Dead or Alive

  “Sentry down,” Driscoll said quietly into his radio. “The ridgeline is clear. Move on up. Keep it nice and tight.” That last bit wasn’t really necessary—not with these guys.

  He looked back to see his men moving a little faster now. They were excited but under control, ready to get down to business. He could see it in their postures, the economy of movement that separated real shooters from wannabees and in-and-outers who were just waiting to return to civilian life.

  Their real target might be less than a hundred meters away now, and they’d worked hard over the previous three months to bag this bastard. Mountain climbing was not anyone’s idea of fun, except maybe for those nutjobs who pined after Everest and K2. Be that as it may, this was part of the job, and part of their current mission, so everybody sucked it up and kept moving.

  The fifteen men formed up in three fire-teams of five Rangers each. One would stay here with their heavy weapons—they’d brought two M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) machine guns for fire cover on overwatch. No telling how many bad guys there might be about, and the SAW was a great equalizer. Satellites could give you only so much intel; some variables you just had to deal with as they came to you. All his men were scanning the rocks, looking for movement. Any movement. Maybe just a bad guy who came out to take a dump. In this neck of the woods, there was a ninety percent chance that anybody you encountered was a bad guy. Made their job that much easier, Driscoll thought.

  Moving even more slowly now, he stalked forward, eyes flicking from his feet, watching each placement for loose rocks and twigs, then ahead, scanning, scanning. . . . This was another benefit of wisdom, he thought, knowing how to quash the excitement of being so close to the goal line. This is often where rookies and dead men made their mistakes, thinking the hard part was behind them and their target was so close. And that, Driscoll knew, is when Old Man Murphy, of Murphy’s Law fame, usually snuck up behind you, tapped you on the shoulder, and handed you an ugly surprise. Anticipation and expectation were lethal sides of the same coin. Either one in the right dose at the wrong moment would get you killed.

  Not this time, though. Not on my damned watch. And not with a team as good as his.

  Driscoll saw the ridgeline looming ahead not more than ten feet away, and he hunched over, careful to keep his head below the lip, lest he present a tantalizing silhouette target for some alert gomer. He covered the last few feet on flat feet, then leaned forward, left hand flat against the rock, and peeked his head up.

  And there you are . . . The cave.

  2

  LOW FUEL,” whoop, whoop, “low fuel,” the computer-generated voice announced. “I know, I know,” the pilot growled in reply.

  He could see the necessary information on his instrument/ CRT display panel. The onboard computer master-trouble light had been blinking for fifteen minutes. They’d crossed the Canadian coast ten minutes earlier, and they could look down at what in daylight would have been green terrain covered with stunted trees. Unless he’d really screwed the navigational pooch, they’d see some lights soon. Anyway, they were feet-dry, which was a relief.

  The North Atlantic winds had been far stiffer than predicted. Most of the night traffic was eastbound this time of day, and those aircraft carried a lot more fuel than a Dassault Falcon 9000. Twenty minutes’ more fuel. Ten minutes more than they needed. Their indicated air speed was just over five hundred knots, altitude twenty-five thousand feet and falling.

  “Gander Approach,” he said into his radio microphone, “this is Hotel zero-niner-seven Mike Foxtrot, inbound for gas, over.”

  “Mike Foxtrot,” came the reply, “this is Gander. Winds are calm. Recommend runway two-niner for a normal approach.”

  “Calm winds?” the copilot observed. “Damn.” They’d just come through more than a hundred knots of jet stream right on the nose for three hours of minor buffeting, not too bad at forty-one thousand feet, but still noticeable. “This is about as long a hop over water as I like.”

  “Especially with winds like this,” the pilot replied. “I hope the engines work on fumes.”

  “We set with customs?”

  “Should be. We’ve done the CANPASS, and we’re cleared into Moose Jaw. Do immigration there?”

  “Yeah, right.” Both knew better. This flight would be a little on the unusual side from Gander on in to their final destination. But they were being paid for it. And the euro-dollar exchange rate would be working in their favor. Especially Canadian dollars.

  “Got the lights. Five minutes out,” the copilot said.

