SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

21

They could hear the choppers before they actually saw them, a slow crescendo of loud, reverberating whomp-whomp-whomping that echoed ominously off the rocky hills and deep ravines. The hair on the back of Ritzik’s neck stood up. The sound made him feel vulnerable because it was impossible to figure out which direction the aircraft were actually coming from, or how many of them there were. The only thing he knew for certain was that they were closing in more and more with every passing second. It was, Ritzik decided, a hell of a way to start the day.

They’d halted just after zero six hundred, as the sky was going from midnight blue to dark purple. It seemed to take forever for the sun to come up, and the air was noticeably chilly — only in the high forties. As it grew light, shortly after seven, Ritzik saw why. Fifteen, perhaps twenty kilometers to the north and east, a line of awesome, jagged snow-covered peaks towered thousands of feet above the sparsely forested foothills. Beyond the range they could see, there was a second series of peaks. Beyond those lay Tajikistan, and safety. But they were still a long way off.

The party had left the desert floor behind shortly after zero four-thirty. The transition had been abrupt. They’d gone from the lunarlike surface of sand and rock, then traversed a ten-klik swath of windswept, sixty-foot dunes, which in turn quickly gave way to steep, precipitous rocky hillocks. From the dunes on, it had all been uphill. The road along which they were currently bumping cut in S-curves between a series of ridges dotted with thorny scrub and clumps of dwarf evergreens bent like hunchbacks by wind and weather. It was rough, desolate, unforgiving terrain.

“Afghanistan without the charm,” was how Rowdy’d put it just after first light.

“I see we’re given to characteristic understatement this morning,” Ritzik had answered.

At zero six-twenty Rowdy called a halt — it was getting too light to go any farther. He detailed Goose and Tuzz to scout ahead, while Curtis and Shep grabbed one of the captured RPG launchers and four rockets and dropped back atop the ridgeline to make sure their six was clean. The rest of the party was detailed to cut boughs and brush to camouflage the vehicles. Which wasn’t going to be easy. The big boxy truck would stand out — unless they buried the bloody thing, which wasn’t an option. And so, while they could soften its lines and make it harder to spot from the air, anybody who was flying low and slow and wasn’t blind couldn’t help but see it.

The rear guard brought the first piece of news at zero seven-sixteen. “There’s movement behind us,” Curtis reported by radio. “One vehicle — maybe two. I’d say about twenty miles, coming west. More or less along the same track we were on. They’re still on the desert floor, moving slowly. But they’re raising dust.”

Ritzik frowned. “How many people we talking about?”

“No way to tell that, Loner.”

“Army?”

“Dunno. Could be. Could also be civilians on the move.” There was static in Ritzik’s ear. Then: “Want us to set an ambush?”

“No,” Rowdy broke in. “You guys get your butts back here. Let’s not waste people or time. I don’t want to expend anything we don’t have to. We’ll keep an eye out. See how the situation develops.”

“Wilco.”

Ritzik turned and looked around, searching. “Tracy?”

He finally spotted her clambering over the ridgeline. “Where the hell—”

She picked her way through the scrub, blushing. “We girls need some privacy, y’know.”

“Sorry.” He pointed toward the truck. “It’s all yours.”

“And about time.” Wei-Liu patted the small canvas sack she carried. “I was able to make some preliminary studies overnight.”

“How does it look?”

“Old. Fragile. The batteries are in terrible shape — you can smell the acid. Obviously, I wasn’t about to touch anything while we were bouncing around.”

“Good idea.”

She waited for him to say something else. When he didn’t, she said, “Okay, I’ll get to work.”

0728. She’d just laid out her tools and secured the rear flap open to give herself some light when she thought she heard the low rumble of distant thunder. Within seconds, Rowdy appeared above the tailgate. She thought he and the rest of them all looked somewhat ridiculous with their faces striped with black, green, and brown camouflage cream. She hadn’t noticed in the dark. But in daylight, they simply looked foolish.

“We got aircraft approaching, ma’am,” he said. “You gotta clear out — take cover.”

Wei-Liu stood her ground. “I’m perfectly all right where I am, Rowdy.”

“The major wants you outside with him in case there’s gunfire,” Rowdy insisted. He vaulted into the truck, followed by Doc Masland. The pair of them rummaged through the crates until they came up with four RPG launchers and two haversacks each holding four of the 85mm rocket-propelled grenades. Rowdy handed a launcher and one of the haversacks to Ty Weaver, who was standing below the truck bed. The sniper pulled the rockets from their pouches, screwed the RDX-explosive warheads and sustainer motors into the tail-finned booster-charge units, slipped one of the assembled rockets into the mouth of the launcher, and held on to the other.

“Get that set to Mickey D,” Rowdy said.

“Roger.”

The sergeant major threw another pair of launchers over his shoulder and dropped his legs over the transom. “Doc—” Rowdy handed the remaining two armed rockets and one launcher to Masland. Then he reached for the remaining launcher and the haversack of projectiles and jumped off the truck. He looked back. “Ma’am …”

Wei-Liu stared at Yates until his expression told her she’d better move. “It would be nice … “ She began to gather her tools.

“Ma’am,” he said, “leave ‘em right where they are. You’re wasting precious seconds.” He pointed through the truck cab. “The major’s straight up the hill — sixty, sixty-five yards.”

From just below the ridgeline, Ritzik pressed his transmit button. “Goose, Loner. Sit-rep.” “Nada.”

“What’s your position?”

“A klik and a half out, to your northeast.”

“Where the hell are they?”

Then Tuzz’s voice: “I have a visual. Loner, they’re coming from the south. Repeat, the south.”

“How many?”

“Two.” There was a pause. “HIPs, I think.”

Goose broke in. “Confirm two HIPs, Loner.”

Attack transports. That meant troops — HIPs could carry as many as twenty-four. Ritzik had war-gamed against HIPs in Israel, during joint exercises with Sayeret Matkal, the country’s lead counterterrorist army unit. The choppers were agile, despite their size and weight. The Israelis had great respect for the big, boxy Special Operations aircraft, too: during the 1973 October War, the Egyptians had used one hundred of them to insert commandos behind Israeli lines in Sinai. Anwar Sadat’s bold move had almost broken Israel’s life-or-death counterattack.

The whine of the twin turboshafts grew louder, sound slapping off the landscape. “Here.” Ty Weaver dropped the armed launcher and a second rocket into Mickey D’s arms. The pilot swung the launcher around to make sure he had clearance, propped himself up so the backblast wouldn’t do anybody any harm. Then he pulled scrub over himself.

The sniper dropped into a small revetment half a dozen yards from Ritzik. He uncapped the telescopic sight on the big HK, sighted through it, then dropped out of sight. Doc came up the ridge, rockets slung over his shoulder. He settled in fifteen yards from where Ty was concealed.

Wei-Liu followed — lagging behind.

“Tracy, get the hell up here now,” Ritzik yelled. “Jeezus H.”

She looked confused. She saw Mickey D, then finally spied Ritzik.

Who grabbed her by the arm roughly. “Get … down.”

She settled next to him, irate. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small container. “C’mere.”

Wei-Liu turned her face toward him. Before she knew what was happening, he’d daubed dark paste on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. She tried to pull away, but he held her firm.

“What the hell do you think—”

“Your skin reflects light,” he said matter-of-factly. He peered at her face and applied more of the greasy cream. “They can see exposed skin from above.” He smeared the backs of her hands and the exposed parts of her wrists. He turned her face left, then right, examining his work. Then he smudged more goop under her eyes and behind her ears.

She’d been self-conscious like this earlier. The forced intimacy of the parachute jump had made her uneasy. And yet there was something comforting about being close to Ritzik that had made Wei-Liu feel good; feel safe. And yet he was always distant; removed; disinterested. She’d never met anyone so intensely single-minded before.

Ritzik pointed toward a stunted conifer about ten yards away. The evergreen was partially obscured by a small rock outcropping. “See that tree? Get under it — squeeze as close to the trunk as you can. Then lie down — and stay down until I tell you otherwise.”

The echoes from the chopper’s big blades were more pronounced now — which meant they were getting close. He looked at Wei-Liu, his face dead serious. “Tracy…”

“Yes?”

“Do not move. Do not look up. Do not shift your position, or squirm.” His face was severe. “Got it?”

“Yes, I got it.” She was pissed at being told what to do. But his tone had conveyed the absolute gravity of the situation. She saluted. “Yes, sir, Major, sir.”

He thrust her toward the tree, oblivious to sarcasm. “Go.”

She’d no sooner settled under the little tree than the whomp-whomp-whomping grew unbearably loud — and then suddenly eased off, the rotor sound replaced by the high-pitched whine of the HP’s twin turboshaft engines.

And then Ritzik saw the first chopper as its bulbous, glass-enclosed snout rose above the south ridge, three hundred yards away, roughly two hundred feet above the ground. It was a troop transport all right — painted in the Beijing Military District camouflage colors: mottled blotches of gray, blue green, and tan. The flight deck was completely glass-enclosed. He could look past the windshield wipers and see the pilots in their khaki flight suits, their hands on the collective and cyclic controls, even the flight manuals stowed next to the seats and their legs running down to the pedals that controlled the tail rotor pitch.

He pressed his transmit button. “If we’re spotted, take ‘em out.” When he realized what he’d just said, the enormity of it smacked him like a gut punch. He’d just single-handedly told his people to wage war against the duly constituted armed forces of the People’s Republic of China. But there’d been no other option. They were cornered and they’d have to come out fighting.

The big bird shifted its attitude slightly, providing a broadside as it dropped its nose over the ridgeline and moved north. The port-side hatch was open — the door slid aft in its track and secured. A machine gun on an elbowed, free-floating gimbal mount protruded aggressively from the doorway. The gunner, in headphones and goggles, craned his head through the hatch.

As the chopper turned, Ritzik could make out the identification on the side of the fuselage and was surprised to see that the lettering was Western, not Chinese. He hunkered, hidden — he prayed — by the branches and the ground. But knowing in his heart that unless the chopper was being flown by Ray Charles and the machine gun was manned by Stevie Wonder, there was no way on God’s earth that the truck and the 4x4 would go unseen. Face it: he was screwed.

Ritzik pressed his transmit button. “Ty—”

“Loner, Ty.”

“The pilots. Shoot the pilots.”

“Roger that.”

From where Wei-Liu lay, she couldn’t see the aircraft. But she could see Ty Weaver as he brought his long gun up over the edge of the rocks where he lay. The heavy black weapon was draped in cloth. The sniper had shredded one of the Russian anoraks and wound the green-, gray-, and brown-flecked camouflage fabric around the stock, barrel, and telescopic sight.

Weaver’s voice in Ritzik’s ear: “Got them.” The muzzle of Weaver’s rifle followed the chopper as it hovered for perhaps fifteen seconds above the ridgeline. Then the bird moved slowly to the north, carefully mimicking the S-curve of the road.

Weaver’s voice again: “Lost the pilots — have the gunner.”

Now a second HIP hove slowly into view. It flew two hundred yards behind and three hundred yards to the east of the first craft, engines screaming, rotors thud-thud-thudding. The second HIP lay back as the first chopper flew a slow and deliberate pass over the road, then disappeared over the northern end of the ridge where the Americans lay concealed.

Ritzik could see the machine gunner in the second chopper. He was hanging out the hatchway, scanning the ravine through field glasses. The goddamn aircraft was virtually on top of the truck before the asshole saw anything.

But he did see it. Ritzik could even see as the man’s lips moved excitedly.

He watched, transfixed, as Chopper Two banked in a tight arc and the pilots confirmed visual contact.

The door gunner disappeared, then reappeared in the doorway. He kicked a rope ladder out of the second chopper. Now the first chopper eased back into view.

Mickey D’s voice in Ritzik’s ear: “Everybody hold until the first troops are on the ground and there’s somebody on the ladder — the pilots will be concentrating on keeping the aircraft stable. Air currents in these ravines are treacherous.”

Ty’s voice: “Roger. I’m back on Aircraft One — got the pilots.”

Rowdy’s voice: “Doc, Mick, Bill: Chopper One; I got number two — me and the spooks.”

Ritzik’s voice: “Rowdy — Loner. What about me?”

Yates’s voice came back fast. “Loner, you watch and pick up the pieces if we leave anything alive.”

Rowdy shifted on the ground, checking his six to make sure that the backblast from the RPGs wouldn’t smack the ground behind him and send pieces of rock into his back. There were no optical sights on these weapons, only the KISS[21] flip-up iron tangent sights favored by guerrillas and terrorists.

He looked over to where Sam Phillips and his two comrades lay concealed, some eight yards abreast of him. “I’m going for the aircraft — the door gunner,” he called to them, his voice masked by the choppers. “You get the troops. You fire short bursts until they’re all down.”

Rowdy shifted focus. The door gunner was back at his post. He was dressed in Chinese Special Ops BDUs: olive-drab shirt over dappled, camouflage trousers. Unlike the Delta shooters, he wore no body armor. In his peripheral vision, Rowdy caught the door gunner in Chopper One dropping a ladder as the big craft hovered five yards above the ravine floor. But his focus remained steady on the second aircraft. He chewed the droopy corner of his mustache, happy with the way he’d positioned his people. The choppers had to descend below the ridgeline, which made it harder for them to take evasive action because they were walled in by Mother Nature. Meanwhile, Rowdy and his people held the high ground.

Rowdy checked the spooks and saw that they were ready. “Sun-Tzu says there are six terrains to be considered when setting the location of battle,” he said, looking in Kaz’s direction. “On steep terrain, the first to claim the high positions and the sunny side will be victorious.” He watched as the HIPs eased into the kill zone and then nodded at X-Man. “We’ve got the sunny side up today.”

The Chinese troops — those who actually made it onto the ground alive — would be forced to move uphill toward them, with very little cover and no concealment. Rowdy looked toward Sam Phillips. “The contour of the land is of great help to the victorious army if the general knows how to use it to his advantage. Remember that, Sam I am.”

Rowdy’s right hand settled around the trigger grip; his left hand held the front-heavy launcher steady. He followed the target as it approached. Rowdy liked the RPG. It was lightweight — the launcher and four rockets weighed less than forty pounds. Much more man-portable than a Carl Gustav or the old Italian Folgore. Sure, it wasn’t as accurate as either one. But at close quarters, which is all Rowdy worried about, it was deadly. Most of all, it was simple. And there were so many of them floating around that there was virtually nowhere on earth you went that you couldn’t obtain one. More to the point, since your adversaries almost certainly carried RPGs just like you did, you could kill them and come away with extra rounds. That, certainly, had been his experience in Mogadishu and Kosovo, Colombia, the Philippines, Lebanon, and northern Iraq.

He fixed the big exhaust of the chopper’s turbo engine in his sight. The bird was dropping slowly, slowly, now just fifteen feet off the road. The bottom of the ladder began to drag. A Chinese trooper, weapon slung over his back, swung out and clambered down, fighting the prop wash, the ground-effect vibration, and the ladder itself.

The son of a bitch almost fell as he caught a leg. Then he recovered, pulled himself up, got his leg free, and continued down two dozen rungs onto the road. He waved at the hatchway, then grabbed the ladder to stabilize it.

Rowdy waited until there were two men on the ladder. He saw the copilot’s face, looking down and back, anxiously, as the soldiers descended. His eyes shifted to the door gunner. And then he lowered the sight picture slightly, and squeezed the RPG’s trigger.

That action ignited a powder charge, which ejected the grenade from the launcher with a loud explosive ka-boom at 84 meters per second. Rowdy was careful to watch as the round flew away, to make sure that all four of the stabilizing fins had deployed. If one of them hadn’t, the damn thing could cartwheel, reverse course, and come back to bite him on the ass. He knew that 5 meters — six one-hundredths of a second — after it left the muzzle, the grenade warhead had armed itself. After 11 meters — thirteen one-hundredths of a second — the sustainer rocket fired with a loud shrieeek. There was a huge flash, and the rocket accelerated to its full velocity: 294 meters a second.

Chopper Two was less than eighty meters from where Rowdy lay. It took less than a third of a second— .2721 of a second to be precise — for the rocket’s Piezo-electric fuse to crush against the interior of the choppers starboard-side interior wall, igniting the 94 percent RDX high-explosive warhead.

The explosion blew the minigunner clear out of the aircraft. Rowdy could see wounded Chinese tossing themselves about inside the fuselage. The aircraft stuttered — maybe shrapnel had hit the hydraulics or guidance systems. It didn’t matter. Either way, the pilots had to fight like hell to bring the chopper under control.

