Soar (16 page)

Wei-Liu slipped the canvas briefcase off her shoulder, unzipped it, extracted a sheaf of handwritten wiring diagrams, and flipped through them until she found the one she
wanted. She paused, then looked up at Ritzik. “What’s going on in here?”

“We’re setting up a TOC—a tactical operations center.”

“Which is?”

He raised his voice to carry over the whine of the C-5’s engine, then decreased his intensity as the sound grew fainter. “Something like a command post. We’ll coordinate the mission from here. All the real-time intelligence—satellite imagery, signals intercepts, target intelligence, weather conditions, everything—will funnel into this building from the U.S. The crew manning the TOC will be in constant touch with Bragg, with Washington—and with us, too—all on a secure basis. They’ll pass us what we need as we need it.”

Wei-Liu peered at the racks of electronics. “This looks like one of my research labs, Major. But when you say ‘command post’ all I can think about is sandbags and crank telephones.”

“That was
The Dirty Dozen.”
Ritzik grinned. “Welcome to Net-Centric warfare
¹⁵
and the twenty-first century.”

“Touché.” She settled onto a crate and focused on her diagram. When she looked up some minutes later, he’d disappeared into the night.

0512.
The satellite images were finally feeding in. Ritzik looked at the streaming infrared video of the IMU’s six trucks and three 4x4s as they made their way across the desert. On another screen, he saw overhead imagery of the single runway at the Changii military airfield, forty-five
kilometers northwest of Ürümqi. The fact that there was no activity was reassuring. A third screen showed a two-hundred-square-mile picture of the Tarim Basin. The terrorist convoy, displayed as a flashing star, was right in the middle of the screen. Two other screens displayed weather patterns for the region.

Tracy Wei-Liu tapped Ritzik on the shoulder. “Pretty incredible stuff.”

“It’s helpful.”

“That seems like an understatement. How did anybody deal with warfare before this kind of information was available? It must have made things awfully difficult.”

Ritzik said, “It may have been harder in the old days, sure. But not impossible.”

A
s A CADET
at West Point, Ritzik had read several studies of Ranger operations during World War II. The one that had stuck most deeply in his mind was Colonel Henry A. Mucci’s January 30, 1945, rescue of the Bataan Death March survivors from the Pangatian Japanese POW camp, five miles east of the Philippine city of Cabanatuan.

In 1944, Mucci was a thirty-three-year-old West Point graduate who, through force of character, motivation, training, and example, had transformed the 98
^th
Field Artillery Battalion, a moribund rear-echelon unit that had never seen any combat, into the Sixth Ranger Battalion, one of the finest fighting machines of World War II.

Short, muscular, and almost never pictured without a trademark pipe clenched in his teeth, Colonel Mucci had quickly become one of Ritzik’s heroes. He was, Ritzik soon discovered, one of those rare, instinctive Warriors who led from the front, like Arthur “Bull” Simon, who’d led the 1970 raid on the Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam, or
Jonathan Netanyahu, the hero—and the only IDF fatality—of the Israeli hostage rescue at Entebbe in 1976.

Whether in training or in battle, Mucci never asked his men to do anything he hadn’t done first. He trained his men the way they’d fight: twenty-mile forced marches at night; ten-mile runs in the mud and rain; two-hundred-and-fifty-yard swims with fifty-pound combat packs under live fire. Those who failed, or quit, were sent down—no exceptions. Mucci wanted no one who didn’t have the heart, the will, and the guts to overcome all obstacles.

And like officers in the very best unconventional units, Mucci didn’t stand on ceremony, either. He thought—and acted—outside the box. He’d once been faced with a serious discipline problem: one of his NCOs made highly disparaging public comments about him. Mucci sought the man out. In front of the Rangers, he tossed the sergeant an unsheathed bayonet and taunted the man to kill him if he felt so strongly. The sergeant took Mucci up on his challenge. It took Mucci mere seconds to disarm the malcontent—and win his total loyalty.

In combat, Mucci’s Sixth Rangers wore no insignia. In fact, he ordered his men not to recognize rank in the field. His reasoning was keep-it-simple-stupid battlefield logic: insignia made the NCOs and officers easier targets for Japanese snipers. “If you’re stupid enough to call me colonel, I’ll salute and call you general,” he reportedly once told one of his junior officers. “We’ll see which one of us the Japs shoot first.”

