by John Weisman
“Skyhorse leader.” Gene Shepard’s voice forced him to focus on the here and now.
“Skyhorse leader sends.”
“We are forming on you.”
Ritzik illuminated his GPS screen, took a reading, called out his position, and asked for a verbal confirmation that they’d all received it so they could assemble. The infrared chem-sticks on Wei-Liu’s legs would help them see him as he circled. He checked his elapsed-time readout and cursed. They hadn’t even begun yet, and they were already running behind schedule.
Since it was dark, they’d be flying a trail formation. In daylight, Ritzik preferred a wedge, with the element spread out at seventy-five-foot intervals in a broad spear tip. But at night, a wedge was problematic. Jumpers could miss the wide, echelon turns and go astray. And so they’d form up single file. Since he was the slowest, given the tandem chute, he would take point. They’d be an eleven-car freight train, with Ritzik as the engine, Rowdy as the caboose, and the others in predetermined positions in between.
RITZIK BLINKED TWICE, sucked some O2, and scanned through his NV, counting the flat Ram Air chutes as they banked into a line behind him. He verified the heading on the GPS unit strapped to his wrist and checked the elapsed-time display. When he was satisfied that everyone was there he called out the element’s initial flight heading and asked for verbal confirmation. After he’d received ten wilcos, he used the Ram Air’s toggles to adjust his trim and bank gently southeast.
As soon as he’d confirmed his heading, he set the lap timer so the leg could be measured, rolled his shoulders, which were sore as hell given the weight he was carrying, then switched his comms package to the radio frequency Wei-Liu could hear. “This is your pilot, Johnny Cool, speaking from the flight deck. We’re expecting smooth sailing all the way to Las Vegas, but please keep your seat belts fastened anyway. The steward will be around with liquid refreshments in just a few minutes. Have a nice day.”
Hanging there helpless, suspended five miles above the earth, and still more than an hour away from landing, WeiLiu wished Ritzik hadn’t just used the word liquid.
5 Kilometers West of Markit,
Xinjiang Autonomous Region,
China. 2035 Hours Local Time.
SAM PHILLIPS GROANED and blinked a puffy right eye. There wasn’t a part of him that didn’t hurt. He looked over at X-Man and Kaz’s inert forms and realized they were screwed. Pure and simple. And they’d done it to themselves. No. That was not correct. He was the guilty party. He’d screwed everybody. After all, he was in charge. They should have tried to make their break earlier. He should have had the balls to insist, the audacity to make a decision and act on it. Because he’d just fought his way to the canvas and taken a peek—and what had been a mile-wide lake was now little more than a hundred yards wide. No cover. No concealment. Nothing but sandy marsh. It looked like the southern Virginia bog where he’d taken the CIA’s landnavigation course. In which, he remembered ruefully, he hadn’t done very well.
At the time he’d rationalized his dismal performance because he was a city boy. He’d grown up in Chicago, where his father was a stockbroker and his mother stayed at home to raise him and his two sisters. He’d never done the Boy Scout thing, or asked to be taken camping, preferring Soldier’s Field and skiing trips to Aspen to neckerchiefs, poison ivy, and hobo stoves. But right now, realizing how badly he’d screwed up, he wished he’d paid more attention to the instructors at the Farm when they’d tried to inculcate the Ways of the Wild in him.
The way Sam saw things, they had two alternatives. The first was to make a break for it tonight. The Tarim Basin was basically an egg-shaped oval, 650 miles long and 275 miles wide. They hadn’t yet traversed the basin’s western border, which was a wide, well-traveled highway that ran from Kashgar, on the western edge, to Yarkant Köl, in the southwest. But they were close—Sam had spent the past hour guesstimating how far and how fast they had come in the past three days. If they could make it to the highway, he was even willing to risk contact with PLA troops. After all, their documents were in order.
Well, that might be a problem. They didn’t have any documents—Mustache Man had their passports and wallets. But Sam and his team had been duly vetted when they’d crossed the border. So they were official. They could bluff their way through. Of course, if the Chinese called the British consul general to come and get them, they’d be in the proverbial deep du-du, because Sam was pretty certain that Langley hadn’t informed the cousins, as MI-6 was known, of SIE-l’s existence.
