Joint Operation Center, Jalalabad,
Afghanistan
April 28, 2011, 2030 Hours Local
Time
“Stand ’em down, Mac.” Wesley Bolin wiped his face with his hands. “We got a hurry-up-and-wait from POTUS. Won’t hear anything until tomorrow.” He muttered something inaudible under his breath.
“Sir?”
“I was just thinking. Get hold of the Sentinel crews and ground the drones we put over the flight path. Let’s keep the two over Abbottabad in a loiter. How much more flight time do they have?”
McGill checked his BlackBerry. “Eighteen hours.
“Relieve them tomorrow afternoon with fresh ones. Hopefully we can go tomorrow night.”
“We got a front coming in about three tomorrow afternoon,” Brigadier General Eric McGill frowned. “Probably have a weather hold even if we do get the go.”
“Crap.”
“What do we tell the troops?” The assault package personnel were well into their alert sequence. They’d been awakened at 5 PM. By six they were working out and having breakfast. Currently they were in the SCIF, the bug-proof room where they’d assembled for their Battle Update Brief, where they were being told that the night’s target was an HVT named Hamid Gul Muhammed, a Taliban bomb maker responsible for the deaths of more than twenty American Soldiers and Marines. They would learn that Gul had fled deep into Pakistan and that the raid was therefore under CIA control.
It was nothing they hadn’t heard before. All of JSOC’s cross-border raids came under CIA control, because so far as the JAG lawyers were concerned, while it was illegal under international law for the U.S. military to invade a sovereign nation, clandestine cross-border incursions were dead-center in the CIA’s mission statement.
“Tell ’em weather. Tell ’em target’s moved. I don’t fricking care.” Wes Bolin was pissed. He almost would have preferred to have the president scrub the mission than drop it into a vacuum.
Worse, when the admiral had asked Vince what happened, the CIA director responded with a stony silence. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—supply a reason for POTUS’s indecision.
It didn’t really matter. The CINC was the CINC. Full stop, end of story.
The Joint Special Operations Command was a strange animal. It didn’t report to the Pentagon hierarchy or to one of the combatant commands, even though most people thought it reported to USSOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. No, JSOC came under the National Command Authority, which translated to the president and the secretary of defense. Without a go from the NCA, nothing moved.
Still, this delay wouldn’t do the shooters any good. Tier One units are like Thoroughbreds. You don’t keep Secretariat in the starting gate overnight.
Secretariats—military ones like Red Squadron, anyway—operate differently, train differently, work differently than conventional units. They shoot tens of thousands of rounds a year honing their skills. They can operate singly or in pairs, squads, teams, platoons, or troops, depending on the situation. Even the way they shoot is different. DEVGRU SEALs and Delta shooters may carry automatic weapons, but on direct-action missions they almost never fire in any mode but semiautomatic. All those bursts of automatic fire by Delta and SEALs happen mainly in movies. DEVGRU SEALs and Delta Soldiers don’t need full auto mode on ninety percent of their operations because they can fire a double or triple tap at virtually the same speed as an automatic weapon does.
And it wasn’t just the human factor that worried Wes Bolin. Tonight all his operational ducks were in the proverbial row. Troops were fresh and primed; weather was perfect; targets were exactly where they were supposed to be. Tomorrow the conditions could change. It could thunderstorm for the next week. Crankshaft—the code name for Bin Laden—could switch locations. Any number of variables could result in additional layers of Murphy factors, which, taken all together, could screw things up. Not make the hit impossible, but make it a lot more difficult. “Better get on it, Mac.”
“Roger, sir.” The big Ranger general stowed his unlit cigar. “By the way,” he said, “the CIA guy—their liaison?”
“Fedorko.”
“Yeah, Fedorko. He’s got a set of prosthetics with him?”
“Affirmative. They’re for Archangel—he’s the undercover CIA’s had in Pakistan since late November.”
“Archangel?” McGill scratched his head.
“That’s his call sign. He’s a double amputee, and we’ll bring him out. But during the mission we need him ambulatory because he’s fluent in Pashto.”
“Know his name?”
“I can find out. Why?”
“ ’Cause I had a master sergeant working for me at the 175 when I was an O-5 whose radio call sign was Archangel. Charlie Becker. Big guy. You didn’t want to fool with him. Hell of a Soldier. Silver Star recipient. Two combat jumps. Yup. Hell of a Soldier. He retired in oh-one or oh-two. Somewhere I seem to remember somebody telling me he’d gone to Langley.”
“Could be. I’ll check,” Bolin said. “Meanwhile, you stand ’em all down, Mac. We’re in hurry-up-and-wait mode until we hear from the CINC.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”