More Than Courage (20 page)

Unable to bear the sight of the pitiful wreckage that his commanding officer had been reduced to, Aveno looked at the Syrian

.Colonel who was still staring at him. Aveno maintained his silence, 154

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as he had thus far. He knew that whatever happened, his last duty to his men and to his nation was to keep the faith, no matter what the cost, no matter how high the price rose. And if the time came when the Syrians lost patience and turned on him the hook that the colonel before him was holding, then he'd have to suffer as they had.

Slowly the colonel walked over to Aveno and looked down at him. "So, are you ready to talk to my superiors? Or must your men continue to pay for your pride and recalcitrance?"

Exhausted by his lack of sleep, food, and water it took a real effort on Aveno's part to raise his head and face the Syrian towering over him. When the two locked eyes, Aveno glared at his tormentor with the most spiteful expression he could muster in an effort to convey all the anger and hatred that he dared not verbalize.

When it was obvious that the American officer was not yet ready to move on to the next stage, the Syrian colonel turned and barked a series of orders. As the gag was stuffed back into Aveno's mouth, the other Syrian officer walked out of the room and headed for the cellblock to fetch the next American slated for torture.

Arlington, Virginia

18:15 LOCAL (22:15 ZULU)

Only a live broadcast of the Super Bowl beat being in the Army War Room during the execution of a real world operation. All that was missing were the nachos and beer. Anyone who could find an excuse to be in there wiggled his or her way though the throng of spectators until they found a spot that offered them a view of the screens and a place where they cotild hear the running narrative.

Straphangers, that gaggle of attentive minions commonly found in the wake of every general officer, were fortunate. Unlike the peons who had no real reason to be there and thus had to resort to subterfuge or begging in order to gain access to the crowded operations center, aides de camp and selected special project officers favored by their generals simply followed the star bearers that they had hitched their professional wagon to. This was how Lieutenant Colonel Robert Delmont managed to gain entry to the plusher, less crowded regions of the Army War Room. -His ticket came in the form of Brigadier General Palmer, the senior Army staff officer who had responsibility within the Department of the Army for Operation Razorback. It did not Wake any difference that Palmer had no part in planning or overseeing

the efforts currently under way aimed at extracting two survivors of RT Kilo. This operation belonged to Central Com.

m*nd, or CENTCOM, the unified headquarters at MacDill Air ¦Base in Florida responsible for Southwest Asia. Success or failure

i °r this day's effort rested upon the shoulders of the commanders 156

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and staff officers assigned to that command and not the august gathering of high-speed generals and colonels assembled in the Army War Room. Their efforts would determine whether two very young and very lost specialist fours would be rescued or fall into the hands of the Syrians at the last minute.

The race between the pursuing Syrians and American search and-rescue teams created the air of excitement that filled the War Room. Since contact with O'Hara and Laporta had been established, every asset capable of gathering information on the comings and goings of Syrian military units in that part of the world had been focused on the area through which the stranded American Green Berets were moving. What O'Hara and Laporta did not know was that a sizable Syrian force was shadowing them.

Like the breadcrumbs dropped by Hansel and Gretel, the ruts left by the oversized tires of Kilo Six provided their pursuers with a trail that a blind man could follow.

Initially the intelligence community couldn't understand why the Syrians had not simply picked up their pace a bit and grabbed the pair of wandering Americans. Only after this strange bit of information was passed off to the operations side of the CENT

COM staff did one of the more switched-on staff officers there provide a plausible explanation. O'Hara and Laporta, he speculated, were bait. According to his theory the Syrians were waiting for the American military to dispatch a search-and-rescue team to extract them. When that happened, the CENTCOM staff officer explained, the Syrians would commit everything they could in an effort to foil the rescue attempt and perhaps even increase their haul of American prisoners by scarfing up some of the would-be saviors along with O'Hara and Laporta. "It won't matter how much it costs them," he stated in the detached and antiseptic manner that staff officers use when trying to describe bloody encounters that occur when soldiers on the ground meet face-to face. "The prestige that a coup like that would garner will be worth the sacrifice. After all, everyone knows that a video showing the corpse of a dead American being dragged through the MORE THAN COURAGE

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streets after a failed operation is worth its weight in gold on the proverbial Arab street."

