Tier One Wild (23 page)

A pause. Curtis wanted to keep the op compartmented as much as possible. He did not like revealing
anything
about his mission to Raynor. Finally he said, “Yes, it did.”

Kolt sighed. “I’m going to ask you one more time to include us on these tails. We can bumper up and swap out more often with four more on surveillance and at least two more vehicles. You need us, Curtis, before this entire thing goes south. We’re not just here to kick doors.”

A longer pause now. “Okay. Not today, but okay.”

“Dammit, dude! You are—”

“Look!” said Curtis. “I don’t have anything for you to follow right now. Come back here and I’ll send you and your little girlfriend on the next run.”

Kolt just disconnected the call.

“I heard that,” Hawk said.

“Yeah. Remind me to kick his ass before this is all over.”

“You’ll have to get in line, boss.”

TWENTY

That evening, while Curtis was paying a visit to Cairo Station to let them know about the potentially burned team and beg for some more bodies, preferably some with better tradecraft, Raynor called Webber on the satellite phone. It was 1415 hours back at Bragg.

“Do you know anything about the chief of base out here, this Curtis guy?” Kolt asked.

“I’ve checked around. The sergeant major says Langley loves him and our CIA liaison says he gets results.”

“Really? What results?”

“He’s a bit of a cowboy, but he is a hell of a dogged investigator. He’s an egghead, though. No military experience.”

Kolt wanted to chime in,
No shit,
but he held his tongue.

“Graduated from Cornell. Masters in poly sci. French and Arabic minors.”

“Any
real-world
results?” Kolt could not hold his tongue for that.

“He’s reined in some SA-24s, and he’s taken tons of other munitions off the market. Last spring in Tripoli he shut down a gang of smugglers with two railroad cars full of land mines heading south into Central Africa. Langley was thanked by several governments for the work that this guy and his team accomplished. What’s the problem?”

Kolt said, “Well, that’s great, but his OPSEC and his PERSEC suck. We’re not up against some bandits running a boxcar of toe-poppers into Chad. These Libyans are well connected and sophisticated. And whoever that was at the meeting today was world-class.”

Webber’s tone stiffened a little. “Look, We didn’t send you over to pull guard duty. I get it if you don’t like the layout of his safe house. I will back you if you pull up stakes and grab your own house for you and your team to bunk in. But when it comes to the recce that you were sent there to do,
he’s
the one running the op. Chances are, he sees this as his opportunity to get ahead at the Agency, and he sees you potentially getting in his way. So what else is new about those guys? You need to deal with it.”

“I understand. But when we—”

Webber interrupted. “You need to work with Myron Curtis and his team. Help him build the target folder for that location. Make it happen. End of story.”

“Yes, sir.”

Webber hung up and Slapshot came into the commo room. “I heard half of that. I can guess how it went.”

Kolt smiled, took a pouch of Redman passed from his teammate. “Webber wants me to be the big boy in the room.”

“That sucks,” said Slapshot with a chuckle.

“You’re telling me. Curtis said he’d roll us into the surveillance plan tomorrow. I’ll just hold him to that.”

“Me and Dig?”

“Sorry, bro. Back to Chalice.”

“That’s okay. You think we’ll get the hit before we pack up and go home?”

“I don’t know. It’s too sketchy, still. I wish we had some clue as to who those men were at Chalice today.”

“Same here. Curtis didn’t recognize them, but he’s running the pictures up to Cairo Station.”

“Send the pics to the intel shop at the Unit. You never know.”

“Done.”

Kolt stood and headed for the bedroom. “I’ve got second watch. Going to catch a couple hours of rack.”

“
Hasta mañana,
boss.”

*   *   *

Hawk came out of the bathroom of the safe house and stepped back into the room she shared with Racer. Kolt was in his boxers, climbing onto the top bunk. She looked him over. Her eyes focused on his left leg. “I see the bandages on your thigh where you caught the frag. But that other scar is older. Bigger, too. You got shot in the leg?”

Kolt nodded as he flipped onto the mattress. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

“Damn, boss,” she said as she noticed a second wound below his knee. “Twice?”

Raynor said, “Twice on the leg. Once on the foot.”

“AK?” she asked.

“Is there any other?” he confirmed with another nod.

“Close-range?”

