Echo Platoon (38 page)

The LAMA settled back onto the deck and Nigel shut it down.

I pushed against Digger’s back. “Everybody out.”

Once we cleared, I examined the interior of the old chopper. There were two steel storage boxes bolted behind the passenger bench. I peered inside. They were filled with mechanic’s tools. They both got unbolted and jettisoned. That was about a hundred pounds of weight saved—maybe more. I tossed the old Russkie fire extinguisher onto the deck. Ten pounds more. I unscrewed the Plexiglas hatch covers and left ’em on the tarmac. That was another thirty-five, maybe forty pounds. I hoped that Mister Murphy was among the things being left behind. He was the real dead weight we had to lose this morning.

Okay—now it was time to test the motherfucker out. “Let’s pile in and see how it flies.”

0717. Wheels up. Nigel took the chopper up six feet, and then skimmed along the tarmac. He worked the controls and pedals, and the chopper rose. At about a hundred feet, he turned his head in my direction, said, “This’ll do, Gov,” and simultaneously gave me the upturned thumb confirming we were good to go.

Then it was back onto the deck to top off the fuel tank. Another six minutes consumed. I got on the radio to Pick. “We’re gonna launch.”

Pick knew we were way behind schedule, but he
was gracious enough not to bring it up. “Roger-roger, Skipper. Good to hear it. Fair winds and following seas.”

“Thanks, Pick—same to you guys.” I tapped Nigel on the shoulder and pointed skyward. “Okay, Nige. As you Limeys like to say, “Tally-the fuck-ho.”

0739. W
E FLEW
VFR,
74
FOLLOWING THE RAILROAD LINE
that runs from Baku to Bataga. Nigel kept the chopper at about twelve hundred feet. We were making just under 140 knots. I unzipped the pouch on my body armor and felt for the paper on which I’d done the flight calculations. The four legs of this flight totaled 462 miles. I peered down at the landscape below, and saw a narrow, winding river over which the twin spans of a railroad bridge and an elevated highway crossed, right in the center of a good-size town lying below us and just north.

I checked the map, confirmed we were over Ali Bajramly, did some mental calculations, and muttered a few rude imprecations in three languages at Mister Murphy. Doom on Dickie. Somehow, he’d managed to cram himself undetected into the far corner of the passenger compartment before we’d left Baku.

Shit. If I could have reached the sumbitch, I’d have tossed his ass out the hatch. But I couldn’t. Besides, I was too busy revising the op plan. We had 280 miles
left to go. We were traveling at 136 knots. You do the fucking math.

You say that you’re no good at math and you need a calculator, and you don’t want to do math—all you want to do is kick ass and take names? Well, here is a bit of truth for all you Rogue wannabes out there. Using the
F
-word in all its compound-complex forms does not make you a Rogue Warrior
®
, because being able to use profanity means nothing without the ability to deal with the real profanity of perplexing situations. Neither does acting pushy, or aggressive, or being able to recite the Ten Commandments of SpecWar
75
from memory. And you can talk about guns all you want, but talking about guns doesn’t make you a Rogue Warrior
®
either. Guns, like knives, and parachutes, and even tanks and F-16s, are all simply TOWs—Tools of War. They are not icons, or collectibles, or trophies to be shown off.

Oh, sure, when I was a tadpole, school was unimportant to me. In fact, I dropped out of high school to join the Navy. But the closer I got to the Teams, the more important having an education became. Let me remind you that my platoon chief at UDT 21, Everett Emerson Barrett, kicked my enlisted butt until I completed my GED, and an admiral named Snyder made sure I completed college and even got a master’s degree. Indeed, I have discovered that the real key to Warriordom can be reduced to three words: study, study, and study. You cannot be a SEAL and not know math. You cannot be a Ranger or a Delta shooter and not know math, because there ain’t no room on the
Teams for someone who can’t solve complex formulae about everything from the HARP of your HAHO, to the use of shaped charges, to decompression after a long, deep dive.

Bottom line? You wanna be like me, then you better fucking learn math, and you better fucking learn it good. Because how the fuck can you plan missions if you can’t fucking add, subtract, multiply, and divide, not to mention do your fair share of algebra, calculus, and trigonometry. Got it? Good.