But Rowdy wasn’t watching anymore. His attention had moved on to the second threat — the soldiers on the ground. He screamed, “C’mon, assholes — get the sons of bitches,” at the spooks, who shook themselves out of whatever Langley-influenced stupor they were in and began to lay down a stream of suppressive fire at the Chinese troops.

And then Rowdy was reloading, quickly but firmly jabbing a second rocket into the blunderbuss muzzle of the launcher, bringing the weapon up onto his shoulder, and aligning his sight picture. The process took him less than seven seconds.

He fired again. The round cleared the RPG cleanly. But the chopper dropped precipitously as the pilot tried to keep his aircraft from spinning into the ground.

The HIP began to buffet. The rocket flew over the top of the bird and exploded against the far ravine wall.

Rowdy cursed. Quickly, he stuffed a third rocket — an OG-7 high-explosive fragmentation grenade — into the launcher’s muzzle.

Now the chopper careened to the right, arcing away from him like a clay bird coming out of a skeet house. Teeth clenched, Rowdy swung the grenade launcher around, following the HIP’s trajectory. He forgot about the iron sights. Instead, he let the wide RPG warhead overtake the center of the cockpit, almost as if he were swinging a big, lethal paintbrush. And just as he “painted” the leading side of the chopper’s glassed-in nose with a smooth, even stroke, he pulled the trigger and “Hoo-ah!” remembered to follow through the swing.

22

From eighty yards away, Ty Weaver’s 168-grain boat-tail bullet caught HIP One’s pilot in the philtrum — that small indentation between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip. The shot was catastrophic: the target’s central nervous system was destroyed and he was brain-dead before he even realized he’d been shot. The chopper lurched vertically ten yards. The HIP’s sudden movement shook three Chinese off the rope ladder. They fell hard, twenty-five feet onto the road below. One scrambled away. The other two lay stunned.

The sniper moved the crosshairs of his sight to his left, found his secondary target — the copilot’s throat — and squeezed the trigger. Weaver saw the man’s head snap sideways. Then the HIP corkscrewed to the right and dropped stonelike forty feet, smacking hard onto the roadbed and shearing its port-side tire off.

The chopper bounced once, then twice, crushing the two soldiers who’d fallen from the ladder. Ty squinted through the ten-power scope, and wasn’t happy with what he saw: the copilot in profile, blood oozing from his neck, still alive, working frantically to operate the controls and save his aircraft. The sniper focused again, his pulse steady, his breathing even, his right index finger easing tighter on the trigger.

The HIP dragged itself to clockwise, blades kicking up dust and stones, rotating on its broken landing-gear strut. Ty cursed silently. Now — when he could see at all — what he saw was the profile of the pilot, head thrown back, strapped dead into his seat.

The pitch of the HIP’s rotor blades changed audibly, and their velocity slowed. But the big bird still scraped across the ground. As it came around, Ty’s scope picked up the minigunner. The poor bastard was fighting centrifugal force, trying to hold on but still vainly searching for a target. The sniper tracked the hatchway, led the target slightly, then squeezed the trigger, the rifle muzzle actually following through the shot. The door gunner pitched backward into the cabin and disappeared.

The HIP’s nose smacked up against a boulder. The wounded bird finally came to rest. Ty’s crosshairs settled on the cockpit. He saw the copilot’s hand move on the collective handle. He raised the crosshairs until they found the zygomatic bone, the thin plate covering the brain between the eye and the ear. He eased the sight back, lifting the crosshairs until they touched the tip of the helix — the curled, upper edge of the target’s ear. And then he squeezed the trigger, watching as the copilot’s head disintegrated with the shot.

Ritzik blinked as the HIP ground itself to a halt. He raised himself out of his concealed position. “Mickey—” The pilot had the RPG leveled at the chopper. Why the hell wasn’t he shooting? “Cream the goddamn thing,” he ordered.

But Mickey D obviously had other ideas. “C’mon—” He dropped the RPG. “Ty — give us cover.” He grabbed his AK and charged down the ravine toward the chopper, followed by Doc Masland and Bill Sandman.

Ritzik scrambled after the trio, pistol in hand. He was eight, maybe ten yards behind the other three, still crabbing down the ravine, when a bullet kicked up rock splinters six inches from his right foot. He spun, rolled to his left, and brought the pistol muzzle up.

A Chinese Special Forces soldier, helmet askew, was coming up the hill, firing his rifle from the hip. He shot wildly in Ritzik’s direction, his eyes wide in double-take shock as he spotted Ritzik’s camouflaged but unmistakably Occidental face. The rifle jammed.

The soldier dropped the weapon, reached into a pouch on his chest, and pulled out a grenade. Ritzik head-shot him—tap-tap—just as he was yanking the pin.

But not quickly enough. The spoon still flew. Time stood still. Ritzik watched as the small sliver of metal arced toward him. His eyes followed its trajectory, and saw behind it how beautiful and clear the morning sky was; how the high white clouds actually intensified the blueness. Ritzik threw his arms over his face and neck and tried to find cover behind the low rocks.

The Chinese crumpled. And he took the brunt of the blast. But not all of it. Something hot and sharp smacked into Ritzik’s flak jacket, knocking the breath out of him. He rolled over, checked himself quickly. He was okay. He half crawled, half walked to the dead Chinese. The man had been cut in two. Ritzik rolled away, looking down the hill. Mickey D was already clambering toward the HIP, AK in hand.

The warrant officer ducked under the still-spinning rotor blades. He came upon a Chinese soldier lying crushed under the fuselage, weapon still in his hands. The warrant officer shot him once in the head, then moved forward, crouched, until he reached the hatchway. He reached in, his gloved hand caught the door gunner’s harness, and he pulled the dead man out of the aircraft, drawing fire. The warrant officer dropped flat. Crawling, Mickey D made his way below the hatch, moving to the tail. Once he was safely beyond the opening, he slowly, slowly, raised himself until he could see the forward portion of the chopper, looking into the cockpit area.

He hand-signaled that the cockpit, at least, was clear. Doc Masland eased up to the opposite side of the open hatch, scanning as much of the tail portion of the fuselage as he could. Bill Sandman came up behind him. He put his left hand on Masland’s shoulder to let him know he was in position.

Slowly, Masland “cut the pie,” sliding closer and closer to the open hatchway to allow himself an ever-increasing slice of vision into the rear section of the fuselage. He could see most of the right side of the cargo cabin. The canvas troop benches were flush against the bulkheads. Masland’s vision was obscured by a pile of what appeared to be cargo netting in the rear of the cabin.

Ritzik came up behind Mickey D. Sandman pointed groundward. Ritzik tapped the warrant officer, who dropped onto hands and knees. The Doc put a booted foot on Mickey D’s back. Weapon at the low ready, he stepped quickly into the fuselage and moved directly to his rear, scanning as he went. Immediately, there was gunfire — three three-round bursts — from Masland’s AK. Without hesitation, Bill Sandman stepped into the chopper cabin and moved in the opposite direction, edging toward the chopper’s cockpit, his back to the fuselage bulkhead.

Most Special Operations units practice room-clearing with four-or six-man teams. Ritzik’s Sword Squadron was different. His unit was capable of clearing rooms with two, four, six, eight, even ten men at a time, depending on the size of the space and the level of the threat. Moreover, Doc Masland and Bill Sandman had trained together for years, the pair of them clearing spaces that ran the gamut from trinity tenements to town houses, to apartments of all shapes and sizes. They’d taken down double-wides, center-hall colonials, ramblers, and eight-thousand-square-foot McMansions; they’d rehearsed on embassies, office suites, schools, barracks, even jails. They scenarioed ways of dealing with stairwells, hallways, and corridors with eccentric configurations. They’d practiced assaulting warehouses stacked with cargo containers, pallets, or floor-to-ceiling shelving. They’d learned how to clamber up icy North Sea oil rigs and board cruise ships in port or on the high seas; they’d worked on successful tactics to use for taking down buses, clearing trailer trucks, and attacking aircraft of every size and shape. And they’d even rehearsed dealing with hostage-taking no-goodniks who’d commandeered a transport chopper — a scenario, incidentally, more than thirty years old, dating from the Black September terrorists who’d killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

And so, the two Delta shooters worked like the proverbial well-oiled machine, flowing into the area without hesitation, the first man taking the long side of whatever space they were attacking, the second following to cover his teammate’s weakest side.

Sandman understood exactly where Doc Masland was going to be. So when he sensed movement at his ten o’clock he knew it wasn’t his brother-in-arms. Sandman’s AK came up and his finger moved from its indexed position on the receiver to the trigger. His peripheral vision caught the movement again. He moved forward toward the threat, releasing one and then another three-shot burst as he advanced.

“My twelve—” Ritzik heard Sandman’s voice in his earpiece. It was followed by one-two-three three-shot bursts. Now he stepped up and entered the chopper cavity. Moved quickly but smoothly heel-toe, heel-toe over the greasy decking, easing to his right along the bulkhead following in Doc Masland’s trail, his pistol’s field of fire centered on the far-side rear corner of the fuselage.

Doc shouted, “My two—” and fired two three-shot bursts.

There was movement at Ritzik’s ten o’clock. His pistol came up and he put one-two-three-four shots into the target. It wasn’t clean shooting but it was effective.

And then Ritzik’s weapon locked back. He’d forgotten to count rounds. He was empty. Like some damn greenhorn on his first day in the shoot house. He was a freaking overpaid RTO. He shouted, “Cover!”

Without removing his gaze from possible threats, Ritzik dropped the magazine out of the well, slipped to one knee, retrieved a fresh fifteen-rounder from his thigh and smacked it into place with the flat of his hand, then released the slide with his right thumb. He shouted, “Okay!” and stood.

Just in time to catch movement at his twelve. Ritzik and Masland shot simultaneously and a Chinese soldier went down. Masland was moving now, using his foot to kick weapons away from dead hands. Quickly, he checked the bodies for signs of life. He found none. He shouted, “Clear!”

Mickey D vaulted into the chopper and made for the cockpit. He reached over the bodies for the power switches and shut the engines down. “Bill, gimme a hand.” The pair of them pulled the dead pilot and his number two out of their shoulder harnesses and seat belts. They dragged the corpses aft and rolled them out of the hatch. The pilot slapped the HIP’s airframe. “I’m going to see if it’s still fly-able,” he said to his partner.

Ritzik helped Doc Masland pull six Chinese soldiers out of the HIP’s cargo cabin. With the door gunner, the two pilots, and the other three from the ladder, there were ten in all. Ritzik pressed the transmit button on his radio. “Rowdy, Loner — sit-rep me.”

Rowdy’s voice came back strong. “We got fourteen hostile DOAs and one aircraft down, Loner. No friendly casualties.”

That was good news. And there was more: Bill Sandman reported that HIP One’s machine gun was operational, with two seven-hundred-round ammo containers secured adjacent to the doorway. Rowdy discovered a third box undamaged in HIP Two.

0751. Ritzik detailed a six-man crew to hide the corpses. He didn’t want them visible from the air. He was pleased to see his Soldiers handle the Chinese dead with respect. An hour ago they’d been fathers, sons, brothers. Now they were unwitting casualties of a shadow war, and their remains didn’t deserve to be mistreated. War, Mike Ritzik thought, is full of paradoxes, some far more difficult to grasp than others.

He watched for a few seconds more, then struggled back up to the crest of the ravine to find Wei-Liu. She was still where he’d left her. She sat, hunkered, her arms tucked around her knees, her face and neck still smeared with cammo cream, although it was obvious to Ritzik that she’d tried to remove it. She didn’t look happy.

“What’s up?”

“You just … killed them all … “ she said. Ritzik was not in the mood for clichés. “What’s your point?”

Wei-Liu started to say something. But Ritzik cut in first. “People like you think war is sterile,” he said, “because that’s the way you’ve seen it, on television. Oh, you see wounded kids. You see the casualties of suicide bombers. You see victims. God, how good television is at showing victims. But that’s not war. War is chaos. War is nasty stuff. It’s about killing people. Killing people and breaking things. War is not nice, Tracy. It’s not a computer game, or a movie. It’s horrific. It’s blood and pain and violence and confusion, and mistakes that cost lives and idiots issuing orders that get people killed. But when it comes down to the real nitty-gritty, war is about killing other human beings, before other human beings kill you.”

He looked down at her. “So, yes, we killed them all. What would you have me do? Declare a time-out? Ask them to leave us alone? Make ‘em promise not to tell anybody we were here and send ‘em on their way? For chrissakes, Tracy, we’re violating China’s sovereignty. That’s a bloody act of war. Can you imagine the consequences if one of us was captured?”

“I hadn’t thought about it in that way.”

Why the hell hadn’t she? She was a freaking high government official. She should have “thought about it that way.” Ritzik bore down on her. “Why not? After all, you had a hand in designing the sensors — and they’re the reason we’re here.”

“But that’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. The sensors are technical tools. They’re no different from a satellite, or the kind of SIGINT or TECHINT the National Security Agency gathers.”

“Except for one element,” Ritzik said.

“Which is?”

“Four people had to put their lives on the line to plant your so-called technical tools,” he said. “And in order to position them they had to violate China’s sovereignty. They had to infiltrate covertly.” He paused. “Just like we did.”

“But they didn’t come to kill — anybody. You did.”

“We didn’t come to kill,” Ritzik said. “We came to do whatever it took to get the job done,” Ritzik said. “We did what we had to.”

“But—”

“But what?”

“I don’t see how you can live with yourself.”

Oh, Christ. “The problem with people like you—”

Her eyes flashed. “What do you mean, ‘like me’?”

“I mean,” Ritzik said, “like you. Smarter-than-thous. Piled-higher-and-deepers. Diplomats. Scientists. Technocrats. Thumb-suckers. Head-shedders. Think-tankers. Pundits. Know-it-all journalists. Lobbyists. Political appointees. Congressmen. Senators. Highfalutin moral hypocrites, my father used to call ‘em. That’s what I mean. People like you. When there’s a crisis, people like you scream and yell and beg folks like me to fix it. Go after Usama bin Laden and wax his butt. Break into Saddam Hussein’s palace at Tikrīt and blow him into the well-known smithereens. Sneak into Bosnia, neutralize a dozen or so goons, and bring a Navy pilot back. Drop into the Bekáa Valley and dispatch Imad Mugniyah and the Hizballah high command. Track down Pablo Escobar and shoot the sucker dead. But no collateral damage, please. And no mistakes. Oh — and you can kill them, but don’t tell us about it, okay? None of that nasty stuff — because hearing about blood and death and pain might make us uncomfortable. And then, when it’s all over, and you’ve done your dirty jobs, please leave. Go back to your cage, or crawl under whatever rock it is that you headquarter.”

“That’s neither fair nor the truth.”

“The truth? The truth is exactly what you just said: ‘I don’t see how you can live with yourself.’ The answer is, I live with myself very well. I like what I see in the mirror when I shave. The problem isn’t me, Tracy. It’s that people like you consider what I do to be uncivilized. Unseemly. Antisocial. Trust me: it makes people like you hugely uncomfortable to be in the same room as people like me.”

“That hasn’t been my experience.”

“Oh, really. How many soldiers do you know, Tracy?”

“How many piled-high-and-deepers do you know, Major?”

He really didn’t have time for this BS. Not now. He turned on his heel and started toward the crest of the ridge. “Currently? One. Which is a sufficient statistical model to substantiate my case, so far as I’m concerned.” He turned and pointed toward the truck. “We have carved you out a little time now. Maybe you should start work.”

23

Ritzik watched, so infuriated he was shaking, as Wei-Liu picked her way around the vegetation, descending carefully toward the ravine floor. “Workmanlike attitude, Mike. Workmanlike attitude.” He repeated the mantra half a dozen times aloud, hoping it would calm him down.

Sure, perhaps he’d overstated the case. But not by much. The core of what he’d said was sadly true. Between the demands for politically correct, zero-defect missions and the realities of the twenty-four-hour Internet and television news cycle, there was very little a Special Operations unit could accomplish without being scrutinized, second-guessed, and micromanaged by a laundry list of individuals, organizations, government agencies, and chain-of-command factotums.

