The Towers (32 page)

“Yeah,” Provanzano said. “Raw intel. What do you make of it?”

“Not much,” Dan said. The firing outside had stopped. He sat up warily, ready to dive again. Around the tent the others rose, dusting off uniforms and jeans, cursing as they examined their screens. “The sheikh—that's bin Laden?”

“Who can be sure? That's the richness of the puzzle, Dan. The frustrating richness of the puzzle. Thousands of pieces. Millions. The picture depends on how they're arranged. But there's never only one picture. That's the problem, you see.”

Dan ran his hands over his face, feeling stubble and grit. “I don't know anything about intel.”

“Hell, who does? Welcome to the Rabbit Hole,” Provanzano said, and slapped him heartily on the back.

IV

Black Dust

 

15

Thirty-Six Miles South of Kandahar

TEDDY
lay shivering, wishing he'd brought more fleece-lined gear. During the night the ground sucked the heat right out. He'd eaten all the carbs he'd brought, fuel for the furnace, and was unashamedly cupped into the other guys in the hide—Tatie and Two Scoops and Knobby Swager, all Echo One—just like, he thought, faggots after a hot night's humping. But he was still shivering.

Long before dawn, and sleep wouldn't come, just jagged, uneasy dreams between midnight and two. Now it was past three by the tritium glow of his watch. Still no sign of light, but the sun couldn't be far away.

He unlocked his pelvis from Tatie's angular butt, half-rolled, and set an eye to the big scope. The lens was shielded so it wouldn't sparkle, even when the sun shone into it. The camo sheet draped over them was the same light tan as the dusty desert sand. He let a handful trickle through his fingers. The stuff was fine as powder, though there were bigger grains too, brown and white, even the occasional pebble. Beneath that skin of sand was more rock; after that, he suspected, rock all the way down, gradually disintegrating and then carried away by the endless wind.

They'd spent the last four days perched on a ridge that came up about fifteen feet out of the desert like the fin of a shark. “A sand shark, ha ha,” Tatie had whispered before Teddy had shut him up with a glance. Didn't get them much elevation, but it was all there was. For many miles around the sand plain stretched to the horizon, interrupted only very seldom, here and there, by slight humps.
The lone and level sand stretched far away
. He frowned, trying to remember where he'd gotten that from. Every gust picked the powder up and blew it along the ground into their faces. They had goggles but the plastic lenses quickly fogged with millions of minuscule scratches. Meanwhile it was so friggin' cold they had to melt ice off the scope every morning, and everything metal was coated with a rime of frost.

The airstrip lay half a mile north, a good distance but there hadn't been any cover closer in. The plan was to insert a SEAL overwatch before the Marines arrived to make sure no bad guys used the area or left anything behind. Like mines. They could've planted them earlier, of course, but looking at how remote the place was, Teddy thought it unlikely. The briefer had said the strip had been built by a wealthy Arab, who'd used it for hunting trips. Teddy couldn't imagine what the fuck he'd hunted; in two days and two nights out here glassing by sun and starlight, they hadn't seen anything bigger than some kind of groundhog that only came out at night and once, far off, a line of small wolves trotting from nowhere to nowhere. The only human beings had been nomads trudging past miles away, images shimmering in the big scope. They scuffed along with blankets pulled over their faces, trailing a thin rime of dust, a ludicrously tiny and overburdened burro slogging along with them, occasionally getting flicked with a stick by one of the kids.

But there'd been more here than a deserted airstrip. Beside it was a walled compound with locked gates that hadn't been mentioned in the brief. They'd gone in over the wall the second night and reconned, walking single file on fresh blacktop. Offices, a repair shop, a big warehouse. No one around, the new buildings all empty. They broke into the warehouse. Not only was no one there, it looked as if no one ever had been, just a faint dusting of sand on new fresh concrete. A drug transshipment point? But he'd thought the Talibs had stamped out the trade, one reason why the Alliance had turned against them. Strange, and he'd squirted a full report back to Higher.

Lying in the hide made him remember Ashaara. Far away on the Red Sea, but not all that different, although it had been hot, not cold, and the air thicker than this thin, high brew. His collarbone twinged. It had snapped when he'd plowed into a vertical rock face, at the end of the HALO drop.