  “Roger, runway in view,” the pilot said. “Flaps.”

  “Flaps coming down to ten.” The copilot worked the controls, and they could hear the whine of the electric motors extending the flaps. “Wake up the passengers?”

  “No. Why bother?” the pilot decided. If he did this right, they wouldn’t notice a thing until the acceleration for the next takeoff. Having earned his spurs and twenty thousand hours with Swissair, he’d retired and bought his own used Dassault Falcon to charter millionaires and billionaires across Europe and around the globe. Half the people who could afford his services ended up going to the same places—Monaco, Harbor Island in the Bahamas, Saint-Tropez, Aspen. The fact that his current passenger was going none of those places was a curiosity, but as long as he paid, the destination was none of his business.

  They passed downward through ten thousand feet. The runway lights were easy to see, a straight lane in the darkness that had once accommodated a wing of United States Air Force F-84 interceptors.

  Five thousand feet and descending. “Flaps to twenty.”

  “Roger flaps twenty,” the pilot acknowledged.

  “Gear,” he commanded next, and the copilot reached for the levers. The sound of rushing air entered the cabin as the landing-gear doors opened and the struts came down. Three hundred feet.

  “Down and locked,” the copilot replied.

  “One hundred feet,” the computer voice said.

  The pilot tensed his arms, then relaxed them, easing the aircraft down, gently, gently, picking the proper spot to touch down. Only his skilled senses could tell when the Falcon touched down on the ten-meter concrete squares. He activated the thrustreversers, and the Dassault slowed. A truck with blinking lights showed him where to go and whom to follow as he headed off to where the fuel truck would be waiting.

  They were on the ground for a total of twenty minutes. An immigration officer queried them over the radio and determined that there were no changes from the CANPASS data. Outside, the fuel truck’s driver disconnected his hose and secured the fuel valve.

  Okay. That’s done, the pilot thought. Now for the second segment of the three-part flight.

  The Falcon taxied back out to the north end of the runway, going through the pre-liftoff checklist, as he always did, after waiting at the end of the runway. The acceleration went smoothly; then the wheels came up, then the flaps, followed by the climb-out. Ten more minutes and they were at thirty-seven thousand, their initial assigned altitude from Toronto Center.

  They cruised west at Mach 0.81—about 520 knots, or 600 miles per hour true air speed—with their passengers asleep aft while the engines gobbled fuel at a fixed rate of 3,400 pounds per hour. The aircraft transponder broadcast their speed and altitude to the air-traffic-control radars, and aside from that there was no need for radio traffic of any sort. In rough weather they might have requested a different, probably higher, altitude for more comfortable cruising, but Gander tower had been correct. Having passed through the cold front that had opposed their flight into Newfoundland, they might not have been moving at all, except for the muted roar of the jet engines hanging on the tail. Pilot and copilot didn’t even speak very much. They’d flown together enough that they knew all the same jokes, and on such an uneventful flight there was no need to swap information. Everything had been planned, down to the proverbial gnat’s ass. Both wondered what Hawaii might be like. They could look forward to a pair of sui
tes at the Royal Hawaiian, and a long sleep to ward off the inevitable jet lag, sure to accompany the ten hours of additional day they were going to experience. Well, both liked a nap on a sunny beach, and the weather in Hawaii was forecast to be as monotonously perfect as it usually was. They planned a two-day layover before proceeding back east to their home field outside of Geneva, with no scheduled passengers on that leg.

  “Moose Jaw in forty minutes,” the copilot observed.

  “Time to get back to work, I guess.”

  The plan was simple. The pilot got on the HF radio—a hold-over from World War Two—and called Moose Jaw, announcing his approach and his early descent, plus estimated time of arrival. Moose Jaw’s approach control took the information from the area control systems and spotted the transponder alphanumerics on its scopes.

  The Dassault began bleeding altitude on a completely normal approach, which was duly noted by Toronto Center. The local time was 0304, or Zulu -4:00, keeping homage to Greenwich Mean/Universal time, four hours to the east.

  “There it is,” the copilot announced. The approach lights for Moose Jaw showed up on the black countryside. “Altitude twelve thousand, descending one thousand per minute.”

