They operate in six teams of six. Even with their support unit, they are no more than sixty, and no one ever sees them. They can operate miles out ahead of the conventional forces—in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they were sixty miles ahead of the American point units.
When on land, they use stripped-down, strengthened Land Rovers, in desert pink camouflage, called pinkies. A fighting unit is just two pinkies, three men per vehicle. Their specialty is to drop in by parachute, high altitude, low opening, hence HALO.
Or they can enter a war zone by HAHO (high altitude, high opening) deploying the chutes just after leaving the aircraft and flying the canopy mile after mile into enemy territory; silent, invisible, landing like an alighting sparrow.
General Chamney turned a computer screen toward him and tapped for several seconds at the keyboard. Then he studied the screen.
“By chance, we have a unit at Thumrait. Desert familiarization course.”
The Tracker knew of Thumrait, an air base in the desert of Oman. It had figured as a staging post in the 1990/91 first invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He did a mental calculation. In a C-130 Hercules, the Special Forces aircraft of choice, about four hours to Djibouti. A huge American air base.
“What kind of authority would you need to lend them to Uncle Sam?”
“High,” said the DSF, “way up there. My best guess, our Prime Minister. If he says go, it’s go. But everyone else would simply pass it upward.”
“And who could best persuade the PM?”
“Your President,” said the general.
“And if he could persuade the PM?”
“Then the order would come down the chain. To the defence secretary, to the chief of the defence staff, to the chief of the general staff, to the director of military operations, then to me. And I do the necessary.”
“That could take all day. I don’t have all day.”
The DSF thought for a while.
“Look, the boys are heading home anyway. Via Bahrain and Cyprus. I could divert them via Djibouti to Cyprus.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s about one p.m. in Somalia. If they take off in two hours, they could land in Djibouti around sundown. Can you fix for them to be made welcome and refueled?”
“Absolutely.”
“On the house?”
“Our tab.”
“Can you be there to brief them? Pictures and targets?”
“Personally. I have a company Grumman out at Northolt.”
General Chamney grinned.
“It’s the only way to fly.” Both men had spent many hours on rock-hard seats in the back of pitching transport planes. The Tracker rose.
“I must go. I have a lot of calls to make.”
“I’ll divert the Hercules,” said the DSF. “And I won’t leave the office. Good luck.”
The Tracker was back at the embassy thirty minutes later. He raced to his office and studied the screen showing the pictures being recorded at Tampa. The Preacher’s technical was still bucking and rolling over the ocher/brown desert. The five men still sat in the back, one with a scarlet baseball cap. He checked his watch. Eleven a.m. in London, two p.m. in Somalia, but only six a.m. in Washington. To hell with Gray Fox’s beauty sleep. He put through his call. A sleepy voice answered on the seventh ring.
“You want what?” he yelled when the morning’s events in London were explained.
“Please, just ask the President to ask the British Prime Minister for this little favor. And authorize our base in Djibouti to cooperate in full.”
“I’ll have to rouse the admiral,” said Gray Fox. He was referring to the commanding officer of J-SOC.
“He’s been roused before. It’ll soon be seven a.m. with you. The commander in chief rises early for his fitness regimen. He’ll take the call. Just ask him to speak with his friend in London and grant the favor. It’s what friends are for.”
The Tracker had more calls to make. He told the pilot of the Grumman at Northolt to draw up a flight plan for Djibouti. From the car pool in the embassy basement under Grosvenor Square, he required a car for Northolt within thirty minutes.
His last call was to Tampa, Florida. Though he was no master of electronics, he knew what he wanted and that it could be done. From the cabin of the Grumman, he wanted a patch through to the bunker controlling the Global Hawk over the Somali desert. He would not get a picture, but he needed constant updating on the passage of that pickup truck across the desert and its final stopping place.
In the communications center at Djibouti base, he wanted direct communication, sound and picture, with the Tampa bunker. And he wanted Djibouti’s complete cooperation with himself and the incoming British paratroopers. Thanks to the clout of J-SOC right across the U.S. armed forces, he got the lot.
• • •
The President of the United States took the call from the commander of J-SOC after he showered after his morning fitness session.
“Why do we need them?” was his query after listening to the request.
“The target is one you designated in the spring, sir. The one designated back then simply as the Preacher. He has inspired seven assassinations on U.S. soil, plus the slaughter of the CIA staff on the bus. We now know who he is and where he is. But he will probably light out at dawn.”
“I recall him, Admiral. But dawn is almost twenty-four hours away. We can’t get our own people there in time?”
“It’s not dawn in Somalia, Mr. President. It’s almost sundown. The British team happens to be in the theater. They were on a training mission nearby.”
“We can’t use a missile?”
“There’s an agent from a friendly agency in his entourage.”
“So it’s up close and personal?”
“The only way, sir. So says our man on the spot.”
The President hesitated. As a politician, he knew that a favor creates a marker and markers can later be called in.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll make the call.”
