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Authors: Tom Clancy,Steve Pieczenik,Jeff Rovin

Tags: #Pakistan, #Crisis Management in Government - United States, #Action & Adventure, #Intrigue, #Fiction - Espionage, #India, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Espionage, #Adventure Stories, #War & Military, #Military, #Government investigators - United States, #National Crisis Management Centre (Imaginary place), #Crisis Management in Government, #Thriller

Line of Control (5 page)

BOOK: Line of Control
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    Sharab waved a gun at him.
    "Go back!" she ordered.
    Apu lingered a moment longer. His houseguests had never done anything like this before that he was aware of. They came and went and they talked. Occasionally they looked at maps. Something was happening. He edged forward a little more. There appeared to be a burlap sack on the floor between the men. One of the men was crouching beside it. He appeared to be working on something inside the bag.
    "Get back!" the woman yelled again.
    There was a tension in her voice that Apu had never heard before. He did as he was told.
    Apu kicked off his slippers and lay back on the bed. As he did he heard the front door open. It was Nanda and presumably the fifth Pakistani. He could tell by how loud the door creaked. The young woman always opened it boldly, as if she wanted to hit whoever might be standing behind it.
    Apu smiled. He always looked forward to seeing his granddaughter. Even if she had only been gone an hour or two.
    This time. however, things were different. He did not hear her footsteps. Instead he heard quiet talking. Apu held his breath and tried to hear what was being said. But his heart was beating louder than usual and he could not hear. Quietly, he raised himself from the bed and eased toward the door.
    He leaned closer, careful not to show himself. He listened.
    He heard nothing.
    Slowly, he nudged the door open. One of the men was there, looking out the window. He was holding his silver handgun and smoking a cigarette.
    The Pakistani glanced back at Apu.
    "Go back in the room," the man said quietly.
    "Where is my granddaughter?" Apu asked. He did not like this.
    Something felt wrong.
    "She left with the others," he said.
    "Left? Where did they go?" Apu asked.
    The man looked back out the window. He drew on his cigarette.
    "They went to market," he replied.
CHAPTER FIVE.
    
    Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 7:00 a. m.
    Colonel Brett August had lost track of the number of times he had ridden in the shaking, cavernous bellies of C-130 transports. But he remembered this much. He had hated each and every one of those damn nights.
    This particular Hercules was one of the newer variants, a long-range SAR HC-130H designed for fuel economy. Colonel August had ridden in a number of customized C-130s: the C-130D with ski landing gear during an Arctic training mission, a KC-130R tanker, a C-130F assault transport, and many others. The amazing thing was that not one of those versions offered a comfortable ride. The fuselages were stripped down to lighten the aircraft and give it as much range as possible. That meant there was very little insulation against cold and noise. And the four powerful turboprops were deafening as they fought to lift the massive plane skyward.
    The vibrations were so strong that the chain around Colonel August's dog tags actually did a dance around his neck.
    Comfort was also not in the original design-lexicon. The seats in this particular aircraft were cushioned plastic buckets arranged side by side along the fuselage walls. They had high, thick padded backrests and headrests that were supposed to keep the passenger warm.
    Theoretically that would work if the air itself did not become so cold.
    There were no armrests and very little space between the chairs. Duffel bags were stowed under the seats. The guys who designed these were probably like the guys who drew up battle plans. It all looked great on paper.
    Not that Colonel August was complaining. He remembered a story his father once told him about his own military days. Sid August was part of the U. S. 101st Airborne Division, which was trapped by the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division shortly before the Battle of the Bulge. The men had only K rations to eat. Invented by an apparently sadistic physiologist named Ancel Benjamin Keys, K rations were flat-tasting compressed biscuits, a sliver of dry meat, sugar cubes, bouillon powder, chewing gum, and compressed chocolate.
    The chocolate was code-named D ration. Why chocolate needed a code name no one knew but the men suspected the starving Germans would fight harder knowing there was more than just dry meat and card boardlike biscuits in the enemy foxholes.
