Dragon Sim-13 (9 page)

Riley smiled. "Comsky's all right, sir. He's a good medic. He isn't any Einstein, but I've got Hoffman to fill that role for me. As far as executive officer goes, I'd like to take Jim Trapp with me. We've worked together some other places and he knows his stuff. For junior weapons man I'd like Pete Reese from Team 1. He was a machine gunner in the Ranger battalion before he came to SF and jumped into Grenada, so at least he's had somebody shoot at him before. He's one of the best with automatic weapons I've seen in a while."

Riley waited as Hossey considered his choices. He mentally reviewed the qualifications of the two men he had picked. Chief Warrant Officer Trapp was probably the best warrant officer in DET-K. Ever since Special Forces had allowed senior noncommissioned officers to get warrant commissions and become detachment executive officers, that position had become an important one. Before that it had been just a nominal job given to new lieutenants in Special Forces, so they could get some experience before becoming detachment commanders. Now lieutenants weren't allowed into Special Forces and warrants filled the executive officer slot.

Trapp had been a sergeant first class before getting his warrant. He was the only executive officer in the unit with Vietnam experience. Trapp had spent two years in Southeast Asia as a young sergeant in Special Forces. He'd gotten out of the army when he returned to the States, but, bored with civilian life, he'd come back in ten years ago. Despite his age, Trapp was in superb physical condition, constantly working out.

The weapons man, Reese, was a good choice also. He was a rotund man who hid surprising strength behind an appearance of being overweight. Despite his size, Reese consistently scored a maximum score on the army's physical fitness test, as did most of the members of DET-K. In his off-duty time, Reese competed in Eighth Army power-lifting competitions. Riley had seen him wield an M60 machine gun at a qualification range and had been impressed with the ease with which the young staff sergeant handled the twenty-two-pound gun. With the addition of these two men, Team 3 would be at full strength.

Hossey appeared to have made up his mind. "OK, I'll talk to their team leaders tomorrow. You go ahead and track them down now. Tell them that as of this minute they're yours. You'd better get your people moving to be ready to go into isolation—it's supposed to start at 0500 at our Osan isolation facility. You need to at least be ready to receive the warning order by then. Sergeant Major Hooker is coordinating your vehicle and the iso area down there."

Hossey sensed Riley had something else on his mind. "What's the matter? I know this whole thing seems strange, but we're going to have to wait for the warning order in isolation before we find out what's really going on."

Riley wasn't sure how to broach the subject. "It's not that, sir. I know this whole thing seems funny. It's about your asking if I wanted to replace someone."

"Yes?"

"Well, sir . . . I'd like to trade off Captain Peterson. It's not that I've got anything against him. Well, sir, it's just that. . . well, you know. He's new and he doesn't know our standard operating procedures and all that."

Hossey shook his head. "I knew there was something we were forgetting. Where the hell is the young captain? I haven't seen him around."

Riley hung his head. "I forgot to call him, sir."

"Shit!" Hossey exploded, and then saw the humor in the situation. "Don't tell me you forgot. You didn't alert him on purpose." Riley could see that Hossey was at least considering his proposal.

The colonel countered Riley's earlier explanation. "Trapp and Reese won't know your SOPs either. You've got to give me a better reason than that."

Riley sighed. He should have known that Hossey wasn't going to let him off that easily. "OK, sir. The bottom line is that he's not that good right now. Maybe with some team time behind him he'll come around. Now that's only my opinion, and I'm only a lowly E-7 and all that, but—" He stopped at the colonel's snort of derision. "Anyway, even though I don't know what this is we're going on, I don't want to go with someone who doesn't understand the situation. Why are you briefing me instead of him? Why didn't you notice he was missing until I brought it up? It's because you know as well as I do that in Special Forces the person who can get the job done best is the one who should do it. At least that's the way it should be. Captain Peterson doesn't know that yet, and if this is a live mission, it isn't the time for him to be learning."

Riley would not have talked this way to any other battalion commander he'd ever had. But he trusted Colonel Hossey. Riley had served under him when the colonel was only a major during a six-month mobile training team mission to Thailand in 1982. They had developed a mutual trust there that had carried over the years.

