“Can we whistle up some support on the ground?” he tried again, “up along the border? We don’t need to tell them why, but they can at least put up a cordon. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
He could see from Simmons’s face that the former soldier wasn’t buying his attempt to get more people involved. “Not going to happen.” The man grunted as if the suggestion offended him. “We got this.”
“You’re not trying to bring him, so we can debrief him . . . are you?”
A corner of the former soldier’s mouth twitched upward in what looked like an attempt to smile. It was still an answer.
The helicopter beat its way northwest for thirty minutes, the moonlit landscape below them slowly turning over from high desert to forest. His input wasn’t sought so he kept his mouth shut, even after he noticed one of the soldiers across from him had a sidearm in hand was watching him closely. He hadn’t noticed the gun earlier; he knew it was for him. There was only one way this was going to end for him.
The rhythmic pulsing of the Black Hawk’s blades was almost relaxing, and his mind wandered back to his kids. Not that they were kids any longer, but he thought of the children they had been. The childhoods he had neglected. He knew the story would be that he’d died in the line of duty, in service to his country. It couldn’t be anything else; the story of what they were doing could never get out. Maybe the kids would be able to forgive him. Forget the absentee father he’d been when they were growing up, even if he couldn’t.
He knew what he had to do. The only thing he had going for him was a chance to go out on his own terms. To hell with all of it. He hoped Carlisle wasn’t full of shit and there actually were people somewhere hanging onto the principles that the country had been built on. It was not a sentiment he was going to find in his present company. People like Simmons and his team didn’t allow sentiment to get in the way of whatever mission they’d been given.
From where he sat in the helicopter, Starret had a good if worthless view of the cockpit and the dark sky beyond. When the copilot turned in his seat and tapped Simmons on the shoulder, pointing at his own headset, Simmons nodded in reply.
“Sir, we’re down to forty-five minutes before we need to turn back for fuel.”
“How the hell is that possible?” Simmons sounded upset and clearly didn’t seem to mind that the conversation was coming through his own headset.
“Sir, when we were directed to you, we were at our FOB outside Laramie; we burned a good bit just getting to you. We were told this was a routine retrieval. Where are you trying to get to, anyway?”
“Wherever I tell you to fly, for now, keep to this heading.”
Starret kept his head turned out towards the gap left open on the sliding door, pretending to ignore the conversation. He had assumed the pilots were part of Simmons’s team, but it was now clear they were who’d been available. They flew for another ten minutes before Simmons kicked his foot. “Pass your headset to Boyd, there.” Simmons was pointing at the soldier with the laptop controlling the ISR drone far above them.
He noted they had a short and, from the look on Simmons’s face, a frustrating conversation. The Black Hawk didn’t alter its course; they were still flying north-northwest. In fact, Starret could see the digital compass on the top edge of the cockpit; they were on a magnetic heading of 340 degrees.
Some of the soldiers were asleep, and he figured if it weren’t for the overly alert operator watching him, with a drawn sidearm hidden behind his leg, he would be, too. That all changed in an instant. The drone operator leaned forward and started shouting. Even without the headphones, he could hear some of it; he picked up on the words “crash site,” “explosion,” and “south.” The rest of the team came alert instantly. Simmons was almost turned in his seat, screaming into the cockpit behind him. He had to reach up and grab a hanging strap handle as the helicopter banked sharply into its turn.
Simmons’s conversation with the pilots wasn’t going well; that much was clear. He figured it was the fuel issue. By the time the team leader was fully reseated, the helo had leveled out and was headed almost straight south. Simmons was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, staring intently at him. Starret could feel the decision being weighed behind Simmons’s wide face; was he useful or not?
Simmons signaled him closer and removed his own headset.
“Can you identify that Osprey by tail number?” Simmons screamed the question loudly enough that it almost hurt his ears. “Or any other identifier?”
He pulled his head back and nodded in the affirmative. “I’ll recognize it if I see it.” He was being honest; he had a good memory, but it wasn’t photographic.
