid it out, the national security adviser had pushed for the sensor-planting operation to ensure that the Chinese weren’t going to cheat. Rockman had agreed it was crucial. But then the mission had been assigned to the CIA over his objections. And, as with most Agency ops these days, the numbskulls at Langley hadn’t factored in Mr. Murphy. Yesterday, after successfully planting the sensors, things went sour. The team had been captured by terrorists—Uighur separatists, perhaps, no one was certain. The Agency panicked—no one notified the White House for six whole hours while they attempted to cover their butts. The president went ballistic when he found out the CIA had no contingency plan to get its people back, and he’d dumped the problem on Rockman at about five o’clock.
It got sticky, SECDEF continued, because the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to take things over, and he’d wasted valuable time derailing what he called their Machiavellian plottings—which is why he hadn’t been able to get hold of Ritzik until zero-dark-hundred.
And to make matters worse, the director of central intelligence was being stingy with intelligence. The secretary retrieved his leather document case from the wing chair. He opened it, revealing a red-tabbed folder. “I was only able to get these from Langley an hour ago—although they’ve been sitting on the DCI’s desk since last midnight.” Rockman opened the folder. It contained a dozen satellite photographs. “This’ll give you some idea of what you’re up against.”
“Do you have a magnifying glass?”
Without a word, the secretary reached in his desk drawer and withdrew one. He handed it to Ritzik, who used it to study the eight-by-tens. He counted trucks and people. “Looks like a force of about fifty—maybe sixty.” He shuffled the images. “Do we know where they’re going? Are the Chinese in pursuit?”
“We can track them by satellite,” the secretary said. “And so far as I know, the Chinese don’t know what’s going on—their satellite capabilities don’t allow them to shift their birds as quickly as we can move ours.” Rockman’s face hardened. “Of course, they may be privy by now. But since they’re playing this pretty close to the vest at Langley, I haven’t been told.”
‘That’s SOP6 for the Agency.” Ritzik knew from bitter experience that the CIA did not like to share its wealth. They held on to intelligence like misers and doled it out the way John D. Rockefeller used to hand out dimes to street urchins.
But real-time intelligence was the key to victory in Special Operations. The essence of Special Operations, as Ritzik knew, was using small, well-trained units to achieve operational success in denied areas. The mission might be direct action, or it might be political, economic, or eve
n psychological in nature. But no matter what the nature of the mission, Ritzik understood that without a constant flow of detailed, up-to-the-minute intelligence, any small and lightly armed force would be doomed. SpecOps Warriors cannot fight blind.
Rockman’s clear gray eyes met Ritzik’s. “I want you to go out and clean up the Agency’s mess—extract those four men covertly and bring ‘em home before the Chinese find out we’ve violated their territory.”
It wasn’t a question.
Ritzik’s index finger tapped the satellite pictures. “I’ll need real-time intelligence to get the job done, Mr. Secretary—information I can download onto my tactical laptops and handhelds.”
“Everything you need, you will receive,” Rockman said. He watched as Ritzik perused the pictures. “Now, before we leave for the White House, I want to hear from you a rough idea of how you’re going to bring those four men home.”
“I’d feint in the Pacific first, Mr. Secretary,” Ritzik said coolly. “Use the Navy to draw China’s attention away from Xinjiang. Once they were diverted, I’d go in by air and get positioned ahead of the sons of bitches. I’d employ speed, surprise, and violence of action. I’d hit when they least expect it. I’d kill them all, so there’s no one left to come back and bite us on the rear end later. I’d grab our people and run like hell to a predetermined, secure extraction point. And then I’d link up with some of our air assets and get across a safe border.”
“Can you be any more specific, Major? The president is going to want to hear more than high concept from you.”
“Sir,” Ritzik said candidly, “I’m going to need a secure phone so I can talk to my sergeant major before I go any further.”
“Why is that, Major?”
“Because Sergeant Major Yates and his cadre of senior NCOs will be the ones doing most of the planning for this mission, not me. They’ve forgotten a lot more about the specifics of putting these sorts of ops together than I’ll ever know.”
“What?” Rockman’s unflappable composure dissolved.
Ritzik understood immediately what he’d done. Rockman, after all, was SECDEF. Meaning that he was treated like some sort of god. He was “handled.” He was “guided.” He was “shielded” from certain … realities.
The shocked look on Rockman’s face told Ritzik that no general, no military assistant or SpecWar adviser had ever told him that Delta’s operations were developed and planned not by the guys with the scrambled eggs on their hats and the stars on their collars, but by the unit in question’s senior enlisted personnel.
At Delta the mission tasking might come down the chain of command from the president or secretary of defense to SOCOM—the U.S. Special Operations Command at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida—or through JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. But once the tasking—which boiled down to the overall goal to be achieved—had been issued, all the hands-on mission planning was done by the unit’s senior noncoms. It was a system that Delta’s creator, Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, had brought from his days as an exchange officer with the 22nd Regiment Special Air Service. “Bottom-up planning,” Beckwith called it. At Delta, in fact, senior NCOs had more than once told JSOC or SOCOM staff puke colonels to shove it after said staff pukes had tried to impose mission-specific orders.
It made perfect sense, too. Ritzik had been at Delta for two tours totaling five years. Of that time, twenty-three months had been spent in language training inside the Delta compound—he spoke Uzbek, Kazakh, and some Dari, as well as a little Russian—and a series of specialized courses where he’d been taught such esoteric skills as breaking and entering (by a career criminal at the medium-security federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia) and guerrilla driving at West Virginia’s Bill Scott Raceway, just outside Charles Town.
