by John Weisman
“Sweetie, I’m home.” Troy Roberts dropped his duffel in the hallway, headed for the kitchen, and swept his wife into his arms.
“And about time, too, because I’m smoochless.” Brittany Roberts threw her arms around his neck. “I have been smoochless for weeks now,” she said, dropping her arms, stepping away, and adapting a serious tone. “Petty Officer Roberts, I want the situation corrected. Immediately.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am. Execute-execute Operation Repair Smoochless.” He kissed her long and passionately, mindless of their son Corbin’s “Eeewww, gross.”
He turned toward the five-and-a-half-year-old, picked him up, and hugged him, disappointed when he didn’t get as big a hug back as he’d expected. Corb was like that just about every time he came home from a deployment. It was as if the bonding had to take place all over again. He kissed the top of his son’s head. “Good to see you, too, troublemaker.” And he put the kid down.
“Where were you?”
“Cali-four-knee-ah.” The SEAL pronounced it Schwarzenegger-style.
“Uh-huh.” The kid shrugged.
“That’s all the way on the West Coast.” Troy struggled to make the kid understand. “Havin’ fun in the sun.” Indeed, the SEAL had gotten a fair amount of desert color.
Corbin looked up at his father. “Was there a pool?”
“You bet there was. And boy, did I do cannonballs. You remember cannonballs, Corb.”
Finally, a smile that Troy felt lit up the room. “Cannonballs are great. And you do them biggest of all.” The kid’s arms went wide. He screamed, “Spuh-LASH!”
“Shhh.” Brittany knelt and cradled the boy in her arms. “Good trip?”
“I guess. We learned some stuff. Got a lot of range time. Improved skill sets. You’ve heard it all before, sweet: same old, same old.”
They’d spoken almost every day. But of course, he’d never been specific. It was always “Hot here,” or “Got a long run in this morning,” or “Food’s not bad, hon, but I sure do miss your cooking.” No specifics. In point of fact, she had no idea whether he’d called her from where he said he was calling from, which was Fort Irwin, California, or whether he’d been in the desert, but a desert in Yemen, or Jordan, or Saudi Arabia.
He grinned. “Brought you back something, troublemaker.” Troy scampered back to the hallway and half a minute later reappeared holding a fair-size cardboard box. He set it on the kitchen table. “Where I was, they train in these,” he said, slitting the wrapping tape with the big blade of the Emerson CQC-8 combat folding knife that he habitually carried both on and off duty. He pulled out a scale model of an Abrams M1A2 battle tank in desert tan, complete with the TUSK (Tank Urban Survival Kit), side skirt reactive armor, reinforced slat armor on the rear, and gun shields for its 7.62mm top-mounted machine gun.
“These are the same tanks they used in Fallujah in Iraq, Corb,” he said, manipulating the model to demonstrate that all the parts moved. He looked at his son’s blank stare.
“Fallujah is a city in Iraq. Iraq is far, far away.” He laughed and looked at Brittany. “Forgot—he wasn’t even born then.” Troy tousled his son’s hair. “Anyway, I figured you’d want your own tank, kiddo. Whatta you think?”
He handed the model to the boy, and the kid’s face told him everything he needed to know. But to make it all the sweeter, Corb leaped into Troy’s arms, nearly crunching the tank between them. “Dad, this is so awesome!”
It still sent the best kind of chill up Troy’s spine whenever Corb called him “Dad.” He’d never thought of himself as a father, only a son, until Bri and Corb had come into his life. Sometimes it scared him more than his work, the dad thing did. But he loved it, because the dad thing was like . . . free fall.
He put the kid down. “Go have fun.”
Troy watched as the boy scrambled toward the stairs to the rec room. He went to the fridge, unholstered his weapon and set it on top, then grabbed a beer, twisted the cap off, and took a long pull. “Ahh.” He scanned the kitchen appreciatively. “Oh, it is wonderful to be home.” He looked his wife up and down and smiled proudly. “You’re beginning to show.”
She blushed. “I feel like a balloon. I want to be a lot slimmer.”
“You look just fine to me.” He took her in his arms. “I’m blessed.”