The answer must have satisfied Simmons, who nodded once and reseated his headset to rejoin the conversation with the drone operator, Boyd.
He let out a breath of relief that he hadn’t been aware he was holding. If they landed, the helo pilots would have the location. They’d know the passenger who wasn’t decked out in tactical gear got off with Simmons and his team. It was pretty thin coverage as far as life insurance went, but he’d take whatever he could get, for as long as he could.
He watched as Simmons alerted his team via a series of hand signals that reminded him of a third-base coach calling for a hit-and-run. Not that he needed a reminder, but these weren’t the frustrated mall cops with delusions of grandeur that staffed so much of the ISS. These were professionals. The other seven members checked their weapons, straps, and gear with a practiced ease that would have been comforting if he didn’t know he was going to be on their target list at some point.
He sat there in the frigid air blasting through the compartment, hands clasped between his legs, doing his best to convince himself that he’d have better options once they were on the ground. That said, so would Simmons . . .
He looked up to see Simmons unscrewing a cap on a pint bottle of whiskey. Shame was what he felt as he caught himself licking his lips. Three years, ten months, and six days, he intoned from the ever-present running clock in his head. The sum of time since his last drink didn’t seem to have the same power that it had held at two days, a week, or a month. That one-month mark had been special; the first time he’d actually believed he could stay sober. Going on four years, the running clock’s constant background noise had faded into something that felt like victory. That was what made it so damned hard to shake his head when Simmons held out the bottle to him.
Simmons was playing with him and flashed a knowing smile before slipping the bottle back into his thigh pocket. Tessa had no doubt handed over his personnel file to these assholes, one more data point that screamed he was not long for this world.
Twenty minutes later, he felt the helicopter flare out and start to circle. At a signal from Simmons, one of the soldiers slid the port side door of the Black Hawk open and they were able to see the rough circle of remaining fire around what looked very much like a crash site. The helicopter’s landing lights flared to life, and Starret thought he saw the outline of a fuselage lying in a small creek before the lazy turn took it from view. Through the bright light, he could see there was a light rain falling that had probably prevented a wider fire.
Simmons leaned across the back of his own bench into the flight deck and pointed towards the ground. Even without hearing what was being said, he could see both pilots shaking their heads. Within a few seconds, Simmons had climbed over the back of his seat and was kneeling between the pilots. He was pointing at the ground again, this time with his own sidearm in hand.
The helicopter couldn’t land, but it came down in a spray of wet ash and held a hover with one skid resting on the sloped ground beneath. At a signal from Simmons, his team bailed out the door and moved away quickly, hunched over and sliding down the hill away from the helicopter. Before he knew what was happening, he was manhandled by a pair of soldiers and thrown out the door. He landed on his side and managed to roll into a push-up position before he was grabbed by the belt and fairly dragged away from the helic
opter’s door. Dropped in a bed of soggy ash, he turned back to look at the helo. Simmons had two bags in hand and threw one back into the helo before sliding down the embankment away from the Black Hawk that was starting to pull up.
He watched from the ground as the team leader took a knee with the rest of his team in a rough semicircle with him in the middle. Pride, more than anything, made him get up out of the mud and do the same. He tucked his chin tight against his chest as the helicopter’s downwash blasted them all with the rain-soaked ash.
“Pricks” was the first word he was able to hear from one of the soldiers behind him as the whine from the Black Hawk’s turbines began to lessen. He wasn’t sure who had spoken, but he figured the pilots had just gotten the last word in.
Starret jerked his head up at the Black Hawk, its navigation lights clearly visible as it moved away slowly. He was figuring that his last lifeline of deniability had just flown away. Simmons could do anything he wanted with him now; no one would ever know about it.
