Specter

15

In the end, the mission had not gone down that night. A hold order had come through from Washington early that evening, delaying the op for twenty-four hours. At first, Murdock had been afraid that the delay would mean the op would be given to someone else, Delta possibly, or SEAL Seven's First Platoon, but it turned out his fears were groundless.

Delta, he'd been told, was still working out its operations plan for the assault at Skopje, and both First and Second Platoons would be going into the backup slot for Third Platoon, as planned.

Murdock was relieved. Until the delay had thrown things into question, he'd not been aware of just how much he wanted this mission… not out of a sense of duty or an enjoyment of combat, but simply because, more and more, he was beginning to feel a personal involvement in the continuing nightmare that was the former Republic of Yugoslavia. He was thinking a lot about Garcia; one of the first things he'd done after coming aboard the Jefferson was to have Doc talk to some of the people in the carrier's medical department and get an update on Garcia's condition from Bethesda.

The word was that Garcia was out of intensive care, which was good news, but that there'd been extensive pulmonary damage, which was bad. SEALs needed good lungs, both for diving and for the kind of physical exertion routinely expected of them both on ops and in training. You don't run fourteen miles in 110 minutes with a crippled lung, and swimming two miles with fins in under seventy minutes is flatly impossible. Garcia would almost certainly be dropped from the SEAL program; there was even some doubt about whether he would be allowed to stay in the Navy.

But it wasn't just Garcia that had Murdock personally involved. There was Stepano, and the look on his face after he'd broken Vlachos that had made Murdock wonder if Stepano himself had been broken in some way. And there was the lingering feeling of being jerked around by the Greeks, and the knowledge that his people had been at risk because of traitors in their security force, and probably in their government as well.

And Murdock had also been thinking a lot about Nikki latrides during the past few hours, a nice girl from a small village who thought the Muslims living next door were "nice people" and "just plain folks." Most of the people in the Balkans, Murdock thought, must be pretty much the same, more than willing to get along with their neighbors so long as their neighbors were willing to get along with them. It was bastards like Vlachos and Mihajlovic and the Serbian rape gangs and the fanatic groups like the EMA and the kept proponents of "ethnic cleansing" that started wars and kept them going.

Maybe, when SEAL Seven paid a late-night visit to the occupants of Gorazamak, they could tip the balance just a wee bit in favor of the just plain folks.

At least that was the way Murdock was thinking about it, and that was why he was looking forward to this op, with all its dangers and all its uncertainties. Time after time in the past, he'd faced the certainty that the bad missions were the ones where people died or were crippled and no one could tell you why.

"This, gentlemen, is Gorazamak, seen from one hundred fifty miles up."

The room was dark, lit only by the glow off the slide-projection screen at the front, and crowded, an ad hoc theater for a highly classified slide show. The mission briefing was being held in Jefferson's CVIC, naval shorthand for "Carrier Intelligence Center," and inevitably pronounced "civic." Present, representing SEAL Seven, were Murdock, DeWitt, and Coburn. This time around, the gold-braid-heavy assembly had been crashed by several petty officers as well, both MacKenzie and Ben Kosciuszko for Third Platoon, and Hawkins as Coburn's chief aide.

Representing Carrier Battle Group 14 were Rear Admiral Douglas TwTant, the CBG commander, and Captain Jeremy Brandt, Jefferson's CO. Another four-striper in the room was Captain Joseph Stramaglia, the carrier's CAG, an outdated acronym that meant he was commander of the carrier's air wing. Other officers included men from Jefferson's Operations Department — from Intelligence, from Met, from Battle Ops. Squadron commanders were present as well.

At the moment, the floor had been turned over to Lieutenant Commander Arthur Lee, the air wing's intelligence officer, and he was going through a series of slides pulled from the latest batch of satellite photos transmitted to the carrier from NPIC, the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center in Washington.

"In this shot," Lee was saying, a telescoping metal pointer in his right hand casting a pencil-thin shadow across the screen, "you can get a pretty good idea of how steep this cliff is. Our shadow triangulations and radar mapping jibe on this one for a change. You've got about twenty meters from the water to the road, here, then another fifty meters of sheer rock, almost straight up, from the road to the objective."

