Soar (39 page)

The radios, Rowdy thought, were indicative of the problems faced by people like him, who risked their lives using equipment designed and built by idiots. Just once, Rowdy thought, it would be nice to go into battle with gear that had been designed by people who’d actually put their hides on the line with it, instead of engineers who test everything in a vacuum. His hand brushed the pommel of the ten-inch bowie knife suspended on his combat harness. Rowdy’s
bowie had never failed him. But then, it hadn’t been designed by some shirtwaist marketing expert or a self-styled expert with a Ph.D. in edged-weapons design, but by actual Warriors—the Bowie brothers—who knew what a fighting knife should be because they’d had ample opportunity to field-test the design under the full range of combat conditions back in the early days of the nineteenth century.

0944.
Rowdy looked down from his perch on the ridge and prayed the God of War was looking down upon him and his troops with favor, and would bless their violence of action. The work had been done. He’d siphoned all the fuel he could out of the HIP before they’d blown the chopper up. He’d secreted the fuel bladder where it wouldn’t be hit if they were attacked. He, Doc Masland, and Bill Sandman had muscled the plutonium core out of the MADM after Wei-Liu had gizmo’d it and pronounced it safe to move. Then they’d carried the nuclear material six hundred yards east and cached it where it would be safe from stray fire. When plutonium burns it can emit deadly alpha rays—and Rowdy wanted the damn stuff nowhere close by. Then he’d packed water, fuel, and some ammo in the 4x4 so they could make their run for it if Ritzik and the rest of them didn’t make it back.

Rowdy had lost enough of his comrades-in-arms over the years so that he didn’t dwell on the possibility that Ritzik, Gino, Ty, Mick, and Sam-I-Am the spook man weren’t making a round-trip. The youngest Ranger at Desert One during the abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran in the spring of 1980, nineteen-year-old Fred Yates, had been given the nasty job of blowing up the damaged RH-53D Sea Stallion choppers to ensure the destruction of the bundles of cash and caches of intelligence materials that had inadvertently been left aboard the damaged
aircraft. It hadn’t bothered him to vaporize the money, maps, intelligence materials, or cipher keys.

But the fact that dead Americans could have been inside the aircraft when he destroyed them had bothered the hell out of him—and still did. In the operational Bible Rowdy Yates carried in his head, the First Commandment was never ever to leave a comrade behind—even on a black op.

And Rowdy’d done his share of black ops. In the 1980s he’d slipped into Lebanon to hunt Islamic Jihad car bombers. He’d worked in El Salvador, where he stalked and killed one FMLN
comandante
who had ordered the assassination of Albert Schaufelberger, a Navy SEAL lieutenant commander, and another whose unit had murdered four Marines and two American civilians at a sidewalk café in San Salvador’s Zona Rosa. In the nineties he’d been detailed to Sarajevo, where he worked covert countersurveillance against the Sepah-ē Pasdaran—Iran’s terrorist-supporting IRGC, or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—which targeted Western peacekeepers. In February 1999, he’d rendezvoused with six case officers from MIT
²⁵
and a twenty-man element of Turkish Special Forces when they slipped into Kenya to capture Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the violent Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. And he’d been in the neighborhood, as they say, when p-p-p-porky Pablo Escobar, the
jefe
of the Medellín cartel, had played the title role in
Bullet Sponge on a Hot Tin Roof.

But this little jaunt was way beyond black. This really was
Mission: Impossible.
They were operating ultra-covertly. Capture was not an option—and neither was leaving anyone to be … identified. Rowdy understood the political implications of the mission all too well. Ritzik had
even put it into words. Or hadn’t. “You do whatever you have to do,” he’d said. Rowdy had supreme confidence in his abilities. The mission was to get these people safely over the Tajik border. And he’d accomplish it, whatever it would take. Rowdy had a survival mind-set and it would carry them all through.

But there was always the unexpected to prepare for. Not to mention the arrival of Mr. Murphy just when you didn’t need him. More to the point, two-plus decades of operating in the real world had shown Rowdy that you’ve always got to anticipate a worst-case scenario, and have something in your back pocket just in case it develops. Which was why while the rest of the party was otherwise engaged, Rowdy wired one of the shaped charges just forward of the 4x4’s gas tank. The detonator was where he could reach it easily from behind the wheel. The end would be quick and painless. And identification? Let the forensic pathologists in Beijing try to figure it all out. The sons of bitches would have their work cut out for them, too: there were two spooks, six Delta shooters, and Wei-Liu. That bloody 4x4 was going to be more crowded than one of those little cars at the circus, the ones where a thousand clowns come pouring out. Body Partz “R” Us.

