Midway during the fight, a sixteenth chopper trailing smoke would break from the formation, careen over the crest of the hill, and be seen to wobble, then land hard at the base of the mountain. Thirty seconds later it would seem to detonate. Actually, this was the detonation of over twenty pounds of C-4 already implanted by a probing force that had located the mouth of the collapsed mine shaft. The blast—or so the plan went—would open a hole big enough for Rat Team Alpha and Rat Team Baker to penetrate the mountain and begin the upward climb into the installation itself, a distance of almost half a mile underground, through uncharted and quite possibly nonexistent tunnels. The two teams would be in radio contact with Rat Six—a radio team at the opening of the shaft—which itself was patched into the Delta command network.
Up top, when the elevator shaft was finally taken, a message would be flashed, and Peter Thiokol, now madly trying to figure out a way to beat the door and its twelve-integer code, would be dispatched to the site to get the door open and get the surviving Delta operators down into the hole. The idea was to bring off the vaunted multiple simultaneous entry—from above and below.
The briefing officer, Skazy, stood back, well pleased with the presentation. It had everything: succinctness, economy of force, a certain audacious daring, split-second timing. It was Delta all the way.
“No, no,” said Dick Puller quickly, “no, no, it’s all wrong.”
The disappointment in the room was audible.
“Goddammit, Major, you haven’t thought it out. You’re willing to spend too much of your own blood on preliminary objectives. You’d waste highly trained specialists taking trees and gullies that are meaningless except as a route to the real objective, which is the shaft to the LCC. And what happens if you make it but you’ve sustained so many casualties you’re effectively out of commission? Who goes down the shaft?”
He stared brutally at Skazy, a former protege now fallen on hard times in his career. This was classic Dick Puller: he had no qualms about blowing people away. Skazy swallowed.
“We thought it was a very sound plan, sir,” he said.
“It’s a very sound plan for a different war, but not for today’s.”
There were a lot of peculiar vibrations in the air. Skazy was popular, hardworking, one of the Delta originals who went all the way back to Eagle Claw. He was a Delta zealot. Nobody liked to see him trashed.
“Colonel Puller,” another Delta officer said, “it’s a good plan. It’s stable, it’s solid, it’s well within our capabilities, it’s—”
But Puller wasn’t interested.
“Mr. Uckley, what’s the latest word on my Ranger battalion?”
“Uh, sir, they’re just entering St. Louis air space. They ran into turbulence coming over the Rockies.”
“Great, and how about Third Infantry?”
“The trucks are hung up in traffic. Evidently, there’s quite a buildup. The state police are trying to hustle them through, but the traffic is a mess. We could divert some helicop—”
“No, we need the choppers for Delta. What’s the disposition on that National Guard infantry unit?”
“Colonel, they’re the perimeter defense team. You said you were afraid we’d be jumped and that—”
“How many?”
“Uh, they’re at company strength now. It’s Company B, 123d Light Infantry, Maryland National Guard. Say, a hundred fifty men. They were on winter maneuvers at Fort Richie. They’ve been trucking in the last few hours.”
“Get ’em assembled,” said Dick.
He turned to the Delta officers.
“You’re grounded. Get Delta on the perimeters, they’re now security. I don’t want Delta into it until we crack the perimeter and carry the elevator shaft. There’s no point in those men dying in the woods like infantrymen. Let ’em die in the shaft, where it’ll do some good.”
Skazy said through a tide of awkward phlegm clogging his throat and a wretched moment’s hesitation, “Colonel Puller, with all due respect, those National Guardsmen are teachers, lawyers, construction workers. They’re fat and out of shape. Now, we’ve got a good, sound plan. These guys can’t—”
Dick cut him off, speaking with brutal authority.
“Maryland NG draws preliminary assault responsibility for this operation, working in conjunction with Tac Air. I can’t wait for the goddamned Third Infantry or the goddamned Rangers. I want them deploying via their trucks too; no sense wasting our choppers on troops who can’t rappel. Get Delta on the perimeter, Major. Call the NG and give ’em the good news. What’s the guy’s name?”
“Barnard. He’s an accountant.”