Christ, in Afghanistan some IWS — idiot wearing stars — from Tampa had seen a digital picture in a postaction report and was so outraged by how native the Special Forces operators had gone that he ordered all the SF troops in Afghanistan to shave their beards and cut their hair so they’d look more “military.” The asshole didn’t care that his order caused hundreds of shooters, who’d worked like hell to blend in with their Afghan surroundings, to become Obvious American Targets. But that was par for the course. In fact, these days, the formal postaction mission analyses that were invariably conducted by SOCOM’s by-the-numbers staff to ensure that “proper doctrine” had been followed were closer in gestalt to colonoscopies than they were to any sort of previously established military procedures.

Which was why the current acronym around the Combat Applications Group for a SOCOM staff review was BO-HICA, which stood for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. And you didn’t want them finding any polyps, either. Polyps — even benign ones — could prove terminal to your career.

During the Second World War, they hadn’t second-guessed Henry Mucci and his Sixth Ranger Battalion. Mucci’s bosses had simply turned him loose and told him to get the job done any way he could. An order put like that, Ritzik knew, gave a commander flexibility, the freedom to lead from the front, and the luxury of occasional failure on the way to victory. It allowed an officer to employ individualism, initiative, and audacity. Today, those character traits were likely to get you a letter of reprimand. Of course, Mucci didn’t have CNN war tarts, Fox News Scud studs, Sunday-talk-show second-guessers, or al-Jazeera to worry about either. Or for that matter, an Army chief of staff who thought buying new berets was more important than buying bullets.

But then, this was the new Army. The Army of One (although precisely one what was manifestly unclear). This was the Army in which three soldiers who were lured across the Macedonian border, and who surrendered to Serb irregulars without firing a shot, were actually awarded three medals each — citations for giving up without a fight. Colonel Mucci must have been spinning in his grave over that one.

And a few years later, Johnny Vandervoort, CENT-COM’s commander, had led — if you could actually call it leading — the campaign in Afghanistan from the manicured safety and four-star comfort of MacDill Air Force Base, half a world away. It was another sorry military first for the Army of Washington, Grant, Patton, Merrill, and Beckwith: war by speakerphone.

While Ritzik and his people had been freezing their asses off in the mountains, COMCENT and his staff worked regular hours. Somehow, the guys with stars on their collars managed to get in their eighteen holes on MacDill’s PGA-grade golf course. Somehow, their aides always roused them in time for an early set of tennis before the daily conference call to Bagram Air Base. And while Ritzik and the rest of his team ate roasted horse anus and grilled sheep’s brain, the generals went off to dinner at Bern’s steak house, where the wine list ran thirty or so pages of fine print.

Ritzik wasn’t resentful about the disparity of lifestyle. Rank, after all, has its privileges. And he’d actually grown perversely fond of roasted horse anus after the first month or so. What he took exception to was the vacuum of leadership and loyalty demonstrated by his Florida hibernation. COMCENT was remote, aloof, and distant — both literally and figuratively. To those who actually prosecuted the war he was far more an abstract concept than a flesh-and-blood combatant commander.

The problem was compounded further because Johnny Vandervoort was not in his heart or soul a man o’ warsman, but a manager of war’s men. Oh, he was a talented manager; a decent if stiff and standoffish peacetime general well-versed in flowcharts, PowerPoint presentations, and systems analysis. He even had a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Pennsylvania. But he was absolutely the wrong man in the job of war fighter. Because this new kind of warfare, Ritzik understood, needed a Grant — a doer — motivated to succeed by private demons, not a McClellan — a ponderer — who preferred even-keel, slow-paced stability to the uncomfortable, rushed tumult of warfare.

0801. “Workmanlike attitude, Mike. Workmanlike attitude.” Ritzik climbed the crest of the ravine, took a few seconds to appreciate the brilliantly blue sky, then faced west. He looked longingly at the mountain range in the distance, frustrated by the way things were going. If there were two choppers in the area, there’d be more. But from where were they coming? And how many?

He pulled the retaining flap from the radio on his vest, reached down, and for the eighth time in two hours switched frequencies to try to contact Almaty. “TOC, Loner.”

He was amazed to hear Dodger’s voice reverb into his earpiece. “Loner, this is the TOC.”

Ritzik excitedly pulled a marker and a notebook out of his cargo pocket. “Sit-rep, TOC. We’ve been running in circles out here with no eyes, no ears, and a bunch of hostiles chasing our behinds.”

Dodger’s voice came back five-by-five. “You can think that if you like, Loner, but from what we saw, we suggest you change your call sign.”

“To what?”

“Tommy.”

“Come again?” Ritzik didn’t have time for this nonsense.

“Tommy.”

“Come again?”

“Tommy. Because for a bunch of deaf, dumb, and blind guys, you sure play a mean pinball.”

“Compliment accepted. Now stop kissing my ass and give us what the hell we need before the damn comms screw up again.”

0802. Sam Phillips climbed into the HIP’s cockpit and plunked himself down next to Mickey D. “Hi. I’m Sam. Rowdy Yates says you actually fly these things.”

“That’s why he’s a sergeant major. He’s always right.”

Sam said, “You ever fly one like this? A HIP?”

“Once,” the warrant officer said. “During a training course on former Soviet equipment. About three years ago.”

“No kidding.”

“Flew an MI-24P gunship, and a HIP. Except it wasn’t this model. This is a HIP-H — a hot-and-high. It’s a second-generation aircraft, configured for high altitude and hot climate. I flew the C version. First generation. A lot more basic.”

“All HIPs look alike to me,” Sam said. “How do you tell?”

“First-generation HIPs had their tail rotors on the starboard side,” Mickey D said. “These newer ones have theirs to port.”

“I’ll remember that,” Sam said, impressed. “Use it when I play Trivial Pursuit.” He toyed with the cyclical handle.

“You ever want to fly choppers?”

“Moi? No way. I hate flying. Besides, helicopters are far too complicated. Y’know, kinda like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. I could never do that. But I drove a T-72 tank, once.”

Mickey D turned toward the spook. “Why? Were you in the Russian Army?”

Sam gave the pilot a bemused look until he realized his leg was being pulled. “A guy I knew ran a mechanized infantry battalion,” Sam said. He pointed toward the snowcapped mountains to the west. “About a hundred miles that way. In Tajikistan. A lieutenant colonel. He let me drive one of his tanks for a couple of hours.”

“Sounds cool.”

“It was better than cool. I got to crush two cars driving on the training course. It was like being in a Die Hard movie.” Sam scratched his chin. “Funny thing: in the late eighties, I spent about eighteen months and about half a million tax dollars trying to convince a certain … group of people to let me photograph the inside of a T-72. It never happened. And then, all of a sudden, when I least expected it, I got an invitation to drive one.”

“You get your pictures?”

“All I wanted,” Sam said. “Of course, when I sent them off to Langley, no one was interested anymore.” He paused. “But that didn’t matter. Because you know what it cost me? Three bottles of vodka. Ten bucks’ worth of booze — and a two-day hangover.” He looked at the instrument panel and tapped the radio. “Hey, this thing work?”

“Dunno,” Mickey D answered. “I don’t do Chinese — neither does anybody on the team. So I didn’t bother to check.”

“I do a little Chinese,” Sam said. He saw the dubious expression on Mickey D’s face. “Well, enough to read a menu, anyway.”

“Read a menu, huh?” Mickey D examined the instrument console. “Wow — nothing but steam gauges,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Everything in this cockpit is analog. The chopper I usually fly is all glass.”

Sam tapped the wraparound windshield. “This looks like glass to me.”

“I’m talking display,” Mickey D said. “At the SOAR, our MH-47Es have TV screens — four of them. Everything is digital — attitude indicators, hover page, radar altitude hold.

You can even upload data from a laptop — flight plan, navigation, comms — and it’s all in front of your nose instantaneously.”

“You’re speaking a language I don’t understand,” Sam said.

“Not like Chinese, huh?” Mickey D flipped a trio of switches. Sam watched as a series of lights flickered to life on the instrument panel. The pilot took a headset from the deck between the seats, wiped the blood and brain matter off on his anorak, and pointed the big plug at a jack on the console. “R-842 high-freq radio,” he said, smacking the plug home. “Two-to-eight megahertz. Range is about a thousand kliks in good weather and no mountains.”

“Take a listen.” The pilot handed the bulky apparatus to Sam. He pointed. “That’s the transmit button. If you understand enough to read a menu maybe you could order us some takeout.”

0806. “Rowdy — Loner. Meet me at the truck.” Ritzik scampered down to the ravine floor. He saw Sam Phillips through the HIP’s windshield and waved at him to join them. He watched as the CIA officer’s index finger pointed straight up, indicating “wait a second.”

Sam pulled the headset off. “Thanks.”

“No prob.” Mickey D watched as the spook sidled out of the cockpit. “So, what’s on the menu?”

“Trouble.” Sam jumped out of the hatch and jogged to where Ritzik stood. He jerked his thumb toward the HIP. “You’re about to have company,” he said.

“I know.”

“How?”

“I finally reached the TOC in Almaty. They have satellite imagery.”

Sam nodded. “What’s the story?”

“Chinese are coming out of Kashgar. Two aircraft: a HIP and a gunship. According to what Dodger told me, the original flight was three transports and two gunships — run by some Special Forces general out of Beijing. Obviously he’s holding one of the gunships back.”

“From the chatter, they’re making good time,” Sam said. “They’re not holding anything back.”

“You heard them?”

“On the radio. Mick got it working.”

“What are they saying?”

“You gotta understand I pick up about every third word,” Sam said. “But the gist of it — at least I think so — was they think two of their choppers were attacked by a large terrorist element. They’re going to use the first two choppers to draw the enemy out, and use the second HIND to flank the tango position and attack from the rear.”

“I think—” Ritzik pressed his right hand against his earpiece. “Come again?” He listened intently. “Roger that, Shep.

“We’ve got more company than expected,” he said. He looked at Sam. “Your IMU pal Mr. Mustache is coming back, too.”

All the color drained from Sam’s face. For an instant his eyes went dead — the face of a serial killer. And then he looked at Ritzik, smiling as cold a smile as Ritzik had ever seen, and said, “It’s my natural charm. He can’t stay away.”

Ritzik frowned, momentarily knocked off course. Then he fiddled with the radio. “TOC, Loner—” There was a momentary pause. “TOC, we’re gonna stay on the air until further notice. I need play-by-play tactical overhead.” He paused. “Roger that.”

Ritzik saw Rowdy Yates jump off the tailgate of the big truck. He put two fingers to his lips, whistled shrilly to get the sergeant major’s attention, and beckoned him over.

“How’s she coming?”

“She’s got the damn thing opened up.” Rowdy stroked his Fu Manchu mustache. “I wish we had an exhaust fan. The battery fumes are pretty damn strong.”

Ritzik said, “Why not just pull the canvas off the frame?”

“I asked. Steel grommets. Steel frame. She’s worried about static electricity.”

“From canvas?”

“From everything,” Yates said. “The HE[22] is sweating. That is one nervous woman, boss.”

“With reason.” Ritzik flicked a pebble with the toe of his boot. “Tell Bill to slice the canvas so she has some light.”

“Gotcha.” The sergeant major wiped a big hand over his bald head. “I gotta tell you — if it had been me working on that thing, we’d all be vaporized by now.”

Abruptly, Ritzik said, “Rowdy, we need to buy her some time. You set an ambush — hit the sons of bitches three, four miles down the road.”

Yates blinked. “Who? Where?”

Ritzik pointed east. “Satellite says three trucks, four pickups. The TOC estimates we have about forty minutes — maybe as much as an hour.”

“That’s not a lot of time.” The sergeant major’s face grew grim. He jerked his thumb toward the truck. “She needs more than that.”

“I understand.”

“Not a lot of alternatives either.” “Huh?”

“We used up the claymores, Mike. We have Semtex, and a couple of boxes of grenades, and maybe a dozen RPG rounds — and that’s all, except small arms.”

Ritzik said, “You could rig the Semtex — cook up a land mine.”

Rowdy pulled at his mustache. “Maybe,” he said. “If I can come up with a way to shape the charges.” Ritzik said: “Just do it.”

Sam Phillips blinked. “Take Chris — X-Man — with you. He was first in his class in car-bomb school.”

Rowdy looked dubious. “Car-bomb school? Who the hell taught that, Hizballah?”

“Close,” Sam said. “Fatah.”

Rowdy’s eyes widened. “Give me a break.”

“No — it’s the truth. X led one of the first teams to train the Palestinian National Authority as a part of the state-building security programs CIA ran in the mid-nineties. It was a result of the Oslo Accords. CIA contractors taught them crisis driving and VIP protection down in Lakeland, Florida. CIA employees taught countersurveillance, interrogation, secure comms — all the tradecraft they’d need to build a security/intel apparatus once they got their own Palestinian state — at a secure site in North Carolina.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Serious? This was approved at the highest levels,” Sam said. “Of course the Palestinians turned it all around. Instead of making peace with the Israelis, they used everything we’d taught them to wage war against ‘em.”

“Well,” Rowdy said. “It is, after all, the Middle East.”

“Precisely. Anyway, X-Man met this guy from Fatah who’d spent ten years in an Israeli jail for making bombs. He was known as the Engineer. He taught X the basics of his craft. In return, X gave him rudimentary edged-weapons training.”

Rowdy said, “Throat slicing in exchange for car bombing. I like it. And all in the name of nation building.”

“Are we a great country or what?” Sam said. “I mean—”

“Hate to interrupt your history lesson, Sam,” Ritzik broke in. “But some of us gotta get to work.”

0814. “Boss—” Mickey D loped over to where Ritzik stood listening intently to an update from the TOC. Ritzik’s hand went up in the pilot’s face like a traffic cop’s. “Hold a sec.”

Ritzik nodded. “Roger that. Loner out.” The news was not good. The Chinese were airborne. Judging from the overhead, they were loaded for bear. He focused on the warrant officer. “What’s up?”

Mickey D jerked his thumb in HIP One’s direction. “It’s flyable, if not quite landable. But if I set it down gently, we might just walk away.”

The chopper was an option he hadn’t considered until now. Ritzik stared at the chopper, his brain spinning. There was no way they’d outrun the Chinese — not HIND gun-ships anyway. Mustache Man and the IMU were closing fast. And Wei-Liu had disassembled enough of the MADM to make it nigh on impossible to move it. Three nasty balls in the air. The question was, which one to shoot first.

That wasn’t hard. The way Ritzik saw it, the most pressing problem was buying Wei-Liu sufficient time to get her job done. Once she’d rendered the device safe, they could all get the hell out of Dodge and scramble over the Tajik border. That was where SECDEF had told him to go. Rockman had passed the word to the TOC that there was a Special Forces training element in Dushanbe and the president was scrambling them. The SF people would move by chopper to Tokhtamysh. There, they’d be put on backchannel comms to Ritzik’s TOC in Almaty. If he could just make it across the border, they’d be waiting for him. But the training group was an overt unit. They couldn’t come get him. Their ROEs didn’t allow them to violate Chinese sovereignty.

So he had to buy Wei-Liu time. And the best way to do that was to take the battle to the enemy. From what Sam Phillips had been able to decipher from listening in on the Chinese, the PLA element in Kashgar understood that two of their HIPs had come under fire from a large IMU element. That gave Ritzik a tactical advantage — albeit a slim one. “What’s the fuel situation?”

“External tank is about half full. Internal tanks are virtually topped off.”

“How much time does that give us?”

“Fuel’s about eighteen hundred liters. That translates into just over two hours of flight time.”

Ritzik nodded. “What about the other chopper? Can we bleed fuel out of it?”

“If there’s a dry bladder tank in the stowage compartment behind the cockpit. I haven’t checked, but if there is one and it wasn’t shot up, we could use it to siphon avgas and top off the external on HIP One.”

“There’s no time for that now,” Ritzik said. “But I’ll get some people on it.” He turned. “Rowdy—”

The burly sergeant major fishhooked. “Yo.”

“Check on the fuel situation. I’m going to take the chopper. We’ll go after the IMU force. What I’m hoping to do is make enough noise to get the Chinese coming out of Kashgar involved — draw them away from you.”

“Gotcha.”

“You guys stay here — most important thing is to give the lady time to work on the weapon.”

“Roger that.” The sergeant major gave the area a quick once-over. “Y’know, Loner, maybe we could make it look like the PLA won this one.”

“Great idea. If you go that route, you’ll have to move the nuke,” Ritzik said. “As soon as she does whatever she has to — bare minimum — get the damn MADM out of the truck. Camouflage it — give her space to work, but keep the damn thing out of sight. Flip the truck if you can. Burn it. And set the chopper off, too — once you drain the avgas.”

“Can do. We’ll make it look like this was the IMU advance party — and it was decimated.”

