Soar (24 page)

That last element was critical. As a second lieutenant not two years out of West Point, Ritzik had once had occasion to accompany a platoon of General Juan Bustillo’s Salvadoran Special Forces on a mission to capture an elusive, deadly, and particularly nettlesome female FMLN
¹⁹
comandante
named Nidia Calderon. The team had choppered from the airfield at Ilopango, northeast, into San Vicente Province. There, they fast-roped down into a rugged landscape of ravines and thick brush, to lie in wait alongside a narrow, twisting trail identified by infrared satellite photography as used by the guerrillas to bypass the local army garrison.

Everything had been thought of. An FMLN defector had given Bustillo up-to-the-minute intelligence about Comandante
Calderon’s schedule. OPSEC had been achieved by keeping the entire SF company in isolation at Ilopango for the previous forty-eight hours. The local army commander was not informed that the unit would be in his area of operations. The pilot flying the platoon into San Vicente was a Cuban-American retired CIA veteran using the nom de guerre Maximo Gomez. “Gomez” had volunteered his services to General Bustillo to help defeat the Communist insurgents. Gomez hovered his slick as the platoon dropped into the ambush zone in a matter of seconds. Then he quickly flew off to the north.

The Salvadoran Special Forces quickly deployed into their ambush positions and settled down to wait for the
comandante
and her six escorts. They hadn’t been in position more than fifteen minutes when the FMLN point man slowly worked his way down the trail. Ritzik watched through night-vision goggles as the guerrilla came closer. He was moving very slowly—one step in a minute or so—cautiously examining the trail as he went.

Like a bird dog catching a scent, the guerrilla stopped cold, fifty yards from the ambush site. He didn’t move a muscle. He stood, statuelike, for two minutes. Ritzik watched transfixed as the man’s nostrils actually twitched, his eyes darting as he scanned left, right, and ahead.

And then, the point man slowly, slowly, slowly … backed away. The Special Forces platoon leader, a Salvadoran captain named Lopez, sent his men charging after the guerrillas. But to no avail: the trap had been discovered. Nidia Calderon escaped. And no one could figure out why.

It wasn’t until months later, while talking to a Vietnam-vet master sergeant at Fort Benning, that Ritzik finally understood why the mission had gone south.

The sergeant asked a single question. “How long before the ambush did you set up, sir?”

“A quarter of an hour, Master Sergeant,” Ritzik answered.

“That was it, sir.”

“What was?”

“The platoon leader’s timing, sir. We learned in Vietnam that you gotta set up at least an hour in front of any ambush—longer is better—because it takes that long for the critters and shitters to get back to normal. Think back, sir. Were the birds chirping? Were the bugs buzzing? Were the tree monkeys whoopin’ it up on that trail?”

Ritzik thought long and hard about it. And the answer was no. “But why was the point man’s nose twitching?” he asked. “What was that all about?”

“That, Lieutenant”—the master sergeant’s eyes crinkled—“is a real-life example of the sociocultural aspect of warfare that very few people ever come to appreciate.”

Ritzik was entirely confused, and he said so.

“Think back, Lieutenant. Think hard. What exactly did you smell when you were laying up in that ambush position?”

Ritzik thought for some seconds. “Earth,” he finally said. “A kind of vegetal, rootsy, jungle smell.”

“And that was all.”

“Yup.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Yes, Master Sergeant, I am sure. Absolutely certain.”

“Then let’s go back a little further, sir. Back to when you departed Ilopango. Take me through it.”

Ritzik described the sequence. He’d taken his gear and walked to the Op Center, where he’d pored over the map with the platoon leader, double-checking the best insertion and exfil routes.

And then it hit him. Like the proverbial ton of bricks. “Oh, goddamn,” he said, his face lighting up. “That was it.”

“What do you remember, Lieutenant?”

“He was wearing cologne. Lopez—the Special Forces captain. It was sweet, and he wore a lot of it. Most all the Salvadoran officers wore cologne.”

He turned to the master sergeant. “That was it, wasn’t it? The point man smelled Captain Lopez’s aftershave.”

“Lieutenant, if you learn two simple lessons about ambushes, you’re never gonna get caught with your skivvies down. One: give the critters plenty of time to get back to normal before the opposition shows up. And two: leave the Skin Bracer at home.”

