SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Rockman waved him off. “Don’t apologize, Hugo. You’ve been crashing. Tell me what’s up.”

“It’s a CIA Charlie Foxtrot, sir, if you’ll pardon my French. Late yesterday, NSA scooped up a series of open telephone calls from Beijing to roughly a dozen commercial satellite imaging companies all around the globe.”

“Yesterday.” That was funny. Rockman remembered Nick Pappas had told the president Beijing had tried to buy one-meter commercial imagery two nights ago. “Are you sure it was yesterday, Hugo — not the day before?”

The captain nodded. “Absolutely, Mr. Secretary.”

“And all of the firms that were contacted — do they sell one-meter-resolution digital satellite imagery?”

“They do, sir.”

“Go on.”

“Beijing asked each company for the precise coordinates in China that had been acquired for exclusive commercial use recently. I’d bet they suspected CIA had purchased a lot of one-meter imagery in the past couple of days in order to keep them blind. I think Beijing — or to be more precise, the Er Bu, China’s foreign intelligence organization — repolled the companies to discover precisely which areas were out of bounds. My guess is that they washed those coordinates through some kind of matrix. Ultimately, it became a process of elimination. From what I’ve been able to ascertain from my sources, when CIA bought up the one-meter imagery, the front companies doing the purchasing didn’t ask for anything except the one precise area Langley wanted to keep the Chinese from seeing.”

Rockman shook his head. “Nick couldn’t be that stupid.” Then he thought about what he’d just said and slammed his palm on his desk. “Oh, yes he could.”

But more to the point, the DCI was covering up his latest gaffe by withholding this critical piece of intelligence. Rockman looked at O’Neill’s haggard face. “Good work, Hugo — you showed real initiative. I owe you a big one.”

He waited until the officer turned and left. Then he hit his intercom button so violently that he snapped it in two. “Get me the president on a secure line — ASAR.”

16

14,250 Feet Above Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China.

2118 Hours Local Time.

Ritzik nudged Wei-Liu with his left leg and pointed a booted foot groundward. There were sparse lights scattered below. He adjusted his NV and peered down, but he could make out no sign of life other than the half-dozen twinkling lights. They were gliding almost due southeast now, at a ground speed of just over thirty-three miles an hour. Distance to the LZ was 21.6 miles—40.6 minutes of flight time given the current tailwind. He checked the time. It had been eight minutes since the last radio check. He pressed his transmit switch, uneasy until he’d received a verbal confirmation from every member of the element. Navigation on night HAHO operations, he was happy to note, was so much simpler with the GPS units — so long as the damn things worked.

Something that hadn’t changed was the fatigue of long Ram Air glides. Ritzik’s arms were gradually growing sore. Even with the toggle extensions, which allowed him to keep his hands at waist level, maintaining the full-flight position was exhausting after more than half an hour or so. And Ritzik’s arms had been virtually frozen in position for almost an hour.

The slow progress also made him nervous. ETA at the drop zone was now close to twenty-two hundred hours. That would give them little more than two and a half hours to bury the chutes and the rest of their jump equipment and proceed to a rear assembly area, which was more commonly called a LUP, or lay up position. From there, well back from the ambush site, Ritzik’s troops would begin their recon. Once they’d gone over the ground thoroughly and decided just where to hit the convoy, they’d set the explosives and unobtrusively mark their fields of fire. Then the team would withdraw, leaving no sign that they’d been prowling and growling. Finally, long before the enemy was anywhere nearby, the team would conceal themselves and let the ambush site slip back to its uninterrupted nocturnal rhythms — letting the “critters and shitters,” as an old Special Forces master sergeant had once described them to Ritzik, return to normal.

That last element was critical. As a second lieutenant not two years out of West Point, Ritzik had once had occasion to accompany a platoon of General Juan Bustillo’s Salvadoran Special Forces on a mission to capture an elusive, deadly, and particularly nettlesome female FMLN{The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, an umbrella organization for El Salvador’s Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups.} comandante named Nidia Calderon. The team had choppered from the airfield at Ilopango, northeast, into San Vicente Province. There, they fast-roped down into a rugged landscape of ravines and thick brush, to lie in wait alongside a narrow, twisting trail identified by infrared satellite photography as used by the guerrillas to bypass the local army garrison.