  “Stand by the transponder,” the pilot ordered.

  “Roger,” the copilot replied. The transponder was a custom installation, done by the flight crew themselves.

  “Six thousand feet. Flaps?”

  “Leave ’em,” the pilot commanded.

  “Roger. Runway in view.” The sky was clear, and the Moose Jaw approach lights strobed in the cloudless air.

  “Moose Jaw, this is Mike Foxtrot, over.”

  “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw, over.”

  “Moose Jaw, our gear doesn’t want to come down. Please stand by. Over.” That notification woke people up.

  “Roger. Are you declaring an emergency, over?” the approach radio inquired at once.

  “Negative, Moose Jaw. We’re checking the electrics. Stand by.”

  “Roger, standing by.” Just a hint of concern in the voice.

  “Okay,” the pilot said to his copilot, “we’ll drop off their scope at one thousand feet.” They’d been through all this, of course. “Altitude three thousand and descending.”

  The pilot eased right. This was to show a course change on the Moose Jaw approach radar, nothing serious but a change nonetheless. With altitude dropping it might look interesting on the radar tapes if anyone cared to look, which was doubtful. Another blip lost in the airspace.

  Two thousand,” the copilot said. The air was a little bumpier at the lower altitude but not as bumpy as it was going to get. “Fifteen hundred. Might want to adjust the descent rate.”

  “Fair enough.” The pilot inched back on the yoke to flatten out the down-angle so that he could level out at nine hundred feet AGL. That was low enough to enter Moose Jaw’s ground clutter. Though the Dassault was anything but stealthy, most civilian traffic-control radars primarily saw transponder signals, not “skin-paints.” In commercial aviation, a plane on radar was nothing more than a notional signal in the sky.

  “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw, say altitude, over.”

  They’d be doing this for a while. The local tower team was unusually awake. Maybe they’d flown into a training exercise, the pilot thought. Too bad, but not a major problem.

  “Autopilot off. Hand-flying the airplane.”

  “Pilot’s airplane,” the copilot replied.

  “Okay, looping right. Transponder off,” the pilot commanded.

  The copilot killed power to transponder one. “Powered off. We’re invisible.” That got Moose Jaw’s attention.

  “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw. Say altitude, over,” the voice commanded more crisply. Then a second call.

  The Falcon completed its northern loop and settled down on a course of two-two-five. The ground below was flat, and the pilot was tempted to reduce altitude to five hundred feet but decided against it. No need. As planned, the aircraft had just evaporated off the Moose Jaw radar.

  “Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw. Say altitude, over!”

  “Sounds excited,” the copilot observed.

  “I don’t blame him.”

  The transponder they’d just shut down was for another plane entirely, probably parked in its hangar outside Söderhamn, Sweden. This flight was costing their charter party seventy thousand extra euros, but the Swiss flight crew understood about making money, and they weren’t flying drugs or anything like that. Money or not, that sort of cargo was not worth the trouble.

  Moose Jaw was forty miles behind them now, and dwindling at seven miles per minute, according to the plane’s Doppler radar. The pilot adjusted his yoke to compensate for the cross-wind. The computer by his right knee would compute for drift, and the computer knew exactly where they were going.

  Part of the way, anyway.

  3

  IT LOOKED DIFFERENT than it had in the imagery—they always did—but they were in the right place, that was for sure. He felt his exhaustion drain away, replaced by focused anticipation.

  Ten weeks earlier a CIA satellite had tapped into a radio transmission here, and another had taken a photo, which Driscoll now had in his pocket. This was it, no question. A triangular formation of rocks over the top identified the spot. It wasn’t decoration, despite its man-made appearance, but rather something left behind by the last set of glaciers that had ground their way through this valley God knew how many thousands of years ago. Probably the same meltwater that had carved the triangle had helped bore out the cave. Or however caves were formed. Driscoll didn’t know, and didn’t especially care. Some of them were pretty deep, some hundreds of meters deep, perfect safe holes to hide in. But this one had originated a radio signal. And that made it special. Special as hell. It had taken Washington and Langley more than a week to localize this place, but they’d been oh-so-careful following it up. Almost nobody knew about this mission. Fewer than thirty people in total, and most of those were at Fort Benning. Where the NCO club was. Where he and his team would return in less than forty-eight hours. God willing—inshallah, as they said locally. Not his religion, but the sentiment made sense. Driscoll was a Methodist, though that didn’t keep him from having the occasional beer. Mostly he was a soldier.