Now, like most SEALs, I don’t carry calculators with me. And so I crunched my numbers the old-fashioned way: pencil on paper. And the answer I came up with was that we had 1.96 hours of flying time left, and 1.2 hours until 0900, which as you will recall, was the optimum time for our hit, given the sun’s position and the condition of the target. That put us three-quarters of an hour in the debit column time-wise, and that was with a perfect flight—no head winds, no engine problems, none of the numerous possible screwups, fuckups, and mess-ups that the great nineteenth-century military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz lumped together as “the fog of war.”

I tapped Nigel on the shoulder. “Any way to gain some time, Nige?”

I didn’t care much for his response. Basically, we were flying this craft in overload as it was, and just getting to Naryndzlar was going to be a problem.

Oleg reached over and pulled the chart out of my hand. He peered at it, then stuck a stubby index finger on the creased sheet of paper. “There,” he said. “We should cut short the trip by flying northwest now, not circling around.”

I saw what he was getting at. My route had been
circuitous, six legs in all, to avoid being spotted. Oleg’s was direct: only three legs. But it took us over two Azeri military installations. I brought the subject up to him.

He shrugged off any objections. “They will not pay attention,” he said. “They will not care about us.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I cannot guarantee,” he said, shouting over the wind and engine noise to make himself understood, “but Azeris in the past have not been effective militarily.”

Ashley nodded in agreement. “I concur with that part of what Oleg says,” she yelled. “Frankly, Dick, it would save us a lot of time. At least half an hour.”

I thought about it, handed the map to Nod, and showed him the new routing with my finger. Then I retrieved the GPS unit from my vest, unhooked it from its lanyard, and handed it to Nod. “Punch the new route into the GPS,” I mouthed, my words getting lost in the ambient noise.

Nod didn’t have to hear. He understood perfectly, gave me a thumbs-up, and went to work. Three minutes later, Nigel looked at the Magellan readout screen, and tally-fucking-ho’d the LAMA northward. Our time to ETA had just been reduced by two legs and twenty-seven minutes according to the little abacus that sits just fore of the bullshit detector and just left of the pussy-meter in my brain.

Plus, because we weren’t going to be heading up into the hills for a while, we could increase our airspeed. Which would save us another four minutes. That brought us into an acceptable Murphy range—just over fifteen minutes behind schedule.

0752. I radioed Pick, gave him the news, and got a
roger-roger. He’d be taking off any minute now, and heading toward his target, thirty miles east of Naryndzlar. I put my head back, rested it against the metal firewall, and closed my eyes. I’ve learned over several decades of Warriordom that you grab rest whenever you can get it. So this was as good a time as any for a Roguish combat nap.

0832. A change in the way we were flying awakened me with a start. I opened my eyes. It had grown much colder, and I looked groundward. Our airspeed had slowed considerably—down to seventy-five, maybe eighty knots from the look of things, and the engine didn’t sound good.

We were climbing over a series of scrubby foothills, whose ridgelines rose perhaps fourteen or fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor. The air around the chopper had dropped into the fifties, and without the hatches, the wind chill made it seem twenty degrees colder than that. I looked over at Ashley, who was shivering.

I mouthed, “You okay?”

“It’s no worse than it was at SERE
76
school,” she answered, her jaw shuddering as she spoke. “I’ll be okay.”

Now? Maybe. But it was going to get a lot colder when we hit the mountains. Well, Ashley was tough. She’d be able to take it. If not, well, she’d be cold. I glanced over at Oleg. His arms were wrapped around the document case, its strap running under his right epaulette. His head was back, his mouth was open, and he was snoring away, oblivious to the slipstream
that was making a prop out of the waxed tip of his long, white mustache.

Good. I extracted the secure cellular from my pocket, snuck another look at Oleg to make sure he wasn’t watching me, then punched up the first of the numbers in my head. It rang twice, and was picked up.

I said, “Sit-rep,” then I plugged my right ear with my index finger so I could hear what was being said on the other end.

I hung up after thirty seconds, called a second number, and more or less repeated the performance. My third call was to Jacques Lillis, and the fourth to Ricky Fewell. The news was all good: the targets Steve Sarkesian planned to hit had all been hardened against attack. Jacques Lillis’s people had identified the TIQs in Paris, and were watching ’em closely. MI-5, the British security apparatus, was waiting in London to pounce on the Iranians Ali Sherafi had sent to hit our embassy there. The oil company HQs were being protected, and the FBI had been alerted. Bottom line? Within six hours, Steve Sarkesian’s nets would all be scooped up—and the sumbitch would be out of business.

