Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“Blackbirds go!” ordered Crowley, and within minutes the Harriers, electing to make their short takeoff over the vertical lift to conserve fuel, were aloft, Freeman simultaneously requesting McCain ’s vertical takeoff Joint Strike Fighters to assist in suppression of hostile ground fire, “should it become necessary,” the latter phrase a qualifier indicating that the American aircraft would not fire unless fired upon, a political fiction that might qualify as an acceptable order in the Byzantine business of the military’s post-op inquiries. All that was known in the fleet was that a Super Stallion had taken a hit , and “no,” the copilot rudely informed Tibbet’s G-2, “it was not a fucking bird. It was a fucking round , a fucking 7.62 mm rolling around in the damn cabin.” For all anyone, including Freeman and Tibbet, whose lead helos had already passed well beyond the fisherman’s hut, knew, the entire helo armada might be coming under ground fire. All everyone had heard for certain was that radio silence had been broken because a Super Stallion had come under ground fire. The Stallion had taken a “direct hit.” Soon the rumor amongst the fully laden combat troops, wedged uncomfortably between their web-seats and the fuselage, was that a Stallion had gone down.

“Anyone get out?”

“Don’t know.”

“Shit!”

In Aussie Lewis’s wry assessment, the usual fuckups had begun.

“Where are those friggin’ Blackbirds?” asked the Stallion’s copilot, who had narrowly missed being killed.

“On the way,” his pilot told him. Relax.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Relax, Evers,” repeated the pilot more sternly. “I know this is your first hot mission, but we’ve a ways to go. Freeman and Tibbet know what they’re doing.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know it’s hard, Dave, but you’ve been trained by the best. You’ll be fine.”

But there was trouble aboard the Stallion. It was coming from a hoarse-voiced general, Douglas Freeman, who, by sheer accident during a chat with a mortar crewman, discovered that the marine, indeed the entire mortar crew and one of its M40A1-marine-trained snipers aboard the Stallion, had by some oversight been through marine Colonel Cobb Martens’ weapons training battalion — made famous by Colonel Michael Nance — without having been given an AK-47 or AK-74 familiarization course. Freeman told the pilot to radio Tibbet, who, red-faced, sent an encrypted fast-blast message to Yorktown to the effect that anyone waiting in the second wave who was not familiar with firing either the AK-47 or AK-74 must be so instructed. Immediately.

There was a problem. There were no AK-47s or AK-74s on the Yorktown . It was an American ship, for crying out loud.

“What?” was the general’s thunderous reply. He couldn’t believe that in the twelve vessels that constituted the Seventh Fleet there wasn’t a single AK-47 in any of the ship’s armories. It seemed particularly improbable, given the popularity of the virtually indestructible Russian weapon among British and American Special Ops teams like his.

“I know where there’re some,” Aussie Lewis assured him. “Unofficial, of course. They’ve got ’em stashed in McCain ’s armory. There’s an ex-marine captain there with special arms training. He was wounded in Iraq. He’s now working in McCain ’s Blue Tile. He’s, ah, what you might call a ‘collector.’”

“Is he?” said Freeman who, turning to Lieutenant Terry Chester, one of Jack Tibbet’s platoon commanders, ordered, “Message Yorktown that Colonel Tibbet and I expect every marine to know how to fire and strip an AK-47 before our Stallions return to pick them up. If we get into a logistics screwup and anyone runs short of ammo, an AK-47 snatched off a dead Russian might be the thing that turns the tide.”

On the Yorktown , the general’s “turn the tide” phrase was met with skepticism, but not, as one might have expected, by the veterans, who knew how an extra clip of ammo could save your hide. The skepticism came more from those young Leathernecks who hadn’t been in action before, whose number comprised about seven hundred of the MEU’s total sixteen hundred personnel. Some of them, such as young Peter Norton, who, though he had never met Freeman, knew something of him, understood that he was fanatical about logistical details, one of his ruling adages being “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.” And had they known Freeman, skeptics would also have known that Douglas Freeman’s attention to logistical detail had been justified by every hostile engagement he’d been part of.

“How far to target?” Aussie asked the Stallion’s burly crew chief.

“A hundred and forty-seven miles,” said the chief.

“That by road?” Aussie asked, leaning forward expectantly, elbows pressing down hard on his pack. Sal and Gomez were watching intently.

“As the crow flies,” answered the crew chief.

“Well,” said Aussie, “I’m not a fucking crow!” and sat back, visibly more relaxed. So were the other team members. It was a curious “good luck” ritual for Aussie, normally the least superstitious of men. At some point at the beginning of a mission he would always ask the crew chief, “How far to target?” and hold his breath. If the reply was so many miles or clicks, Aussie would ask, “That by road?” and the reply, common enough in the airborne services, was usually “As the crow flies.” As long as the crew chief’s answer had “crow” in it, it was a sign to Aussie that the mission would be successful.

“Ya hear that, boys?” he shouted at his team. “As the fucking crow flies.”

“What? — ” said Sal absently, checking his weapon. “Oh yeah, crow — right.”

“Gonna be a piece o’ cake!” said Aussie.

“No problem,” said Freeman, who was keen to maintain high morale, but he and Tibbet had pored over the logistics of “the devil’s domain” and knew the crucial element on this mission was not surprise — that had been lost because of CNN — but rapid resupply. Otherwise, as the general and colonel concurred, it could be a monumental balls-up, the general’s second Priest Lake.

What the general hadn’t told Aussie or the team — had never told them — was that he made it his business before every mission to give the crew chief aboard their helo or landing craft a heads-up about Aussie’s “crow.” In a team where there were few, if any, secrets, this was an exception that the general had made.

No matter how close he and his men had become over the years, he believed that for each member there had to be a moat across which neither friend nor foe should venture, an inviolable port that was the private preserve of secrets which only men and their Maker knew, the terrible memories of comrades lost, like Bone Brady, the fatally wounded SpecOp soldier whom, years before, Douglas Freeman had shot at point-blank range. It was the man’s face, head flung back, eyes rolling comically and all the more grotesquely for that, bloodied teeth, bottom jaw sliding from side to side, that haunted the general. No matter that Brady had begged to be put out of his misery, the face would rise up in the gut-tightening minutes before deployment.

For a moment, Douglas Freeman’s head slumped in shame, but he sat up quickly, ramrod straight, and made as if to clear his eye of grit, always a problem with so many men and things aboard, packed tightly together. “Know that fella Orwell?” he shouted at Johnny Lee. “Limey who wrote that Animal Farm ?”

“Read it in school,” said Johnny, straining for his naturally high-pitched voice to rise above the roar of the helo’s three big turboshafts.