Los Angeles Class

3

"Working late, I see."

Commander Frank Gordon looked up from his desk, startled. Admirals did not pay friendly visits to junior officers in their Pentagon offices, especially long after closing time. The Pentagon was always alive — there were always people working late, or on the night watches — but the place still generally felt more like a civilian office than a military base, and most of the personnel, including nearly all of the civilians employed there, came in at seven or eight and went home by five.

"Admiral Goldman!" He started to rise. "I didn't hear you come in, sir."

"Sit, sit," the older man said, gesturing with his hand. "No formalities. It's after hours."

He nodded toward the coffeemaker on a table against one wall. "Can I get you some coffee, Admiral?"

"No, thanks. I heard you were working late. What's up?"

"Putting together my notes for a dog-and-pony show tomorrow. Another briefing for some budget wonks and bean counters from the GAO on programs that we can't tell them about because they're not cleared for it."

"You know, Frank, Rebecca hasn't been seeing a lot of you, lately. She's been complaining about being a Fort Fumble Widow."

Gordon's jaws clamped down hard. He was careful with his words. "I know, Admiral. And I'm truly sorry." He spread his hands, taking in the computer and the pile of papers on his desk. "But I just haven't been able to get clear."

"I know, son. And I'm not blaming you. But it's been damned tough on Rebecca."

"And on me, sir." He hesitated. "I… I really do love her, you know."

There. He'd said it.

Admiral Benjamin Goldman was the father of his wife, Rebecca. His relationship with the admiral had started off badly… just about as bad as was possible. He'd met Becca at a service dance and he'd been smitten hard. Well, so had she, though the word around the base had been that he'd deliberately put the moves on and swept her off her feet. The only trouble was, she'd been engaged at the time, and a sudden change of mind and the resultant late-night elopement had not sat well with the conservative elder Goldman. He'd not spoken to his daughter for several years after that, and the word was that Frank Gordon was on the old man's shit list… that he was never going to rate a decent command.

That was all old news now, thank God. He'd received command of the Bluefin, an aging diesel boat fitted out to carry commandos, and he'd acquitted himself well in a highly secret covert op in the White Sea two years before. After the success of Operation Arctic Fox, he'd received the promise of another submarine command, after his required rotation ashore.

That promise, frankly, had been pretty much all that had kept him going these last twenty months. Sometimes, he thought that his posting to the Pentagon — as a staff assistant in the Office of Naval Special Operations Command — was going to drive him stark, raving bug nuts, a pure Section Eight.

"I know you do," Goldman said, in response to Gordon's blunt statement. "And I regret the years lost. Petty. Stupid, really. But that's all behind us, right?"

"Absolutely, sir," Gordon said, but even yet, he felt a small, deep-buried and sullen bit of suspicion. Benjamin Goldman never did anything without purpose. Why was he bringing all of this up now?

"So… you got a moment?"

"Of course, sir."

"Come with me."

Puzzled, Gordon rose from his desk, towering over the small, wiry Goldman. Where was the man taking him?

"I expect you're anxious to get out of the Puzzle Palace," Goldman told him, using yet another of the countless names Pentagon employees used for the huge structure. Most simply called it "the Building," but those in a more critical mood referred to it as "the Fudge Factory,"

"Fort Fumble," "the Squirrel Cage," or — Gordon's favorite by far — "the Five-Sided Wailing Wall." "The Puzzle Palace" was a pet name contested by the occupants of the National Security Agency's huge facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. Both claimed title to the name with a jocular, my-place-is-worse-to-work-in-than-your-place proprietorship.

"Yes, sir," Gordon replied, with neither hesitation nor fear of ruffling Goldman's feathers. The admiral knew how he felt about his Pentagon assignment. For almost two years, he'd been marking time… doing an important job, yes, but driving a damned desk instead of a submarine, which to his way of thinking was among the more inhuman of mental tortures.

