Colonel Moore nodded. "I had a hell of a time getting the navy to release the ship to conduct the mission. It's moving now, but there's probably going to be a stink about it. The navy is real big on chain of command, and this mission requires that we short-circuit that as much as possible. I have several recommendations I'll put in the afteraction report that would help improve the system for interservice taskings in the future."
Sanders nodded his approval. "That's part of the reason we run this. To learn before we do the real thing."
Meng was relieved. The SFOB staff was doing the majority of the work for him. All he had to do was push the units one step further to actually do the tasks they were assigned. In every case all that consisted of was using the authorization code words listed in the oplans.
9
"To be certain to take what you attack is to attack a
place the enemy does not protect."
Hossey was tired. It would be another two hours before the first scheduled broadcast from the team, their ANGLER report, should come in. Hossey was still angry over the SATCOM communications screwup by the SFOB, but he was smart enough to know there wasn't anything he could do about it. USSOCOM was on the other end at the SFOB, and they had more rank there than he cared to shake a stick at. Besides, Hossey reasoned, they had apologized.
What concerned him more was his own attempt to abort the mission based solely on the lack of communication with the SFOB. Upon reflection, Hossey realized he had acted presumptuously. No commo with the SFOB was not sufficient reason to have made that abort decision. He could account for his actions with only two possible explanations. The first was that he was tired and had reacted poorly under stress. The second, and more ominous, was his gut feeling that something was rotten about this whole mission. He wanted to start dissecting that feeling to see if he could come up with something tangible, but he was too tired to think that hard.
After leaving instructions with the commo man on duty to wake him when the ANGLER came in, Hossey went to the small office he had been using and threw himself onto the cot for a short nap.
Trudging through the swampy forest, the team found the going much harder than they had anticipated. The ground was spongy moss that sucked in the foot almost to the top of the boot. Each step was an effort. It took them an exhausting forty-five minutes to cover the first kilometer, even though the terrain was relatively flat. Mitchell halted the team for a five-minute break after the first hour and moved up next to Riley.
"If it stays like this, we could have a problem. We'll make it to the objective rally point in time, but it's going to be tight for Olinski and his guys to make it to the pickup zone before first light. When we get to the pipeline, I'm going to cut them loose there and have them go straight to the pickup zone instead of coming to the objective rally point. We can use the team linkup SOP if they need to come back to the objective rally point for any reason."
Riley considered this. "With Lalli being hurt we probably ought to keep him with the main body so the medics can look after him. How about switching him and O'Shaugnesy? That way we still have a communications man with each cell. They're carrying the same weapons, too, so Lalli can pull O'Shaugnesy's job at the target site."
Mitchell nodded in concurrence. In isolation they had considered the option of letting Olinski head off early, and agreed to use that plan if necessary. The second change with Lalli and O'Shaugnesy made sense.
Mitchell went to check on Lalli's condition and inform him of the change. When he returned, he gave Riley the night-vision goggles he'd been wearing. For the second hour, the buddy teams switched goggles. The team continued their march.
After three hours, Team 3 had covered an estimated three and a half kilometers, making better time as the men got used to walking in the muck. Riley figured another thirty minutes until they reached the pipeline. The lack of any sign of civilization was comforting, since they stood little chance of walking into anyone in the middle of this vast forest at night, but it was also unnerving to Americans unused to such vast uninhabited spaces.
At 1840Z they halted to allow O'Shaugnesy to send the initial entry message. While O'Shaugnesy set up the antenna dish and oriented it, Captain Mitchell pulled out his message format pad and started writing the ANGLER report.
Translated, using the message format, his report read:
01: (First message the team was sending.)
ANGLER: (Name of the format used.)
AAA: (Infiltration location) DUSTER.
BBB: (Infiltration time) 2355Z 6 June.
CCC: (Wounded) none. Mitchell had thought about this one for a few minutes. Lalli's cut wasn't that serious, and he didn't want to give the FOB the mistaken idea that they had made contact with the enemy.
DDD: (Killed in action) none.
EEE: (Mission status) go.
FFF: (Present location) grid 361487.
DOUBLE: (Detachment's code word.) Lack of this code word in a message would indicate that the message was being sent under duress.
Mitchell then placed the message into final form, eliminating any excess, and writing in segments. He hated this part: writing in six-letter blocks. It made for mistakes and was a pain to read. He double-checked his unencrypted message:
ZEROON EANGLE RAAADU STERBB BTWOTH
REEFIV EFIVEZ ULUSIX JUNECC CDDDEE
EGOXXX GOFFFT HREESI XONEFO UREIGH
TSEVEN XXDOUB LEXXXX
With this done, Mitchell used his onetime pad to encrypt the message. He first wrote the message letters on top of the six-block groups on the page of the onetime pad; then, using a trigraph, which linked all the letters in the alphabet in three-letter combinations, he matched the original message letter with the onetime pad letter to come up with a third letter. The final message he handed to Lalli was unintelligible:
MWKERR WLSORN
ELWPMD WHRZAQ
KTHRUE WOSLRJ
MERTTS EKDWIW
QNDPTM RHEMWL THRNWL
MAEOTY PALTMR ZXDSTY
WQARWP THRMWL POIWER WHTISM
Lalli sat down at the keyboard of his digital message data group device and typed in the coded message. The DMDG took the coded message and, transcribing it into Morse code, placed it on a spool of tape.
Lalli then hooked up the DMDG to the SATCOM radio with a cable. O'Shaugnesy had gotten a successful bounce-back from the satellite they were to use. He'd aimed the antenna at the proper angle and elevation and sent out a brief squelch. He'd received the same squelch bounced back to him from the satellite, which confirmed that the antenna was properly aligned. Now they waited.
When it was time to send the message, the tape would be run at many times normal speed, transmitting the message in a short burst. The purpose of the burst was to reduce transmit time, which correspondingly minimized the possibility of being intercepted and RDF'd. The base station would receive the burst and copy it on tape. The tape would be slowed down and run across the small screen of the FOB's DMDG. The message would then be broken out by reversing the process Mitchell had used. A duplicate of the onetime pad that Mitchell carried was in Colonel Hossey's hands. Even if someone else intercepted the message and slowed it down, there was no way it could be read without that matching onetime pad. Olinski carried the team's backup onetime pad and would use it to monitor the radio traffic from his position at the pickup zone.