He pressed a control button in his left hand, and with a ratcheting click-clunk, the picture changed. It was the same castle, obviously, but from a slightly higher angle, looking down at a ribbon of white beach at the foot of the cliff. The image was almost magically clear, a crisp black and white that showed minute details of leaves and branches, all in perfect focus. The perspective, looking down the cliff's face, was dizzying.

"This one shows the beach below the castle. It's not very wide, three meters maybe, and sandy. We think the sand was trucked in and dumped, back when the place was a rich-tourist mecca. Of course we can't show you, but the lake is extremely deep — over nine hundred feet out toward the center. Just imagine that cliff continuing, straight down, for the length of another three football fields. The water is remarkably clear. There are stories that you can see fish seventy feet down. For that reason alone, our combat team will have to approach at night."

Click-clunk.

"This is just east of the castle… the castle is out of the picture, down here. Woods. Steep slopes. These objects here… and here… and here are probably small bunkers. Since the sixteenth-century Ottomans didn't go in for such things, we can assume they were late additions." A polite ripple of laughter ran through the audience. "We can also assume that the castle's present tenants are expecting any assault to be made down off the mountain, through these woods, and across this crest, rather than up from the lake."

And that, Murdock thought, as he sat in a folding metal chair with arms and legs crossed, was a damned good assumption. Getting into that lake would take some damned world-class parachutist skills. Getting up to the castle out of the lake afterward would require world-class mountaineers… or mountain goats.

Well, SEALs could handle all of that, and more.

Click-clunk.

"Ah. This is one of my favorites. We're looking straight down into the courtyard here. It's a stone-floored, walled-in area approximately one hundred twenty meters north to south, forty meters east to west. This is the gate, in the northwest wall, and this is the bridge across the canyon right outside the wall. These, as you can see, are trucks, Soviet-style jeeps, and private automobiles. If you look close, you can see that, yes, we can read license plate numbers from orbit."

That raised another laugh.

"There are some interesting features about this one. Look over here, in this little cul-de-sac around behind the stables. It's hard to make out without enhancement, but bear with me. This, right here, is the top of a man's hat, an officer's billed cap. These are his shoulders… arms… The way he's standing, we think he must be facing the wall while he takes a leak. Notice the shoulder boards here… and here. Now, these aren't in color and our resolving power falls short of what we'd need to make out details of a uniform, but very few of the militias or the shooters of groups like the EMA go in for shoulder boards, or anything like a real uniform. Most of them wear hand-me-downs, old Soviet-issue, and shoulder boards are a pain so they're usually the first to go when things get ragged. What we think we have here is an officer, possibly in the Macedonian Army, but much more likely he's JNA. If so, that would tend to confirm the idea that we may be up against Serbian regulars here, who've infiltrated into Macedonia as part of this, this rather fantastic plot."

The lecture droned on. Murdock paid attention with a part of his mind, but all of the hard decisions had already been made. The five of them, him, Ed, Mac, Kos, and Captain Coburn, had worked out a rough operations plan after lunch yesterday, then fleshed it out with some of the boys in Battle Ops afterward. The plan had been approved by Tarrant, who'd passed it on to Washington with his own recommendation.

Details, countless details, remained to be hashed out, but it had looked like this one was going to be a go. Then the hold order had been flashed from Washington, and everything was left hanging in the air.

Planning had proceeded, however, with the assumption that a go order would be forthcoming. That final seal of approval from Fort Fudge, as the Pentagon was sometimes known, was always the real chain-jerker. People on the front line, from Admiral Tarrant down to the newest swabbie recruit in the carrier's snipe gang, tended to work well as a team. They knew their jobs and they knew their responsibilities, and they'd been trained to carry them out with a minimum of supervision from on high. It was the REMFing munchkins and bean-counters and shit-for-brains pencil-pushers in Washington that scared Murdock.

And the President…

The current Administration was not known for its love of the military, nor for its clear-cut and unambiguous decisions regarding foreign policy and U.S. military intervention overseas. There'd been considerable speculation aboard the Jefferson about which way the White House was going to jump on this one. Murdock had kept his thoughts on the matter to himself and advised others who'd tried to draw him out to do the same. A good soldier follows orders, stays out of politics, and respects the office of his commander in chief even if he doesn't care for the man sitting in the Oval Office at the moment.