Kolt thought back to the dry streambed in Pakistan where he’d been stitched by the Taliban fighter. He’d been no more than eight or ten feet away. “About as close as we are right now, I imagine,” Kolt responded.

And then Cindy responded in a way that set her apart from nearly every other female on planet earth. “That’s awesome.”

Kolt laughed hard at that. She was the first female in the training cell, and even though the jury was still out around the command on how beneficial the pilot program had been, he could see that she was cut from a different cloth.

“Freak,” he said. “Stick around long enough, and you’ll get some enemy-administered tattoos of your own.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I love this job.”

Cindy flipped off the lights, then crawled into her bottom bunk.

Kolt said, “I met your dad. Never served under him, but Webber loved the guy.”

Cindy smiled. “Yeah, me, too.”

“He’s why you joined?”

“Isn’t all that in my file?”

Kolt smiled. “What makes you think I read your file?”

She paused before replying. “You have been thorough with every other piece of kit you’ve taken along on this op. I watched you clean your weapon, triple-check the freqs on all the radios, check the fuel levels in the op cars, change out the fuzzy dice, and everything else.”

“Surely you don’t think I just consider you another piece of gear.”

“No, boss. Just saying that I don’t believe for a second you would have taken me if you didn’t know everything about me worth knowing first.”

Before Kolt could answer, Hawk added, “If I had the same access as you, I’d have read
your
file before coming on this op.”

Kolt adjusted his body to where his thigh wound wasn’t pressing against the thin mattress. Then he admitted, “I did read your file, yes.”

“Well, since
I
haven’t read
your
file, can you tell me why
you
joined Delta?”

Kolt thought it over. The psychs had asked him just that, many years ago. But no one in the Unit had asked him since. The guys in the Unit either figured they knew why you were there, or else they didn’t give a shit.

Kolt smiled, the expression hidden from Cindy in the dark.

Bunking with a female was different than bunking with a male, for more reasons than Raynor had initially imagined.

He said, “I did it for the college money.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“I don’t know. I’ve about forgotten. Serve my country, same as everyone. I also did it to prove to myself that I could.” He paused. “Also same as everyone, I guess.”

“That’s it?” she asked. She didn’t seem satisfied with his answer. Since she was a female, Kolt wondered if it was the length of his answer that she didn’t like.

He obliged her. “After I enlisted and I went through Ranger School, I kept thinking some RI would grab me by the arm and tell me,
Get your ass out of here. You aren’t Ranger material
. But they never did, and I made it. A couple years later, I got pulled aside and was told to jump fences to the officer corps, so I hit the books pretty hard. While I was in school, I kept expecting some professor to pull me aside and say,
Sorry, son. The university is not for you. Why don’t you go back to the enlisted ranks?
But that never happened, either, and they handed me a commission of infantry. And then, all the way through tryouts for the Unit, I kept waiting for one of the cadre to pull me aside and say,
Thanks for playing, Captain, but the Rangers are expecting you back Monday morning
. Again, it never happened, and I made it through.”

It was quiet in the room for over a minute. “I guess you know I was PNG for a while.”

“Yes,” she said. He could hear the discomfort in her voice with admitting that she knew.

“Well, for the three years I was out, I blamed myself, yeah, but I also figured everyone who ever thought I was worth a shit was wrong. I found myself blaming them for … encouraging me forward. So when I got the chance to come back to the Unit, I would not have done it if it were just about me. But by then…” He struggled for the words. He’d never even talked to the psychs like this. “By then I knew that I had to help others. I did my best, and that got me back in. Still, every day I feel like I’ve got something to prove. I see men all over the compound who’ve accomplished more, worked harder, faced greater adversity. I am damned lucky to be here, and lucky to serve with them.”

“Shit, boss. I don’t buy that. You are a legend.”

Kolt shrugged. “No, I’m lucky, the legends are dead. I’d prefer to remain just another guy on the team this time around.”

“Medals for the dead, right, boss?”

It was a Delta slogan. No one in the Unit gave a damn about a medal. The dead were deserving of honor. Those living were just doing their jobs. Besides, only after shit went bad on target did anyone do anything to earn a medal. Executed as planned, there would be no reason for medals. Even so, Kolt was surprised Hawk even knew of the slogan.

