Soar (25 page)

What would they do if the convoy showed up early? What would they do if they came across a shepherd? What would they do if a group of smugglers or an uninvolved civilian drove up the road? That had actually happened during Delta’s first mission, the attempted rescue of the American hostages in Tehran, back in April 1980. Within literal seconds of the assault element’s arrival on an allegedly isolated stretch of Iranian desert where no one ever went, three vehicles—a busload of civilians, a gasoline tanker, and an old pickup truck—all drove past the site. Result: instant FUBAR—anda compromised mission. The lesson
learned? Plan for all contingencies. Never stop rolling those scenarios in your head.

So Ritzik paid careful attention to possible cover positions and ways to reach them as he moved forward. A branch of the scrub to his left, for example, could be used to mask his footprints as he backed off the road to seek cover behind the boulders thirty feet away, or he could hunker down under the thorny bushes to the east. Fifty, maybe sixty yards off the right side of the road stood a patch of knee-high grass that might provide some camouflage.

Complete concealment wasn’t necessary, either. At night, the best way to keep a man from being seen was by following what the R&E instructors called the Quadruple-S Rule, the four being silhouette, shine, shape, and speed. Don’t silhouette yourself against the horizon; don’t allow any light to shine off you or your equipment; don’t allow the rectangular shape of your equipment to give you away, because there are virtually no naturally square shapes in nature; and don’t move so fast that your enemy’s peripheral vision will pick you up.

The last S-rule was perhaps the most important—and least understood. Without going into the technical elements, the way we see an object at night is different from the way we see that same object during the day. In daylight, light comes into the eye directly, moving from the lens back to the cone cells in the center of the retina. At night, it is our peripheral vision that dominates, because instead of hitting the cone cells of the retina, illumination is picked up by its rod cells, which are grouped around the periphery of the cones. That is why, on night patrol, constant scanning in a figure-eight, as opposed to a straight-on, left/right approach is utilized. At night, by always looking off center, you are much more likely to catch a piece of something than you
are by staring straight at it. A quick or jerky motion, therefore, is much more likely to be observed at night because it “reads” more distinctly in a man’s peripheral vision.

2224.
From the number two position, Ritzik watched as Gene Shepard worked his way up the road. The point man’s footfalls were absolutely silent, even though the gravel wasn’t being helpful. Sound was a unit’s biggest tactical problem at night. In the old days it had been the ability to see. But with miniaturized thermal imagers and fourth-generation NV readily available, darkness was no longer an impediment. In fact, Ritzik preferred fighting at night because he knew that his equipment was lighter, better, and more sensitive than anyone else’s. But sound and smell were still dead giveaways. Sound and smell told the enemy where you were—even how many of you there were.

At night, every sound is amplified. You can hear the scrape of metal against metal, the rasp of a man clearing his throat, or the click of a loose rock from two hundred yards away. How much smell can affect an operation was something Ritzik had learned in El Salvador. And one immediate result had been that he made sure none of his men ever used any scented products in the field. But there was more: sweat, food, even web gear could actually give a man’s presence away. The odor of a cigarette, for example, can carry as far as a football field if the wind is right.

Eighty yards ahead, Gene Shepard moved slowly, cautiously, deliberately, his suppressed weapon carried in low ready, his trigger finger indexed alongside the receiver, scanning through his NV as he went. He made his way through a slight depression, then inched up the incline on the far side. As he drew closer to the crest, he slowed his pace even more, lowering his body to keep himself from making a silhouette. Finally, he dropped onto the ground
and, with his weapon held in both hands, he proceeded at a crawl.

At the ridgeline, the point man froze. After a half minute he clambered slowly backward, below the crown. There, his right arm extended straight from the shoulder, his gloved hand a fist.

The eight others froze where they were. Now Shepard’s thumb extended from his fist—thumb up—and his hand quickly inverted, thumb pointed at the ground.

It was the silent signal for “enemy seen or suspected.”

Ritzik’s hands told the element to deploy to the left side of the road. There was more cover available to the left than to the right. Moreover, splitting the force could prove hazardous if there was any shooting, with the two groups firing directly at each other.