0956.
“Kaz, keep your head down, goddammit.” Rowdy chewed the end of his mustache, noting for the record that it was a very feeble substitute for his habitual cheekful of Copenhagen. Would these spooks ever learn? Movement gave you away. It didn’t take much, either. Pilots were trained observers—like experienced hunters in the field. And when you hunted, you never tried to find a whole deer. You looked for an anomaly; something that wasn’t supposed to be there. The flash of white when the buck flicked its tail. The sudden shift of light and shadow as a boar
moved through a thicket toward water. The momentary glint of sun reflecting off the lens of a telescopic sight. Or the callow, upturned face of a dumb-as-rocks spook who’d heard the chopper but still wanted to see the frigging thing so his eyes could corroborate what his ears had just told him.

He’d positioned them well clear of the burning truck and smoldering chopper. They’d moved the MADM back down into the ravine and slid the damn thing into its crate, which they positioned ostentatiously at the rear of the truck. Rowdy made sure they tilted the damn thing so the heavy wooden box transporter sat with its yellow-and-black universal symbol for
NUKE
pointing skyward. No way the Chinese would miss that.

The 4x4 was a quarter mile to the west, on the far side of a narrow S-curve, sixty yards off the road and camouflaged so well that even Rowdy’d had a hard time spotting it from the ridge high above. The group was split in two. Rowdy, Wei-Liu, and the spooks were concealed on the northern ridge under a jagged outcropping, shielded by a small stand of knobby, wind-sheared evergreens and irregular clusters of nasty, thorned, dark green bushes that stood waist-high, crowned by reddish new growth. The rest of the Delta people were spread along the southern ridge. Their fields of fire would mesh right in the area some eighty yards away where the truck, the chopper, and the Chinese bodies lay. Rowdy’d kept one RPG launcher and four rockets. Doc and Goose had the other pair and all the remaining rockets.

The
whomp-whomp-whomping
of the chopper grew closer. And then the sound altered as Rowdy picked up the high-pitched whine of big twin turbine engines. And then, as the ground began to shake beneath him, he saw the big bird crest a hundred and fifty feet above the southern ridge, veer east, then slow as the pilot spied the battleground below.

He saw the flat, armored, humpbacked dual cockpits.
The stubby wings. The nose-mounted Gatling traversing side to side. The rocket pods. Christ, it was a HIND, a hunter-killer gunship.

The chopper rotated to give the pilot a better view of the scene. He descended to fifty feet above the ravine floor, edged closer to the burning HIP, rotated counterclockwise above the bodies of the Chinese soldiers, then maneuvered over the nose of the upended truck, passing not a hundred feet to the north of the MADM—although there was no outward indication that the pilot or gunner saw the nuke. What the hell did these guys need—flares? Then the pilot dropped the chopper’s nose slightly, and proceeded to follow the road westward, its rotor wash creating a 360-degree tsunami of dust, stone, and loose brush.

“Everybody stay down … stay down … he’s trying to pick up a scent.” Rowdy released the transmit button, hoping he’d been heard over the chopper’s screaming engines, watching as the HIND picked up speed, climbed a few hundred feet into the air, flew off to the east, then reversed course and backtracked, its armored-glass nose lowered to give the pilot and gunner the widest possible angle of vision.

Rowdy had a sudden urge to smile because this guy wasn’t playing by the rules. Obviously, the Chinese pilot hadn’t been made privy to this particular scenario, which was known in the Joint Forces Command war-game scenario list as “Special Situation Ambush No. 12,” or “SSA-12.” In “SSA-12,” a “Red Force” chopper-borne hostile insertion element sees the bait set out by the “Blue Force” ambushers, lands, and is decimated. And guess what? In ten out of ten SSA-12 war-game simulations, the Red Force chopper always settles right where the Blue Force commander plans the ambush site. That is because at the Joint Forces Command, the outcome of war games is always decided in advance. The red team, known as OPFOR, or Opposing
Force, always loses. Which, Rowdy knew, is why JFC war games were totally useless—except as résumé builders for dumb-ass generals.