7,000 Feet Above Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China. 2146 Hours Local Time.

R
ITZIK
’
S
ETA
was less than twelve minutes. He and Wei-Liu had pulled off their oxygen masks at 8,500 feet, reveling in the cool night air. Then Ritzik replaced the internal communications hookup with an earpiece and throat mike and ran a quick comms check with the rest of the unit. He was astonished to find the radios were all working properly.

The tailwind had picked up. It was strong enough now—eighteen miles an hour—that the team’s landing would have to include a downwind leg, base leg, and final approach. He checked his altimeter and took a reading off the GPS screen. They were right on course, and descending steadily. At one thousand feet of altitude, he would execute the landing pattern. The rest of the element would come in behind him, each offset and well separated from the others so that the turbulence from their parachutes wouldn’t affect one another’s landings.

Indeed, even now, things could go terribly wrong. A nighttime thermal could lift them willy-nilly thousands of
feet above the desert floor. The wind could shift, or increase beyond the twenty-knot maximum for safe landings. Wind shears or microbursts—short-lived downdrafts—could slam the jumpers into the desert floor at fifty miles an hour. A sudden dust devil could corkscrew them into the ground. And then there was ground turbulence. It could be caused by anything from a ragged tree line to a ridge of sand dunes. Ground turbulence was similar in many ways to the roiling air caused by jet aircraft when they take off or land. That powerful vortex behind them can—and sometimes does—cause smaller aircraft following too close behind to invert and crash.

3,500 Feet Above Xinjiang Autonomous Region,
China. 2151 Hours Local Time.

R
ITZIK COULD MAKE OUT
the dunes below clearly through his NV. He scanned the area to the southeast. There was scrub brush and more dunes, with an occasional clump of wind-stunted trees. Directly to the south, he picked out an unpaved, rutted road moving almost due east-west. That would be the smugglers’ track leading from the bridge. He steered slightly south, then turned eastward, flying parallel to the pathway. He’d pick out a landing zone away from the road, far enough from the bridge and causeway so there was no chance they’d be spotted.

Altitude: 1,800 feet.
Ritzik adjusted his trim and went to half brakes, decreasing his airspeed to about ten miles an hour but increasing his descent rate. He steered a wide left-hand turn, his altitude dropping quickly now. Now he was flying crosswind. Ahead and below, he could pick out a series of brush-topped dunes. As he crossed over the top of
them he could sense a change in the canopy as he hit the mild ground turbulence. He descended to fifteen hundred, fourteen hundred, thirteen hundred feet. Off to his left, half a kilometer away, he picked out the narrow causeway that stretched from the bridge across the soft marsh leading away from the Yarkant Köl. And then he worked the brakes once more and began a wide, flat right hand turn that would take him on the downwind leg of his approach.

Altitude: 1,000 feet and coming down rapidly.
Ritzik released the brakes to slow the descent speed. But, with the wind behind him now, his ground speed accelerated. He dropped his arms and slowed down as he brought the parachute into a second right hand turn. Now he was on the base leg. His altitude was about eight hundred feet. He was concentrating now on picking out the best possible landing zone—didn’t want to come down in the marsh, or hit the crest of the dunes. Off to his right, he saw one possibility: a slight depression perhaps two hundred feet across. At its far end was a clump of vegetation; to its left, six hundred feet away, half a dozen ragged, windblown trees.

Altitude: 300 feet.
The head wind had picked up. He raised his arms, reducing the brakes. Off to his right was a small row of dunes. The Ram Air canopy reacted, buffeting Ritzik and Wei-Liu.

Altitude: 200 feet.
He reached down with his left hand and hit the quick release on his combat pack. It fell away. As it reached the end of its tether, the shock bounced the two of them violently. Then, quickly, he eased both toggles up into the full flight position. Their airspeed quickened, but the rate of descent slowed, giving them a more gentle angle of attack.

Altitude: 60 feet.
One hundred yards straight ahead, Ritzik saw that what had appeared from a thousand feet to be a clump of vegetation was in fact a wall of thornbushes perhaps five feet high that crowned the far rim of the depression. They represented instant pain and suffering. He’d flare well in front of them. Wind speed appeared to be constant from the way it was hitting his face.