"Hmm. Does that mean," Goldman said, "that you think you'd be doing a better job, a more important job, somewhere else?"

The question caught Gordon by surprise. They'd been walking clockwise down the gleaming main corridor of D-Ring, but now Goldman swung them left into Corridor 4, heading deeper into the Pentagon's heart. Where the hell was the admiral taking him?

"No, sir," he replied carefully. He knew Goldman expected straight answers, but Gordon was feeling now like he was treading through a minefield. "But I do know that my best work isn't done behind a desk."

"Sea duty means long stretches away from home."

"Yes, sir. And Rebecca knew that when she married me."

For a moment, he wondered if he'd gone too far. Goldman's leathery face was impassive, but could easily be masking anger. They reached one of the red-framed security elevators, which Goldman summoned with a magnetic-strip ID card. The doors opened a moment later, and they stepped inside. Goldman used his card again to access a subbasement level that Gordon hadn't even known existed.

There were plenty of rumors about deep-underground chambers beneath the Pentagon, and some of them were even true. Gordon knew that a nuclear-safe war room existed down there, and fairly reliable rumor had it that there was at least one small nuclear plant as well… a fact that would not sit well with many of the civilian residents of Washington and its Virginia-side ring city had they known. The word was that secure communications and command facilities had been tunneled out of the bedrock beginning back in the fifties or early sixties, when it was taken for granted that the Building was ground zero for at least a couple of Soviet ICBMs.

"I want my daughter to be happy," Goldman said, as the elevator began descending rapidly. "But you also understand, I know, that I can't let my feelings as a father interfere with my duties as COMSUBSPECLANT."

"Of course not, Admiral." Now Gordon was really puzzled, and curious.

The elevator slowed, stopped, and opened up. They stepped into a narrow corridor with concrete-block walls and naked fluorescent tubes on the ceilings. As a top-secret underground facility, it bore little resemblance to Hollywood's concept of such mythic places. "Just where is it we're going, Admiral?"

They stopped at a checkpoint manned by two stolid-faced Marines, one prominently armed with an M-16. Goldman gave the other his ID card. "He's with me," Goldman said. "Temporary clearance, Blue-Five."

"I need you both to sign in here, sir," the Marine said.

"We call it the Bunker," the admiral replied as Goldman scrawled his name, rank, the date, and the time into a log, then handed the pen to Gordon. "Part of the Washington scene the tourists never see."

They went on past the checkpoint, taking several turns along the way and eventually climbing aboard an electric car, like a golf cart, which took them through a maze of subterranean tunnels. By that time, Gordon's sense of direction was thoroughly scrambled. There were places where water dripped from the ceiling and puddled on the bare, concrete floor, and he wondered if they were somewhere under the Potomac by then. Interesting thought. There were rumors of similar buildings and tunnels beneath the White House, and even of an ultrasecret underground highway going all the way from the White House subbasement out to the National Naval Medical Center in suburban Bethesda. Did this warren of labyrinthine tunnels connect somehow?

"Do you remember a report you wrote nine months ago?" Goldman asked as they parked the golf cart and passed another security checkpoint. " 'Use of Intelligence/Strike Assets in Certain Middle East Field Operations,' I think you called it."

"Yes, sir. That was one I did for your office. Using SEAL Teams for deep-ashore intel gathering and hostage-rescue ops in Lebanon. I never heard anything else, and assumed it was shitcanned."

"It wasn't. It was going the rounds of various desks in

Special Ops, at Langley, even at the White House, but nothing much was happening. At least, not until Terry Waite vanished."

Terry Waite. Gordon knew the name well, of course, since much of his work in the last year had concerned the hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A no-win situation if ever there'd been one.

