Quest for Honor (8 page)

Six years of training and study had toughened him, though, and now he didn’t want to just sail along anymore. He wanted to climb the mountain. Maybe that would mean a new job. He’d have to look into that. Maybe it would mean a new woman in his life, too, although he didn’t particularly feel like hunting for one. But he knew he’d have to find himself a goal, something to shoot for, beyond going to the office every day and training every night, even beyond the Diamond Nationals.

Jim left the interstate at Eau Claire, heading north. The sign said it was about sixty miles to Rice Lake. He’d made good time, so he thought ahead to the rest of the evening. He’d check into the hotel, grab some dinner and maybe see if they had a movie theater in town. The new Captain America picture was out, and ever since he was a kid, Jim had been a comic book fan, reveling in the adventures of heroic men and women. The comics were a lot different today than they used to be, of course, but he still trekked to Madison once a month or so to haunt the comic book stores. Batman and Superman were his all-time favorites, but seeing Cap on the big screen would be fun.

It had been a long ride but it gave him a chance to think, and he came to a decision about Annie. It just wasn’t going to work with her. Now it was just a matter of mustering the courage to tell her that. Damn, why did he find himself so passive around women? It had been that way forever, way back to junior high. Just when he started noticing girls, they started noticing him, too. But while he noticed their evolving curves and breasts and legs, they noticed his tall, gawky frame, his glasses and his acne. How many times had he gotten the cold shoulder at school dances? Too many to count. That really didn’t change much till he got to his junior year of high school, when his body started filling out and his play on the basketball floor got their attention. But up until then, it was a lonely time.

His mother always knew, though, always understood. Once or twice she’d found him sniffling in his bedroom over the latest slight or insult, and she always had a kind word, a hug, a kiss on the forehead. Alice Millman Hayes was the perfect mom, as far as Jim was concerned. From those embarrassing middle-school misadventures with girls to that day during his senior year, at the state basketball tournament, and beyond, she’d supported him unequivocally. He could still see her sitting in the stands at the arena, clapping and shouting encouragement to him as he walked back to the bench after missing the free throws that would’ve won the championship. Dad was sitting next to her, arms crossed, looking away from him.

God, how he missed her.

He wiped the tears from his eyes. He missed his dad, too. Things had gotten better between them after high school, and Jim was there by his side the night his mother died, and he was in the hospital room with him when the final heart attack came. Although his dad had never said it out loud, Jim believed that his father truly loved him, was proud of him, just as his mother was. He wanted to believe that, had to believe that Dad had loved him just as much as he loved Mark.

There was the sign for the Rice Lake exit. The GPS in his smart phone dutifully reminded him to get off the freeway here, and his hotel was only a mile or so away. Still not five o’clock yet, so had time to unwind a little bit. He’d hit the sack early, compete the next day and hit the road for home, hopefully with a trophy or two in hand. This seemed like a nice town, but he couldn’t think of any reason why he’d want to stay an extra night. He’d get home kind of late, but he could sleep in Sunday. Maybe he’d give Annie a call, talk things over. Make a clean break of it.

Of course, he could always stay a second night. Why make the long drive home any sooner than he had to? It wasn’t as if he had a whole lot else going on.

CHAPTER NINE

Djibouti

O
fficially, Tom Simons
was the Special Assistant to the Ambassador for Cultural Relations. Since the United States didn’t have much in the way of relations beyond economic aid and military support with the small Horn of Africa backwater of Djibouti, Simons didn’t have a lot to do in that capacity. The great majority of his time, therefore, was devoted to his real job, that of Chief of Station for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Simons was fifty-three years old and left his family’s Indiana farm for the Marine Corps the day after he graduated from high school. The Corps was good to him, and after twenty-two years he retired with the rank of sergeant major. His experience working military intelligence, not to mention his combat record in Desert Storm and other places he still wasn’t allowed to talk about, opened a door at CIA. He worked his way up through the ranks to the COS level, much to the surprise of some stuffed shirts who said a former non-com could never do it, and requested a posting anywhere there might be some action. After 9/11 that meant anywhere from North Africa through the Middle East, Central Asia and all the way to Indonesia and the Philippines. The posting at Djibouti came open and Simons jumped for it, much to the consternation of his second wife, who would’ve preferred someplace a bit more civilized, like Europe or at least South America. She soon became Simons’ second ex-wife.