Ritzik said, “Hide the 4x4. You can’t let ‘em see it, Rowdy — not a hint.” He pointed up the slope. “Set up defensive positions — improvise a couple of shaped charges and set ‘em. But don’t initiate anything unless they’re about to overrun you.” He looked at the sergeant major. “Oh, hell, Rowdy, you’ve forgotten more about this than I’ll ever know.”

“Roger that, Loner.”

“But get everybody home. In case things go south and we don’t make it back, you take the 4x4 and get everybody out — Tajikistan.”

“You’ll come away just fine.”

“Maybe. But the bottom line is evade and escape, Rowdy. No tracks, no evidence.” Ritzik took in Sam Phillips’s skeptical expression. “Look, I figure if Mick and I can shift the Chinese eastward — where Mustache Man is coming from — we can focus the PLA on them, instead of us.”

“Since you like long odds I have a real estate proposition you might be interested in,” Sam said. “A seaside hotel and health spa in Chechnya — it’s a Red Roof Inn, run by real Reds. The saunas are all heated with napalm. I can let you have it for thirty cents on the dollar.”

“Okay, so I believe in Santa Claus, too,” Ritzik said. “You have a better idea?”

The CIA officer’s face grew serious. “No.” He shrugged. “Actually I don’t.” He looked at Ritzik. “Let me come with you. I’d like a crack at Mustache Man.”

Mickey D said, “Boss, I’ll need a second pair of hands in the cockpit.”

Ritzik looked at the spook. Finally, he said, “You could work the radio — translate.”

Sam shrugged. “Anything you need.”

Ritzik focused on the sergeant major. “I want to take Ty with me. And one more to help crew the chopper.”

Yates said, “Take Gino.”

“Good.” Ritzik scanned the cloudless sky. “Rowdy—” “Loner?”

Ritzik’s face was a mask. “You do what you have to. Whatever it takes.”

“Wilco.” Yates’s expression told Ritzik the message had been received.

Ritzik turned to the pilot. “Mick, let’s go hunting. Get the bird ready to fly.”

24

Mickey D strapped himself into the pilot’s seat. Sam Phillips pulled the shoulder straps tight and attached them to the waist belt. Then the spook reached down, plucked the big headset off the console, and clamped it around his ears. Ritzik and Gene Shepard held on to the flight-deck support struts, watching as the pilot’s left hand used the collective control to add throttle and increase the pitch of the HIP’s rotor blades. The ravine filled with sand and loose brush as the twin turboshafts increased thrust and the six blades began to bite the morning air.

The HIP raised itself, shaking wildly as the broken gear cleared. Mickey D fought the controls. The ravine walls were the problem. The steep incline created unnatural turbulence. The rotors weren’t getting enough air, and the HIP didn’t want to lift off — and if it did, there was a good chance he’d slam back groundward. He eased the chopper back onto the ground, listing dangerously to port. Dammit, the big chopper was out of balance. There was at least two hundred kilos more weight on the starboard side, where the external fuel tank hung.

Mickey D tried to remember what the side clearance for a HIP was, and drew a blank. Well, if he had a hundred feet of clearance on either side, he’d be okay. He looked to port and starboard. Not close.

“You guys get your asses aft,” Mickey D shouted. “Help me balance this thing out.”

“Roger.” Ritzik hand-signaled Gene Shepard, and the two of them edged aft, to where Ty Weaver had strapped himself and his big sniper rifle into port-side seats. The aircraft rose once more, lifting jerkily. The first sergeant found one of the crew safety harnesses, shrugged into it, and fastened it securely. Ritzik stopped amidships, holding on to a bulkhead strut with his right hand. His left pointed toward three boxes of machine-gun ammunition, stowed against the starboard bulkhead. “Let’s move this.”

Ritzik had already started for the opposite side of the cabin when the HIP rolled violently to port, corrected, and shot vertically twenty yards into the air. He was tossed clean off his feet and catapulted toward the open door. Shepard, strapped in, one-handed the shoulder strap on Ritzik’s body armor before he pitched out the hatch. The lanky soldier dragged Ritzik aft, found a safety harness, and attached it to him.

Then the three of them got to work. There was one seven-hundred-round ammo box already attached to the machine-gun arm, the belted rounds positioned in the feed tray. Ty secured the weapon, which was swinging freely on its pintle arm, while Ritzik and Gino unstrapped the two additional ammo boxes, dragged them port, and secured them where they’d be easy to reach using webbing attached to the canvas troop seats.

Ritzik saw something strapped down across two of the rearmost seats. He clambered aft and found the RPG launcher and three rockets that the first sergeant had brought aboard. Jeezus H. Kee-rist. Unless it was fired at just the right angle, the backblast would bring the HIP down like a rock. Ritzik started to say something, but Shepard cut him off. “Don’t worry, Loner — I got it all figured out.”

The big chopper’s nose tilted down now. As the aircraft rose into the morning sky, Mickey D increased the cyclic pitch so that as the rotor blades passed over the tail of the aircraft, they chewed more air than they did when they passed over the nose. The chopper flew forward, circling slowly.

Ritzik looked down through the open doorway. He could see his people moving purposefully, stripping the downed HIP, carrying equipment, setting explosives. They were, Ritzik noted, doing what they did best: soldiering. For an instant, it flashed across his mind that he might not see any of them again. But that’s the way it was. At the compound, you never knew if the brother-in-arms you had a cup of coffee with at zero six hundred, and who departed for Beirut, Lima, Kinshasa, or Kashgar at thirteen hundred would make it back. Delta operators were consummate warriors; the best-trained, most highly motivated shooters in the world. They were comfortable with themselves, and with their abilities, confident they could prevail in any situation, anywhere. But in the end, you could never really know how events would play out. That existential uncertainty was something people like Ritzik accepted; an integral part of their life’s equation. You assumed it like a mantle when you were accepted into the Unit. It was a fundamental part of the equipment — both physical and psychological — that you carried every time you left on an assignment.

Ritzik caught a glimpse of Rowdy clambering over the tailgate of the big truck. They hadn’t said good-bye. They wouldn’t have. Good-byes weren’t a part of their lexicon the way greetings were. And then the chopper banked away, Mick turned east, the HIP flew into the sun, keeping a steady three hundred feet above the ridgeline, and Ritzik lost sight of them all.

There was no use trying to talk — there was far too much engine noise. Ritzik looked to see if there were any headsets in the cabin, but found none. So he tapped Gino’s body armor, pointed at the machine gun, and mimed firing it.

The first sergeant nodded in the affirmative. His big gloved hands opened the feed cover to make sure the heavy rounds had been seated in the tray correctly. He slapped the cover closed, dropped the operating handle downward, and pulled it to the rear, then eased it forward. He flipped the machine gun’s rear sight up, unstrapped the arm, sighted, flicked the safety downward, and squeezed the trigger, loosing a six-round burst earthward. Shepard stuck out his lower lip as if to say, Not bad, and gave Ritzik an upturned thumb.

Ty pulled the rifle out of its case. He crossed the cabin, unlatched the starboard-side door, and slid it aft, ramming it home and securing the safety strap.

Ritzik made his way forward, stuck his head through the flight-deck hatchway, and squeezed Mickey D’s shoulder. The pilot turned his head toward Ritzik. “We’re stable,” he shouted. “Gonna be okay.”

“Good.” Ritzik pointed through the windshield. “Follow the road,” he shouted. “You’ll see them soon — they’re about twelve miles behind us.”

“You got it.”

“But don’t get close. Stand off a few miles. I want to wait for the Chinese.” He leaned toward Sam. “Anything out of Kashgar?”

“Negatory.”

“Keep listening. I’m going to check the TOC.” He rapped the spook’s shoulder. “Headset?”

Mickey D jerked his head sideways. “Sam — it’s by my left leg.”

The spook reached over and fumbled next to the pilot’s calf and came up with one. Ritzik pulled the big muffs on over his radio headset to mask the engine noise. He slipped back into the cabin, pulled a troop seat down, and dropped into it. “TOC, Loner.”

“Lo … OC.”

Ritzik repeated the call sign. But all he got out of the frigging radio was static. He stood up, made his way aft, secured himself close to the open doorway, and tried once, twice, thrice again without result.

And then, after fifteen seconds of ominous, infuriating silence, Dodger’s voice blasted into his head. “Loner, TOC.”

Ritzik exhaled. He fumbled in his cargo pocket, brought the GPS unit out, switched it on, and read out the HIP’s coordinates. “Can you give me a position for the Chinese?”

He listened for a response from the TOC, then asked, “Speed?” Ritzik entered the information in his own unit, waited, then squinted at the small screen. “I get fifty-three minutes,” he said. “Please confirm.” Ritzik listened to the response. “Roger that.” Then he switched frequencies. “Rowdy, Loner. You have a fifty-three-minute countdown. Repeat: five-three-minute countdown. Please confirm.”

Wei-Liu was not having an easy time of it. And now, on top of everything, Rowdy’d just told her he had to move the damn device within the next couple of minutes and no, he couldn’t wait. Yet all she’d managed to do in just over a half hour was to disconnect the battery. And even that hadn’t been simple.

The four nuts were corroded by acid, moisture — who knew what. It had taken every bit of her strength to loosen them from the bolts. She wasn’t worried about sparks because her tools were nonmagnetic. And she’d had four of the Delta Soldiers elevate the weapon so she could slide the thin, three-foot-square antistatic pad from her kit bag under the bomb. But between the energy field and static charges generated by the chopper as it took off, the sorry condition of the batteries, and the huge amount of energy still stored in the capacitors — with no way to drain them in this outdoor environment — the situation was still far more volatile than she would have liked.

She was sweating, even though it was no more than fifty degrees. At least she wasn’t worried about radiation. The core of the device was adequately shielded. Oh, yeah, she’d ascertained that significant factoid immediately. But the Chinese Pentolite was unstable. Over the years it had turned a sickly grayish-greenish yellow, and because of the temperature fluctuations it was weepy with drops of nitroglycerine. She would have liked to pack all two hundred or so pounds of the explosive in ice.

She hadn’t seen this kind of timing device before, although it was similar to some of the timers they’d found on the special atomic demolition munitions, or SADMs, that Soviet covert operatives had prepositioned during the Cold War. Which scared her a little bit. Wei-Liu had learned to respect Soviet design, because although it was less complex than U.S. product, it was much more cold-blooded. The Soviets were more concerned with winning a war than they were with preserving the lives of their troops or their scientists. They’d willingly absorbed more than twenty million casualties during the Second World War. Fifty million in a war with the U.S. was not unthinkable. So the lives of a couple of thousand nuclear scientists or Spetsnaz Special Forces troops didn’t matter worth a damn.

She examined the bundles of wiring, all of it colored black and all neatly ganged together in bunches of six wires, which she’d sliced out of four pliable rubberized conduits. Not what you saw in Hollywood. All of Hollywood’s atomic devices, every one, from James Bond to The Peacemaker, had neatly colored wires. Yeah—right.

Oh, if the filmgoing public ever knew the truth, Wei-Liu thought, they’d be scared out of their wits. Real bombs weren’t built with colored wires. All the wires were black. Or white. Or red, green — whatever. You tagged your wires during construction with strips of colored tape so you knew what went where. And then, when it was all finished, you pulled the color strips off and voilà: instant confusion. Not that the tactic would stop a good EOD[23] team. But it would give them pause — and keep them busy for a few hours.

Then there were timing devices. All the timers she’d ever seen in movies either ticked off the seconds analog or blinked them digitally. In real life, it didn’t quite work that way. The timers on small and medium-sized U.S. atomic demolition munitions — SADMs and MADMs — had no clocks. You armed the weapon using a highly complicated arming sequence, then set the detonator timer by punching numbers on a keypad that resembled a touch tone telephone. There was no readout.

The Soviets had much more sinister timers on their pocket nukes. They were analog jobbies, which could be set at one, three, six, nine, or twelve hours. But in point of fact, it didn’t matter. Whichever selection you made, the device was actually designed to detonate the instant you moved the switch itself. The Sovs, after all, didn’t trust their people to make individual decisions. And so the state took care of things for them.

She ran a voltmeter over the wire bundles, then gingerly separated each strand and tested them one by one. When she’d examined all thirty-six and was confident about what she’d found, she quickly snipped all but twelve. These she examined once more, using a second device. Then she separated the twelve wires into two groups of six and labeled them with red-and green-colored tape. She moved quickly now, still working carefully so as not to disturb the explosive layer that surrounded the plutonium core of the weapon. When she’d isolated the capacitor wiring and run a new ground wire from the MADM to the antistatic pad, she rose off her knees, walked to the tailgate, swung off the rear end of the truck, and searched until she located the big sergeant major. “Rowdy, I’m ready.”

0832. X-Man looked over the inventory. It was pretty sparse. He had four two-and-a-half-kilo blocks of Semtex, a hundred yards of firing wire, three blasting caps, and a single Chinese firing device. Blowing the truck was no problem. The truck had been pulled off the road to camouflage it. It sat slightly askew, its nose and right front wheel elevated. All he and Kaz had to do was fashion a shaped charge. Then they’d set the charge under the uphill side of the truck positioned between the front axle and the motor. The upward force generated by the Semtex — X-Man figured on using more than six pounds of the Czech explosive — would be more than enough to flip the vehicle. Flip it, hell. They’d blow it into next week.

But Ritzik and Yates also wanted shaped charges — which was going to be tough. It wasn’t that X-Man couldn’t build an improvised charge. Unlike Kaz, a computer-science wonk who’d reluctantly taken the one-week basic dynamite and crimp-the-blasting-cap-without-losing-a-finger course because it was required of all technical personnel, X-Man had requested every one of the explosives programs the Agency offered at ISOLATION TROPIC, which was the code-name designator for the Agency’s boom-boom school at Harvey Point, North Carolina, just outside the small town of Hertford. He was fascinated by the subject.

X’s first instructor had been a private contractor, a Brooklyn-born, seventysomething World War II veteran who called himself Roy (although it was probably an alias, since just about every instructor at Harvey Point worked under an alias). Whatever his real name might have been, Roy was irrefutably a heavily tattooed, bulldog-faced retired chief boatswain’s mate, a former member of the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams. He had first practiced his craft as a nineteen-year-old, blowing up miles of coral reefs and beach obstacles in the Pacific to create channels for Marine landing craft. He’d refined his abilities during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. According to the scuttlebutt, he’d left the Navy in the early 1970s and been “sheep-dipped” by the Agency, going to work for Bill Hamilton, Langley’s smooth-talking, genteelly diabolical head of maritime services.

Roy’s instructional style had been … unique. He flapped bent elbows against his rib cage, almost as if he were trying to fly, when he growled at his students. And The swore exactly like the chief petty officer he had once been. But he knew his stuff, and more to the point, he was Old Navy — the Navy of oral, not written, instruction. And so he passed his tradecraft on through vivid example, memorization, and anecdote, not the sort of sterile PowerPoint presentations or dry, pseudo-academic lectures they were used to. X-Man had found it hugely energizing.

Roy had started them out with the basics: two days of blasting-cap crimping. “You people at Christians In Action got friggin’ money to burn,” Roy told them the first day, tempering his language because of the three women in the course. “And so they’ll give you all the friggin’ toys money can buy. If its electronic, or cyber, or automated, they’ll buy it for you.”

The old guy paused, then fired for effect. “But lemme tell ya: that don’t mean squat. Because when you’re gonna need this stuff, you’re gonna be out in the boonies in some friggin’ sixth-world country where they ain’t got no friggin’ electricity, or friggin’ satellite-enhanced detonators, or what have you. And all you’re gonna be able to friggin’ lay your hands on is the same kind of blasting cap I used fifty years ago. Which is why I’m gonna make sure you won’t blow your friggin’ hands off when you handle your basic Mark One Mod Zero keep-it-simple-stupid blasting cap by crimping it too damn high.”

And so, X-Man and the rest of them learned. And after a while they progressed to newer-design electric and non-electric blasting caps, pencil detonators, pressure switches, and radio-controlled detonators. They set off ammonium nitrate bombs. They learned to deploy shaped-chain and cable-cutting charges, and how to position Mk-133 and Mk-135 demolition packs to collapse suspension-bridge towers and highway-overpass abutments. In the second week, Roy taught them about improvised demolitions. They learned to make shaped charges out of number-ten cans and C-4, and cobble together blasting caps out of plumbing pipe, ground tetryl, wire, and pencil lead. They learned (one of the women with some noticeable embarrassment) how to waterproof firing devices using condoms.

