The Mercenary Option

by Dick Couch

  Aboard the lead Pavehawk, Garrett Walker had his hands full. His first problem was talking with Janet Brisco. It would take a few minutes to extend their secure, dedicated satellite coverage along their new flight path, but as soon as the 130 made altitude, Fagan was able to establish a HF link to Diego Garcia. None of them, especially Janet Brisco, wanted to rely on the HF patch any longer than she had to. High-frequency transmissions were unreliable; satcom technology was cell-phone technology—clear, secure, and if you could afford a dedicated communications satellite channel, highly reliable. Garrett’s second problem was Frederick Janos. After they landed in Herat, Janos stated that he had fulfilled his contract and that the job was over. Steven immediately offered to double his fee to continue. He refused. Garrett literally had to put him on the helicopter at gunpoint.

  “Home Plate, you there?”

  “Right here, First Base. Hear you five-by, how do you hear me?”

  “Lima Charlie. How are we going to go about this?”

  They were transmitting in the clear, but time was short, and there was nothing they could do about it. And it was again Janet Brisco’s game. She was the one who would make the operational decisions. It would be up to Garrett and Bijay for the tactical execution. It was a simple mission; find and recover a tactical nuclear weapon before it was detonated by some lunatic.

  “Okay, First Base. Our egg is somewhere on the resupply convoy, and the convoy is on the move. Thanks to your lady-friend here we were able to bypass a lot of the military chain of command, and I am in contact with the officer in charge of the convoy escort detachment traveling with the convoy. When we get secure comms, I will tell him our problem is a conventional one, so I want everyone to play along with this. No sense making this any more scary than it is. He has been given orders to cooperate with us. Now, I estimate you will reach the convoy in about thirty minutes. You getting all this, First Base?”

  “I’m with you, Home Plate.”

  “Second Base, are you with us?”

  “Yes, hello, I am here,” said Bijay from the trail Pavehawk. “Can you hear me?”

  “This is Home Plate, I hear you fine,” Brisco quickly cut in. “We now have our satcom channel in place. Shift to the dedicated net and get back with me.”

  In less than a minute, each of them had checked in on the secure satellite link. “All right, everyone,” Brisco resumed. The relief was evident in her voice; secure communication was the lifeline of any special operation. “I want you to listen closely. I will not have time to repeat myself. We have to assume that this weapon is armed and on a timed delay. We also have to assume that it can be detonated on command. Therefore, we have to take the weapon and whoever is with the weapon by surprise. This means we may have only one shot at it. To do this, we have to work together, and timing is everything. You guys copy?”

  “Steven, good copy,” from the flight deck of the 130.

  Both Garrett and Bijay rogered up from the two Pavehawks.

  Early Friday morning, January 3,

  the White House

  It would be dawn on the Potomac in another hour. In the White House Situation Room, the President was joined by his Secretaries of State and Defense, his DCI, and his National Security Adviser. They had immediately gathered here when they learned of the location of the second bomb. Rita Westinghouse was often excluded from what she called the Big Four, but she was with them today. The Situation Room was officially her turf. Westinghouse had a Ph.D. in systems analysis, as well as a masters in international affairs. She functioned more as a senior staffer, with little exposure to the public and the press. If she resented this nontraditional, behind-the-scenes role in the administration, she kept it to herself. In truth, she was content to bury herself in the inner workings and technical details of the NSA and leave the press conferences to others. At the direction of the President, she had kept a steady flow of selected information relating to the crisis coming to the Oval Office and the other three men present. She was included today because all the decisions had been made; now they would await the outcome together. No matter how this turned out, she would be a very busy lady for the next few weeks.