In real life, as Rowdy knew from bitter experience, the enemy is seldom cooperative. In real life, the situation is always fluid and unpredictable. More to the point, it is always Murphy-rich. The one time Rowdy had been allowed to play the OPFOR bad guy in an SSA-12 scenario, he’d held a pair of chopper gunships back, out of sight of the LZ. When his landing force had been attacked, he’d unleashed the Cobras and decimated the ambushers. Which is when the generals running the exercise had stopped the war game and ordered him to replay the segment so their Blue Force ambushers would win.

The same principle applied here. Once they’d fired on the HIND, the Chinese gunner would know exactly where their positions were—and he could lay down a deadly rain of machine-gun and rocket fire on them from above.

So Rowdy had to hold fire, hoping the HIND would land once the pilot saw the MADM. The HIND’s armor was virtually impervious to RPG and small-arms rounds. Only when it was on the ground—its wide twin exhausts and air intakes vulnerable to intensive RPG and rifle fire—could they immobilize the big gunship.

But Rowdy already knew the HIND wouldn’t land—no more than a tank crew would abandon the safety of its armored cocoon in hostile territory to go examine something. It just wouldn’t happen. No: once the Chinese pilot spotted the MADM, he would do what he had no doubt just done: radio for backup. Send for additional troops and EOD specialists.

Reinforcements were precisely what Rowdy didn’t need. The sergeant major sighed. Another tidy war-game scenario shattered by messy real life. He pressed his transmit
button. “He’s gonna make another pass. When he does, if he hovers—or even if he slows down—shoot his exhausts out and take the sucker out so we can get the hell out of here.”

1003.
The HIND flew overhead on an easterly course. But it didn’t descend, hover, or decelerate. Instead, it maintained a steady altitude of three hundred feet, flying parallel to the road—and well out of RPG range. After a quarter of a minute, it was out of sight. The engine scream diminished, and soon all Rowdy heard was the thumping of rotors. In less than a minute they, too, faded into the distance. But that didn’t mean the son of a bitch wasn’t coming back.

Rowdy eased himself out from cover and surveyed the scene below. What would Sun-Tzu do? Rowdy knelt, chewing on his mustache. And then he remembered exactly what the Master taught—and knew exactly what to do. “Force is like water: it has no consistent shape. Military genius is the ability to adapt force to your opponent during the fluidity of battle, even as water flows around the obstacles in its way.”

“I have been an idiot,” Rowdy said aloud, causing Wei-Liu and X-Man to look at him strangely and Kaz to snicker.

Rowdy looked in the tech’s direction. “The Master says, ‘Wisdom is not obvious. Those who can see subtlety will achieve victory.’”

The spook inclined his head in mock reverence: “I am an unworthy grasshopper.”

Rowdy’s hand moved in a Zen-like wave. “I forgive you your sins.” And then he eased back under cover, lifted the RPG launcher onto his shoulder, aimed it in an easterly direction, and pressed the transmit button on his radio. “Loner, Loner, do you copy?”

129 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
1003 Hours Local Time.

T
HEY WERE LOW
on fuel—Mick estimated twenty-five minutes’ flight time left. Ritzik tried calling Rowdy to see if he’d managed to siphon the avgas out of the downed HIP. They’d need every bit to make it as far as the Tajik border, given the fact that they’d be carrying fifteen people and flying higher than the aircraft’s safe operational ceiling. But the radios weren’t working. Mick, pissed, said, “Sam?”

“Yo?”

“Pull my earpiece, will ya?”

“Sure.” The spook reached across the console, yanked the soft foam plug, and draped the wire over the pilot’s shoulder.

“Oh, that feels better.” Mickey D swiveled his head. “Y’know, boss, these damn radios are no better than Polish suppositories.”

Mick was a strange one. Ritzik understood that. But this was bizarre, even for him. “Huh?”

“This guy in Warsaw,” Mick continued, “he’s all plugged up. Y’know, whatchamacallit—constipated. So he goes to the doctor, who prescribes suppositories. The doc says, ‘Use one of these twice a day for two days, then come back and see me.’ The guy leaves. Three days later he’s back, worse than ever. He says, ‘Doc, those suppository things don’t work worth a damn.’

“The doctor’s shocked. ‘Whaddya mean they don’t work? I prescribed the most powerful suppositories available.’ The patient says, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, first of all they’re hell to take—they’re the size of horse pills. Swallowing ‘em is just about impossible. Second, for all the good they did me, I could have shoved ‘em up my ass.’”