Section 8 (4 page)

"I'm sorry," he said.

* * *

Over four kilometers away, on the side of a mountain to the southeast along the shore, an old man sat in a wheelchair. He was parked on a narrow ledge, less than five feet wide, that had been cut out of the rock. On the right arm of the wheelchair was a red button, which was depressed under the weight of his hand. He slowly released the pressure. To his right, a man stood behind a digital video camera set on a tripod. The video camera had a bulky lens—a night vision device. And it was pointed toward the clearly visible flames where the battle had just taken place. The sounds of shots still echoed across the water toward their location, but the number and frequency had dropped off considerably.
"Did you get it all?" the old man asked in Tagalog, the language of Filipinos.
"Yes, sir."
"Can you identify them as Americans?"
"The zoom on this is very good. There is no doubt they are not Filipino."
"Very good."

CHAPTER 2
The Philippines

The story ran less than six hours later on the largest news station in Manila, and was picked up internationally within twenty minutes. Video of a failed American-Filipino raid that cost the lives of all the hostages, a dozen Filipino commandos, a classified number of American soldiers, and an unknown number of guerrillas.
The U.S. Defense attaché in Manila was ambushed by reporters, and because he had not been clued in on the Delta Force participation, he denied it and then looked foolish as the footage was played for him. If it had just been the several Delta and twelve Filipino commandos dead, perhaps it could have been covered up, as other incidents in the past had been: terrible training accident, helicopter went down at sea, all lost.
But there was no getting around the dead hostages. Those people had families. They'd been in the news, with the Abu Sayef continuously releasing videos of them pleading for their release. It was the number one news story in the Philippines, and it spread like wildfire in the media around the globe.
No one seemed to know or even particularly care about who had videotaped the attack and how it had gotten to the Manila news station. The focus was on the illegal participation of American forces on Philippine soil in a raid that had cost the lives of not only Americans, but two Germans, an Italian, and a French citizen.
After all that had happened in Iraq, the United States government was gun-shy about negative military publicity. Heads began to roll.