No one had any way of knowing for sure if this was the reasoning behind the Syrians' delay in seizing the pair of Americans.

Yet lacking any other credible explanation, the commander of CENTCOM decided to list it as one of the assumptions when he issued his planning guidance for the operation. In doing so, a simple search-and-rcscue was turned into a full-bore military incursion, requiring the commitment of the entire panoply of air power deemed necessary to achieve air superiority and support the hefty contingent of troops assigned the task of securing the area while search-and-rescue helicopters flew in to snatch O'Hara and Laporta from the jaws of certain death. By the time this package had been assembled, briefed, and approved, one of the more cynical members of the CENTCOM staff likened the whole affair to dispatching a carrier battle group to rescue a kitten from a tree.

If there was anyone in the Army War Room at that moment who agreed with this analogy, they held their tongue. Few watching the operation on various monitors that displayed the operational graphics and current sitreps pouring in from the field would have been amused by an observation such as that. To those who made up the various staffs that populated the Pentagon, this was simply business as usual. The American military had both the power and the willingness to use it when it came to saving their '

own. It was what conventional wisdom dictated. It was what their code demanded. To have done otherwise would have been seen as a breach of faith.

The data tracking events unfolding in Southwest Asia continued to stream into the Army War Room from space-based platforms designed to gather intelligence and link every unit actively involved in the operation to their controlling headquarters no Matter where it was in the world. Computers gathered this information, sorted it, and distributed it to predesignated nodes all around the operations center where it appeared on screens of Countless monitors and overhead displays as symbols, graphics, 158

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numbers, diagrams, or simple verbiage. Much of it was of little value to the senior army officers and their subordinates gathered in the operations center. Even those snippets of information that were worthy of serious consideration at the Department of the Army level could not be acted upon at that level during the conduct of the operation. Tactical decisions such as commitment of additional forces, shifting planned strikes from primary targets to secondary targets, and even the ultimate "Go--No Go" call belonged to subordinate commanders much further down the chain of command who were looking at the exact same information Delmont and Palmer were privy to.

Not every officer gathered to watch appreciated this. Even some of the most senior generals continued to entertain the notion at this late hour that they were still in charge. While Robert Delmont understood how some of the high-speed personalities in the room needed to think this way in order to justify their presence, he knew that their notions were little more than a fantasy, a four-star wet dream. So long as none of them tried to exercise their authority, Delmont mused, no one would get hurt.

No one, that is, who wasn't scheduled to get hurt.

I

From among the gaggle of spectators, a full colonel called out to no one in particular, "There go the Apaches!"

Setting aside his wandering thoughts, Delmont looked up at the display upon which the current situation was being projected.

Blue symbols representing elements of an air cavalry troop began to close with a red symbol used to mark the location of a Syrian ground reconnaissance unit that had been following O'Hara and Laporta. Even on the big display each of these graphic representations appeared to be no different from thousands of other such symbols Delmont had seen during countless training exercises and in the classrooms of the Command and General Staff College.

It almost took a conscious effort for him to appreciate the fact that the blue air cavalry symbol was more than a visual aid used by higher headquarters to track units on their maps. I he

^wp

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blue rectangle with the diagonal slash and designation "1-9 Cav"

was the digital depiction of real people operating multimillion dollar weapons systems that were, at that very minute, roaring across the pitch-black wastelands of a country ten thousand miles away in search of their prey. They were, quite literally, the tip of a spear that had been put into motion by some of the men and women who were now rubbing elbows with Delmont.