Ever since 1982, the Iranian-backed, pro-Palestinian extremists that called themselves Hezbollah, the Party of God, had been collecting hostages in Lebanon. The well-remembered ploy by Iran in holding fifty-two American embassy personnel for 444 days while a horrified world watched must have been considered a success in terrorist circles, because they'd made a career of kidnapping foreigners, especially Americans. Some had been held for five years, now, and the American public — and Congress — was growing increasingly angry and frustrated. In an apparent replay of the Vietnam tragedy a generation before, the American giant was being held impotent by a tiny and dedicated group of terrorist-revolutionaries.

Hezbollah claimed to be taking hostages to protest the treatment of fellow Shi'ite fundamentalists in Lebanon, and to win the release of Shi'ite terrorists now in prison in Israel. There were few options in dealing with them. Israel flatly refused to bargain with terrorists under any conditions… as did most in the American military. The hostages were held in scattered and well-concealed locations, and even discovering where they were was a major problem for the U.S. intelligence agencies tasked with finding them. An all-out, overt military strike was likely to result in the death of at least some of the hostages, in friendly-fire incidents, or when they were executed by a vengeful Shi'ite militia. The only alternative seemed to be to wait and hope for a break… while year after year slipped by, with American citizens imprisoned for no crime other than being Americans.

Terry Waite had offered an unexpected hope. An envoy from the Church of England, he'd presented himself to the Muslim fundamentalists as a neutral negotiator hoping to end the standoff that threatened the delicate balance of conflicting powers throughout the Middle East, a standoff that was unfairly painting all Shi'ites worldwide as terrorist, hostage-taking madmen. Over the course of several months, he'd won freedom for three hostages. Twenty-three remained imprisoned, however… eight Americans, one Indian, two Saudis, and eleven Europeans.

Then, in January of this year, Terry Waite himself had vanished… another hostage for Hezbollah demands.

"What's so important about Waite?" Gordon wanted to know. "Just the fact that he was so high-profile?"

"There's more to it than that. Here we are."

Goldman ushered him into a door flanked by Marine sentries, through a carpeted anteroom, and past another set of doors. Inside was a combat command center setup much like that aboard an Aegis cruiser, a technology-cluttered room filled with computer displays, TV monitors, communications consoles, and dozens of men, civilians and military, speaking in low-voiced tones.

Several men looked up from the display monitor they were studying. One, a young man with a long face, in shirtsleeves, frowned. "Who's this? What's he doing here?"

"Commander Gordon," Goldman said. "He's the gentleman who first conceived this op. I thought he should be here."

"Welcome to the Bunker, Commander," the young man said. His ramrod posture, his crisp manner made it clear he was military, even though he was casually attired in civvies.

"Thank you, sir."

"This is Marine Lieutenant Colonel North," Goldman said. "Former National Security Council aide. He's also had something to do with this scenario tonight."

"Colonel North?" Gordon said, shaking the man's hand.

"Yes, that Colonel North." He sounded tired.

The previous November, a Lebanese newspaper had printed a story declaring that the Reagan administration had sold high-tech missiles to Iran in a bizarre-sounding ploy to free the hostages held by pro-Iranian Shi'ite guerrillas in Lebanon. Weeks later, Attorney General Edwin Meese had dropped a bigger bomb: American officials had taken the money from the missile sales and diverted it — illegally, as it turned out, under the terms of the 1984 Boland Amendment — to the anti-Sandanista contras of Nicaragua. If President Reagan was directly involved, he could easily be impeached.

Meese had added, however, that the entire operation had been run by one man working on his own in the White House basement, a "loose cannon," as Meese put it, named Oliver North….

North had been fired. His boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, had resigned, but ongoing investigations by Congress and a special prosecutor were turning up new pieces of the story daily, including involvement by the NSC, the CIA, and members of the president's cabinet, including Vice President Bush, a former CIA director. It looked like North was going to be subpoenaed to testify before Congress soon.

The fact that North still had security clearance for this place, that he was here in the Pentagon at all, spoke volumes.

The Marine must have read the thoughts behind Gordon's eyes. "Operation Free Sanction has been in the works since last year," he said. "I wasn't going to jump ship now. Not with so much at stake…. "

"Free Sanction?"