Ritzik shifted in the harness, flexing his legs. “Stand by. At about fifteen feet I’m going to flare—bring us to a nice, gentle landing. We’ll touch down and walk away as if we were stepping off an escalator.”

Wei-Liu’s head bobbed up and down. “Way to go.”

Altitude: 15 feet.
Ritzik eased both of his toggles downward, applying full brakes. The Ram Air slowed to almost a complete stop. Their soles were perhaps ten feet off the ground, when the entire left hand side of the parachute folded in half. “Oh, shit—” Instinctively, Ritzik released the toggles to allow air back into the cells. It didn’t happen and they dropped like rocks.

“Uhhhh.” Wei-Liu went down hard, Ritzik crumpling on top of her like a linebacker. He hit the quick releases and freed himself, then rolled to his right and released the chute straps. He pulled himself onto his knees, then rolled onto his side, pain shooting from his left ankle up his leg.

He crawled back to Wei-Liu and rolled her onto her back. “You okay?”

All she could do was suck air.

Ritzik pulled her harness off and ran his hands over her coveralls. She didn’t wince, so he figured nothing was broken. “Just got the wind knocked out of you,” he said.

A second chute descended rapidly. Wei-Liu watched as it flared, stopped dead in the air; the jumper stepped on to the
desert floor as the canopy dropped, deflated, behind him. A third chute appeared out of the darkness. Wei-Liu pulled off her helmet. She could hear the canopies fluttering above.

Ritzik snagged Wei-Liu’s arms and pulled her to her feet. “C’mon,” he said. “We can’t stay in the middle of the LZ—we’ll get somebody killed.”

He pointed at his combat pack. “Grab that, will you?”

He pulled his chute toward him, gathered it up into his arms, and hobbled toward the trees. Fifty feet from the tree line, Ritzik dropped his bundle and sat. Gingerly, he worked his hands around his left ankle. The good news was it wasn’t broken, only sprained. He’d work the pain off. He untied the triple knots on his Adidas, pulled the laces as tight as he could get them to support the ankle, retied his boot, and pulled himself to his feet. “Time to get down to work.”

“Down to work?” Wei-Liu looked at him incredulously. “Major, so far we’ve thrown ourselves out of a perfectly good aircraft, paraglided about sixty miles, and just walked away from a rough landing in hostile territory. Sounds like a pretty full day to me.”

“Does it, now.” Ritzik’s eyes hardened. “Well, that’s just the commute, ma’am. The easy part. The part we do before breakfast. We haven’t begun the real work yet.”

A
S SOON AS
the entire element was on the ground, Ritzik tried to check in with the TOC. But the frigging radios weren’t send/receiving on any frequency except the close-range, insertion-element comms channel. Curtis Hansen tried to pull a satellite signal from the TOC on his laptop, but all the damn thing pulled in was static. The one piece of satcom gear still operational was the feed of the convoy’s position displayed on the tiny screen of Ritzik’s Blackberry PDA. It was still moving north alongside the Yarkant Köl.

As the element blacked out their faces with multicolored cammo cream and pulled on the Russian anoraks and dark knit caps, Ritzik did the math on the coordinates. He put the ETA at the bridge in just over two hours—the clock was really ticking now. Ritzik decided he’d worry about the comms later. Right now they had to cover just over a kilometer and a half of road—about a mile—and set the ambush. They’d leave Mickey D and Wei-Liu at the LUP.
²⁰
The
pair of them could spend their time concealing the jump gear. Maybe the chopper pilot could get the radios to work.

2220.
The approach to the road was slow going—slower than Ritzik might have wanted. That was because the sand was soft, and even though the LUP was far removed from the ambush site, Ritzik wasn’t about to leave tracks that could be seen after the fact. And so, with Gene Shepard on point, the nine-man element carefully picked its way foot by foot from the LUP across three hundred yards of rolling dunes, camouflaging their boot prints as they moved, then turned east onto the washed-out, rutted smugglers’ road leading to the western end of the narrow causeway.

Roads made Ritzik nervous. You were exposed and vulnerable out in the open. Noise discipline was also a problem, especially when the unit was carrying heavy equipment—as this one was. But there was no choice now. Either he used the road, or he spent valuable time trying to cover up all those easily identifiable tracks in the soft sand. He concentrated on moving as quietly as possible, running what-if scenarios through his head as he put one boot in front of the other.