Detachment Delta (7 page)

Charlie had just started to speak to Royal, when the front of the House of Horrors crashed open. The silhouette targets, most of them looking like Islamic terrorists, were still simply targets, but they came forward like a small army with guns blazing. The lead silhouette target-come-to-life was actually James Rashad, and his head was sewed back on, blood seeping, but the threads clearly visible, and he was holding a gun at the head of Virginia, who had a frightened look on her face.

The entire team opened fire with double-taps from their weapons, hitting the jihadists in the face, usually the forehead. Charlie put two shots right between Rashad's eyes, but he shook his head and the expended bullets flew off to the side out of the bullet holes.

“Oh, you want to fight dirty, huh?” he said to Charlie.

With that, the rogue cop stuck his pistol up against Virginia's temple and cocked it.

Charlie yelled, “No!” and sat up breathing heavily, looking all around the hotel room.

Virginia's nude form lay next to him. She was sleeping soundly and was breathing softly. She stirred a little and a smile lit up her face. It must be nice, Charlie thought to himself, as he saw how peacefully and securely she slept.

He remembered various sayings, such as George Orwell's in his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism,” in which he wrote “Those who ‘abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” The quote had been misquoted many times, with credit even being given to Sir Winston Churchill. Most often, Charlie heard it being said, “We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Out of curiosity, he really researched it one time and found the actual quote by Orwell.

 

THE
knock on the door awakened Virginia, and she stretched and smiled, looking at the rose lying next to her face on the pillow. Then she noticed Charlie dressed and moving catlike to the door. He looked through the peep-hole, glanced at her, and winked, while she pulled the sheet over her, and he opened the door. A waiter walked in pushing a stainless steel catering cart. Charlie thanked him, handed him some money, and the waiter smiled, nodded, and left the room, the door closing with a loud click.

“Hungry?”

“Starved,” she said. “What time is it?”

He said, “Daylight.”

She laughed and ran into the bathroom, emerging a few minutes later with one of his shirts on, which engulfed her. She sat down opposite him after giving him a soft kiss.

“This is great!” she said, “What did you order?”

He said, “Room service like I promised last night.”

“Oh my!” she replied, as he uncovered both dishes, steaming plates with rib steaks smothered in mushrooms, two eggs over easy, hash browns, and wheat toast, along with glasses of orange juice and two pots of hot tea, which he had already learned she liked as he did.

“I won't be offended if you want me to change your order,” he said. “Some people are picky about breakfast, and I wanted to surprise you so I guessed.”

She came around the table and kissed him again, saying, “You guessed right, Sergeant Strongheart. This is above all my favorite breakfast. You nailed it, pal.”

He chuckled at her expression, which struck him funny coming from a female attorney.

Virginia cleared her appointments and stayed with Charlie until he had to leave for his plane.

They wistfully parted, each knowing that this relationship was probably going to be only a treasured memory for both of them.

They both had new adventures to embark upon. Virginia was on an exciting new case, and Charlie actually prayed silently as he left, and told God he would love to have a real love, a woman he could live with the rest of his life, and have children, lots of them. He wondered if there was such a woman anywhere, who could handle his life as an operator in Detachment-Delta and could handle the danger he faced, the long absences, and the secrecy about his work. He had tried betrothal to one woman, and the job killed the relationship, but he could not imagine any other profession. He was born to the job.

As his plane headed southward toward North Carolina, Charlie had no idea what was in store for him when he returned to Fort Bragg, but he new whatever it was, it would make him feel alive.

CHARLIE
drove out Gruber Road at Fort Bragg, past McKellar's Lodge, and finally arrived at the Delta Force compound. He reported in and met with the Old Man and gave him a briefing on the operation in New York City. After a few hours of briefings, Charlie was with his team, doing what they usually did—training.

He found himself on a bench on the outside of an MH6 Little Bird, a light helicopter adapted for Delta Force use. The tops of the trees suddenly swayed, while he and his teammates came up over a stand of pines, and a bus loaded with passengers made its way down a dirt road next to the sandy pine thicket. The Little Bird had flown out in front of the bus and gone into a hover, when suddenly the trunk of a tree exploded and the large pine fell across the bus's path with a loud thump. The Little Bird set down in a cloud of light tan sand, followed by a second Little Bird, as eight Delta operators poured off the seats mounted on both sides of the choppers, with three of them, including Charlie, boarding the bus. A “hostage,” Pitbull, who was actually Charlie's team commander, a captain, who was a star full-back on the West Point football team, was flex-cuffed and seated on the second seat, with a dummy terrorist next to him with a gun, and a dummy terrorist behind him holding another gun to his head.

Charlie put a double-tap into the face of the terrorist next to Pitbull, while a teammate double-tapped the forehead of the terrorist behind the hostage.
Boom!
The back door of the bus exploded open and two more teammates came through the emergency exit door and shot up the remaining hostage holders, having to be very careful not to shoot the live bus driver now slumped in faux death over the large black steering wheel. They followed Charlie and his teammate as the two of them grabbed Pitbull by the upper arms and escorted him to the first Little Bird, where he was tossed in. The remaining C.A.G operators had formed a perimeter around the two aircraft and fell back as the remaining team members hopped onto the benches. The pilots cranked up the rotors, and sand swirled out and up from the rotor wash, and the Little Birds lifted up, banked left, and rose over the tree cover, roaring away, leaving a smoking bus, full of shot-up mannequins and one real driver feigning death as he still lay across the steering wheel.

