Ian Slater - Payback

“Pricks!” came a rejoinder, Aussie snatching a towel that looked as if it were attacking his head, so vigorous was his rubdown, his mind scanning his memory of payback techniques with all the speed of the legendary Freeman ransacking his mental files for mission-altering minutiae. Choir Williams, Aussie knew, had a phobia about spiders. Salvini, after having related over a beer a story about a horror movie that had haunted him since his youth, had revealed that he harbored a fear, whenever he was on a flush toilet, of being attacked by something primeval that lurked in the sewer systems of the world. About Mervyn and Brady, Aussie didn’t know, but he promised himself he’d bloody well find out. The general, being a mere spectator and not a perpetrator in the smart-asses’ chorus, assumed an innocent “don’t know anything about it” expression, and led Aussie, after he’d changed, to the briefing ready room, where Johnny Lee and Gomez, the last two of the nine to land on the carrier, were already seated, smirking at each other over Aussie’s plight and enjoying a soft ice-cream cone given to them by off-duty aviators who were drawing out the long, thick stream of chocolate ice cream from the “dog machine” in the nearby Dirty Shirt room.

“Well,” said Aussie, looking at Lee and Gomez, “if it isn’t the two fucking stooges!”

“All right, guys,” said Freeman. “Listen up.”

Freeman was grateful for the morale-boosting joke, but his tone was now all business, and he declined the offer of ice cream because it was cold dairy, a dessert that had a propensity to give him gas, a distinctly unhandy thing to have in any situation and a painful distraction for the leader of a mission, even if the mission was to be overseen by Freeman in the relative security and comfort of the carrier’s high-tech Blue Tile rooms. The fact remained that, sitting or standing, the general bore enormous responsibility, not only for his eight-man team, but for the future safety of the millions of Americans, and indeed anyone, who boarded the thousands of commercial airliners that flew daily in American skies.

“Our transport’s being readied on the hangar deck,” he told the eight men. “I want to go over Payback’s details again.”

There were none of the usual stereotyped groans emitted by actors in the movies who complain of going over a plan for the umpteenth time. Every one of the eight men was listening intently. For Bone Brady it was like preparing for an examination. No matter how much you’d studied and restudied the outline and computer-generated three-dimensional layout of the ground around the Kosong MANPAD warehouse, and the layout gained from the two-inches-to-the-kilometer scale SATPIX overflights of MAMS — man-made structures — the information constantly updated by human intel, field agents, or by signal intel, there was always the danger of an overlooked detail.

On one practice mission in the kill house at Fort Bragg, Freeman, unbeknownst to the rest of the team, had had Special Operations Command install a LASKAS — laser-keyed alarm system — overnight. Such information about the kill house at Fort Bragg or the warehouse at Kosong was something that a SATPIX recon, even those flights capable of IRI, infrared investigation, would have missed in the interval between overflights. Plus, everyone from the President down was concerned about not making another blunder like President Carter’s ill-fated attempt to get the American hostages out of Iran.

With such SNAFUs in mind, Freeman had made sure, even though the Kosong warehouse stood several miles south of the town of Kosong and should not be easily confused with any other building, that each member of his eight-man team knew precisely which quadrant of the football-field-sized warehouse he’d be responsible for. That is, “if,” as Eleanor Prenty pointed out in her final Payback memo to Freeman, “your team manages to get in.” Freeman had immediately scratched out “if,” replacing it with “when.”

After they’d gone over the plan in the ready room, including another run-through of Army hand signals and American Sign Language, Freeman glanced at his under-wrist watch. It was now 1130. “I’ve told Commander Cuso we’ll be good to go at 1630. That’ll give you a daylight launch and five hours now for chow, rest, and combat-pack check. The McCain serves everything from cordon bleu to your trusty all-American hamburger. You will, however, remember that you’re not to eat any of it.” He glared down at their ice cream with an exaggerated expression of disapproval. “You will, for lunch, resume eating your delicious kimchi.” Eddie Mervyn and Brady exchanged glances as if they’d been instructed to eat shit.

“Yummy,” said Aussie, ever the contrarian.

“I don’t want to detect any American scent,” emphasized the general, who, despite his orders to stay at mission control, was wearing his battle-camouflage uniform. Like the team’s other seven SpecFor uniforms, it was in marked contrast to the spit and polish of Aussie’s Navy officer issue of ironed, knife-edged khakis. “Remember,” continued Freeman, “no aftershave, no deodorant, no hair gel. No toothpaste — use bicarb. And no hot chocolate, cola, or beverages other than water or Chinese green tea. Intel sources tell us the NKA have currently purchased tons of cheap black Typhoo tea from China, but as long as you stick to your green tea issue you’ll be fine.”

To drive home the point, the general told the five newcomers about what had happened to a SpecFor team in a suspect cave high up in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush. The team, assigned the mission with only ten minutes’ advance notice, had had no time to prepare “food-wise.” It had been a deathtrap, everyone but the team leader wiped out. Freeman had always suspected that, like so many incidents in ’Nam, the rush insertion had been betrayed in large measure by the SpecFor’s telltale American smells. The al Qaeda terrorists who’d unloaded on them, Freeman told his team, had probably literally gotten wind of the SpecFors before they’d even entered the cave.

“Sir,” asked Eddie Mervyn, who’d been selected as chief pilot and whose speech became more rather than less formal as the mission’s H-hour neared, “are we going straight in to Kosong or off-angle?”

Aussie Lewis, who was busying himself changing from his Navy-issue khakis into the camouflage battle uniform that had been rushed over to the McCain courtesy of Colonel Tibbet’s Marine Expeditionary Force aboard the Wasp-class carrier Yorktown, looked at Mervyn in surprise. Choir Williams, Salvini, and the burly Tavos did the same. Along with Freeman’s fundamental axiom of “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace” it was well known among SpecFor types that Freeman’s strategy, unless the enemy was actually waiting and looking straight at you, was that the best line of attack was the shortest, the most direct.

“Straight at ’em,” said Freeman, adding by way of explanation, “I’ve always been a big fan of Horatio Nelson. Straight at ’em.”

Eddie Mervyn, however, gave good cause for what at first had seemed to be ignorance of Freeman’s adage. He indicated the TV in the ready room. Its sound was down, but the pictures from the McCain ’s TV weather office, always available for its pilots, gave all the visual aid Eddie needed. “Those L3 thunderheads coming down at this battle group from the northwest don’t look promising,” he told the general, referring to the line of towering white cumulonimbus that were now flattening out into foreboding dark anvil shapes off the North Korean coast, a promise of stormy weather driving south against any straight east-west line of attack against Kosong.