hard focus. It wasn’t worry, however. Douglas Freeman tried to spend as little time as he could worrying, a devotee of the man Muslims saw as a holy prophet, and Christians, the Messiah: “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.
Even so, Freeman had to think ahead and Sal, seeing the general’s frown of concentration, asked, “Problem?” It was a question that an enlisted man would hardly be expected to ask a general, at least not so casually, but this SpecFor team, with the exception of Tony Ruth, had been in action together before. Besides, the easy familiarity between officers and enlisted men came naturally to such small groups of men who’d been in combat and who’d bivouacked in close quarters.
Freeman’s voice thundered over the Chinook’s combined rotor slap and engine noise. “No problem, gentlemen. No problem at all.” He looked down at Prince, the five-year-old black spaniel whose floppy ears were covered by earmuffs that Choir Williams had made especially for him, and who seemed to perk up as if reading the general’s mind.
“The first thing we need to know,” the general continued, “is which way those bastards headed off from the DARPA installation at the end of the lake. And for that answer—” He leaned forward and scratched Prince affectionately behind his ears, the dog immediately half closing his eyes in canine ecstasy. “—we need to get Prince here a scent from those terrorist creeps, if we can. That right, fella?” The general’s right hand moved from Prince’s ears to beneath his chin. Panting happily, Prince eagerly thrust his head forward, asking for more.
From the helo’s open door, the slipstream roaring like rushing water against his goggles, Freeman caught a glimpse of the densely forested mountain fastness of the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness Area that flanked Lake Pend Oreille to the east beyond the Idaho-Montana border. To his left, northwest, he could see the six-thousand-foot- high summit of Bald Mountain, and, south of the lake, Cedar Mountain. On the long, ear-shaped lake, which looked to him more like an elongated question mark than an ear, lay several rectangular shapes: DARPA’s barge out from the shore, designated DARPA ALPHA on his map; the data hut on the shoreline; and several other storage buildings scattered around the small settlement of Bayview on the ear’s lobe, with Coeur d’Alene another twenty miles to the south. Freeman also saw there was only one road leading out from the DARPA installation to Interstate 95, eight miles west of the lake. Prince’s nose was at his side, the spaniel’s eyes watering from the icy-cold wind that swept over the misty blue mass of the Cabinet Mountains and the Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge beyond the lake where rivulets, born in snowcapped peaks, fed both Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake to the northwest.
“Gonna see a grizzly, eh?” Freeman asked Prince, who remained incommunicado as he basked in the extended chin scratch the general was giving him and the back scratch that, now that the turbulence had subsided, Choir was lavishing on him.
“Grizzly?” put in Aussie. “I certainly hope not. Terrorists are one thing, grizzly bears are something else.”
“Then,” Freeman told the team, “you’d better check your weapons, guys. Make sure you’re loaded for bear as well as scumbags.”
Salvini had selected a 22.1-pound, 49.2-inch Belgian general-purpose machine gun, or GPMG, a weapon that could fire fifty-round belts of the big 7.62 mm slugs over an effective killing range of three-quarters of a mile, should a “long punch” firefight break out.
For his part, Choir had chosen the German-made Heckler Koch general-purpose MG36, which was a lighter and shorter machine gun. The MG36, with folding stock and carrying handle, had a transparent thirty-round magazine, fired standard NATO 5.56 mm-caliber rounds, and had a kill reach of more than a third of a mile. In his pre-op briefing at Fairchild, the general had told the other seven men in his eight-man team that while the trail would most likely lead them through thick bush and forest, there would also be open alpine meadows at the higher elevations of the Bitterroot Mountains. In such places, the shorter-range Heckler Koch’s famous MP55.6-pound submachine gun was favored by most others in the team. The general’s weapon of choice was an AK-74, an updated AK-47 which he’d chosen for its relatively light weight—7.5 pounds — easy maintenance, and greater range than the Heckler Koch MP5. The general had had his AK-74’s original folding metal frame stock replaced with wood so that it could be used as a “door opener” or “skull crusher,” should the occasion arise.