This part of North Carolina was covered with tall, stately evergreens, with interspersed swamps filled with hardwoods. The ground everywhere was sandy with a fine, grainy sand, sometimes almost white. Most of the pines found at Fort Bragg had no lower branches. This was partly from the army very wisely warding off large forest fires by trimming the trunks of the trees at least ten feet off the ground. That way, in a dry year, a fire would be more likely to simply sweep through a forest or thicket burning dry grasses and undergrowth and at the most darkening the trunks of trees, but not igniting the highly flammable and sometimes explosive upper canopy.

The entire team hydrated with water and Gatorade, and then met in the audio visual room to watch several camera angles of their execution of the mission, after which the self-critique would begin.

Pitbull called Charlie aside after the debriefing, calling him by his nickname, short for Pocahontas. “Poke, the Old Man and the staff want you in the briefing room tomorrow morning at oh-dark-thirty for a heavy-duty briefing.”

“ 'Bout what, Cap?”

“Beats me,” the team leader replied. “You know, need-to-know. None of my business, I guess. I just know it is something classified Tango Sierra, NOFORN.”

The latter were the phonetic letters for TS (top secret) and the acronym for “no foreigners.”

The briefing room was filled with a number of strangers when Charlie entered the next morning. He could tell several were probably retired army officers and in shock when they saw the laxity in the military demeanor of the several Detachment-Delta personnel in the room.

The Old Man and the command sergeant major came in, and Charlie said, “Good morning, Pops. Morning, Weasel.”

Pops grinned and nodded. Weasel, the senior noncommissioned officer in 1st SFOD-D, said, “Howdy, Poke.”

Just about everybody in Detachment-Delta had a nickname, even the bosses, and there was little or no military formality, because the anonymity was so important. Charlie had even, early on, gotten in trouble for being dressed too noticeably with his obvious modern-day Lakota attire and hairstyle, until he explained that with his dark complexion and jet black hair, he would come under even closer scrutiny by people wondering if he was a Middle Easterner. This made complete sense to the commanding officer, Colonel Peter “Pops” Gresham.

Colonel Gresham had started out as an enlisted man, a grunt, and then made it through the Special Forces qualification course and earned his Green Beret and Special Forces tab as a weapons specialist. He attended language school for Tagalog, which is a native dialect from the Philippines, and worked on an A-Detachment with the 1st Special Forces Group in Okinawa, working his way up to sergeant first class, while also taking night and correspondence classes and getting his bachelor's degree in organizational management, with emphasis on management of human resources.

At the suggestion of the 1st Group commander, he applied for and was accepted to Officer Candidate School and graduated as the honor graduate. He spent a year as a second lieutenant platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then was snatched to the USA J. F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, where he was promoted to first lieutenant and became an aide-de-camp to the commanding general of the center. He soon made captain, and after begging the general for command time, he became a detachment commander of an ODA, or Operational Detachment-A, referred to by many as an “A-team,” with the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and then he and the group relocated to Fort Carson, Colorado.

He went through Selection for C.A.G. and was a Detachment-Delta operator for some time, but then, after making it to lieutenant colonel, he ended up becoming deputy commanding officer of the 10th Group. When he finally hit the list for full bird, he was slated to take over either the 10th Group or the 1st Group, and he knew he eventually would have made brigadier and maybe ended up in command of Special Forces, but he made his feelings very clear that he wanted command of 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, even if it meant sacrificing a star or two on his lapel. After becoming an operator, Gresham became a true believer that this unit was the elite of the elite and was very much needed, especially since he made his eagle after September 11, 2001.

One day, Poke was speaking to Weasel in his office, and he said, “Top, I need to speak with the Old Man,” just as Colonel Gresham was walking in the door.

“The Old Man?” he joked. “The Old Man? Why not just call me Pops or Grandpa, since I already have one foot in the grave?”

Weasel said, “That sounds great, Colonel, since every swingin' Richard in this unit but you has a nickname. You are Pops from now on!”

So that was how the colonel got his nickname, but Charlie was a different story. One guy tried nicknaming him “Chief” and another “Tonto,” and they both got educated.

Charlie was not totally friendly when he explained, “Every white guy in the world, just about, calls just about every red guy in the world either Chief or Tonto, and every white guy thinks he is the first person to think of the nickname.”

In Delta and Special Forces, merciless teasing is the name of the game, so Weasel immediately picked up on Charlie's irritation and said, “You know, we are in the army and need to be politically correct, guys, and I can see someone will get punched if you guys call Charlie by such a racially charged name, so from now on, in order to be more sensitive we'll call him Pocahontas.”

All the operators, who were actually gathering for beers at the end of the day at the Green Beret Club on Smoke Bomb Hill, just roared with laughter, including Charlie, who laughed at himself and shook his head. It did not take long for that name to be shortened to “Poke.”

One of the men in the conference room was Damien Percy Rozanski, a retired major general from the Military Intelligence branch who had spent almost his entire career in staff positions. He was a devout politician and a devout liberal. The current commander in chief was a conservative and so were many officers in the GWOT, regardless of what they showed the public, so Percy, as he was called by his very few close friends, was sneaky and underhanded in many of his dealings. He had political ambitions and clearly saw himself as the future savior of the Democratic Party. He now held a position as an undersecretary of Homeland Security and had a very arrogant attitude toward many in the room and wherever he went. Maybe it was because of his membership in the Mensa Society, or maybe it was because what he saw in the mirror and what the public saw were opposites. When he glanced into the looking glass, he always viewed a Great Dane, but when the public viewed him most saw a sad, old, overweight basset hound.

Kerri Rhodes, the national security advisor to the president, was there.

A very large gentleman, behemoth actually, was there who was an assistant director of the CIA. His name was Bunny Hawkins.

Another participant was Randall Yost, deputy director of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and who was a recently retired colonel who'd spent much of his career with the U.S. Army Rangers, until he got enthused about Military Intelligence when he became the S2, the intelligence officer, of his Ranger regiment.