Closing his eyes, the special ops plans officer found that he could almost see the dark, featureless desert slipping away beneath the attack helicopters of the air cav troop as if he were there with them viewing the world through their night-vision goggles and sights. Instinctively his memory conjured up the sounds of the aircraft engines, punctuated by crisp, almost encrypted chatter, as pilot and gunner exchanged information.

For a moment Delmont imagined that he could even smell the sickly sweet scent of warm hydraulic fluids and taste the bitterness that a dry mouth produces when one is about to engage in mortal combat.

Syria

02:20 LOCAL (22:20 ZULU)

The confrontation that Lieutenant Colonel Robert Delmont envisioned taking place between the AH-64s of the 1st of the 9th Cav and the Syrian recon unit was not near as dramatic as he imagined. In fact, as far as the air cavalry gunners and the pilots were concerned they were almost as detached from the engagement they were involved in as were the men and women in the Army War Room. There was very little of the underlying apprehension or trepidation that one would image a soldier going into combat would experience. All the Apache crews were profession^s If they did feel anything, it was a strange, unspoken pleasure that many soldiers feel when they are finally allowed to practice

their trade. The opportunity to pit one's skills against a living, 160

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thinking foe is something few people understand, matched only by the chance to fire live missiles and kill something. If any of them felt any regret over what they were doing, it was that they, the shooters, would not be able to linger and watch as their missiles ripped through the thin armor of the Syrian recon vehicles and tore them apart.

The mayhem created by the Hellfire missiles loosed by the distant Apaches did not go completely unobserved. This honor belonged to two pairs of OH-66 Arapaho scout helicopters.

Those nimble aircraft, crewed by a single pilot/gunner, were the eyes of the 1st of the 9th. Ranging far in advance of the attack helicopters, the Arapahos skimmed and wove their way along, flying mere feet above the surface of the desert. In addition to the stateof-the-art night-vision devices that allowed their pilot/gunner to view the world outside his cockpit as if it were high noon, each Arapaho sported an array of sensors that monitored the airwaves for unseen threats, such as enemy surface-to-air search radars.

Thus doubly cloaked by darkness and their innate ability to avoid their foe's best efforts to detect them, the Arapahos made sure ip

that none of the Syrian recon detachment that had been following

"ill

.

O'Hara and Laporta survived long enough to do something foolish like rush forward and attempt to seize them before the Black hawks arrived.

Like a pack of raptors stalking unwary prey, the scout helicopters shifted until each had found a spot in which it could observe its target. One by one, they reported to their troop commander that they had their mark in sight and were ready to light it up with a laser designator.

Within the darkened confines of his own attack helicopter, the young captain charged with "neutralizing" the Syrian recon unit studied the tactical situation as displayed on his monitor while these reports came in. After each Arapaho gave an "up," indicating that he was primed and ready to play his role in the pending attack, the troop commander replied with a businesslike "Roger If

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When all his scouts had checked in, he turned his attention to his Apaches. "Red Six, this is Six. Stand by to fire, out." Without waiting for a response, the troop commander switched frequencies and informed his squadron commander that his unit was set and ready to execute even though the lieutenant colonel who commanded the 1st of the 9th already knew this. Thanks to the wonders of modern electronics, information gathered by the Arapahos was relayed simultaneously to the troop commander, the squadron operations center, and other headquarters scattered about the globe that had an interest in what was happening on the ground. Satisfied that his subordinate out in the field was indeed ready, the squadron commander gave him a crisp "Roger"

before turning to the Air Force colonel who was in command of this mission. "Colonel, the One Nine Cav is ready to rock 'n'

roll."

Like the director at NASA's mission control, the Air Force colonel sitting in his own operations center in southeastern Turkey methodically checked with each officer who was either in command of an element playing an active role in the rescue attempt, or was supporting it from afar. Each of them responded in turn that their particular piece was set and ready. The colonel drew in a deep breath as he lifted the receiver of the direct line to his superior. "Sir, we are set," was all he said when the general officer on the other end of the line answered.