“I don’t want ’em spread out all over the goddamned landscape,” he snapped, his face set in a glare, “with broken legs and dirty weapons and love affairs with farmer’s daughters. We don’t need it. I won’t begin my assault until I get my tac air, and that’s a good four hours. Land ’em in Hagerstown under battle conditions. I want airfield perimeter security from the state police, I want advance parties on the convoy into us as well as route security, and I want perimeter security set up ASAP upon arrival. Those guys on the mountain sent out a radio transmission; maybe there’s a column of unfriendlies waiting to bounce Delta on the way in. I want the men locked and loaded from minute one. I don’t want any screwing around. Get ’em in here fast, and tell ’em to get working on their assault plan as soon as they get here. First briefing is at 1200 hours and I’ll expect complete terrain familiarity.”
Puller turned from the young man who took this order, a mild-looking twenty-eight-year-old FBI agent of no special ability named James Uckley who had been appointed Dick’s No. 1 guy because he was the first to show up, having been ordered onto the site by a special Bureau flash from his Hagerstown office, where he’d been investigating a bank embezzlement. Dick chose Uckley because he believed that enthusiasm was far more important than intelligence, and Uckley seemed enthusiastic, if bewildered. Moreover, Dick didn’t want smart guys around him to argue with him. Dick liked dumb people who did what they were told, and he liked telling them what to do.
Uckley put this decision out on the emergency teletype which clattered back to the Situation Room, where it was put on to the troops.
“They get those recon shots yet?” Puller demanded.
“Not yet,” said Uckley, looking at the staggering amount of communications equipment that had been set up with surprising speed against one corner of the rickety old wall of the place. Several technicians bent over the stuff, but for some reason Puller refused to acknowledge them, preferring instead to deal with the world through Uckley.
“I’ll sing out if they come over,” Uckley said uncomfortably. In truth, he was a little afraid of Puller. In truth, everybody was a little afraid of Puller. He wasn’t even sure whether he should call him sir, or colonel, or what.
Puller went back to his binoculars. Above him the mountain loomed, white and pristine. The red aerial stood out like a candy cane. He could see no movement.
There was one road up, through rough ground. Halfway up it just stopped, where Aggressor Force had blown it. Smart. No armor would come their way, at least not today.
He looked at his watch—1124. A little more than twelve hours to go. And Delta still wasn’t on the damned ground, this sorry-dick Maryland Guard unit was trying to get its act together, 3rd Infantry was fucking around somewhere on the road, and the only good news was that his Ranger battalion was at least airborne for its cross-country flight and now had an ETA of 1600 hours.
Twelve hours, he thought again. His expression was grim, but this was nothing new: Dick Puller’s expression was always grim. He was born grim. Whatever thoughts he had he kept to himself, although the tension in his face and the way it drew the color from his skin and pulled his muscles taut and his mouth flat suggested something.
At last he asked, “Any word on those locals yet?”
“State police still knocking on doors,” Uckley said.
Puller’s first move was to send state policemen into the town of Burkittsville on a fast canvass of old-timers. Who knew that mountain? What was there? How did you get up it? What was inside it? Dick didn’t trust maps. It was an old ’Nam habit, where a bad map had once almost killed him. It was one of the few mistakes he’d made in his career.
Richard W. Puller was a stern, rangy man of fifty-eight with a gunmetal-gray crew cut that revealed a patch of scalp up top. He had remarkably forceful dark eyes and a way of moving and walking that suggested if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem. Someone — not an admirer — once said of Dick Puller, “You’d have to put a full magazine into the bastard to stop him from coming at you, and then his shadow would cut your throat.” He was not a well-liked man and he did not like many people: a wife, his two daughters, a soldier or two along the way, mainly the tough old master sergeant types that got the killing done in the hairy moments and a few guys in elite units the world over, such as SAS, where he’d done a tour of exchange-officer duty.
He also had a talent for the truth. He would tell it, regardless, a gift that did him little political good in the Army, where you had to go along to get along. He was hated by all manner of people for all manner of rudenesses, but particularly for his willingness to look anybody straight in the eye and tell them they were full of shit. He was, in short, exactly the sort of man made for war, not peace, and when a war came, he had a great one.
He was in-country from 1963 to 1970; he did two tours with the 101st Airborne but spent most of his time leading A-team detachments way out off the maps, interdicting North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia or training indigenous troops — Nungs and Montagnards — to fight against the hated North Vietnamese. He got stuck in a long siege in a big A-camp up near the DMZ and with a twenty-four-man team and three hundred indigs he held off a North Vietnamese division for thirty-eight days. When an airborne unit finally fought its way through to relieve them, he had seven Americans and one hundred ten Nungs left alive.
He also worked for MACV’s Special Observation Group, the mysterious, still-classified intelligence unit that sent ops all over ’Nam, some said even up north. Puller then had a long and flashy career running a Mike Force battalion, a quick reaction team that helicoptered to the relief of A-team detachments in the soup and proceeded to do maximum damage in minimum time. He was an exceedingly aggressive officer, but not a sloppy one. He’d been hit three times, once with a big-ass Chinese.51, the shock of which would have killed most men. It didn’t matter. If you were professional, you got hit, that was all.
But he came back from the war with a special vision, a Mike Force for the world. His idea was that the United States should have at its disposal a group of swift, deadly raiders. He had a dream of a commando group, superbly trained, fast-striking, brilliantly equipped, that could react swiftly to any major incident.
And he had gotten it, too, though as he fought for his project through the tortuous labyrinth of army politics, his personality had assumed the unlovely contours of a zealot. Somewhere in the Pentagon’s D-ring he lost the capacity to laugh; somewhere at some meeting or other he lost his perspective. He won, and Delta Force was the prize: Delta Force, which he had defined and trained and led: which he had, in the final analysis, fathered. And which he had, in the popular view, failed.
A bell rang.
“Sir, the recon photos are coming in,” Uckley shouted as the photos began to roll off the computer transmission platen.
Puller nodded grimly, not really seeing Uckley until the boy handed them over.
Dick looked at the pictures. They were in color, but they were like no pictures Uckley had ever seen. It seemed to be some kind of white-gray blur; in the murk there were little red flashes.
Dick was counting.
“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty …”
Then he went silent.
“Sixty. Sixty of the fucks above ground. These are men, son. Aggressor Force as seen from outer space, a million miles up, portraits courtesy of an Itech infrared floating up there in the sky somewhere. Now, why is that number significant, Uckley?”
Uckley swallowed. He’d never been in the military. He made a guess.