Soar

by John Weisman

  He opened his eye and waited until it focused on X-Man’s face. He blinked three short, four short, two short, and one long, then waited for X-Man’s reaction.

  Three long, followed by long-short-long. O something. OK-OK-OK.

  Sam opened his eye as far as he could and nodded. X-Man was transmitting again. Short-short. Long-long. Short-short-long. I-M-short-short-long. Sam shook his head. Negatory.

  X-Man cocked his head toward the outside of wherever they were being held. Then he transmitted again. I-M-something.

  U. Short-short-long was U. It was the IMU out there. He was telling Sam they’d been snatched by the IMU.

  The IMU. That figured. Langley said the IMU was seriously weakened these days. Well, these guys didn’t appear very weak. Sam blinked T, then E, then I-S-T-S, because he couldn’t think of what the hell R was.

  X-Man gave him an affirmative nod. Then he started blinking again. “I-s-i-t,” he said.

  Thank God he was keeping it simple. But sitting? What if the truck moved? What if one of them outside saw it move?

  X-Man didn’t give him a chance to object. He slithered backward to give himself some clearance. Then, knees bent, the security officer rolled onto his belly. And then somehow, incredibly, without garroting himself, he levitated and jerked himself upright, into a kneeling position. The move actually slackened the hog-tie cord between X-Man’s neck and his ankles.

  Sam was still holding his breath. Jeezus. It was okay: the truck hadn’t moved. Not a millimeter.

  X-Man’s eyes told Sam what to do next. Sam complied, squiggling forward until he’d put his face close up against X-Man’s butt and the soles of his feet. X-Man’s fingers found the back edge of the tape across Sam’s mouth and pried it loose.

  The instant it came off his lips, Sam breathed so rapidly he began to hyperventilate.

  Quickly, he fought to bring his body under control. “I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay,” he whispered, the sound of his own hoarse voice both reassuring him and giving him back some blessed degree of control over the situation, even though he was still bound hand and foot.

  Sam swallowed hard. “X, do you know where Kaz and Dick are?”

  Instead of answering, X-Man wriggled his butt and his shoulders at Sam.

  Who finally got the message—and got with the program. He buried his face between X-Man’s shoes and worked with his teeth at the hog-tie knot just above the ankles.

  They’d used cheap plastic line to do the job, and Sam was able to pull the frayed end out and release the knot in a few minutes without chipping any teeth. Then he attacked the thick roll of dark tape that pinioned X-Man’s wrists and forearms behind his back. He had managed to gnaw through two of the perhaps half-dozen layers of foul-tasting tape when the shooting started and the truck was rocked by nearby explosions.

  4

  The Oval Office.

  1059 Hours Local Time.

  NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER Monica Wirth glanced at the legal pad in her left hand. Then her eyes flicked in the president’s direction. A barely noticeable movement by Pete Forrest’s eyebrow told her exactly what he wanted her to do.

  Wirth dropped the pad to her side, crossed the rug with its Great Seal of the United States, and moved behind the president, where she could focus on Ritzik. “I like your overall plan, Major. It’s simple and direct. But there is one huge flaw.”

  “Ma’am?” Ritzik was shaken. He thought he’d covered all the bases.

  “As proposed by you, there is only one service branch employed on the actual rescue—the Army. The other branches are used in support roles, or not included at all.” She dropped the pad out of sight. “The Navy wants a substantial piece of this, Major Ritzik. So does the Air Force. So does the Central Intelligence Agency. The Joint Chiefs chairman is strongly recommending—his staff has already drawn up a mission profile and detailed operation plan, I might add—that we assemble a company-sized unit made up of Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations personnel to do the job, as opposed to your twelve-man Army element with Air Force support.” Wirth paused. “So, Major, how do we deal with the chairman’s objections?”

  Mike Ritzik glanced at the dark circles under the national security adviser’s eyes as she stood behind the president’s wing chair, and realized she’d probably been up all night. The president didn’t look too good, either. Neither did the SECDEF. “I don’t believe a company-sized force is a good idea for this mission, Dr. Wirth.”

  “Why?”