They'd buried the chutes, then humped to the site in the dark. He and Cooper and Kowacki and Donoghe had spent two days huddled in the foundations of a shattered, abandoned village. He still had a piece of broken porcelain he'd picked up there. Part of a bowl, with half a blue rabbit on it. They'd sweated absolutely motionless half-buried through the day and then the night again. Waiting was what SEALs did best. Absolutely motionless, blending with the sand, part of the wallpaper. The second night he'd crawled out to recon the firing point and barely made it back before sunrise. At which time some of the hostiles had come out to eyeball the meet site. They'd walked over them, right through the village. Looked right at him, once.

But hadn't seen them.

And then the Target of Interest, the terrorist leader they called the Maahdi, hadn't shown up where the source had said he would. Teddy and Coop'd had to crawl across nearly half a mile of open terrain. The drop had busted Teddy's rifle scope and he had to get in close,
close,
to get a decent shot.

Eight hundred yards, open sights, in a fishtailing wind, and he'd had his share of luck that day. The heavy, tapered, boat-tailed slug had plowed into the TI higher than he'd expected, skull instead of chest, and he'd watched the head blow apart into pink mist, not believing what he was seeing. But he'd take it, and he had loaded another round, to Cooper's calm chant: “Shot two, center hit, TI down. Call the cleanup crew.”

*   *   *

THIS
morning wouldn't be nearly as dramatic, but that was okay. No drama was fine by Teddy O these days. He turned his wrist outward. Coming up on H Hour.

Recon gave you time to think. He'd gone over all the contingency plans. Walked through everything in his head. If they saw a truck column coming to occupy the airstrip. If some wandering goatherd stumbled over their site. His SOP was to duct-tape them, morphine them silly, and leave them where somebody ought to stumble across them in a few days. Or not; goatfuckers had to take their chances, along with everybody else.

A finger scratched his back. He rolled over to where Two Scoops pointed. Pulled his goggles up and flicked the switch. The other SEAL made a serpentine movement with his hand.

In the green prickling seethe of amplified infrared a snake writhed slowly across the ground. Maybe ten yards off. Teddy eyed it. For a moment it appeared to want to come their way. Its head lifted, a wedged blur in the unfocused green. A shadow of flickering tongue. Then it altered its angle and slowly undulated away, leaving a rippled pattern like the passage of a rubber raft through calm water.

*   *   *

FOUR
o'clock. He rooted through his pack and came up with two packets of Taster's Choice they'd broken out from the MREs, and found cream and sugar packs too. He tilted his head back and poured the bitter crystals into his mouth and followed it with the sugar, the powdered creamer, and a mouthful of water from his CamelBak. Pushed the gritty mass from side to side through his teeth by pushing alternately on his distended cheeks until it was half-dissolved. It wasn't Starbucks. More like bad rest-stop machine coffee. He followed up with two big Motrins, then one of the whey-protein bars Stroud had shoved in their pockets as they moved out. It sounded disgusting and had a tree-hugger wrapping that put him off, but they weren't that bad.

He molded a Slim Jim around his gums to marinate and returned his attention to the scope. A slow scan revealed nothing changed. The black sky was still sequined with desert stars, but seeing the peaks vanishing-faint against it meant dawn was imminent. He shivered and pulled his jacket flaps up. He wasn't coming out here again without fleece.

He'd been surprised to get this mission. Force Recon must have had something else going, not to be prepping the way for their own jarheads. Sweeping farther east, he suspected, to start sealing the Pak border. But better sitting out here with your thumb up your ass than probing the same aperture back aboard
Kitty Hawk
.