Djibouti had indeed been the place to be for a COS wanting some action, especially for an ex-marine who was only three pounds heavier than he was when they pinned the globe and anchor on him at Parris Island. His hair had some gray on the sides now, and he couldn’t hide it now that he had to let his hair grow out a bit from the Corps’ regulation high-and-tight. The former sergeant major’s daily runs and workouts with the martial arts trainers on the nearby base kept him in top condition, and more than once he’d gone into the field himself, sometimes in search of the elusive Sudika, “the Thunderbolt”, the highest-ranked al-Qaida officer in the Horn. Simons had never found him.

Until now, perhaps.

He stared at the note in his hand, and had the feeling that everything he’d worked for, in uniform and in mufti, might just be coming down to this. He forced himself to take a deep breath, and then turned back to the younger man sitting across from his desk.

“What do you think, Phil?”

Phillip Klein was Simons’ assistant chief and had been in Djibouti fourteen months now, compared to his boss’s three years. With his rather nondescript appearance, average height and thinning hair, Klein didn’t look anything like a spy, which was one reason he was a pretty good one. “We’ve never had any contact with Sudika before, have we? How would he have found out about this dead drop?”

“After we pulled out of Mogadishu in ’93, it took us a while to re-establish some contacts over there,” Simons said. “Didn’t really get going until we moved into the Lemon in ’01.” “The Lemon” was the local nickname for Camp Lemonnier, the former French Foreign Legion base that was taken over by the U.S. Navy and was now home to the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. “We put the word out that anybody from the other side who wanted to come over could contact us through this particular dead drop.”

“Sounds a little risky. The other side could use that to set one of our people up.”

Simons nodded. “Everything’s a risk in this business, Phil. We can’t just drop a business card off at every mosque in town, now, can we?”

“Has it been used before?”

“To my knowledge, only four or five times in the past six years, and never by anyone with, shall we say, the stature of Sudika.” He picked up the file on his desk and flipped through it again. It was about a half-inch thick and contained virtually everything Western intelligence services knew about the Ugandan al-Qaida operative who called himself Sudika. Most of the intel was CIA-generated, but some significant data came from Israel’s Mossad and the French DGSE. “If this is legitimate, it could be big. Pretty damn big.”

“Nobody from The Contractor’s inner circle has ever come over. Voluntarily, anyway.” Klein’s eyes glinted with a glimmer of excitement. “The Contractor” was the CIA’s nickname for Osama bin Laden. In the months since the Navy SEALs had sent The Contractor to his final reward, many more of his associates had been rolled up, the result of the intelligence bonanza that was the other great prize of the raid. Sudika was perhaps the highest-ranked al-Qaida chieftain who wasn’t dead or in Gitmo by now, although there were rumors about someone else rising to the top. To flush out Sudika, and perhaps even this newest and potentially greater threat, would be an intelligence coup indeed. “He could very well have important intel.”

“He could at that,” Simons said. He looked again at the message, which had been picked up from the dead drop that morning. It appeared to be a series of gibberish words, hand-lettered in English, but the accompanying paper was the decoded translation his staff had finished just minutes ago. Sudika had used a rather simple code known as the Caesar cipher. Not the hardest cipher to break, by any means, but one that could be used to provide at least a modicum of security in a message. The fact that the terrorist had not used a more complex code told Simons that he was under pressure, probably operating against some sort of deadline. Reinforcing that impression was the insistence that a response had to be received by sunset two days later. That gave Simons just over twenty-four hours from now to get his answer back to the dead drop.

“I assume we want to respond right away?”

“Yes,” Simons said without hesitation. “Use the same cipher. Tell him we agree to the meet. But let’s not let him run the entire show. Tell him we must have a response by August first.”

Klein made a note on a pad. “A little more than two weeks from now. Creating a little urgency, are we?”

“Why not?” the COS said. “Let him know we’re not going to screw around. I would imagine he doesn’t want to, either. This guy’s pretty sharp, by all accounts, and I think he might be under some time pressure.”