But Ritzik was the exception to the rule. Most junior officers spent only two years with Delta, using their tour as a ticket-punching way station on their way to a colonel’s command, followed by a general’s stars.
NCOs, however, could spend a dozen years or more at the unit, participating in hundreds of operations, drills, rehearsals, and call-outs, and more important, the hot-washes, those no-holds-barred, rank-has-no-privilege debriefing sessions that followed every op or full mission profile exercise. Sergeants were the ones who ran the ops at Delta Force. Junior officers like Ritzik were—as the senior NCOs liked to say—no more than overpaid RTOs (radio telephone operators).
“Mr. Secretary, it’s the truth. When we were in Afghanistan, I was the nominal troop leader. Sure, I worked on developing the unit’s mission concepts and fine-tuning its goals. But once we were tasked I deferred the operational planning to the master sergeant, Fred Yates, who was my team leader back then.”
Rockman hooked a thumb toward a heavy black telephone sitting on his desk. “Then get this sergeant major of yours—Yates, you say—on the line, Major, and do whatever head-shedding you have to do to come up with something workable. I need to hear specifics before we leave for the White House.”
14 Kilometers north of Tazhong,
Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China. 2045 Hours Local Time.
SAM PHILLIPS opened his right eye—which took considerable effort and caused him a fair amount of pain—and tried to figure out just where he was. He concluded, after some woozy seconds, that he was in a dark void, lying on his side, his head drooping into a puddle of something nasty. He thought, That road we were on must have been paved with good intentions, because I have obviously gone to hell.
He wriggled slightly—which caused a sharp twinge in his rib cage—and learned that his arms were bound tightly behind his back. He tried to straighten his legs, which were tied at the ankles tightly enough to hurt, and bent at the knees. But when he moved, a noose around his throat tightened, and he eased up quickly so as not to choke himself. The mothers had hog-tied him.
There was foul-smelling wetness under his face. He tried to open his left eye, but it was fused shut. So he lay there for some seconds, hoping that he’d get some degree—any degree—of vision back in his blurry right eye, and listening desperately for any clue that might indicate where he was. He heard snippets of muffled speech coming as if from a distance. But it was impossible to decipher what was being said.
How long had he been awake? Three minutes? Four? However long it had been, his eye wasn’t getting any better. And so he lay quietly, working hard not to panic, trying to regulate his breathing so he wouldn’t choke on the tape gag, letting his body and his brain recover by counting silently back from two hundred; a Zen exercise to steady himself.
By the time he’d reached zero, the sight in his right eye had finally unblurred enough for him to be able to make out worn floorboards below his nose.
Okay—that meant he’d been stashed in a vehicle or a house. There were no houses anywhere close by, unless they’d been driven into Tazhong. Which from the lack of ambient sounds was improbable. So, most likely, he’d been tossed into the bed of the truck that had been sitting astride the road. Or some other truck. After what had taken place earlier, Sam Phillips was not about to assume anything. Sam rolled right so he could look up. He was rewarded with a fuzzy image of canvas and metal. He raised his head, sniffed, and caught the faint but clear odor of diesel fuel.
A truck it was, then. Sam squirmed to his left, and made contact against something. He had to roll completely over now, scraping his nose across the wet floorboard. But finally his eye settled on X-Man’s photographer’s vest. He fought his way onto his shoulder—Whoa, that hurt—so he could see his teammate’s back. He watched, for a minute or so, and was hugely relieved to see that X-Man was taking shallow but regular breaths.
Then he forced his legs as far up as he could so he could see the security man’s legs without choking himself. X-Man was hog-tied, too.
Forcing his legs to comply, he scrunched forward until his forehead touched X-Man’s back. He tapped the security man’s back twice, knock-knock.
There was no on
e home.
He prodded the back of the photographer’s vest once more, grunting through gagged lips as he did.
Still nothing.
He squeezed up against the photographer’s vest and smacked his whole body against X-Man until he heard a short, muffled groan from his colleague. Sam moved back, until he’d put a foot or so between them. “Chris, try and roll over,” he said. “But be careful not to rock the truck and attract attention.” Of course, given the tape gag, it didn’t quite come out that way. But X-Man’s body told Sam he’d gotten the message.
It took perhaps five or six minutes, but they were finally face-to-face. Sam wriggled close and examined the cut over X-man’s eye and the bruises on his cheeks. Christ, he was a mess.
X-Man started to blink rapidly. Sam thought he was having a seizure, until he realized that the security man was transmitting Morse code.
Oh, Christ, Sam thought. He’d learned Morse back at the Farm during his initial training. They’d taught it so case officers could mark dead drops, or leave signals for their agents, or—the instructor had actually once joked—“Just in case two of you are tossed into adjoining cells and you want to communicate with each other.”
Sam remembered how the whole class had rolled their eyes at that one. Which was when the instructor said, “Well, smart-asses, that’s how we did it at the Hanoi Hilton.”
But Sam hadn’t used Morse for years.
He closed his eye and counted to ten, racking his befogged mind as he tried to remember the twenty-six dit-dah long-short combinations. It was useless. His brain was mush. All he could come up with was SOS—three short, followed by three long, followed by three short.
Which jogged his mind a little. Wait a second. H was four short. S was three short. I was two short. And E was one short. That was all the shorts. There was no four long. O was three long—he knew that. What the hell was one long? T.T.T was one long. And M; M was two long.
