KBL

by John Weisman

  To be sure, Charlie understood intellectually that the rigors of undercover work require immense, almost ineffable levels of concentration, discipline, and, above all, the ability to be out there with no net, no support, no backup, and, most critical, no one to talk to. Like a hardhat diver a hundred feet down. Alone. In a vacuum.

  That last little bit—and he’d learned it on the job because no one had ever discussed it with him before he’d come here—was the toughest part of working a long-term undercover assignment like this one: no one to talk to. No one to bounce ideas off of. To fricking listen to you. To let you vent about your frustrations. About your fears, anxieties, doubts. About your hopes and dreams, and yes, your successes. The aloneness, the vacuum, was debilitating. Draining. Exhausting. Depressing.

  Charlie had spent virtually his entire military career in the 75th Ranger Regiment. The Army was collegial. The Army was built to be that way. Squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, divisions. It was all about working as a team. Which was why, when some idiot had come out with the inane recruiting slogan “An Army of One,” Charlie had wanted to smack the stupid sonofabitch silly. An Army of One? One what?

  Well, now Charlie was an army of one. Working in a vacuum. He’d arrived in Abbottabad four months ago, almost to the day. The intervening weeks had not been easy.

  Oh, that was putting it mildly.

  It was tough. It was tougher than tough. It was compartments within compartments within compartments. It was bottling up all your hopes and dreams inside an impenetrable shell, the shell that will keep you alive in this hostile, deadly environment, but the shell that wants to explode out of frustration, anxiety, aloneness.

  That was why catching sight of Tareq was so important to him. It was the first time in weeks, certainly since he’d killed Saif the Iraqi, that he felt he was making forward progress.

  But there had been no reply to his message. And it would have been oh so wonderful to hear someone say, “Thanks, we needed that.”

  Yeah. It would.

  But then it occurred to him, sitting there on the street by the Iqbal Market, not six rupees in his bowl. It occurred to him, like Boing! The Proverbial Lightbulb. An epiphany.

  Having put Saif in the ground was thank-you enough. Interdicting a threat and neutralizing it? That was what he did. He didn’t need a thank-you. He was a Ranger.

  Always would be. Even in Abbottabad. Because what was Abbottabad?

  It was a target. It was his job to be here.

  And what was his job?

  Recon. Spotting Tareq was his job.

  Because he was on Point.

  Of course he was. Because Rangers Lead the Way!

  Charlie refocused. Remembered the Ranger Creed.

  I will complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.

  Airborne Ranger. That’s who he always was and would always be.

  He pushed off and rolled down the street toward his next checkpoint.

  Energized. Recommitted.

  Thinking, Hoo-ah, Ranger Becker, Drive ON!

  19

  Cumberland Parkway, Virginia Beach, Virginia

  March 6, 2011, 1935 Hours Local Time

  Brittany Roberts slid the pasta salad onto the big folding table, careful not to crease the tablecloth. Troy and Ken Michaud had moved the table up against the wall in the family room to give everybody a little more space. She gave the table an approving glance. Pasta salad, pot roast, and a big green salad followed by homemade apple pie and vanilla ice cream made for a lovely dinner. Plates, napkins, and flatware were laid out. There were even flowers. There was a fire in the fireplace, sports on Fox Soccer channel, and the mini fridge that Troy kept under his bar on the other side of the room was full of Corona, Coors, and Michelob Light.

  She was barely showing, her figure still slim in skinny jeans and a long-sleeved flowing top. She ran a hand through long, dark hair and looked around the room, delighted that everything was shipshape. The word brought a smile to her face.

  Brittany loved the house. They’d bought it a year and a half ago, at a fire-sale price. The basement family room had a beamed ceiling and a fireplace. The front garden was framed by a white picket fence that Troy and Ken had put up last summer as a birthday present for her. The neighborhood was lovely, the schools were good, and she was less than fifteen minutes from the Lynnhaven Mall, across from which she worked part time as a billing clerk at a printing company.

  She turned and headed for the stairs, bringing the gravy for the pot roast, which was even now out of the crock pot braising liquid and being sliced by Danny Walker.

