Echo Platoon (39 page)

And so, newly dedicated to the battle, he flew not only by skill, but also by SHEER WILL and SHEER DETERMINATION. He kept us moving ahead, forcing the chopper higher and higher even though the LAMA was disintegrating as we climbed. Yet, it didn’t matter. Why? Because we were ATTACKING, and in that mode, we’d take our fucking chances. More to the point, we’d keep going toward our objective.

0904. The chopper’s airspeed was only thirty-five knots now, and dropping. I could hear the engine begin to consume itself as we strained up the fucking Karabakh ridgeline, not more than fifty, forty, thirty yards above the scruffy treetops.

I didn’t want to hit the trees. I really didn’t want to hit the trees.

And then, and then, and then, Nigel crested the ridge, and we saw what was beyond it.

I felt the way Moses must have felt as he looked down on the Land of Canaan. Below and to the west lay a narrow, fertile valley. It was completely clean and green, no more than a kilometer wide, and totally hidden from the outside world.

It was like being on another planet. No shear. No crosswinds. Tranquil air. And pastoral bliss: cattle and sheep grazed peacefully below. I saw three—no, four—small farms, with postage stamp–size vegetable patches. It was as if we’d flown into a time warp.

The valley hadn’t been on the map. Not the one I was using anyway. Maybe if we’d had a tactical pilotage chart, I would have seen it. But we’d been using a commercial map—and the scale was just too big to pick this place up.

I peered over Nigel’s shoulder. To the north, a small lake on a northeast/southwest axis fed a series of mountain streams running off southward.

We progressed up the valley for three, maybe four kliks. The green disappeared, replaced by the gray-brown scrub of the Karabakh. I saw the road that would take us to Naryndzlar, and pointed it out to Nod, who nodded, tapped Nigel on the arm, and
hand-signaled that he should drop down and follow it. The land got uneven, and desolate once more. We’d left Eden—and were in the mountains once again.

0909. New air currents started to affect the chopper. We got hit by crosswinds, blowing us off course even at our pitiful altitude. Nigel fought the controls, keeping us steady. We maneuvered about six kliks south of Syrchavand, where Pick was circling. I scanned the skies but couldn’t see anything in the bright morning light. Suddenly, we were buffeted by a nasty wind shear. That’s the mountain air for you: unfuckingpre-dictable.

The chopper dropped sixty feet in half a second, giving us all a bit of a shock. Then Nigel banked away and found smoother air. He regained altitude, and came around a right-hand bend above the road. Off at two o’clock I saw a trio of oil storage tanks. Once, they had been camouflaged to match the vegetation. Now the green, gray, brown, and tan paint had mostly chipped away and the tanks sat unused, huge rusting hulks.

Oleg came alive. He pointed at the tanks. “Red Army built those,” he growled.

I looked over at him. “Nice work,” I said sardonically. I don’t think he got it. So I turned my attention toward more important things. Like the condition of our aircraft. The LAMA’s engine was still vibrating, but not as badly as it had been as we’d crested the ridgeline.

0913. We proceeded west through the narrow valley, the jagged Karabakh mountains towering above us on either side. Nigel had dropped us low, flying a mere hundred feet above the narrow, blacktop (actually it
was browntop) road below. He pulled up slightly over Vanklu, giving us a look at the old church. Vanklu was only four kliks from Naryndzlar.

I got on the radio, told Pick we were on final approach, instructed him to launch the jumpers, and made sure I got a “roger-roger.”

0914. Nigel banked into an oblique turn. The hotel was dead ahead, sitting atop the ridge. But running parallel with us, right along the north side of the ridge, ran a half-dozen high-tension power lines. They came out of the mountain, ran for about two kliks, supported by huge steel towers anchored onto the mountain side, then disappeared once more into the Karabakh. The power lines hadn’t been on my fucking map either.

You couldn’t see the towers or the lines from the hotel. But they would sure as shit fuck with my jumpers, who were flying in from the northeast. I was reaching for the transmit button on my radio when Pick’s voice echoed in my ear. “Jumpers away,” he told me.

