Full Assault Mode (8 page)

FIVE

Isolation Cell Black—Black Ice—undisclosed location

Cindy “Hawk” Bird’s four-by-four-foot box leaked from the top. It leaked bad. But she was as comfortable in the water as a Navy SEAL, so water drops she could handle. Now, waterboarding—that was a different matter. She hoped it wasn’t coming to that. But she knew she had been stubborn throughout her seventy-two hours in the box, including during five interrogations, for which she was strapped to a chair in a very cold and musty room. She couldn’t be sure. Some of the bruises were certainly from her struggle with the two gorillas from the light blue Ford Focus outside Macy’s. Others were from the interrogator, including the severe pain she felt near her floating left rib. But it wasn’t the box, the raindrops, the hard interrogation tactics, or the awful stench of her own urine that was driving her crazy. No, those were unsettling, for sure, but it was clearly that damn baby crying for her daddy.

Hawk tried to adjust the angle of her long, unshaven legs inside the tiny-ass plywood box. She palmed both ears to drown out the loud screams of the wailing babies. Over and over, the same tape played. And it played loud. The only relief was the intermittent but unpredictable spurts of Middle Eastern music. Hawk recognized the variety of songs praising Liwa’a Abu Fadl al-Abbas, Syria’s pro-Iranian Shia “International Brigade,” which curtly insulted nonbelievers and blatantly threatened the Syrian rebels. But given a choice, she’d take the music over the crying babies.

If this was the Delta-operator life she so wanted to be a part of, or “living the dream,” as she so often heard the boys in the Unit say throughout the Spine, she was certainly having second thoughts.
How long have I been here. Is this just training?

Actually, it had only been just under forty-eight hours since Hawk was rolled up. It’s easy to lose track of time when you are in the box. Your ability to think clearly is conceded early. Tracking time is a bitch. Simple arithmetic is compromised. Trying to stick to your cover story while scooting away from your own shit is even dicier.

But it wasn’t like she hadn’t been warned. No, her superiors at Delta had made it very clear to her that selection was an ongoing process, and even though she had proved valuable to the command on several occasions now, she wasn’t entirely accepted. There were still some naysayers. Older, very seasoned operators that had been around for decades, by nature, didn’t impress easily. Old-school mind-sets that never believed the pilot program was a smart idea in the first place. Women had no place in the unit or on the battlefield, they argued. More so, in their eyes, women just got in the way of the male operators actually, well, operating. But the Delta commander, Colonel Jeremy Webber, saw it differently. From his perspective, Cindy Bird had validated his long-held assumptions that a female could help an operator ensure a successful mission. Webber wasn’t looking for female operators, nor was he arguing that the Unit should even consider female operators. He just wanted the eye candy, but from a performance perspective only. No airheads. They had to be switched on. And as far as Webber was concerned, results mattered most.

Hawk’s performance in Lybia at the fall of the Ghadhafi regime two years earlier, and the unique help she provided to Major Kolt Raynor and his AFO cell on the streets of Cairo, had been commended. Moreover, the fact that her performance had been widely talked about and debated inside the halls of the Unit validated Webber’s every assumption.

In fact, Cindy Bird was the first female guest at a place called Isolation Cell Black. To the guards it’s known simply as Black Ice. And, yes, it was training, vital training, for sure, but it was the kind that nobody really got a kick out of. You don’t sign up for Black Ice; you don’t put it on the training schedule. No, you don’t find Black Ice; it finds you.

There were no time-outs at Black Ice. No potty breaks, no lawyers, and no phone calls home. And Black Ice, for the time being anyway, was still as big a secret to the members of Delta as the exact standards required to enter the ranks in the first place remained after thirty-five years. Guests at Black Ice had to sign a Special Access Program nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, when they were released. That is, if they could still steady a pen long enough to sign it. Speaking about it, the experience, or even its existence was forbidden. And, so far as Webber knew, after six out of the seven operators enrolled had survived, or graduated somewhat, the secret still held.