She looked up at him. “We’re blessed.” She kissed his neck. They stood, embracing for a long time, rejoicing in the feel of each other’s bodies, in the closeness, the touching. She could feel the coolness of his beer bottle on her back. “How long will you be home this time?”
“Don’t know.” He released her and took another swallow of beer. “We’re on call, so it may be three, four days, maybe a week, maybe more.”
“I hope it’s more.” Her brow wrinkled. “Any idea about a deployment?” She didn’t want to go any further.
“Nope. But I get the feeling we’re gonna head out some time in the near term.” He looked at her. “It’s our turn for AFPAK. You know about the rotations.”
Indeed she did. She knew that two rotations ago, the squadron Troy’s was replacing had lost one SEAL and suffered three wounded, including one double amputee. Then there was the retired DEVGRU SEAL who had been killed in December 2009 in Khost at Forward Operating Base Chapman, while working for CIA.
“Whatever,” Troy said. “We do what we do. In the meanwhile, I’m home, we’re together, and you’re beautiful. God’s looking after us.”
“Yes, He is.” She beamed. “Go up and take a shower,” she said. “I’m going to finish down here.” She looked at him. “Hungry?”
“Nah. We grabbed pizza during the debrief.” He looked at her. A broad smile spread across his face, reacting to the warm, inviting smile on hers. “Maybe I’m psychic, but something tells me if I’m good I may get lucky tonight.”
“Y’never know about luck, sailor.” She grinned. “But if you’re very, very, very lucky, you may get . . . lucky.” She giggled. “Quite lucky.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“What’s the other?”
“You know what they teach us, Bri.”
She laughed. “That luck has nothing to do with it. That it’s all training.” She looked at him slyly. “Muscle memory and all that stuff.”
“Oh, yes, muscle memory and all that stuff, Mrs. Roberts. Emphasis on the muscle.” He watched her cheeks turn bright red. “And I have been training. Oh, have I ever.”
She took the beer bottle out of his hand and kissed him on the lips. “Begone,” she said. She pointed at the fridge. “Secure your weapon, then make sure Corb’s in bed and lights out. I’ll be up to conduct an inspection in exactly six minutes. We’ll see just how much memory your muscle has.”
30
JSOC Joint Operations Center SCIF, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
April 3, 2011, 0400 Hours Local Time
“I’m gonna need me a full Sentinel countermeasures package—two, maybe three birds, sometime in the near future. You tell me.” Wes Bolin wrapped his size ten-and-a-half hands around a big coffee mug emblazoned with the sword and shield of the KGB. The mug was a gift from Vince Mercaldi, who had bought it at what he liked to call “the real Company Store.” Which would be the CIA employee gift shop that sat between the Northwest Federal Credit Union branch and the unclassified cafeteria, the one used by overt employees and Agency guests, as opposed to the classified cafeteria, which was reserved for covert operatives only. The fourteen-ounce mug was half-filled with lukewarm, weak coffee. Bolin had come of age on U.S. Naval Academy coffee, brewed so thin, the admiral liked to say, that you could see the bottom of the mug even after you added milk. It was a habit he’d never outgrown.
“Three more? As of last night you already got a second bird over Abbottabad. Must be something real big.” Brigadier General Eric McGill was a big man, a huge man, who, as a varsity offensive lineman at West Point, had earned the nickname “McGorilla” for his intimidating three-point stance. Currently he was Wes Bolin’s point man in Afghani
stan and commander of Task Force 131, JSOC’s J-Bad-based hunter-killer group, whose mission was to find and eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban high-value targets on both sides of the AFPAK border. He had SEALs, Delta shooters, Rangers, and Air Force special operations personnel under his command as well as an array of technological resources whose value ran into the eleven figures.
“Y’never know, Mac. ‘Be prepared: That’s the Boy Scouts’ marching song,’ remember?”
“Only too well.” McGill retrieved the big Cuban cigar he carried in his breast pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “What’s the goal?”