"Your plan, Commander," a Navy captain, whose name was Rafferty, said. He pointed at the big-screen display. "It's going down as we speak."

Gordon looked at the screen. His mouth gaped. There, in green light of varying shades, was an aerial view of rugged terrain, and a massive building or fortification of some kind. He could see people there, too, dozens of them inside the big structure … many of them visible through the walls and roofs of interior buildings.

And in the bottom left corner of the screen, fourteen men, heavily armed, were just moving into view.

"Ah, Starbase, Alfa," a voice said from a wall speaker. It sounded like the man was whispering, but the volume, kicked high, turned the whisper to a near shout. "In position, Waypoint Three. Objective in sight."

"Roger that, Alfa," an Army major with a communications headset said, cupping his needle mike. "You are go for execute."

"Starbase, Alfa, copy."

"My God," Gordon said, awed. "This is really happening? Right now?"

"It's happening," North said. "Welcome to the Bekaa Valley, Commander. You might not have known it, but you… and they are about to make history tonight!"

"My God," Lieutenant (j.g.) Kenneth Randall said, peering through the night-sight binoculars at the mammoth construction squatting on the hillside a hundred meters ahead. "It's a frigging fortress."

He'd known what it would look like, thanks to the training runs, but seeing it here, for real… it brooded over the Bekaa Valley like a squat, ancient gray monster.

"It was, once," Lieutenant Gerald Gallagher whispered beside him. "The Ottoman Turks built the place a hundred fifty years ago. It's seen better days, though."

"Yeah," MM1 Rich Bowman said from nearby. "Nothing like an Israeli air strike to turn a classy neighborhood into a dump."

Randall scanned the structure a moment more, taking in the chips, gouges, and craters in those massive stone walls. A sentry stood on the wall, cupping his hands as he lit a cigarette. A stiff wind was blowing in from the Med, twenty-five miles away, beyond the saw-toothed bulk of the Lebanon Mountains to the west. Somewhere in the distance, another sentry called out a challenge, and the grinding and rattle of an ancient truck rose from the dirt road winding up the hill to Al Kufayr. The scene was calm… but charged with hidden tension, a bomb with a fast-burning fuze.

He handed the binoculars back to Gallagher, and pulled his night-vision goggles down over his paint-blackened face. The goggles restricted his view somewhat, cutting off his peripheral vision, but they enabled him to see the pitch-black of a moonless, overcast night painted in vivid shades of yellow and green.

The three Navy SEALs lay on a ridgetop south of the compound. At their backs, the rest of Alfa Platoon, eleven more men in black combat dress, black face paint, and black wool watch caps crouched or lay in a wide perimeter, facing out in all directions.

Gallagher studied the walls a moment longer through the binoculars. "Okay. Everything looks just as advertised. I don't see a reason for an abort now."

"I concur, Wheel," Randall said.

"Yeah, let's take the sons of bitches down," Bowman added.

"Okay, as we rehearsed it, then. Plan Dagger. We secure the walls and main gate together. First Squad grabs the approaches and the main building, and sets overwatch on the road. Second Squad goes in and finds the packages. Let's do it!"

This is it, Randall thought, heart hammering beneath Kevlar vest and equipment-laden combat harness as he made his way back to the center of the perimeter, and signaled Squad Two to join him. This is what it's all been about….

They'd been practicing this op for six weeks, ever since word had come down from G2 that four of the Mideast hostages were being held in a couple of small rooms inside the war-torn Ottoman fort deep in the Bekaa Valley of southeastern Lebanon. They'd studied satellite and recon aircraft photos of the objective, including high-penetration IR shots that peered down right through the wood and straw or clay shingle roofs of some of the structures. They'd practiced with a mock-up of the fort on a sand table behind the SEAL Two barracks at Norfolk. Then they'd practiced in killing house mock-ups, first at Norfolk, and later at the big Special Operations Command compound at Fort Bragg. They'd practiced a dozen different possible scenarios and deployments; the one they were using now, Dagger, was one of three honed to perfection; the other two were in place as backups, should the unexpected turn up. The great and terrible Murphy was always very much a part of these operations, a god of war to be feared, respected, and placated with backup plans and assets held in reserve.