* * *

Vaughn and his team were back in "isolation." It was a term used in Special Operations for the time when a team was completely cut off from the outside world in a secure location. It was usually done for mission planning. Now it was being done simply to hide the six Delta Force survivors after the mission.
They were locked in a compound far behind the gate of what used to be Subic Naval Base, now being run by the Filipinos. A team from the First Special Forces Group out of Okinawa had been their ASTs—area specialist team—for their mission isolation, and that team was now acting as both their jailers and protectors. No one had come in and said anything about what would happen to the six, but they did have access to TV in their building and they knew the hammer was going to come down.
Vaughn felt isolated inside the isolation. He'd been honest about the problem with the LLDS at their first debriefing, and the other five team members had been surprised, and a bit skeptical. They had held their peace, though, due to the losses the team had sustained, especially knowing the bond between Vaughn and Jenkins.
The communications sergeant who gave Vaughn the LLDS and was responsible for making sure it was functioning had died in the raid, so he couldn't be questioned about the status of the original battery. Mission SOP was that all batteries to be carried on an operation were to be brand new. Had this one been forgotten about? Had it malfunctioned? The device had been destroyed when the missile hit it, so that couldn't be checked. It was just Vaughn's word that the battery had died.
The other five said they believed him, but Vaughn sensed an edge of uncertainty. He felt it himself. He couldn't get the image of Frank Jenkins's severed body out of his mind. He hadn't been able to sleep since they got back to Manila, and didn't think he would be able to sleep solidly for a while to come.
He knew he should call his sister, but no phone calls were allowed, and he was secretly grateful for that. The isolation would at least protect him from the emotional fallout. He also knew it could not continue indefinitely, even though a part of him wished it would.
With the debriefings done, the team was left alone to ponder their fate. Already, less than twenty-fours after the botched raid, the Undersecretary of Defense for Special Operations in the Pentagon had taken one for the team and tendered his resignation, claiming the authorization for Delta Force to be on the raid had come from his office and he had overstepped the limits of his power. Vaughn doubted that the raid had originated anywhere but at the highest levels. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen someone who was truly in charge stand up and take responsibility for something they had ordered.
"It's bullshit."
He didn't realize that someone had come into the briefing room, where the imagery, maps, and overlays for the mission were still tacked to walls. He'd been sitting there alone, not wanting to be with the others in the small recreation room watching CNN scroll by, showing practically the same story every half hour, the graphic images of the raid video playing again and again. Whoever had been manning the camera caught the RPG hitting Jenkins's helicopter, and Vaughn could not help but dwell on his brother-in-law's last moments of life whenever he saw it.
The man who stood in the doorway wore civilian clothes: black trousers, black T-shirt, and white sport coat. A bit much for the climate, Vaughn thought, then spotted the bulk of a gun in a shoulder holster and knew that was the reason for the coat.
"Who are you?" he demanded of the man. "This is a secure area."
"It's a secure area because I secured it," the man replied.
"CIA." Vaughn said it with a tinge of contempt. "Clowns in Action," as they were well known in the Special Operations community. Stemming from when the CIA and Special Forces were both spawned out of the OSS—Office of Strategic Services—after World War II, there had been no love lost between the two organizations. The war on terror had not brought the two organizations any closer, as the CIA had tried to expand its paramilitary forces under the guise of fighting terrorism—an area that military Special Operations felt was their purview.
"No. I'm not CIA," the man said, surprising Vaughn.
"DIA?" His tone had shifted from fact to question.
"No."
"Are we going to play alphabet soup?" Vaughn asked, tired of the game. He figured this guy was here to deliver the bad news, whatever it might be.
The man shrugged. "Let's say NSA just so you feel better."
"Why would that make me feel better?"
"It seems important to you to know who I work for."
"I want to know who I'm talking to."
"My name is Royce."
Vaughn stared at him. He was older, in his later forties, maybe early fifties. The way he carried himself indicated he'd been in the military at one time, probably long ago, before disappearing into the covert world and landing wherever he had—NSA, or elsewhere. Royce's face was tanned from the sun and had plenty of stress lines etched into it, typical for his line of work. He was tall and thin with somewhat long dark hair with a liberal amount of gray in it. His face was clean-shaven and there was the slightest trace of a scar across his forehead, disappearing underneath the hair on the right temple. Vaughn recognized a kindred spirit in the shadow world, but that didn't make him feel any better, since it was a world where secrets were kept and motives were often questionable.
"What do you want, Royce?"
Royce indicated a chair. "Mind if I sit?"
"Yes."
Royce sat anyway. He regarded Vaughn with mild interest, as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. Vaughn disliked the way this was going. "You always ask questions you've already determined the answer to?" he demanded.
"I know my answer," Royce replied. "I just wanted to know yours."
Vaughn sighed. He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. "I don't want to play games."
"I'm not here for games," Royce said. He nodded his head toward the door that led to the rec room. "How come you're not watching the news?"
"I know what happened."
"But not what's going to happen," Royce pointed out.
"Neither does CNN," Vaughn said.
Royce leaned back in his chair, turning it sideways. He stretched out his long legs and put his heels on another chair as he continued to contemplate Vaughn, tipping the chair back, balancing it on the rear two legs.
"Why don't you tell me what happened?" Royce asked.
"Read the debriefing."
"I did." Royce waited, like a good therapist wanting the patient to expose himself more than he had, but Vaughn wasn't into it. He'd done all the talking and explaining he was going to. The silence stretched out for a couple of minutes.
Abruptly, Royce removed his heels from the other chair and slammed his chair to the ground with a bang. "All right. You answer me square, just a couple of questions, and I'll be out of here and leave you to your misery."
Accepting the inevitable, Vaughn nodded.
"Did you fuck up?" Royce asked.
There was no hesitation in the answer. "Yes."
Royce frowned, and Vaughn could see the scar more clearly. Royce leaned forward. "In the AAR you said that the battery in the designator died. It appears from that point you did everything humanly possible. And the dead battery was the communications sergeant's fault, who unfortunately is no longer with us."
"So?"
"So, doesn't that mean what happened is the communication sergeant's fault?"
Vaughn stared Royce in the eye, his gaze unblinking. "I was the team commander. Everything on that mission was my responsibility."
Royce abruptly stood. "All right." He headed for the door, then paused and turned. "If you had to do it all over again, would you?"
"I'd have a good battery in the designator."
Then Royce was gone.

