KBL (43 page)

“That’s McGorilla with the boss.” Rangemaster cut his sandwich into two perfectly equal portions. “Probably doing what the brass always does: Figure out how to get us in trouble. Complicate our lives. Toss a few hurdles in our direction.”

“That’s what I love about you: you’re always so optimistic.” Heron yawned. “Full of Christian love and trust.”

“If I weren’t an atheist, or a Buddhist, or a Wiccan, I’d be full of Christian love and trust,” Rangemaster said. He cut each half of his sandwich into two more precise portions, picked up one, and devoured it in a single bite. “But I’m not, and I ain’t.” He looked at Padre. “Which one am I again, Padre?”

“Pagan. I keep telling you. You demand human sacrifices, therefore you’re a pagan.”

“I thought human sacrifices were a SEAL thing.”

“They are—that’s why they invented Hell Week.” Fish elbowed his way toward the table bearing a tray of steak and eggs and hash browns.

Rangemaster made room for the newcomer. “Pull up a throne, your lordship.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” The SEAL set down his tray and scratched at his beard. “Anybody seen Gunrunner?”

Cajun: “He’s working out, Fish. Says he has to lose weight.”

“Good,” Fisher grunted. “Because he was behind me on that last stick at Knox. Came down the rope and pancaked me.”

Heron: “Gotta be faster, Fish.”

“I do better in a maritime environment.” He stirred sugar into his coffee. “Don’t like to be a fish out of water.”

Rangemaster: “Original. I’ll bet you’ve never said that before.”

“Absolutely.” Fish held his left hand up in a three-fingered salute. “Scout’s honor.” He glanced over at the table of officers. “Who’s the supersize general?”

“McGill.”

“The Ranger? Seventy-fifth Regiment?”

“That’s him.”

“How can he be a Ranger general? He’s too big. Looks like he needs a cargo chute.” Fish hooked a thumb in McGill’s direction. “That man does not eat only one meal a day.” Wes Bolin’s predecessor, the ascetically thin Ranger General Stanley McChrystal, was legendary for eating only one meal a day.

“Let the truth be told,” T-Rob said. “Not all Ranger generals eat only one meal a day.”

Fish laughed. “And here I thought that was the Army’s latest deciding factor for general officers rank.”

44

JSOC Joint Operations Center, Jalalabad, Pakistan
May 1, 2011, 1915 Hours Local Time

“Okay, listen up.” Captain Tom Maurer stood in front of a three-by-five-foot flat screen to conduct the BUB. Taped to the wall and surrounding the screen were photographs of the Khan brothers and their wives and children that had been taken by the crews at Valhalla. There were also ground-level photos of the compound gates and the concertina-topped walls with the main structure rising behind them. “Tonight our CONOP is Hotel 53. It’s a deep end-run into Pakistan, so nobody get lost and miss the tour bus on the way back, okay?”

He waited for the laughter to subside. He punched up the first PowerPoint slide. “Because it’s a deep run and there’s the possibility that we may have to fight our way out, weapons tonight will be four-sixteens for the assault package. I want us to be able to reach out and touch people should we have to. If the Rangers want to bring some seven-sixty-two stand-off weapons, that’s fine with me. And we’ll be breaching, so prepare for up to six doors or gates.

“As usual, an HVT. Name: Hamid Gul Muhammad, code name Undertaker—same target as two nights ago. And still just as nasty a piece of work. Bomb maker, trained in Iran. Responsible for more than twenty American KIAs.” Maurer looked out at the faces of the SEALs, Rangers, and aircrew. “So how about let’s put his head on a pike tonight.
Hoo-yah!
”

He waited for the
hoo-yah
s and
hoo-ah
s to subside, then he hit the remote and the second slide popped up. It was a surveillance photograph of the Khan compound. “He lives here, with his family and two other families. So watch out for wives and children. We don’t want collaterals tonight. You see a weapon in a woman’s hand, or her hand reaching for one, you shoot her dead. Same for the kids. Otherwise, cuff ’em and stow ’em.”

Maurer pulled up the third screen. There were a pair of X’s at positions on the south side of the outer wall. The one on the right had a green circle. “Clean zone. That’s for people we know and have searched and identified.” The next screen had a red circle. “Dirty zone: everybody else.”

He looked toward the back of the room. “We have two Soldiers from Delta’s intelligence package with us tonight. They’ll ride with me in the enabler helo. They speak Pashto and Arabic, so they’ll handle the on-site TQ and lead the SSE.” TQ was tactical questioning and SSE was sensitive site exploitation: mining for intelligence materials and taking DNA samples and photographs of prisoners, corpses, and leave-behinds. The more you could learn, the more effective your hunt.