By the time X-Man took the three-week advanced explosives course the following year, making the earth move was a sure thing. He could flip a bus, vaporize a limo, or even collapse a bridge. Now he learned how to build car bombs, and wire cell phones so he could blow the target’s head off when the son of a bitch answered, but not disturb the hairdo of the person across the table. He made huge bombs out of fertilizer and diesel fuel, powerful enough to bring down a ten-story building. He absorbed the intricacies of platter charges, ribbon charges, breaching charges, and roof-cutters.

But no one at Harvey Point had ever taught X-Man alchemy. Making claymores without some way to contain the plastic explosive and direct its explosive force precisely where he wanted it was going to be tough.

He pulled himself to his feet and wandered over to the charred hull of the chopper. Maybe he’d be able to find something else usable inside. But after three minutes, he came up dry and decided not to waste any more time.

He watched as Rowdy and four others gently slid the MADM into its shipping container then moved it out of the truck bed. He stayed where he was: he’d had enough of It’s company. But after they muscled the damn thing up the ravine wall into a protected position some two hundred yards away, flanked by rocks and shaded by sparse trees, he and Kaz climbed into the truck and poked around.

Wei-Liu had left the MADM battery unit behind. They examined it. Probably weighed fifty, even sixty pounds. It was seeping a nasty-smelling liquid, too. Not a good sign. The truck bed was empty, so they eased themselves off the rear gate and headed back toward the meager pile of explosive.

Which is when X-Man’s eye caught the empty water cans. There were two of them, slightly dinged and painted olive drab, tossed carelessly into the ditch at the side of the road. He’d never worked with rectangular containers before. But as Roy had told them, never be afraid to improvise, and always use what you have at hand. He looked at Kaz. “What do you think?”

The sensor tech pursed his lips. “Could work,” he said. “Anything is better than nothing.”

“Agreed.” X-Man plucked the water cans off the ground, shook them to make sure they were empty, and tucked them under his arm.

25

X-Man reached under his trouser leg, retrieved the composite knife from his boot, and drove the blade through the metal side of the water can. “Ritzik wants shaped charges — Ritzik gets shaped charges.”

Kaz said, “You play with the Semtex. I can do the scut-work.”

“Great.” X-Man passed the paramilitary officer the pierced can. “Cut that whole side away.”

“Gotcha.” Kaz pulled the water can close and started sawing around the perimeter.

X-Man looked on approvingly, then unwrapped a block of Semtex. “I’m gonna knead some dough.” The security officer set a small sheet of metal from the downed chopper on the ground. Then he began to work the plastic with his hands until it was vaguely pliable. “Kaz—”

“Yo?”

“When you’re done, I need the knife back.”

“Take it.” The tech handed the blade to X-Man, who sliced a second Semtex block in two and added the smaller portion to the mix. When he’d gotten the explosive in roughly the shape he wanted, he reached over and took the water can.

Working carefully so as not to cut himself on the jagged edge, X-Man laid the blob of Semtex in the can, manipulating it until it was about three inches thick and pressed securely against all five interior walls. Then he began to shape the explosive. Starting in the middle, he formed the plastic into an inverse cone. The formula was simple: he packed the plastic explosive so that the cone was approximately one-half as deep as it was high, which formed a cone of precisely sixty degrees in angle.

“What do you think?” X-Man displayed his handiwork.

Kaz cocked his head at the explosive-filled can. “You know more than I do about these things, Chris,” he said. “But it looks a little skimpy to me.”

X-Man pursed his lips. “Roy used to say you can never have too much explosive, only too little.”

“Roy was a wise, wise man,” Kaz said. “I’m sorry I never took the course when he was teaching it.”

“He was so cool,” X-Man said. “Told us how he and two other Frogs once blew a mile-and-a-half underwater trench in Barbados as a favor to some local guy.”

“C’ mon.

“No, I’m serious. A mile and a half.” X-Man began to knead the other half of the Semtex block. “God, I would have loved to see that one.” He rolled the plastic into a salami-sized sausage, pinched off the ends, and flattened what remained. Then he layered new explosive atop the old, giving the Semtex more bulk, still careful, however, to maintain the sixty-degree angle of the cone. The cone would detonate in what was known as the Monroe effect, and would explode in an arc similar to the fan-shaped pattern of a claymore.

Once the Semtex was properly shaped and packed, he passed the can to Kaz, who used the knife to puncture the water can precisely behind the apex of the cone. Kaz inserted a detonator into the explosive. When the detonator was firmly in place X-Man examined Kaz’s handiwork and found it acceptable. Then the two of them repeated the operation with the second water can.

0845. X-Man worked his way up the crest of the ravine and along the ridge until he found where Rowdy had set up one of the two camouflaged positions. He glanced around. All things considered, the Delta men had done a remarkable job — he hadn’t seen the MADM until he was virtually on top of the device. And the firing positions were great. Rowdy’s people commanded the high ground. That alone would make an infantry assault costly. But just as valuable, he’d found positions that afforded the Delta shooters protection from air attack.

Yates was on his radio. X-Man waited until the sergeant major signed off and turned to face him. “Good news and bad news, Sarge.”

“Call me Rowdy.” Yates was preoccupied and in no mood for the spook’s lighthearted banter. “I don’t give a shit which you tell me first.”

“The good news is that we won’t have a problem flipping the truck. The bad news is that there’s only enough plastic for these two improvised devices if you want to do a good job on the truck.”

“You’re wasting my time,” Rowdy said. He held his arms out. “Let me have ‘em.”

X-Man laid the two shaped charges atop a knee-high flat rock, as reverentially as oblations. He was careful to display the explosive without disturbing the detonators. Rowdy’s eyes moved quickly over the plastic-filled cans. Then he looked up and his expression softened. “Thanks,” he said. “Good job. You two need a hand setting the truck?”

“Naw.” Kaz kicked a stone down the hill. “We can do it. We’ll let you know when we’re set to blow it.”

Yates rubbed a hand across his forehead then checked the digital watch on his left wrist. “Work fast,” he said. “We got less than a half hour until the opposition arrives.”

“Wilco, Sarge.”

Yates put on his War Face. “I said, call me Rowdy.”

“Why?”

Yates turned on him, coming up very close, eyes wide, bull neck throbbing, invading X-Man’s space. The sergeant major, X-Man realized, could become hugely intimidating when he wanted to — and X-Man wasn’t easily intimidated.

“Why?” Rowdy stared down at the younger man wild-eyed for a few seconds. Then he growled, “Because ‘Sarge’ sounds like a character played by William Bendix in all those World War Two movies.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“Bad karma, guy. The William Bendix character always used to die. The negative association could affect my feng shui.”

X-Man blinked twice. He watched as Rowdy’s mustache upturned into a sly grin. He pressed his hands palm to palm in front of his chest and bowed his head in mock reverence to the sergeant major. “I am chastened, Master Rowdy,” he said. Then he turned and scurried back down the ravine with Kaz following in his footsteps.

Yates watched them go. They weren’t bad kids — for spooks. Rowdy looked down at the IEDs[24] with approval. The kid certainly knew his explosives. Still, Rowdy didn’t have much use for spooks. His dealings with CIA had been mostly futile. In Iraq and later Somalia, CIA had been more a part of the problem than the solution. Rowdy was convinced that for all the help the suits at Langley provided Delta, the Agency’s initials should really stand for Can’t Identify Anything. In Mogadishu, faulty CIA intel caught Rowdy’s platoon in an ambush that cost him two of his troopers and a painful gut wound that took him out of action for six months. During the Kosovo campaign, Delta’s Agency liaison had been a retired Supergrade who’d been station chief in Belgrade in the mid-seventies. He’d had no contacts and no sources, and provided the Unit with no useful intelligence whatsoever. Still, it wasn’t the guys on the ground — the kids like X-Man who had some understanding of the real world — so much as the suits back at Langley who kept things screwed up so badly. Christ, they were such dumb-asses; they might as well be generals.

“Hear anything?” Ritzik shook Sam’s shoulder to get his attention, then tapped the spook’s headset.

“Negatory.” Sam shook his head, shouting to be heard over the swash of the rotors. “I think they’re maintaining radio silence.”

“Possible.” Ritzik thought for a minute. He bent his head to get himself closer to Sam’s ear. “How’s your Chinese accent?”

“Kind of like Maurice Chevalier’s English,” Sam shouted back. “I sound like a round-eyes. Why?” “I was thinking,” Ritzik said. “Maybe you could try to convince them the radio was shot up. You know — a syllable or two, and then silence?”

“I could try something real basic like wŏ bŭ-dŏng.”

“What’s it mean?”

“No comprendo — I don’t understand.”

“Could you say, ‘Can’t read you’ instead? ‘Don’t understand’ sounds pretty phrase book.”

“That’s an idiom,” Sam shouted. “I’m not fluent enough to do idioms. But I could try one-word directions to get ‘em where we want ‘em to go — y’know, dŏng, nán, xī, běi—north, south, east, west. And I could probably add left and right: zoŭmián and yòumián.”

“Up to you,” Ritzik said. “You do as much as you feel comfortable doing.”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Ritzik looked up and peered through the windshield. His hand found the radio dial and he switched to the insertion-team net frequency. “Mick—”

He watched Mickey D’s head go up and down. “Yo?”

“Your eleven o’clock, about nine, ten miles out.”

There was a three-second pause. Then: “Roger that, Loner. I see the dust trail.”

“Drop down some. Stay low — where they won’t see us or hear us for a while.”

The pilot’s head went up and down. But by the time he’d said, “Wilco,” Ritzik had already switched frequencies. He steadied himself as the big chopper slowed and lost altitude. “TOC, Loner — I need an update on the incoming flight.”

Ritzik waited for a reply. “TOC–Loner.” He transmitted the call sign a third, fourth, and fifth time. But all he heard in his earpiece was white noise.

“Curtis, can you and Goose give me a hand?” Tracy Wei-Liu had reached a critical stage of the disassembly. She’d unbolted the capacitor bank from the body of the MADM, then disconnected the fuse wires running from the energy cells into the Pentolite, easing the wires millimeter by millimeter from the capacitors. That had been the most problematic element of the exercise because there was no way of measuring whether or not any of the capacitors’ latent energy remained in the wiring. More to the point, the core of the fuse wire was made of copper — and Chinese Pentolite, Wei-Liu knew, reacted adversely to copper, brass, magnesium, and steel. There were two wires buried three inches in the pale grayish-yellow explosive. By the time she exposed the end of the second one from the capacitor unit, she’d sweated clear through her shirt.

Rowdy had put her in the most secure position he could find. She and the bomb were concealed under a ten-foot-long outcropping of rock, some twenty yards below the top of the ridge. Slightly below her position, a ragged cluster of scruffy trees, bent almost forty-five degrees by the wind, helped shield her from view. Rowdy and the rest of them had used whatever they could find to obscure her work site. They’d brought boughs from below, as well as using the tarp from the truck to create a trompe l’oeil effect of light and shadow that masked Wei-Liu and the device.

It was time to remove the capacitors, to get them safely clear of the explosives. For that, she’d need an extra pair of hands or two. The capacitors themselves were banked in an insulated rectangular box that sat atop the MADM’s hull. The fifty-five-pound battery pack, which resembled the compressor compartment of a 1930s refrigerator, had been bolted directly behind the capacitors. The battery had been removed. But acid had leaked, fusing the six capacitor-unit bolts to the metal hull. Wei-Liu hadn’t been able to budge a single one.

The two Delta shooters ducked into Wei-Liu’s hideaway. She showed them the problem.

“Give us a couple of minutes,” Goose said. He rolled onto his back and pointed a small flashlight inside the MADM shell. “Got to see the nuts.” He squinted, then pulled himself onto his knees. “Twelve millimeter — maybe thirteen,” he said. “You have a socket set, ma’am?”

“I don’t,” Wei-Liu said. “I have a set of wrenches, though — here.”

The soldiers examined the tools. Curtis fit one of the wrenches to the top bolt and twisted it. “Too big — use the twelve.”

Goose picked through the pile, found the wrench, and worked his arm inside the MADM hull. After a few seconds he said, “Damn,” and pulled his arm out. He looked at Wei-Liu. “It’s fused. Gonna have to muscle it off. You have any pliers?”

Wei-Liu retrieved a small pair from her tool satchel and displayed them. “Will these work?”

Goose’s face fell. “Needle nose,” he said. “Useless. I can’t get traction.”

Wei-Liu said, “What’s the problem?”

“The bolt head and nut are the same size,” Curtis said. “You have a single twelve-millimeter wrench. I need something to hold the bolt head tight while Goose takes the nut off.”

“Got it covered.” Goose pulled a dark multipurpose tool from a pouch on his belt. “Try this.”

He tossed the tool to Curtis, who flipped it open, revealing a set of snub-nosed pliers. “We’ll have these off in a couple of minutes, ma’am.”

Wei-Liu’s hand covered the bolt head. “Wait—”

Goose looked at her. “What’s the problem?”

“Those are steel,” Wei-Liu said. “You can’t use them — they might cause a spark.”

“Your call, ma’am.”

Wei-Liu plucked the multitool from the soldier’s hand and played with it for a few seconds. And then she extracted a saw-edged knife blade from one of the handles, locked it into place, and cut two small strips of cloth from her shirt-tail. She wrapped one strip around each of the pliers’ jaws. “Now,” she said. “Now.”

0900. “Fire in the hole.” From his position behind a boulder fifty yards upwind, X-Man shifted the safety bail on the firing device to its armed position, depressed the flat handle, and ducked. The six-pound charge of Semtex lifted the uphill side of the truck and flipped it, rolling the big vehicle onto its back in a huge orange fireball and cloud of toxic black smoke.

Kaz poked his head up to admire their handiwork. “Was it good for you, X?”

X-Man brushed debris out of his hair. “Oh, yeah. The earth really moved for me, Kazie-poo.” He waved at Yates, who gave the two spooks a smile, an upturned thumb, and then beckoned them up to his position.

“As soon as Bill and Tuzz finish siphoning off the avgas, get to work on the chopper. I want it burning when the Chinese show.”

Kaz grinned. “How come you give us all the good jobs?”

Rowdy shooed them away. “Go — play with matches. I have real work to do.”

He did, too. He had to position the IEDs where they’d do the most harm. He’d already scanned the area, trying to put himself inside the head of the Chinese commander. The PLA wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No — they’d try to drop their force above or behind. So Rowdy’d use them on his flanks. They might not stop the Chinese, but they’d slow them down.

He peered down at the overturned truck and the destroyed shell of the HIP. He knew he’d have to move the Chinese corpses again, scattering them to make it appear that they’d died overcoming the terrorists. It wasn’t something Rowdy was especially anxious to do. But it was essential if the ruse was to work. He scanned the horizon to the east, saw nothing, then glanced reflexively at the watch on his left wrist. Not nearly enough time, dammit. Not enough at all.

0906. Six detonator wires. Six detonator wires ran from the capacitors into the explosive. Wei-Liu was certain. She’d painstakingly isolated twelve from the unmarked bundles. But six of those had to be either duplicates, dummies, or re-dundants, because this MADM’s circuitry was engineered for a six-point detonation. She pulled the schematic out of her pocket, checked it for the fifth time in eleven minutes, and confirmed once again that the J-12 device was triggered by a six-point detonation.

But what if she was wrong?

She’d managed to remove and then drain the capacitor block using an improvised ground to ensure there was no significant power left. Yes, the explosive was unstable. But she’d kept it from being unduly shocked or disturbed and, more important, protected from any sudden surge from the residual power in the capacitors. So, unless someone smacked it, dropped it, or put a bullet into it, the Pentolite wasn’t going to blow. And — as she’d explained so that Rowdy and the rest of them wouldn’t worry needlessly— once she’d disconnected the wires, even if it did blow up, the explosive wouldn’t trigger the MADM’s nuclear core, because the Pentolite wouldn’t be able to detonate in the precise sequence necessary to induce critical mass. There would simply be one hell of an explosion.

“How big?” the sergeant major asked.

“Big enough,” she said, “to bring a decent-sized apartment house down.” That had obviously impressed him, because he’d moved everybody even farther away from the device than they had been.

Six-point detonation. Wei-Liu looked at her handiwork and then glanced at the schematic one last time. Okay: all she had to do was cut twelve wires, and the bomb would be rendered safe. Snip-snip. End of story.

