SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Ritzik pulled her harness off and ran his hands over her coveralls. She didn’t wince, so he figured nothing was broken. “Just got the wind knocked out of you,” he said.

A second chute descended rapidly. Wei-Liu watched as it flared, stopped dead in the air; the jumper stepped on to the desert floor as the canopy dropped, deflated, behind him. A third chute appeared out of the darkness. Wei-Liu pulled off her helmet. She could hear the canopies fluttering above.

Ritzik snagged Wei-Liu’s arms and pulled her to her feet. “C’mon,” he said. “We can’t stay in the middle of the LZ — we’ll get somebody killed.”

He pointed at his combat pack. “Grab that, will you?”

He pulled his chute toward him, gathered it up into his arms, and hobbled toward the trees. Fifty feet from the tree line, Ritzik dropped his bundle and sat. Gingerly, he worked his hands around his left ankle. The good news was it wasn’t broken, only sprained. He’d work the pain off. He untied the triple knots on his Adidas, pulled the laces as tight as he could get them to support the ankle, retied his boot, and pulled himself to his feet. “Time to get down to work.”

“Down to work?” Wei-Liu looked at him incredulously. “Major, so far we’ve thrown ourselves out of a perfectly good aircraft, paraglided about sixty miles, and just walked away from a rough landing in hostile territory. Sounds like a pretty full day to me.”

“Does it, now.” Ritzik’s eyes hardened. “Well, that’s just the commute, ma’am. The easy part. The part we do before breakfast. We haven’t begun the real work yet.”

17

1.5 Kilometers West of Yarkant Köl.

2214 Hours Local Time.

As soon as the entire element was on the ground, Ritzik tried to check in with the TOC. But the frigging radios weren’t send/receiving on any frequency except the close-range, insertion-element comms channel. Curtis Hansen tried to pull a satellite signal from the TOC on his laptop, but all the damn thing pulled in was static. The one piece of satcom gear still operational was the feed of the convoy’s position displayed on the tiny screen of Ritzik’s Blackberry PDA. It was still moving north alongside the Yarkant Köl.

As the element blacked out their faces with multicolored cammo cream and pulled on the Russian anoraks and dark knit caps, Ritzik did the math on the coordinates. He put the ETA at the bridge in just over two hours — the clock was really ticking now. Ritzik decided he’d worry about the comms later. Right now they had to cover just over a kilometer and a half of road — about a mile — and set the ambush. They’d leave Mickey D and Wei-Liu at the LUP.{Lay Up Position.} The pair of them could spend their time concealing the jump gear. Maybe the chopper pilot could get the radios to work.

2220. The approach to the road was slow going — slower than Ritzik might have wanted. That was because the sand was soft, and even though the LUP was far removed from the ambush site, Ritzik wasn’t about to leave tracks that could be seen after the fact. And so, with Gene Shepard on point, the nine-man element carefully picked its way foot by foot from the LUP across three hundred yards of rolling dunes, camouflaging their boot prints as they moved, then turned east onto the washed-out, rutted smugglers’ road leading to the western end of the narrow causeway.

Roads made Ritzik nervous. You were exposed and vulnerable out in the open. Noise discipline was also a problem, especially when the unit was carrying heavy equipment — as this one was. But there was no choice now. Either he used the road, or he spent valuable time trying to cover up all those easily identifiable tracks in the soft sand. He concentrated on moving as quietly as possible, running what-if scenarios through his head as he put one boot in front of the other.

What would they do if the convoy showed up early? What would they do if they came across a shepherd? What would they do if a group of smugglers or an uninvolved civilian drove up the road? That had actually happened during Delta’s first mission, the attempted rescue of the American hostages in Tehran, back in April 1980. Within literal seconds of the assault element’s arrival on an allegedly isolated stretch of Iranian desert where no one ever went, three vehicles — a busload of civilians, a gasoline tanker, and an old pickup truck — all drove past the site. Result: instant FUBAR — anda compromised mission. The lesson learned? Plan for all contingencies. Never stop rolling those scenarios in your head.

So Ritzik paid careful attention to possible cover positions and ways to reach them as he moved forward. A branch of the scrub to his left, for example, could be used to mask his footprints as he backed off the road to seek cover behind the boulders thirty feet away, or he could hunker down under the thorny bushes to the east. Fifty, maybe sixty yards off the right side of the road stood a patch of knee-high grass that might provide some camouflage.