Robert Doherty - Section 8

Ears ringing, Vaughn slowly rolled onto his back. He blinked as the night vision goggles worked to regain their setting after the overload. He didn't really want to see. Didn't want to get up. Didn't want to confirm what he already knew. It was only a question of how truly bad this was, and he instinctively knew it was very bad.

As the ringing subsided, he could dimly hear firing, though not as much as before. Accepting his duty with the battle still going on, he tucked the MP-5 into his shoulder and got to one knee, scanning the area, though he knew they'd already failed.

The hostage shack was gone. A gaping hole stood in its place. The explosion had been so large, it also took out most of the barracks building, killed quite a few of the terrorists who had been arrayed around the complex, and cut a swath into the jungle behind the buildings. There was no way anyone inside could have survived the explosion.

As if on autopilot, Vaughn fired at an Abu Sayef guerrilla who was limping away from the scene of the explosion. He continued to scan, saw bodies everywhere, turned and looked behind him. A half-dozen Filipino commandos were tentatively moving forward. He could see the crashed helicopter burning in the surf.

Drawn by the flames, Vaughn walked toward it, the water lapping around his legs. A couple of his men were already at work, removing bodies from it, searching for survivors. He paused as he recognized one of the bodies laid out next to the helicopter – or partial body.

A helicopter blade had sliced through the man, cutting him in half. The upper half had been dragged above the waterline. There was no sign of the lower half. Most likely it was still pinned in the wreckage.

Trembling, Vaughn walked over to the torso and knelt next to Sergeant Major Jenkins. He ripped open the combat vest and body armor and, reaching into the breast pocket, retrieved the picture of Jenkins's wife – his sister. He looked at it for several moments, then at his friend and brother-in-law.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Over four kilometers away, on the side of a mountain to the southeast along the shore, an old man sat in a wheelchair. He was parked on a narrow ledge, less than five feet wide, that had been cut out of the rock. On the right arm of the wheelchair was a red button, which was depressed under the weight of his hand. He slowly released the pressure. To his right, a man stood behind a digital video camera set on a tripod. The video camera had a bulky lens – a night vision device. And it was pointed toward the clearly visible flames where the battle had just taken place. The sounds of shots still echoed across the water toward their location, but the number and frequency had dropped off considerably.

"Did you get it all?" the old man asked in Tagalog, the language of Filipinos.

"Yes, sir."

"Can you identify them as Americans?"

"The zoom on this is very good. There is no doubt they are not Filipino."

"Very good."

The story ran less than six hours later on the largest news station in Manila, and was picked up internationally within twenty minutes. Video of a failed American-Filipino raid that cost the lives of all the hostages, a dozen Filipino commandos, a classified number of American soldiers, and an unknown number of guerrillas.

The U.S. Defense attachй in Manila was ambushed by reporters, and because he had not been clued in on the Delta Force participation, he denied it and then looked foolish as the footage was played for him. If it had just been the several Delta and twelve Filipino commandos dead, perhaps it could have been covered up, as other incidents in the past had been: terrible training accident, helicopter went down at sea, all lost.

But there was no getting around the dead hostages. Those people had families. They'd been in the news, with the Abu Sayef continuously releasing videos of them pleading for their release. It was the number one news story in the Philippines, and it spread like wildfire in the media around the globe.

No one seemed to know or even particularly care about who had videotaped the attack and how it had gotten to the Manila news station. The focus was on the illegal participation of American forces on Philippine soil in a raid that had cost the lives of not only Americans, but two Germans, an Italian, and a French citizen.

After all that had happened in Iraq, the United States government was gun-shy about negative military publicity. Heads began to roll.

Vaughn and his team were back in "isolation."

It was a term used in Special Operations for the time when a team was completely cut off from the outside world in a secure location. It was usually done for mission planning. Now it was being done simply to hide the six Delta Force survivors after the mission.

They were locked in a compound far behind the gate of what used to be Subic Naval Base, now being run by the Filipinos. A team from the First Special Forces Group out of Okinawa had been their ASTs – area specialist team – for their mission isolation, and that team was now acting as both their jailers and protectors. No one had come in and said anything about what would happen to the six, but they did have access to TV in their building and they knew the hammer was going to come down.

Vaughn felt isolated inside the isolation. He'd been honest about the problem with the LLDS at their first debriefing, and the other five team members had been surprised, and a bit skeptical. They had held their peace, though, due to the losses the team had sustained, especially knowing the bond between Vaughn and Jenkins.

The communications sergeant who gave Vaughn the LLDS and was responsible for making sure it was functioning had died in the raid, so he couldn't be questioned about the status of the original battery. Mission SOP was that all batteries to be carried on an operation were to be brand new. Had this one been forgotten about? Had it malfunctioned? The device had been destroyed when the missile hit it, so that couldn't be checked. It was just Vaughn's word that the battery had died.

The other five said they believed him, but Vaughn sensed an edge of uncertainty. He felt it himself. He couldn't get the image of Frank Jenkins's severed body out of his mind. He hadn't been able to sleep since they got back to Manila, and didn't think he would be able to sleep solidly for a while to come.

He knew he should call his sister, but no phone calls were allowed, and he was secretly grateful for that. The isolation would at least protect him from the emotional fallout. He also knew it could not continue indefinitely, even though a part of him wished it would.

With the debriefings done, the team was left alone to ponder their fate. Already, less than twenty-fours after the botched raid, the Undersecretary of Defense for Special Operations in the Pentagon had taken one for the team and tendered his resignation, claiming the authorization for Delta Force to be on the raid had come from his office and he had overstepped the limits of his power. Vaughn doubted that the raid had originated anywhere but at the highest levels. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen someone who was truly in charge stand up and take responsibility for something they had ordered.

"It's bullshit."

He didn't realize that someone had come into the briefing room, where the imagery, maps, and overlays for the mission were still tacked to walls. He'd been sitting there alone, not wanting to be with the others in the small recreation room watching CNN scroll by, showing practically the same story every half hour, the graphic images of the raid video playing again and again. Whoever had been manning the camera caught the RPG hitting Jenkins's helicopter, and Vaughn could not help but dwell on his brother-in-law's last moments of life whenever he saw it.