by Bob Mayer
They were picking up speed, but Vaughn knew it wasn’t fast enough. The pilot had them low over the beach, trees off to the right, waves breaking to the left, sand below.
“Time?” he demanded of the pilot.
‘Ten seconds to impact.”
They were still a good two hundred meters from the camp, and he knew he had cut it as close as he could. He threw the designator out of the helicopter at the same time he yelled into the intercom: “Bank.”
The helicopter turned hard to the left over the ocean.
Even though the missile was coming in at supersonic speed, Vaughn could have sworn he saw it flash by. There was no doubting the impact as it landed on the beach where he had dumped the designator. The explosion turned night into day for an instant as flames shot forty feet into the air, followed by a shower of sand. The shock wave hit the helicopter and it shuddered violently for a second, then held steady.
He had averted immediate disaster, but now things were preparing to go from bad to worse. “Put us down on shore,” Vaughn ordered as a string of green tracers punched through the darkness at them, narrowly missing. He flipped down his night vision goggles. He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, which he had to ignore as the Huey landed hard one hundred meters from the two buildings, to the west along the beach.
The other four helicopters appeared right on time, coming in low along the beach to the west, to be met not with a destroyed barracks and a few surviving terrorists in shock, but a wave of automatic fire from numerous Abu Sayef guerrillas pouring out of the barracks. Undaunted, the helicopters plowed toward their landing zone just short of the target.
“Come on,” Vaughn yelled to the Filipino commandos as he jumped off. He had the extended stock of the MP-5 tight to his shoulder and fired twice, double-tapping a figure holding an AK-47, then continuing to run forward, killing two more terrorists and closing on the building where the hostages were supposed to be held.
The other four helicopters were flaring to land when an RPG round fired by a guard hit one of the choppers dead on, exploding as it penetrated the cockpit. Out of control, the helicopter banked and plunged into the surf. Upon impact, the blades ripped off, tearing through the rear compartment, killing those who had survived the initial blast.
The other three helicopters landed on the beach, and the men on board jumped out into the middle of the raging firelight. Vaughn was forced to dive to the sand as concentrated automatic fire tore through the air in his general direction, barely missing him. He had no idea if anyone else from his helicopter had followed him, and he was still a good fifteen meters from the hostage building.
Vaughn continued firing as he spotted targets. He estimated there were at least thirty or forty guerrillas opposing them—the result of failing to destroy the barracks. They had not planned for this. Military tactics dictated a three-to-one ratio in favor of the attacking force for an assault to be successful. The odds here were reversed.
As he sighted in on another target, a large flash lit the night and his night vision goggles blacked out. Then a hot blast of air lifted him up and slammed him down to the ground while a thunderous explosion deafened him. Sand and debris came raining down— among it, body parts.
Ears ringing, Vaughn slowly rolled onto his back. He blinked as the night vision goggles worked to regain their setting after the overload. He didn’t really want to see. Didn’t want to get up. Didn’t want to confirm what he already knew. It was only a question of how truly bad this was, and he instinctively knew it was very bad.
As the ringing subsided, he could dimly hear firing, though not as much as before. Accepting his duty with the battle still going on, he tucked the MP-5 into his shoulder and got to one knee, scanning the area, though he knew they’d already failed.
The hostage shack was gone. A gaping hole stood in its place. The explosion had been so large, it also took out most of the barracks building, killed quite a few of the terrorists who had been arrayed around the complex, and cut a swath into the jungle behind the buildings. There was no way anyone inside could have survived the explosion.
As if on autopilot, Vaughn fired at an Abu Sayef guerrilla who was limping away from the scene of the explosion. He continued to scan, saw bodies everywhere, turned and looked behind him. A half-dozen Filipino commandos were tentatively moving forward. He could see the crashed helicopter burning in the surf.
Drawn by the flames, Vaughn walked toward it, the water lapping around his legs. A couple of his men were already at work, removing bodies from it, searching for survivors. He paused as he recognized one of the bodies laid out next to the helicopter—or partial body.
A helicopter blade had sliced through the man, cutting him in half. The upper half had been dragged above the waterline. There was no sign of the lower half. Most likely it was still pinned in the wreckage.
Trembling, Vaughn walked over to the torso and knelt next to Sergeant Major Jenkins. He ripped open the combat vest and body armor and, reaching into the breast pocket, retrieved the picture of Jenkins’s wife— his sister. He looked at it for several moments, then at his friend and brother-in-law.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
***
Over four kilometers away, on the side of a mountain to the southeast along the shore, an old man sat in a wheelchair. He was parked on a narrow ledge, less than five feet wide, that had been cut out of the rock. On the right arm of the wheelchair was a red button, which was depressed under the weight of his hand. He slowly released the pressure. To his right, a man stood behind a digital video camera set on a tripod. The video camera had a bulky lens—a night vision device. And it was pointed toward the clearly visible flames where the battle had just taken place. The sounds of shots still echoed across the water toward their location, but the number and frequency had dropped off considerably.