She sighed. After everything they’d been through, twelve wires seemed so, well, anticlimactic. But what if she was wrong …

Wrong? She? Not. Wei-Liu took the nonmagnetic needle-nose pliers, double-checked to make sure she had both knees on the antistatic mat, took one deep breath, exhaled, and then clipped the six red-taped wires one after the other.

Nothing. She took another deep breath and clipped the half-dozen green-flagged ones. She set the needle-nose pliers down on the antistatic mat but remained kneeling. Two immense and totally unexpected tears of relief rolled down her cheeks.

“TOC–Loner.” Still nothing. Ritzik went forward. He tapped Mickey D’s shoulder. The pilot glanced around for an instant, then returned his attention to keeping the aircraft level. “Mick,” Ritzik shouted, “you have to take her up so I can pull a signal from Almaty.”

Mickey D didn’t acknowledge Ritzik. But his left hand adjusted the collective, his right played the cyclic control, and the chopper’s nose dipped about three degrees. Mick’s left hand shifted again on the collective and the aircraft began to rise as evenly as an elevator. At one thousand feet, Mick slowed the ascent and the HIP began a gentle sweep to the south. Ritzik pressed the transmit button. “TOC–Loner.”

“Loner — TOC.”

Thank God. “Dodger — sit-rep.” Ritzik listened, tapping coordinates into his handheld and getting them repeated so he knew they were on the money. The Chinese were coming out of Kashgar from the northwest — still only two of them: one HIP and a HIND gunship.

“No sign of the other HIND?”

“Negatory, Loner. It departed Kashgar, but we have no position for it.”

Ritzik didn’t like that at all. But there was nothing he could do about it. Meanwhile, the imagery showed the remaining two aircraft were making a wide swing over the desert. That made sense: they’d make their attack from the east so they’d be coming out of the sun. “Keep me posted.”

Ritzik made his way aft, carefully picking his way around Ty Weaver, who was dry-firing through the open hatch from a sitting position. “How’s it going?” he asked the sniper.

Weaver looked up. “? — Okay, boss.” He watched as the officer moved past him, then slipped back into his shooter’s frame of mind. This sit was A-Okay, all right. It was an AOkay FUBAR.

Weaver was faced with a sniper’s operational nightmare. All sniping is based on a few basic principles. Consistency is the most elemental of these, because consistency equals accuracy. Breathing, sight picture, spot weld, trigger pull, body position, platform stability, rifle, sight, and ammunition — the more these elements of shooting are kept consistent, the more accurate the sniper will become.

He adjusted the sling, then slipped into an open-legged sitting position. In most circumstances, Ty preferred not to use the sling. But there were times — like this one — when he needed every bit of help he could get. He extended his left leg slightly to provide himself a little more stability as the chopper bounced, pressed his cheek against the stock, swung the big rifle right/left, then left/right, found himself an imaginary target, and eased his finger onto the trigger. As he did, the HIP hit an air pocket and he lost his spot weld. The shot would have gone wild. Solution: Concentrate, schmuck. And hold the damn rifle more securely.

The rifle, ammo, and scope were no problem. Ty could play this particular 7.62 instrument like a bloody Stradivarius. He’d put thousands of rounds through the MSG90. He knew how it would perform with a cold barrel, and where the rounds would go after two, three, four, five, even ten shots. He’d tuned his own body to the rifle’s unique vibrations, and so was able to read and understand even the most minute variation in the tuning-fork sprong that coursed through the gun and through him every time he pulled the crisp, beautifully unfluctuating three-pound trigger. Those things wouldn’t change.

But Ty knew he could forget about platform consistency. The platform was the chopper deck, which was not only vibrating from the engines and rotor blades, but moving left, right, up, and down. Not to mention the ear-shattering noise. Body position? He could shoot offhand — standing up — but only if the chopper remained in a steady hover. Not bloody likely in combat. Shooting from a prone position was out of the question, because the field of fire from the chopper would be way too narrow. That meant he’d be reduced to using a kneeling or a sitting position. Sitting also restricted his field of fire to some degree. But it was a lot more stable than kneeling — especially given the chopper’s constant bumpy motion.

Sight picture was another important element of consistency. But it, too, was going to be problematic. Back at the CAG, Ty had worked for hours to maintain the consistency of his sight picture. His spot weld — the placement of his cheek against the rifle’s stock — was exactly the same whenever he pulled the trigger. That uniformity produced the exact same eye relief — the distance from his eye to the scope’s rear lens — every single time he put the rifle to his shoulder. Consistent eye relief, in turn, resulted in an identical sight picture through the scope. Today, the HIP’s motion would make maintaining consistent spot weld and sight picture problematic. Not impossible: Ty had worked to develop sniping proficiency from virtually any kind of platform, including choppers. But the HIP added hugely to the degree of difficulty he’d be attempting.

Follow-through was also going to be a predicament. In normal circumstances — like the ambush at Yarkant Köl — Ty had been able to maintain the consistency of his shooting through the stability of his follow-through, which meant that between the time he fired the shot and the bullet actually left the gun there was no movement of the barrel. Stability ensured that the sight picture never changed, not even by a hairbreadth, in the roughly quarter of a second between the trigger pull, the sear release, the firing pin striking the primer, and the bullet traveling down the MSG90’s 23.62-inch barrel and emerging from the harmonic stabilizer or the sound suppressor. Proper follow-through was going to be difficult when, even though the rifle might not move, the platform was guaranteed to shift between trigger pull and bullet departure.

Then there was angle compensation. It is easiest to shoot straight across a flat space — shooting on a target range, for example. The flatter the angle, the less the shooter has to compensate for uphill or downhill trajectory, which has to be figured differently from bullet drop, crosswind, or temperature and humidity fluctuations.

At an uphill angle of forty-five degrees, for example, you can put your crosshairs dead center on the target, pull the trigger — and your shot will miss its mark, going high by about eight inches. The difficulty of shooting from the chopper would be compounded because Ty knew he’d be snap-shooting at extreme angles of thirty, forty, even sixty degrees as Mickey D maneuvered the HIP under battle conditions. It would be kind of like trying to shoot ten out of ten bull’s-eyes while riding a roller coaster. No — it would be like trying to shoot from one moving roller-coaster car to a target sitting in a second moving roller-coaster car. All things considered, Ty thought, the situation was nasty enough to make a man take up the “spray and pray” shooting technique, or think about forgetting everything he’d ever learned, and reverting to “Kentucky” windage.

0912. Ty sensed Ritzik moving past him. He was shouting, but the sniper paid the major no mind. He was completely focused on his own situation, working Zen-like to exclude every bit of extraneous stimuli, until only he and the rifle remained. If he could accomplish that much, he’d be able to overcome the physical obstacles and do what he had to.

Suddenly the chopper hiccuped, knocking him out of position. The HIP dropped like a stone, recovered, twisted into the sun at a forty-degree angle, fighting its way into the sky. The sniper was slapped to the deck and rolled aft. He fought to maintain what was left of his balance, cradling the big rifle to keep it from smashing into a bulkhead or seat. Oh, this was not going to be any fun at all.

26

“Loner, TOC. Your bogeys are coming in from the east. Distance is twenty-two miles and closing.”

“Roger that, TOC.” Ritzik hand-signaled Gene Shepard to hang on. He worked his way forward to the cockpit, stepping around the sniper, who was focused, trancelike, on a spot somewhere outside the aircraft.

“Mick,” Ritzik shouted, “let’s do it.”

“Hoo-ah, boss.”

Ritzik’s fingers whitened around the cockpit support struts as the HIP dropped. “Mick?”

“Yo?”

Ritzik’s knees flexed as if he were shooting a mogul course as the craft twisted violently, recovered, shot upward, and finally veered to its left, turning into the sun. “Get us in position for Ty to take the other pilots out before they discover we’re not friendly.”

“Roger that. What side is he shooting from?”

“Port side. Port side.” Ritzik squinted through the windshield as the chopper regained even flight. Then he turned and staggered aft, holding on to whatever he could find for support.

Sam Phillips’s stomach queased as the HIP abruptly lost altitude. He fought the nausea, finally regaining his equilibrium as Mick brought the craft around. Instinctively, he reached up and snugged the shoulder straps that held him against the seat back. Sam had never much liked flying, and choppers made him a lot more nervous than planes. They were, he thought, complicated, hard-to-fly aircraft that required total concentration on the part of their pilots. Indeed, as he’d watched Mickey D familiarize himself with the HIP’s responses, he’d been amazed that the pilot could keep the big bird in the air at all, single-handedly. And when Mick hovered the HIP the first time, Sam swore he could smell the tension rolling off the pilot’s body and permeating the cockpit.

“Sam, Sam!”

Mick’s shout brought Sam back to reality. He pulled off the headset. “Yo?”

“Sun visor.”

“Gotcha.” The spook reached over, swung the lightweight plastic around, and rotated the visor screen down across the windshield. “Okay?”

“Roger that.” Mick glanced down at a screen on the console that sat in the middle of the nose, right between the two seats. “Sam, turn that second switch to your left.”

Sam put his hand on a black knurled knob on the console’s bottom row. “This one?”

The pilot’s chin thrust forward. “One row up.”

“This one.”

“Yup.”

Sam turned the knob. A green radar screen flickered to life. Mick checked it, then shouted, “Right-hand switch, top row. Throw it.”

Sam moved the toggle upward. “What did I just do?”

“If I remember correctly, you turned the manual IFF transponder shutoff switch to its off position.”

The move made no sense to Sam at all. “Why did I do that?”

“So I can convince the other aircraft we have transmission problems.” Mick eased the HIP into a shallow descent, skimming the aircraft no more than a hundred feet above the nap of the land. “When I yell, flip it the other way.”

“I’m gonna put the headset back on,” Sam shouted, his hands miming earpieces.

Mick’s head bobbed up and down. “Roger.” He paused as he adjusted the chopper’s attitude. “Remember—”

“What?” Sam adjusted the head strap and pulled the bulbous mike close to his lips.

“Double orders of pot stickers and Hunan beef — extra spicy.”

0914. Gene Shepard ran a gloved hand over his safety strap, which was turnbuckled to a bulkhead strut. He’d attached the webbing to his belt. It allowed him side-to-side movement, but was short enough to ensure that his body would stay inside the aircraft even if the HIP were to bank at a sixty-degree angle. He adjusted his own communications gear, then swung around and double-checked Ty Weaver’s safety straps. The sniper’s tether was shorter than Shepard’s so that he could use his weight and its natural tension to steady himself.

When he was satisfied, he shook the sniper’s shoulder. Ty gave him an upturned thumb, then settled down facing the open port-side doorway, his rifle in the crook of his arm.

Shepard waited until his teammate was in position. Then he stepped to the aft side of the doorway, unsecured the machine gun, and swept the weapon left and right, up and down, to make sure it had full play. He’d be the first one firing at the IMU convoy. But once the PLA aircraft hove into view, he’d have to stay clear of the sniper’s field of fire.

Ritzik stood just aft of the cockpit, watching as his men prepared for battle. It was at times like this that he was conscious of how great a blessing God had bestowed on him because He’d allowed him the chance to go to War with men like these not once but dozens of times. At Delta, there were few renegades, few rogues, few prima donnas. They just didn’t last. Oh, there were personality conflicts aplenty. And Delta, like other SpecOps units, had seen a small but still unsettling share of domestic-violence cases. And sometimes people just plain pissed one another off — and settled things with their fists. But once they’d passed the Selection for Delta and been through the battery of psychological exams, the men tended to find their own place, then stay with the unit for years. Some, like Rowdy, had been there more than a decade. Which was why, when it came down to times like this, there were no better Soldiers on the face of the earth than these Warriors with whom Ritzik was privileged to serve. And his true gift from God was that he’d been allowed to know and understand that fact.

And then the moment was over. He checked his own web gear, then unstrapped the AK from the seat where he’d stored it, pulled himself aft until he reached the starboard doorway, secured himself in a firing position, patted the chest pouches that held a dozen of the Chinese grenades, slapped a fresh mag into the receiver, and chambered a round.

0919:15. Mickey D banked right, then left, at about seventy knots, guiding the HIP along a series of small ridges. He glanced at the radar screen, raised the chopper’s nose, then pulled hard left. “Sam — Sam — throw the switch.”

Gene Shepard balanced on the balls of his feet, hands on the machine gun, as the big airframe rolled up, then down, then hove to. Four heavy trucks popped into his field of view. He flipped the safety off with his right thumb, brought the stock up against his shoulder, found a sight picture, and loosed a six-round burst at the first of the trucks. His rounds kicked up stones six yards beyond the vehicle’s squared-off hood. Shepard compensated, swung back, leaned into the weapon, and fired again.

Mickey D’s eyes caught something on his radar. “Sam — Sam throw the damn switch.”

“Roger.” Sam’s right hand toggled the IFF control. He watched the pilot in amazement. Mick’s arms and legs were flailing independently; his body was actually twitching in the seat. His eyes were buggy. The pilot looked to Sam as if he were receiving electroshock treatment.

0919:30. Mick called, “Contact-contact-contact.” The HIP banked, then kicked skyward. Sam grabbed a cockpit strut, his knuckles white. He fought motion sickness. And then, in his earphones, Sam heard Chinese. It was like a slap in the face. He’d missed the transmission. Heard it, but missed it. He’d screwed up. Worse, because he was still at the stage where he had to listen word by word, then produce an English subtitle in his brain before he could make sense of what was being said. Sam forgot about the chopper’s motion, shut everything else out, and fought to concentrate on what was coming through his headset.

0919:32. Ritzik saw the IMU truck column as the HIP flashed over it. He tried to get a burst into one of the vehicles, but the chopper rolled to port, and all he saw was sky. Even with the ear-shattering noise, he could make out something in his earpiece. He turned the volume up full.

It was Mick’s voice. “Contact-contact-contact.”

And then Ritzik was slapped against the deck as the chopper popped three hundred feet straight up, corkscrewed counterclockwise twice, banked hard left, then right, and then dove straight for the convoy.

0919:36. The 62’s tall leaf rear sight, Gene Shepard concluded, was going to be useless, except to align with the thick front post. He felt the chopper’s violent series of moves under the soles of his Adidas. But he wasn’t thrown off his stance because his body was compensating gyro-scopically for each twist and turn. He was in a groove now, reacting to every minute nuance of Mick’s piloting. Pinball wizard. The HIP rolled slightly, and then the convoy appeared at the left edge of Shepard’s peripheral vision. He brought the machine-gun arm around, dropped the muzzle until his front sight was where he wanted it to be, and then stitched the trucks broadside as Mick gave him a seven-second window of opportunity. He could see splinters flying as the fat, 7.62 rounds impacted on target. And then the HIP veered away and nosed into the sky. Shep heard the slap-slap-slap of rounds as ground fire chased them.

0919:46. Ritzik saw the Chinese aircraft — both painted with the same distinctive camouflage pattern as the HIP. They were coming from his left — out of the sun. And then Mick banked, turned, and the two PLA aircraft disappeared from view. Ritzik yelled a warning.

0919:49. Ty Weaver had the big HK up. He was sitting open-legged, his rear end planted firmly on the decking, right leg tucked, knee bent almost ninety degrees, his left leg extended so his butt and feet formed a makeshift tripod. He’d wrapped the sling around his left arm to give himself increased stability. The bottom of the triceps muscle on his right arm was supported by the outside of his right knee so that bone didn’t rest on bone. That was the rule: soft against hard; hard against soft. His hand held the rifle stock firmly in the hollow of his shoulder; Ty’s cheek pressed against the comb, making a solid spot weld.

Except — he couldn’t see. The sun’s glare was too bright. And then Ty felt Mickey D shift the chopper’s attitude, moving slightly to the left. The starboard side of the Chinese HIP floated slowly into his frame of view. The sight picture was perfect. Ty’s right hand shifted slightly, moving onto the knurled knob to adjust the parallax. Then he was back on the trigger, concentrating on breathing, on the target, and on the crosshairs, zoning everything else out of his consciousness.

0919:52.”Toggle the switch, Sam. Toggle the switch.” Mickey D swung the chopper around smoothly so as to give the sniper the most stable environment possible. He caught the spook’s hand in his peripheral vision as Sam worked the IFF switch. The pilot saw the Chinese HIP slow and hover so the HIND gunship could make its first pass.

0919:52. Gene Shepard watched, transfixed, from the corner of the starboard-side doorway as the HIND wheeled, straddled the road, and tore into the convoy with its Gatling gun and rockets. It moved almost lazily over the panicked Uzbeks, its heavily armored fuselage impervious to ground fire.