Hawk’s wooden box offered no amenities—short of plenty of privacy, that is. Outside the box, pointed at odd angles, four large spotlights illuminated the hard right angles of plywood and cast long shadows on the dirty and paint-chipped walls. It did come with a single lightbulb cut into the center of the roof. Not that anyone was concerned about a detainee having enough reading light at night. The light was just part of the package deal. It never turned off, ever, and cast a short seven-inch-long shadow off the side of her half-gallon tin coffee can that held an inch of warm potable water. She had debated to use it as her personal Porta-Potty. But anticipating that the guards wouldn’t find it amusing, and knowing that without water she would become delirious and rapidly lose strength, she opted to simply let nature take its course where she sat.

The package also included a twelve-inch-long metal chain secured to a heavy eyebolt in the roof. Just enough chain so that when the accompanying shiny handcuff was placed around Hawk’s wrist, it kept her in an agonizing position. At some point, and she couldn’t be sure exactly when, Hawk’s left arm had become numb from her shoulder to her fingertips. Reaching up with her right hand to take the pressure off her wrist created by the cuffs was her only source of relief.

A small six-by-six-inch sliding window at the very bottom of the box provided her only view of the outside world. It also served as the entry point for the two lukewarm bowls of chicken broth she had received so far.

Most men don’t come out of Black Ice with the same mental state as when they entered. The place wears on a man, any man. Hawk had no way of knowing this, of course, but inside her own box, she realized she was just as human as the rest of them. Black Ice wasn’t picky about who it broke. It wasn’t specific about religion, nationality, or even sexual orientation. No, Black Ice was an equal opportunity torture chamber.

Black Ice became a necessity after several Delta operators were captured in Pakistan years ago, when the MI-17 they were in was shot down by Taliban fighters in the mountains northeast of Gardez. The leader of that rescue team was LTC Josh Timble. Timble had been Kolt Raynor’s mentor for years in Delta, and, in fact, it was Raynor’s screwup across the border in Pakistan that led to TJ’s and the others’ capture. Black Ice wasn’t around back then for TJ to benefit from, but thanks to his efforts and doggedness after his repatriation, the command recognized the importance of preparing Delta operators for captivity before they needed the skills. It was an insurance policy that, God willing, they would never cash in.

Hawk’s mind was near collapse. She argued with herself internally about the importance of Delta, and even about how committed she was. Sure, she took a big step when she actually killed a man at close range in Cairo. That changed her, just as it changes every male operator. But she wasn’t an operator. That had been made very clear to her by the command. Even Kolt Raynor had reminded her of that one night inside the Cairo safe house.

Maybe this Delta stuff is just as insane, just as inhumane, just as crazy as this fucking box. Is all this shit still worth it?

With her left wrist secured to the chain in the center of her isolation box’s roof, weighing four pounds fewer than when she tried squeezing into the size 6 skinny jeans at the mall, and covered in dried shit from her earlier bowel movement, she wondered why she signed up for Delta in the first place. She could have just finished up her enlistment in the army like normal people do
. I think I made a big mistake
.

Jalalabad Airfield, Afghanistan

A few hours after taking Shaft’s latest situation report over the phone, Kolt leaned over a large black-and-white satellite photo sprawled out on a wooden table. He had left the comfort of Bravo Team’s tent, gained the wooden palette walkway that kept troops out of the mud during the rainy season, and half jogged the forty meters or so across the frozen dirt ground. He slipped around a short maze of concrete T-walls and sand-filled Hesco barriers designed to protect the place from incoming enemy mortar rounds before stepping up two steps and pulling aside the first of two large nylon flaps that served as the entrance to the Joint Operations Center.

Kolt moved quickly to the nearby long table to grab a cup of coffee. He emptied the GI-issue silver pot, giving him just half a cup, all the while ignoring the handwritten sign prominently posted just behind the half-opened boxes of Christmas care packages from home that read
LAST CUP REFILLS THE POT
.

Kolt balanced his Styrofoam cup, careful not to spill what little hot coffee he had, as he walked across the uneven floorboards toward the unwelcoming makeshift planning bay located toward the back of the tent. He passed behind five rows of tables, each crowned by a half dozen of the latest Dell laptop computers, perfectly aligned and alive. On the far wall, six large plasma flat screens played
Kill
TV on different frequency feeds. Somewhere in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, a dozen armed drones captured every move of unsuspecting ant-size people of interest. Their every move opened to the sky was piped hundreds of miles into this single headquarters.