As usual in the group, the general had allowed each member of the team, with the exception of Aussie, to select his own weapon. Lieutenant Johnny Lee, the multi-linguist, Gomez, and Eddie Mervyn liked the Heckler Koch MP5 navy version. With its closed bolt action, unlike its open bolt cousin that begins firing when the bolt is “triggered” forward, the navy version fires with the bolt already forward, reducing any aim-altering shoulder bump. And, while weighing only 7.7 pounds, it has an effective kill range of 328 feet firing 9 mm ammo.
It was left to Aussie Lewis, at the general’s request, to tote a standard Heckler Koch G36 assault rifle fitted with an under-barrel launcher that could fire up to ten 40 mm grenades a minute to a distance of approximately 300 yards. The eighth member of the team, Tony Ruth, an ex-Ranger who had stayed in the kind of top physical condition Freeman always demanded of his team members, came along at Aussie’s invitation. Tony Ruth had met Aussie Lewis in Iraq, in Karbala. His favorite weapon was an Italian Franchi eight-round SPAS — sporting purpose automatic shotgun.
No, Tony Ruth had told the other members of the SpecWar squad, and anyone who ever challenged him — and a lot of people had — he wasn’t any relation to Babe Ruth. Yes, he had played in the minors, and worked one game in the majors. Then Iraq came a year before his retirement. Yes, he sure did intend to go back to North Carolina and play ball, but the example of Pat Tillman, the twenty-seven-year-old offensive lineman for the Arizona Cardinals who had walked away from a $3.6-million, three-year contract in the NFL because he believed it was time to serve his country and who was killed in action in a blue-on-blue in Afghanistan in June 2003, had had a great influence on Tony Ruth, as it had on a lot of other Americans, and he’d met Douglas Freeman through Aussie not long after the SpecWar team lost a member on a SpecWar op off the “Hermit Kingdom”—the North Korean coast.
“Hey, Tony,” Aussie called out, pointing to the Franchi shotgun, “why not haul a Mossberg instead of taking that old Italian job? Holds nine rounds instead of eight. You never know when that extra cartridge—”
“Yeah—” riposted Tony. “But if you’ve already had to fire eight rounds of buckshot or door-bashing slugs, you’re in so much trouble you don’t need an extra round, you need a medic. Fast.”
“Ah-ha!” said Salvini. “He’s got you there, Aussie.”
“Oh, shut your face, wop! I’d still bet on a Mossberg.”
“You’d bet on anything,” said Sal.
“Sal’s right,” Choir Williams told Tony Ruth. “Last mission we were on, Aussie was sound asleep aboard the transport until he heard someone mention a ‘bet.’”
“That is correct,” chimed in Freeman, always happy to see such good morale en route to a mission that his gut instinct told him would stress the nerves and physical fitness of his seven fellow commandos to the max. “Aussie could hear the word ‘bet,’” Freeman said, “even if it was whispered at a rock concert.”
“I don’t go to rock concerts,” said Aussie, sniffing. “I’m more cultured than you bastards.”
“Oh,” said Sal. “How about that cultural movie we saw the other night? That blonde with the big—”
“A question of good photography,” said Aussie, affecting a high-minded, dismissive air. “It wasn’t the young lady’s cleavage that interested me. It was the interpretive angle of the shot and the — ah — subtle arrangement of her wardrobe I was viewing.”
“What are you talking about?” said Salvini. “She was naked!”
“Nevertheless,” Aussie began, then paused. “Oh, you peasants wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh?” joshed Ruth. “Well, tell me,
“Well,” Aussie answered slowly, “I think, Mr. Ruth, that she would cut me off for a month!”
Everyone laughed, though Freeman’s mirth was restrained by recalling how he might still be in the proverbial doghouse for having to leave
As the general reached forward to pat Prince once more, he felt the one-shot pen in his pocket. This time it wasn’t loaded with a rubber stun bullet but a lethal round. He hoped that all the other equipment in the team’s “goodies” packs, provided by DARPA, and the other off-the-shelf wares of war would be as efficient.
“Two minutes!” announced the Chinook’s loadmaster as the amber light began flashing.
“Brace!” and each of the eight commandos readied themselves for a hard landing. Choir held Prince to his
