Soar (6 page)

There was foul-smelling wetness under his face. He tried to open his left eye, but it was fused shut. So he lay there for some seconds, hoping that he’d get some degree—any degree—of vision back in his blurry right eye, and listening desperately for any clue that might indicate where he was. He heard snippets of muffled speech coming as if from a distance. But it was impossible to decipher what was being said.

How long had he been awake? Three minutes? Four? However long it had been, his eye wasn’t getting any better.
And so he lay quietly, working hard not to panic, trying to regulate his breathing so he wouldn’t choke on the tape gag, letting his body and his brain recover by counting silently back from two hundred; a Zen exercise to steady himself.

By the time he’d reached zero, the sight in his right eye had finally unblurred enough for him to be able to make out worn floorboards below his nose.

Okay—that meant he’d been stashed in a vehicle or a house. There were no houses anywhere close by, unless they’d been driven into Tazhong. Which from the lack of ambient sounds was improbable. So, most likely, he’d been tossed into the bed of the truck that had been sitting astride the road. Or some other truck. After what had taken place earlier, Sam Phillips was not about to assume anything. Sam rolled right so he could look up. He was rewarded with a fuzzy image of canvas and metal. He raised his head, sniffed, and caught the faint but clear odor of diesel fuel.

A truck it was, then. Sam squirmed to his left, and made contact against something. He had to roll completely over now, scraping his nose across the wet floorboard. But finally his eye settled on X-Man’s photographer’s vest. He fought his way onto his shoulder—Whoa,
that
hurt—so he could see his teammate’s back. He watched, for a minute or so, and was hugely relieved to see that X-Man was taking shallow but regular breaths.

Then he forced his legs as far up as he could so he could see the security man’s legs without choking himself. X-Man was hog-tied, too.

Forcing his legs to comply, he scrunched forward until his forehead touched X-Man’s back. He tapped the security man’s back twice,
knock-knock.

There was no one home.

He prodded the back of the photographer’s vest once more, grunting through gagged lips as he did.

Still nothing.

He squeezed up against the photographer’s vest and smacked his whole body against X-Man until he heard a short, muffled groan from his colleague. Sam moved back, until he’d put a foot or so between them. “Chris, try and roll over,” he said. “But be careful not to rock the truck and attract attention.” Of course, given the tape gag, it didn’t quite come out that way. But X-Man’s body told Sam he’d gotten the message.

It took perhaps five or six minutes, but they were finally face-to-face. Sam wriggled close and examined the cut over X-man’s eye and the bruises on his cheeks. Christ, he was a mess.

X-Man started to blink rapidly. Sam thought he was having a seizure, until he realized that the security man was transmitting Morse code.

Oh, Christ, Sam thought. He’d learned Morse back at the Farm during his initial training. They’d taught it so case officers could mark dead drops, or leave signals for their agents, or—the instructor had actually once joked—“Just in case two of you are tossed into adjoining cells and you want to communicate with each other.”

Sam remembered how the whole class had rolled their eyes at that one. Which was when the instructor said, “Well, smart-asses, that’s how we did it at the Hanoi Hilton.”

But Sam hadn’t used Morse for years.

He closed his eye and counted to ten, racking his befogged mind as he tried to remember the twenty-six dit-dah long-short combinations. It was useless. His brain was mush. All he could come up with was
SOS
—three short, followed by three long, followed by three short.

Which jogged his mind a little.
Wait a second. H
was four short.
S
was three short. I was two short. And
E
was one short. That was all the shorts. There was no four long.
O
was three long—he knew that. What the hell was one long?
T.T.T
was one long. And
M; M
was two long.

He opened his eye and waited until it focused on X-Man’s face. He blinked three short, four short, two short, and one long, then waited for X-Man’s reaction.

Three long, followed by long-short-long.
O
something.
OK-OK-OK.

Sam opened his eye as far as he could and nodded. X-Man was transmitting again. Short-short. Long-long. Short-short-long. I-M-short-short-long. Sam shook his head. Negatory.

X-Man cocked his head toward the outside of wherever they were being held. Then he transmitted again.
I-M-
something.