He continued with screens that showed photographs and diagrams of the locations where the helos would land, where the walls had to be breached, and where the Rangers would set up their blocking force and security perimeter. “Because it’s Pakistan, we’re worried about neighbors,” he continued. “So we’ll link up with an OGA asset at the target site.” OGA stood for “other government agency,” which is how most of the military referred to CIA. “He’s an undercover and looks like a local, but he’ll be holding a firefly, so nobody shoot him, okay?” Maurer paused. “The slim guy with the white beard sitting in the back of the room—stand up, Paul—is Paul Fedorko, who works at OGA’s Ground Branch. He knows the asset and he’ll provide him with a vest, a cover, and NODs. The OGA guy will handle the neighbors.”

Maurer looked over the room. “Any questions?”

There was silence.

“Okay,” he said. “Dismissed. Let’s go get the job done.”

2030 Hours

By 2000 Hours the assault package was broken into smaller working groups, studying overhead imagery of the target, marking overlays, and making up their grid reference guides, or GRGs, which many of the assaulters would wear on their wrist the same way NFL quarterbacks write their plays on their wrist.

Rangemaster traced the distance from J-Bad to Abbottabad. “Captain said we were going deep?” He shook his head. “This is fricking halfway to San Francisco.”

“Asshole’s killed more than twenty Americans,” Geoff Ziebart said. “Worth the trip.”

“We’ve never gone this deep before, Z,” Rangemaster said. He rubbed his mustache. “Strikes me funny.”

“Me, too.” Padre tapped the map. “Plus, all our prep? Not normal.”

“Neither are the sixty-Js,” said Gunrunner. “This smells funny to me.”

“You smell funny to me,” Cajun said. “But it makes sense. Maybe Gul is a cover name. Maybe they found Cyclops.” Cyclops was the code name for the one-eyed Taliban chieftain, Mullah Omar.

“Or the Doctor. Just like we said at T-Rob’s that night.” Doctor was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Usama Bin Laden’s Number Two.

“Or the big guy himself.” The SEALs looked at one another. Padre whispered the code name: “Crankshaft.”

Danny Walker had been off with the brass. Now he walked up to the knot of SEALs. “Gents?”

T-Rob: “Master Chief. You know anything special about this mission?”

“Yeah, I do: you guys are on it.”

“That’s it?”

“No. I actually have some information you might want to know. Like our call signs tonight. Troop leader—that’s Commander Loeser tonight, although he’ll be riding in Chalk Two, replacing Jack Young—will go by X-ray India One. Captain Maurer’s call sign is X-ray Romeo One. I’m the assault leader, call-sign Jackpot.” He watched as the men took notes. “We clear?”

Rangemaster: “Crystal, Master Chief.”

Walker: “Good. TLPs are in effect as of now.” TLPs, or troop leading procedures, were the overall term for ensuring that the assault element was properly jocked up and all their equipment was checked, double-checked, and triple-checked before the load out.

The master chief checked his watch. “Listen up. PCI at twenty-one hundred and PCCs starting at twenty-one thirty.” PCIs were the precombat inspections during which the assault leader and officers checked the troops’ equipment. PCCs were precombat checks, an ongoing procedure of SEALs checking one another’s equipment to make sure everything was functional and nothing had been forgotten. It was during the PCCs that they’d clone their radios, synching one with the other to ensure that everyone in the assault element was on the same frequency.

“Questions?” Walker scanned his SEALs.

They were silent.

Of course they were: they’d been through this sequence hundreds of times. “Great. Okay, you guys go jock up.”

Joint Operations Center
2145 Hours

Wes Bolin checked the live video feeds from the two Sentinels that were loitering twelve thousand feet above the Khan compound in Abbottabad. Thermal imagery indicated that both the guest house and the main house were occupied. Three other Sentinels were already in position above Peshawar, Hasan Abdal, and Rawalpindi, where they’d spoof the Pakistani radar sites and shut them down if necessary, as well as monitor all of Pakistan’s secure communications networks.

If the Paks sounded an alarm, Bolin would know it. And he’d scramble air assets immediately to protect his people.

He ambled back to his office, sat at his desk, and stared at the big clock on the opposite wall ticking off the seconds. This was the one part of being an admiral that he didn’t much care for. Tonight he’d be in the JOC, watching from the sidelines and relaying information back to Washington. He would much rather have been on one of the chalks as an assault leader, or at the very least a part of the command element riding the enabler helo.

He did, of course, occasionally accompany his troops. And once in a while he even saw action. But not as often as he would have liked. He envied his junior officers, the kids like Dave Loeser and the up-and-comers like Tom Maurer and Scott Moore. They could still be a part of the rough-and-tumble, edge-of-the-envelope stuff, the kick-ass take-names part of Warriordom that had made them become SEALs, or Rangers, in the first place.

Rangers. Crap. He hadn’t passed on the identity of the Ranger that McGill had asked him to check on. Frantic, he checked every sheet of paper on the desk. But he couldn’t find his note or remember the name. “Dammit.”

He picked up the phone and waited for the lieutenant colonel manning the operations desk to answer. “Gary, ask Captain Maurer to find the OGA guy on CONOP Hotel 53 and get me the true name of their Abbottabad asset.” He listened. “His call sign is Archangel. And ASAP, will you? It’s urgent.”