“Well, today he’s an infantry officer.”
And so Dick Puller made the first of his controversial decisions. It was based on a secret conviction: that the planes would not kill enough of Aggressor Force to suppress its calculated fire. The first assault would be a failure: those who waged it were like the Brits who went over the top at the Somme in 1916, a doomed generation. With their lives they would purchase very little: at best, they would bleed Aggressor Force of enough of its will and its health, so that, as he now saw it, a second assault with Third Infantry and the Rangers sometime after nightfall would carry the perimeter. Then the real drama would start: Could Peter crack the door? Could the Delta specialists get down the shaft and into the capsule? Could the Rat Teams get there from the rear?
“Sir, the CO of the Guard wants to talk to you.”
“Put him on.”
Dick took the radio phone.
“Delta Six, over.”
“Delta Six, I’d like a clarification on this order.”
“Affirmative.”
“You got federal specialists in there, commando types, hardcore pro military. But you want my guys to carry the brunt of this attack?”
“Affirmative, Guard Six.”
“Do you have any idea what’s up there? They—”
“I heard. I saw the report.”
“Sir, I’d like to request that my higher headquarters authenticate the or—”
“Captain, you do any damn thing you like, but at 1500 hours I want your company humping that hill. First, you’ll do much better in the light. A night attack’s a terrible thing. Second, and more important, I’ve laid on Tac Air at 1500. You want to hit the Aggressor area just as the Air moves out. Those A-10s are going to make hamburger out of whoever’s up there. You have my word. You’ll be mopping up, that’s all. I’d warn your guys to watch out for unexploded 20-mil shells. Those things can tear a leg off. That’s what you have to worry about.”
Puller’s face was bland and sweet as he lied. He was an excellent liar.
“Oh, Air. Air.”
“A-10s, affirmative, Guard Six. Ever seen em hose something down? Those cannons rip through lumber like a chain saw. You’ve never seen anything like it!”
“Yessir,” said the captain. “I’ll get ’em assembled and on the way, sir.”
“Real fine, Guard Six. Real fine.” He looked at his watch. It was close to 1400 hours. He heard whistles somewhere, and the sound of trucks. It was the Guard, already saddling up.
He felt somebody looking at him. It was the hard, lean face of Skazy, closing in on him.
“What are you looking at?” Puller said.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Dick,” said Skazy.
“You’re out of line, Major,” said Puller, facing him square.
“You wouldn’t send us in from Desert One. You’ve got to send us in here.”
Puller looked hard at him. Skazy had been combat assault commander seven years ago in Eagle Claw. When Puller made the decision to abort, Skazy had called him, to his face, a cowardly motherfucker and taken a punch at him.
“You’ll get your great chance, Frank. Just grow up a little, will you? It’s going to be a long day.”
Skazy said, “Look, Dick, if you have any trouble because it’s me here, and because I took my shot at you at Desert One, that’s fine. A commander de
serves support from his juniors. I’ll step out of my command and go in as a regular trooper. McKenzie can take over, he’s a good man. But goddammit, Dick, you’ve got to use us this time.”
Puller looked at him.
“Get back to your unit, Major,” he said.
Outside, the trucks had begun to move toward the mountain.
Rat Team Baker was suiting up in the barn. In the distance a chopper had landed, its blades beating with a liquid slosh of noise against the wooden walls. The rhythm was insistent, urgent, and through it they could hear the sound of the National Guard trucks rumbling down the muddy road toward the mountain. But the two men, aware that in minutes they’d be airborne, worked hard at getting ready.
“Here,” Witherspoon said. “You keep this on your belt.”
“Yo, man, thanks,” said Walls, taking it. It was a Taurus PT-92 9-mm automatic in black matte finish, with a double-stacked magazine that held fifteen rounds. He popped the magazine, which dropped out, then locked back the slide and looked into the chamber, where everything seemed to gleam with bright highlights. He thumbed the slide release, and the heavy sheath of metal slammed forward. The gun snapped in his hand. He reinserted the mag, and rejacked the slide to chamber a round.
“Safety up or down, man?”
