SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

“Talgat’s no dummy, Rowdy. The minute he sees that C-5, he’s gonna know.”

“By then,” Yates said, stowing the book, “the Big Suit at the White House will have put the fix in at the Kazakh presidential palace and we’ll be slicker than deer guts in a pine forest. Besides, we’ll have all them young pecker-wood Rangers making a cordon sanitaire around us, so who’s gonna complain?” He stood up and rapped his scarred knuckles on the desk. “Remember the holy trinity, Shep: speed, surprise, and violence of action.” The sergeant major unsheathed his marker, flourished it like a sword, and thrust at the legal pad, drawing a quick Z through a trio of items. He scanned the remainder of his to-do list. “That leaves sixteen for Zorro. How you coming, Sancho Panza?”

“I think you’re mixing your characters.” Shepard flipped through half a dozen sheets of paper. “Okay: I finally located the chutes, masks, and O-two prebreather units,” he said. “There are two dozen RAPS{Ram Air Parachute Systems.} out at Marana the CIA was saving for some black op. Two tandems, sixteen masks, and sixteen double-bottle units. The Air Force bitched and moaned, but SECDEF has the juice, and they’re already on the way. ETA is about fifteen hundred. Then we have to get the chutes out to the rigger’s shed and go over ‘em before we repack and stow.”

Yates’s head bobbed up and down once. “Get Curtis, Goose, Marko, Tuzz, and Dodger on it. They’re gonna be jumping the damn things; they might as well make sure they’re sound.”

“Wilco, Sergeant Major.”

“Equipment?”

“Good to go equipment-wise: Russian Kirasa-5 tactical vests. Everybody already has GSG-9{Assault boots specially designed by Adidas for Grenzchutzgruppe 9, Germany’s primary counterterrorist unit.} boots. I’ve got French Nomex coveralls, Russian web gear, and Bulgarian AKs. We can’t use MBITRs,{Handheld multiband inter/intra team radios.} so I found fourteen secure CipherTac satellite-compatible radios. They were made for a Kraut contract. They’ll work with our duplex system and the satcom chips, so the comms are good to go. And the Chinese claymores are up at Dam Neck — they’ll be here by close of business today.”

“Hey, asshole,” Yates growled, “we never close. Remember that.” He swallowed the last of the sweet coffee. Departure was scheduled for twenty hundred hours — not enough time, he worried, to get everything done.

At least, Rowdy thought, they’d be comfortable on the trip over. The big C-5 was one of the Air Force’s SOLL–II, or Special Operations Low Level II aircraft, capable of landing, unloading, and taking off under complete blackout conditions. It was coming in from the 436^th Airlift Wing at Dover, Delaware. The plane’s upper deck had reclining seats for seventy-three, as well as a galley and real heads. That beat the canvas strap benches, piss tubes, and chemical buckets on the C-130s they usually flew.

Plus, the C-5’s cargo bay was huge. If they had to, they could check and repack all the chutes in the belly of the Galaxy. It might be awkward working around the pallets, but it could be done. Rowdy shook himself out of his stupor. What the hell had Shep said about Chinese claymores? “Shep?”

The first sergeant said, “Yo?”

“Chinese claymores?”

“Coming from Dam Neck.”

“Good. Pack three or four blocks of Semtex, too.” Semtex was the old Soviet-bloc equivalent of C-4 plastic explosive. Originally made during the Cold War in Czechoslovakia (for which reason Rowdy liked to say it was great for canceling Czechs), it was durable, malleable, and stable. And forensically, it would leave behind no indications that those who’d employed it were Americans.

Shepard made a note. “Roger that.”

Rowdy glanced up at the clock, thinking again how there’s never enough effing time. He had to scramble one of Delta’s six-man 1ST — intelligence support teams — to run the tactical operations center at Almaty. And he still had his research to do. The unit kept case study files on operations running all the way back to World War II. Colonel Beckwith had insisted on maintaining the case studies — and they’d always proved valuable in the past. Rowdy wanted to look at some thirty-year-old SAS operations in Oman. The geography was roughly similar to the Tarim Basin — except for the huge Tian mountain range ringing the Western Chinese desert. He pulled the reading magnifiers off his nose and stuck them in his pocket. “Be back in about half an hour.”

“Gotcha. I’m just about finished with the comms.”

“Good. You get hold of any RPGs?”

“Not yet. I sent Bill Sandman to dig ‘em up. All he could find was LAWs.”

“Crap.” Yates scratched a large spider bite just below his sunburned ear. “I’ll take care of it. I think I know where I can lay my hands on a dozen or so.” He chicken-scratched the acronym on his legal pad. “What about IR strobes?”

“Got ‘em.” Shepard gave the sergeant major a wicked grin. “One less item on my list.”