  “First of all, the size alone is cause for failure. Moving a hundred-plus people attracts attention. Second, I totally reject the chairman’s concept of a unit assembled specifically for this operation. Jointness is a concept that Congress first forced on the military for political reasons. Unlike most of the dumb ideas they come up with on Capitol Hill, this one actually worked—like when the Navy carriers served as forward basing for Special Forces during the Afghan campaign. But when it comes to the sorts of small-unit operations I do, jointness for jointness’s sake can be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous, Major?”

  “Dangerous, ma’am. I’m not talking about being able to communicate on the same radio frequencies—that’s a good idea. But so far as I’m concerned, unless you’ve trained with someone for a long time, it’s impossible to operate with that man successfully on a high-risk op. You don’t know what the other guy is thinking, how he works, or what he’s good at.”

  “But we’re talking about our most elite forces, Major,” Wirth said. “You’re all professionals. Certainly that counts for something.”

  “It does, ma’am,” Ritzik said. He paused just long enough to sneak a look at the president, who was staring at him intently. Strange that the man hadn’t said anything. Ritzik’s eyes shifted back to the national security adviser. “Working with strangers increases the chance of failure—increases them exponentially. Sure, symbiosis and integration—and those are a couple of the buzzwords you hear from the Joint Chiefs these days—can be achieved. ‘Integration’ is precisely what I’ve been doing for the past two years with the SOAR. But fluidity in combat takes months of work. The schedule the secretary outlined to me doesn’t allow any time for that kind of mission prep.”

  “I’m still skeptical,” Monica Wirth said. “Admiral Buckley makes a strong argument that a joint strike force would be effective and successful.”

  “The admiral would say that.” Ritzik almost had to laugh. Phil Buckley, the current JCS chairman, was a Navy sea systems manpower specialist who had spent twenty-eight of his thirty-one-year career behind a desk as a staff officer. According to the RUMINT7 at Bragg, he’d been selected for chairman in the last months of the previous administration because he’d been the safe choice, a bureaucrat who wouldn’t rock the boat. Phil Buckley had spent the past decade and a half not commanding or leading, but writing legislative memos.

  The role suited him, too. Buckley was precisely the sort of individual who looked good marching down the marble corridors of the Hart or Cannon office buildings. He was tall and lean and had the eagle-eyed stare of a Warrior. But in point of fact, the man had never seen a shot fired in anger. He was a manager, an apparatchik, one of the Pentagon’s detested professional paper pushers.

  Ritzik knew the suggestion Chairman Buckley was putting forward was a recipe for disaster. But they all had to know it, too, didn’t they? He started to speak again. But the words caught in his throat, because Ritzik, openmouthed, caught something he hadn’t been supposed to see: an imperceptible signal, passing like electricity, between the other three.

  That was when Ritzik realized what was going on. The president was testing him. Challenging him to prove he could succeed. This was all about will. Resolve. Tenacity. Determination.

  Ritzik viewed Pete Forrest with fresh respect. And as a sign of that esteem, he’d give his commander in chief the unvarnished truth. At Delta, you always spoke your mind during the hot-wash sessions, no matter how much it might wire-brush the senior officers. B
ecause as Ritzik saw it, the Warrior’s ultimate goal wasn’t getting promoted, but to prevail over your enemy and bring all your people home.

  So Ritzik focused on the president and hot-washed. “Units like the one the chairman is suggesting do work out just fine—in Hollywood movies, sir. But in the real world, they get people killed. That’s why at CAG, our senior noncoms insist on doing the mission planning. Because every time some staff puke colonel or dumb-as-a-brick general comes up with a bright idea—we pretty much know it’s going to get our people killed.”

  Pete Forrest looked intently at Ritzik. “I was a staff puke, Major.”

  “Yes, sir, you were,” Ritzik said, his tone unyielding. “But before that, you were Airborne. You led a platoon in combat. You know I’m right.”

  The shocked look Ritzik got from the national security adviser told him he’d probably just put an end to his career.

  But he wasn’t about to back down. “The way I see it, sir, junior officers like you and me often end up sending good men home in body bags because somebody with stars on his collar wants a piece of the glory for his service, or his unit.”

  Ritzik focused on President Forrest’s face. “Remember that Navy SEAL who fell out of the chopper in Afghanistan a couple of years back, sir?”

