State Of Honour

Truth was, the CIA’s ultra-secretive Special Activities Division, the most elite section of which was the Special Operations Group, had worked in tandem with Delta since their inception in the late 1970s, and regularly recruited operatives from the squadrons. But it was obvious that the CIA had the upper hand, and Tom had heard rumours that Crane headed the Special Operations Group, or had done.

Crane seemed to relax. “Sure. What the hell do I know anyways?” he said, although not without a hint of sarcasm.

“We’ve successfully carried out eight similar hostage recues over here,” Sawyer said, still apparently unfazed. “That’s why POTUS wants to go for it. But if the NSC judge it’s totally off the wall, they’ll say so. I know there’s only a twenty per cent chance of success, but we’re ready and able to give it our best shot. If we don’t try it, we’re likely to be too late. Now I’m no politician, that’s for certain, but why wouldn’t they have made a demand already, if they wanted something?”

“Why wouldn’t they have killed her already, if they wanted her dead?” Crane replied.

Tom thought that that was sound reasoning, although it made him shudder to think it could end that way. But you could bat this one back and forth for days, and you’d still be left with the same dilemma. He guessed that was why those who had to make such decisions would go for it. The alternative was inertia. And if the secretary died while they were procrastinating, well, that could be political suicide. Besides, although it wasn’t a perfect plan, no plan was, especially with what they had to work with. But it was unlikely to be any different in a week’s time, and with the passage of time came an increased likelihood of a leak.

“Are we done?” Sawyer asked.

“Yeah. Run it past Houseman,” Crane said.

Sawyer headed for the door, a laptop and a bundle of photos under his arm. Tom saw Crane glance at him, although he looked preoccupied.

“I’ll see what I can do, Tom. Just stick around for now.”

18.

Tom hadn’t wanted to push his luck, thinking that if he kept in the background Crane might be able to get him to go along on the mission. He got a cup of coffee from a vending machine in the lobby, and sat on a pleather chair. He thought about those who’d died already, and those young men who might lose their lives in the next few hours. He just hoped that their sacrifices would lead to a worthy outcome.

He sensed someone behind him and twisted around. It was Steve Coombs, holding the extended handle of a small suitcase on wheels.

“The hell you doing here?” Tom asked.

“Benazir Bhutto got a bomb threat. It’s closed till further notice,” Steve said, referring to Islamabad’s international airport, named after the assassinated female politician. “I’m flying home from Kabul. The CIA said they had a couple more questions; asked me to come in on my way to the airport.”

Placing the cup on the floor, Tom stood up. “Good to see you, Steve, anyhow.”

They shook hands.

“And you, Tom?”

“I’m staying put for now.”

“How’s that?”

Tom shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. You get home safely, you hear. And give Page my love.”

Tom hadn’t seen Steve’s wife in maybe two years, but he admired the woman, and he knew that his friend was devoted to her. Steve was a lucky man in many respects, he thought. His parents farmed three-hundred acres in Eastern Pennsylvania spit into cattle and soybeans. He had six siblings, all of whom were married and doing well. Steve had told him that growing up on a farm was like he imagined heaven to be.

As they parted company Tom thought his own early life couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Up until he was eight, he saw his father about once every three months, if he was lucky. He gave him a toy or twenty bucks. He looked handsome in his Army officer’s uniform. He was six-two with a natural muscularity, his black-onyx-coloured eyes and hair marking him out like a movie actor. He’d never married his mother, and Tom didn’t have his name, Dupree being her surname. His father was uneasy around him, avoiding physical contact, and there would be long silences between them. He was Louisiana Creole, his forefathers being colonial French who’d settled in the southern states. Tom excelled at French at school; did it, he supposed, to make his father proud in some remote way.

He clenched his jaw muscles now and tried to focus on something positive.

“Tom.”

It was Crane’s voice. Tom looked over towards the row of elevators and saw him walking across the tiled floor, his big legs striding out, his confidence restored. Tom stood up.

“It’s a goer. You ready for this?” Crane said, excitedly.

“Hell, yeah” he replied, thinking Crane’s mood had turned a full one-eighty.

“We don’t land until the Rangers have secured the site. You realize that, right?”

“How did you pull it off?”

“Apart from Houseman being sympathetic, which, I have to say, ain’t his natural disposition, I told him that you were the only man suitable to go along who she’d feel instantly comfortable with.”

“Thanks, Crane.”

“You know how to use an MP5?”

Tom nodded.

“I’ll make sure you have one.”

“You getting paid to keep me alive?” Tom asked.

Crane grinned. “If I was intent on keeping you alive, I woulda made sure you went home on that plane.”

