More Than Courage (3 page)

whenever they located a target they had been dispatched to find.

Ignorant of its origin, Captain Burman joined in on what he took to be a harmless attempt to liven up their harsh and monotonous existence. It was three weeks before Aveno discovered, through a slip of his driver's tongue, the true story behind the adaptation of seafaring cliches. Unsure of how Burman would take this piece of information, Aveno decided to keep that knowledge to himself. With the irritating sand and stress already eating away at Burman's nerves, Aveno knew that it wouldn't help to tell his commander that he was the butt of a collective joke.

Adding to the strain of their protracted deployment and the stress that living in the desert placed upon them was a gnawing doubt Aveno had concerning the value of their efforts. Like the cold war that his parent's generation had endured, the current war

on terror seemed to have no end. To many of his fellow countrymen, people to whom 9/11 was just another news story that was little more than a bad memory, the war on terror had become a distraction, a drain on national resources that some felt would be better spent on social welfare programs, education, or new roads.

To them the idea of chasing terrorists and eradicating the threat they posed was a quixotic notion, a foolish dream that could never be achieved. Even Ken Aveno found himself wondering from time to time if it made sense to dispatch a group of highly trained professional soldiers like those belonging to RT Kilo to chase small cells of terrorists and call in bombers to drop high-tech precision guided bombs on their tents when they were found.

This point was driven home every time a nation that was supposed to be an ally took a step to undo those small successes that RT Kilo did manage to achieve. In truth, Aveno could find little fault in what the French and others were doing. He believed that if his own national leaders were not prisoners of their own rhetoric, they would be seeking some way of getting out of an open ended policy that was only costing American lives. Of course, MORE THAN COURAGE

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such considerations were well above Aveno's pay grade. His personal mission was to follow orders and finish his current tour of duty with some degree of pride and sanity.

These dark troubling thoughts were in Ken Aveno's mind as he approached Kilo Six, Captain Burman's Hummer. Through the camo nets were still draped over the vehicle, he caught sight of Burman perched on the hood. This was a bad sign, for it had become something of a ritual for his commander to assume this particular posture when translating orders he had received during the day into detailed instructions. It was his way of announcing that the team had been tasked to go out into the gathering darkness once more and find something that a cabal of staff officers, ten thousand miles away, had suddenly taken an interest in. While most of these forays resulted in the discovery of targets that were subsequently bombed into oblivion, more times than Aveno cared to count, the forays had turned into a snipe hunt, but one in which the snipe had sharp teeth and long, deadly claws.

Stopping a few meters away, he watched as Captain Burman pored over maps and scribbled notes on a pad lying next to him.

It didn't seem right to the young officer that in this age of computers and high-tech wizardry success and failure in combat still depended upon illegible scribbling on a page made by a human being. It was as if they were insulators placed within an increasingly high-speed system to keep it from overheating or spinning out of control. That there were fellow officers sitting in the Pentagon and at Fort Leavenworth trying to figure out how to eliminate those insulators was no great secret. Rubbing his irritated eyes, Aveno thought that the sooner those guys finished their work and made him obsolete, the sooner he would be free to pull pitch and turn his back on Syria, its people, and its fucking desert.

It was several minutes before Burman noticed that his executive officer was standing off to one side watching him. Determined to finish what he was doing before he lost the last bit of useful daylight, Burman ignored Aveno.

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The task his team had been given that night was another routine mission. A Syrian ADA missile battery had become active some sixty kilometers southwest of where they were. As far as anyone knew there was very little in the region where the battery was located, and nothing of military value. The small villages scattered throughout the area relied on camels and goats. Half of the population was still nomadic, real Lawrence of Arabia stuff, as SFC

Kanncn put it. Hence the reason for curiosity and concern by various intelligence agencies.

Though the operations order he had received made no mention of it, Burman knew that someone back in Washington, D.C., was hoping that the barrenness of the area was an indication there was something worth defending hidden among the sun-dried brick huts and seemingly innocent expanses of nothingness. So Team Kilo was being dispatched to find out if it was just another cluster of terrorist training camps, or something more significant, especially installations involved in the development, testing, and manufacture of special weapons, the modern catchall phrase used to describe nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Everyone knew that facilities dedicated to this purpose existed somewhere in Syria and that the Syrians were doing their best to hide and protect them. But not everyone agreed on where they would most likely be found and how best to go about finding them. So even the relatively simple mission of locating and designating the Syrian ADA battery for aerial attack carried with it the implied task of uncovering any evidence of unusual or suspect activity that other intelligence resources had, to date, failed to detect.

Even so, the evening's mission was pretty much routine. As such Burman saw no reason to make a big fuss over the way it would be executed. When all precombat checks and briefings had been completed they would move out in a dispersed column. He would lead out with Kilo Six, followed by the team's senior NCO

in Kilo Two and the air force liaison officer, or LNO, in Kilo One.

Aveno, who was still patiently waiting, would bring up the rear in Kilo Three. Once they were within striking distance of their MORE THAN COURAGE

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objective the team would find a concealed spot from which Bur man and Aveno would sally forth, either mounted or on foot, to sniff out the exact location of their target while Kannen stayed back with Ciszak. How they would proceed depended on what they discovered during this preliminary recon. So other than mapping out their route of march, Burman saw little need for any additional detailed planning.

Having finished jotting a few notes just as the last modicum of light waned, Burman laid his map and pad aside and looked around. When his eyes finally turned toward the dark shadow of his executive officer, he acted surprised. "I didn't see you standing there, Lieutenant Aveno."

Burman slowly eased his way off the Hummer's hood. "I imagine you're waiting for me to vacate this spot," he quipped,

"so you can finish your appointed rounds."

"No rush, sir. I knew you were in the midst of putting together an order." When Burman turned to walk away without saying a word Aveno called out, "Anything exciting, sir?"

