"Damn," Major General Nichols said, covering the mouthpiece of the
phone. He was on the Kennedy, in Mission Planning, talking on secured
satellite phone to JSOC Control in the Pentagon. "Gournes picked up
some radio traffic on sideband. Some assholes are talking about trying
to go in. Whoever the hell they're working for, they could screw things
up royally." He spoke again into the receiver. "Do you have a lead on
where they are?" He nodded. "Right, my thinking exactly. Which means
they probably blew up that plane as a diversion. And our F-14 jockey
suckered for it." He paused again. "No, we're not scheduled to go in
for another twenty-four hours. But that may have to be pushed up. I'd
say we have two choices. Either we interdict these dingbats, or we just
go ahead and get it over with, take out the launch vehicle and--" He
paused again.
"What do you mean, we can't?"
His eyes narrowed.
"Don't give me that 'classified' bullshit. I've got Top Secret
clearance and I damned well have a 'need to know.' "
A long pause ensued. "Jesus! Now you tell me. 'Nuclear material'? What
the hell does that mean? You're planning to send in my boys to take
down a nuke! This is the first I've heard . . . Thanks a lot for
telling me. Good Christ!" He paused once more. "Okay, let me think.
I'll get back to you."
He settled the phone back in its cradle and looked around Mission
Planning, the gray walls covered with maps. "Shit, this whole thing is
coming apart."
"What is it?" General Max Austin asked. He was two-star, with steel-
gray hair. As the base commander for Souda, he had been placed in
charge of Operation Lightfoot, code name for the action to retake
Andikythera. Even though they had known each other for fifteen years,
Nichols was not necessarily pleased to have this REMF, rear-echelon
motherfucker, running the show. Austin had been given the undemanding
post on Crete for a year mainly as an excuse to bump up his rank in
preparation for retirement.
"The whole op is rapidly going to hell in a handbag," Nichols said.
"The Pentagon conveniently left one small fact out of my briefing
papers. I'd kill somebody, if only I knew who." He looked up. "Max, we
may have to send the Deltas in tonight. Just get this damned thing over
with."
"That's not possible," Austin declared without hesitation. "This
operation can't go off half-cocked. You of all people ought to know
that."
"Well, sometimes circumstances don't wait around for the textbooks. The
Gournes SIGINT team just intercepted some radio traffic. Somebody's out
there talking, and they know more than we do. They're probably free-
lance clowns, most likely mercenaries, but they're claiming the bad
guys may be about to launch one of the vehicles, within the next few
hours. So they're planning to hit the place tonight."
"Well, they won't stand a chance," Austin said.
"I agree, but what they can do is royally fuck up our insertion.
They'll disrupt the hell out of everything and probably get a lot of
the hostages killed."
"Okay," Austin mused, sipping at his coffee, "we've got two problems
here. Maybe they should be handled separately. First we interdict these
guys going in, and then we decide what to do next."
'The best way to solve them both at once, two birds with one stone, is
with a preemptory strike on the island," Nichols insisted again. "Right
now. Tonight. We just go in and take the place down."
"No way, Eric," Austin interjected. 'That's going to skew the risk
parameters in our ops analysis. We'd have to scrap our computer
simulation and virtually start over. Hell, that alone could take us
three hours."
All those fancy analyses are best employed wiping your bum, Nichols
heard himself thinking, almost but not quite out loud. We've got nobody
on the ground, so we're working with satellite intel, and SIGINT--which
ain't giving us shit 'cause those bastards aren't talking on their
radios.
"Let me make sure I heard it right a minute ago," Nichols went on. "We
can't just take out the launch vehicles, a surgical strike, because
there's a chance there could be nuclear material on board?"
"You've got it right. I'd hoped not to have to tell you. So consider
this Classified. The whole op has been jacked up to a Vega One. We've
never had anything that serious before."
That's nuclear, Nichols told himself. Well, he figured, why not. If the
terrorists did have a bomb.
"This damned thing is hot," Austin continued. "They don't get any
hotter. So there's no way in hell I'm going to go around procedures. If
you and your boys don't do this clean, it's going to mean our next
command, yours and mine, will be somewhere within sight of Tierra del
Fuego. If there's a nuclear incident here, the Greek government would
probably tear up our mutual-defense treaty and convert the base at
Souda into a souvlaki stand. Am I making myself clear?"
"If I hear you right, what you're saying is, no way can we afford to
fuck this one up."
"I've always admired your quick grasp of the salient points in a
briefing. So, we're going to do this by the goddamn book; we're going
to dot every goddamn 'i' and cross every goddamn 't' and get every
goddamn detail of this op, right down to the color of our goddamn
shoelaces, approved, signed off, and ass-kissed in triplicate. That
Iranian hostage disaster did not exactly make a lot of careers. Again I
ask you, Eric, am I getting the fuck through?"
"In skywriting. The only small problem I see, sir, is that while
everybody is carefully protecting their pension, those assholes on the
island may start slaughtering hostages, or put this 'nuclear material'--
which I have just learned about in such a timely fashion--into goddamn
orbit. And then my Deltas are going to be in the middle of a shitstorm
they easily could have prevented if they'd been given the chance.
They're my boys, and I don't really take kindly to that happening.
_Sir_." He reached in his breast pocket for a cigar, the chewing of
which was his usual response to stress.
"So what exactly do you propose we do?" Austin asked.
"The most obvious first thing would be to interdict this bunch of
mercenary jerkoffs and keep them from going in there and getting a lot
of people killed. I say we should find them and stop them, using
whatever force it takes. There are enough civilians in harm's way as it
is." He leaned forward. "Look, if we have to dick around waiting on the
Pentagon before we can go in, at least we can stop these mercenary
assholes. It has to be done. And we don't need some computer study
before we get off our ass. I want to take them down, and nobody has to
even know about it. If it comes out in some debriefing someday, we'll
worry about it then."
"All right, maybe I agree with you," Austin sighed. "They should be
interdicted. What do you want? A Pave-Low?"
"Just give me an SH-60. To pick them up. I'm going to put the love of
the Lord into these amateurs, then bring them in. Hell, they're
probably well-intentioned, just doing what somebody paid them to do."
And who could blame that somebody, he found himself thinking, if it
takes the U.S. of A. this long to cut through its damned bureaucracy
and mount an operation.
"All right, I'll give you a Seahawk," Austin said. "It can be prepped
and ready to go by"--he glanced at his watch--"0300 hours. Will that be
enough?"
"Guess it'll have to be." By that time, he was thinking ruefully, we
could be taking the island. And with that thought he decided to hell
with protocol and fired up his well-chewed cigar.
"Look, Eric, I know what you're thinking," Austin said after a pause.
"That an old fart like me is cramping your guys' style. And, dammit,
maybe there's a grain of truth in that-- hell, more than a grain. But
here's the downside. If your Deltas go in half-cocked and get cut up,
we're going to get blamed. On the other hand, if they don't go in till
Washington says so, then, yes, maybe it'll be too late, but it's going
to be on somebody else's service record, not ours. I'm protecting your
boys, whether you see it or not. If we only go in on orders, then the
Deltas are not going to be the ones taking the heat if this thing falls
apart."
"Just get me the damned chopper," Nichols said quietly.