Tom Clancy Support and Defend

51

Dominic made it to the chalet over a minute after the Iranians left, but he kept running. He considered looking for a landline phone inside, but he knew if he didn’t find one the Mercedes would be long gone in the time it took him to check. The sprinted first through the yards of the other winter chalets on the winding street, and then on the snow-covered paved road. He knew it would be impossible to catch up with the fleeing vehicle, but lacking an intelligent plan, action seemed like his only recourse.

On the other side of the first bend in the road, just a hundred yards or so beyond the chalet where Ethan Ross’s body now lay, he saw the thick trees gave way to a wide-open windswept hill alongside the road. He was able to look out here over the valley, and he thought it possible he might get a sat phone signal here as well. Just as he reached for the phone tucked into his waistband, the earpiece in his ear chirped. He took the call by touching it.

“Adara?”

“Yeah, it’s me. I’ve been calling you for a half-hour! Where are you?”

“In Italy. In some mountains. That’s about all I know.”

“Well I’m en route, so if you can be more precise, call me back. In the meantime, I can conference you in with the deputy chief of CIA station Milan. He’s been working the phones dealing with your situation for twenty or thirty minutes, but he needs to talk to you.”

Dominic was winded from running and talking at the same time, but he kept running and said, “Put him through.”

There was a full minute of nothing on the line, Dom caught another look over the valley and noticed the road ahead wound back and forth in a series of tight switchbacks to maximize the number of little vacation chalets the developers here could cram on the hillside. Dom left the road, ran between a pair of wooden cabins on his left, then started tearing down a forested hill, hoping he could make up some time with the Mercedes.

Suddenly a booming and annoyed-sounding voice came into his ear. “Who’s this?”

“Deputy Director, I’m an FBI special agent involved in the Intelink-TS counterintelligence case in Geneva. Are you aware of the situation?”

“Yes. I spoke with the woman who patched me through to you. I know what you are, I am asking for your name.”

“I’m afraid I can’t give you that.”

“Why the hell not?”

Dom kept running, he stumbled over a bicycle hidden in the snow in the backyard of a chalet, but in seconds he was up and running again, speaking between pants as he reached the next paved piece of the switchback road and continued across it. “Look, my name is Jones. Will that work?”

“No, it won’t. FBI doesn’t mask their identity, so that tells me you aren’t from the Bureau. Before we go any further, I need to know who you work for.”

“If you need to know who I work for, then we won’t be going any further.”

There was a pause. Dom covered twenty yards before the man spoke again. “You’re one of those, huh?”

“I’m the only guy who knows what the hell is going on over here, so that might be good for something.”

The DCOS took a moment, but finally he said, “Okay. I understand you are in pursuit of Ross and an unknown group of actors.”

Dom shook his head while he ran. “Ross is dead. Iranian intelligence officers have his data, I don’t know if they have the decryption key they need to get into it, but I’m sure they have the drive itself. They are in a Red Mercedes SUV heading south.”

“Shit. What’s your location?”

“I’m about a half to three-quarters of a mile south of where the helo went down. That was a couple miles south of the SS26 highway. Does that help you?”

“Yes, I know where the local emergency crews are responding to the crash. I’ve got some help on the way to you.”

“Agency help?”

“Negative. I’m in Milan and I have no armed assets close. I’m sending you U.S. Army help. It turns out a group from the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat team is in your AO right now. They are based in Vicenza, but a rifle platoon is doing some alpine training in the foothills south of the SS26. I was able to get routed right through their CO, and he ordered them to load into trucks and head in your direction. I’ll call them back and tell them about the Mercedes coming down the road.

Dom slowed, then started walking. He couldn’t believe his luck. “A platoon of infantry! Are you kidding? That’s perfect.”

“Well, not exactly perfect. There is one problem.”

“What’s the problem?” As far as he was concerned, they could wrap this up in minutes.