The British Prime Minister was in his office in Downing Street. It was one o’clock. It was his habit to take a light salad lunch before going across Parliament Square to the House of Commons. After that, he would be out of contact. His private secretary took the call from the Downing Street switchboard, put his hand over the receiver and said, “It’s the U.S. President.”
Both men knew each other well and got on at a personal level, which is not vital but extremely useful. Both had stylish wives and young families. There was the usual exchange of greetings and inquiries after the near and dear. Unseen operators in London and Washington recorded every word.
“David, I have a favor to ask.”
“Ask away.”
The President took no more than five sentences. It was a strange request and took the Prime Minister by surprise. The call was on speakerphone; the cabinet secretary, the senior professional civil servant in the country, looked askance at his boss. Bureaucrats hate surprises. There were possible consequences to be thought through. Dropping Pathfinders into a foreign country could be regarded as an act of war. But who governed the Somali wilderness? No one worth the name. He wagged an admonitory finger.
“I’ll have to check with our people. I’ll call you back in twenty minutes. Scout’s honor.”
“This could be very dangerous, Prime Minister,” said the cabinet secretary. He did not mean dangerous for the men involved but for international repercussions.
“Get me, in order, the chief of the defence staff and the chief of Six.”
The professional soldier came on first.
“Yes, I know the problem and I know about the request,” he said. “Will Chamney told me an hour ago.”
He just assumed the Prime Minister would know who the director of Special Forces was.
“Well, can we do it?”
“Of course we can. Providing they get a damn accurate briefing before they go in. That’s down to the Cousins. But if they have a drone overhead, they should be able to see the target clear
as day.”
“Where are the Pathfinders now?”
“Over Yemen. Two hours short of the U.S. base at Djibouti. That’s where they’ll land and refuel. Then they’ll be fully briefed. If the young officer in charge is satisfied, he’ll tell Will at Albany Barracks and ask for a green light. That can only come from you, Prime Minister.”
“I can give you that in the next hour. That is, I can give you the political decision. The technical one is up to you professionals. I have two more calls, then I’ll be back in touch.”
The man who came on from the SIS, or MI6, or just 6, was not the Chief but Adrian Herbert.
“The Chief is out of the country, Prime Minister. But I have been handling this case with our friends for some months now. How can I help?”
“You know what the Americans are asking for? To borrow a unit of our Pathfinders?”
“Yes,” said Herbert, “I know.”
“How?”
“We do a lot of listening, Prime Minister.”
“Did you know the Americans cannot use a missile because there is a Western agent inside the bastard’s entourage?”
“Yes.”
“Is he one of ours?”
“No.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“By sundown there will probably be a Swedish merchant marine officer, a hostage, a few yards away as well.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“It’s what we do, Prime Minister,” said Herbert. Mentally, he made a note to put in for a bonus for Mrs. Bulstrode.
“Can it be done? Extraction of both men? Wipeout of the target?”
“That’s a military question. We leave that sort of thing to them.”
The British premier was not a politician without having a keen eye for benefit. If British Pathfinders could pull the Swedish officer out of there, the Swedes would be rather grateful. The appreciation might go right up to King Carl Gustaf, who might mention it to Queen Elizabeth. No harm done, no harm at all.
“I’m giving the green light, subject to the military’s overriding judgment on feasibility,” he told the chief of the defence staff ten minutes later. Then he called the Oval Office back.
“You got it,” he told the President. “If the military say it can be done, the Pathfinders are yours.”
“Thanks, I won’t forget it,” said the man in the White House.
• • •
As the phones went down in London and Washington, the Grumman twin jet entered Egyptian airspace. Egypt, Sudan, then the descent toward Djibouti.
Outside, at 33,000 feet, the sky was still blue, but the sun was a blazing red ball above the western horizon. In Somalia, and at ground level, it would be about to set. Through the Tracker’s headphones, a voice came from Tampa.
“They’ve stopped, Colonel. The technical has pulled into a tiny hamlet miles from anywhere, on a track between the coast and the Ethiopian border. It’s just a cluster of a dozen, maybe twenty, mud-brick houses, with some scrubby trees and a goat pen. We don’t even have a name for it.”
“Are you sure they are not moving on?”
“Looks like no. They are climbing out and stretching. I am zooming in close. I can see one of the target party, talking with a couple of villagers. And the guy with the red baseball cap. He’s taking it off. Wait, there are two more technicals approaching from the north. And the sun’s about to go down.”
“Get the GPS fix on the village. Before you go to infrared, get me a series of vari-scaled pictures by last daylight from as many angles as possible. Then patch them through to the comms room at Djibouti base.”
“You got it, sir. Will do.”
The copilot came through from the flight deck.
“Colonel, we just had a call from Djibouti control. A British C-130 Hercules in RAF livery just landed from Oman.”
“Tell Djibouti take good care of them and refuel the Herc. Tell the Brits I’ll be there momentarily. By the by, how long to ETA?”
“Just cleared Cairo, sir. About ninety minutes to runway threshold.”