The men moved quickly, camouflaging their footprints with branches as they backed away from the rutted track. Ritzik kept his head up long enough to make sure they’d all cleared. He slid his pistol out of its thigh holster and attached the suppressor to the threaded barrel. Then he settled down behind a clump of bushes perhaps sixty yards off the road and eased the Sig’s hammer rearward. Ty Weaver lay next to him, the dull muzzle of the sniper rifle’s silencer poking through the thorns.

Ritzik pushed the transmit switch on the radio. “Shep—how many?”

“Uno.”
Gene Shepard’s whispered voice came back in his ear. “Half a klik away and approaching on foot.”

“Armed?”

“Affirmative.”

They’d have to wait this one out. Ritzik looked at his watch. It was already past the half hour. If they didn’t start setting the ambush by twenty-three hundred…

He didn’t want to think about the consequences.

2229.
The double-clicks in Ritzik’s left ear told him the target was getting close. Ritzik couldn’t see him, not yet. But Shep could. And he signaled by hitting his radio transmit twice.

And then … there he was. A lone figure, cresting the rise. Ritzik focused as he drew closer. He was wearing a PLA uniform top and non-descript pantaloon trousers tucked into some sort of calf-high boots. His head was bare, his face framed by a fierce beard and long, matted, unkempt hair. He strode, oblivious to his surroundings, right in the middle of the road. If he was the point man for the convoy, he wasn’t taking the job seriously. His rifle—it looked to be an AK—was slung over his shoulder. The tip of the cigarette dangling in Mr. Oblivious’s mouth recorded as a hot spot in Ritzik’s NV. A cellular telephone was clutched in his right hand. As he came over the crest, he soccer-kicked a stone. He cursed in Uzbek as the damn thing glanced off his toe and skittered only a couple of feet. Then he took a second shot, which sent it ricocheting past Gene Shepard’s nose.

About ten yards over the ridge, Mr. Oblivious stopped long enough to take a huge double drag on his cigarette. He exhaled smoke audibly through his nose, then pulled the butt from between his lips, stared at it quickly, dropped it on the road, and ground it out with the toe of his boot.

Mr. Oblivious walked another twenty-five paces and stopped again. He looked left, then right, as if to make sure there was no traffic coming. Then he strode over the narrow shoulder and marched away from the road, ten yards onto the hard sand of the desert floor, not twenty-five feet from where Ritzik and Ty Weaver lay. He turned his head and checked the road again. And then the son of a bitch set down the AK and the cell phone, unfastened his pantaloons,
dropped into a squatting position, and took an Uzbek dump. A noisy Uzbek dump. A smelly Uzbek dump.

He squatted there for about a minute before cleaning himself off. He appeared to be about half clean when the phone rang, and Mr. Oblivious cursed long and loud. Despite the tense situation, Ritzik nevertheless found himself amused that the universal law that governs the timing of unwelcome phone calls worked equally as well in China as it did back Stateside.

Mr. Oblivious snatched the phone off the ground and barked into it.

Ritzik listened. Mr. Oblivious was indeed Uzbek, and he was the convoy’s point man. From the one side of the conversation he heard, Ritzik confirmed Mr. Oblivious had been sent ahead to make sure there was nothing untoward in the bridge and causeway areas. Moreover, the man was obviously dealing with a superior, because while he’d let loose a string of deletable expletives when the phone rang, he was now being deferential. Dutifully, the man reported that everything was clear and safe, and yes, he’d wait to be picked up in a couple of hours.

The conversation lasted less than half a minute. And then, Mr. Oblivious snapped the phone shut, slid it into a pocket, called his boss a less-than-polite name, and finished wiping himself. Then he rubbed his left hand in the sand to clean it, brushed the sand off on the uniform jacket, cleared his nose, adjusted his pantaloons, took half a dozen steps toward the road, dropped into a sitting position, reached into his breast pocket, and pulled out a cigarette.

Which is when Ritzik shot him. The suppressed round made a soft
thwock
as it hit Mr. Oblivious square in the back of the head. The Uzbek fell forward without making a sound.

Ritzik scrambled to his feet, covered the fifteen yards
between them in less than two seconds, and—careful to select a firing angle from which ricochets wouldn’t pose a hazard to his own people—put two more silenced rounds in the man’s head.

