SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Short, muscular, and almost never pictured without a trademark pipe clenched in his teeth, Colonel Mucci had quickly become one of Ritzik’s heroes. He was, Ritzik soon discovered, one of those rare, instinctive Warriors who led from the front, like Arthur “Bull” Simon, who’d led the 1970 raid on the Son Tay prison camp in North Vietnam, or Jonathan Netanyahu, the hero — and the only IDF fatality — of the Israeli hostage rescue at Entebbe in 1976.

Whether in training or in battle, Mucci never asked his men to do anything he hadn’t done first. He trained his men the way they’d fight: twenty-mile forced marches at night; ten-mile runs in the mud and rain; two-hundred-and-fifty-yard swims with fifty-pound combat packs under live fire. Those who failed, or quit, were sent down — no exceptions. Mucci wanted no one who didn’t have the heart, the will, and the guts to overcome all obstacles.

And like officers in the very best unconventional units, Mucci didn’t stand on ceremony, either. He thought — and acted — outside the box. He’d once been faced with a serious discipline problem: one of his NCOs made highly disparaging public comments about him. Mucci sought the man out. In front of the Rangers, he tossed the sergeant an unsheathed bayonet and taunted the man to kill him if he felt so strongly. The sergeant took Mucci up on his challenge. It took Mucci mere seconds to disarm the malcontent — and win his total loyalty.

In combat, Mucci’s Sixth Rangers wore no insignia. In fact, he ordered his men not to recognize rank in the field. His reasoning was keep-it-simple-stupid battlefield logic: insignia made the NCOs and officers easier targets for Japanese snipers. “If you’re stupid enough to call me colonel, I’ll salute and call you general,” he reportedly once told one of his junior officers. “We’ll see which one of us the Japs shoot first.”

On January 27, 1945, Mucci was given the go-ahead to hit Pangatian. His mission: truck 120 enlisted men and eight officers seventy-five miles through Japanese-occupied territory to a town called Guimba. There, Mucci and his Rangers would link up with roughly 250 indigenous Philippine forces. The combined group would then work its way past villages and Japanese garrisons, ford the Talavera River, then work its way south, bypassing the large Japanese garrison at Cabu. The march would take them more than twenty miles behind enemy lines. Just southwest of Cabu, the Rangers would attack the Japanese camp and liberate the Americans (and any other prisoners they might find) before the Japanese could slaughter them. Then, with the help of fighter aircraft cover, they’d exfiltrate everyone to safety.

Mucci assembled his intelligence from sparse aerial photographs, as well as from local resistance fighters and reports from an American unit known as the Alamo Scouts. But it was sketchy at best — which hadn’t allowed the Rangers to practice their assault. And so, on-scene and behind enemy lines, Mucci made a tough call: he would delay the attack by one day in order to gather more intelligence and gauge the enemy’s strength.

That decision, Ritzik believed, proved to be the deciding factor. In the ensuing twenty-four hours, Mucci’s forces initiated multiple (and successful) reconnaissance missions of the camp and its guards. By January 29, Colonel Mucci had made detailed sketches of the Japanese compound, allowing the Rangers to rehearse their moves.

The attack on Pangatian was executed at dusk. Twenty-four hours later, Mucci had rescued 512 Bataan death-march survivors and evacuated them safely through hostile territory to the American lines. And while he and his Soldiers killed more than five hundred of the enemy, the operation cost him only two of his Rangers: Captain James C. Fisher, the Ranger doctor, and Corporal Roy Sweezy. More: he accomplished it all with nothing more than basic aerial photographs, good orienteering, and labor-intensive, eyes-on, sneak-and-peek ground reconnaissance — no GPS units; no satellites; no computer technology.

These days, a cow can hardly break wind anywhere in the world without a satellite, or a sensor, or a UAV analyzing the methane content. But there is a downside to this information avalanche: there is so much data coming in that timely analysis and distribution often becomes impossible. This results in the unfortunate situation known as garbage in, garbage in.

Ritzik first came to this judgment in Afghanistan. There were so many satellites, so many Predator and Global Hawk UAVs, so many U-2 and Aurora{Aurora is the stealth-technology successor to the SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane. It was first flown tactically over Afghanistan. Its existence has not yet been disclosed.} stealth flights, and other SIGINT, TECHINT, PHOTINT, and ELINT vacuums sweeping up information, that the bosses back in Tampa were rendered incapable of making simple yes/no, or go/no-go decisions.