Primary Target

“No surprise there,” he said. “You know what we used to call Heath? Captain Ahab. He gets fixated on something, some whale of a thing, and he will chase it to the bottom of the sea. And he’ll be happy to take all his men with him.”

Don paused. He sighed.

“Listen, Stone, you have nothing to prove to me, or to anyone. You’ve earned a free pass. You can decline this mission. Hell, in a couple of months, you could leave the Army if you want and come join me in DC. I’d like that.”

Now Luke nearly laughed. “Don, not everybody around here is middle-aged. I’m thirty-one years old. I don’t think a suit and tie, and lunch at my desk, is quite my speed just yet.”

Don held a framed photograph in his hands. It hovered above an open box. He stared down at it. Luke knew the photo well. It was a faded color snapshot of four shirtless young men, Green Berets, mugging for the camera before a mission in Vietnam. Don was the only one of those men who was still alive.

“Me neither,” Don said.

He looked at Luke again.

“Don’t die out there tonight.”

“I don’t plan to.”

Don glanced at the photo again. “No one ever does,” he said.

For a moment, he stared out the window at the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush rising all around them. He shook his head. His broad chest rose and fell. “Man, I’m going to miss this place.”

* * *

“Gentlemen, this mission is suicide,” the man at the front of the room said. “And that’s why they send men like us.”

Luke sat in a folding chair in the drab cinderblock briefing room, twenty-two other men sitting in the chairs around him. They were all Delta Force operators, the best of the best. And the mission, as Luke understood it, was difficult—but not necessarily suicide.

The man giving this final briefing was Lieutenant Colonel Morgan Heath, as hands-on and gung-ho a commander as there was. Not yet forty years old, it was clear that Delta was not the end of the line for Heath. He had rocketed up to his current rank, and his ambitions seemed to point toward a higher profile. Politics, maybe a book deal, maybe a stint on TV as a military expert.

Heath was handsome, very fit, and over-the-top eager. That wasn’t unusual for a Delta operator. But he also talked a lot. And that wasn’t Delta at all.

Luke had watched him a week earlier, giving an interview to a reporter and a photographer from Rolling Stone magazine, and walking the guys through the advanced stealth and navigational capabilities of an MH-53J helicopter—not necessarily classified information, but definitely not the kind of thing you want to share with everyone.

Stone almost called him on it. But didn’t.

He didn’t, not because Heath outranked him—that didn’t matter in Delta, or shouldn’t—but because he could imagine ahead of time Heath’s response: “You think the Taliban read American pop magazines, Sergeant?”

Now, Heath’s presentation was up-to-the-minute technology for ten years earlier, PowerPoint on a white backdrop. A young man in a turban and with a dark beard appeared on the screen.

“You all know your man,” Heath said. “Abu Mustafa Faraj al-Jihadi was born sometime around 1970 among a tribe of nomads in eastern Afghanistan or the tribal regions of western Pakistan. He probably had no formal education to speak of, and his family probably crisscrossed the border like it wasn’t even there. Al Qaeda runs in his veins. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, by all accounts he joined the resistance as a child soldier, possibly as young as eight or nine years old. All this time later, decades of nonstop war, and somehow he’s still breathing. Heck, he’s still rocking and rolling. We believe he’s responsible for organizing at least two dozen major terror attacks, including last October’s suicide attacks in Mumbai, and the bombing of the USS Sarasota at Port of Aden, in which seventeen American sailors died.”

Heath paused for effect. He eyed everyone in the room.

“This guy is bad news. Getting him will be the next best thing to taking down Osama bin Laden. You guys want to be heroes? This is your night.”

Heath clicked a button in his hand. The photo on the screen changed. Now it was a split image—on one side of the vertical border was an aerial shot of al-Jihadi’s compound just outside a small village; on the other side was a 3-D rendering of what was believed to be al-Jihadi’s house. The house was two stories, made of stone, and built against a steep hill—Luke knew it was possible that the back of the house emptied into a tunnel complex.

Heath launched into a description of how the mission would go. Two choppers, twelve men on each. The choppers would set down in a field just outside the walls of the compound, unload the men, then take off again and provide aerial support.

The twelve men of A-Team—Luke and Heath’s team—would breach the walls, enter the house, and assassinate al-Jihadi. If possible, they would carry the body out on a stretcher and return it to base. If not, they would photograph it for later identification. B-Team would hold the walls and the approach to the compound from the village.