The JOC was the working domain of the joint staff officers that did the lion’s share of the work. A 24-7 operation, the staff developed target decks, analyzed mountains of raw intel in search of a golden nugget, and assessed risk and monitored the entire battlefield—all with a single goal in mind: get Delta operators out in the badlands turning targets as fast and as often as possible. Pushing the operations tempo, or optempo, was the sole purpose of the J-staff. A unique mix of the distinct aroma of a Best Buy showroom, fresh plywood flooring, and sweaty, overworked adults on reverse schedule who rarely see the sun could be detected as soon as you opened the second flap.

Standing around him in the tight quarters and surrounded by plywood walls covered with giant maps of the major fighting spots across Afghanistan and western Pakistan, Admiral Mason and his staff listened intently.

“Buildings two, three, four, five, and possibly seven,” Kolt stated with authority while pointing in succession with his unfolded Spyderco blade. Admiral Mason and the others hung on Kolt’s every word with a focused gaze.

“We need to do better than that,” Mason rhetorically stated as he shook his head side to side. “Your man needs to pinpoint the exact location, or I’m not authorizing a launch. I thought that was perfectly clear, even to you, Major.”

Kolt was dumbfounded. He squinted in disappointment.
Fuck
. Fine, it wasn’t perfect, but it was actionable. He looked first at Admiral Mason, conspicuously taller than the rest in the room, with a full head of brown but graying hair that never seemed to need a comb, before shifting to the others around the table, the task force planners, the JSOC Command sergeant major, and the helicopter force’s air-mission commander.

It was the first time Kolt and Mason had been in the same room together in weeks. In fact, Mason had kept his distance from Kolt for the last few months. So much so that folks were starting to realize that the admiral wasn’t Kolt’s biggest fan. It was an astute observation and something not lost on most of the force, particularly after the admiral skipped the hot wash after the Thunder Turtle mission.

Kolt didn’t necessarily have anything against the admiral. Well, besides the fact that he was a Naval Academy graduate, a fact not lost on anyone else in the tent since his obnoxious 1982 class ring stood out like a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl ring on a newborn baby. More than the gaudy ring, most annoying to Kolt was the admiral’s noticeably brand-new set of pressed MultiCam camouflage fatigues he always wore.

Midshipmen don’t become flag officers by spending their formative years with their fatigue pants not bloused in their boots properly or their fatigue top sleeves not rolled down correctly and buttoned at the wrists. No, the quickest way to nonselect for promotion was violating military regulations on uniform wearing and appearance. Kolt often wondered if this was why very few former Delta commanders were ever given the reigns of the Joint Special Operations Command.

Mason had served the last four years holding down a desk job in the Pentagon. It was a two-star special operations billet requiring a bright white and pressed service uniform daily. Both the billet and the uniform fit him like a glove. It was one of the very few senior staff jobs that ensured he was read on to all JSOC operations. And, in turn, to Delta’s top secret ops. Which meant, of course, that Kolt Raynor’s antics over the years were no secret to him.

Admiral Mason knew all about Raynor’s stupid move in Pakistan that got several of his teammates killed and captured years earlier. He knew about the shady redemption operation, an unsanctioned operation, to locate and rescue his Delta teammates, including his best friend, Lieutenant Colonel Josh Timble, from a black site in Pakistan.

Mason was an action officer detailed to brief the National Security Council when the hijacked Boeing 767-400 jetliner tried to take off from an airfield in New Delhi. After hearing the details of how Kolt Raynor and three other Delta operators landed on the wide-body fuselage while it was moving, breached through the roof hatch, killed a half-dozen Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists, and rescued over 140 hostages, Mason knew that the army major needed a breathalyzer, piss test, and full psych workup.

And most recently, just six months ago, Mason had been part of the entourage when the president secretly visited the Delta compound at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to thank them for taking out American-born terrorist Daoud al-Amriki. Of all Delta’s successes since the war on terror began after 9/11, this operation was personal. Kolt and Josh Timble, in another off-the-books operation, this time on U.S. soil, prevented Marine One from being blown out of the sky just outside Andrews Air Force Base as the president returned from overseas. The president openly thanked the unit, yet everyone knew it was all Kolt and his buddy TJ. And Josh Timble didn’t make it home.