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Riley brought up the rear and signaled thumbs-up to the crew chief waiting there. The MH-53 lifted and sprinted to the east for home. Riley walked along the center of the helicopter, past the team members who were seated on the web seats facing inward, until he reached Davis. Gesturing for the team member who sat next to the prisoner to move over, Riley sat down in between. He leaned over and yelled in Davis’s right ear: “What do you think?”

Davis shook his head and lifted his hands. He had managed to break the plastic bindings the team members had put on him when they’d burst into the hangar.

“When did you do that?” Riley asked.

“On the way from the hangar to the airfield,” Davis replied.

“No one checked you in all that time?”

“Nope.”

Riley slumped back in the web seat and closed his eyes. It was early in the morning and all he wanted to do was get some sleep. But he had a feeling it was going to be a very long day.

NICHOLAS M. ROWE TRAINING FACILITY CAMP MACKALL,

NORTH CAROLINA

24 OCTOBER, 6:12 a.m.

The MH-53 landed at the helipad across the street from what generations of Special Forces soldiers had called Camp Mackall, but in 1992 had been re-designated in honor of Colonel Rowe. The students quickly off-loaded the helicopter and moved out to the tin shacks that made up the forward operating base (FOB) for debriefing.

The sprawling compound was named after Col. Nick Rowe, a Special Forces (SF) officer who’d spent five years in captivity in Vietnam before escaping. He’d then led the way in the development of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course in the Special Forces School before being assassinated in the Philippines in 1989 while on attaché duty.

The first Special Forces students in the fifties had lived at the compound under poncho hootches. As time went by, the facility had grown, with tar-paper shacks, then tin, being added. But despite the slow upgrade in facilities, the school still had the same aura about it— intense men working with all their guts to earn the right to wear the Green Beret.

Chief Riley had earned his beret in 1980. At that time, only SF-qualified men wore the beret with full flash—the small cloth shield pinned in front under the SF crest. Non-SF-qualified personnel assigned to a Special Forces unit for support purposes wore the green beret with a “candy stripe” across the flash to designate their different status. Even that was a sore point with many old veterans of Special Forces who felt that the beret should be reserved for those who had earned it. As the eighties dragged on, even that small distinctive piece of cloth was lost as the “Special Forces tab” was introduced. Sewn onto the left shoulder, just like a Ranger tab, this tab was designated to be the only way to tell if someone was Q-course qualified. That opened the door for the beret to be worn by anyone assigned to an SF unit, from cooks to truck drivers to clerks.

At the present moment Riley just didn’t give a damn. He’d worn the beret with pride for well over a decade and had given his blood for his country on more than one occasion; in doing so, however, he had learned that his country was just as ready to crap on him as it was to reward him. His assignment to Fort Bragg as an instructor in A Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group, was a prime example of that. It was the reward for his last mission.

Riley had done his job—he had stopped genetically engineered killing machines, the results of an experiment gone awry. But the army had not been happy with the technique he had used—flooding the tunnels under downtown Chicago. And others in very high places had not been happy with the fact that Riley now knew too much. The powers that be had started out with threats, but Riley had counter-threatened to expose the whole story about the government’s secret project with synthetic battle forms. He’d won that round but lost the war: orders arrived the following week removing him from his team and assigning him to Fort Bragg as an instructor.

An assignment to the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School was not one sought by most Special Forces soldiers. Any man who truly wanted to be in SF wanted to be on a team, which meant being in a line SF group. The official reason given for Riley’s assignment to the training group was “to allow him to recover fully from his wounds.” Riley knew that the real reason was to get him away from the press, which was still wondering about unexplained deaths connected with the Chicago incident, and also to punish him—unofficially, of course.

Riley shook all those thoughts out of his head as he entered the shack where the team of student officers was gathered, the air loud with mutual congratulations and questions as the men relived the training mission they had just completed. Riley stood impassively in the back of the room, listening. He noted those who were talking and those who weren’t. A few men were just looking at him. The official debriefer, a Department of the Army civilian with an intelligence background, would be here shortly to conduct an operational debrief just as if it had been a real mission.

