KBL (41 page)

Oh, sure, CIA’s defeatist analysts insisted on saying the Libyan situation could deteriorate; that Qaddafi was well entrenched and financed; that the situation could drag on for months with no clear winner; and that in any case, there was no clear picture of who the rebels were, what they’d do when and if they prevailed, and what their relationship with the U.S. would be. Worse, CIA recommended a clandestine approach: stealth support of supplies, intelligence, and quiet military assistance for the Libyan insurgents channeled through NATO.

“But on the other hand—and it is a big ‘but,’ Mr. President,” Dwayne had growled to the president not an hour ago, “what has CIA done for you lately? Forty-three thousand people at Langley, a budget in the tens of billions, and they can’t even prove Usama Bin Laden’s living in Abbottabad. And now Vince Mercaldi, your handpicked CIA director, is trying to force your hand into approving an operation in Abbottabad. With no proof.”

Abbottabad, Abbottabad, Abbottabad.

The president was sick and tired of Abbottabad.

And yet all Vince wanted to talk about was Abbottabad and Bin Laden. A risky mission. A possible embarrassment for the administration. There was no up-side unless Bin Laden was there, and he was killed.

Seventy-six, seventy-seven percent chance he’d be there. That’s the figure Spike had quoted. There were no guarantees about that, either. It could be fifty percent. It could be zero. That was the point.
They didn’t know.

And the president was a man who liked guarantees. Sure things. Sure things were his modus vivendi. It was how he’d campaigned; it was how his whole political career had been engineered. Create the proper conditions, build an organization, develop wide grassroots support, and do it all under everyone else’s radar. Make sure you had it in the bag, then make it all look like a surprise. And if those prerequisites weren’t met, then kick the can down the road until they were.

Except this was one instance when the president couldn’t kick the can down the road. They would need a decision. Go or no-go.

Vince wanted a decision today. The president could see it in the CIA director’s face. And Spike’s.

It was Spike who’d told him point-blank that he would be morally, politically, and strategically culpable if he didn’t do this. Not going to Abbottabad would come back to haunt him, the analyst had said.

Those were challenging words addressed to the Leader of the Free World. Words to box him in. Paint him into a corner.

Because they were, the president understood, absolutely true.

Which is why they were the precise questions the polls he’d secretly ordered the day after that Sit Room session were supposed to answer. The polls—two of them, both close-hold—that he’d had his top political consultant conduct.

First: Would he be held accountable if it was discovered he hadn’t gone after UBL when he had the chance?

Second: If a risky military operation became a disaster, would he be held responsible?

And third: If the answers to those questions were yes, how deeply would they affect his chances of reelection?

The president had to know the answers before he could act. It was Litigation 101: never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer. Otherwise he was just rolling dice.

Not his style.

He’d said just over a week ago that he would give them an answer today. And he’d meant it.

But the polls weren’t completed yet
. There’d been screw-ups. That unfortunate info-bit had been whispered in his ear by the White House political director as they made their way down here from the Oval Office.

Results wouldn’t be in until early Friday. Tomorrow morning.

Today he had nothing to give them.

The president stroked his chin. “Spike, you make an overwhelmingly convincing argument.” And the analyst had, too. The only possible answer to Spike’s presentation was “Go,” and the president knew it. So did everyone else in the room.

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“And so . . .” The president paused.

He could see them anticipating.

But he was the president. The CINC—commander in chief. They couldn’t do a thing without him. That was the law.

There was no reason to hem or to haw. “You’ll have my final decision tomorrow.” The president hoisted himself out of his chair and left without another word.

Vince Mercaldi sat stunned. Tomorrow?

Tomorrow was a travel day. The president was scheduled to leave the White House at 8:30 for Tuscaloosa, Alabama, then fly to Cape Canaveral for the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour, followed by an event in Miami. POTUS wouldn’t return to the White House until shortly before midnight.

The CIA director had no idea what was going on. And he didn’t like it one bit.

But there was nothing he could do to fix the situation. Or force it.

He hadn’t boxed the president into a corner.

Not at all.

It had been the other way around.

41

Joint Operation Center, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
April 28, 2011, 2030 Hours Local Time

“Stand ’em down, Mac.” Wesley Bolin wiped his face with his hands. “We got a hurry-up-and-wait from POTUS. Won’t hear anything until tomorrow.” He muttered something inaudible under his breath.