Klein made a note on his ever-present pad. “Didn’t he go to college in the States? Minnesota, wasn’t it?”

“Close,” Simons said, standing up. “Wisconsin.”

CHAPTER TEN

Afghanistan

F
OB Langdon got
hit the day after Mark’s visit. Five mortar rounds dropped into the hillside compound just after sunrise, and by the time Solum’s own mortar team was able to respond, two soldiers were wounded and one was dead. Corporal Pat Tracy, a twenty-three-year-old farm kid from Nebraska, was the fourth KIA in the battalion since Mark had taken command. That was four too many as far as he was concerned.

Mark choppered in that afternoon to see for himself. The outpost had taken some damage, but the men were quickly repairing the breaches in the HESCO barriers that formed the perimeter and had cleared away the remains of the destroyed hooch, where Tracy had been writing a letter home when the round came in through the tin roof. The psychological damage to the men who had survived would be tougher to repair, but getting that job underway was Mark’s responsibility.

Solum was handling things about as well as could be expected, considering that one of his men had just died. He was all business, making sure the repairs and cleanup work got done, evacuating his wounded and the body of his fallen soldier. Mark’s helo arrived shortly after the evac bird left. The men were grim-faced, but they were holding it together. It would sink in later, and there would be tears shed in the hooches this evening.

Solum laid out a map of the valley on the table in the cramped hut that doubled as his HQ and his own hooch. “Our intel from the village says the Tals are staging out of this compound,” he said, pointing to a small cluster of buildings about five kilometers west of the nameless village. The outpost overlooked the Afghan town that was about an hour’s trek away. Solum and his men hadn’t ventured further west since setting up the base. Two klicks past the compound was the Pakistan border

“How solid is the intel?” Mark asked.

“Pretty good, Colonel,” Solum said. “The chief in the village tipped us off right away to a couple arms caches. I’ve had mounted patrols going out regularly since we set up shop here. I’m a little worried about this village, though. It’s been a week since we’ve been there. I had a patrol scheduled to go through there tomorrow.”

That didn’t sound good to Mark, either. What was now FOB Langdon used to house a platoon of Afghan Border Police, a notoriously corrupt outfit. Appeals from some of the
maliks
in the valley led Mark to use his influence with ISAF; the ABP’s were moved elsewhere and Mark sent Solum and his men in to take over their post and convert it into the battalion’s most distant outpost. The enemy pretty much had their way while the ABP unit was around, but that was changing. “The chief seems to be reliable, then?”

Solum nodded. “He lost a grandson to the Tals in Kabul before we moved in. They hung him from the diving board of that swimming pool the Russians built.”

Mark remembered seeing that grim site when he arrived in the capital during his first tour. The Olympic-sized outdoor pool was built by the Soviets during their occupation of the country, but the Taliban drained it and used it for a gallows. Sometimes they didn’t bother to hang the victim; they just pushed him off the diving board to the concrete floor ten feet below. Bound and gagged as they were, not too many survived the fall. Those who did were shot where they lay.

“Maybe it’s time to pay that compound a visit, Ken.”

“My thoughts exactly, sir. I’ve got a mission planned for this evening. Care to come along?”

“I’ll promise not to get in the way. You’ll be in command.”

“Thank you, sir. We move out at 1600 hours. We’ll go through the village on the way. I plan to hit the enemy compound at 2030.” He folded up the map, then his shoulders dropped a bit and Mark heard a sigh.

“You all right, Ken?”

“Tracy…he’s my first KIA,” the young lieutenant said softly. He looked over at Mark with eyes that were raw, pleading. “That letter is gonna be the toughest I’ve ever had to write.”

Mark nodded, remembering the day in 1991 when he had to write one of those letters for the first time, from a dusty tent in southern Iraq. “It won’t be easy, Ken, but you have to do it. I wish I could tell you it’ll be the last one you’ll ever write on this job, but we both know it probably won’t be.”

“How do you deal with it, Colonel?”

Mark looked away for a second, remembering Specialist Eric Meyers, a gung-ho young infantryman from Arizona who had taken an Iraqi bullet in the first hour after Mark’s unit came over the border from Saudi. There had been more since then. Would it ever end? Would they ever be able to beat their swords into plowshares?

