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
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.
“It’s the size of an infantry platoon?”
“No,” said Puller. “You just guessed, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Uckley.
“Good. If you ever guess again around me, I’ll end your career. You’ll be history. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you don’t know, that’s fine. But things go freaky when junior officers try to guess their way through. Is that understood?”
Uckley gulped. The older man’s stare was like a truck pressing on his sternum.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Instantly, the transgression was forgotten.
“An infantry platoon is thirty-two, a company about one twenty-eight. No, the significance of the number is twofold. First, it’s so large that it’s clearly a holding operation. It’s not an in-out job; these guys mean to stay up there until we find the guts to push them off that hill. And secondly, it’s so large that it means these people couldn’t come in private cars. We’d see a caravan. So there’s got to be a staging area around here, maybe a rented farm. Find the farm and maybe you find out who they are.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get on that thing, and have the Sit Room send out your pals in the Hoover building to go through the rentals in this area over the last year or so. The state cops could help on that too.”
“Yes, sir,” said Uckley.
As the young man hurried over to the communications room, Puller studied the picture. Yes, he was good. Whoever was running Aggressor Force had been on a few special ops in his own time.
He had at least half of his men on the perimeter and the other half on some kind of work detail up near the launch control facility. Reading the signature of the men and the operation, Puller swiftly concluded that he was up against a well-trained elite unit. Israelis? The Israeli airborne were the best special ops people in the world. South Africans? There were some ass kickers in that fucked-up country, too, you could bet on it. What about Brit SAS? With a regiment of SAS boys, Dick often said to American generals, I could take over any country in the free world, with the exception of the State of California, which I wouldn’t want.
Or maybe they were our own guys.
That thought had gone unspoken so far, and even now no one really wanted to face it. But the truth was, Americans could easily be doing this. Maybe some hotshot in Special Forces got tired of waiting for the balloon to go up. He thought he’d help it, rid the world of commies, and to hell with the two hundred million babies that got burned in the process. “Provisional Army of the United States!”
Dick looked at the picture again.
Who are you, you bastard? When I know who you are, I’ll know how to beat you.
“Sir!”
It was Uckley.
“Sir, Delta’s on the ground at Hagerstown. They’re on their way.”
Puller looked at his watch. Three and a half hours had elapsed since the seizure. Skazy had Delta on the ground now, and moving to the staging area. The choppers for the air assault would be in inside the hour. The A-10 crews were getting their ships gunned up at Martin Airport outside of Baltimore, that was one hangup. Some kind of new weapons pod had to be mounted, 20mm instead of their usual 30-mil cannons, because the big 30s with their depleted uranium shells had too much kinetic energy for the computer in the LCF at the top of the elevator shaft;