“I need the Paks to be deaf, dumb, and blind. On command. But without making ourselves obvious.” Bolin pulled a tactical pilotage chart out of his briefcase and unfolded it on the conference table. He drew a line with his finger. “Coming from here, I run southeast, skirt to the north of Shahi Kowt,” he tapped the map, “then cross the border at Tawr Kham and run the corridor between the Pak West ADIZ and the Peshawar no-fly zone.” ADIZ stood for Air Defense Identification Zone. All flights entering an ADIZ are required to file a flight plan with the Pakistani military and remain in constant two-way contact during their transit.
For the past month, Bolin had examined satellite imagery and pored over pilotage maps. There were more direct routes to Abbottabad than the one he was leaning toward, but they also overflew some populated areas and, more to the point, came dangerously close to Pakistani military installations. Bolin wanted to thread the needle, flying the lowlands that skirted the demarcation line between several Pakistani commands.
He’d studied the Paks. Most of their military commands were stovepiped; they did not interact. So if Colonel Ahmed happened to catch a glimpse of unidentified choppers flying in Colonel Walid’s sky, that would be Colonel Walid’s problem, not Colonel Ahmed’s.
Then he’d had his intelligence people work the problem. They discovered that the Pak military didn’t even have a universal communications system. Each region had its own. Which made it even better odds that the Paki left hand would have no idea what the Paki right hand was doing, and Bolin’s SEALs and their Night Stalker stealth MH-60J and MH-47 helos could skedaddle hi-diddle-diddle straight down the middle. Invisible to everyone.
If it was dark enough. “Mac?”
“Sir?”
“Punch up moon phases for the next couple of months, will you?”
“Starting when?”
“Tomorrow would be good. And take it through fifteen May.” If POTUS hadn’t signed off by then, it would probably be too late.
The Ranger hunt-and-pecked at his laptop keyboard. “We’re in new moon now through the tenth.”
“Next new moon?”
McGill squinted at his screen. “Zero-three May.”
“And May tenth?”
“First quarter.”
Too much light. “Send me those dates, will you, please?”
“Yes, sir.” McGill did some typing. “Heading your way, Admiral.” He closed his laptop. “Sir, how big’s the package?”
“Six, maybe seven birds, to include a JMAU and an SSE in the secondary, and a FAARP backed up by a couple of Ranger platoons.” JMAUs were forensics-capable Joint Medical Augmentation Units; SSEs were sensitive site exploitation groups, more colloquially known as slurpers. FAARPs were forward area arming and refueling points positioned no more than thirty-five miles from the target.
“I could invade a country with six, maybe seven birds, a couple of Ranger platoons, a JMAU, and an SSE. Where you going?”
“Can’t say yet, except that it’s not an invasion. But I’m going deep on this one, Mac. I’ll need every fricking Pak air defense radar between the border and Islamabad north to go sightless for three, maybe four hours.” Bolin looked at the Ranger. “Can we do that?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“Time, conditions, maybe a little bit of luck.” The big Ranger tapped the four-by-six-foot area map on the wall. “Most Pak radar faces east, toward the main enemy, India. There are Pak Air Force fields at Risalpur, Kamba, and Islamabad. Each has radar and missile defenses, and some of them come back this way. We’ve spoofed every single one except Islamabad on previous missions—and they never noticed a thing. But we’ve never smacked all the sites at the same time. That’s the unanswered question: Can we silence every site simultaneously?”
“And make them think nothing’s wrong. That’s the key, Mac. They have to believe everything is situation normal.”
“Sitnorm, sitnorm.” McGill paced back and forth, cigar chomped between his teeth, muttering the word like a mantra. He looked, Bolin thought, like a caged animal or a crated attack dog, winding into tighter and tighter circles as, brow knit, he scowled at the floor.
Then: “Here’s what.”
“What?”
“Every weekend they run maintenance.”
“And?”
“One at a time they shut down for about three hours, sometimes a lot more. Which one shuts down depends on the traffic, so it’s not as if they maintain a specific schedule.”
“And?”
“So take Islamabad. When I-bad goes dark, they signal Peshawar, Risalpur, Rawalpindi—all the other stations that they’re going dark. If we can screw with their comms, maybe we can make them think it’s okay to go dark. Not all—but some. And the others, we maybe capture signal, then tap their lines and rebroadcast it back to them—like a tape loop. Or we could spoof a power outage. Most of those installations rely on substations we know about—Sentinel should be capable of taking down the power grids.”