The Black Hawk was just over the burnt shell of the Osprey’s fuselage, with small fires surrounding it sputtering in the rain when it exploded. The flash within the bay of the helicopter was closely followed by the crack of an explosion. The helicopter itself exploded a split second later, adding a deeper whoomph sound when its fuel tanks went up. He stared silently as the burning aircraft plummeted straight down and crashed just outside the already burnt wreckage of the Osprey.
He turned to look at Simmons who was staring back at him, holding a small transmitter.
*
“Something tells me the pilots weren’t part of the team.” Tom Soares had a way with words.
Kyle couldn’t disagree. The two of them stood half in, half out of the mine entrance. They’d been alerted to the noise of the helicopter well before they’d watched it come into the valley and disappear around the curve of the mountain as it dropped lower over the Osprey’s crash site downstream.
Before it had dropped out of view, Kyle’s night vision had allowed him to see the limbs and heads of what looked like a squad’s worth of infantry on board.
“What are we dealing with?” he asked Soares.
“ISS.” Tom spit into the dirt. “They’ll be ex-players.”
“Shit.”
They’d been preparing to leave the cave when they heard the helicopter approaching and had ended up huddling just inside the entrance. The rest of the team was piled up in the rock-walled corridor behind them.
Tom was nodding to himself. “If that was an Army chopper, given that they just took it out, they are probably on their own. Makes sense from their perspective . . . they have to have a drone in support. Only way they could have spotted the fire from the Osprey so fast.”
“Agreed.” Kyle had been thinking the same thing. No one was lucky enough to have just found the Osprey in these mountains, in this weather.
Kyle turned back around to the tunnel leading into the hillside. “Jeff, have Dom pass up the ghillie suit.”
“What are you thinking?” Tom asked.
“There’s your trail down there. Even with the rain we’ve had, it’s going to lead them here. Agreed?”
Tom nodded back at him.
“We aren’t going to get out of this without a fight.” It was the last thing he wanted, but he’d never had any luck wishing shit away. “We can only hope they aren’t going to report in until they have something to report. I can try and take out their drone controller. We have to stay black from whatever infrared they’ve got up looking for us, before the rest of you come out from under this rock and engage.”
“Right,” Tom agreed. “How many ghillie suits you have?”
“Just the one,” Jeff answered for him as he pushed his way to the front of the line and thrust the suit at him.
“We have four claymores,” Jeff added. “Do we risk leaving the cave and putting them out on the trail?”
Kyle was stripping off the gear he’d loaded up for earlier and was stepping into the suit that would negate his infrared signature and break up his outline.
“No,” he answered facing Jeff. “They have to have a drone in support and it would just confirm our presence. They might report that.”
Kyle turned back to Tom. “How certain are you that they’re ISS?”
“The Army, even the DOD, outside of General Gannon never knew about Sir Geoff.” Tom gave his head a firm shake. “The ISS arrested General Gannon; that’s when we bolted. Gannon died falling down some stairs under home arrest.” The fellow SOF officer paused a moment to let that sink in and then pointed out the mine shaft’s entrance.
“And . . . no one outside of the ISS would have wasted pilots just to protect what it is they are doing here.”
Kyle found himself nodding in agreement but looked over at Jeff for his input.
“That tracks,” Jeff said as he grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around, and stretched out the ribbons of polymer material streaming out the back of the ghillie suit.
Jeff checked the collar of the suit, and zipped it into the hood that he’d forced down over his head.
“OK.” Jeff gave him a thumbs-up. “Looks good.”
“Stay in the mine, no comms until I break silence. Agreed?”
“You’re going after the uplink?” Tom stated the obvious; they’d all operated with the support of ISR drones in the past.
“We have to hope these assholes are the ones holding the drone’s puppet strings. Think about it… they just killed two army pilots and took out their helicopter. The drone has to be under their local control otherwise there would be a room full people somewhere monitoring the whole operation.”
“Makes sense,” Jeff added. “They’ll likely have a sat-phone for backup.”
“I know,” he answered, shaking his head. “But if we don’t kill the drone link, we’ll have no chance of breaking contact.”
