Eyes of the Hammer (The Green Berets) (3 page)

Pike had the appearance of an old man, after twenty-nine hard years in the army. He was almost six feet tall and thin as a rail. His face was lined and weather-beaten and his head was topped with hair that had turned completely gray.

As Linders returned Pike's salute and told him to sit down, he wondered why he always felt a little funny when dealing with the colonel. Some of it, he knew, stemmed from the fact that Pike had been in the military a year longer than Linders had, yet Linders greatly outranked the colonel. Part of it also, Linders had to admit to himself, was that whereas the closest he had come to combat was in a B-52 thirty-five thousand feet over North Vietnam, Pike held a reputation as one of the most combat-tested officers in the army. Pike exuded a sense of toughness and competence that overshadowed Linders's political charisma.

Linders decided not to waste any time. He had a meeting across the river with some congressmen in thirty minutes. The sooner he passed the monkey onto Pike's back, the better.

"I just finished talking to the chairman. He wants us to prepare contingency plans in case we get tasked to send some people down to Colombia in response to the attack in Springfield yesterday."

Pike sat down. "Has that been traced back down there already, sir?"

"No, but it's pretty much assumed that the drug cartel was behind the attack. If the FBI or CIA gets good evidence and can finger who did it, there's the possibility we might have to send some people down south."

Pike shook his head slightly. "Snatch or snuff?"

Linders frowned at the terminology. "Plan for extraction of indicated personnel."

"Sir, with all due respect, we've got people who are ready to do that, but if all I can give them is a country but no names or locations, there isn't much they can do as far as planning goes. Delta's been sitting on several plans for hitting the people behind the kidnappings in Lebanon for over four years now."

Linders had to agree with Pike's reasoning. "I know it isn't likely that we'll do anything, but I want to be able to tell the chairman, if he asks, that we're working on it."

Pike bowed to the inevitable. "Yes, sir. I'll take care of it. Anything else?"

Linders was glad to be rid of the responsibility. "No, that's it. How long do you think it will take?"

Pike shrugged. "Without more specific intelligence, the boys down at Bragg will simply pull out their country area study on Colombia and do some figuring on aircraft ranges and stuff like that. That's about all they can do, sir. I'll alert them today and they should have all that ready in two days. I'm going up to Plattsburgh Air Force Base tonight for one of the nuke testing missions. I'll be back tomorrow evening and I'll check back in with Bragg then."

Linders dismissed Pike. "All right. I'll assume it's taken care of, then."

Pike saluted and left to make his way down to his less elaborate office. He was used to getting vague tasks. He didn't enjoy the thought of passing this one on to the Delta Force operations people at Bragg. Pike had spent several years with Delta and he knew that this sort of "prepare to do something but we're not sure what, yet" tasking was viewed as a pain in the ass.

Since coming to the Pentagon a year ago, Pike had grown more and more discontented. In all his previous twenty-eight years, he had never seen as many dumb decisions being made as he had in this building. Pike considered himself a warrior. He had never married, the army being his first and only love. Here, though, Pike was seeing a side to his love that he had not been forced to deal with before. He understood that he couldn't spend all his time with soldiers, preparing for combat, but he was sure that the time and energy he wasted every day in the Pentagon could be put to better use.

Over the course of the last six months, Pike had watched the different services scramble to protect their slices of the shrinking budget pie. The incident that had lit the match under Pike's discontent had occurred only two months ago. He had written a position paper for the DCSOP-SO relating to the relative budgetary importance each service placed on its Special Operations Forces (SOF). He had pointed out that over the course of the past five years, the combined budget for SOF in all three services had amounted to less than one tenth of one percent of the total defense budget. Yet, in that time period, SOF had conducted over 50 percent of all real world military missions conducted by Department of Defense forces. Those missions ranged from numerous military training teams spread across the world working with other countries' military forces, to covert operations by units such as Delta. Pike felt that the disparity between the SOF units' budget and their production output was ridiculous. He had argued in the report that funding for Special Operations units be somewhat more commensurate with their present contribution. He had been dismayed when his report was sent back by the Pentagon's deputy chief of staff for operations with a "nonconcur" written in red ink on the cover.

Pike didn't need to be a genius to see the handwriting on the wall as well as on his report. He'd tried to get a transfer out of the Pentagon, back to a post where real soldiers did real things. The Special Forces branch representative at personnel headquarters had been blunt: With Pike's mandatory retirement looming less than a year away, they weren't going to move him anywhere. Pike still loved those soldiers he knew were out in the woods training hard, but he no longer felt the same about the big green machine. He was just a cog, an old one at that, and the machine was getting ready to throw him out on the scrap heap.

Because of that, Pike had started spending as much time as possible away from the Pentagon on any sort of trip he could possibly justify, such as the one to Plattsburgh this evening. There was no real need for Pike to be there, but since his office was responsible for coordinating the nuclear security testing missions, observing one of those missions was justifiable. The bottom line was that he wanted to get the hell away from this building and see the real Special Forces in action.

CHAPTER FOUR

NIGHT OF THURSDAY, 22 AUGUST

PLATTSBURGH, NEW YORK

11:00 P.M.

The battered van rumbled up the ramp off the Northway. Fifty feet from the exit it pulled into the parking lot of a used-motorcycle shop. The headlights illuminated the gate in the chain link fence that surrounded the shop's motorcycle graveyard. The driver, a large, bearded man wearing a denim jacket emblazoned across the back with Harley-Davidson, stopped the van, got out, and walked over to unlock the gate. He returned to his van, drove into the yard, and parked in the dark shadows behind the shop.