Unfortunately, Alfa Platoon had damned little riding in reserve.

Randall led the six men in his squad down the north face of the ridge, keeping to the black night-shadow of boulder and hillside. BMC Donald Hughes, QM1 Charles Goddard, GM1 Lawrence Kyzinski, GM2 Barry Neubauer, ET3 James McKenna, and MN3 Sidney James followed at ten-meter intervals, keeping well spread apart, moving silently into the gully south of the objective.

Kyzinski had point, moving ahead of the group with silent steps across the rocky ground. He stopped suddenly, hand held high. His fingers moved in the code SEALs used under silent op conditions—two men… armed… that way… twenty meters.

Randall had already slung his primary weapon and drawn his pistol, an H&K USSOCOM-issue .45, muzzle-heavy with its blunt sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. As he moved up to take position next to Kyzinski, he could make out the yellow-white-green shapes of two Palestinian sentries just ahead. "Starbase," he whispered into his needle mike. "Alfa Two. We've got two tangos. Taking them down."

"Roger that, Alfa Two," a voice crackled in his ear. "You are weapons free. Take 'em out."

Randall grimaced. He didn't like this op-to-HQ immediacy, didn't like the feeling that a bunch of stars and suits and prima donnas back in the Pentagon were literally looking down over his shoulder.

He exchanged hand signals with Kyzinski; he would take the one on the left, Kyzinski the one on the right. They crept forward, as silent as death.

A sudden flare of white light dazzled Randall's night optics. One of the Palestinians had just struck a match, and was cupping it to light the other's cigarette. Side by side, Randall and Kyzinski approached swiftly now, crouched low. At ten meters, Randall dropped to one knee, took careful aim, and squeezed the trigger twice, a double tap, the soft hisses of his shots mixed with Kyzynski's quick one-two. One sentry coughed and groaned; the other looked startled and opened his mouth to scream, but only blood, black in the night-vision goggles, came forth. Both men collapsed in a huddle, bodies tangled with one another in a macabre embrace.

Kyzinski made sure both were dead with his Mark I dive knife; a covert op deep in enemy territory was no place for chivalry. Ahead, the ground rose steeply beneath the brooding walls, green-lit, of the fortress. "Alfa Two, two tangos down," Randall reported. South gully clear."

"Copy that, Alfa Two," Starbase said. The speaker had an annoying nasal twang to his voice. "We have IR traces on one sentry on the south wall and another in the southeast tower. You're clear to move in to Objective Nevada."

"Copy."

Idiots, he thought, as he started working his way up the slope. This was step-by-step micromanagement at its worst and, so far as Randall was concerned, a recipe for certain disaster.

"Where are these pictures coming from?" Gordon wanted to know. "I've never seen anything like this."

At the touch of a few keys on a keyboard, the technicians at the big display console could zoom in on any part of the scene being shot from overhead, with a close-up tight enough to pick out details of the SEAL Team's weapons, or the insectlike masks of their LI goggles. A touch of another key actually identified individual men by name and rank, or tagged others of the ghostly green figures as "Unknown, presumed hostile."

The camera view drifted slightly as he watched, but would occasionally recenter itself on the fortress from a slightly different angle, as though it were circling the compound counterclockwise. He didn't know of any spy satellites that could do that; most spysats passed overhead rather quickly, with, at best, five or ten minutes above the horizon. This camera seemed to be loitering somewhere in the sky overhead.

"Believe me," Goldman whispered, in response to his question, "you don't want to know."