None of which meant that Murdock couldn't entertain some pretty serious private reservations.

At least the delay allowed the SEALs to pack in one good night's sleep, and it gave them the chance to go over their equipment thoroughly. In the meantime, Jefferson had taken up her assigned position at the mouth of the Adriatic, a featureless point in the water nicknamed "Gyro Station." The name had originally been pronounced like the Greek word for the lamb and pita bread sandwich, yee-ro. Before long, though, popular usage and the realization that the word wouldn't carry well over radio had devolved it to gyro, as in a ship's gyroscopic navigation.

Though Jefferson would be the mission's combat control center, the SEALs would actually deploy from a land base. The San Vito Dei Normanni Air Station, located a few miles from Brundisium close to the tip of the heel of Italy's boot, had been selected as their staging area. Support aircraft and some necessary last-minute gear were being flown down from Rhein-Main, in Germany.

In the meantime, the SEALs carried out their pre-mission chores aboard the carrier, waiting, wondering what the word from Washington was going to be. Under Mac's critical eye, each man packed his own ram-air parachute, a tradition that had been started some years ago in SEAL Six. There was less likelihood of a mistake that way, with each man relying on his own eyes and hands and brain instead of those of some anonymous rigger who was just doing his job. The SEALs were "just doing their job" as well, but in their line of work, the smallest mistake could kill them. They'd spent the entire day so far going over all their weapons as well, breaking them down, cleaning them, loading out magazines, checking for wear, and drawing fresh suppressors for their Smith & Wesson 9mm automatics. Radios, sat-comm gear, signaling devices, maps, compasses, climbing rope and harnesses, gloves, boots, night-vision goggles, flashlights, first-aid kits, load-bearing vests, everything right down to their sticks of camo paint and the plastic binder handcuffs each man would carry — everything was checked and double-checked, then carefully packed in rucks and stowed aboard the waiting COD aircraft.

They also studied. Floor plans of Gorazamak were faxed via satellite from Washington to the Jefferson, and every man went over each sheet, memorizing stairs and blind corners, corridors, rooms, and closets. There was no guarantee that the interior of the place would look anything like these maps, of course. They were based on blueprint specs from a British firm that had renovated Gorazamak fifteen years ago, and it was possible that there'd been numerous changes made since. But load-bearing walls would be the same, as would stairways, especially those of the castle's original stonework that remained. Though Gorazamak had been built as a sixteenth-century fortified outpost, it had been refurbished as a pasha's summer cottage on the lake during the nineteenth century, then renovated again as a small combination of museum and hotel when tourism had become more important to the area than rug caravans from Korc.

Now the tourists were gone… unless one wanted to count the SEALs that were already walking its corridors in their minds.

Murdock, meanwhile, along with DeWitt and the two senior chiefs, had continued with round after round of additional last-minute planning sessions in CVIC, as additional spy-sat photos were fed through from Washington. So far, there wasn't a lot on them that Murdock hadn't seen in the earlier shots.

Perhaps the oddest part about all of this was that Murdock had been sitting here for over an hour, leader of the SEAL team that would be the stars of this show, and no one had yet asked him anything about it. How he expected it to be, how he expected to be able to carry it out. He'd already accepted the mission and had contributed his part to the planning. It was up to others now to work out the support and logistical details, while he wondered how many more last-second changes might be implemented, changes that would affect him and his people as soon as they hit the ground.

"We're still working out the bugs in the pickup," Lee was saying, and that snapped Murdock's full attention back to the briefing. The satellite photo on the screen was another view of the courtyard, the irregularly shaped pavement inside the castle's walls. "An hour ago, another plan update came through from Washington. They're recommending that a Ranger team be inserted to seize control of the airport at Ohrid, some twenty kilometers from the primary objective. The advantage, of course, is that we can fly in a Combat Talon and land it at the airfield, pack the hostages and our ground team aboard, and fly them right out under fighter cover from the Jefferson. The down-side, of course, is that we'll need another twenty-four-to-forty-eight-hour delay to implement it."

A chorus of groans ran through the compartment, followed by murmuring voices.