So Plan One was to make a break for it tonight, try to flag down a PLA unit, and ask for help. But Sam knew the odds of Plan One working were slim to none. That left Plan Two. Plan Two would be to wait until they were well along the narrow, rutted trail leading across the mountains to Tajikistan and then escape. After all, there was nothing so invigorating as a fifty-mile hike through twenty-thousand-foot-high mountain passes, with a bunch of well-armed, pissed-off guerrillas in hot pursuit.
But there was an upside to Plan Two. When Sam had departed Dushanbe two and a half years previously, he’d left a small but productive agent network in place. One of his principal agents, Halil Abdullaev, was the muktar of Tokhtamysh, a small Tajik settlement where the Soviets had once based a parachute battalion.
Tokhtamysh sat astride two barely traversable smugglers’ roads, one leading east through the Sarkolsk Mountains sixteen kilometers to the Chinese border, the other south across the Pamirs to Afghanistan. From its strategic location Halil—and therefore Sam—had been able to monitor narcotics shipped to the West from Afghanistan, and the weapons that were smuggled back across the border. From Tokhtamysh, he tracked Uighur infiltrators coming from China to join up with their al-Qaeda allies in the Stans, and IMU terrorists moving in the opposite direction to stage raids in Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
If they could reach Tokhtamysh and Sam could find Halil, he’d pay his old agent to smuggle them to the American embassy in Dushanbe. Sam realized Plan Two was also somewhat far-fetched and prone to lead to disappointment. But frankly, it was all he could come up with right now.
Whichever option he decided to go with, there was one constant: before they left, he’d find some way of disabling or booby-trapping the nuke. And the way Sam felt right now—which bordered on clinical depression—he wouldn’t give much of a damn if the frigging thing went off, either.
15
21,775 Feet Above Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China.
2029 Hours Local Time.
RITZIK REALIZED that the Universe had shifted, and the laws of nature obviously weren’t working anymore. At least, not for him. Yes, it was dark—the moon was in its waning eighth. And it was inhumanly cold—his fingers were numb and he couldn’t feel his toes anymore. But, to get to the point, Rowdy had promised nighttime mountain breezes. Tailwinds, to speed them on their way. And yet, according to his lap timer and the GPS unit, he was currently being assailed by daytime valley breezes. Head winds.
This glitch was causing the insertion element a thorny logistical problem. The Ram Air parachute glides at a constant ground speed of thirty miles per hour. With a twenty-mile-an-hour tailwind, the airspeed grows to fifty miles an hour. With a twenty-mile-an-hour head wind, however, ground speed is reduced to a mere ten miles an hour. And that’s what Ritzik was currently doing. This meant that instead of reaching the drop zone in an hour and a half, it was going to take almost five hours to cover the same route.
Which would mean they’d arrive at the intercept point an hour after the IMU tangos had passed through it. More bad juju.
And then there were the Chinese. The gate-crashers. Given the way things were progressing, the PLA had already found Barber’s body, checked the coordinates programmed into his GPS unit, and were waiting in ambush for Ritzik’s element to drop into the LZ.
He inhaled a deep, therapeutic breath of O2 and switched transmission frequencies. “TOC, Skyhorse.”
As if to confirm the complete TARFUness of his miss
ion status, there was no response.
He tried a second time, and a third. Finally, he heard, “Skyhorse, TOC.”
“Sit-rep, Dodger.”
“No changes.”
That was good to hear. “Target?”
“On course. ETA four hours eighteen minutes.”
“Gate-crashers?” Ritzik was desperate for another small shred of good news.
He got it: “Imagery is consistent. No movement at Changii.”
“Skyhorse out.” Ritzik switched to the radio’s insertion-element frequency. “Skyhorse back door.”
“Skyhorse back door.” Rowdy’s growl answered in his ear.
“We’re not making required speed, back door.”
“That’s been factored, leader.”
Ritzik was dubious and said so.
“Patience, grasshopper. Think sniper. Back door sends.”
Ritzik sighed into his mask. He’d always envied the sniper’s mental strength, the capacity to wait, immobile, for hours—days, if necessary—observing the target, waiting for the right moment to make the shot. The ability to do so—in more than a rudimentary way—was beyond him. Oh, he could physically make the shot; that was no problem. The physical requirements of slowing your heart rate and learning how to fire between beats, so bullet placement wouldn’t be affected by your respiration, were technical elements that could be learned. Marksmanship was a frangible skill that required practice, practice, practice. No, it was the mental aspect of the craft, the snipers’ Zen-like ability to get outside their own bodies and look at their environment in a holographic sense, which had always escaped him. And that was what Rowdy’d just been talking about.