  “At the start of Operation Anaconda,” the president said. “Chief Petty Officer Jackson.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ritzik was impressed the man remembered. “Well, I was in the AO, sir. I knew that assault element hadn’t ever worked together before. It was thrown together—Rangers, Special Forces, and SEALs, with SOAR pilots and aircrews. All strangers. But you know how it was: we had all those alleged instant communications setups in operation, and so instead of letting some junior officer or master sergeant on the ground run things, all the staff pukes—excuse me, ma’am, the ‘joint operations advisory staff’ officers—a hundred miles away at Bagram Air Base, and the middle-manager pukes seven thousand miles away at Central Command in Tampa, they all put their two cents in on how things should be done.”

  The national security adviser stroked her chin. “I never looked at it that way before—DOD never put it in those terms when they briefed us.”

  “They wouldn’t,” Ritzik said. “But it’s the truth, ma’am. Bottom line is that the Navy micromanagers at CENTCOM wanted their service to grab a piece of the glory, and so did the Marines, and the Air Force, and my boss’s boss’s boss, and the rest of ‘em. So the mission was hobbled from the get-go. Worse, COMCENT8 didn’t have the, the”—Ritzik caught himself up—“the guts to tell the paper pushers to butt the hell out. And then Mr. Murphy got himself added to the manifest.”

  Monica Wirth said, confused, “CIA?”

  “Of Murphy’s Law fame, ma’am. Of course, your briefers tend not to use that term. They prefer to talk about ‘the fog of war,’ or what Clausewitz called la friction. But it all boils down to what can go wrong usually does. At Takhur Ghar—that was the objective—first, the chopper, it was an MH-47E, developed mechanical problems, which delayed takeoff until very close to dawn. So the team lost one of its key assets, its ability to attack at night, when the enemy couldn’t see them coming. Then the weather changed—for the worse, naturally. But they kept going. The comms got spotty, because they were using line-of-sight radios, and the ridges got in the way. So they couldn’t stay in touch. The altitude presented new challenges, too. Takhur Ghar is twenty-one hundred meters high—that’s almost seven thousand feet. But the pilots hadn’t trained to fly combat missions at that altitude and under similar weather conditions, so they had virtually no idea how the choppers would react in the thin air, zero visibility, and turbulence. Then the intel turned out to be bad. The satellites and the Predators and the billion-dollar photo recon systems all missed the bad guys because al-Qaeda had done a good job of camouflaging themselves and their bunkers. And we didn’t have any HUMINT. So no one warned the assault element they’d be facing Chechens. No one told them the LZ was going to be hot. That’s why the pilot brought the chopper in a little flat, flying an admin approach, because it was easier to control in thin air. But he caught ground fire. The chopper was hit. The hydraulic systems went out, and the pilot panicked.”

  “Panicked?” Wirth said. “That’s strong language, Major.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And it wasn’t what the official reports about Takhur Ghar said. But that’s what happened. I was there.” He paused. “If you train the way you fight, your instincts will kick in when things go bad. You’ll be able to overcome the obstacles. You’ll outthink and outfight the enemy. And you’ll get the job done. On Takhur Ghar, the mission hadn’t been bottom-up planned by shooters, but top-down planned by staff pukes. On Takhur Ghar, no one had trained the way they were going to have to fight. So the pilot reacted badly. Instead of putting his people on the ground to suppress the fire and counterambush the hostiles, he retreated. He hauled butt. And I guess he thought he’d done an okay job getting everyone out of there. Except he hadn’t. Jackson had fallen out.” Ritzik paused, his eyes scanning the room. “And no one noticed Jackson was missing.”

  He was pretty worked up by now. “Why was that? I’ll tell you something: why doesn’t matter. What matters is that somebody with stars on his collar back in Tampa wanted Navy SpecWar to get a piece of the glory that night, and so this patchwork-quilt unit that had never trained or operated together before was sent out to do a job. And when the you-know-what hit the fan, things went bad. Bottom line: seven men died. Seven. If you ask me, they were squandered, because no matter how good each of them might have been individually, the group didn’t have any unit integrity.” Ritzik caught his breath. “Mr. President, let me tell you about unit integrity—”

  “Major,” Pete Forrest broke in, his tone rebuking, “I know all about unit integrity.” He didn’t need a lecture on the subject from this young pup, and the peeved expression on his face displayed it.