  There were nine of them for dinner. She and Troy and Corbin, who was being allowed to stay up later than usual because of the guests, and Ken Michaud, who just about lived with them since he’d broken up with his long-time girlfriend. Master Chief Danny Walker and his wife, Christine, had come, and Jerry Mistretta, who was also stag, and Kerry and Jama Brendel.

  She glanced at Jerry and Ken as they sipped their beer, deep in conversation with Kerry, the tall, lanky SEAL known as Rangemaster. Hopefully, she thought, they’ll find someone soon. But in the special operations community, relationships, Brittany had come to understand, could be rocky. There were the long deployments—months of separation. There was the constant gnawing comprehension that your boyfriend or husband earned his living by jumping out of aircraft at heights measured in miles, or looking out of nuclear submarines, or spending long periods of time in groups of two or four or six, living unannounced and unwelcome in the midst of people who would just love to behead him, shoot him, or blow his limbs off with an IED. She and Troy had visited SEALs at Walter Reed. Wounded Warriors, they were called. Missing limbs. She cried every time she left the wards, thinking but at the same time trying not to think how she would feel if Troy was like one of his wounded brothers in arms. And of course there were the constant stories of SEALs and their wandering eyes and testosterone overdrive.

  She was lucky. She and Troy had their church and their faith. And she knew how much he loved her. Loved her enough to take her on with a three-year-old child and tell her straight out, “Corbin’s my kid just as much as he’s yours.”

  The dinner was sort of an impromptu thing. They’d run into Danny and Christine at church, and Brittany suggested they do something together later, because the guys were scheduled to TDY out west for some training first thing Monday morning and Ken was coming to dinner anyway. Christine said she and Danny asked Jerry over so he wouldn’t have to eat by himself, and so why didn’t Bri and Troy just join them. And then they saw Kerry and Jama, and asked them if they were free—and they were.

  But Brittany’s baby sitter wasn’t available this weekend, and so to make it work she and Troy would host and Danny and Chris would bring the main course and Jama and Kerry the dessert.

  Or, as Danny’d put it as they all walked out into the March sunshine, “Hey, guys, it’s Darwin, Sun Tzu, Musashi. Adapt, overcome . . . or starve.”

  Brittany loved the closeness of Troy’s team. It was very much like having a big, extended family around. Danny’s wife was like an older sister. So was Roger Orth’s wife, Barbara.

  It was the first extended family she’d ever known. Brittany was an only child, a Chesapeake, Virginia, native who had left home at nineteen, using marriage as a form of rebellion against her loving but distant only-child mother and orphaned father. Her intended, who had just turned eighteen, worked at a Jiffy Lube.

  Four years later, she was abandoned, miserable, and living back in her parents’ house, her seven-month-old Corbin cared for by her mother while she worked at Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Lynnhaven Mall and took classes toward an associate’s degree in business technology at Tidewater Community College.

  She met Troy at Dick’s. He’d come in to buy the latest Under Armour cold-weather compression gear. They had talked, and as he was fond of telling anyone who would listen, he’d fallen in love with her glorious green eyes in about, oh, five seconds. F
ifteen minutes after they had first spoken he asked her out, and she said yes.

  That had been two and a half, almost three years ago, when Troy was still at SEAL Team Four. But ST4 was an overt team. The team partied as a group, went out to restaurants, held picnics. Troy could even talk about his work—or at least some of it.

  Where he worked now—Brittany was hesitant even to think the word DEVGRU, though it wasn’t classified—everything was secret.

  Like tomorrow’s deployment. All she knew was what he had told her: he was going out west for some training. It might last a week, it might last a month. He didn’t know.

  Sometimes, she’d come to realize, his explanation was actually true. Sometimes, however, “out west” or “down south” could mean Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Colombia, or some similarly dangerous place. Like the time a year ago January when he’d said he was going up to Fort A. P. Hill in northern Virginia for a week and came home with a deep suntan. Or last March, just about a year ago, when he told her he was going to do a week of HALO—high-altitude low-opening—parachute certification in Arizona. Four days later she turned on the news and saw that the president had made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with troops at Bagram Air Base, and also with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. In one of the shots, she caught a glimpse of Troy. He was dressed in Afghan clothes and a funny-looking hat, standing at the edge of the contingent of bodyguards escorting Karzai to the meeting.

