SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Rowdy had lost enough of his comrades-in-arms over the years so that he didn’t dwell on the possibility that Ritzik, Gino, Ty, Mick, and Sam-I-Am the spook man weren’t making a round-trip. The youngest Ranger at Desert One during the abortive attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran in the spring of 1980, nineteen-year-old Fred Yates, had been given the nasty job of blowing up the damaged RH-53D Sea Stallion choppers to ensure the destruction of the bundles of cash and caches of intelligence materials that had inadvertently been left aboard the damaged aircraft. It hadn’t bothered him to vaporize the money, maps, intelligence materials, or cipher keys.

But the fact that dead Americans could have been inside the aircraft when he destroyed them had bothered the hell out of him — and still did. In the operational Bible Rowdy Yates carried in his head, the First Commandment was never ever to leave a comrade behind — even on a black op.

And Rowdy’d done his share of black ops. In the 1980s he’d slipped into Lebanon to hunt Islamic Jihad car bombers. He’d worked in El Salvador, where he stalked and killed one FMLN comandante who had ordered the assassination of Albert Schaufelberger, a Navy SEAL lieutenant commander, and another whose unit had murdered four Marines and two American civilians at a sidewalk café in San Salvador’s Zona Rosa. In the nineties he’d been detailed to Sarajevo, where he worked covert countersurveillance against the Sepah-ē Pasdaran — Iran’s terrorist-supporting IRGC, or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — which targeted Western peacekeepers. In February 1999, he’d rendezvoused with six case officers from MIT{Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, Turkey’s intelligence service.} and a twenty-man element of Turkish Special Forces when they slipped into Kenya to capture Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the violent Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. And he’d been in the neighborhood, as they say, when p-p-p-porky Pablo Escobar, the jefe of the Medellín cartel, had played the title role in Bullet Sponge on a Hot Tin Roof.

But this little jaunt was way beyond black. This really was Mission: Impossible. They were operating ultra-covertly. Capture was not an option — and neither was leaving anyone to be … identified. Rowdy understood the political implications of the mission all too well. Ritzik had even put it into words. Or hadn’t. “You do whatever you have to do,” he’d said. Rowdy had supreme confidence in his abilities. The mission was to get these people safely over the Tajik border. And he’d accomplish it, whatever it would take. Rowdy had a survival mind-set and it would carry them all through.

But there was always the unexpected to prepare for. Not to mention the arrival of Mr. Murphy just when you didn’t need him. More to the point, two-plus decades of operating in the real world had shown Rowdy that you’ve always got to anticipate a worst-case scenario, and have something in your back pocket just in case it develops. Which was why while the rest of the party was otherwise engaged, Rowdy wired one of the shaped charges just forward of the 4x4’s gas tank. The detonator was where he could reach it easily from behind the wheel. The end would be quick and painless. And identification? Let the forensic pathologists in Beijing try to figure it all out. The sons of bitches would have their work cut out for them, too: there were two spooks, six Delta shooters, and Wei-Liu. That bloody 4x4 was going to be more crowded than one of those little cars at the circus, the ones where a thousand clowns come pouring out. Body Partz “R” Us.

0956. “Kaz, keep your head down, goddammit.” Rowdy chewed the end of his mustache, noting for the record that it was a very feeble substitute for his habitual cheekful of Copenhagen. Would these spooks ever learn? Movement gave you away. It didn’t take much, either. Pilots were trained observers — like experienced hunters in the field. And when you hunted, you never tried to find a whole deer. You looked for an anomaly; something that wasn’t supposed to be there. The flash of white when the buck flicked its tail. The sudden shift of light and shadow as a boar moved through a thicket toward water. The momentary glint of sun reflecting off the lens of a telescopic sight. Or the callow, upturned face of a dumb-as-rocks spook who’d heard the chopper but still wanted to see the frigging thing so his eyes could corroborate what his ears had just told him.

He’d positioned them well clear of the burning truck and smoldering chopper. They’d moved the MADM back down into the ravine and slid the damn thing into its crate, which they positioned ostentatiously at the rear of the truck. Rowdy made sure they tilted the damn thing so the heavy wooden box transporter sat with its yellow-and-black universal symbol for NUKE pointing skyward. No way the Chinese would miss that.