0919:55. Mick maneuvered the HIP, keeping level with the Chinese transport at a distance of three hundred yards, and as evenly as he could, he slowly rotated the craft counterclockwise. His lips were moving: “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, Ty — get the job done.”

0920:00. The glassed-in cockpit panned inside Ty‘s field of view. He compensated for the distance using the Mil-Dots in his reticle, eased the fine crosshairs where they belonged, held steady, and squeezed the trigger, sending the 168-grain boat-tail bullet on its way.

0920:01. The Chinese HIP dropped like a stone. TV’s scope followed the chopper until the aircraft slipped below the HIP’s floor line. He knew he’d hit the pilot. But now the HIP had turned, and he didn’t have a clear shot at the left-hand seat. He crabbed forward, straining at the safety straps, until he could see the HIP’s air intakes three football fields away. No good: they had baffles. The Chinese chopper yawed clockwise, then held steady as the copilot gained control over the craft. Ty caught the confused expression on the door gunner’s face. The man was shouting into his microphone. Instantly, Ty’s crosshairs quartered the gunner’s face and held on the bridge of his nose. He squeezed off a second round. The machine gunner went down. Now he raised the crosshairs until they found the HIP’s starboard-side engine exhaust. Ty put three quick rounds into it.

The MSG90’s bolt locked back. Ty unslung the heavy gun, released the magazine, and let it drop onto the decking. He felt Mickey D rotate the chopper. But Ty fought off distraction. He reached for a second five-round mag, which he rammed home. Then with his left hand he slapped the cocking bolt forward and reslung the rifle. He shouldered the weapon and made his spot weld. But there was nothing in his sight picture except a wisp of gray-brown smoke.

0920:05. Ritzik, strapped securely to a turnbuckle, dangled his legs out the port-side doorway. He peered out and saw the Chinese HIP, pluming smoke, keel over to its right, then fall away, spin out, nose stonelike, two hundred feet to the ground, and explode in a huge fireball, its rotors shattering into shrapnel. Then he lost sight of the burning craft as Mick put their own HIP into a tight, evasive turn, then flattened the aircraft out to make a strafing run at the convoy.

0920:06. Sam screamed, “They don’t know what the hell’s going on. They think they’re taking ground fire.” He swiveled in the copilot’s chair and shouted once again so Ritzik would know what was happening. But his voice was lost in the scream of the engines as Mickey D put the chopper into a tight turn and swooped down toward the IMU trucks.

0920:16. Gene Shepard swung the machine-gun muzzle forward. He was leaning out the HIP’s doorway, the wind slapping at the high collar of his bulletproof vest, the dead Chinese door gunner’s ill-fitting soft helmet jammed on his head, its chin straps flapping wildly in the slipstream. The road was below. Mick had them right where they had to be. Shep strained against his web harness, dropped the muzzle slightly, which put the wide post of the front sight directly in the middle of the road. As soon as his peripheral vision picked up the last boxy truck in the IMU convoy, he flicked the safety up, tightened his finger on the 67’s heavy trigger, and watched as the armor-piercing rounds kicked up gravel in the center of the road at the rate of 650 per minute.

0920:21. Mickey D kept the HIP centered above the convoy, watching the chopper’s shadow as it moved down the road toward the IMU convoy. He adjusted his airspeed; shifted his cyclic stick and pedals, dropping the HIP to fifty feet, so he could come in flat, at about eighty knots. He sensed the dull chatter of Shep’s machine gun, although he had a hard time actually separating it from the other noise.

Besides, there was a more pressing problem to deal with. The HIP was giving him no quarter. It was a cumbersome, awkward helicopter; sluggish, unwieldy, slow to respond — a burro of an aircraft.

Mick thought, And what’s the first step to flying a burro? You use a two-by-four and get its bloody attention. His left hand fought the collective lever. No sooner did he have it under control than the cyclic shaft in his right hand began to stutter. The pedals felt as if they’d been lubed with molasses. He bullied the controls into submission and finally brought the HIP where he wanted it to be, pulled up, swung around, and readied the aircraft for the next run.

0920:24. Sam Phillips pressed the mike against his lips. “Wŏ bŭdŏng. Wŏ bŭdŏng.” Holding his hand over the foam he pushed the mike up over his head and shouted at Mickey D. “They were asking how we’re doing.”

Mick’s head went up and down once. But he couldn’t answer — he was too effing busy trying to stay out of the HIND’s way. The big, hunchbacked gunship had come around behind him and Mick wanted those guns and rockets nowhere near his six. He dropped the HIP’s tail, flared left, and pushed the big transport chopper into the sky as the gunship flashed past.

As it did, Mick caught a glimpse into the HIND’s tandem cockpits. The gunner/copilot occupied the front position, protected by a thick flat pane of armored glass. Above and behind him, separated by heavy armor and more bulletproof glass, sat the pilot. The fuselage door was shut — no sign of a waist gun — so there was probably no third crewman aboard this morning. Give thanks for small blessings. Mick harassed the controls until he’d slowed the HIP and he could see as the HIND yawed right, swerved, and started its shallow dive toward the convoy.

0920:29. Sam heard chatter in his headset — the HIND pilot was talking to him. He flicked the switch on/off, on/off, and repeated his message, trying like hell to sound authentically Mandarin, and knowing in his heart that he was nowhere close.

Mick brought the HIP around so he could watch. The HIND was an ungainly aircraft for a gunship, way too big and heavy to be maneuverable on the battlefield the way, say MH6 Little Birds, Apaches, or even Cobras were able to pop up, shoot, and dart away. Well, the damn thing weighed twenty-two-thousand-plus pounds at takeoff — almost three tons more than the American Apache tank-killer. And its avionics were no more advanced than the HIP’s sluggish controls. Hell, Mick could outmaneuver a HIND even in one of SOAR’s big double-rotored MH-47E Chinooks. But he couldn’t outrun one. HINDs were fast. And deadly. It had that four-barrel Gatling-type gun in its nose. And under its stubby, downswept wings — which provided the craft with more than a quarter of its lift during forward flight — were four pods, each holding twenty 80mm rockets. On the HIND’s wingtips, two missile rails each held what looked like two of the old Soviet AT-3 “Sagger” antiarmor missiles. Mick turned to the spook next to him and shouted, “Watch.”

The HIND lined up on the road again. Sam could see the IMU guerrillas scattering, running into the scrub grass, trying to find cover. Half a dozen of them were carrying loaded RPG launchers. But he knew the rocket grenades would be useless against the gunship unless it was hovering. From about twelve hundred yards, the HIND fired one of its Saggers. The last truck in the convoy was vaporized in a bright yellow-red ball of fire.

The HIND kept coming. Eight hundred yards out, the gunship loosed a barrage of rockets that exploded wide of the road, sending shrapnel into the fleeing Uzbeks. The ugly chopper dropped to a hundred feet, its Gatling gun chewing the roadbed, making furrows, cutting the convoy and the terrorists to pieces.

Its strafing run completed, the HIND veered away to port, pulled up in an unexpectedly gentle climb, and turned into the sun. Sam watched as an Uzbek crawled out from under a truck, pulled himself to his feet, and emptied his AK ineffectively at the HIND’s armored belly. Mick eased the HIP over the smoldering convoy and Sam felt the aircraft shudder as Gino opened up with their own machine gun and cut the guerrilla in two.

“Jeezus H—” From nowhere, four rockets bracketed the HIP, streaked past, and exploded on the desert floor. Sam managed to choke out, “Didja see that?” And then he succumbed, turning ad nauseam green as Mickey D threw the HIP into a tight climb, rolled to the left, dropped, twisted, revolved, then climbed, leaving the spook’s stomach somewhere far behind.

“Hang on, Sloopy,” the pilot screamed. “The sons of bitches just figured out we ain’t with them.” Mick muscled the big chopper almost ninety degrees onto its right side, throttled full, and twisted the aircraft in the second eardrum-popping, breath-stopping, gravity-defying move in less than fifteen seconds, leaving Sam feeling as if he’d just put in a couple of hours of hard time on one of the ride-and-pukes at King’s Dominion.

27

Mike Ritzik got the hint they’d been unmasked when he found himself suspended completely outside the open doorway, separated from the ground by a worn, two-inch-wide canvas strap and a carabiner that had probably been made by prison labor in Shenyang. The shock of the violent evasive move pulled the AK out of his hands and he watched it disappear between his legs. He looked down and saw the ground directly below his feet. Then the HIP rolled again and he was yo-yo’d back inside the cabin and smacked rudely onto the deck face first.

He took hold of the door-frame support to keep himself inside just in case Mickey D decided to try crazy eights again, then craned his neck to make sure Ty and Gino were still among the living. The sniper was walking on his knees, his arms wrapped protectively around the HK, heading for someplace he could strap the weapon down. Gene Shepard was working frantically to secure the machine gun’s pintle arm.

Ritzik’s eyes scanned the cabin. He saw the RPG rockets tied down aft, pulled himself more or less upright, detached from the bulkhead, quickly secured the safety harness to the overhead rail with the carabiner, and lurched aft toward the grenade launcher, only to be swept off his feet as Mickey D dropped the HIP’s nose and began to slalom the chopper wildly toward the ground. Ritzik slid forward a yard and a half, finally coming to rest against the cockpit bulkhead.

0921:21. “Help me find him, Sam — help me find him.” Mick had lost the HIND somewhere behind them. He was vulnerable. No place to be. He gave the HIP all the throttle it could stand and started an evasive sequence that took them in a clockwise corkscrew at about a sixty-eight-degree angle, followed by a rapid climb and an outward turn, followed by a series of quick, veering, downward maneuvers that brought him back over the IMU convoy at a height of about thirty feet.

As they flashed by, Mick heard the ping of rounds on the airframe. He jogged the HIP left, then right. As he pulled past the burning truck that had led the decimated convoy, and swerved violently to his right, a rocket streaked from somewhere behind him on the desert floor.

Damn convoy hadn’t been decimated enough, Mick decided.

Five hundred yards behind Mickey D the HIND wrenched itself out of its attack trajectory, twisted away, released chaff, and pulled hard to starboard at a dangerous angle, flying east, away from the chaff.

The rocket seemed to waver, then veered toward the HIND’s countermeasures and headed west, its trail visible as it cut through the floating, shiny chaff cloud and vanishing into the morning sky.

0921:27. “What the hell was that?” Ritzik pulled himself into the cockpit area.

“Dunno, boss.” Mick jogged the HIP slightly to the south. “SA-7 of some kind. Maybe a Strela. Maybe a Chinese HN-5. Who the hell knows? It was moving too fast.”

“Damn.” That was all they needed. “We’re vulnerable,” Ritzik said. The HIP didn’t carry countermeasures.

“You guys strap in,” Mick said. “Lemme deal with this.”

0921:39. Mick pulled the HIP’s nose up slightly and careened westward, fifteen yards off the desert floor, chest heaving, his eyes scanning for the gunship. He finally caught a glimpse of it at his four o’clock, turning into him, running flat-out balls to the wall, altitude about six hundred feet.

Where the hell had the gunship been hiding? He’d done a frigging three-sixty and still he hadn’t seen the goddamn thing.

0921:43. Mick let the son of a bitch come on. He knew the HIND’s rockets wouldn’t do him any good — not at such an oblique angle. It was the Gatling he had to worry about. The frigging HIND could fire thirty degrees left or right of center. Mick gave himself more throttle and increased the collective pitch, pulling the HIP up vertically, keeping his own craft out of the fatal sixty-degree funnel. The HIND followed.

“C’mon, c’mon, you asshole — try this.” Mick’s eyes narrowed. Suddenly he decelerated, bringing the HDP into a hover. As the HIND flashed past, Mick popped the HIP straight up, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen hundred feet. If the gunship was fully loaded — and it appeared to be — it was virtually incapable of quick stops and hovering.

0921:50. Ritzik, Ty, and Gene Shepard rolled onto their hands and knees as the HIP slowed to a hover just above two thousand feet. Ritzik reached for the troop seat just forward of the port-side doorway and pulled it from its storage position. “You guys better do a Bette Davis,” he croaked.

“Betty who?” Gino Shepard’s words were lost in the chopper noise, but Ritzik understood the first sergeant’s raised shoulders. Ritzik dropped onto the seat and secured the harness.

He shouted, “She’s the one who said, Tasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night.’”

0922:11. Mickey D watched as the HIND arced into a wide turn, then fought for altitude, flying an intercept route that would cut them off from escape. Mick’s eyes scanned the horizon. They were sitting above the road as it came off the desert basin and curved into the foothills. The burning convoy sat to the HIP’s north and west by about two kliks — just over a mile. The nose of the front truck was less than a kilometer from where the desert plain’s lunarlike surface gave way to the sixty-foot dunes and S-curved ravines leading to the two mountain ranges that marked the Chinese-Tajik border. Mick rotated the HIP once in a three-sixty to make sure the second HIND was nowhere in sight. And then he popped the HIP another three thousand feet into the sky. “Your move, asshole.”

The gunship climbed steadily toward the HIP. At eight hundred yards or less, the Gatling was deadly. The rockets had three times that range.

Mick watched as the HIND’s profile grew larger and larger. And then, as it drew within two kilometers, maybe a little more, the gunship loosed two quick quartets of rockets.

Mick dropped the nose of the HIP toward the desert floor, rotated so he faced the HIND, then dropped the chopper in a vertical plunge, as sudden and violent as an elevator whose cable has been sheared off.

The HIP’s airframe protested by buffeting violently. Hell, the damn thing hadn’t been built for aerobatics. Mick literally stood on the pedals to maintain control as the HIP dropped below the eight rockets. His left arm fought to decrease the collective while his right somehow managed to maintain the cyclic pitch in a neutral attitude.

At less than a hundred feet above the deck he adjusted the cyclic pitch and added throttle, dropping the nose slightly and putting the HIP into forward flight. He skimmed above the desert, heading straight for the burning convoy. Above and behind him, the HIND loosed another rocket barrage.

Mick yanked the collective and the HIP jumped skyward, accelerating to two thousand feet. When he saw the rockets strike, he dropped the HIP and skimmed the ground once more. “I can’t see him, Sam — where the hell is he?”

Sam Phillips twisted in the left-hand seat, but all he saw was empty sky. “Can’t see him, Mick.”

The pilot yawed left, then right. “Damn—” He yanked the HIP skyward and to the left. A hundred yards in front of the chopper’s nose, an RPG rocket flashed into the sky. “Sorry.” Mick regained control, eased the HIP back toward the deck, and flashed over the convoy, shouting into his throat mike: “Loner, Loner, can you see him?”

Ritzik heard Mickey D’s voice in his earpiece. But the noise in the cabin was too loud to make out what the hell the man was asking. “Come again, come again,” he shouted, and then clapped his hand over his ear, trying like hell to shut the din out.

Message received. “Hold on—” Ritzik reached up then slid the carabiner onto the port-side safety rail, ratcheted the web strap as tight as he could, then released the seat harness and stood up, his right hand tight on the door frame. He pulled himself into the doorway, then stuck his head outside.

The suction of the slipstream almost pulled Ritzik out of the aircraft. He braced himself with his right hand. And then, using the safety strap to steady himself, he pulled himself aft, grabbed the rear door frame with both hands, and stuck his upper body out the doorway.

The HIND was directly on their six, perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards above the HIP, and less than a mile away. It was closing fast. Ritzik could see the flashes from the rocket pods as the gunship fired another burst. Instinctively, he ducked his head back into the cabin and shouted, “Rockets!” into his mike.

The HIP shot into the sky again, knocking Ritzik off his feet, slamming the back of his head into the door frame.

Everything went black and white. Ritzik saw big white spots in a black universe. And then he was on his butt, his back against the folded troop seat. Gino’s gloved hand was on his neck, and the first sergeant was drizzling water in his face. He struggled to his knees. “I’m okay, I’m okay.” Gino released him. Ritzik wiped his face, raised his goggles and swabbed the water out of his eyes, crawled back into the doorway, and stuck his head outside.

The HIND had gained on them. It was still directly behind the HIP, less than a mile out, and four, maybe five hundred feet above them, high enough to be able to block Mick’s evasive maneuvering — a fast-reacting cornerback angling on a wide receiver. Ritzik watched the ground blur as the HIP veered north and dropped to within twenty feet of the ground. The narrow ribbon of road came into his field of vision as Mick pushed the HIP westward, balls to the wall.