“Up is on. You go to red by snapping it down. That’s a double-action piece, so you don’t have to carry it cocked and locked.”
“Cocked and locked it’s gonna be,” said Walls, “just like my old .45. Cocked and locked is best.”
It was a nice piece for backup, but not quite what he wanted for the main work.
“Now, what about Mr. Twelve?” Walls asked, slipping the automatic into an ambidextrous Bianchi holster on his belt.
“Say again?”
“Mr. Twelve Gauge. Shotgun, man.”
“Yeah, so I found one. Here it is,” Witherspoon said, handing the weapon over: a Mossberg 500, with a twenty-inch barrel in a grainy gray Parkerized finish. It had a combat magazine extension beyond the pump reaching out to the muzzle, giving it a chin-heavy, pugnacious profile.
“That piece is very important to the guy that owns it. He didn’t want to give it up. It’s called a Persuader. Now he didn’t want to give it up. It’s his life insurance. But I talked him into it.”
Walls took the gun and knew at once it was made for him. He held it, touched it, rubbed it, smelled it, clicked it. Damn, it felt good.
He began to thread the heavy red plastic double-ought twelve-gauge shells into it, discovering that it would swallow eight of them. Loaded, it felt heavy; all that buckshot slung out under the barrel. He jammed dozens more into the leg pouches of his camouflage pants until his legs felt as if he were exercising. It would mean he might have to lay on the suckers, but it was better to hurt a little and have the spares when you needed them than to be comfortable and come up dry at party time. He’d found that out in a hole somewhere. He held the loaded gun close to him.
Meanwhile Witherspoon was locking a 30-round 9-mm clip into his Heckler&Koch MP-5. The gun had a foolish look to it, a sci-fi look: its ribbed silencer threw it out of proportion.
“Is that a toy, man? It looks like some kind of plastic kid toy.”
“It works great,” said Witherspoon, “a great close-in weapon.”
Then Witherspoon put on his AN/PVS-5C night vision goggles. They looked like a set of binoculars mounted in some kind of scuba-diving mask, which was held on Witherspoon’s head by a harness of elastic straps; they drew their power from a 1.3V DC battery pack he wore at his belt. The glasses responded to heat, and in the cool blackness of a tunnel a man would radiate an orange glow as if he were on fire, making him easy to track and kill.
“You could have used this stuff in ’Nam,” Witherspoon said.
Walls snorted.
“Man, I’m so bad I can see in the dark without help, you know. That’s what kept me alive.”
Then Witherspoon pulled on his flak jacket, which had already been mounted with an AN-PRC-88 radio receiver. A pair of headphones with a hands-free mike on a pylon out in front of his lips completed the outfit. He stuffed a book-sized mass of gray clay into one bellows pocket. Walls knew it to be C-4; he’d blown up a few things in his time in the tunnels.
Witherspoon stood, staggered for just a second under the weight of the gear. Walls couldn’t help a little laugh.
“Man, you look like a ghostbuster,” said Walls, “and you talk like an ofay. Man, how long you study, learn to talk that white bullshit? ‘It’s a great close-in weapon,’” Walls mocked through his nose with a cruel grin on his face. “Be natural, my man. Be a nigger. You a nigger, be a nigger.”
“I don’t care how I sound if it keeps me alive and gives me the edge,” said Witherspoon, stung by the accusation.
“A bad nigger with a bad shotgun, that’s the best motherfuckin’ edge,” said Walls.
The men rose from their ritual. Walls pulled on his flak jacket too. He’d nixed the night vision stuff. There were picks, shovels, grenades, and a few other gimcracks to be arranged, but essentially they were ready. Then he noticed a red bandanna on a bench, left over from some cracker handyman or other. Quickly, Walls flicked off his watch cap, snatched it up, expertly spun it into a roll, then tied it Apache-style around his forehead.
“You see, boy,” he said to the horrified Witherspoon, “in the hole it’s hot as shit, and the sweat sting up your eyes. Saw a white guy once blown away ’cause he missed a first shot ’cause he couldn’t see nothing.” He smiled for the first time.
An officer yelled, “Game time, rats.”
