Specter (29 page)

As soon as he'd unstrapped the ruck from his legs, then hit the emergency release, his fall had slowed dramatically. Working at the toggles, he could feel the chute responding now to his guidance, and when he unsheathed the flashlight from his vest pocket and turned it on the canopy, everything looked all right, at least so far as he could see. Possibly one side of his chute had rolled under, but the shock of dropping the gear had freed it.

The problem was that his angle of approach had been calculated on his weight plus the better than one hundred pounds he'd been carrying. Without the ruck he was seventy-some pounds lighter, and dropping along a corresponding shallower descent path. Unfortunately, he had nothing to go on for navigation except for his compass, and that only showed direction, not how far he'd traveled. When he finally dropped beneath the overcast, he saw that he'd overshot the DZ by quite a bit; he was still over the lake, but not by much ... and that damned castle looked like it was going to do its best to take him out.

He had too much forward speed to simply dump air and drop. What he needed to do was pull a 180 before he crashed into the castle walls or into the mountain beyond, and get back where he belonged, out over the lake. And that was going to take some doing ... especially if his chute had suffered any damage earlier.

He was across the beach now.
Shit!
There was a warm updraft coming off the land. It felt as if he were actually rising. Pulling harder on the toggle, he started to slip to the left. Too late. He was going to hit. . . .

No ... he was going to pass right over the damned place! He felt awkward, as though he had no control at all. It was damned frustrating, too. The castle was laid out below him exactly the way it had looked in those satellite photos, with a smaller, inner tower rising from the rear of a roughly oval walled court. With a properly working chute, he could have dropped in anywhere he pleased, touching down right atop one of those stone parapets if he'd wanted. Ram-air chutes gave a jumper unprecedented control and accuracy whenever everything went right.

But of course, in combat things never went right, not one hundred percent anyway, and that was why an op this complex was using the middle of the lake as a DZ, instead of down there inside the castle keep.

The scenery from up here was nothing less than magnificent, a literal bird's-eye view. Doc had read recently that the Albanians' name for their own country was Shqiperia, “the land of Eagles,” and that the Albanians were Shqiptars, “the Eagle Men.”
Eagle Men, my ass,
he thought, a little wildly under the surge of adrenaline coursing through his system.
They ain't got nothing on me!

As silently as a huge, gliding eagle, Doc swept over Gorazamak's outer walls, still turning to the left, still high enough that he was able to look down inside the enclosures. He could see men down there easily. . . a sentry by the front gate, two more men standing together on one of the highest of the inner parapets. Those two were almost lost in the darkness above the light-bathed courtyard below, but Doc caught the flare of a lit cigarette. He was still above the highest of the walls, though considerably below an array of UHF antennas and communications masts on the roof. If he tangled up in those. . .

But then he was safely past, still slipping left, sliding clear of the loom of the fortress. Now his only worry was slamming into the side of the mountain ... or landing in the damned trees.

The mountain bulked above the castle's rocky perch like a solid wall, some of it sheer stone cliffs like the heights below the fortress, most steep and rugged but not impassable, blanketed in thick forest growth. There was lots of snow on the ground, more than there'd been in Bosnia. It reflected light enough from the castle that Doc could easily see the branches reaching up for him, just below his boots.

During the fighting against Communist guerrillas in Malaysia in the early 1950s, the British SAS had developed a new type of parachute insertion, one tailored for the thick forest and jungle of the Malay Peninsula, called “tree jumping.” The idea was to deliberately land in the woods, with your chute snagging you far up at the top of the tree canopy, where you could use a long length of line to lower yourself to the forest floor.

The idea hadn't worked out well, and the practice had soon been stopped. Too many troopers had impaled various parts of their anatomy. Doc had a superb imagination. . . not to mention a thorough medical understanding of just what could happen to a man landing in the treetops. He kept pulling down on the left-hand toggle. Could he tighten his turn... pull it back over the lake? ...

No way. He was heading south now, half a mile or more clear of the castle but dropping so fast with his turning maneuver that he didn't have a prayer of reaching the water. Quickly, he assumed the emergency tree-landing position— legs tight together to protect his crotch; left arm over his eyes, left hand in his right armpit, palm out; right arm over left arm, with right hand in the left armpit, palm out; head cocked to the left to protect his face and throat....

He felt something brush along his left leg, snag at the shotgun strapped to his side... and then he was crashing down through branches in a series of jerks and jolts. Pain arced through his right leg like an electric shock.
Shit!
Then his canopy snagged hard and yanked him to a halt; a second later, his back slammed into the tree's trunk with a thump that left him stunned.

Doc held his tree-landing position until he'd stopped falling, then slowly relaxed. After the racket of his landing, it was almost blissfully quiet, except for the barking of a dog somewhere not too far off. The ground, he estimated, was thirty feet down. His right ankle was throbbing, whether broken or sprained, he couldn't tell yet. “The Eagle,” he muttered softly to himself, “has landed. Almost.”

And he didn't even have the climbing rope carried by those old SAS tree jumpers. There'd been line in his rucksack, but that was lying on a hillside somewhere in Albania right now, along with a flotation device, most of his shotgun ammo, and five hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammo for the 60-guns.

Shit, shit, shit
, he thought, swaying slightly, then bumping again into the tree's trunk.
Now what?

When they estimated they were a mile from the beach, they'd stopped, according to plan, waiting for another ten minutes. Though they were no longer showing beacons, which might have been visible from the castle at this range, the rallying point was well-enough defined by the lights from the castle that three more men were able to find them—Holt, Roselli, and Brown.

They swam the rest of the way in slowly, taking care not to break the surface with a carelessly kicking foot. They were almost certainly invisible from Gorazamak ... but if they weren't, they would be no more suspicious than a mat of black, floating vegetation.