“Ever tried it?”
“Nope. But it’s well within their ROC.” ROC was military shorthand for range of capabilities.
“Who can you put on this right now?”
“Got some signals intelligence squirrels, and some MASINT contractors with cyberwar experience who maybe could program the algorithms we’d need to bore inside the power grids. Plus the Sentinel people and their contractors.”
“Make a compartment.” Bolin understood that secrecy was everything. “Read in those you have to. Get the proper paperwork. And maximum op-sec. No conversation except in SCIFs. You’re point, and you report to me, or to Joe.” Joe was Air Force Brigadier General Joseph Bradley Franklin, Bolin’s deputy back at Fort Bragg.
“Got it.” The Ranger’s gaze settled on the admiral. “Timeframe?”
“I need to know you’ve solved the problem by the sixteenth of the month, and I will need on that date a couple of paragraphs telling me exactly how you did it—and in nontechnical language, Mac.”
“Can do.” McGill stuffed the cigar back in the breast pocket of his ACU. “Anything else you’d like to tell me, sir?”
“Not right now.” Bolin took a long swig of the cold coffee. “But let me speak plainly, Mac: if you think you know what’s going on, or if you even think you think you know what’s going on, forget about it. No whispers, no RUMINT, no gossip. I can’t have it.” Bolin squinted at the Ranger general. “Got it?”
“Hoo-ah, Admiral. Heard, understood, and acknowledged.”
31
Bin Laden Group Operations Center, Langley, Virginia
April 5, 2011, 0545 Hours Local Time
Dick Hallett yawned, stretched, and scanned the message from Valhalla Base. Charlie Becker had been alerted, and the soil sampling was under way. He pulled a green pencil out of the mug of writing instruments on his desk, flipped open a spiral notebook, and drew two neat green lines through the appropriate portion of his to-do list. The notebook was two-thirds filled. Green lines stood for tasks accomplished successfully, red lines stood for screw-ups, and blue-highlighted items were requests or orders from Vince Mercaldi and were to be dealt with ASAP.
Hallett’s work schedule had been turned on its head ever since he’d become chief of BLG. Abbottabad was nine hours ahead of Washington, so he lived on a Pakistani schedule, coming to work just before midnight and dragging himself home somewhere between five and six the
next evening. Unless there was a crisis, in which case he’d grab a combat nap on his couch and remain until it was solved.
His schedule had been like this since the previous August, and Hallett was exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
His wife, Sara, worked at the National Clandestine Service’s logistical support group, which created legends for CIA’s covert operations personnel. They kept regular hours. She wanted him to hang it all up. He had twenty-nine years in, four beyond what was necessary for full retirement benefits—more if you counted his five years in the Marines. And he was an SIS-2, senior intelligence service and holding the equivalent rank of a two-star general. She had only nineteen months left until she was eligible to retire. Why didn’t he just go now and spend the time fixing up their lodge in Idaho? Hunt. Ski. Play with the grandkids. Sleep.
But he couldn’t—he wouldn’t—quit now. Hours be damned, they were on the cusp of ending an almost ten-year hunt, and Dick Hallett was not about to leave before the mission was completed.
He scanned the never-ending, ever-expanding to-do list. Blue-highlighted was the terse note KHAN MODEL. That would have to wait. CIA’s technical services people worked normal schedules. They wouldn’t appear until seven.
He flipped the page. Picked up the phone. Dialed.
The phone rang twice. “Bailey.”
U.S. Navy Captain (SEAL) Larry Bailey was Wes Bolin’s detailee to the Bin Laden Group. Vince Mercaldi and Bolin had an eye-to-eye relationship, but down the chain of command, there was liaison. In JSOC’s case, liaison meant Larry Bailey.
“Larry, Dick Hallett. Morning.”
“Same to you.” Hallett heard the SEAL slurp his ever-present coffee. The tall, dark-browed Texas SEAL was a caffeineado. “What can we do for you, Dick?”
“You guys were supposed to get me a package for my guy in Abbottabad.”
“The Ranger you’ve got on the ground. Roger that.”
“And?”
“Arrival within the next twenty-four hours.”