"They are also," Lee continued, "asking for clarification on the insert. Their feeling is that a helicopter insertion would be more viable than a HAHO."

The groans redoubled.

Admiral Tarrant stood up and strode toward the podium where Lee was standing. "As you were, people," he said as the CVIC's lights came up. "As you were! I agree with your, ah, unemotional assessment of the situation, and I believe that Washington will have to agree too, given a little more time to consider all of the implications. The time element in this operation is too critical to permit further delay." Tarrant scanned the audience, his eyes singling out Murdock. "Lieutenant Murdock? You and your people are going to be on point for this one. Do you have anything to add?"

"Good Lord. Ops is actually asking me what I think?"

The audience laughed. Murdock stood up and waited for the laughter to subside.

"So far as the infiltration goes, Admiral," he said when the room was quiet again, "we don't have any choice. A helo insert at the castle is definitely out. If they put us down outside the walls, the bad guys know we're coming. If they put us inside the walls, well… there's not a lot of room in there. If the chopper was knocked down on the approach, it would completely block that courtyard, not to mention screwing up the assault team's schedule.

"As for the extraction, I don't much care how you get us out, just so long as you do. I would definitely argue against any more delay. The longer we wait, the tougher things are going to be for us on the ground. We've already seen signs that they've been moving in more troops from Ohrid. I think we've got to go tonight, or not at all."

"Which extraction technique would you prefer… assuming, of course, that Washington gives us a vote?"

They'd been over this ground a good many times already. "I agree that the airport option offers the best safety if we can get the hostages to Ohrid. The trouble is, to get to the airfield we've got eighteen kilometers of narrow road, hemmed in between a lake and a mountain, followed by the city of Ohrid itself, then another two kilometers to the airport, and no alternate way of getting there. We know the opposition has a mechanized regiment in the area. Unless Washington's figuring on sending in half of the Army Special Forces to secure that road, I believe the risks of transporting the hostages over that route are unacceptable. There's the risk of ambush, either by troops already in place or by runners from the castle. There's also the danger of enemy air strikes, if any MiGs or Hips leak through our air cover. No offense, Captain Stramaglia, but your boys can't be everywhere at once."

The audience laughed again, including the CAG. Jefferson's air wing would be tasked with assuring American control of the skies for this operation… but the best air superiority in the world couldn't guarantee protection from one or two hedge-hopping and determined enemy pilots. And Murdock had to consider all possibilities.

"So in my opinion, extraction both of the ground team and of the hostages has got to be from the castle. That has the advantage of giving my boys a defensible perimeter while we're waiting for the extraction aircraft, and better cover for the hostages.

"As for how we do it, well, we've discussed STABO, SPIE, and STAR extractions, but there are problems with all of those. If we use STAR, we can only take them out one or two at a time. If we use STABO or SPIE, we could get more people out faster, but the fact that the hostages aren't trained would almost certainly lead to people getting tangled up, and possibly hurt."

He was discussing the three primary means of recovering people from the ground without having to land an aircraft, all of them first implemented in Vietnam. STAR — Surface To Air Recovery — was the well-known technique requiring the evacuee to wear a harness attached to a helium weather balloon, which was snagged in midair by a low-flying MC-13 °Combat Talon transport. The Army's STABO and the Navy's SPIE were means of inserting or extracting personnel using special harnesses attached to lines dangled beneath a helicopter.

"Besides," Murdock said with a grin, "none of those means of extraction is exactly in keeping with a congresswoman's sense of decorum and proper modesty." Laughter… and a smattering of applause. Murdock decided not to add that a STAR recovery would almost certainly have to be reserved for any of the hostages who were seriously wounded while they were being rescued. That was a very real possibility that the mission planners had to always keep at the backs of their minds.

"Absolutely the best extraction technique will be to use helos, coming in and landing right there in the castle's parking lot. It looks like that courtyard is just big enough for one helo to touch down at a time, especially if we move the cars out of the way. One chopper could take all the hostages, and then a second can move in and pick up the team when the first one's clear. We can wait to call the choppers in until the entire area is secure, so they don't have to face a hot LZ, and we'll have that beach below the castle as a backup, if a pickup in the courtyard proves impractical. There would be the usual hazards of flying out through hostile territory, especially after everyone in Europe figures out what's going down, but a couple of Pave Low IIIs ought to be stealthy enough to sneak in and sneak out again without getting tagged. Especially if the Navy does their part in the EW department, and if we have decent air cover off the carrier."