"I understand that, Dave. I hate to ask, because I already know the answer, but who do you want to go with you as detachment commander?"

"Let me have Captain Mitchell back, sir. Just for this mission. With him there'd be a real commander on the ground to handle things, and I could do my job right, without having to do the commander's too. We did OK in Australia on the joint mission with the SAS there, as you might remember. Also, if he's up to speed on this USSOCOM planning you and he have been doing, he'd be a valuable asset."

Mitchell had been a team leader longer than any other captain in DET-K, until finally Hossey had had to move him. He had made Mitchell his battalion operations officer just two months ago, and he hated like hell to give him up now. But he had an uneasy feeling about this whole mission. He'd seen a lot of weird things in twenty-one years in the army, twelve of which had been in Special Forces. But he'd never seen a situation quite like this. China was hot right now. Hossey was smart enough to know that the situation in Beijing was not likely to end in victory for the democratic movements. He also read the daily classified intelligence bulletins that described troop movements in the country.

Despite his "just an exercise" theory, there was always the chance that this was the real thing. That meant this was probably not something to hedge on. Hossey felt that he needed to give it his best shot, even though it would hurt his headquarters to lose Mitchell as operations officer.

Hossey conceded. "All right. You call him. Anyway, ever since I moved him off the team he's been moping around my headquarters. This ought to bring a smile to his face. Now let me go make all these changes and place a few phone calls to Osan to get things ready down there."

Camp Page, ChunChon, Korea Friday, 2 June, 1713 Zulu Saturday, 3 June, 2:13 a.m. Local

The ringing of the phone woke Mitchell out of a sound sleep.

"It's for you," he mumbled to his wife, who was cuddled up next to him on a single-sized army-issue bed. "Probably one of your soldiers got in a fight downtown and is in the lockup," he added as she groggily got up and padded across the small room to the phone near the door.

"Three three oh two, this line unsecure. Captain Long speaking."

She put the phone down on the cabinet and returned to the bed. "It's for you, wise guy."

Mitchell cursed as he got out of bed and grabbed the phone. "What?"

"Hey, bud. Get your butt on down here to the team room and start working for a living."

Mitchell immediately recognized Riley's voice.

"Hey listen, Dave, don't screw with me, OK? It's two in the morning if you haven't noticed. Are you out drunk with the guys?"

"Listen, Mitch, I'm not bullshitting you. I just talked to the Old Man. It's an alert and you're back in charge of the team for this one. The colonel's in his office right now if you want to call him and check. But hurry up, 'cause we got to get moving for isolation. This one's got a short fuse."

By now Mitchell knew that Riley was serious. He tried to get his alcohol-and sleep-fogged brain to wake up. "How the hell am I going to get from here down to Seoul at two in the morning?" He and his wife didn't have a car—they weren't allowed at ChunChon and Mitchell didn't need one at Yongsan. And the train had stopped running hours ago.

"I'll get the Old Man to call the MPs there and have them run you down in one of their cars."

"All right. I'll get my stuff and head over to the MP building. See you in a couple of hours." Mitchell looked across the darkened room at his wife, then went over and sat next to her on the bed. She was so tired that she had almost fallen back to sleep.

Mitchell shook her shoulder gently. "Hey, babe. It's an alert. I've got to go back down to Seoul."

Jean struggled to open her eyes. "Are you going to deploy?"

"I don't know. Go back to sleep. I'll give you a call when I find out what's going on." He got up and quickly dressed.

Jean wanted to get up and say good-bye, but she was completely exhausted from her eighty-hour work week. They'd both been through alerts like this many times before. "Take care," she whispered as her husband walked out the door.

FOB, Osan Air Force Base, Korea Friday, 2 June, 2000 Zulu Saturday, 3 June, 5:00 a.m. Local

Riley wandered around the isolation area. It was an old one-story building, barely big enough to isolate all five teams from DET-K at once. The building had no windows and was routinely swept for listening devices, since the North Koreans would have been very interested in hearing what went on inside. The facility was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Armed air police guards manned the one gate, admitting authorized personnel only. Once a team entered isolation, they had no outside contact until the mission was complete.