The moment had come. Walls grabbed his Mossberg, felt the heave and slap of the automatic at his hip, the weight of the flak jacket. He lumbered out to the chopper.
The tough-looking old white guy stood off to one side as they ran to the slick, watching them go with numb eyes. Brass, Walls thought. White brass. Shit, he hated white brass, stern fuckers with little squinty eyes who looked at you like you were shit on their shoes.
But then the white old guy gave him a little thumbs-up for happy hunting and—fuck it!—hey, winked at him. Walls saw the radiance of something almost never on the pale, slack faces of the white race—belief. That is, belief in him, in Walls.
You may not be much of anything, motherfucker, the old white guy was saying, but damn, boy, you one hell of a tunnel rat.
You got that right, Jack, thought Walls, running the last few yards through the breeze to the bird.
The Vietnamese woman, in black with an M-16 and a pair of gym shoes, was already aboard, a blank look on her face. But as he moved closer, squinting in the bright sunlight, she looked at him.
Jesus, he thought, losing himself in her opaque glare, home again.
The Huey with the two Rat Teams lifted, nose heavy, a bit ungainly, hung for just a second, and then with an agility that even these many helicopters into his career still surprised Puller, zoomed off, and he watched it go.
“Good pilot on that ship,” Major Skazy yelled. “He’ll insert ’em just where you want ’em.”
Puller said nothing. He shifted his vision. Across the white meadow, under the bright sun and blue sky, he now saw the NG trucks in the distance, deuce-and-a-halfs, a convoy of them, small as toys, now lumbering into the woods to begin the ascent to the primary assault position.
The trucks moved poorly, tentatively bunched up; one would spurt ahead, then slow. It was an accordion opening and closing across the landscape.
“Aggressor Force’s going to see them coming,” said Skazy. “Plenty of time to get ready.”
“Aggressor Force was ready anyhow,” said Puller.
“It’s Delta’s job,” said Skazy.
The older man turned to look at the younger. He remembered Skazy at Desert One, his face mottled with fury, coming at him without regard for rank or protocol or career or whatever, just coming at him, screaming, “You gutless old bastard, we can still do it. We can do it with five choppers!” And Puller h
ad said, “Get your men on the planes, Major. Get them on the planes,” as the harsh wind, the noise, the utter confusion had swirled around them.
Now, eight years later, Skazy was still a major. He’d been passed over, his career ruined just as completely as Puller’s for his legendary flip-out. He was still Delta, though, still a true believer.
“Dick,” Skazy was suddenly saying, “let me go in with the NG. Those guys need some experience. Let me take Delta up to support them from the flanks, and to urge them on, give them something to see. Dick, we can—”
“No, Frank. You’ll get carried away, the way you did at Desert One. You’ll lose control, you’ll rush in. You’ll get everybody killed and you still won’t stop the men in the hole.”
He delivered this brutal sentence with a little bit more pleasure than was strictly necessary, as if to indulge the bully in his soul. But it was also that Skazy, brave, hardworking, brilliant, was just a bit reckless. He was a terrible accident waiting to happen. He needed to be led and aimed. He was a perfect subordinate: he wasn’t the man you wanted out there on his own.
“Whatever you say, Colonel Puller,” said Skazy, his face immobile.
Suddenly, he turned.
“Just use us this time, goddammit, Dick. And you weren’t right at Desert One. I was.”
Skazy stormed back to his staff, leaving Puller alone.
Puller looked back to the mountain, feeling suddenly old and a bit scared. Maybe the rat thing was pointless, maybe those tunnels weren’t there at all. And certainly those kids in the trucks would be chopped up. Maybe even Delta couldn’t make it.
He checked his watch. The A-10s ought to be shooting the gap any second now.
He looked back to the mountain. It was a dramatic white hump before him, the red and white aerial like a candy cane at its top, and that peculiar dark stain where Aggressor Force had built its odd tent.
He felt himself being looked at. Up there, Aggressor-One would be looking through his binoculars. Watching. Waiting. Planning.
I hope you’re not half so lucky as you are smart, he thought. It was also a prayer.