Meng stood up and left his office, heading down to Tunnel 3. Wilson was at the tail end of his night shift as Meng came in. "How's it going? Want me to stick around for the infil simulation?"
Meng shook his head. "You can go home now. I'll cover everything."
Wilson pointed at the map board. "When do you want to send the mission termination message to the FOB? They're probably pretty anxious right now." Wilson checked the clock. "It's only two and a half hours before they're supposed to lift off."
Meng waved a hand. "I just sent that from my office. Kept it off the screen in here so it wouldn't confuse them more than they already are."
Wilson frowned briefly. He hadn't seen the message go by on his console. Still, he knew that Meng could bypass the master console from his office. He stood up. "The program ready?"
Meng replaced Wilson at the master console. "Everything is quite ready. We will find out shortly how well prepared these people are."
"See you tonight, then." Wilson stretched his back and wandered down toward the front of the Tunnel. A thought occurred to him. He walked over to Major Tresome, the communications specialist, sitting at his console in the front row. "Did you see the mission termination message just go out?" he asked in a low voice.
Tresome shook his head. "Just the normal mission traffic between SFOB and FOB. No administrative stuff."
Wilson looked back up the Tunnel at Meng and then back at Tresome. "Meng says he sent it."
Tresome shrugged. "He probably did. Meng usually does a lot of stuff from his office. He doesn't like using this terminal for admin traffic. Whatever goes through here comes up on the screen and in the printouts. That means the exercise participants here in the Tunnel see it. Meng can bypass all that from his office or from the master console."
"But wouldn't you or I have seen it go by?"
Tresome shook his head. "Nope. There's no record of that. Like I said, Meng can bypass."
Wilson was too tired to pursue it any further. "Well, you might as well shut down the SATCOM link with the FOB if Meng has already closed down with them."
Tresome reached forward and flipped a switch. "We're on the computer now." Tresome scanned the board. "Hell, Meng's damn office terminal is still linked into the FOB." He looked up at Wilson. "Should I shut that down too?"
Wilson thought about it. "No reason not to. We've nothing more for them. He probably just forgot to shut it down."
Hossey grabbed the message as it came out of the machine. He felt his heartbeat pick up as he read the message.
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET
TO: CDR FOB Kl/ MSG 38
FROM: CDR USSOCOM/ SFOB FM
SUBJ: INFILTRATION
AUTHORIZATION CODE: BLAZING THUNDER/
REPEAT/ BLAZING THUNDER CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET
Hossey took the message and drove to the hangar. The team had spent most of the day there trying to relax and rehearse various tactics. He pulled up to the personnel door and Hooker, who was standing guard just inside, opened it. Hossey showed the sergeant major the message. Hooker whistled lightly and commented, "I didn't think they had the balls in D.C. to do this."
Hossey shook his head. "I guess the massacre pushed the powers-that-be over the line."
He headed across to Riley and Mitchell, who were leaning back against their rucks. He handed the message to Mitchell, who read it, then silently passed it across to Riley.
Riley looked at his team leader. "Does this mean what I think it does?"
Mitchell nodded. "Get the team together."
Riley whistled to wake up everyone. "Gather around."
While they waited for the men to assemble, Hossey went over to alert the Talon crew. Mitchell took a deep breath, then addressed the team. "The mission's a go, men. We just got infiltration authorization. No offset or cancelation. This is the real thing." Mitchell looked at his watch. "We load in two hours."
Without a word the team members turned and went back to their rucks, each man absorbing the information in his own way. All day long the tension in the air in the hangar had grown as the uncertainty dragged on. Now the uncertainty was replaced by apprehension. They were really going.
The men reacted to the news in different ways. A few, such as Mitchell and Olinski, seemed to withdraw and become even quieter. Others, such as Lalli and Reese, got louder, even cracking jokes. Both reactions were a way of dealing with the stress.
Each man did final weapons checks. Rucksacks were rigged for jumping. They were going in heavy, equipment-wise, for a three-day operation, but they were prepared for almost any eventuality.
The men were dressed in jungle fatigues dyed black. Over the fatigues each soldier wore his combat vest, configured to carry extra magazines and ammunition for the weapon he carried. The vest had straps that were buckled around each thigh through the crotch, so the vest could serve as a safety harness if no pickup zone was readily available for the helicopter, and extraction became necessary. The extraction harness consisted of two snap links fitted into the shoulders of the vest, which would hook into ropes hung below a helicopter.
Riley, along with Trapp and Comsky, carried the Soviet SVD sniper rifle. It fired the Soviet 7.62 by 54mm cartridge. All three men were school-trained snipers and could hit a two-inch circle out to twelve hundred meters, under favorable conditions. Riley felt that the use of the Soviet rounds to take out the cameras would shift suspicion for the raid to the Soviets. The Soviet-Chinese border had been the sight of numerous border clashes since the end of World War II. The Chinese might even suspect a Soviet Spetsnaz, or Special Forces, team.
Additionally, Riley and Trapp carried cutoff M79 grenade launchers, attached to their combat vests with a snap link. Hooker had a hard time tracking down the M79s for them. They supposedly had been made obsolete years ago and replaced by the M203, a weapon that combined the M16 rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher, which was hung below the Ml6 barrel. But Trapp remembered the effectiveness of a cutoff
M79 from his Vietnam days. The short, stubby weapon could be attached to the vest, out of the way, until needed. The 40mm grenade launcher acted in effect like a large shotgun. The M79 used high explosive (HE), and special flechette rounds, which consisted of hundreds of sharp little metal slivers. Riley and Trapp each carried twenty mixed rounds for the M79s.
The captain, and the two communications men, Walt O'Shaugnesy and Paul Lalli, each carried MP5 SD3 submachine guns — silenced 9mm guns that held a thirty-round magazine. They could be fired on semiautomatic or full automatic with a flip of the selection lever. Although accurate only out to about a hundred meters, the guns would be effective for silent, close-in killing of enemy security personnel if needed.
Olinski and Hoffman each carried the Italian-manufactured SPAS 12 semiautomatic shotgun. These twelve-gauge shotguns were carried because they could be used without leaving a distinctive signature. They were in limited use by the local population throughout the target area. A corpse riddled with twelve-gauge 00 buckshot or slugs would not immediately point to a foreign source. Additionally, Riley liked them because a shotgun was a very effective weapon during an ambush. It was an area weapon with devastating results at close range. Each shotgun could be loaded with nine shells, which could be fired as fast as the trigger was pulled. To add to their effectiveness, the gun's magazines were loaded with alternating double-aught buckshot rounds and solid slug rounds. The twelve-gauge slug round was guaranteed to put a man down permanently if it hit him.
Chong, Reese, Smitty, and Devito all carried the squad automatic weapon. The SAW fired 5.56mm rounds from a hundred-round drum magazine. Not as heavy as the more commonly used M60 machine gun, the SAW could still reach out nine hundred meters with an effective field of fire. Riley was counting on these for suppression of the enemy if they did make contact or had to fight off a reaction force. With the SAWs providing area suppression, and the SVDs giving accurate, long-range fire, Riley felt that they had a good chance of beating off a reaction force, at least for a little while. For close-in work, the M79s, shotguns, SAWs, and submachine guns would do the job.