    The airmen ate the K rations sparingly while lying low.
    After a few days the air force managed to night-drop several cases of C rations and extra munitions to the soldiers. The C rations contained dinner portions of meat and potatoes. But introducing real food to their systems made the men so sick and flatulent that the noise and smell actually gave their position away to a German patrol. The airmen were forced to fight their way out. The story always made Brett August uneasy with the idea of having too much comfort available to him.
    Mike Rodgers was sitting to August's right. August smiled to himself.
    Rodgers had a big, high-arched nose that had been broken four times playing college basketball. Mike Rodgers did not know any way but forward. They had just taken off and that nose was already hunkered into a briefcase thick with folders. August had flown with Rodgers long enough to know the drill. As soon as the pilot gave the okay to use electronic devices, Rodgers would pull some of those folders out.
    He would put them on his left knee and place his laptop on the right knee. Then, as Rodgers finished with material, he would pass it to August. About halfway over the Atlantic they would begin to talk openly and candidly about what they had read. That was how they had discussed everything for the forty-plus years they had known each other. More often than not it was unnecessary to say anything.
    Rodgers and August each knew what the other man was thinking.
    Brett August and Mike Rodgers were childhood friends.
    The boys met in Hartford, Connecticut, when they were six.
    In addition to sharing a love of baseball they shared a passion for airplanes. On weekends, the two young boys used to bicycle five miles along Route 22 out to Bradley Field. They would just sit on an empty field and watch the planes take off and land. They were old enough to remember when prop planes gave way to the jet planes. Both of them used to go wild whenever one of the new 707s roared overhead. Prop planes had a familiar, reassuring hum. But those new babies-they made a boy's insides rattle. August and Rodgers loved it.
    After school each day the boys would do their homework together, each taking alternate math problems or science questions so they could finish faster. Then they would build plastic model airplanes, boats, tanks, and jeeps, taking care that the paint jobs were accurate and that the decals were put in exactly the right place.
    When it came time to enlist-kids like the two of them didn't wait to be drafted-Rodgers joined the army and August went into the air force.
    Both men ended up in Vietnam.
    While Rodgers did his tours of duty on the ground, August flew reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam. On one flight northwest of Hue, August's plane was shot down. He mourned the loss of his aircraft, which had almost become a part of him. The flier was taken prisoner and spent over a year in a POW camp, finally escaping with another prisoner in 1970. August spent three months making his way to the south before finally being discovered by a patrol of U. S. Marines.
    Except for the loss of his aircraft, August was not embittered by his experiences. To the contrary. He was heartened by the courage he had witnessed among American POWs.
    He returned to the United States, regained his strength, and went back to Vietnam to organize a spy network searching for other American POWs.
    August remained undercover for a year after the U. S. withdrawal. After he had exhausted his contacts trying to find MIAs, August was shifted to the Philippines.
    He spent three years training pilots to help President Ferdinand Marcos battle Moro secessionists. After that August worked briefly as an air force liaison with NASA, helping to organize security for spy satellite missions. But there was no flying involved and being with the astronauts now was different from being with the monkey Ham when he was a kid. It was frustrating working with men and women who were actually getting to travel in space. So August moved over to the air force's Special Operations Command, where he stayed ten years before joining Striker.
    Rodgers and August had seen one another only intermittently in the post-Vietnam years. But each time they talked or got together it was as if no time had passed. When Rodgers first signed on at Op-Center he had asked August to come aboard as the leader of the Striker force.
    August turned him down twice. He did not want to spend most of his time on a base, working with young specialists. It. Colonel Charlie Squires got the post. After Squires was killed on a mission in Russia, Rodgers came to his old friend again. Two years had passed since Rodgers had first made the offer. But things were different now. The team was shaken by the loss and he needed a commander who could get them back up to speed as fast as possible. This time August could not refuse. It was not only friendship. There were national security issues at stake.