Fort Shafter, Hawall

In the early days of World War II, after the attack at Pearl Harbor, there was serious concern that the Hawaiian Islands would be invaded by the Japanese. Defensive preparations were made throughout the islands, including the digging of tunnels in the lava flows that made up most of the land. These tunnels housed various military organizations, from air defense headquarters to hospitals.
One such tunnel system on Fort Shafter was still in use. It housed an agency known as Westcom Sim-Center, which stood for Western Command, Simulation Center. It was the place where the major commands of the United States military in the Pacific theater played their war games using sophisticated computer simulations.
At the moment, inside the Simulation Operations Center—which mimicked the one at Western Command headquarters—a simulation involving the Air Force was being run. On the large video display at the front of the room a map showing North Korea and vicinity was projected. A blinking red dot was rapidly moving across the Korean peninsula from east to west, closing on a blue triangle.
The red dot represented a B-2 bomber, the blue triangle the principal North Korean nuclear plant that produced weapons grade material. Anxiously watching the dot were two dozen Air Force officers. Their billion-dollar toy was "in action," and the Sim-Center had a notorious reputation for what the officers would say—only among themselves—was "no bullshit." If the computer determined that the North Koreans had spotted the bomber—or worse, shot it down—the computer would play out the simulation that way. These officers had planned the mission using the best intelligence they had, and now the computer was taking their plan and testing it and the expensive high-tech toy they were employing.
At the very back of the room sat the scientist in charge of the Sim-Center, Professor Foster, who appeared to be the exact opposite of what he was: a computer programming genius. Foster was a hulking man, over six and a half feet tall and weighing in at a beefy 280 pounds. He'd played football at Stanford, where he'd received his undergraduate degree. He'd actually been good enough to be drafted by the Oakland Raiders and had gone on to training camp, where he blew out his knee on the first day, ending his professional career. Then he'd gone back to graduate school and focused on developing computer programs to simulate real events. He approached these simulations like they were the Super Bowl and the American military was the opposing team.
Today he was a bit disappointed. The flight route chosen for the B-2, the crew that was locked in a simulator at Wheeler Air Force Base "flying" the plane, and the intelligence used to plan the mission were all top-notch and working perfectly. Foster was tempted to throw a curve in, one of a dozen he had prepared. Perhaps an engine malfunction on the airplane, or a North Korean antiaircraft missile being moved into the flight path, or even the National Command Authority that had authorized the mission canceling it at the last minute. But he knew the probabilities of any of those happening were very low and it wouldn't be fair, although what was fair in warfare, no one had been able to pin down.
So the red dot reached the blue triangle without being spotted, dropped its bombs "destroying" the nuclear facility, and made its escape without incident, much to the delight of the military men in the room. After they had all filed out on their way to celebrate at the Fort Shafter Officers' Club, Foster sat alone in the Sim-Center, preparing the after-action review, which would be disseminated to the various commands involved.
Successful AARs were always harder for him to write, because there was little he could comment on. There were a few minor suggestions, but otherwise it was a pathetically thin report. And the problem with thin reports was that people then began to question the value of the Sim-Center. It was a Catch-22 that Foster had been fighting for over eight years.
The secure phone on his desk rang, and he frowned. It almost never rang unless a simulation was running. He stared at it through four rings, then reluctantly picked it up.
"Foster."
"Gambit Six."
The phone went dead, but Foster remained perfectly still, holding the receiver to his ear as if the voice would come back and retrieve the two words. They were words he had hoped to never hear.