It would be easy to say that they were fucked. But in point of fact, they weren’t—nor would they be. Because I make sure that all the men under my command train for situations like these. The operational budget for today’s SEALs is only 14 percent of what the Navy gets for its SpecWar forces. The biggest chunk of change goes for (of course) administration. Then comes equipment. Training is at the bottom of the totem pole. Doesn’t make sense, does it? Maybe that’s why SEALs are leaving the Navy in record numbers these days. My shooters, however, still get saturation training. I bend the rules—even break ’em if necessary—to make sure they can HAHO and HALO
under the very worst of conditions, because that’s the way they’re gonna have to do it for real. Do the powers that be try to screw with me? You bet. But fuck ’em. My men are more important than some apparatchik with stars on his sleeve. So I’ve taken my guys through high-tension power lines. And forced ’em to make the kinds of hairy, last-minute adjustments that Mister Murphy drops on us at the worst of times. And because they’ve been through my Roguish crucible of pain, and forged themselves on my Warrior’s anvil, they will survive to fight, no matter what the odds, or the situation.

But there was no time to ruminate about how good my Warriors are right now. Why? Because Nigel had the LAMA’s nose up, and we were climbing the ridge. The hotel was getting closer, closer, closer.

As I peered through the windshield making my final mental calculations Ashley managed to smack me in the face as she shrugged out of her overalls. I deflected her elbow on the second pass, but she’d already caught me hard enough to make my eyes water. WTF—was she related to Boomerang?

0916. We limped in from the east, the sun at our backs, performed a pretty smooth admin flare for an aircraft in our condition, and dropped cleanly onto the number-one chopper pad on the south side of the hotel, 250 yards from the main entrance and 100 yards from the big hangar. There was no one within a hundred yards as Nigel shut down.

Even before he did, Digger was outside, his submachine gun up and ready. Nod hit the deck, too, standing at attention as Oleg climbed out, turned, and held his hand out so that Ashley could take it.

I rolled out of the chopper’s port side into the brisk
morning air, and inhaled a deep breath of exhaust fumes, so happy to be alive that I wanted to kill someone. I made sure all my equipment was ready to go, started the stopwatch, then withdrew my suppressed USP, held its muzzle down, close to my right leg, and headed for Oleg and Ashley, who’d already started toward the hotel entrance.

00:00:25 T
HEY HADN’T BEEN EXPECTING US—WHICH
was the whole idea. I could see the
byki
and hotel staff scrambling, confused. Oleg paid no attention. Just like the general he was, he hadn’t waited until Nigel had shut down to climb out. He clambered from the starboard hatchway and adjusted the document case so it hung out of the way. He helped Ashley out, and then, like an old, dangerous Russkie bear, he wrapped his big left paw around her shoulder, and the two of them began to march in lockstep unison up the long macadam path toward the hotel.

00:00:31 My SEALs had to move fast to catch up. Once they did they fanned out in a diamond pattern around Oleg and Ashley, just like Alpha Team bodyguards. They carried their MP5s suspended horizontally around their necks, fingers indexed just above the trigger guards.

I was perhaps ten yards behind them when a bearded Goon in a pair of brown velvet jogging pants and a UCLA T-shirt, with a big semiauto pistol in a shoulder holster came over a rise in the path and cut across Oleg’s bow. The Goon had a concerned look on his face, and his eyes shifted back and forth between
my guys, Oleg, and Ashley. Obviously something was not quite right. And then I realized what it was: Alpha Team bodyguards do not carry MP5s. They carry AK-74s.

The Goon hesitated, which was GNBN for us. The bad news was that he blocked the path, and his right hand was already moving toward his shoulder holster. The GN was that he couldn’t stop looking at Ashley, and therefore he didn’t see me, ten yards back. So I brought the USP up in a two-handed grip, got a 20/20 sight picture, and double-tapped him before he had a chance to do anything dangerous.

Fucking textbook perfect, if I don’t say so. Who says Mister Murphy is always sitting on my shoulder? The goon spun backward, half-turned to my left, then dropped onto the grass in a heap. I caught up with Oleg. Ashley’s face was a mask. I think she was in shock. Like most youngsters, she’s been taught that fights should be fair. You don’t fire unless fired upon and all that crap. Well, that kind of mealy-mouthed philosophy may be okay if you are debating some pimple-faced asshole in your freshman ethics class. But it has no place on the battlefield. On the battlefield, you kill the enemy before he has a chance to kill you. Any way you can.