U.
Short-short-long was
U.
It was the IMU out there. He was telling Sam they’d been snatched by the IMU.

The IMU. That figured. Langley said the IMU was seriously weakened these days. Well, these guys didn’t appear very weak. Sam blinked
T,
then E, then
I-S-T-S,
because he couldn’t think of what the hell
R
was.

X-Man gave him an affirmative nod. Then he started blinking again. “I-s-i-t,” he said.

Thank God he was keeping it simple. But sitting? What if the truck moved? What if one of
them
outside saw it move?

X-Man didn’t give him a chance to object. He slithered backward to give himself some clearance. Then, knees bent, the security officer rolled onto his belly. And then somehow, incredibly, without garroting himself, he levitated and jerked himself upright, into a kneeling position. The move actually slackened the hog-tie cord between X-Man’s neck and his ankles.

Sam was still holding his breath. Jeezus. It was okay: the truck hadn’t moved. Not a millimeter.

X-Man’s eyes told Sam what to do next. Sam complied, squiggling forward until he’d put his face close up against X-Man’s butt and the soles of his feet. X-Man’s fingers found the back edge of the tape across Sam’s mouth and pried it loose.

The instant it came off his lips, Sam breathed so rapidly he began to hyperventilate.

Quickly, he fought to bring his body under control. “I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay,” he whispered, the sound of his own hoarse voice both reassuring him and giving him back some blessed degree of control over the situation, even though he was still bound hand and foot.

Sam swallowed hard. “X, do you know where Kaz and Dick are?”

Instead of answering, X-Man wriggled his butt and his shoulders at Sam.

Who finally got the message—and got with the program. He buried his face between X-Man’s shoes and worked with his teeth at the hog-tie knot just above the ankles.

They’d used cheap plastic line to do the job, and Sam was able to pull the frayed end out and release the knot in a few minutes without chipping any teeth. Then he attacked the thick roll of dark tape that pinioned X-Man’s wrists and forearms behind his back. He had managed to gnaw through two of the perhaps half-dozen layers of foul-tasting tape when the shooting started and the truck was rocked by nearby explosions.

N
ATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER
Monica Wirth glanced at the legal pad in her left hand. Then her eyes flicked in the president’s direction. A barely noticeable movement by Pete Forrest’s eyebrow told her exactly what he wanted her to do.

Wirth dropped the pad to her side, crossed the rug with its Great Seal of the United States, and moved behind the president, where she could focus on Ritzik. “I like your overall plan, Major. It’s simple and direct. But there is one huge flaw.”

“Ma’am?” Ritzik was shaken. He thought he’d covered all the bases.

“As proposed by you, there is only one service branch employed on the actual rescue—the Army. The other branches are used in support roles, or not included at all.” She dropped the pad out of sight. “The Navy wants a substantial piece of this, Major Ritzik. So does the Air Force. So does the Central Intelligence Agency. The Joint Chiefs chairman is strongly recommending—his staff has already drawn up a mission profile and detailed operation plan, I might add—that we assemble a company-sized unit made up of Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Operations personnel
to do the job, as opposed to your twelve-man Army element with Air Force support.” Wirth paused. “So, Major, how do we deal with the chairman’s objections?”

Mike Ritzik glanced at the dark circles under the national security adviser’s eyes as she stood behind the president’s wing chair, and realized she’d probably been up all night. The president didn’t look too good, either. Neither did the SECDEF. “I don’t believe a company-sized force is a good idea for this mission, Dr. Wirth.”

“Why?”

“First of all, the size alone is cause for failure. Moving a hundred-plus people attracts attention. Second, I totally reject the chairman’s concept of a unit assembled specifically for this operation. Jointness is a concept that Congress first forced on the military for political reasons. Unlike most of the dumb ideas they come up with on Capitol Hill, this one actually worked—like when the Navy carriers served as forward basing for Special Forces during the Afghan campaign. But when it comes to the sorts of small-unit operations I do, jointness for jointness’s sake can be dangerous.”

“Dangerous, Major?”

“Dangerous, ma’am. I’m not talking about being able to communicate on the same radio frequencies—that’s a good idea. But so far as I’m concerned, unless you’ve trained with someone for a long time, it’s impossible to operate with that man successfully on a high-risk op. You don’t know what the other guy is thinking, how he works, or what he’s good at.”

