Gunny’s people, Response Element Two, had been assigned to the Charlie and Delta sites, at the eastern end of the Op-Area. Element One and Element Two had both been directed to work from north-to-south, disarming the northern sites first, and then moving down to handle the southern sites. The longer the disarming efforts dragged on, the more risk there was of being spotted by hostile forces.
In theory, by getting the most distant sites out of the way first, the teams would put themselves closer to evac if anything went wrong in the second half of the mission. It wasn’t much of a theory in Gunny’s book, since the risk of getting caught wouldn’t be any greater in the second half of the operation than it was in the first half. But that was the sort of half-bright thinking that the rear echelon types were famous for.
Nobody was calling this a suicide mission, but that’s what it was starting to smell like. His team of Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs had been assigned to locate and disarm multiple pre-positioned explosives packages of unknown size, strength, and configuration. They had no idea of what these packages might look like, no idea of how sensitive they might be to intrusion or tampering, and only rough estimates of their locations. To put the icing on the cake, they’d be working in near-arctic conditions, under a sky dominated by hostile air cover.
If that wasn’t brilliant tactical planning, Gunny didn’t know what was. He grunted. Some genius back at G3 needed to have his ass kicked for dreaming up a goat rodeo like this. If they got out of this alive, Gunny might just have to go look up the idiot in question, and kick down the door to his fucking office.
The idea made the Marine grin — a cold and feral expression, with no trace of humor in it. He was nearly ready for the purge now. Nearly annoyed enough, and worried enough, and frustrated enough for the final piece of his emotional preparation.
The purge had been Colonel Ziegler’s term, back when Gunny Armstrong had been a punk Pfc. with the 11th MEU in Iraq.
“You don’t start a patrol when you’ve got to take a dump,” Colonel Z had said. “You hit the head before you hit the trail. You get all the shit out of your body, so it doesn’t slow you down.”
“Well you’ve got to do the same thing for your brain,” the colonel had said. “You can’t go into combat with a bunch of unnecessary shit clogging up your brain. You’ve got to offload it. You’ve got to purge it. You’ve got to call up all of your doubts and angers ahead of time. Think about it. Stew over it. Get mad about it. And then get rid of it. Let it go, just like taking a dump. So when the time comes to be a Marine, you’ve got nothing else on your mind but being a Marine.”
As far as Gunny Armstrong was concerned, it had been good advice. It had gotten him through three tours in the sandbox. He figured it would probably see him through this mess as well.
He was mad now, and scared, and all the things a Marine cannot afford to be when he’s in the field. He could feel the knot of emotions building inside him, rising through his bones like the shriek of the chopper’s turbines. He wondered for a second if he should sneak something in there about his ex-wife, just to really push things over the top.
But he didn’t need it. He felt the internal safety valve in his chest lift, venting his rage and his fear, and he made no move to stop it. He slammed a fist into his sternum, to make sure that the imaginary tank of feelings emptied itself entirely. “Ooh-rah!” he said to himself. “Ooh-fucking-rah!”
The ritual did its job. He felt the calm descend over him. He was ready. He was focused. The only thoughts in his mind were of the mission, and his Marines. Everything else was insignificant bullshit.
The copilot’s voice crackled in the left ear of his headset. “Two minutes, Gunny.”
Gunny Armstrong felt for the talk button and keyed his mike. “Two minutes, aye. Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant.”
He looked out the window at jagged terrain of the ice pack. It was time to go kick some ass. Time to go be Marines.
CHAPTER 50
Captain Bowie leaned back in his chair, and set his coffee cup on the wardroom table. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Your Mouse unit decided on its own to abandon the search, and return to the position where we launched it?”
Ann Roark nodded. She didn’t like the way this conversation was starting out.
“That’s right,” she said. “According to Mouse’s internal error logs, he operated without problems for the first five and a half hours of the run. Then an event that occurred during the run triggered a spontaneous mission abort.”
“Do you have any idea what that event was? What triggered this spontaneous mission abort?”
Ann took a breath and nodded. “I know what caused it. But it’s a little bit complicated.”
The Navy man lifted his coffee cup and took a swallow. “I’ve got a few minutes. See if you can spell it out for me.”
Ann sighed loudly, and then instantly regretted it. She was a civilian, and technically free to say whatever she wanted, but she knew that senior military people didn’t react well to signs of reticence or dissatisfaction.
Her father had been a major in the Army, until a roadside bomb outside of Ramadi had turned his up-armored HMMV into a few thousand pounds of Swiss cheese. Major Dad had been big on discipline and outward displays of respect. He’d been quick to decode Ann’s body language for any hint of dissent or defiance. He’d interpreted every huff, every roll of the eyes, and every hunched shoulder as a sign of rebellion: a challenge to his authority.
There wasn’t a lot of reason to believe that this Navy captain would be any different. With that single pronounced sigh, she had telegraphed her frustration in a language that the military mind could only interpret in one way. She might as well have told him to fuck off. God, she hated dealing with these people. They made her crazy.
Ann nearly sighed again, but she caught herself, realizing that it would only rebroadcast her frustration. She shifted mental gears, and tried to think of a way to phrase the problem with Mouse.
“Search mode is not much different than transit mode,” she said finally. “As it moves through the water, the robot is using its onboard sensors to scan for the submarine, but it’s essentially following a programmed series of navigational waypoints. We set the waypoints ahead of time, when we plan the search pattern. I upload the coordinates of each waypoint to the robot prior to launch, and Mouse travels from one waypoint to the next, like following a trail of breadcrumbs.”
The captain nodded for her to continue.
“As long as Mouse was searching for the submarine,” Ann said, “he was essentially operating in directed transit mode.”
“I’ve got that,” Captain Bowie said. “So what happened?”
Ann paused. He really wasn’t going to like this part. “Mouse found the submarine,” she said. “About five and a half hours into the search.”
She spoke quickly now, trying to get across the rest of her message before Bowie’s brain had a chance to process the first part.
“That’s what triggered the problem,” she said. “When he found the sub, Mouse shifted from directed transit mode to autonomous mission mode, so he could carry out the next phase of the operation and plant the beacon on the hull of the submarine. And during the mode shift, something glitched in his operating program. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but I think it was that same program error we were getting a couple of weeks ago, when we were running tests … before we rescued that submersible.”