  They sat around a large conference table, surrounded by military communications specialists and NSA staffers who worked at consoles on the periphery of the room. At William St. Claire’s direction, the massive electronic intercept capability of several agencies had been brought to bear so those assembled could follow the course of events. Thanks to this electronic eavesdropping capability, now highly refined by the war on terrorism, they had tapped into Janet Brisco’s control net. Perhaps the fate of the world did not hang in the balance, but the fate of his administration probably did. They would have been like a gathering of baseball fans in the 1930s listening to the World Series on the radio save for the large monitor at the end of the table. The picture was grainy, but it was in color. There was almost a three-second delay because of some dated transfer technologies, but the Global Hawk drone held focus on the lead vehicles in the convoy. It was like a long, dusty caterpillar crawling across the Afghan desert terrain known as the Dasht Margow. There were some enclosed vans for machinery and a refrigeration unit with food stores, but most of the convoy vehicles were lowboys with pipeline sections chained in place. Shepherding the convoy, like fighter escorts tending a formation of WWII bombers, were Humvees with mounted weapons. Most were open vehicles with goggled, helmeted figures looking not unlike Rommel’s desert rats in North Africa. They had no idea that half a world away, their Commander in Chief and his closest advisers were watching their every move.

  “How far are they from the TAP construction site?” James Powers asked no one in particular. The men were in shirtsleeves, and all but Armand Grummell had loosened their ties. Rita Westinghouse wore a tailored charcoal suit.

  “About fifty-five miles,” Barbata replied. “More to the point, some forty-five miles to where the bursting radius of that weapon will begin to take effect on those at the construction site. At the speed they’re making, they will be at the site in an hour and a quarter.”

  “And there’s no way to get those people out of there?”

  “Not unless you want them to begin to trek across the desert on foot.”

  The group was quiet for a moment before the President spoke.

  “So when do they reach the end of our response window?”

  Again, Barbata answered. “Sir, we have about an hour to respond. Then we risk physical or radiological damage to the site.”

  As a contingency to avoid a possible nuclear event, and to protect those at Site South, the USS Princeton(CG-59) was stationed just over the horizon off the coast of Pakistan. Several of her Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles were being fed a steady diet of updated coordinates of the moving convoy. If it became necessary, Princeton would launch three of those Tomahawks. The deadly missiles would overfly the length of the convoy and distribute hundreds of antipersonnel bomblets that would shred the unarmored vehicles, killing virtually everyone. The notion of killing some fifty contract drivers and close to eighty military personnel with friendly fire would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but 9/11 had changed all that. Surface-to-air missiles and armed fighter jets occasionally were put on alert around Washington, D.C., to shoot down airliners that might come under the control of terrorists. This contingency had the collective approval of the five seated around the table, but only one individual would make the decision to launch the Tomahawks. There was a special Delta Force strike element on the tarmac at Kandahar ready to respond, but it was decided to place no more lives at risk—at least no more lives that would have to be accounted for.

  “Well, Armand,” Bill St. Claire said with a forced jocularity, “I hope our little band of mercenaries can pull this off.”

  “So do I, Mr. President,” Grummell replied as he burnished his spectacles. “So do I.”

  Friday Afternoon, January 3,

  central Afghanistan

  Captain Grant Heber rode al
ong in his command Humvee along the left flank of the convoy. This particular line of trucks was Convoy 127. It was open, desert hardpan, and the Hummer easily bounded over the flat, rolling terrain. When possible, he liked to drive on the flank; it gave him a better view of the convoy. Heber took his job seriously, but he would much rather be with an Army Ranger company chasing booger-eaters in the mountains than playing nursemaid to this caravan. The convoy road was well-worn, hard-packed gravel that had been handling heavy trucks for just over six months. The roadbed was firm but very dusty. Leading his convoy was a five-ton N52A2 cargo truck with a reinforced suspension and twenty-five hundred pounds of armor plating. Its duty was to serve as a vehicular mine sweeper. They had not had a land mine incident in three months, and the “armadillo,” as the soldiers called it, could protect the single driver against all antipersonnel and most vehicle mines that the al Qaeda guerrillas could muster. Still, they continued to try. The roadway was clearly marked and fenced, but every three or four weeks al Qaeda sappers tried to mine the road at night. Motion sensors set up along the road would detect the sappers. This led to an air burst from a five-hundred-pound, air-dropped JDAM. The explosion did little to the roadbed, but sent a lethal shock wave through anyone nearby. Heber himself had found two of the would-be sappers alongside the road, stone dead but with little evidence of physical trauma save for the dried blood around their ears and mouth. It broke the monotony. Convoy escort work, Heber admitted, was important and relatively safe as duty in Afghanistan went, but it was boring. Until today.