Team 3 had commandeered one room as their main work area. It already had blank map boards and tables in it. Another room, with twelve bunks, would be their sleeping area. Colonel Hossey and Hooker, along with three other personnel from the S-3 shop, worked out of the forward operating base operations center (OPCEN), which also held the SATCOM terminal and radio equipment.

A forward operating base, or FOB, was a Special Forces headquarters, usually at battalion level, which was designed to run up to eighteen A teams through isolation and then be headquarters and radio base station on missions. Since Team 3 was the only team this FOB was isolating, Colonel Hossey could give it more personal attention. The FOB's mission was to isolate the team while the team prepared for the mission. Then the FOB commander would listen to the team's briefback, where the detachment presented its plan for conducting the mission. The FOB commander then would either approve or disapprove the plan. If the plan was approved, the team was launched on the infiltration. The FOB's mission from then on was mainly to monitor the team's radio traffic. The FOB also was the link to higher headquarters, which was usually called a Special Forces Operating Base, or SFOB. For this mission, the USSOCOM element at Fort Meade would be their SFOB.

In the OPCEN Riley glanced up as someone opened the door. He smiled as he saw a bedraggled Captain Mitchell hauling his rucksack and duffel bag through the door. "Hey, partner, let me give you a hand."

Mitchell passed over his ruck. They threw the gear into the sleeping area and went back to the op center. Mitchell looked over the area. "Where's the team?"

Riley pointed at the door leading into the isolation work area. "I got them started getting the area ready. Comsky and Lalli got here just before you did. Hooker managed to track them down in Itaewon."

"What's the mission?"

Riley shook his head. "I don't know. All Colonel Hossey got was an alert notice from USSOCOM and a reference to Typhoon 17 Alpha."

Mitchell nodded. "That's the war plan against China. But did it say which part of the plan or give any sort of time line?"

"Nope. Just be ready to go at 0500. Which we are."

Mitchell thought the whole thing was unusual and didn't mind saying so. "Is this real or just an exercise? Do you have an offset area?" He paused as Hossey came in the door on the far side of the room and gestured for the two of them to come over. "Glad you could make it, Mitch."

"What's going on, sir?"

Hossey pointed at three locked one-drawer metal file cabinets stacked on a table. "Typhoon 17 Alpha." He handed over a set of keys for the locks. "You should have most of what you need for planning in there. I haven't received the warning order yet. It should be coming through. We just got commo set up with the SFOB. They say we'll get the warning order about 2100 Zulu. They're operating out of Fort Meade, for some reason, so we should be able to get some good intel from NSA if they're willing to get off their asses and walk next door. In the meantime you might as well hang up the maps and get started with the stuff in those files."

"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to

attack the enemy's strategy."

Sun Tzu: The Art of War

FOB, Osan Air Force Base, Korea Friday, 2 June, 2100 Zulu Friday, 2 June, 6:00 a.m. Local

Colonel Hossey read the warning order as it rolled out of the terminal, then looked over at Hooker. "Is this for real?"

Hooker shrugged. "As far as I know it is." He grabbed the paper. "I'll give it to Captain Mitchell."

Hossey took it out of the sergeant major's hands. "I'll do it."

Since DET-K was smaller than a normal Special Forces battalion, Hossey's FOB was also smaller. He had himself, Sergeant Major Hooker, and only three other enlisted men to run the shift work. Mitchell, as the S-3, would normally have been in charge of the operations center. Now that Mitchell was back with the team, Hossey had taken over that job himself. For the duration of this mission he would let his executive officer command the other four teams in DET-K who were doing normal training back in Yongsan. His top priority lay here, especially if this mission turned out to be real.

Hossey took the warning order and left the operations center, going into the isolation area. The team had already set up tables, chairs, and map boards. They were all staring at him expectantly as he walked to the front of the room. He beckoned to Captain Mitchell and Riley.