“Did you get it all?” the old man asked in Tagalog, the language of Filipinos.
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you identify them as Americans?”
“The zoom on this is very good. There is no doubt.”
“Very good.”
CHAPTER 2
The Philippines
The story ran less than six hours later on the largest news station in Manila, and was picked up internationally within twenty minutes. Video of a failed American-Filipino raid that cost the lives of all the hostages, a dozen Filipino commandos, a classified number of American soldiers, and an unknown number of guerrillas.
The U.S. Defense attache in Manila was ambushed by reporters, and because he had not been clued in on the Delta Force participation, he denied it and then looked foolish as the footage was played for him. If it had just been the several Delta and twelve Filipino commandos dead, perhaps it could have been covered up, as other incidents in the past had been: terrible training accident, helicopter went down at sea, all lost.
But there was no getting around the dead hostages. Those people had families. They’d been in the news, with the Abu Sayef continuously releasing videos of them pleading for their release. It was the number one news story in the Philippines, and it spread like wildfire in the media around the globe.
No one seemed to know or even particularly care about who had videotaped the attack and how it had gotten to the Manila news station. The focus was on the illegal participation of American forces on Philippine soil in a raid that had cost the lives of not only Americans, but two Germans, an Italian, and a French citizen.
Heads began to roll.
*****
Vaughn and his team were back in “isolation.” It was a term used in Special Operations for the time when a team was completely cut off from the outside world in a secure location. It was usually done for mission planning. Now it was being done to hide the six Delta Force survivors after the mission.
They were locked in a compound far behind the gate of what used to be Subic Naval Base, now being run by the Filipinos. A team from the First Special Forces Group out of Okinawa had been their
ASTs—area specialist team—for their mission isolation, and that team was now acting as both their jailers and protectors. No one had come in and said anything about what would happen to the six, but they did have access to TV in their building and they knew the hammer was going to come down.
Vaughn felt isolated inside the isolation. He’d been honest about the problem with the LLDS at their first debriefing, and the other five team members had been surprised, and a bit skeptical. They had held their peace, though, due to the losses the team had sustained, especially knowing the bond between Vaughn and Jenkins.
The communications sergeant who gave Vaughn the LLDS and was responsible for making sure it was functioning had died in the raid, so he couldn’t be questioned about the status of the original battery. Mission SOP was that all batteries to be carried on an operation were to be brand new. Had this one been forgotten about? Had it malfunctioned? The device had been destroyed when the missile hit it, so that couldn’t be checked. It was just Vaughn’s word that the battery had died.
The other five said they believed him, but Vaughn sensed an edge of uncertainty. He felt it himself. He couldn’t get the image of Frank Jenkins’s severed body out of his mind. He hadn’t been able to sleep since they got back to Manila, and didn’t think he would be able to sleep solidly for a long while to come.
If ever.
He knew he should call his sister, but no phone calls were allowed, and he was secretly grateful for that. The isolation would at least protect him from the emotional fallout. He also knew it could not continue indefinitely, even though a part of him wished it would.
With the debriefings done, the team was left alone to ponder their fate. Already, less than twenty-fours after the botched raid, the Undersecretary of Defense for Special Operations in the Pentagon had taken one for the team and tendered his resignation, claiming the authorization for Delta Force to be on the raid had come from his office and he had overstepped the limits of his power. Vaughn doubted that the raid had originated anywhere but at the highest levels. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen someone who was truly in charge stand up and take responsibility for something they had ordered unless it went well and they looked good.
“It’s bullshit.”
He didn’t realize that someone had come into the briefing room, where the imagery, maps, and overlays for the mission were still tacked to walls. He’d been sitting there alone, not wanting to be with the others in the small recreation room watching CNN scroll by, showing practically the same story every half hour, the graphic images of the raid video playing again and again. Whoever had been manning the camera caught the RPG hitting Jenkins’s helicopter, and Vaughn could not help but dwell on his brother-in-law’s last moments of life.
The man who stood in the doorway wore civilian clothes: black trousers, black T-shirt, and white sport coat. A bit much for the climate, Vaughn thought, then spotted the bulk of a gun in a shoulder holster and knew that was the reason for the coat
“Who are you?” he demanded of the man. “This is a secure area.”
“It’s a secure area because I secured it,” the man replied.
“CIA.” Vaughn said it with a tinge of contempt. ‘Clowns in Action,’ as they were well known in the Special Operations community. Stemming from when the CIA and Special Forces were both spawned out of the OSS—Office of Strategic Services—after World War II, there had been no love lost between the two organizations. The war on terror had not brought the two organizations any closer, as the CIA had tried to expand its paramilitary forces under the guise of fighting terrorism—an area that military Special Operations felt was their purview.
“No. I’m not CIA,” the man said, surprising Vaughn.
“DIA?” His tone had shifted from fact to question.
“No.”