You could get acquainted with your men, for one thing. Tatie, Two Scoops, Knobby. He'd heard stranger nicknames. Two Scoops had gotten his from a serious accident trying to crap into a Ziploc. His shaved head was bony and yellow. Teddy wondered what kind of hair the guy had that he thought shaving it off looked better. He was from El Centro and had a three-year-old son who lived with his grandmother. Swager, of course, was the skinny SEAL cub who believed the gun porn in the glossy magazines. The one who'd looked as if he was about to faint when they got the word to deploy. So far he'd held up, though. Tatie, squad leader for Echo One, had two years of prelaw at Idaho State but had either flamed out on the tests or lost his tuition money in a poker game, versions differed. Instead of the bar he'd found the SEALs. He had a country-boy affect and looked rawboned dumb, but Teddy suspected he was actually the smartest dude in the platoon. The kind of guy you knew he'd end up someplace significant, if he survived. Plus, he made a great hillbilly tuna, with the packets of mac and cheese.

Teddy's job was to get them through it. So far this hadn't been a demanding recon, but sometimes you turned a corner and suddenly there you were wading through lava up to your balls.

A green spheroid. A grenade. And Sumo Kaulukukui gives him that look. “War's a motherfucker, ain't it?”

“You fat bastard,” Teddy subvocalized, almost saying it until subterranean discipline muted his larynx beneath the wind-fluttering cover. His fingers dug into the powdery, icy sand like the claws of a reptile. “Why'd you have to be so fucking noble? Why'd we have to be so fucking gung ho?”

Forget that. Forget it! This was another war. This time the fuckers had attacked New York, Washington. And the SEALs, the Marines, and the Air Force were bringing revenge. Land here and organize, then drive on Kandahar, capital of the Taliban. Bring America's regards to the too-tall, smiling asshole who'd planned and financed it.

Teddy tilted his wrist again. As if tied to the glowing numerals, a subtle whine drifted down from the constellations, a thin, dwindling song so vanishingly faint it could only be heard in the lulls of the wind. So distant, really, he couldn't tell precisely what it was. Probably a lingering Predator.

Scoops kicked as he came awake, almost getting Teddy in the balls. “Sorry,” he whispered.

“Get rid of that when you wake up, Petty Officer.”

“Rid of what, Chief?”

“That flinch. Get you killed, one of these days.” Teddy debated telling him how it would have killed him if he'd woken like that with someone walking over a hide site looking for him, like in Ashaara, but didn't. The more the chief talked, the more they would too. No one was around for miles—no question of somebody sneaking up unobserved—but this wouldn't be the only recon they'd be on in this fight.

Although it was looking as if it might not take that long after all, the way the Northern Alliance was moving out. He'd expected it to take all winter to stage enough forces in for an offensive, that was how it had worked in Desert Storm, but this thing seemed to be running on a different schedule.

He low-crawled up out of the depression and peered out over the land. The engine sound from far above waned, as if the aircraft was climbing. He checked his watch again. Close enough. “Let's go. You two, north end of the field. Scoops and I'll take the south.”

He threw off the cover and for the first time in two days rose to full height. His joints cracked, sending pings of pain along steel wires. He slung rifle and pack. Rolled up the cover. Kicked more sand over where they'd buried their shit. Then, when the others gave him the thumbs-up, started off across the desert, patting his chest to make sure he had the grenades.

Toward the airfield. They had to physically be there, marking both ends, before the helos would come in. Insertion was their most vulnerable moment. The jarheads would be coming in locked and loaded for a hot LZ.

It felt good moving out, planting one boot in front of the other after being cooped up so long. The bounce of the ruck, the swing of the weapon. He kept the NVGs powered up, kept his gaze moving. If there was another hide team out here … somebody not so well disposed toward U.S. Marines falling out of the sky … they'd be powering up their Stingers or Strelas right about now. He stopped and scanned the south end of the runway with the IR on his rifle, which had a different frequency response from that of the goggles. Nothing. He detoured around a hillock, then circled back and jogged up to check its top. It was unoccupied.

On across rock-littered sand … the asphalt of the strip glowed ahead, still warmer than its surroundings even after the frigid night past. Partially covered with blowing sand, it wavered in the green dim as if underwater. He put his rifle to his face again and scanned for the other team. There they were, green blobs undulating slowly across the landscape.

“About here, Chief?”

“Looks good.” He sank to a knee, breathing hard. His collarbone ached. He checked all around. Were they in someone's crosshairs? He pulled rocks together, piling a cairn like some biblical altar. Checked his watch one last time, then nodded to the second class. “Go ahead. Pop it.”