  Ritzik realized he’d gone too far. “I apologize, sir, but I lost men in Afghanistan because … idiots back here made decisions based on political considerations, or pure ignorance about what was taking place on the ground.”

  “Sometimes that’s the reality,” the president said.

  “Yes, sir, it may be reality—but I don’t have to like it. The problem is that when screwups like that happen, the politicians and generals who caused the problems in the first place never pay for their mistakes. They get promoted. Me, sir, I’m the one stuck with the job of filling body bags. So if you don’t mind, I’ll take a pass on the politics. The way I see it, my only job is to make sure the mission succeeds, and my men come home.”

  “And you say those two goals are impossible if we assemble a joint force.”

  “Yes, sir.” He took a few seconds to consider what he was about to say, then continued. “Mr. President, if you think the Navy, or the Marines, or whoever, should take this job on, that’s up to you. You’re the CINC. My only recommendation is that no matter who you assign, please deploy a single unit—a group of operators who have worked together so long they can finish one another’s sentences and read one another’s body language—to do the job. Otherwise, you’re going to squander those men’s lives just the way they were squandered on Takhur Ghar.”

  The president took his time before responding. He liked this compact, muscular young man. Liked the fact that he spoke his mind. Liked even more that he obviously put the welfare and safety of his people ahead of his own career. Loyalty down the chain of command, Pete Forrest knew, was a rare, even uncommon virtue in today’s military culture. “Point taken, Major.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  After some seconds, the president said, “Outspoken youngster, isn’t he, Rocky?”

  “I told you he was,” the secretary said, a Cheshire-cat smile on his face.

  Pete Forrest leaned forward. “The only question I have remaining, Major Ritzik, is whether, as an operator, you really believe this is doable.”

  “Mr. President, in almost twenty ye
ars in the military I’ve learned that nothing is impossible, given the right resources and, more important, the political will to get the job done.”

  Pete Forrest stared across the low butler’s table separating him from the young officer, his eyes probing the man’s demeanor for any sign of weakness, indecision, or hesitation. So far, he’d sensed none. “Don’t worry about resources, Major,” the president finally said. “Or politics. Do you have the will to get the job done?”

  Mike Ritzik’s response was instantaneous. He looked the president in the eye. “Sir, I will not fail. I will bring those four men home.”

  After a quarter of a minute, the president’s gaze shifted to his secretary of defense, who was now sitting next to Ritzik on the couch. “Monica.”

  “Mr. President?”

  “This comes under the ‘Special Activity’ rule, doesn’t it?” “I believe so, Mr. President.”

  “Then draft a Finding. I want this done by the numbers.” “Yes, sir.”

  “And let’s keep it close hold: that means you, me, and the general counsel.” The president looked back at Rockman. “Rocky,” he said, “give this op a compartment.9 Give the major whatever he needs to get the job done.” The president paused. “And both of you”—he swiveled in the chair until he caught Monica Wirth’s eye again—“both of you, you take whatever heat is necessary to protect this boy’s back.”

  Sword Squadron, Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, North Carolina.

  1134 Hours Local Time.

  SERGEANT MAJOR FRED YATES tucked the handset between his bull neck and rippled shoulder, swung his boon-dockered feet up onto the coffee-stained gray steel desktop, and shouted into the mouthpiece, “Talgat, you Kazakh superman, assalamu alaykim.”

  Yates paused, a wide grin spreading across his sun-reddened face. “Yeah, it’s me, Rowdy Yates. Salemetsiz be, Colonel—you okay?” He nodded his head up and down. “Jaqsë—I’m just fine, thanks. No”—he laughed—“my Kazakh is still lousy as ever. So how are you?” Yates waited for an answer. “She did? A boy? What’s his name?” Yates flipped to a clean page of the legal pad that sat on his lap, took a felt marker out of his BDU breast pocket, and wrote A-I-B-E-K in capital letters on the page. “Three-point-three kilos? That’s huge, Talgat, huge,” he boomed. “You gotta be very, very proud, buddy.”