  Okay, how do we do this? he asked himself. Hard and fast, of course, but how to do it hard and fast? He was carrying half a dozen grenades. Three real ones and three M84 flashbangs. The latter were sheathed in plastic instead of steel, heavy on noise-making explosives, made from some kind of mix of magnesium and ammonium to make it seem as though the surface of the sun had paid an unexpected visit, to dazzle and blind anyone nearby. Again, the chemistry and physics of the things didn’t really concern him. They worked damned well, and that was what counted.

  The Rangers were not in the business of fair fights. This was combat operations, not the Olympic Games. They might apply first aid to whatever bad guys survived, but that was as far as it went, and only then because survivors tended to be somewhat more talkative than the dead. Driscoll peered again at the cave’s entrance. Somebody had stood right in that spot to make his satellite phone call, and a RHYTHM e-lint satellite had copied it, and a KEYHOLE satellite had marked the location, and their mission had been authorized by SOCOM himself. He stood still, next to a large rock, close enough that his silhouette would blend with it. No evident movement inside. He wasn’t surprised. Even terrorists had to sleep. And that worked for him. Just fine, in fact. Ten meters. He approached with movements that would have appeared comical to the uninitiated, exaggerated straight-up-and-down movements of his feet and lower legs, carefully avoiding loose stones. Then he got there. Dropped to one knee and looked inside. He glanced over his shoulder to ensure that the rest of the team wasn’t bunching up. No worries there. Still, Driscoll felt the flutter of apprehension in his belly. Or was it fear? Fear of screwing the pooch, fear of repeating history. Fear of getting men killed.

  A year earlier in Iraq, Captain Wilson’s pr
edecessor, a green second lieutenant, had planned a mission—a straightforward insurgent hunt along the southern shores of Buhayrat (Lake) Saddam, north of Mosel—and Driscoll had concurred. Problem was, the young lieutenant was more interested in filing a glowing report than he was in the safety of his Rangers. Against Driscoll’s advice and with night falling, he’d split the team to flank a bunker complex, but as was their tendency, the hastily redrawn plan didn’t survive its first contact with the enemy—in this case, a company-sized gathering of Saddam ex-army loyalists who encircled and butchered the young lieutenant’s fire team before turning their attention on Driscoll and his men. The fighting withdrawal had taken most of the night, until finally Driscoll and three others made their way back across the Tigris and within range of a firebase.

  Driscoll had known the lieutenant’s plan was a disaster in the making. But had he argued strongly enough against it? If he’d pushed it ... Well. This was the question that had haunted him for the past year. And now here again in Indian country, but this time all the decisions—good, bad, disastrous—were all his own.

  Eye on the ball, Driscoll commanded himself. Head back in the game.

  He took another step forward. Still nothing ahead. The Pashto people might be tough—they damned well were tough, Driscoll had learned—but they hadn’t been trained beyond how to point a rifle and pull the trigger. There should have been somebody in the cave entrance doing overwatch. He saw some cigarette butts nearby. Maybe a sentry had been here and run out of smokes. Bad habit, Gomer, Driscoll thought. Bad fieldcraft. Slowly, carefully, he eased inside. His night-vision goggles were a godsend. The cave was straight for about fifteen meters, rough sides, mostly oval-shaped in cross-section. No lights. Not even a candle, but he could see a right turn coming, so Driscoll kept his eyes tuned for light. The cave floor was devoid of clutter. That told the sergeant much: Somebody lived here. They’d been given solid information. Will miracles never cease? Driscoll thought. As often as not, these hunting expeditions turned up nothing but an empty hidey-hole and a bunch of pissed-off Rangers holding their own dicks.