19.

The capital lay in a narrow valley of the Hindu Kush on the banks of Kabul River. The convoy of adapted Land Cruisers moved at speed, Tom sitting in the second vehicle beside Crane. Both men wore fatigues and body armour, their Heckler & Koch MP5 9mm sub-machine guns upright between their legs. They were fixed with suppressors. Crane had explained that all of the assaulters’ weapons were suppressed, so if they heard a round go off from a firearm that wasn’t, it meant it was from a hostile source.

The distance to Kabul International Airport was ten miles, the North Side Cantonment of which housed the command centre for the Afghan Air Force. They would utilize the seven helipads there for the mission, although the Afghans had been told an elaborate lie. Crane had told Tom that if they knew what they were up to, they would’ve all been arrested. Bagram Air Base, which had been used as a staging point for Special Forces’ missions along the northern Af-Pak border, was so depleted that it could no longer be used safely.

Kabul International was connected to the capital by a four-lane highway, shared with domestic traffic. As Tom stared out he saw the heat haze rising above it, the tarmac melting from the hours of intense sunlight.

“You wouldn’t believe this was Afghanistan, would ya?” Crane said, smiling.

“No. It’s changed a lot since I was here last.”

“Don’t get me wrong—you get outside the ring of concrete and steel and it’s still a Third World hellhole as bad as any I’ve seen.”

“You think we were right coming here?” Tom asked.

“It was a hornets’ nest. But staying as long as we did, hell, no. They sit down and talk, but you can’t tame these people. They’re tough, goddamn it. Toughest people I’ve ever met.”

“Nothing tough about IEDs,” Tom said.

“A necessity. They couldn’t fight a hundred thousand well-armed troops face-to-face.”

“So that’s all gonna be forgotten about now, huh?”

“Look, I do my job. Damn good at it, too. You know why?” Crane said, rhetorically. “Cuz I don’t hold grudges. That gives you ulcers. I got enough bad habits as it is.”

“That’s not what you said about the Pakistanis,” Tom said, massaging an aching bruise on his thigh.

“Always gotta have exceptions, Tom.”

Tom glanced at him. “How will they’ve treated her?”

“That depends,” Crane said, his voice serious.

“On what?”

“If she’s been compliant, they’ve likely just ignored her most of the time. But if she’s acted like the US Secretary of State, they’ve probably treated her worse than a stubborn goat.”

Tom watched Crane staring into space now, and wondered what was going through his mind. He hadn’t held back. He wasn’t the type. Fingering his Buddha in his pocket, Tom just hoped she’d acted as he’d instructed her to if the worst happened.

The military terminal was marked by a ring of black, red and green Afghan flags and what looked like relatively newly built redbrick buildings. As the Land Cruisers passed through the heavily guarded checkpoint, Tom felt a knot in his gut. He was both a part of it and a bystander; a voyeur, even. But as Crane opened the door and the sticky heat hit him he consoled himself by knowing that if she was there, she would be glad to see a friendly face at least.

Let her be there, he thought. Let her be alive.

20.

The sound of the twin engines and huge tandem rotor blades scything the cold air was near-deafening as the special ops Chinook flew at almost two-hundred miles per hour. The Black Hawks had silenced rotors and engines, but by the time the Chinooks got there it would be game on. Dusk had fallen now and the clouds were high and wispy, the skyline above the mountains the colour of hacked strawberries.

Tom had been told to wear a seat belt and helmet to stop himself from knocking himself out if the helicopter had to take a sharp turn or got caught in downdraft. Although the cabin had been fitted out with padding, it still looked as if it was weeks away from being finished. But anything that wasn’t functional was left out, especially on a mission. The operators called the helicopter the flying school bus, which Tom thought inappropriate.

He sat on a red canvas, aluminium-framed seat, his feet placed firmly on the metal decking with exposed rivets. Crane, wearing a clear earpiece attached to a PTT radio, sat beside him, talking to one of the other CIA men who were in flight. An iron-pumper with a black beard and square face, a real Cro-Magnon hard case, who was nodding as Crane talked in short loud bursts like a drunk in a noisy bar.

From the oval porthole opposite him, Tom could see a four-blade Apache attack helicopter. It was a state-of-the-art killing machine, the nose-mounted sensor hub housing the night-vision systems for its 30-mm Chain Gun carried between the landing gear, and the Hellfire missiles and Hydra rocket pods on the stub-wings sticking out of the fuselage behind the cockpit. But he knew such weapons had been of little use in a guerrilla war where the combatants had dressed like locals and had lived among them, too.