On January 27, 1945, Mucci was given the go-ahead to hit Pangatian. His mission: truck 120 enlisted men and eight officers seventy-five miles through Japanese-occupied territory to a town called Guimba. There, Mucci and his Rangers would link up with roughly 250 indigenous
Philippine forces. The combined group would then work its way past villages and Japanese garrisons, ford the Talavera River, then work its way south, bypassing the large Japanese garrison at Cabu. The march would take them more than twenty miles behind enemy lines. Just southwest of Cabu, the Rangers would attack the Japanese camp and liberate the Americans (and any other prisoners they might find) before the Japanese could slaughter them. Then, with the help of fighter aircraft cover, they’d exfiltrate everyone to safety.

Mucci assembled his intelligence from sparse aerial photographs, as well as from local resistance fighters and reports from an American unit known as the Alamo Scouts. But it was sketchy at best—which hadn’t allowed the Rangers to practice their assault. And so, on-scene and behind enemy lines, Mucci made a tough call: he would delay the attack by one day in order to gather more intelligence and gauge the enemy’s strength.

That decision, Ritzik believed, proved to be the deciding factor. In the ensuing twenty-four hours, Mucci’s forces initiated multiple (and successful) reconnaissance missions of the camp and its guards. By January 29, Colonel Mucci had made detailed sketches of the Japanese compound, allowing the Rangers to rehearse their moves.

The attack on Pangatian was executed at dusk. Twenty-four hours later, Mucci had rescued 512 Bataan death-march survivors and evacuated them safely through hostile territory to the American lines. And while he and his Soldiers killed more than five hundred of the enemy, the operation cost him only two of his Rangers: Captain James C. Fisher, the Ranger doctor, and Corporal Roy Sweezy. More: he accomplished it all with nothing more than basic aerial photographs, good orienteering, and labor-intensive,
eyes-on, sneak-and-peek ground reconnaissance—no GPS units; no satellites; no computer technology.

These days, a cow can hardly break wind anywhere in the world without a satellite, or a sensor, or a UAV analyzing the methane content. But there is a downside to this information avalanche: there is so much data coming in that timely analysis and distribution often becomes impossible. This results in the unfortunate situation known as garbage in, garbage
in.

Ritzik first came to this judgment in Afghanistan. There were so many satellites, so many Predator and Global Hawk UAVs, so many U-2 and Aurora
¹⁶
stealth flights, and other SIGINT, TECHINT, PHOTINT, and ELINT vacuums sweeping up information, that the bosses back in Tampa were rendered incapable of making simple yes/no, or go/no-go decisions.

Very early on in the campaign, for example, one of the CIA’s Hellfire missile–carrying Predator UAVs actually spotted the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, himself. But by the time this info-bit was filtered through the multiple management layers of CENTCOM’s captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, generals, and the all-important Judge Advocate General (JAG) legal cadre, it was too late to do anything about it. And so, Omar-baby escaped to fight another day.

It was, Ritzik therefore concluded, just as dangerous to be presented with too
many
options as too
few.
Both were limiting.

Ritzik knew that good intelligence, like a dependable
weapon, was one of the better tools he had at his disposal. But it was just that: another tool. It wasn’t a crutch, or a panacea.

The essence of unconventional warfare would always boil down to one fundamental element:
Warriordom,
the deeply ingrained will and fierce determination of Soldiers to use the holy trinity of speed, surprise, and violence of action to prevail against great odds. Full stop. End of story.

And that’s the way it would play out in Xinjiang. If he and his people were able to overcome their initial vulnerabilities and achieve what the SpecWar historians called “relative superiority” over the larger guerrilla force, then in all likelihood they’d be able to complete the mission successfully. No sophisticated, complex op plans, either. Just basic, no-frills, straight-ahead, in-your-face Soldiering.

Warriordom was the heart of Ranger School, and the even tougher Delta Selection course. The weeks of physical and mental anguish were a crucible of pain in which SpecWarriors were forged. The hardship and the severe crescendo of challenges were deliberate. Their goal was to make the Soldier-candidates demonstrate to themselves that they could put out 200 percent more exertion, concentration, and tenacity than they ever thought they could.