  An hour ago he was boring holes in the desert, trying to keep his mind off his next leave period. In ten days he would be in Bangkok, soaking in a tub of cool water with two Thai beauties catering to his every wish. Then a call had come through from his battalion commander saying that OPCON, or operational control, of his escort element had been passed to a civilian agency, which Heber immediately took to be the CIA. The Colonel had given him only a frequency that could be programmed into the satcom radio on his Humvee. Moments later, a woman’s voice came over his radio with unusual clarity. She identified herself only as “Control,” and she was very businesslike.

  “Listen carefully, Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven. We believe there is a bomb aboard one of your vehicles. We don’t know which one. I have been tasked with finding and disarming it. Now, I’m going to give you some instruction, and I want them carried out to the letter, do you understand?”

  “A bomb! How can you—”

  “Break, One-Two-Seven, we don’t have time for this. Again, I have some very simple and specific instructions for you. Lives are at risk, and that includes yours.” The voice softened, but only a little. “Now, I’m going to need your trust and your help. If we work together on this, we can keep you and your men safe. But you have to work with me on this, okay?”

  “Okay, Control, go ahead with your traffic.” Then Janet Brisco told Captain Grant Heber exactly what she wanted him to do. For the next thirty minutes or so, he and his convoy rolled across the central Afghan plain as though nothing was amiss.

  “Hey, Cap,” his driver called over the engine noise of the Hummer, “you’re sweating like a pig.” His corporal at the wheel had a heavy New York accent. “You want I should switch on the AC?” Unlike the trucks in the convoy, the Humvee had no air conditioning.

  “I want you to keep your fuckin’ eyes on your drivin’, and keep station on the middle of the convoy.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver replied with exaggerated formality. His captain was normally not so uptight.

  After what seemed like an eternity, the radio speaker again came alive with a female voice. “Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven, this is Control, over.”

  Heber took up the handset to speak. “This is One-Two-Seven. Go ahead.”

  “This is Control. Are you ready to execute?”

  “Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven, that’s affirmative,”

  “Okay, One-Two-Seven, standby, out.”

  Two minutes later Brisco was back on the radio to Heber. During the intervening time, she had updated Steven in the MC-130 circling overhead and the two Pavehawks just over the horizon.

  “Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven, this is Control. Execute, execute, over.”

  “This is One-Two-Seven. Understand execute. One-Two-Seven, out.”

  Heber took up a Motorola transceiver. “In the sweeper, you there, Sweeney?”

  Leading the resupply convoy, Corporal John Sweeney took his turn driving the heavily reinforced 6X6 armadillo. The duty was rotated among the convoy military escort with each man taking two hours of drive time in the armored lead vehicle. Corporal John Sweeney was from Little Rock, Arkansas. In spite of the elevated danger of driving the sweeper, John Sweeney actually looked forward to it. For two hours, he was the convoy leader. There was no dust, no following some vehicle in front of him, no bounding across the desert in a Humvee, just the un-obstructed view of the broad Afghan plain from the high cab of the big five-ton truck.

  “Yes, sir. Corporal Sweeney here.”

  “Okay, Sweeney,” Heber said, “listen up. I want you to make like you’re having a breakdown. Stop the truck, get out, climb up on the front bumper, and raise the hood.”

  “But, Captain, the truck’s runnin’ fine. Why would I want to do that?”