Killing Mr. Oblivious wasn’t something Ritzik had been especially anxious to do. He took no joy in killing. It was an essential part of his job. And he was proficient at it. But the Selection process for Delta was careful to weed out the rogues, the thrill killers, and the sociopaths, who thought that throat-slitting or double-tapping was fun. Still, Ritzik had no hesitation about killing. And he wasn’t about to compromise his mission by wasting time waiting for the Uzbek to finish his cigarette and move on.

He knelt, checked the man for a pulse, and found none. He rolled the corpse over onto its back, stood astride it, searched for documents or any other intel, and came up dry. Mr. Oblivious wasn’t carrying anything—not even an ID.

Ritzik secured his weapon, extracted the cell phone from the dead man’s jacket, switched it off, and dropped it into a pocket. It would be interesting to discover who paid the bills. “Let’s get moving.”

A
S THEY REACHED
the end of the causeway, Ritzik was pleased to discover that the gap between the concrete surface and the unpaved road was huge—an eight-inch drop from the end of the causeway into an enormous pothole. The literal bump in the road hadn’t shown up on the satellite images. But it was going to force the convoy to slow down precipitously.

Rowdy Yates jogged through the light ground fog the slightly less than half a kilometer to the bridge, carefully paced back, and took Ritzik and Ty Weaver aside. “Change of plans. You initiate on ‘Two—just like always.’ But you hit the lead truck first.” Yates looked at Ritzik. “Time your countdown so Ty can shoot just as Truck One comes off the causeway. It’ll bottleneck the others. They won’t know what’s happening in the back of the column until it’s too late. I’ll set the claymores off and you’ll be picking ‘em off from the rear like Gary Cooper in the old
Sergeant York
movie.”

The sniper snorted. “Promise it’ll be that easy, Rowdy?” “On my word.” Yates held up his right hand, palm raised.
“Oh, by the way, I got some lovely waterfront property to sell you right outside Mazār-e Sharīf.”

“And you’ll respect me in the morning, too, right?” Ty started walking to the rear to search out a shooting position.

Yates gestured toward the causeway. “Setting those claymores is gonna cause us a headache or two, boss.”

Ritzik nodded. “I saw.” The trouble lay in the narrowness of the causeway. The Chinese claymores had an effective range of roughly two hundred meters. But they were most deadly when the target was within a sixty-meter cone. The problem was that the concrete sides of the causeway were just over three feet high, and the causeway itself was more than ten feet above the marsh. The precise measurements had been impossible to gauge from the satellite images. It was going to be unworkable to position the claymores where he’d wanted to, because the causeway sidewall would mask too much of the blast.

Oh, the situation could be remedied. But it was going to take precious time to camouflage the damn things and hide the firing wire. Ritzik shook his head, disgusted. “Do what you have to. They’re critical.”

2316.
The firing positions were going to be problematic, too. The marsh was soft—and much deeper than expected. That was the trouble with technical intelligence: it could give you just partial information. Nothing was as good as an old-fashioned, eyes-on recon. An old-fashioned, eyes-on recon would have shown what Ritzik and his team discovered in a matter of minutes: there were fewer cover and concealment possibilities than they would have liked.

But the downside came with an upside: there was no easy avenue of escape for the bad guys, either. The ambushed tangos would have to try to flee by jumping off the causeway
into the marsh—where they’d be killed quickly. Or, they’d try to push forward onto the roadway, where Ritzik’s second element would cut them to pieces. Once the convoy was stopped, it could be decimated. Terrorists seldom practiced vehicular counterambush drills. And at 2340, Ritzik got another piece of good news: Rowdy, Goose, and Shep had solved the claymore situation. They’d camouflaged the devices and set them so the deadly cones of the blasts would broadside directly into the last three trucks in the column, the shaped charges killing most of those inside.

2325.
Ritzik called back to the LUP. He’d need Mickey D’s firepower. And he wanted Wei-Liu close by, to work on the MADM as soon as the killing zone was safe.

2345.
Now came the hard part: the waiting. The ambushers had laid themselves out in a modified letter
L.
Rowdy, Shepard, Masland, Curtis, and Goose were strung out in the marsh shallows by the western end of the causeway, concealed by the patchy fog and clumps of saw grass. The other five were split: Ritzik,
Ty
Weaver, and Mickey D on the right side of the road; Tuzz and Sandman on the left, to deal with any tangos who tried to flank from behind. The element’s fields of fire were marked by IR chem-lights.