"A dry hole!" Captain Rafferty exclaimed. "How the hell did that happen?"
"Bad intel," North suggested. "Wouldn't be the first time."
"We didn't pull all of this together for another Son Tay, damn it!" an Army general exclaimed.
Son Tay was the prison camp north of Hanoi raided by Army Special Forces in 1972 in order to free American POWs being held there. The raid was a brilliant and unqualified success. The only problem was that the prisoners weren't there; they'd been moved not long before, possibly because someone in Saigon had talked.
"Well you don't need to blame Intelligence," a man in a dark, civilian suit said, sounding angry. "We had good solid intel on this one. One-A! The best there is!"
"Yeah," another suit said. "Maybe it's the conception and planning this time."
"Did you hear that guy, Dean?" the general said. "Sierra Alfas. That's Syrian regular Army, goddammit! They weren't supposed to be within ten kilometers of the objective! What the hell went wrong?"
"Gentlemen," Admiral Goldman said, "I think we can defer the traditional postop recriminations until after we get our people out of there."
"What about their air cover request, sir?" Captain Rafferty wanted to know. "They're standing by with a full alfa strike on the Nimitz, hot and ready to go!" An "alfa strike" was the general term for a full carrier-borne attack against any shore target.
"That really isn't advisable at this juncture," the first civilian said. "If we needed to protect our helicopters coming out, yes… but we can't afford to have this come out now, and an air strike would guarantee that it would come out."
The general chuckled, a grim and humorless sound. "It's a little late to worry about ass covering now, isn't it, Dean?"
"It's not ass covering. We have to think of the hostages. A failed rescue attempt is bad enough. If we bomb them, they're just liable to take it out on our people."
And wouldn't they have done the same if we'd been successful? Gordon wondered. Does this make any sense at all?
But he said nothing. Right now, the men in that Pentagon basement room were more concerned about fixing blame, salvaging careers, and controlling damage than they were about the SEALs now fighting for their lives in southern Lebanon.
"We've got to do something about those SEALs, though," North said, his boyish face creased with worry. "Damage control later. We've got to get them out now!"
Rafferty shrugged. "We're doing all that can be done, Colonel. We'll dispatch choppers off the Nimitz to pick them up at the secondary extraction site. But it's going to be up to them to get there."
"That might be a bit easier if you give them the air strike they called for," Gordon said, breaking his silence.
"Eh?" the captain asked, turning to look at him. "What's that?"
"Send in that air strike, sir. That'll keep the bad guys off their backs long enough for them to get to where they need to go."
"I don't believe we asked for your opinion, Commander," the general said.
"He's right," Goldman said. "Damn it, you can't abandon those people."
"The political risks are unacceptable."
"So how did you get the SEALs in?" Gordon asked Goldman, whispering.
"We took advantage of the unstable politics in the region, actually. The Israelis hold undisputed control of the airspace over southern Lebanon, from their border all the way to Beirut, sixty miles up the coast. Their troops held a southern strip of Lebanon as well, a security zone designed to keep Palestinian terrorists from shelling Israeli towns and kibbutzim from across the border. We made an under-the-table deal with Israeli intelligence to fly three Sea Kings into the Bekaa Valley at hedge-clipping height. The locals will assume the helos are Israeli."
"Cute. And they get the blame for the firefight and any breakage?"
"Exactly. That sort of skirmishing goes on all the time in there."
"But an air strike off the Nimitz would give the game away. Shit."
"As you say, Commander. Shit."
Gordon watched the fight on the big display, as running green figures moved among white flashes in an eerie silence punctuated by bursts of radio transmissions.
"Alfa Team, Alfa Leader! We're going over the south wall! First Squad provide cover. Second Squad, go! Rendezvous at LZ Sacramento! Let's do it!"
"Let's go, Alfa Two. South wall. Watch your fire, Long-arm, we're coming over the top."
"Copy, Alfa Two. We're watching for you."
How long, Gordon wondered, before the Syrians sent in reinforcements and the game really got hot?
5
"Time to get the hell out of Dodge," Randall said as he reached the southern rampart and crouched beside the head-shattered body of a Hezbollah militiaman, weapon at the ready.
"I could live with that, sir," GM2 Neubauer told him. Together, they dropped over the southern wall of the fortress and onto the rocky ground outside as red-and-yellow tracers flashed across the night, and the sky lit up with explosions, and the rest of Second Squad followed close behind. Randall and Neubauer dropped to the ground twenty meters from the loom of the fortress wall, aiming their weapons at it as the rest of Second Squad filed south between them, crouched low and moving fast.
QM1 Goddard and ET3 McKenna paired off and took up an overwatch position twenty meters farther south.
"Set!" McKenna called over the tactical channel. "Go!"
"Moving," Randall replied, and he and Neubauer rose from the ground and made a low-stooped run to the south, passing Goddard's and McKenna's positions just as McKenna loosed a pair of quick, sharp, three-round bursts at bad guys coming over the wall. Someone screamed in the night, the sound much larger than the thuttering hiss of McKenna's sound-suppressed MP5SD.
With a close-knit and practiced coordination reminiscent of a meticulously choreographed dance, the SEALs leapfrogged back into the valley south of the fortress, then worked their way down the valley, always careful that at each moment, at least two of them were covering the withdrawal of the others. Once, a pair of Hezbollah gunmen tried rushing the group, shouting in Arabic as they bounced down the valley wall. Goddard and McKenna were on guard at the time, catching the men with a pair of hissing, three-round bursts that tripped both attackers and sent them tumbling heels-over-head all the way to the valley floor.
Clear of hostile pursuit, they reached Point Tucson, their first E&E waypoint, a tangle of boulders where the valley opened onto a broad, sloping plain. They dropped into a defensive perimeter, holding their position until First Squad could join them. Minutes dragged past, an agony of waiting, while gunfire continued to bang and thunder from the direction of the fortress.
Abruptly, the voice of Chief Matthew Anderson came over the tactical channel. "Man down, we have a man down!"
"Alfa, Starbase. Please clarify," the nasal voice said.
"Alfa Two, Alfa One," Anderson said, ignoring the call from Starbase. "The Wheel is down, I say again, the Wheel is down!"
"The Wheel" was SEAL slang for the head honcho, the man in charge. Lieutenant Gallagher had been hit.
"Alfa One, this is Two," Randall said after a moment, when no further information was forthcoming. "One, this is Two. Do you copy? Over."