  Heber sighed. Sweeney was a good trooper, but not the sharpest tool in the drawer. “Because you don’t want to become Private Sweeney. Just do what I asked.” Then Heber, with a flash of inspiration that illustrated why he had two bars on his collar and Sweeney had two chevrons on his sleeve, added, “It’s a drill, Corporal—a test of convoy security.” Every soldier understood drills.

  “Yes, sir; I’m on it,” Sweeney replied as he brought the big truck to a halt. “I’ll get right under the hood and have a look-see.”

  Heber put down the Motorola and took up the radio handset for the convoy control circuit. “This is Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven to convoy. All vehicles halt. I repeat, all vehicles come to a complete stop. We have a breakdown with the sweeper. Stand by in convoy formation, and we will keep you advised when we can resume travel. Sheep Dog, out.”

  Heber directed his driver to head for the sweeper, then took up his satcom radio. “Control, this is Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven. Convoy is now halted, over.”

  “Thank you, One-Two-Seven. Stand by, and we’ll let you know when you can resume travel. Control out.” Janet Brisco shifted frequencies on her satcom set. “Steven, Garrett, Bijay; are you with me?” She breathed a sigh of relief as they all came up on the dedicated satcom frequency. There was no the time to repair a failed communications link.

  Janet Brisco sat in her control station in the air-conditioned van in Diego Garcia. Her eyes flicked over the communications console like an experienced pilot sweeping his flight gauges. At a glance, she saw all was in order. Then she lit a cigarette and steadied down on the large flat-screen color display in front of her. She watched as the convoy stopped and a man driving the lead vehicle climbed from the cab and raised the hood of the large truck.

  “You can come down a few thousand feet,” she said to Dodds LeMaster, seated at the console next to her, “and move off a few miles; I want to see this from a lower angle.” LeMaster deftly moved the Global Hawk drone away from the flank of the convoy and lost altitude. As he did, the cameras of the drone remain locked on the convoy. Judy Burks sat between and behind them, looking over their shoulders. Brisco adjusted the boom mic on her headset as she keyed the transmit button. Her concentration, Judy noted, was so intense it was scary. She reached forward without looking and clipped two toggle switches on her radio panel.

  “All right, gentlemen, let’s do this right and get that son of a bitch. I have convoy control on the net. You with us, One-Two-Seven?”

  “Ah, yes, ma’am, Sheep Dog One-Two-Seven copies you five by, over.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “My name?”

  “C’mon, we don’t have all day; what’s your first name?”

&nbs
p; “Uh, it’s Grant, ma’am.”

  “Okay, Grant, you’re on the varsity team now. I want you to keep that convoy where it is for now. Pass the word along the line as you normally would when you experience a breakdown. Keep everything as normal as possible; just another glitch en route, okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Five miles in front of the convoy and a quarter mile off the road, the trail Pavehawk swooped in low and came to a hover near a dry wash. Bijay and five Gurkhas tumbled from the door, tucked and rolled, and made for cover as the helo banked away and headed north.

  “This is Bijay; we’re on the ground and standing by.”

  “Very well, I want silence on this net. Bijay, it’s all yours, same drill as before. Ready?”

  “I am ready,” came the precise reply.

  There was a rapid series of pulse tones as a speed dialer punched in the number. After the fifth ring there was an answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Please, sir, I forgot a part of the message I was supposed to deliver. I must give you the rest of the message. Are you there, sir?”

  “Do not call me again, ever.”

  “Please, sir, I must—” But the connection was broken.

  Janet Brisco was right there. “Stand by, that may have been enough for a fix.” She looked over to Dodds LeMaster, whose hands flew over the keyboard. His screen flickered once and came up with an overhead shot of the convoy. Then the computer took over and plotted the data. A grid superimposed itself on the convoy, and the machine gave a long chirp. A blinking cursor circled the fifth truck in the file, a lowboy semi trailer with three six-foot sections of pipe chained to the flatbed.