00:01:09 Oleg ushered Ashley around the goon’s corpse and kept moving toward the front door. We’d landed on the south side of the plateau, below the crescent of rooms and suites. The path we were walking along ran basically south/north, cresting a series of low knolls. It had been landscaped so as to keep the approach to the hotel out of the sight line of the big double-door entrance.

That worked in our favor: the goon I’d wasted
couldn’t be seen by anyone coming out the front door.

00:01:31 We drew closer, still unchallenged. I could get a sense of the place’s layout. My eyes went toward the north end of the hotel—the second-floor corner suite where I’d find Ambassador Madison.

I wanted to check the skies, too, but I wasn’t about to do it, because my jumpers were up there, and I wasn’t about to draw attention to ’em. I glanced at my watch. If they’d released on time, they’d be landing within three minutes.

But that would be then, and this was now. The big main double doors swung inward, the welcoming committee came through, and headed in our direction. Five
chornye
in bright jogging suits surrounding a tiny, olive-skinned figure with a pencil-line mustache, dressed in a shiny, single-breasted black suit, white shirt, and maroon tie, that gave him the absurd air of a 1960s-era William Morris agent.

“Do nothing,” Oleg hissed. “Just keep quiet until I tell you.”

Fuck him—this was my op, not his. But I dropped the USP out of sight behind my right leg. My trigger finger was indexed on the frame. The safety was off, and the pistol was cocked in single-action mode.

Oleg’s face took on a big, wide grin. He loosed a torrent of rapid Russkie at the little guy, his left arm hugging Ashley close to him every second or third word.

The little guy understood what Oleg was saying—and so did Ashley, because she was reacting just right, laughing and making nicey-nicey, which—just as planned—distracted the
byki
as well as the little manager, who couldn’t take his beady little eyes off her bright blue . . . dress. But the manager must have had
good instincts too, because he didn’t give up an inch of ground. As he held his position, so did the
chornye
. Not good.

00:02:00 There was an instant of absolute quiet right then. At which point my Roguish ears picked up the welcome sound of canopy flutter coming from my three o’clock. No, the sound of canopy flutter is
not
obvious to most people. But it is obvious to me, especially when I am looking to hear it.

And then, my instincts were confirmed, because someone on the other side of the hotel shouted “holy shit” in Russkie or maybe Armenian. Now I don’t speak either Armenian or Russkie. But I know “holy shit” when I hear it, no matter what the language.

The shout was followed by staccato bursts of automatic weapons fire. Which meant that my jumpers were low enough to lay down some suppressive fire. From what my watch said, they were a full thirty seconds early, too.

00:02:06 This was no time to wait for Oleg to say anything. I brought the USP up and shot the two closest
byki
with a pair of rapid double-taps. The other three started to grab for their weapons.

It was already too late for them. Here is a lesson for all you people out there. If you want to be a bodyguard, don’t carry your weapon inside your jogging suit where you can’t get at it without undoing a bunch of zippers or Velcro closures. Nod shot two, and Nigel got the third before their Russkie paws were able to clear their weapons. Oleg had the little guy around the neck, his big hands shutting off the asshole’s air supply. He broke the guy’s neck one-handed and dropped the
chornye
corpse onto the ground.

00:02:11 “Let’s go—” Oleg pulled a big semiauto pistol out of his waistband beneath his uniform blouse and charged into the hotel lobby.

I wasn’t ready. Not yet. Not before giving Ashley some protection. “Nod, give her a pistol.” I pushed Ashley behind me. Nod unholstered his USP and handed it to her.

I couldn’t see where Oleg had gone. Well, he was doing his own thing right now. Me, I had to find Ambassador Madison, and I had about four and a half minutes to do it.

00:02:18 We made entry as a TEAM. I took point. Nigel and Nod were at my shoulder. Ashley behind them. Digger had rear guard. Fuck: the lobby was empty. Oleg was nowhere in sight.

00:02:26
Scan. Breathe.
I saw no one behind the registration desk. Off on the far side of the desk, a narrow door led toward an office space. There were lights inside. I silent-signaled Digger and Nigel to check it out. Nod and I pushed Ashley between us and moved up the center of the lobby, weapons at low ready, scanning for threats.

The lobby itself was wide and deep. At the rear was the staircase leading down to the disco, and at each side a corridor. To the left was the registration desk. To the right, a narrow passageway led who knows where. It hadn’t been on my sketch.