The deputy COS began explaining the situation, and before he finished talking, Dom had broken into a frantic sprint once again. He continued down the hill as fast as he could.

Twenty-three-year-old first lieutenant D. J. Dower slammed his radio back in its cradle in the cab of the truck and ordered his driver to make a hard left at the next intersection. The whiteout conditions that they’d experienced earlier in the day had improved greatly, but he could still barely see the turn off that led up the hill toward the neighborhood of luxury chalets to the south.

Dower still wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on, but he did know that whatever it was, it was “real world” and not part of their training.

And D. J. Dower had never done anything “real world.” He and his platoon had been eating chow over a campfire in their bivouac after a long morning of training when he was contacted by a colonel at U.S. Army Garrison Vicenza, told to leave all their gear except their small arms, load up into their three M939 five-ton trucks, and move out to the south. Ten minutes later, just after they were on the road, a second radio call came through, this by a man patched through from Vicenza. He gave no information about himself, but he asked Lieutenant Dower about the number of troops in his platoon, and then told him there was a national security situation in his AO.

Dower didn’t get it. The area he was heading for was wild snow-covered hills and fancy vacation villas. This wasn’t exactly western Pakistan.

The unidentified man on the brigade network channel told the lieutenant that he and his men would have to move as a blocking force to stop a red Mercedes SUV descending one of the hills just south of their location.

D. J. Dower coughed nervously. “Uh, be advised, we have no live ammunition.”

“I understand that. You are going to have to improvise.”

Dower looked at his first officer, behind the wheel, who just looked back at him. After a moment the lieutenant said, “Improvise with what, sir?”

“Son, you’ll have to be scary. You’ve got thirty-four armed and uniformed soldiers. That’s an imposing sight. Make the most out of it.”

“Yes, sir,” Dower said. “The occupants of the Mercedes. Are they armed?”

“Heavily. Not going to sugarcoat it, son. I’m throwing you in a shitty situation.”

A second radio call from the same man two minutes later pinpointed an intersection at the bottom of a high hill. A winding road through a field led away from the intersection and up into the trees, where it snaked back and forth for several miles around entire neighborhoods of small but luxurious wood chalets.

Dower ordered the trucks to stop and to block the entire intersection, and then he gave the order over his radio for everyone to dismount.

Bravo platoon’s M4 carbines and M249 squad automatic weapons all wore BFAs, blank firing adapters. They were screwon bright red metal plugs that attached to the muzzles of their rifles so that the low-pressure blank rounds in the weapon would properly cycle.

With the BFAs in place, all thirty-four weapons could fire loud blanks that made them sound like they were lethal weapons. But with the BFAs in place, all thirty-four firearms were obviously nothing more than nonlethal props. The red plugs were visible at one hundred yards.

As they moved into position, Dower told his men their assignment was to stop a carload of armed opposition from escaping. He was certain every single one of the thirty-four men with him said some sort of a curse. Most cussed loud enough to be heard, and the rest just bitched under their breath. And the first lieutenant couldn’t say he blamed them. They were pissed at him for the order he gave, and he was pissed at the man who gave him the order.

Nevertheless, Dower and his men would do their job. They spread out in front of the trucks, and Dower had to shout to be heard. “Everybody with an M4, I want you in a cordon on the road with me. The six of you that have SAWs, I want you on overwatch on that rise behind the trucks. Out of view from the road.”

The Bravo SAW operator, a nineteen-year-old Hispanic American named Chacon, said, “Overwatch, sir?”

“Yeah. We’ll take our BFAs off so we look legit. If the bad guys start shooting at us, I want all six of you rocking full auto with the SAWs. All we’ve got is attitude and noise, so we’re going to use as much of both as we can.”

Dower knew his only chance was for the armed men heading his way to consider their situation hopeless, because if they decided to fight, Dower and his men were pretty much dead. Quickly he and his men unscrewed their BFAs from their rifles and hid them in cargo pockets. Then they waited on the frigid road, all eyes up the hill.