The Apaches would fly ahead soon and be the second wave of attack, once the Black Hawks had landed at the insertion point and there was no further need for an element of surprise, however brief. Then they would buzz the valleys of the White Mountains in the vicinity, deterring any element of reinforcements. The drone reconnaissance hadn’t shown up any other settlements nearby, but a group of Leopards could always be squatting under scrub or in dugouts.

Tom chewed his lip and grabbed the seat bar as the Chinook hit turbulence. He knew he was heading for a death zone.

The last time he’d flown in a helicopter had been on a short flight from DC to Richmond, Virginia, where the secretary had opened a library at South University. That was a fortnight ago. He’d thought that his time with her would end in a clean slate until he’d gotten the call from his direct superior, informing him that she would be going to Islamabad. He never knew why, in detail. He didn’t have to know. He was only ever told her destination days before if her schedule changed. But he’d felt uneasy from the beginning, a nagging doubt that had played out as fretful dreams.

Crane turned to Tom. “ETA five minutes,” he mouthed, holding up five fingers. He opened up a laptop to get the live feeds. “That’s the view from Sawyer’s video camera in Salt One,” he bellowed. “That’s the interpreter next to him. Bet he didn’t sign up for this. The operators call it flying it into the X. Heavy shit, huh.”

The interpreter was a Pakistani, his face obscured by a black ski mask. Tom knew that his whole family would be killed if he was ever recognized.

The screen was split into quarters, with different images appearing from the various cameras, including those mounted on the Black Hawks’ fuselages. Briefly, Tom wondered what his first words to her would be. Whether it would be appropriate to apologize or simply say he was glad to see her alive? But what if they found her dead already? What if the plan failed at the last moment and she was killed or terribly injured? What would he say or do then? he thought.

As the amber LED lights were cut, he spent the next few minutes zoning out.

“They’re moving in,” said Crane, breaking into Tom’s thoughts.

Tom looked down towards Crane’s lap at the live feeds. “The Black Hawks are shaking a lot,” he said, watching one of the helicopters hover above the fort’s flat roof as the other lowered down to about ten metres above the courtyard. Each had a sniper aiming a suppressed rifle out of the cabin’s open side door, scanning the rescue site for any sign of a fighter.

“Uplift of trapped air,” Crane said. “It’ll be fine. The Delta work top down, bottom up, and converge in the middle. Smooth and fast, smooth and fast. A breacher blows down a door, then the fire teams enter. They take out the resistance. The main dangers are trip wires, IEDs and blind firing around walls. If the whole place isn’t rigged with Semtex, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry. If she’s there, we’ll find her.”

At least Crane is still upbeat, Tom thought. He just hoped he had a right to be, despite the man’s previous misgivings.

On screen, he watched Sawyer lead the assault on the ground. He fast-roped adroitly in leather mitts some seven metres from the bar jutting out from Black Hawk’s fuselage, landing into a swirl of dust and small stones. After being propelled forward by the rotor wash, he took point in the dark courtyard, adjusting his headphones before speaking into his cheek mic. The main building was directly ahead of him, a few outbuildings and vehicle ports left and right. He scanned around with his M4A1 carbine, fixed with a thermal scope and red-dot laser, his four-tube night-vision goggles allowing peripheral vision, but making him look as if he’d landed from another solar system.

After the main interpreter sprained an ankle on the descent and a medic had his ill-secured backpack almost torn off by the wash, the assault teams panned out and ran forward, their torsos clad in sixty-pound ballistic plates. The live feed showed a serious of controlled explosions, bursts of automatic fire and swift movement.

“Alpha three down. Medevac,” Sawyer shouted, looking over at an operator seven metres from him, his body splayed on the ground.

With that, another Delta was blown into the air three metres in front of Sawyer. He landed heavily, his legs a twisted mess. The operators couldn’t use their fragmentation grenades, because they had no idea where the secretary was being held. But the local fighters were using them to devastating effect. That and a triangulation of small-arms fire.

“Jesus,” Tom said.

The movement ratcheted up to something approaching frantic. Gunfire crackled and breaching charges erupted. A flurry of tracer rounds flew through the air from a corner turret and, a few seconds later, there was a massive explosion coupled with a white flash. Tom heard the muted voices of the men on the ground.

“Salt Two down,” said Sawyer. “A bird’s down. A bird’s down.”

“Shit!” Tom said.

With that, an Apache hovered before blowing off the turret. A funnel of flame exploded upward from the black smoke ball, the smashed clay bricks showering down onto the courtyard. Tom thought it might as well have been made of balsa wood for all the protection it had afforded.

“Wow,” Crane said. “See that? Got those RPGs for damn sure.”