Ritzik caught the flash of the Gatling, but couldn’t see the rounds. Now the IMU convoy flashed by directly beneath the HIP’s wide body and disappeared behind them.

Something dangerous tore into the HIP’s belly, shaking the aircraft. And then Mick slammed the HIP into a flat, ninety-degree right-hand turn, pointing the transport’s nose north. Ritzik lost sight of the HIND.

In the cockpit, Mick’s hands felt as if they’d sweated clear through his Nomex flying gloves. Maybe they had: the leather finger pads were slightly sticky on the controls. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except keeping the HIP steady, running at full throttle mere feet above the burning convoy, giving whoever on the ground had the missile — if they did have another missile — a tough target. It was human nature: give somebody a choice between a hard target and an easy one and they’ll take the easier shot.

The HIP burst through the ground smoke — but took no ground fire. Just beyond the western side of the convoy Mick used the smoke as cover, rotated the HIP six, seven, eight hundred yards to the south, then literally slid behind the first line of dunes and dropped into a hover, putting the convoy and the line of dunes between the HIP and the gunship.

Mickey D popped the HIP above the sixty-foot dune and watched as the HIND pilot took notice and abruptly changed course. Mick grinned at Sam. “Greedy, greedy,” he said, watching as the Chinese adjusted his angle of descent then accelerated and careened to the south at about six hundred feet to begin his strafing run.

Which is when the IMU guerrillas fired their second SA-7. Sam was transfixed as the HIND jogged violently left, then right, then pivoted to climb away from the convoy, releasing bunches of chaff.

Except this time Mickey D had suckered the HIND broadside to the IMU missile launcher. Broadside meant that the gunship’s jet exhausts, located amidships, just forward and above the chopper’s stubby wings, were now exposed to the missile’s sensors. And just like scissors cut paper but rock breaks scissors, the fat, round, hotter-than-hot exhaust from twin Isotov TV-3-117 turbines trumps chaff every single time in the missile-sensor playbook.

Frankly, Mick didn’t give a rusty F-word whether the IMU was firing an ancient Soviet SA-7, or a newer Strela-2, or a stolen Chinese HN-5. All he knew was that every one of those missiles was an old-fashioned heat-seeker. To work properly, they required a heat source — the exhaust — to lock on to, and a minimum range of five hundred meters for the fired missile to arm itself. Which, Mick noted with satisfaction, was just about what the HIND pilot had allowed, intent as he was on blowing the crap out of the HIP.

Because the HIND was so low, the missile’s flight time was less than one-two-three seconds. Which was when the contact fuse of the kilo-and-a-half high-explosive warhead grazed the exhaust vent and the rocket detonated just inside. There was a brief, explosive hiccup as the engines disintegrated. A violent blast jerked the HIND onto its side. A millisecond later there was another flash, which broke the chopper in two. Rotors shattering, the gunship’s front end cartwheeled, then dropped stonelike onto the desert floor, bursting into a huge fireball that was immediately enveloped in a funnel-shaped cloud of thick, black smoke.

From the starboard doorway, Ritzik saw the dark plume and then a series of vivid white-and-orange explosions as the chopper’s rockets blew up.

Then it was all wiped from his field of vision as Mick rotated the HIP clockwise and accelerated, flying low to keep the dunes between them and the IMU as the pilot headed due west. The Chinese were still out there — prowling and growling. Ritzik had to get his people out before the PLA chopped them all to bits.

28

Ten hundred fifteen hours. That was the cutoff Rowdy Yates had set for himself. If Ritzik wasn’t back, they’d get the hell out of Dodge and head for the Tajik border. But now there was a chopper in the area. He heard the thud-thud-thudding as rotor sound bounced off the rocky terrain. Friend or foe? It didn’t matter. They’d stay under cover until he knew for sure. If things had been perfect, he’d have received an intel dump from Dodger or Marko at the TOC. But Almaty was off the air. The frigging radios were still fried. He couldn’t reach Ritzik. There was even static when he broadcast to Doc, Goose, Curtis, and the rest of the Delta element, who lay no more than a hundred and fifty yards away, direct line of sight, on the opposite ridge.

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?”

They 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.’”

“And your point is?”

Mick’s eyebrows wriggled. “Problem with you blanket-heads is you have no sense of humor. You—”

“Mick — chopper. Ten o’clock.” Sam pointed southeast.

Ritzik followed the spook’s arm. It was the second HIND. It was closing. He didn’t need this. “Mick — can you give us some altitude here?” He turned, on the verge of going aft to free up the machine gun, when he heard Rowdy’s voice in his earpiece.

Pray long enough, Ritzik thought, and every once in a while your prayers will actually be answered. “Rowdy — Loner.” Ritzik clapped his hands over his ears so he could make out what the sergeant major was saying. “Repeat-repeat.” He listened intently for about twenty seconds. Then said, “Roger. I copy. Wilco. Loner out.”

1005. Ritzik leaned forward so he could shout in Mickey D’s ear. “He wants us to come in hot — strafe the ravine, then the southern ridge. Then he wants you to hover on the south ridge. I’ll drop the ladder and we’ll go out — look like an assault team. Sam will retrieve and stow the ladder once we’re down. Then you drop behind the ridge — settle on the deck.” He squeezed the pilot’s shoulder. “Can do?”

“Coming in hot’s no prob,” Mick shouted back. He looked at the HIND. “The hovering may be a little rough, though.” He wiggled his head back and forth. “Hey — somebody stick that Polish suppository back in my ear so I can hear the crap that son of a bitch is transmitting, okay?”

29

Rowdy Yates heard the HIP before he saw it. He’d scrambled the five Delta shooters off the southern ridge, ordering them to leave enough detritus behind so their positions still appeared to be manned. Then they’d all taken up counterambush positions on the north ridge. Doc Masland held down the left flank with one of the RPGs. Goose had the second launcher on the right. Rowdy, who kept Wei-Liu and the spooks close to him, commanded the center field of fire.

The HIP came in fast and low. It skimmed the north ridge, wheeled sharply, then laid suppressive fire fifty feet below the Americans. Rowdy could see Gene Shepard in the doorway, Chinese helmet on his head, working the machine gun, shell casings flying past his feet as he sprayed the ground. As the HIP had careened a hundred yards east of the truck, he detonated the shaped charge, which he’d run down into the ravine.

Even two hundred yards off, Rowdy still felt the heat and concussion. He peered through the thick black smoke. The explosion brought down two good-sized trees. Rowdy shot a quick, approving look at X-Man — the kid obviously knew his stuff.

Mick took the HIP through a series of evasive moves, swinging the chopper up and around and running southeast to northwest. Then he swung back for another strafing run. This time Gene worked the road, just south of the explosion. The rocky base of the southern ridge was shattered by withering machine-gun fire.

Rowdy scanned the horizon. “Loner — Rowdy. Where’s the HIND?” He waited, but received no answer. Ritzik probably hadn’t heard him — there was too much noise.

1010.The HIND’s crew wanted to know what the hell was going on. That much was clear from the urgent tone of the transmissions. But Sam Phillips couldn’t make out what was being asked. Nor could he answer. He’d done everything he’d been instructed to do: the IFF was transmitting, and he’d tried mouthing a few garbled words of Mandarin. But military jargon was military jargon, and he just didn’t have any of it in his head. Jeezus H. Kee-rist. He was going to get them all killed.

1011.Mick rotated the HIP, then hovered fifty feet below the crest of the southern ridge. When the chopper had been stable for ten seconds, TV Weaver tossed the assault ladder out of the port-side doorway. Gene Shepard was first man out. The tall, lanky Soldier lowered himself onto the rope ladder and started down rung by rung, fighting the stuttering hover of the chopper, the blast of rotor wash, and the swaying, unstable rungs. Ty followed. He’d left the heavy sniper’s rifle behind. Instead, he carried the RPG launcher strapped across his back, the haversack of four rockets bumping up against it.

Ritzik held the top of the ladder to try to steady it. He glanced up to see Sam Phillips clamber from the cockpit, then turned his attention back to the ladder. Ritzik grappled with the ropes, trying to steady them as Ty fought to keep his balance. The sniper was struggling under forty pounds of launcher and rockets that pulled him backward off the pendulous ladder.

1011:27. Mick caught a glimpse of the HIND. It had circled behind them and was approaching from the south. How the hell long had it been there? Had they taken the bait, or were they lining up for a missile shot?

In that instant he lost control of the big chopper for a second and a half. The HIP pivoted abruptly, rose six feet, then dropped a yard.

1011:28. The sudden movement bounced the sniper off the ladder. Ty fell backward. He landed atop Gene Shepard and knocked the lanky first sergeant loose. The two men dropped three yards, then landed in a heap. Ritzik watched as Shepard rolled off the sniper’s inert body. Shepard looked up at Ritzik, who was frozen in the doorway.

1011:31. Ritzik screamed, “Sam — you pull the ladder up.” Then he swung out of the door, grabbed the two heavy rails of the assault ladder, brought them together so he could get both his hands around them, then dropped like a stone, fast-roping the twenty feet to the ground without using his feet. By the time he’d landed there was smoke coming off the thick leather palms of his gloves.

1011:33. Ritzik looked down. Ty was breathing — so the fall hadn’t killed him. But he’d landed hard on the weapons. Maybe knocked the breath clean out of him. Maybe worse. But no time to deal with it now. Quickly, Ritzik cut the launcher’s sling in two and sliced through the right-hand shoulder harness of the rocket sack. Shepard gingerly rolled the sniper onto his side and eased the canvas strap off the inert man’s shoulder.

1011:41. Ritzik looked up as he unslung the AK. The dark belly of the HIP pivoted, then swung away, revealing a shockingly blue sky. Shepard put his arm through the rocket sack, flipped it onto his back, and snatched up the launcher. Ritzik took Ty by the shoulder straps of his body armor and dragged him to cover.

The sniper’s eyes opened and he tried to speak. But nothing came out but a gasp. Ritzik said, “We’ll be back for you.”

1011:52. Ritzik and Gino ran a jagged pattern just below the ridgeline until they reached the cover of trees. The two men threw themselves down and crawled until they had a clear view of the road below. Shepard reached back, plucked a rocket from the bag, jammed the rocket into the muzzle of the launcher, and hefted the assembly onto his shoulder. Then, careful to make sure that Ritzik was hunkered clear of the RPG’s backblast area, he aimed the rocket halfway down the southern ridge and pulled the trigger.

1011:52. “X-Man — keep your glasses on the pilot. Give me a running commentary. I want to know every time he takes a breath.” Rowdy’s focus was on his RPG, but his peripheral vision picked up the HIND as the gunship reacted to Mick’s maneuvering.

“Gotcha.” The CIA man squinted into compact field glasses. “Pilot’s looking down at his instruments, concentrating on something,” X-Man said. “Can’t see behind his visor, but his mouth is moving like hell.”

The HIND slowly crested the southern ridge, not three hundred yards from where Ritzik and Shepard lay. X-Man panned away from the gunship, catching Shepard as he fired the RPG. The spook followed the rocket’s path with the binoculars.

1011:59. “Didja see that?” X-Man’s voice was excited. “It was almost like he stuttered the goddamn chopper when the RPG blasted into the hillside.” And then the spook ducked instinctively as the HIND’s Gatling began to chew up the south ridge where the RPG had exploded.

“C’mon, c’mon, X. Sit-rep.” Rowdy watched as the rounds walked down the ravine, debris flying. Suddenly the HIND yawed, then recovered. “X, goddammit, what’s happening in the frigging cockpit?”

“Pilot just flipped up his visor. He’s looking down into the ravine.”

Rowdy found the gunship and settled the RPG’s iron sights on the HIND as it rocked, then steadied itself. The big ship, he noted with some satisfaction, was cumbersome at slow speed. “C’mon, X — where’s the John Madden?”

“He’s scanning the ravine,” X-Man said. “Coming down slightly. Oh, wait — he just shouted something into his mike. His lips are moving a mile a minute.”

Rowdy settled the sights on the HIND’s baffled air intakes, the muzzle of the RPG dropping evenly with the chopper.

“He’s dropping some more. Talking. Oh, oh, oh — his eyes went wide. He sees the bomb now. He’s—”

Rowdy shouted, “Execute! Execute! Execute!” into his mike.

There was about a three-quarter-second lag. And then all three RPGs fired in rapid sequence into the ravine, shrieking away from the launchers, trailing white smoke.

Masland’s shot missed. The rocket struck the armored glass of the HIND’s forward cockpit. The impact shook the gunship but never penetrated the gunner’s thick protective cocoon.

Through his field glasses, X-Man followed the smoke trail as the second round went wide, detonating against the shell of the burning truck. He watched, frozen, screaming, “Oh, shit,” as the HIND’s gunner manipulated the Gatling’s muzzles up, up, up, and left, trying to swivel the gun in the direction the RPG rounds had come from.

And then Rowdy’s big forearm smacked the spook’s head from behind, the binoculars went flying, and X-Man was knocked to the ground.

Because Rowdy’s rocket had found its mark: the big crate holding the MADM, and the Chinese Pentolite detonated with an even bigger explosion than Rowdy had dared to hope for.

The blast caught the belly of the HIND, blowing the gunship’s stubby wing off. The chopper yawed right as the pilot reacted. Then a huge pressure wave hit the aircraft, and almost immediately, the HIND began to drop. Rowdy watched as the HIND’s pilot fought with the controls, trying to stabilize his aircraft. But he couldn’t. The Pentolite created a huge vortex of negative pressure, and the rotors couldn’t bite air because there was literally no air to bite.

The HIND bucked, then dropped rocklike onto the ravine floor. The rotor tips hit the ground, disintegrating as they cut themselves into shrapnel.

Rowdy loaded another round into the launcher’s muzzle, took aim, and fired at the chopper’s exhaust vent. The round went wide. But it hit the aft portion of the aircraft squarely, exploding in a great bright flash, knocking the tail rotor off. The HIND spun once, centrifugally. And then the chopper sideswiped the smoldering truck and exploded in a huge, orange ball of fire. The ordnance detonated, sending rockets and ammo spewing into the sky, trailing white smoke like so many fireworks. Rowdy could feel the intensity of the heat from where he lay. He rolled onto his side, looked over at Wei-Liu, and cracked a grin. “Nice work, Madam Deputy Assistant Secretary,” Rowdy said. “Glad to see we’re all still here — and ready to exfil.”

Wei-Liu wiped dust from her face. She looked at Rowdy Yates. His eyes, for the briefest of instants, displayed a look of such utter relief that it shocked her. And then, like a curtain drawn, the vulnerability faded. She started to say something, but remained silent; drained. Incapable of words or emotions. She was exhausted. She barely had the energy to blink. She shook her head vacantly and monotoned, vaguely in the sergeant major’s direction, “I’d really like a good night’s sleep.”

1013. Ritzik clambered to his feet, ducking involuntarily as half a dozen Gatling rounds popped like cherry bombs. He ran to the ridgeline and looked south, about four hundred yards, to where the HIP, resting precariously on its broken landing gear, idled. He raised both arms high above his head, fists clenched, thumbs extended. Then he turned, waved at the opposite ridge, and pressed his transmit button. “Rowdy, Loner. Get everybody over here so we can exfil ASAP.”

Ritzik listened as the sergeant major growled something. Then he said, “Roger that, Rowdy. We have to refuel.”

He turned toward the HIP. “Mick — did you copy that?” Ritzik watched as the big transport’s rotors gained speed, and then the aircraft levitated gingerly, rose into the sky, and nosed eastward, crossing the ridge to where Rowdy had prepositioned the fuel bladder.

Ritzik clapped his hand to his ear so he could hear the sergeant major’s transmission. “Roger that,” Ritzik said. “I’ll bring Ty with me.”

Ritzik scrambled back along the ridge to where he’d left the sniper. Ty was conscious. But it was obvious he was in tremendous pain. Ritzik looked down. “What’s the prob, Ty?”

The sniper blinked. “Broken ribs, I think,” he said between gritted teeth. “Oh, God, it hurts to breathe.”

“Pain’s good for you,” Ritzik said. “Tells you you’re still alive.”

“Then I must be alive,” Weaver said, “because I hurt like hell.”

“You’ll feel better when we get you to Dushanbe.”

“Is there beer in Dushanbe?”

“Affirmative.”

“Then you’re right: I’ll feel better in Dushanbe.”

“Time to move out.” Ritzik reached down. “Can you stand?”

The sniper grimaced. He took Ritzik’s hand. His grip was strong. “We’ll see, won’t we, Loner?”