His gaze dropped to Wei-Liu, suspended beneath him. He wondered what she was thinking. He tried to speculate how she’d respond when the shooting started, and surprisingly found himself optimistic. If the way she’d come through the jump was any indicator, she’d be all right under fire. He also tried to figure out why she’d agreed to come with them in the first place. It certainly wasn’t going to do her career any good.
Still, the willingness to stick her neck out was something Ritzik appreciated. He himself had come to grips with the fact that he’d probably never make 0-6—colonel—although it would be a disappointment to his family. Ritzik came from a large North Philadelphia family of émigrés—refugees from the abortive pro-democracy Hungarian uprising of 1956. His father, Andy, had been a beat cop for thirty-five years before he’d pulled the pin and retired to the Gulf Coast of Florida in the mid-nineties. The move was well deserved: Andras Ritzik had raised five children alone after his wife died of a stroke at the age of forty-two. And he’d done well as a single parent: Ritzik’s brother Frank was a sergeant on the Philadelphia PD’s SWAT team; elder brothers Andy Junior and Joe were Pennsylvania State Police troopers, and his sister, Julianna, worked as an investigator for the City of Brotherly Love’s district attorney.
Ritzik’s father, who’d never gone above the rank of patrolman, had always wanted to see his firstborn command a battalion or a regiment. But Ritzik knew all too well that promotion these days was based not on the ability to lead, but on the pure Machiavellian cunning to thrive within the backstabbing environment of staff assignments and the willingness to curry favor with paper-warrior generals.
It just wasn’t his milieu. Indeed, Ritzik was considered bureaucratically challenged because he preferred stabbing his people in the front—and with a knife, not a memo. Plus, he had a short fuse. He was undiplomatically blunt. And obviously, he was impolitic: he’d turned down the chance of a lifetime to work on SECDEF’s staff, after which promotion would have been a gimme. Neither was he particularly anxious to attend the National War College, which was where you went if you were fast-tracked for a command billet and a general’s stars. No, Ritzik was a most atypical West Pointer: no eagles or stars in his sights; happy where he was as a junior officer who had the privilege of serving with the finest and most capable Soldiers in the world.
Two years before, when Ritzik told Rowdy he’d just turned SECDEF down, Yates thought over what he’d said for about thirty seconds.
Then the sergeant major spat tobacco juice into his cup, wiped his lower lip, and said, “The way I see it, Loner, the only real difference between a brown nose and a shithead is depth perception—and there are already so many damn officers with depth perception working at the Pentagon they just don’t need you and your twenty/twenty vision screwing up their lives.”
RITZIK SHOOK HIMSELF out of his reverie. He checked his timer and GPS unit and discovered much to his amazement that they’d picked up a little speed. The winds actually were shifting. Maybe. Still, he did a little quick mental math and was happy to see that if everything remained constant, they’d reach the LZ in just under three hours. That wasn’t good enough—not by a long shot. But the situation was far better than it had been half an hour ago.
Room 3E880-D, The Pentagon. 0739 Hours Local Time.
THE SECURE PHONE on Robert Rockman’s desk was ringing as the secretary came into his hideaway office. He launched himself at the receiver, hit the button, and waited for the green light. “Rockman.”
“This is Captain O’Neill, sir. Signal, please?”
“Skyhorse-Pushpin.”
“Thank you, sir. You were anxious to hear about PLA aircraft movement yesterday. I just picked up something relating to those HIP-? transports out of Beijing. You asked me twice about the choppers and only once about the fighter aircraft, so I figured you had a special interest in keeping ‘eyes on’ the choppers.”
Perceptive fellow, this O’Neill. “Yes?”
“I made some quiet inquiries. DIA reports SIGINT that the choppers have been diverted from their original destinations.”
Rockman wrinkled his brow. “Diverted,” he said.
“Langley had plotted them going to Changii,” O’Neill said. “I know that because of—” He paused. “Well, sir, I just know it from a good source.”
