Linders was idly twirling a pencil when his secretary buzzed the intercom to tell him that Colonel Pike was outside. Linders told her to send him in. The door swung open and an army colonel wearing camouflage fatigues limped in. A worn green beret was stuck in the cargo pocket of the man's pants. The name tag over the right breast pocket read PIKE. Over the left pocket was sewn a pair of master parachutist wings topped by a Combat Infantryman's Badge.
Pike had the appearance of an old man, after twenty-nine hard years in the army. He was almost six feet tall and thin as a rail. His face was lined and weather-beaten and his head was topped with hair that had turned completely gray.
As Linders returned Pike's salute and told him to sit down, he wondered why he always felt a little funny when dealing with the colonel. Some of it, he knew, stemmed from the fact that Pike had been in the military a year longer than Linders had, yet Linders greatly outranked the colonel. Part of it also, Linders had to admit to himself, was that whereas the closest he had come to combat was in a B-52 thirty-five thousand feet over North Vietnam, Pike held a reputation as one of the most combat-tested officers in the army. Pike exuded a sense of toughness and competence that overshadowed Linders's political charisma.
Linders decided not to waste any time. He had a meeting across the river with some congressmen in thirty minutes. The sooner he passed the monkey onto Pike's back, the better.
"I just finished talking to the chairman. He wants us to prepare contingency plans in case we get tasked to send some people down to Colombia in response to the attack in Springfield yesterday."
Pike sat down. "Has that been traced back down there already, sir?"
"No, but it's pretty much assumed that the drug cartel was behind the attack. If the FBI or CIA gets good evidence and can finger who did it, there's the possibility we might have to send some people down south."
Pike shook his head slightly. "Snatch or snuff?"
Linders frowned at the terminology. "Plan for extraction of indicated personnel."
"Sir, with all due respect, we've got people who are ready to do that, but if all I can give them is a country but no names or locations, there isn't much they can do as far as planning goes. Delta's been sitting on several plans for hitting the people behind the kidnappings in Lebanon for over four years now."
Linders had to agree with Pike's reasoning. "I know it isn't likely that we'll do anything, but I want to be able to tell the chairman, if he asks, that we're working on it."
Pike bowed to the inevitable. "Yes, sir. I'll take care of it. Anything else?"
Linders was glad to be rid of the responsibility. "No, that's it. How long do you think it will take?"
Pike shrugged. "Without more specific intelligence, the boys down at Bragg will simply pull out their country area study on Colombia and do some figuring on aircraft ranges and stuff like that. That's about all they can do, sir. I'll alert them today and they should have all that ready in two days. I'm going up to Plattsburgh Air Force Base tonight for one of the nuke testing missions. I'll be back tomorrow evening and I'll check back in with Bragg then."
Linders dismissed Pike. "All right. I'll assume it's taken care of, then."
Pike saluted and left to make his way down to his less elaborate office. He was used to getting vague tasks. He didn't enjoy the thought of passing this one on to the Delta Force operations people at Bragg. Pike had spent several years with Delta and he knew that this sort of "prepare to do something but we're not sure what, yet" tasking was viewed as a pain in the ass.
Since coming to the Pentagon a year ago, Pike had grown more and more discontented. In all his previous twenty-eight years, he had never seen as many dumb decisions being made as he had in this building. Pike considered himself a warrior. He had never married, the army being his first and only love. Here, though, Pike was seeing a side to his love that he had not been forced to deal with before. He understood that he couldn't spend all his time with soldiers, preparing for combat, but he was sure that the time and energy he wasted every day in the Pentagon could be put to better use.
Over the course of the last six months, Pike had watched the different services scramble to protect their slices of the shrinking budget pie. The incident that had lit the match under Pike's discontent had occurred only two months ago. He had written a position paper for the DCSOP-SO relating to the relative budgetary importance each service placed on its Special Operations Forces (SOF). He had pointed out that over the course of the past five years, the combined budget for SOF in all three services had amounted to less than one tenth of one percent of the total defense budget. Yet, in that time period, SOF had conducted over 50 percent of all real world military missions conducted by Department of Defense forces. Those missions ranged from numerous military training teams spread across the world working with other countries' military forces, to covert operations by units such as Delta. Pike felt that the disparity between the SOF units' budget and their production output was ridiculous. He had argued in the report that funding for Special Operations units be somewhat more commensurate with their present contribution. He had been dismayed when his report was sent back by the Pentagon's deputy chief of staff for operations with a "nonconcur" written in red ink on the cover.
Pike didn't need to be a genius to see the handwriting on the wall as well as on his report. He'd tried to get a transfer out of the Pentagon, back to a post where real soldiers did real things. The Special Forces branch representative at personnel headquarters had been blunt: With Pike's mandatory retirement looming less than a year away, they weren't going to move him anywhere. Pike still loved those soldiers he knew were out in the woods training hard, but he no longer felt the same about the big green machine. He was just a cog, an old one at that, and the machine was getting ready to throw him out on the scrap heap.
Because of that, Pike had started spending as much time as possible away from the Pentagon on any sort of trip he could possibly justify, such as the one to Plattsburgh this evening. There was no real need for Pike to be there, but since his office was responsible for coordinating the nuclear security testing missions, observing one of those missions was justifiable. The bottom line was that he wanted to get the hell away from this building and see the real Special Forces in action.
CHAPTER FOUR
The battered van rumbled up the ramp off the Northway. Fifty feet from the exit it pulled into the parking lot of a used-motorcycle shop. The headlights illuminated the gate in the chain link fence that surrounded the shop's motorcycle graveyard. The driver, a large, bearded man wearing a denim jacket emblazoned across the back with Harley-Davidson, stopped the van, got out, and walked over to unlock the gate. He returned to his van, drove into the yard, and parked in the dark shadows behind the shop.
After resecuring the gate, he opened the back of the van. Ten dark figures, bristling with weapons, slipped out. The leader of the group, a short, slim man, shook the driver's hand. The driver got back in the van and settled in to wait.
The ten silhouettes moved to the rear of the yard. The fence there was slightly different from the one that enclosed the other three sides of the shop's parking lot. It was chain link topped with barbwire. An old, rusted sign hung on it. After years of neglect in the harsh Adirondack winter, the sign was barely legible: "U.S. Government Property, Keep Out."