After resecuring the gate, he opened the back of the van. Ten dark figures, bristling with weapons, slipped out. The leader of the group, a short, slim man, shook the driver's hand. The driver got back in the van and settled in to wait.

The ten silhouettes moved to the rear of the yard. The fence there was slightly different from the one that enclosed the other three sides of the shop's parking lot. It was chain link topped with barbwire. An old, rusted sign hung on it. After years of neglect in the harsh Adirondack winter, the sign was barely legible: "U.S. Government Property, Keep Out."

The leader of the band, identified as Riley in the few whispered conversations, gave a command. One of the figures detached himself from the group. Weapon slung over his back, he opened the fence with bolt cutters. Quickly the ten men squirmed through. The last man laced the cut links back together using parachute cord. In the dim light, the fence appeared whole again.

Riley nodded to himself. So far, so good. He tapped the man behind him and, as the signal was passed back, moved out, leading the way. The group crossed the dirt road that ran the perimeter of Plattsburgh Air Force Base, and entered the blackness of the four square miles of forest that bordered the runway on its western side. Their target was nestled in those woods.

Riley switched on his night-vision goggles. Through them, he immediately spotted the previously unseen infrared chem light that marked their designated path. Riley led his men to the first chem light, sliding through the trees and underbrush with the skill of a man used to such nighttime forays. Approaching the glowing dot that indicated the light, he spotted another one beckoning him onward through the woods to the northeast.

Following the trail of lights, the group of armed men moved like wraiths through the dark forest. Nine hundred meters from the fence, at the last chem light, Riley spotted to his right front the on-off flickering of an infrared (IR) light, indicating someone flicking the IR switch on a pair of goggles as a signal.

Riley moved forward to the man wearing the goggles. Reaching the guide, he turned and, touching the man behind him, signaled the group to move into a tight defensive perimeter. The signal was silently passed back, and after a brief rustling of leaves the entire team was settled down, weapons pointing outward.

Riley put his head next to the guide's and whispered. "What you got, Partusi?"

"Same as the photos. Nothing much has changed. Leave these guys here and I'll show you."

Riley signaled the rest of his party to stay in place, then he moved forward with Partusi another seventy-five meters. He didn't need the night-vision goggles as the ambient light grew brighter. Reaching the edge of the woods, he peered out. The compound was big—larger than he had expected from the pictures—almost three hundred meters by one hundred. It was completely enclosed by a chain link fence topped with barbwire. Riley was studying it from the woods that paralleled the south side, looking long-ways through the compound.

Every hundred meters along the fence stood a guard shack. It was obvious to Riley that the shacks were designed more as places for the guards to stay out of the weather than as defensive positions. Riley could make out movement in the nearest one.

On the right side of the compound, the eastern side, Riley saw the lone tall guard tower reaching fifty feet into the night sky. In the glow of the arc lights that illuminated the compound, he could discern the muzzle of an M60 machine gun poking over the sandbags on top. His eyes continued their inspection.

"Damn," he hissed to Partusi. "When did that thing get moved in?" Riley indicated a four-wheeled armored vehicle inside the fence, underneath the tower. "I thought that stayed over by the main post with the reaction force."

Partusi shrugged and whispered back, "Our asset said sometimes it do and sometimes it don't. Tonight's a don't."

Riley nodded. They had prepared for this possibility anyway, along with many other contingencies. Across the center of the compound Riley counted the massive berms. Each over sixteen feet high, they squatted in two rows of five, with a road between them running north to south. From their asset's briefing, Riley knew that the side of each berm facing the road consisted of a massive iron door ten feet high by twelve feet wide. The other sides and top were covered in earth, masking the six feet of steel-reinforced concrete underneath, which protected the contents.

Riley turned back to Partusi. "Give me the rundown on your surveillance."

Partusi pointed as he quietly briefed. "Got a man in each guard shack. That's eight guards to start off with. Six have Ml6s. Two are armed with M203 grenade launchers—the one there in the southeast corner and the third one up on the west side. The tower's got an M60 machine gun with two men up there. The Avenger, that's what that armored thing under the tower is called, got a crew of three. An M60 is in the turret as its main weapon.

"We also got a Chevy Blazer, with two air force police in it, driving the compound perimeter road about every thirty to forty-five minutes. They really ain't checking too carefully. The guard changed at 2000 so we got this crew until 0400. Nothing much else."

Riley nodded. Everything was just as the civilian base worker they had recruited as an intelligence asset had told them it would be. Thirteen guards on target. Possibly two more in the Blazer. A reaction force of thirty men over at the main airfield that could be on target in six minutes, give or take a couple.

Partusi continued. "The ground sensors are there. Just before dark the air police in the Blazer drove off the dirt road and onto that grassy strip between the road and the fence to check them. They seem to be working. No remote cameras, but the sensors must be relayed back to the reaction force. There's a phone and radio in the tower. The Avenger probably got a radio too; you can see the antenna on the turret. I'm not sure about the guard shacks. Probably landline to the tower, but they haven't been doing any checks that I could tell.

"No air activity since a quarter to ten. Had two F-11’s land then. You can't see the runway from here but it's over to the northeast, beyond those trees up there."

"What about the grating?"

"All taken care of."

Riley considered the situation. He looked at the glowing dial of his watch. The team still had four hours before they did the job. After giving Partusi some final instructions, he went back to the rest of the team. Gathering them in close, he briefed them on the information that Partusi had imparted. Finishing that, he updated the tactical situation.

"Everything stays as planned. Except I want you, Haley, to take out that armored vehicle under the tower right away. Miller, you hit the guard with the M203 in the southeast corner with your first shot. I've already detailed Partusi to take out the other 203 on the west side with his first shot."