  That was an eye-opener. When she asked him about it, he just smiled and kissed her and said, “Aw, sweetie, you know we shouldn’t talk about that stuff.”

  Then she understood: working at DEVGRU meant Troy could end up in some place he could never talk about, doing something he would never be able to talk about. Like the months of November and December, when he came home from an assignment and told her he might have to leave his job.

  He never said why. But she’d read in Navy Times that a SEAL team had killed a hostage by mistake during a rescue attempt. She asked Troy if that had something to do with his situation. He looked at her with his big brown eyes, hugged her, and said, “Baby, I can’t say anything. But it’ll be okay.”

  Indeed secrecy was omnipresent in their lives. He had a Navy cover job and a Navy cover unit, so they had answers for the times people asked about his work. And if, God forbid, anything happened to him, because his deployments were classified all that would come out publicly was that he was a petty officer second class working in support of Naval Special Warfare Group Two. If that: the real names of two of Troy’s shipmates killed in Afghanistan had never been released. Their deaths were reported, but under pseudonyms.

  If something happened to Troy, there would be no yellow ribbons or public grief. It wasn’t done. Not at this command. DEVGRU’s mourning was done in private.

  That was all on the one hand. On the other hand, she knew that Troy had the best training and the best equipment and worked with some of the best intelligence the United States could provide. She knew that very, very few candidates made it into his unit. BUD/S was tough; what Troy had had to go through to make it into DEVGRU was even tougher. He was the real tip of the spear. The best of the best. And knowing that made her very, very proud of him, of the unit, and of what they could accomplish.

  Coors Light in hand, Troy wandered over to the corner of the family room, where Kerry, Ken, and Jerry were talking, their voices masked by the English Premiere League game he had TiVo’d. He paused long enough to check the score. In the forty-first minute, Liverpool was up two-nil over Manchester United. That brought a smile to his face. Although he appreciated the robotic relentlessness of Man U, he was delighted to see that once in a while the underdogs kicked some butt, too.

  He’d gotten to appreciate English Premiere League Football—he still called it soccer—during cross-training with the Royal Marines the previous year. At its best—he realized this the first time he saw Chelsea play Arsenal—it was all about team. The pace of the game also floored him. He marveled at the accuracy of the passes, often made blind, with the passer just knowing that his teammate was going to be exactly where he needed to be. In many ways, watching the best of the EPL reminded him of the seamless way he and his shipmates in Red Squadron worked.

  In fact, when he thought about it, there were some strong similarities. Like the EPL, Troy and his shipmates were professionals who were expected to excel every time they played the game. No excuses. No woulda-coulda-shoulda.

  The difference, of course, was the game, and the stakes. Troy’s team played for life-and-death stakes. If Man U or Chelsea or Tottenham lost one, it affected their standing in the league and their chance of winning the championship. If DEVGRU lost, it meant someone died, or that the results could have huge implications for the United States.

  Troy clapped a hand around Ken Michaud’s shoulder. “Padre—ready to eat?”

  The tall, thin redhead took a pull on his Corona. “In a bit.” He nudged Kerry. “So, Rangemaster here thinks we’re setting up to snatch Ahmed Wali Karzai.”

  Ahmed Karzai, the head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, was the half-brother of Afghani president Hamid Karzai. AWK, as he was known, had his finger in every pie in the province—taking a slice of the trucking revenues, drugs, and protection. You didn’t move in Kandahar unless you gave AWK a piece of your action. More than one American general and a couple of ambassadors had tried to dislodge him. None was successful.

  “AWK’s back on our team,” Troy shook his head. “Petraeus loves him these days. So does State, because he helps USAID’s people move around. Besides, we’re working a three-level house. The big house on AWK’s compound is two stories, remember?”