The door opened and Davis walked in. He stood next to Riley. That quieted everyone down for a moment.

Riley stepped into the center of the room. “All right. Everybody grab a seat.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, which was grimy from the past three days of living in the North Carolina pine forest. The hangar they had attacked was only four miles from their present location. The exfil flights had followed a roundabout route that ended back here.

Riley perched himself on the edge of the table that held the team’s planning maps. “We covered infiltration and surveillance up until the arrival of the prisoners, yesterday afternoon out in the field. Right now, before the debriefer gets here, I want to do a quick immediate review of actions on the objective and exfiltration.” Riley looked over at Davis. “This is Master Sergeant Frank Davis. He’s a reservist who works with us every once in a while. Hammer,” Riley said, using the man’s nickname, “from your perspective as hostage, what did you think of the team’s actions at the hangar?”

Davis was a short man, slightly taller than Riley, at five feet nine.

He was built like a fireplug, with thickly muscled arms bulging out of his shirtsleeves. Curly salt and pepper chest hair poked over the top button of his shirt, and his head was covered with gray. His face was ruddy and creased from exposure to the elements. His voice was loud, with a gravelly sound.

“Well, Chief, to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that if there had been real bullets in all those guns, I’d be dead right now.”

The team rustled with irritation, but no one said anything.

Hammer continued. “I could hear you coming about four seconds before you hit the door of the hangar. Sounded like a bunch of orangutans stomping in the dirt as you ran up. And I know the guards could hear you. That’s the first time I would have died—the guards would have gunned us down first and then hosed you all as you were charging in the door. But if that hadn’t done in me and my ladies, you all would have done it for them as you came in. No one yelled ‘Get down,’ like you were told to, until after you had already ‘killed’ the guards. I was in the line of fire when a couple of you shot at the guards with your blanks.

“On the positive side, at least the guy who jumped on me checked the ties the ‘guards’ had put on me. I had them make the knots loose so I could get out of them if I had to. Whoever checked them found that out and replaced the ties with the plastic.”

Hammer paused and held up the slim piece of plastic. “But! But I broke the tie you used on my hands on the way from the hangar to the landing zone. Those damn things don’t work and—”

“We were told to use them by Major Burris,” one of the students interrupted.

Hammer nodded. “Yeah. I know. But did Major Burris go on the mission with you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “When it’s your ass on the line, you need to make damn sure that every piece of equipment you plan to use actually works. Duct tape works real good. Just carry a roll of hundred-mile-an-hour tape and put a few wraps of that around the wrists and even the hands. Make sure the person can’t use his fingers.”

Hammer was warming to his theme. “Remember one rule if you remember nothing else: in a hostage situation you have to assume everyone is a bad guy. There’s nothing to say the bad guys won’t switch clothes with the hostages, or won’t tape toy guns into the hostages’ hands and throw their real guns away and pretend like they’re the victims the moment you start coming in the door. Treat everyone as bad guys until you can confirm they aren’t.

“Another thing: you all lost track of me and my ladies when we made the emergency landing. Whoever was assigned to me took off and left me when it came time to get on the helicopter. Guys, the whole purpose of this mission was to bring me and my wife out alive. Yet you all threw that out the window when things got a little hairy. I could have wandered off and not gotten on that bird and no one would have been the wiser.”

Riley could see that some of the students were listening and absorbing Hammer’s comments, but he also noticed that the man’s lack of formality was irritating some of the officers. It was a problem Riley had encountered often in the past four months of teaching personnel who outranked him. In the effort to impart information, he was sometimes lax in observing military custom. It usually wasn’t a problem once the students knew the instructor and had gained respect for him, but in this case, they knew nothing about Hammer other than his role of hostage in this direct action mission.