Only if the other guys agreed to do it, too, which meant it would probably never happen. There would always be work to do for Americans like Meyers and Tracy, dirty, nasty work, dangerous work in places like the one they were in now. He looked back at Solum. “You just do your job, Ken. That’s all you can do. Keep your men sharp, stay alert, and you’ll bring most of them home. That’s all we can ask of ourselves as officers.”

The lieutenant nodded. It was times like these Mark felt his heaviest responsibility, but he drew on the lessons he’d learned along the way, good and bad. It had been that way in this man’s Army since George Washington took command at Cambridge Common, July 1775. Mark remembered reading about that event at the Academy and had visited the marker in the Common near the Harvard campus. With a bit of a shock, Mark realized that Washington was only forty-three years old at the time, three years younger than he was now.

“By the way, Colonel, I heard from my uncle back home about that soldier you mentioned the other day, the one who was with your dad in Korea.”

“Oh?” Mark had told Solum about old Ed’s buddy. The young lieutenant said he thought he remembered the name and would check it out.

“Yes. Michael Solum was my great-uncle. My grandfather’s younger brother. I sent an email to my father, and he said Mike was his uncle. Dad asked me to give you his address so you can write him; he has some stories for you that he got from his father. From what he said, my great-uncle and your dad were pretty tight.”

Mark had to collect himself for just a moment. He’d been thinking of his own father quite a bit lately. “I’d like that,” he said.

Solum handed Mark a folded slip of paper. “That’s my father’s email address. He lives way up in Bayfield now, retired there a couple years ago. Doesn’t mind the winters.”

Mark remembered the beautiful little town on the shores of Lake Superior, with the Apostle Islands dotting the surface of the lake. “I’ve been up in Bayfield, but not in the winter. Your dad didn’t go south when he retired?”

“No, he said he had enough heat and humidity in Vietnam to last him a lifetime.”

The platoon started to mount up in mid-afternoon. Mark would be riding shotgun in Mustang Three, the third Humvee in the five-vehicle convoy, with Solum in the second, following the point vehicle. A last check in with Mark’s intel people back at Roosevelt, known collectively as “Prophet” due to their ability to monitor enemy radio traffic and distill credible intelligence from the transmissions, revealed that the Tals had been on the move that day. They were overheard boasting of their mortar attack on the FOB. Solum made sure the men in the column knew the enemy was celebrating the death of one of their brothers. The news did not go over well, but Mark was pleased to note that the men were keeping it together as they prepared their vehicles and weapons.

He would’ve preferred to hit the Taliban compound with a tactical air strike followed by a company-strength infantry assault supported by armor, but the official Rules of Engagement that had been “modernized” a year or so earlier meant that he and Solum had no tac air and no armor. What they did have was about two dozen troops, nearly three-quarters of Langdon’s complement, and they had to wind their way down the mountainside on a road that was barely wide enough to accommodate the Humvees.

They kept it slow, always on the lookout for possible IEDs. At that pace it took an hour to reach the village, but there was still plenty of daylight left. Enough for them to see that nobody was out walking around, and that by itself was unusual. The lead Humvee came to a sudden halt.

“Look alive, gentlemen,” Mark said. In the turret behind him, the soldier on the .50-caliber machine gun readied his weapon.

Over the company radio net, Solum’s voice crackled, “What do you see up there, Smitty?”

“Movement in that large hut at our two o’clock, sir. Looked like a kid.”

“All right, One and Two dismount, let’s check it out. Everybody else, stay alert.”

Mark saw Solum and another soldier getting out of the second vehicle. He saw the building now, about twenty-five meters away, and there was movement in the open doorway. The approaching soldiers had their rifles at the ready. Mark noticed with approval that the turret gunners in the lead two vehicles were keeping their weapons trained at their ten o’clock and two o’clock, just in case.

Solum peeked into the hut, then stepped inside, followed by one of his men. After a moment, the lieutenant’s voice came back over Mark’s radio. “Colonel Hayes, we need you in here, sir.”