They didn't come ashore on the beach. There was too great a chance that they'd be observed from the walls above, even the possibility that it would be patrolled. Instead, the seven men aimed for the rocks south of the beach. The bottom came up swiftly to meet them there. Soon, their boots scraped against rocks, mud, and weed, and they crawled the last few yards on hands and knees through a thick wall of reeds, still shoving the raft before them.

“Shadow!” a voice called softly from the rocks, a welcome challenge.

“Bucephalus.”

DeWitt and six more SEALs were already waiting for them at the rally point. Gold Squad's CO had splashed down closer to the shore than Murdock had, and some of the others—Mac, for instance—had come down just short of the shore. Only one SEAL was missing now, Doc Ellsworth, and he might be arriving at any moment.

The SEALs had just utilized two of their elements for their insertion, air and water. Quietly now, they began preparing to take on the land as well.

All of the SEALs had studied both maps and satellite photographs of the stretch of lake shore directly beneath the castle, knew it well enough to—literally in this case—find the place in the dark. While the rest of the SEALs began unpacking their assault gear, Roselli and Sterling pulled the protective tape off their H&Ks, cleaned the weapons, and snapped in thirty-round magazines. They broke two sets of NVDs out of their waterproof cases, left all of their extra ammo and gear with the rest of the team, and slipped off into the darkness, moving uphill.

Now, twenty minutes later, they lay among the rocks on the east side of the coast road, using their night-vision gear to peer down on four soldiers standing guard at the entrance to the approach road north of the castle. The soldiers, completely unaware of the black-garbed commandos watching them from the blackness overhead, were not particularly alert. One was pacing back and forth at the entrance to the main road, nervously looking up and down the highway as though he expected an assault to come from the north or the south, rather than from across the lake. The other three seemed to be ignoring the first, sitting and talking, smoking pungent cigarettes and drinking something that was almost certainly not coffee from a couple of thermos bottles stashed in a rucksack.

Roselli wished that Stepano was with him to translate their conversation. Steponit, however, was on another reconnaissance, along with Red, Scotty, and the 21C. The two SEALs listened long enough to satisfy themselves that the sentries here were running on routine, that there was no alert out, no indication that the SEAL platoon's arrival had been detected. The nervous guy by the road was a kid, a teenager, and had the look of a new recruit taking his duties very seriously indeed. The other three, probably seasoned campaigners, were passing around a thermos and telling one another stories. From the gestures one was making with his hands and the laughs and declamations being made by the others, the subject was the favorite topic of all soldiers and sailors on duty late at night with no superiors listening in.

Soldiers' bull sessions, Roselli thought, were probably universal, the same no matter what the language or the nationality.

Quietly, he laid a hand on Sterling's arm and squeezed. Like shadows, the SEALs backed away from their observation nest above the storytellers.

It was time to get back to the others.

During their sweep of the area, Roselli and Sterling had managed to verify by Mark I eyeball much of the data already acquired through satellite photos. Spy satellites were incredible reconnaissance tools, allowing you to see fantastic detail from a hundred miles up. Many in the Pentagon and in the U.S. intelligence community swore by the high-tech voyeurs, claiming that the age of HUMINT, of intelligence acquired by human agents on the ground, was all but dead.

Few SEALs thought that way, however. There were still too many things that satellites couldn't do ... like keep a particular sentry under observation for hours at a time, or catch the pungent whiff of a Russian-made cigarette in the darkness. Checking out an objective personally taught you things about the target, and about the enemy, that you never could have gleamed from the bright, flat, and sterile slickness of a photograph.

The highway, Roselli and Sterling had discovered, was not patrolled or covered by either ambushes or electronic surveillance for at least a hundred meters in either direction. Four men were standing guard at the cutoff road winding sharply up the mountain northwest of the castle. That was a new twist, one added since the last set of satellite photos had been faxed across to the
Jefferson,
and reason enough for the manned sweep.

What any raid or hostage-rescue assault such as this one required more than anything else was intelligence. How many soldiers occupied the castle? How many were on duty... and where were the off-duty troops quartered? Were there other approaches besides the road leading up to the front gate? Were there machine guns or other heavy weapons on those parapets, or were the troops carrying small arms only? Were there reinforcements closer than the air base at Ohrid?

Many of those questions could be answered by satellite, but not all, and even the best orbital reconnaissance gave, not fact, but probability and guesswork. And the most important questions for this kind of mission could not be addressed by satellite at all. Where were the hostages being kept? Were they being held in the same room, or were they dispersed throughout the objective? How heavily were they guarded? Were they all at Gorazamak, or might some of them have been taken elsewhere for added security?

Roselli and Sterling approached the SEAL base camp south of the beach, a rocky niche tucked away behind boulders and pine trees, close enough to the water that they could hear the steady
lap-lap-lap
of the waves against the shore.

DeWitt's team was scouting the approaches to the castle itself. The remaining SEALs had been stowing their gear and laying out the markers, tetrahedral reflectors that would show up on a properly set multi-mode radar like tiny suns and guide in Alexander's second element. A four-man cordon had been thrown out around the beachhead, to give early warning of the approach of hostiles.

And one man, Doc, was still missing.

Murdock was with Higgins and Kosciuszko, crouched over the sat-comm unit, speaking quietly into the microphone. “Copy that, Olympus,” he was saying as Roselli and Sterling drew close. “We'll try to do our best to have things quiet by the time they get here. Alexander out.”

“Skipper,” Roselli said as Murdock handed the microphone back to Higgins. He slid the NVDs off his head and switched them off to save the batteries. “We're back.”

“Let's have it, guys.”