"I tend to agree," Admiral Tarrant said, "as does my ops staff. You can rest assured that I'll include your opinions in my next communication with Washington."

As they continued to discuss options, it struck Murdock what a monumental operation this actually was, a team effort involving some twelve thousand men aboard the seven ships of CBG-14, the pilots and ground crews of the Air Force Special Operations Squadron who would be responsible for inserting and recovering his men, the Delta team that would be hitting the hijacked aircraft at Skopje at the same time in order to avoid tipping off the opposition, and God alone knew how many thousands of other military and civilian personnel from Washington to Greece and back again who were working on this op, code-named Alexander.

Alexander, for the boy-king of Macedonia who'd conquered half the known world 2300 years before.

Murdock did not dwell on the thought that, while Alexander had been arguably the most spectacularly successful of all of history's conquerors and military figures, he had also died very young…

At 1825 hours, the word came through at last. Operation Alexander was go, and as originally planned.

The MC-13 °Combat Talon aircraft, a Hercules especially augmented and equipped for this type of covert, deep-penetration mission, was waiting for them when they arrived at the Italian air base. Painted jet black, without identifying marks or insignia, it seemed to be a part of the night as the SEALS gathered up their parachutes and weapons loadouts and started filing up the huge aircraft's rear ramp.

They'd left the Jefferson to pursue her endless circles at Gyro Station, flying the COD on a short hop across the mouth of the Adriatic to San Vito. The MC-130, one of four deployed south from Rhein-Main, Germany, had arrived at San Vito just ahead of them and was already fueled and ready to go. Another, with a Delta team aboard, had already left on a roundabout route that would take it to Skopje.

Each man in the SEAL platoon had his own way of facing the possibility of death or injury or capture in the coming mission, from Doc's wisecracks to Mac's single-minded professionalism to the L-T's habit of going the rounds of his men, talking quietly with each. During the flight into San Vito, the Professor had been reading Polybius's account of the rise of the Roman Empire, of all things, while Roselli perused a dog-eared copy of last month's Penthouse. Holt, Nicholson, and Fernandez had exercised the warrior's historical ability to sleep anywhere, any time, while Frazier had quietly written a letter to his wife. Most of the rest had cracked jokes, told stories, or gone over their gear and weapons yet again.

ET1 Josip Stepano had not said much since the SEALs had left Salonika yesterday morning. He knew the L-T was worried about him, and he'd done his best to reassure Murdock that he was fine. But after completing all of his checks of personal gear, weapons, ammo, and chute, Stepano had done very little over the past few hours but think… and remember. He wondered often just how much he had in common with the other SEALs of the Team, especially when it came to motivation.

The Navy SEALS had the reputation of being hard-hitting, hard-drinking, fast-living superwarriors — and for the most part the rep was a well-deserved one. SEALs themselves often claimed that their unit's acronym stood not for SEa, Air, and Land, but for Sleep, tAt, and Live it up. You couldn't live as close to the edge as SEALs did every day and not have a bit of wildness to work off once in a while. Still, it seemed sometimes to Stepano that his fellow SEALs were more concerned with their warriors' fraternity than they were with the old-fashioned concept of patriotism.

Stepano was a patriot in every sense of the word. He loved his adopted country as only one who has escaped the nightmare of tyranny can. In lighter moments he joked about his love affair with a government official's daughter, but those moments were rare, the memories of the state police pounding on his father's door that night too fresh and sharp. His session as interrogator with Vlachos had brought back some of those memories with a fresh and blood-bright clarity.

He was American now and fiercely proud of that fact. A citizen when he was eighteen, he'd joined the Navy three years later. Because of his language skills, he'd been granted special clearance after an exhaustive background check, and that had led him first to Navy Intelligence, then to the SEALS.

But a man could never entirely escape his roots, that deep-down sense of who he was and where he'd come from originally.

Maybe… maybe what he and the others were going to do tonight would make some small difference in his homeland.

For Stepano, this operation had become intensely personal.