Riley stepped up and pointed at Captain Murphy. “Sir, did it ever occur to you to ask the pilot of the Caribou where we were once we did the ‘emergency’ landing?” Riley let a few moments of silence go by, then gestured around the room. “Did it ever occur to any of you?” He didn’t wait for an answer this time. “You have to use your sources. You also left the pilot there without even checking to see what his status was. You don’t leave someone behind. Never. Also, you left the plane sitting there intact. I know this was a training exercise, but in real life you would have to blow that plane and not let it fall into enemy hands.”

Riley sighed. “And what’s with all these digital watches? When people were checking the time, I saw more little mechanical fireflies than real ones out there in the woods.” Riley peeled the Velcro cover off his battered army-issue watch. “Doesn’t anyone wear a regular watch with a luminous face?”

There was much more Riley needed to go into, but at that moment the door opened and the debriefer stepped in with his tape recorder. Riley nodded at the man and then gestured for Hammer to leave with him. He could listen to the tape later. Right now he’d had about all he could take.

Riley and Hammer walked over to the FOB operations shed without a word, each lost in his own thoughts and unwinding mentally. Inside the shack, the company sergeant major presided over a pot of hot coffee. He smiled as the men walked in. “Welcome back. Have fun?”

Riley took off his combat vest, threw it near his locker, and sank into a metal folding chair, gratefully accepting the steaming coffee. “As always, Sergeant Major. My fun meter is all pegged out.”

“Maybe this will help.” The sergeant major held out an envelope. “Arrived this morning with the mail.”

Riley’s face broke out in his first smile of the day as he saw the return address—Chicago—and the handwriting. Hammer and the sergeant major smiled in turn. “Someone you want to hear from, I can see,” said the sergeant major. “I need to make sure the chow hall has breakfast ready for all the teams coming in this morning.” He slid out the door. Hammer made himself scarce by going over to a cot and throwing himself on it. He was snoring within three minutes.

Alone with his letter, Riley slit open the envelope. Three sheets of white paper fell out. Folded inside was a cartoon showing a man facing two doors labeled: Damned if you do, and Damned if you don’t. He scanned the letter quickly before going back and reading it more carefully.

Hey Dave,

Thought of you when I saw this cartoon. Same shit going on here and I imagine same shit going on with you. Last week when we talked you sounded pretty bummed. So I thought I’d cheer up your day with my chicken scrawl. I’m writing this sitting at my desk trying to ignore the twelve cases I got stacked up and need to close out. I’ll be damn glad when winter gets here—it gets most of the assholes off the street.

Things are crazy as always. Not only do we have the usual street killings going on, but now we got the wise guys acting up and taking potshots at each other. The feds sent in a new task force to fight organized crime, and all they’ve managed to do is fuck everything up while making a few headlines in their fancy suits. I’m glad I can stay away from most of the crap—not that I have much choice.

They still have me working all the junk cases. I’m on the Chief’s shit list so I’m keeping my head down and not making any waves. Some of these people have long memories. If everyone who knows what really happened wasn’t so scared about the truth getting out—well, enough about that. I guess the world’s not gonna end.

Riley read the rest of the letter, then slid it into his breast pocket and headed for the mess hall. Donna Giannini had been assigned by the Chicago Police Department to help him during his last mission in Chicago. They’d uncovered a highly classified Pentagon “black project,” and afterward a security lid had been clamped down on the whole affair. She was put on administrative leave with pay while the higher-ups tried to figure out what to do about her. Eventually the feds did nothing, but her superiors in the police department resented the fact that she knew more than they did. So she was moved off active homicide cases and given one shit detail after another. Now the job was closing down the paperwork on old cases. She initially joked about it, but the joke got old as she was given jobs well below her rank of police lieutenant. Still, Riley admitted to himself as he pushed open the door to the chow hall, she’d kept a better attitude about her fate than he had about his.