“Sir?”

“I was just thinking. Get hold of the Sentinel crews and ground the drones we put over the flight path. Let’s keep the two over Abbottabad in a loiter. How much more flight time do they have?”

McGill checked his BlackBerry. “Eighteen hours.

“Relieve them tomorrow afternoon with fresh ones. Hopefully we can go tomorrow night.”

“We got a front coming in about three tomorrow afternoon,” Brigadier General Eric McGill frowned. “Probably have a weather hold even if we do get the go.”

“Crap.”

“What do we tell the troops?” The assault package personnel were well into their alert sequence. They’d been awakened at 5
PM
. By six they were working out and having breakfast. Currently they were in the SCIF, the bug-proof room where they’d assembled for their Battle Update Brief, where they were being told that the night’s target was an HVT named Hamid Gul Muhammed, a Taliban bomb maker responsible for the deaths of more than twenty American Soldiers and Marines. They would learn that Gul had fled deep into Pakistan and that the raid was therefore under CIA control.

It was nothing they hadn’t heard before. All of JSOC’s cross-border raids came under CIA control, because so far as the JAG lawyers were concerned, while it was illegal under international law for the U.S. military to invade a sovereign nation, clandestine cross-border incursions were dead-center in the CIA’s mission statement.

“Tell ’em weather. Tell ’em target’s moved. I don’t fricking care.” Wes Bolin was pissed. He almost would have preferred to have the president scrub the mission than drop it into a vacuum.

Worse, when the admiral had asked Vince what happened, the CIA director responded with a stony silence. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—supply a reason for POTUS’s indecision.

It didn’t really matter. The CINC was the CINC. Full stop, end of story.

The Joint Special Operations Command was a strange animal. It didn’t report to the Pentagon hierarchy or to one of the combatant commands, even though most people thought it reported to USSOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. No, JSOC came under the National Command Authority, which translated to the president and the secretary of defense. Without a go from the NCA, nothing moved.

Still, this delay wouldn’t do the shooters any good. Tier One units are like Thoroughbreds. You don’t keep Secretariat in the starting gate overnight.

Secretariats—military ones like Red Squadron, anyway—operate differently, train differently, work differently than conventional units. They shoot tens of thousands of rounds a year honing their skills. They can operate singly or in pairs, squads, teams, platoons, or troops, depending on the situation. Even the way they shoot is different. DEVGRU SEALs and Delta shooters may carry automatic weapons, but on direct-action missions they almost never fire in any mode but semiautomatic. All those bursts of automatic fire by Delta and SEALs happen mainly in movies. DEVGRU SEALs and Delta Soldiers don’t need full auto mode on ninety percent of their operations because they can fire a double or triple tap at virtually the same speed as an automatic weapon does.

And it wasn’t just the human factor that worried Wes Bolin. Tonight all his operational ducks were in the proverbial row. Troops were fresh and primed; weather was perfect; targets were exactly where they were supposed to be. Tomorrow the conditions could change. It could thunderstorm for the next week. Crankshaft—the code name for Bin Laden—could switch locations. Any number of variables could result in additional layers of Murphy factors, which, taken all together, could screw things up. Not make the hit impossible, but make it a lot more difficult. “Better get on it, Mac.”

“Roger, sir.” The big Ranger general stowed his unlit cigar. “By the way,” he said, “the CIA guy—their liaison?”

“Fedorko.”

“Yeah, Fedorko. He’s got a set of prosthetics with him?”

“Affirmative. They’re for Archangel—he’s the undercover CIA’s had in Pakistan since late November.”

“Archangel?” McGill scratched his head.

“That’s his call sign. He’s a double amputee, and we’ll bring him out. But during the mission we need him ambulatory because he’s fluent in Pashto.”

“Know his name?”

“I can find out. Why?”

“ ’Cause I had a master sergeant working for me at the 175 when I was an O-5 whose radio call sign was Archangel. Charlie Becker. Big guy. You didn’t want to fool with him. Hell of a Soldier. Silver Star recipient. Two combat jumps. Yup. Hell of a Soldier. He retired in oh-one or oh-two. Somewhere I seem to remember somebody telling me he’d gone to Langley.”

“Could be. I’ll check,” Bolin said. “Meanwhile, you stand ’em all down, Mac. We’re in hurry-up-and-wait mode until we hear from the CINC.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

42