“Go on.”
“The flight plan was changed. The transports are going to Kashgar instead.”
“Kashgar. Gunship cover as well?”
“Affirmative, Mr. Secretary.”
Rockman cursed silently. The shift put the PLA four hundred miles closer to Ritzik’s rescue operation. “Has CIA advised anybody of this?”
“Not that I know of, sir.”
“Do you know why they’ve buttoned up?”
“May I speak with you face-to-face, sir?”
“Come on down.”
As O’Neill came through the door, the secretary could see that he hadn’t been to sleep. The captain said, “I’m sorry for my appearance …”
Rockman waved him off. “Don’t apologize, Hugo. You’ve been crashing. Tell me what’s up.”
“It’s a CIA Charlie Foxtrot, sir, if you’ll pardon my French. Late yesterday, NSA scooped up a series of open telephone calls from Beijing to roughly a dozen commercial satellite imaging companies all around the globe.”
“Yesterday.” That was funny. Rockman remembered Nick Pappas had told the president Beijing had tried to buy one-meter commercial imagery two nights ago. “Are you sure it was yesterday, Hugo—not the day before?”
The captain nodded. “Absolutely, Mr. Secretary.”
“And all of the firms that were contacted—do they sell one-meter-resolution digital satellite imagery?”
“They do, sir.”
“Go on.”
“Beijing asked each company for the precise coordinates in China that had been acquired for exclusive commercial use recently. I’d bet they suspected CIA had purchased a lot of one-meter imagery in the past couple of days in order to keep them blind. I think Beijing—or to be more precise, the Er Bu, China’s foreign intelligence organization—repolled the companies to discover precisely which areas were out of bounds. My guess is that they washed those coordinates through some kind of matrix. Ultimately, it became a process of elimination. From what I’ve been able to ascerta
in from my sources, when CIA bought up the one-meter imagery, the front companies doing the purchasing didn’t ask for anything except the one precise area Langley wanted to keep the Chinese from seeing.”
Rockman shook his head. “Nick couldn’t be that stupid.” Then he thought about what he’d just said and slammed his palm on his desk. “Oh, yes he could.”
But more to the point, the DCI was covering up his latest gaffe by withholding this critical piece of intelligence. Rockman looked at O’Neill’s haggard face. “Good work, Hugo—you showed real initiative. I owe you a big one.”
He waited until the officer turned and left. Then he hit his intercom button so violently that he snapped it in two. “Get me the president on a secure line—ASAR.”
16
14,250 Feet Above Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China.
2118 Hours Local Time.
RITZIK NUDGED WEI-LIU with his left leg and pointed a booted foot groundward. There were sparse lights scattered below. He adjusted his NV and peered down, but he could make out no sign of life other than the half-dozen twinkling lights. They were gliding almost due southeast now, at a ground speed of just over thirty-three miles an hour. Distance to the LZ was 21.6 miles—40.6 minutes of flight time given the current tailwind. He checked the time. It had been eight minutes since the last radio check. He pressed his transmit switch, uneasy until he’d received a verbal confirmation from every member of the element. Navigation on night HAHO operations, he was happy to note, was so much simpler with the GPS units—so long as the damn things worked.
Something that hadn’t changed was the fatigue of long Ram Air glides. Ritzik’s arms were gradually growing sore. Even with the toggle extensions, which allowed him to keep his hands at waist level, maintaining the full-flight position was exhausting after more than half an hour or so. And Ritzik’s arms had been virtually frozen in position for almost an hour.
The slow progress also made him nervous. ETA at the drop zone was now close to twenty-two hundred hours. That would give them little more than two and a half hours to bury the chutes and the rest of their jump equipment and proceed to a rear assembly area, which was more commonly called a LUP, or lay up position. From there, well back from the ambush site, Ritzik’s troops would begin their recon. Once they’d gone over the ground thoroughly and decided just where to hit the convoy, they’d set the explosives and unobtrusively mark their fields of fire. Then the team would withdraw, leaving no sign that they’d been prowling and growling. Finally, long before the enemy was anywhere nearby, the team would conceal themselves and let the ambush site slip back to its uninterrupted nocturnal rhythms—letting the “critters and shitters,” as an old Special Forces master sergeant had once described them to Ritzik, return to normal.