As the operators moved into the main building they began to clear the warren of corridors. Their eyes were covered by helmet-mounted NVGs as they aimed suppressed, desert-tan HK416 assault rifles and Colt carbines, assaulting the building from top and bottom, just as Crane had said they would. The insurgents fell away like ghosts, or buckled under double taps to the head and body from relatively close quarters, after they were fixed with IR lasers. Once a section was cleared, an assaulter shouted, “Move,” and his teammate would shout, “Moving,” before taking a step. It was precise. Calculated.

Outside, a second Apache fired a rocket at the far left-hand side of the surrounding wall of the fort compound, smashing a gaping hole in the clay bricks.

“There ain’t enough room to put the Chinooks down in the courtyard and the gate is likely to be rigged. Hence the hole. We’re going in,” Crane barked. “And put your goggles on or you’ll be picking grit out of your eyes for a week.”

Tom felt a rush of adrenalin. He’d been in combat zones many times, but this was something else.

21.

The Chinook hovered before descending ten metres from the fort’s outer wall. After it touched down in the landing zone, the tail ramp lowered so that they could disembark quickly without squeezing through the cabin doors. A bearded master sergeant, holding an HK fixed with an AG416 40mm grenade launcher, led them through the smoke and swirling dust whipped up by the rotors, over the chunks of bricks and into the main courtyard. The downed Black Hawk was burning up in the far right-hand corner, the other circling in front of the bullet-ridden walls of the main building. The Delta told them to follow his steps, saying that they hadn’t swept the area and IEDs could be anywhere.

Tom saw a dozen bodies lying dead or groaning on the ground, including three operators, who were being attended to by medics. A group of women, hugging children and wailing, sat in the courtyard to the left. In front of them, a couple of Delta stood either side of the second masked interpreter as he attempted to comfort the innocents and obtain intel in the process. Directly behind him, four operators were securing those insurgents who’d surrendered or had been captured alive with plasticuffs before hooding them. At the doorways to the outer buildings, infrared lights visible only via the operators’ night-vision goggles signalled that they’d been cleared of any threat.

Tom, Crane and the others were met at the central door by another five Delta, all wearing mismatched uniforms and padded gloves. One was holding a Belgian Malinois dog on a lead, its eyes protected by a ballistic visor, its torso sheathed in body armour. The dog snarled when they came close, bearing huge fangs. Its Delta handler jerked the lead and took point. Sawyer remained behind, organizing the ongoing security of the periphery with the rest of the troop, together with the Rangers who had disembarked from a Chinook beyond the wall.

The interior was thick with dust and stank of stale smoke and kerosene. Guided by the operators’ helmet-mounted flashlights, the dog led the way, its snubbed snout tracking the scent of the secretary via an article of clothing taken from her bedroom at the embassy. The GPS had pinpointed the building, but the signal had faded en route, so it was impossible to tell her exact position in the many dark corridors and small rooms that constituted the fort proper. The corridors were on three levels and narrow, no more than two-metres high, creating a claustrophobic effect. The walls were uneven, the floors pitted and strewn with small rocks.

After five minutes or so, the dog, salivating now and snorting, moved down a slope below ground level. It stopped at a reinforced metal door at the end of a pitch-black corridor peppered with rat droppings. The air here smelled of something akin to rotting vegetables. An operator carrying an M4 Super 90 shotgun moved up before banging on the door and calling out. There was no answer. Tom clenched his jaw muscles, feeling anxious. Crane stepped forward and ordered the door blown open.

“We can’t risk it,” Tom said, intervening.

He knew that if the door opened inward, the secretary could be killed as it careered into her.

“Blow it down, son,” Crane insisted.

Ignoring Crane, the Delta spoke into his cheek mic. “A metal door, sir. Lyric could be beyond it. No question of knocking out the hinges with Hatton rounds. It’ll need an explosive breach.” After getting an order from Sawyer, he said, “Copy that.”

The rear operator came forward and placed a strip of adhesive breaching explosives over the lock, which would rip it apart. He primed it with two blasting caps, so that if one malfunctioned there’d be less chance of failure, and reeled out the connecting wires. Tom and the others retreated a way back down the dim corridor. As blast shields were held up in front of them they lowered their heads. Tom just hoped the door would blow back outwards.

“Fire in the hole,” the Delta shouted.

After a two-second delay, the explosion was ferocious, making the shields almost buckle, the shock wave exaggerated by the confined space. An operator ran forward, with bolt cutters strapped to his back. He leapt over the blown-down door, his red-dot laser scanning the room. He flipped up his night-vision goggles, activated his helmet flashlight and double checked for any sign of the secretary, a booby trap or Leopard.

“Clear,” he shouted.

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