  “Shit, you’re right,” Padre blinked. “When we were there with Petraeus, he held the Jurga or whatever they call it on the top floor, and it was up just one flight.” Their troop had pulled bodyguard duty for the International Security Assistance Force commander the previous year.

  “So who does that leave?” Cajun Mistretta leaned behind Troy’s bar and dropped his bottle into the recycle bin. “Today’s frog is a green frog, T-Rob,” he grinned. “My guess is Cyclops.” Cyclops was the code name for the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar.

  Troy suggested, “What about The Doctor?” That was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who was Usama Bin Laden’s Number Two.

  Cajun pulled the other three in close and whispered conspiratorially. “Or maybe even the big guy: Crankshaft.” He opened a fresh bottle of Corona. “Boy, would I love to pull the trigger on him.”

  “You’re nuts,” Rangemaster scoffed. “There’s no solid intel on UBL.”

  “So what? There’s no solid intelligence on the other two, either. And what about the NATO story last whenever it was?”

  Padre squinted at Cajun. “That he was living in Pakistan?”

  “That the one.”

  Troy said, “It was debunked. CIA, the White House. They all denied it.”

  Cajun frowned. “I wouldn’t trust anything the White House put out. Remember how long they took to green-light the Maersk op when that container ship captain was taken hostage?”

  “And tried to get us to wound, not shoot to kill,” Rangemaster said.

  “Did they actually do that?” Troy asked.

  “That’s what I heard, too,” Cajun said. “But y’know what, all White Houses are the same. They’re filled with politicians. Me? I say just let us do our jobs. Don’t tell us how to do them.”

  “Agreed.” Troy took a pull on his beer. “Sometimes I can’t figure out why they don’t understand we’re doing God’s work.”

  Padre laughed. “That we are—helping all those AQN and Taliban scumbags get their seventy-two virgins.”

  Rangemaster grinned. “I hope we help Crankshaft on his way, too.”

  “If we can find him,” Troy said. “C’mon, we see some pretty good stuff. Any of you guys read anything credible anywhere about Crankshaft living in Pakistan?”

  The four SEALs looked at one anoth
er. All of them shook their heads no.

  “Y’know what?” Troy finished his beer and dropped the bottle into the blue bin behind his bar. “We’ll know when we get out there. Eyeball the target, then we’ll Google Earth it and see what matches. That should give us some clues.”

  “Good idea,” said Cajun.

  “I have a better one,” said Rangemaster. He pointed at Danny Walker coming down the stairs carrying a huge platter of sliced pot roast. “Chow time.”

  20

  National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California

  March 8, 2011, 0700 Hours Local Time

  Shortly after 0700, Alpha Troop’s 1-and 2-Teams, Charlie Troop’s 2- and 6-Teams, and Commander Dave Loeser and his Red Squadron executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Joey Tuzzalino, assembled in the lobby of the Landmark Inn, the only hotel located on the Fort Irwin grounds. They were all dressed in Army combat uniforms (ACUs) patterned in tan, green, and brown multicam. The ACUs bore an ID strip on the chest of their combat vest and infrared-readable American flags sitting on their right shoulder above the tab that identified the men as members of the Twenty-Seventh Civil Affairs Company, a unit that does not exist. Their rank tabs were all the same: E-5.

  The only visual elements that differentiated them from regular Army troops were their appearance—they wore their hair longer than most Soldiers, and a few had facial hair—and the weapons they carried: instead of Colt M4s, they had suppressed piston-driven HK416s and the short-barreled LWRCI 7.62 rifles known as JKWs, and instead of Berettas, Sig-Sauer and HK semiautomatic pistols. You had to look twice to pick up on those subtleties.

  Which was the idea. Clad as they were they looked no different from the thousands of Soldiers who used the Fort Irwin National Training Center for their predeployment urban combat training. The NTC, a hundred miles west of Las Vegas in California’s vast San Bernardino Desert, comprised roughly one thousand square miles of sand dunes, flatlands, and mountainous terrain in many ways similar to the topography of Iraq and portions of Afghanistan. Its airspace was restricted. Communications were ideal owing to the uncluttered electromagnetic spectrum in the sparsely populated region.