“Medals for the dead.”

Cindy changed the subject slightly. “My boyfriend, Troy, went through selection and assessment last year, but he got yanked on Bloody Thursday. Couldn’t hack it. Since then he’s had a stick up his butt about the Unit. He’d freak if he knew I was a member.”

“It’s not for everyone,” Kolt said, more to be polite than to enter into a new topic of conversation.

“Guess not. He’s got the raw materials to be a hell of an assaulter, but he just jacked it in. I don’t know why, he doesn’t say.”

“I can think of about a thousand reasons why someone would jack it in. It’s designed so only the most motivated or the most insane make it. The Army psychs weed out the nut jobs before they get that far, and the Delta psychs double-check the Army psychs. It’s a pretty good system for making sure the right kind of people make it in. Nothing wrong with your boyfriend for giving it a shot. He is in the ninety-eighth percentile.”

“I don’t know,” she said. Clearly she was bothered by his failure.

Kolt shook his head in disbelief. “Fifth Group isn’t badass enough for you? Damn. Maybe you are just impossible to please.”

She laughed out of politeness, but Kolt sensed that she was thinking that over.

He asked, “Where does he think you are right now?”

“Temporary duty at Aberdeen to attend the Field Management of Chemical and Biological Casualties course.”

“TDY at Aberdeen makes sense. Gotta keep those NBC skills up,” Kolt said sarcastically.

“You know what they say about you, Racer?” Cindy asked, turning the subject back to him.

“Something along the lines of ‘effort takes no talent,’ I would guess.”

“You heard that one?”

“I’ve been hearing it most of my life.”

“I think it’s a compliment. Besides, I’ve heard you did some stuff that you couldn’t do just by being an eager beaver.”

“I’ve been around long enough to know I earned some of the criticism. I can understand where they are coming from. TJ pulled my ass out of a couple of fires over the years.”

“Do you think Lieutenant Colonel Timble will return to operational status?”

“I guarantee he will. And if you hear anybody say that he won’t, kick their ass for me.”

“Will do.”

“Hawk, we need to go to sleep.”

“Roger, boss. Another day of honeymoon fun tomorrow.”

“You know it.”

TWENTY-ONE

Day and night, the training in the village compound near Wadi Bana continued.

Many of the indoor aspects of the training took place during the evenings, when the al Qaeda drone spotters in the hills around the villages were at a disadvantage to the night-vision capabilities of the Predators, Reapers, and Global Hawk UAVs that crisscrossed the skies high above Yemen. Doyle and his men would use the nighttime to sit inside and study maps of the U.S., read tomes of documents about aircraft and airports and timetables, and for each man to learn more specific information for his legend. They also pored over driving laws and customs, and the procedure for mundane tasks like renting hotel rooms, purchasing bus fare, and buying a chicken sandwich at Burger King.

The physical training occurred during the daylight hours, when drones could be spotted, though Doyle still kept his men under some degree of cover that shielded their actions from the skies. The men did PT and worked on hand-to-hand combat in the makeshift gyms, they trained with firearms on the partially covered range, and they practiced with the Igla-S system, using mock-up devices made out of mortar shells and dead car batteries and grip and trigger mechanisms removed from rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

The models looked odd, but they rested on the shoulder and they used modified iron sights made from tin, and the weight, at just over seventeen kilograms, was almost exact. The men had to pull them quickly from the backs of cars and from boxes and even from holes in the ground and then get them on their shoulders and aim them. They had to run with them, climb ladders with them, and even though they did not have an actual SA-24 there in the village, they studied the schematics of the weapon and watched videos on YouTube until late in the night to familiarize themselves with the missile system.

Doyle pushed them relentlessly, and after a few days of this, he selected four men out of the twelve. He told these men that they had earned a special place in the mission, right alongside David himself. Their training during the day would be done away from the other men of the cell, on the far side of the village. Here, Doyle had a twenty-foot-long steel intermodal transport-shipping container brought up from the wharf in Mukalla City on the coast. Without explaining the reasoning behind this, he then had it painted the same color as the sandstone buildings of the village, and placed four feet in the air on bricks. He blocked off the rear half of the container with sandbags, and then stacked wooden ammo crates along one wall of the container, leaving a space eight feet wide, seven feet tall, and ten feet deep.