And, outside, the sun went down. Within minutes, South Sudan, eastern Ethiopia and all Somalia were enveloped in moonless night.
14
Deserts can be furnace hot by day yet freezing at night, but Djibouti is on the warm Gulf of Aden and remains balmy. The Tracker was met at the foot of the steps of the parked Grumman by a USAF colonel sent by the base commander to welcome him to the command. He was in light, tropical-weight desert camouflage, and the Tracker was surprised by the balminess of the night as he followed the colonel across the tarmac to the two rooms in the operations block that had been set aside for him.
The base commander had been told very little by Air Force HQ in the U.S. except that this was a J-SOC black operation and that he was to offer every cooperation to the TOSA officer, whom he would only know as Colonel Jamie Jackson. It was the name the Tracker had elected to use because he had all the supporting paperwork.
They passed the British RAF C-130 Hercules. It had the standard roundels on the tail fin but no other insignia. Tracker knew it came from the 47th Squadron of the Special Forces Wing. There was a glimmer of light from the flight deck, where the crew had elected to stay onboard and brew up real tea rather than the American version of it.
They walked under the wing, past a hangar buzzing with ground crew and into the ops building. Part of the “every cooperation” instruction included welcoming the six scruffy-looking British free fallers who were gathered inside, staring at an array of still pictures on the wall.
A rather relieved-looking American master sergeant, whose shoulder flash indicated he was a comms specialist, turned and threw up a salute. He returned it.
The first thing the Tracker noticed of the six Brits was that they were in desert cammo, but without either rank or unit insignia. They were deeply suntanned on their faces and hands, stubbled around the jaw and with tousled hair, except for the one who was bald as a billiard ball.
One of them, the Tracker knew, must be the junior officer commanding the unit. He thought it better to cut straight to the matter in hand.
“Gentlemen, I am Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Jackson of the U.S. Marine Corps. Your government, in the form of your Prime Minister, has been kind enough to allow me to borrow you and your services for this night. Which of you is in command?”
If he thought the mention of the Prime Minister was going to start any genuflecting, he had the wrong unit. One of the six stepped forward. When he spoke, the Tracker recognized the kind of voice derived from years at a private boarding school that the British, with their talent for saying the opposite, call public school.
“That’s me, Colonel. I am a captain, name of David. In our unit we never use surnames or ranks, or throw salutes. Except to the Queen, of course.”
The Tracker recognized that he was never going to match the white-haired Queen, so he just said, “OK, so long as you can do what is required this night. And my name is Jamie. Would you introduce me, David?”
Among the other five were two sergeants, two corporals and a trooper, although the Pathfinders rank is never mentioned. Each had a specialty. Pete was a sergeant and the medic, with skills way beyond mere first aid. Barry was the other sergeant, expert in weapons of all kinds. He looked like the product of a loving union between a rhino and a battle tank. He was huge, and it was all very hard. The corporals were Dai, the Welsh Wizard, who was in charge of communications and would carry the various pieces of wizardry that would enable the Pathfinders, once on the ground, to remain in touch with Djibouti and Tampa, and provide the video downlink that would enable them to see what the drone overhead could see. The bald one, of course, was Curly, who was a vehicle mechanic of near-genius level.
The youngest, in age and rank, was Tim, who had started in the Logistics Corps and has trained in explosives of all kinds, along with bomb dismantlement.
The Tracker turned to the American master sergeant.
“Talk me
through it,” he said, gesturing at the wall display.
There was a large screen showing exactly what the drone controller in MacDill Air Force Base outside Tampa was seeing. He passed the Tracker an earpiece with a mic attached.
“This is Colonel Jackson in Djibouti base,” he said. “Is that Tampa?”
On the flight down, he had been in constant contact with Tampa, and the speaker had been M.Sgt. Orde. But the shift had changed eight time zones to the west. The voice was female, a Deep South drawl, molasses over cane sugar.
“Tampa here, sir. Specialist Jane Allbright on the control stick.”
“What have we got, Jane?”
“Just before the sun went down, the target vehicle arrived at a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere. We counted the occupants climbing out. Five from the open back, including one in a red baseball cap. And three from the front cab.
“Their leader was greeted by some kind of village headman, then the light faded and human shapes went to heat blobs on infrared.
“But at the very last light, two more open-backed pickups arrived from a northern direction. They provided eight bodies, of which one was being half dragged by two others. The prisoner seemed to have blond hair. Darkness came in seconds, and one of the men from the south joined the northern group. The blond prisoner stayed with the northern group.
“Judging by the red heat signals, they were housed in two of the residences either side of the central clearing, where the three vehicles are parked. The engine heat faded, and they are now in darkness. No one seems to have emerged from either house. The only heat signals remaining are from a goat pen to one side of the open square and a few smaller, wandering ones we believe to be dogs.”
The Tracker thanked her and went to the display wall. The village, in real time, was being studied by a new-on-shift Global Hawk. This RQ-4 would have thirty-five hours of endurance, more than enough, and with its synthetic-aperture radar and electro-optical infrared camera would see anything move down there.