There were four children in the hut. Two of them were still alive, but Mark almost wished they weren’t. The girl, who couldn’t have been any older than eight, sat on the dirt floor, her bloodied, toothless mouth gaping open, raw empty sockets where her eyes had once been. On the tattered bedding next to her, a boy of maybe five lay with open wounds covered with flies.

They found some adults, all of them frail and gray-haired, cowering in one of the huts. The Taliban had swept through the village that morning. Somehow they found out, or guessed, that the chief had informed on them to the Americans. As punishment, they brutalized the children of the village, forcing their parents and grandparents to watch. The girl was raped, her teeth broken with the butt of a rifle when she hesitated to obey the order to fellate her assailants. When they finished, they gouged out her eyes. The chief, who was the grandfather of the girl, was beheaded. A dozen or so younger men and women were carted off.

Mark had seen some pretty goddamn awful things in this country but this was right up there with the worst. Solum had wisely decided not to let anybody else into the hut except the medic, to treat the injured children as best as possible, but word quickly spread among the troops. Mark heard the muttered curses, and before they moved out the two officers went to each vehicle and ordered the men to stay focused. There would be a reckoning, and it was coming very soon. The engines of the Humvees roared as the convoy moved out.

The mountains seemed to close around them as they rolled through the valley. Mark used his field glasses to sweep the mountainsides, hoping without much confidence to see any sign that they were being watched. The Tals almost surely had spotters up there, well-hidden, with their own binoculars and radios. Solum was monitoring the enemy frequencies. Neither side was going to have the element of surprise in the coming engagement. Once again Mark considered calling in an air strike, maybe with some Apaches instead of fixed-wing fast-movers, but even that request would have to go up to Brigade and then he’d run into those stupid ROEs again. Helluva way to run a war, but as the General had reminded him more than once, they were here to win hearts and minds, and you couldn’t do that by hosing down a compound that probably had women and children inside. Too bad the other side didn’t play by the same rules.

Well, there was only one thing to do about that. Get inside that compound, and then it would be their men against his, straight up. Mark liked those odds.

The first warning shout from the spotter up on the mountainside came over the radio when they were half a klick from the compound. “Okay, guys, punch it!” Solum ordered, and the engines roared as they picked up speed, closing on the target. No sense giving the enemy a chance to zero in their mortars or bring RPGs into play. Within two minutes they were dismounting at the south wall near the main gate. Solum waved Four and Five to stake out the rear of the compound, where there might be another gate besides the ones on the south and east walls, and watch for enemy coming over the wall, trying to escape.

The compound was average-sized by Afghan standards, roughly square and about a hundred meters on each side, surrounded by an eight-foot wall of sun-baked mud. Their most recent aerial photos showed thirteen structures inside, with six or seven likely to be individual homes. They would have to go house-to-house.

From inside they could hear sounds of movement, some shouts, and the unmistakable, all-too-familiar sound of AK-47 bolts being slammed into place. Solum hustled over to Mark. “Only way in is the two gates,” the lieutenant said, breathing a bit hard. Mark tried to remember the man’s file; was this going to be his first firefight? Mark hoped not. “Colonel, could you take half the men and cover the gate on the east wall? I’ll come in first from this gate.” Solum was excited, which was okay, to a point, but he was getting a little too wired.

“Ken, look at me.”

“What?”

Mark took him by the shoulder and turned him away from the men. “Stay focused, Lieutenant. You’ve gotta keep it together. Stay calm.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Take four men, two to this corner, two to the opposite corner,” Mark said, pointing first to the southwest corner of the compound to the left of the main gate. “One man gets boosted up on each corner. They can eyeball the gates. None of the buildings inside are higher than the wall, so our guys on the corners can spot any enemy on the rooftops waiting to pick off the assault teams. They can lay down covering fire when we come in.”

“Good. Good idea.” Solum appeared a bit more in control now. “Sergeant Powers!”

“Right here, sir.” The tall, North Dakota-born Sergeant First Class, Langdon’s ranking non-com, hustled over. Solum rattled off orders for Powers to pick and deploy the men who would get up on the corners to cover the assault.

“Corporal Swanson! Your squad is with the colonel.”

“Roger that, sir.” Swanson waved an arm at the men behind him, bringing six up close but hugging the wall. “Where to, Colonel?”