“But we’re talking about our most elite forces, Major,” Wirth said. “You’re all professionals. Certainly that counts for something.”

“It does, ma’am,” Ritzik said. He paused just long enough to sneak a look at the president, who was staring at him intently. Strange that the man hadn’t said anything. Ritzik’s eyes shifted back to the national security adviser.
“Working with strangers increases the chance of failure—increases them exponentially. Sure, symbiosis and integration—and those are a couple of the buzzwords you hear from the Joint Chiefs these days—can be achieved. ‘Integration’ is precisely what I’ve been doing for the past two years with the SOAR. But fluidity in combat takes months of work. The schedule the secretary outlined to me doesn’t allow any time for that kind of mission prep.”

“I’m still skeptical,” Monica Wirth said. “Admiral Buckley makes a strong argument that a joint strike force would be effective and successful.”

“The admiral would say that.” Ritzik almost had to laugh. Phil Buckley, the current JCS chairman, was a Navy sea systems manpower specialist who had spent twenty-eight of his thirty-one-year career behind a desk as a staff officer. According to the RUMINT
⁷
at Bragg, he’d been selected for chairman in the last months of the previous administration because he’d been the safe choice, a bureaucrat who wouldn’t rock the boat. Phil Buckley had spent the past decade and a half not commanding or leading, but writing legislative memos.

The role suited him, too. Buckley was precisely the sort of individual who looked good marching down the marble corridors of the Hart or Cannon office buildings. He was tall and lean and had the eagle-eyed stare of a Warrior. But in point of fact, the man had never seen a shot fired in anger. He was a manager, an apparatchik, one of the Pentagon’s detested professional paper pushers.

Ritzik knew the suggestion Chairman Buckley was putting forward was a recipe for disaster.
But
they
all had to know it, too, didn’t they?
He started to speak again. But the
words caught in his throat, because Ritzik, openmouthed, caught something he hadn’t been supposed to see: an imperceptible signal, passing like electricity, between the other three.

That was when Ritzik realized what was going on. The president was testing him. Challenging him to prove he could succeed. This was all about will. Resolve. Tenacity. Determination.

Ritzik viewed Pete Forrest with fresh respect. And as a sign of that esteem, he’d give his commander in chief the unvarnished truth. At Delta, you always spoke your mind during the hot-wash sessions, no matter how much it might wire-brush the senior officers. Because as Ritzik saw it, the Warrior’s ultimate goal wasn’t getting promoted, but to prevail over your enemy and bring all your people home.

So Ritzik focused on the president and hot-washed. “Units like the one the chairman is suggesting do work out just fine—in Hollywood movies, sir. But in the real world, they get people killed. That’s why at CAG, our senior noncoms insist on doing the mission planning. Because every time some staff puke colonel or dumb-as-a-brick general comes up with a bright idea—we pretty much know it’s going to get our people killed.”

Pete Forrest looked intently at Ritzik. “I was a staff puke, Major.”

“Yes, sir, you were,” Ritzik said, his tone unyielding. “But before that, you were Airborne. You led a platoon in combat. You know I’m right.”

The shocked look Ritzik got from the national security adviser told him he’d probably just put an end to his career.

But he wasn’t about to back down. “The way I see it, sir, junior officers like you and me often end up sending good men home in body bags because somebody with stars on
his collar wants a piece of the glory for his service, or his unit.”

Ritzik focused on President Forrest’s face. “Remember that Navy SEAL who fell out of the chopper in Afghanistan a couple of years back, sir?”

“At the start of Operation Anaconda,” the president said. “Chief Petty Officer Jackson.”

“Yes,
sir.”
Ritzik was impressed the man remembered. “Well, I was in the AO, sir. I
knew
that assault element hadn’t ever worked together before. It was thrown together—Rangers, Special Forces, and SEALs, with SOAR pilots and aircrews. All strangers. But you know how it was: we had all those alleged instant communications setups in operation, and so instead of letting some junior officer or master sergeant on the ground run things, all the staff pukes—excuse me, ma’am, the ‘joint operations advisory staff’ officers—a hundred miles away at Bagram Air Base, and the middle-manager pukes seven thousand miles away at Central Command in Tampa, they all put
their
two cents in on how things should be done.”