No, that’s not quite accurate. He’d be dead. I switched off the phone and slipped it back into my pocket, glancing over to make sure that Oleg was still snoring. He was.

With the other problems solved, I could pay attention to our situation. I tapped Nigel on the shoulder and asked for a sit-rep.

It wasn’t good. “There’s a flutter in the engine, Gov,” he said.

Well, I knew that already. You could hear the goddam thing struggling. “Will she make it?”

He shrugged, keeping both hands on his controls. “I dropped speed, but it’s a real fight, and we haven’t begun to climb yet.”

I looked over at Nod, who was mirroring Nigel’s every move, flying the fucking LAMA by osmosis. “How we doing’?”

Nod came out of his trance, hit the Magellan’s “on,” switch and when the screen came alive, handed the gizmo to me.

I peered at the readout. We were about forty minutes out, as far as I could guesstimate, due east of Naryndzlar. Below us was a narrow, winding river that made a ninety-degree turn south, then flowed down a more or less northwest to southeasterly course. I grabbed the map and the GPS unit from Nod, laid the map over my legs, balanced the Magellan on my right knee, and tracked our progress with my right index finger.

I looked down at the sequence on the small GPS screen. Yup. We were flying over Mughanly now. Next town to the west should be Kurdlar. After Kurdlar, we’d reach the mountains—the outer edge of the Caucasus range, and things would start to get hairy. I reached for the Magellan to double-check.

Which was when Oleg came out of a nightmare with a series of snorts and starts, his body shaking like a big wet bear. Inadvertently, he swatted Ashley with his big fat Ivan elbow, sending her body up against mine, and the Magellan careening off my knee. The position finder bounced once on the deck plate, knocking the double-A battery cover off. Digger shoestring grabbed the batteries as they rolled toward the hatchway. I hit my quick-release shoulder
harness and went for the GPS. I swooped forward to scoop it up just as Oleg smacked into Ashley again. Her foot connected with my injured knee, and I reacted badly, kicking the fucking Magellan out of the chopper.

I thought about going after it, because that’s how stupid I had just been. I fell back onto the bench, secured myself with the safety harness, and looked down ruefully at the lanyard that should have been attached to the Magellan. I looked over at Oleg. He was back asleep, oblivious to what he’d done, his mustache fluttering in the slipstream, a small line of drool coming out of the corner of his mouth. Digger O’Toole, who has a very sarcastic streak in him, rolled his fucking eyes skyward, held the batteries in his palm, and proffered them toward me without saying a word.

He didn’t have to. I used sign language to tell him he was a number-one sort of guy, which brought an uneven, malevolent grin to his pasty Mick face.

And Nod didn’t make me feel any better by telling me that we could probably fly visual from here on, because the course was pretty much due westerly. Hey, I’d fucked up, and I knew it. But there was nothing to do but keep moving forward.

0847. Twenty miles to go. And then, there it was: the high Karabakh Khrebet ridge, looming in front of us like a big fucking wall. The narrow road we were following disappeared into a tunnel. Doom on us, because we didn’t have that luxury. We were gonna have to muscle our way over the goddamn ridgeline meter by meter and come out on the far side without crashing.

Which result was not guaranteed, because the chopper was in rough shape, and vibrating badly. Nigel really had his work cut out for him now. He was up to it, though, hunched over the controls, his hands and feet planted firmly on sticks and pedals, the neck-band of his Russkie uniform wet with sweat, even though the air was close to freezing.

And then suddenly, his head turned toward me, his face contorted with the stress. “I can’t hold it, Gov—gotta set ’er down or we’re history.”

I gave him an absolute negatory. I didn’t fucking care if we crash-landed on the goddam plateau at Naryndzlar. But if we set the LAMA down now, we’d never fucking get airborne again. I knew it, and so did Nigel, even though he chose to disregard the message in his gut.

“Just fly the fucking thing, Nige—”

“Aye, aye, Gov.” His face showed new determination. Like all SEALs, Nigel knew he had to produce when the odds were all against him. Like all SEALs he knew he had no choice other than TO KEEP GOING. He’d just needed to get a little encouragement from someone else who was in the same boat—or chopper—as he was.