“Agreed.” Tom hefted the sniper rifle and checked its action before handing it over to him. “We’ll be ready.”
Kyle moved as quickly as he dared; the ghillie suit would break up his profile and mask his IR signature, but he could still be seen by normal night vision, especially when he was moving. His best chance was to get across the stream and get as high as he could up the opposite hillside, before the ISS team had a line of sight around the wide bend in the valley halfway to the Osprey’s crash site.
The rain had been falling in a light drizzle for most of the day and crossing the stream was a little hairier than he would have liked, particularly in the dark. He probed with his feet among the slick river rocks that he negotiated by feel as the current tugged at his legs.
Once he’d gained the opposite slope, he started upward as quickly as he could until the first flicker from the dying fires of the original crash site became visible. There was a much stronger glow being cast behind the dark hump of the intervening hillside from the helo crash, as it looked to still be burning hard. That fire had jumped to a couple of trees that were in the process of trying to out burn the light rainfall. Everything was soaked, so he knew that fire would be going out as well. The last thing they needed was the attention a forest fire would get.
He took up a prone position; his face and one shoulder projecting out between a massive mound of flaky rock and the trunk of a large pine towards the enemy. He set up the .338 Lapua rig on its bipod and oriented himself behind the scope. Muscle memory took over as he moved in slow but steady rhythms. He could see there were seven tangos in a tight circle looking outward through their own scopes. He followed the familiar pattern of their muzzles. The team down there had good discipline; each figure was focused on his own field of fire as they tracked their weapons back and forth. Tom was right. . . professionals. The ghillie suit was first and foremost a portable sauna. It trapped his body heat and he was already cooking. He felt the first rivulet of sweat run down between his shoulder blades following his spine.
There were two other figures separate from the main group, closer to
the creek. The pair were walking through the circle of burnt destruction that had been the Osprey’s final resting place. One of them was carrying a ruggedized laptop that he recognized immediately. It was an RC-298 that was used to control an ISR drone or a swarm of mini-birds. The 298s had just been coming on line as he was leaving the Army; they were cutting-edge. Whoever these guys were, they were well funded, and as his British colleagues used to say about them, kitted out with the very best.
He focused on that target, uncertain as to what he was seeing. The soldier carried the laptop like a briefcase and had a sidearm in his other hand. From time to time, he’d gesture with it at the other figure with him. That individual was a civilian, wearing blue jeans and a light jacket. At the moment, he was down on one knee looking at a piece of the wreckage with a flashlight. So . . . they’ve got an unwilling recruit. Kyle immediately dismissed the civilian as he couldn’t see a weapon.
If the ISS team were relying on satellite communications with higher-ups, a squad this size would probably be carrying a sat-phone as a backup. Their tactical radios would normally suffice, as they only had to communicate as far as the drone somewhere overhead. The automated flying computer could reroute any short-range, ground-based radio communication to a satellite, and from there, to anywhere in the world. That type of networked communications was ubiquitous across the military, but it required the tactical radios on the ground to be tied into the drone and, subsequently, the satellite network.
The whole system had been in place for decades. It allowed for command echelons at bases or back at the Pentagon to communicate with and track the physical location of units. But . . . these guys were clearly not interested in broadcasting their location to anyone. Why else would they have taken out the helo pilots who had flown them in? He had to assume that they had not tied their tactical radios to the drone. Assume? Hell, they were all praying that was the case.
He ran through the scenarios in his head and came to a decision very quickly; drone controller first, then the sat-phones. He knew it was a good bet the guy carrying the RC 298 laptop was functioning as the radioman, and could very well have a sat phone on him as well. He moved his sight picture to bring the larger group into focus again. Unless this squad worked differently than any he’d ever seen, the short tank-looking figure inside the group of seven was probably in command. He seemed to be the one watching everyone else as they kept an eye on the perimeter. It was possible he’d have a sat-phone as well.
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 27