“Are we going to play alphabet soup?” Vaughn asked, tired of the game. He figured this guy was here to deliver the bad news, whatever it might be.
The man shrugged. “Let’s say NSA just so you feel better.”
“Why would that make me feel better?”
“It seems important to you to know who I work for.”
“I want to know who I’m talking to.”
“My name is Royce.”
Vaughn stared at him. He was older, in his later forties, maybe early fifties. The way he carried himself indicated he’d been in the military at one time, probably long ago, before disappearing into the covert world and landing wherever he had—NSA, or elsewhere. Royce’s face was tanned from the sun and had plenty of stress lines etched into it, typical for his line of work. He was tall and thin with somewhat long dark hair with a liberal amount of gray in it. His face was clean-shaven and there was the slightest trace of a scar across his forehead, disappearing underneath the hair on the right temple. Vaughn recognized a kindred spirit in the Black Ops world, but that didn’t make him feel any better, since it was a world where secrets were kept and motives were often questionable.
“What do you want, Royce?”
Royce indicated a chair. “Mind if I sit?”
“Yes.”
Royce sat anyway. He regarded Vaughn with mild interest, as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. Vaughn disliked the way this was going. “You always ask questions you’ve already determined the answer to?” he demanded.
“I know my answer,” Royce replied. “I just wanted to know yours.”
Vaughn sighed. He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. “I don’t want to play games.”
“I’m not here for games,” Royce said. He nodded his head toward the door that led to the rec room. “How come you’re not watching the news?”
“I know what happened.”
“But not what’s going to happen,” Royce pointed out.
“Neither does CNN,” Vaughn said.
Royce leaned back in his chair, turning it sideways. He stretched out his long legs and put his heels on another chair as he continued to contemplate Vaughn, tipping the chair back, balancing it on the rear two legs.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” Royce asked.
“Read the debriefing.”
“I did.” Royce waited, like a good therapist wanting the patient to reveal is inner self, but Vaughn wasn’t into it. He’d done all the talking and explaining he was going to. The silence stretched out for a couple of minutes.
Abruptly, Royce removed his heels from the other chair and slammed his chair to the ground with a bang. “All right. You answer me square, just a couple of questions, and I’ll be out of here and leave you to your misery.”
Accepting the inevitable, Vaughn nodded.
“Did you fuck up?” Royce asked.
There was no hesitation in the answer. “Yes.”
Royce frowned, and Vaughn could see the scar more clearly. Royce leaned forward. “In the AAR you said that the battery in the designator died. It appears from that point you did everything humanly possible. And the dead battery was the communications sergeant’s fault, who unfortunately is no longer with us.”
“So?”
“So, doesn’t that mean what happened is the communication sergeant’s fault?”
Vaughn stared Royce in the eye, his gaze unblinking. “I was the team commander. Everything on that mission was my responsibility.”
Royce abruptly stood. “All right.” He headed for the door, then paused and turned. “If you had to do it all over again, would you?”
“I’d have a good battery in the designator.”
Then Royce was gone.
Fort Shafter, Hawaii
In the early days of World War II, after the attack at Pearl Harbor, there was serious concern that the Hawaiian Islands would be invaded by the Japanese. Defensive preparations were made throughout the islands, including the digging of tunnels in the lava flows that made up most of the land. These tunnels housed various military organizations, from air defense headquarters to hospitals.
One such tunnel system on Fort Shafter was still in
use. It housed an agency known as Westcom Sim-Center, which stood for Western Command, Simulation Center. It was the place where the major commands of the United States military in the Pacific theater played their war games using sophisticated computer simulations.
At the moment, inside the Simulation Operations Center—which mimicked the one at Western Command headquarters—a simulation involving the Air Force was being run. On the large video display at the front of the room a map showing North Korea and vicinity was projected. A blinking red dot was rapidly moving across the Korean peninsula from east to west, closing on a blue triangle.
The red dot represented a B-2 bomber, the blue triangle the principal North Korean nuclear plant that produced weapons grade material. Anxiously watching the dot were two dozen Air Force officers. Their billion-dollar toy was “in action,” and the Sim-Center had a notorious reputation for what the officers would say—only among themselves—was “no bullshit.” If the computer determined that the North Koreans had spotted the bomber—or worse, shot it down—the computer would play out the simulation that way. These officers had planned the mission using the best intelligence they had, and now the computer was taking their plan and testing it and the expensive high-tech toy they were employing.
At the very back of the room sat the scientist in charge of the Sim-Center, Professor Foster, who appeared to be the exact opposite of what he was: a computer programming genius. Foster was a hulking man, over six and a half feet tall and weighing in at a beefy 280 pounds. He’d played football at Stanford, where he’d received his undergraduate degree. He’d actually been good enough to be drafted by the Oakland Raiders and had gone on to training camp, where he blew out his knee on the first day, ending his professional career. Then he’d gone back to graduate school and focused on developing computer programs to simulate real events. He approached these simulations like they were the Super Bowl and the American military was the opposing team.