Ritzik had entered Delta’s Selection with 159 other men. When it was over, a mere three were accepted into the Unit. The process, which was designed by Delta’s founder, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, and based closely on the British SAS Selection process, has not been altered since the very first volunteers showed up at Fort Bragg back in the late 1970s. Delta Selection proved conclusively to Ritzik that no physical or mental obstacle—not cold, or fatigue, or stress; not topography, or water, or even a determined and dedicated enemy—could ever keep him from completing, and prevailing, in his mission.

That fundamental truth about himself and the Soldiers he worked with was what kept Ritzik on track. He knew that to succeed, at some point he’d have to suck up the pain, overcome the crises, and
Drive On,
just the way he’d done during Selection, or Colonel Henry Mucci had done during the assault on Cabanatuan. And if Mr. Murphy showed up and the going got rough? Then he and his Soldiers would grit their teeth, say FIDO—Fuck It, Drive On—and grind it out.
FIDO:
surmount any physical obstacles in their way.
FIDO:
get close without being seen.
FIDO:
sneak and peek to ascertain the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.
FIDO:
attack with utter ferocity and kill as many of the enemy as they could.
FIDO:
disable the MADM and get the hell out with the American prisoners.

R
OBERT ROCKMAN
pulled the heavy secure telephone across the top of the desk in his hideaway office and dialed a similar instrument on a desk at the Navy Command Center, a bustling warren of windowless, interconnected offices on the fourth floor’s D-ring. Once the phone rang with its unique monotone, he pushed the button that enabled the encryption and voice-distortion devices. And didn’t begin to speak until the red light on the phone receiver had turned green. When it did, Rockman barked, “This is Mr. Rogers at OSD.
¹⁷
Get me O’Neill.”

Captain Hugh O’Neill, USNA ‘86, was one of eight “sweat hogs,” or action officers, at the Command Center, working twelve-hour shifts to track naval movements and crises worldwide. At zero eight hundred, just over twelve hours ago, he’d been abruptly seconded to the secretary’s personal staff on a temporary additional duty, or TAD, assignment. At 0805 O’Neill had been ushered into the secretary’s hideaway, where he was presented with a file folder
diagonally striped in orange, on top of which sat an SCI—sensitive compartmented information—secrecy form and a Parker ball pen with the seal of the secretary of defense engraved on its gold-plated cap.

The secretary said, “Sign the form, Captain. Then read the file. You can keep the pen.”

O’Neill didn’t have to be asked twice.

The compartment was called SKYHORSE-PUSHPIN. O’Neill’s assignment was to track the Chinese military’s reaction to a provocative wave of unscheduled American reconnaissance flights and naval ship movements, and report as necessary to the secretary. He was to work his network of fellow sweat hogs and his contacts in the other uniformed services and intelligence agencies to elicit information without advising his sources as to its ultimate destination. He would act with absolute discretion. He would write nothing down. And he would deliver his findings only after he had asked for and received the Skyhorse recognition signal from the secretary.

Rockman waited out a fifteen-second delay. Then he heard: “This is Captain O’Neill.”

“This is OSD—Mr. Rogers.”

O’Neill said: “Signal?”

Rockman said, “Skyhorse-Pushpin.” He paused. “What do we know, Hugo?”

“They’re pinging us, sir, no doubt about it.”

“Good.” That meant the Chinese had taken the bait. “What’s the evidence?”

“I’ll call you back from the SCBF in two minutes with that information, sir.” The NCC’s SCBF—the acronym stood for sensitive compartmented information facility—was a small, bug-proof room with a thick door and a cipher lock at the very end of the maze of Command Center offices.

Rockman replaced the receiver in its cradle and waited.
Thirty seconds later the phone squalled once. He picked the receiver up and repeated both the encryption process and the code-word recognition signal. “Sit-rep, Hugo.”

“Naval Air confirms six close-quarters intercepts of our routine surveillance aircraft in the past eight hours. A message from COMPAC details two Chinese ELINT trawlers moving in the straits of Taiwan. My colleagues at DIA are reporting huge military message traffic surges. And Rear Admiral Taylor, our naval attaché in Beijing, has just been summoned to the Defense Ministry at ten hundred hours Beijing time—that’s about an hour from now, sir—to explain what the Chinese are calling our ‘highly provocative moves in Chinese territorial waters.’”