But Gordon had already decided that the camera platform must be a high-stealth recon aircraft of some kind, rather than a satellite in orbit. The name "Aurora" flashed through his thoughts. There'd been lots of rumors lately of a whole new generation of reconnaissance aircraft coming on-line to replace the now-ancient technology of the U-2 and the remarkable Mach-3+ SR-71 Blackbird. Dubbed "Aurora" from a classified document mistakenly released to Congress and public scrutiny, the new aircraft were rumored to be so stealthy they were all but invisible, powered by a whole new type of propulsion plant that sounded more like magic than technology, and so black-project secret that their very existence would likely be denied for decades to come. Whatever they were called, it probably wasn't Aurora any longer.

No, Goldman was right. He didn't want to know about things like that.

He watched as one group of seven SEALs scrambled up the south wall of the fortress, a low and bomb-damaged barrier only about ten feet high, while another group of five slipped around the west side to approach the front gate in the north. Another Hezbollah sentry, standing on the south wall, was taken down, this time by someone wielding a knife from behind. Gordon winced as the blade slashed; blood, glowing hot yellow under IR imagery, stained the front of the Hezbollah guerrilla's uniform. The SEAL lowered the corpse to the stone surface of the parapet walk.

Frank Gordon was a trained and experienced military officer, used to the idea of sudden death on the battlefield. But his direct exposure had been from the combat command center of a submarine, where the enemy was represented as a sonar target designated Sierra and a number. He'd never seen a man killed before… certainly not taken from behind with the sweep of one arm, and instantly killed with a quick thrust-and-slice of a razor-edged combat knife. It was… disconcerting.

"This is the Bekaa Valley?" Gordon asked, trying to keep his thoughts from morbidly fastening on the sprawled corpse on the screen. "That's a hell of a long way inland. How'd you insert them. HALO?"

"No," North said. "Too risky. We took advantage of the fact that our Israeli friends have complete air superiority over southern Lebanon. A word to our counterparts with Israeli Military Intelligence, and they let us fly three Sea Kings off the Nimitz, bringing them in nape-of-the-earth right along the Lebanon-Israel border."

"The ragheads think the choppers are Israeli," an Army colonel said, "if they see them at all."

"The teams were put down in open country north of Marj'Uyun three hours ago," North explained, "at an LZ secured by a Ranger pathfinder team that infiltrated yesterday. They made their way on foot from there, about seven miles over some pretty rough terrain. Those SEAL guys are damned impressive."

"Almost as good as Marines, eh, Ollie?" Captain Rafferty said. They chuckled.

"E and E?" Gordon asked.

"Primary extraction point is right down the hill from Al Kufayr," North told him. "They call in the choppers when they have the package and the LZ is secure. Secondary LZ in case of trouble is two miles south, near Hasbayya. And they can always infiltrate through into Israel, and make contact with our people there."

"So… I assume the 'package' is a hostage."

"At least two hostages, maybe more," the Army colonel said. "Good, solid intel on this one."

"Good, solid intel" was always the big problem in this sort of op. In this case, it almost had to be from HUMINT— human intelligence — assets on the ground at the objective; a satellite or high-tech spy plane couldn't ID hostages in a basement prison cell.

Something bothered Gordon, though. "What about reprisals? There are twenty-four hostages, now. If you rescue two, won't the others suffer for it?"

"These are important hostages, Commander," Rafferty replied. "We get them out, we'll be able to bring pressure to bear on the Hezbollah terrorists who grabbed them. They won't dare hurt the others, for fear of a bad world press, and because we'll demonstrate our ability to hit them where it hurts, no matter where they hide."

Which left Gordon more bothered than before. Important hostages? What the hell were the criteria for determining which captives were important, which ones were not? As for bringing pressure to bear on their captors, that sounded like sheer wishful thinking. Hezbollah was just as likely to shoot a few of the prisoners still in their keeping, just to warn the United States not to try these sorts of cowboy tactics again.

Gordon was beginning to get a bad, bad feeling about the whole situation.