    The NCMC had become a vital force in crisis management and Op-Center needed Striker.
    The colonel looked toward the back of the plane. He watched the group as they sat silently through the slow, thunderous ascent. The quick-response unit turned out to be more than August had expected.
    Individually, they were extraordinary.
    Before joining Striker, Sergeant Chick Grey had specialized in two things. One was HALO operations-high-altitude, low-opening parachute jumps. As his commander at Bragg had put it when recommending Grey for the post, "the man can fly." Grey had the ability to pull his ripcord lower and land more accurately than any soldier in Delta history. He attributed this to having a rare sensitivity to air currents. Grey believed that also helped with his second skill-marksmanship. Not only could the sergeant hit whatever he said he could, he had trained himself to go without blinking for as long as necessary. He'd developed that ability when he realized that all it took was the blink of an eye to miss the "keyhole," as he called it.
    The instant when the target was in perfect position for a takedown.
    August felt a special kinship with Grey because the sergeant was at home in the air. But August was close to all his personnel. Privates David George, Jason Scott, Terrence Newmeyer, Walter Pupshaw, Matt Bud, and Sondra Devon the Medic William Musicant, Corporal Pat Prementine, and Lieutenant Orjuela. They were more than specialists.
    They were a team. And they had more courage, more heart than any unit August had ever worked with.
    Newly promoted Corporal Ishi Honda was another marvel.
    The son of a Hawaiian mother and Japanese father, Honda was an electronics prodigy and the unit's communications expert. He was never far from the TAC-SAT phone, which Colonel August and Rodgers used to stay in touch with Op Center The backpack containing the unit was lined with bullet-proof Kevlar so it would not be damaged in a firefight.
    Because it was so loud in the cabin Honda sat with the TACSAT in his lap. He did not want to miss hearing any calls.
    When he was in the field, Honda wore a Velcro collar and headphones of his own creation. They plugged directly into the pack. When the collar was jacked in, the "beep" was automatically disengaged; the collar simply vibrated when there was an incoming call. If Striker were on a surveillance mission there was no sound to give them away.
    Moreover, the collar was wired with small condenser microphones that allowed Honda to communicate subvocally. He could whisper and his voice would be transferred clearly to whoever was on the other end.
    But Striker was more than just a group of military elite drawn from different services. It. Colonel Squires had done an extraordinary job turning them into a smart, disciplined fighting unit. They were certainly the most impressive team August had ever served with.
    The plane banked to the south and August's old leather portfolio slid from under his seat. He kicked it back with his heel. The bag contained maps and white papers about Kashmir.
    The colonel had already reviewed them with his team.
    He would look at them again in a few minutes. Right now August wanted to do what he did before beginning every mission. He wanted to try and figure out why he was here, why he was going. That was something he had done every day since he was first a prisoner of war: take stock of his motivations for doing what he was doing. That was true whether August was in a Vietcong stockade, getting up in the morning to go to the Striker base, or leaving on a mission.
    It was not enough to say he was serving his country or pursuing his chosen career. He needed something that would allow him to push himself to do better than he did the day before. Otherwise the quality of his work and his life would suffer.
    What he had discovered was that he could not find another reason. When he was optimistic, pride and patriotism had been his biggest motivators.
    On darker days he decided that humans were all territorial carnivores and prisoners of their nature. Combat and survival were a genetic imperative. Yet these could not be the only things that drove us. There had to be something unique to everyone, something that transcended political or professional boundaries.
    So what he searched for in these quiet times was the other missing motivation. The key that would make him a better soldier, a better leader, a stronger and better man.
    Along the way, of course, he discovered many things, thought many interesting thoughts. And he began to wonder if the journey itself might be the answer. Given that he was heading to one of the birthplaces of Eastern religion, that would be a fitting revelation.
BOOK: Line of Control
4.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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