The choppers would then touch down again and extract both teams. If for any reason the choppers could not land again, the two teams would make their way to an old abandoned American forward fire base on a rocky hillside less than half a mile outside the village. Extraction would take place there, or the teams would hold the former base until extraction could occur. Luke knew all this by heart. But he didn’t like the idea of a rendezvous at that old fire base.

“What if that fire base is compromised?” he said.

“Compromised in what way?” Heath said.

Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me. Booby-trapped. Staffed up by Taliban snipers. Used by sheepherders as a place to gather their flock.”

Around the room, a few people laughed.

“Well,” Heath said, “our most recent satellite images show the place empty. If there are sheep up there, then there’ll be nice bedding and plenty to eat. Don’t worry, Sergeant Stone. This is going to be a precision decapitation strike. In and out, gone almost before they realize we’re there. We’re not going to need the old fire base.”

* * *

“Madre de Dios, Stone,” Robby Martinez said. “I got a bad feeling about this one, man. Look at that night out there. No moon, cold, howling winds. We’re going to catch some dust, for sure. We’re going to catch hell tonight. I know it.”

Martinez was small, slim, razor sharp. There was not a wasted ounce of meat on his body. When he worked out in shorts and no shirt, he looked like a drawing of the human anatomy, each muscle group carefully delineated.

Luke was checking and rechecking his pack and his weapons.

“You always got a bad feeling, Martinez,” Wayne Hendricks said. He was sitting next to Luke. “The way you talk, a man would think you never saw combat before.”

Hendricks was Luke’s best buddy in the military. He was a big, thick-bodied hunk from the redneck wilds of north central Florida who had grown up hunting boar with his dad. He was missing his right front tooth—punched out in a bar fight in Jacksonville when he was seventeen, and never replaced. He and Luke had almost nothing in common except football—Luke had been the quarterback on his varsity squad, Wayne had played tight end.  Even so, they had clicked the minute they first discovered each other in the 75th Rangers.

It seemed like they did everything together.

Wayne’s wife was eight months pregnant. Luke’s wife, Rebecca, was seven months along. Wayne had a girl coming, and had asked Luke to be her godfather. Luke had a boy coming, and had asked Wayne to be the boy’s godfather. One night, while drunk at a bar outside Fort Bragg, Luke and Wayne had cut open their right palms with a serrated knife, and shaken hands.

Blood brothers.

Martinez shook his head. “You know where I been, Hendricks. You know what I’ve seen. I wasn’t talking to you, anyway.”

Luke glanced out the open bay door. Martinez was right. The night was cold and windy. Frigid dust blew across the pad as the choppers prepared for takeoff. Clouds skidded across the sky. It was going to be a bad night for flying.

All the same, Luke felt confident. They had what they needed to win this. The helicopters were MH-53J Pave Lows, the most advanced and most powerful transport choppers in the United States arsenal.

They had state-of-the-art terrain-following radar, which meant they could fly very low. They had infrared sensors so they could fly in bad weather, and they could reach a top speed of 165 miles per hour. They were armor plated, to shrug off all but the heaviest ordnance the enemy might have. And they were flown by the US Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, code name Nightstalkers, the Delta Force of helicopter pilots—probably the best chopper pilots in the world.

The raid was scheduled for a night with no moonlight so the helicopters could enter the operation area low to the ground and undetected. The choppers were going to use hilly terrain and nap-of-the-earth techniques to reach the compound without appearing on radar and alerting any unfriendlies—especially the Pakistani military and intelligence services, who were suspected to be cooperating with the Taliban in hiding the target.

With friends like the Pakistanis…

The low-slung buildings of the air base and the larger flight control tower squatted against the staggering backdrop of the snow-capped mountains. As Luke stared out the bay door, two fighter jets took off a quarter mile away, the scream of their engines nearly deafening. A moment later, the jets reached the sound barrier somewhere in the distance. The takeoffs were loud, but the sonic booms were muted by the wind at high altitude.

The chopper’s engine whined into life. The rotor blades began to turn, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. Luke glanced along the line. Ten men in jumpsuits and helmets, not including himself, were all compulsively checking and rechecking their gear.  The twelfth, Lieutenant Colonel Heath, was leaning into the cockpit at the front of the chopper, talking to the pilots.

“I’m telling you, Stone,” Martinez said.