"Nothing to be concerned about, Lieutenant."

Aveno remained where he was, struggling to suppress the anger he felt welling up in him. The bastard was fucking with him. He was always fucking with him. It was as if they were still back at the Point, and Burman was still a first classman and Aveno was still a plebe. Since they were in different units and first classmen seldom took the time to bother with plebes who were not in their own company neither man had-known the other then. Still, after all these years the psychological gulf remained.

There wasn't a man in the team who hadn't taken note of the "Me Tarzan, you Jane," attitude that Burman showed in all of his dealings with his number two. Aveno knew it wasn't personal.

As best he could tell, he had never said or done anything that could even remotely be considered improper or offensive to his commanding officer. Yet from day one the two had never really clicked. In Aveno's opinion Burman's policy of keeping him at a distance and his insistence on using proper military titles instead 26

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of establishing a more amiable relationship did not prevent the two from working together professionally. But it did create unnecessary friction. Like the fine grains of sand that he could taste with each bit of food and feel every time he blinked his eyes, Burman's manner was irritating and wearing. All Aveno could do was to endure, just as he endured the harsh and uncompromising desert. The same could be true for the rest of Team Kilo. For better or worse the fourteen men had to keep functioning and surviving until such time as the Fates smiled upon them and their circumstances changed.

Arlington, Virginia

11:45 LOCAL (15:45 ZULU)

Pushing away from his desk, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Delmont studied the document he had been working on for the majority of the morning. It wasn't a particularly long piece of correspondence.

In fact it was less than.a page in length. Nor was it of any great importance. If it had been, it would have been long gone rather than undergoing revision after revision after revision.

The particular version Delmont was currently working on was by his count number eleven. While excessive even by Pentagon standards, it was far from being a record. Within the army's Directorate of Special Operations that dubious honor belonged to another single-page response concerning training ammunition for an exercise being conducted with navy SEALs. It had been bounced back and forth sixteen times between the action officer and the director, Brigadier General James Palmer, who finally put his stamp of approval on a letter that was not all that different from the initial draft. Though Delmont was confident that his letter was not going to surpass that mark, he had little doubt that it would once more find its way back to his desk, scarred by red marks annotating corrections and changes made by Palmer that did nothing to alter its content. This practice had nothing to do with any issues Palmer had with the letter's style, grammar, or content. It was simply his way of putting off dealing with an issue that he was not quite ready to address.

Ordinarily Delmont didn't mind this sort of busywork. Having spent more than eighteen years chugging along his chosen 28

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career track, he understood that every senior officer had his own peculiar idiosyncrasies that subordinates had little choice but to live with. Palmer was no different. Demanding and uncompromising, the general was the sort of man one didn't try to put something over on. Those who did were never afforded a second opportunity to repeat that mistake. For officers that Palmer deemed worthy to serve him, the general went to great pains to ensure that their time on the Department of the Army staff was educational and professionally rewarding. So long as he kept his mouth shut, did what was expected of him, and played Palmer's brand of hardball, Delmont knew that he would depart from the Puzzle Palace on the Potomac, as the Pentagon was known, with an outstanding evaluation and his choice of assignments.

Still, those distant rewards were of little consolation to him at the moment. Unable to concentrate on the task at hand, Delmont leaned back in his seat and glanced at the row of clocks arrayed along one wall of the outer office that he shared with half a dozen other action officers. Because American forces operated all over the world with various contingents in one time zone supporting others in different time zones, all directives and operational orders issued by the Department of Defense used Zulu time, or Greenwich mean time. To assist the action officers who generated those directives and orders, each clock displayed the current time in a different part of the world. He looked at the one labeled Charlie, which meant it was the third time zone east of Greenwich.

It was almost twenty hundred hours in Syria. RT Kilo would be on the move by now, he thought. While he was sitting in an office that was a stone's throw away from the nation's capital, wordsmithing a letter that was of little consequence, soldiers who had earned the right to wear the same black-and-yellow shoulder patch of the army's Special Forces that adorned the sleeve of his uniform were making their way across the Syrian desert. Closing his eyes, Delmont could easily picture what the commander of RT

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Kilo was seeing at that moment. He even imagined he could taste the fine sand that tended to hang suspended like a mist in the blacked-out interior of the team leader's humvee as it bounced across the uneven desert.

Delmont knew all there was to know about Recon Team Kilo.

In a locked safe, which only he and three other officers had the combination to, were files on every aspect of Operation Razorback, a black operation whose aim was to locate sites where special weapons that had once belonged to Iraq were being stored.

The mission that was about to kick off half a world away was typical of those assigned to the recon teams that represented Razorback's cutting edge. The intelligence summary that had initiated this night's mission identified fhe approximate location of a Syria surface-to-air missile launcher protecting a facility that was believed to be a chemical warfare lab that had once been part of Saddam Hussein's mighty arsenal. Had the analysts at Langley been sure of this there would have been no need to send RT Kilo to ferret out the lab's location. Aircraft alone would have been able to do the job. But the lab, if it were truly there, was tucked away in a small village made up of a few hundred families and protected by a small garrison and an ADA battery. Had that battery not let fly with a pair of missiles at an American drone en route to check out another site, no one would have even associated this collection of hovels with anything of military value.

The practice of tucking important military facilities in out-oftheway locations was something the Syrians had adopted from their Iraqi cousins. Not only did the tight-knit nature of a small community make it all but impossible for Israeli agents to slip in unnoticed, it served to force both America and Israel to spread its intelligence-gathering assets out over a larger area. Adding to the problems faced by the American intelligence analysis and targeting officers was the quaint custom of placing high-value targets right next to sites that were normally immune from attack, such as schools, hospitals, and mosques. That the same international law 30