Unfair.
Anger and anxiety had been eating at him throughout the one-hour flight from Islamabad to Skardu. When he returned to ST-6 headquarters in Virginia, he’d have to prepare a postoperations report. In it, he’d have to explain what went wrong with the mission and how Zaman had escaped.
Following that, he’d be subjected to a briefing called a hot wash, during which every detail of the mission would be picked over and second-guessed by dozens of officers from the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, and ST-6.
Now he wanted to get up and kick something or do some physical training, but there was nowhere to go in the DC-9 fuselage crammed with passengers, suitcases, plastic bags filled with clothes. A serious-some might say fanatical-athlete, Crocker hadn’t missed a day of PT in twenty years.
With no outlet, his indignation metamorphosed into rigorous self-examination. Soon he was questioning the decisions he’d made, his leadership, his intelligence.
Then, he got pissed off for criticizing himself.
What the hell am I doing?
Crocker’s father-the most straightforward, hardworking man he’d ever known-had taught his son to be ruthlessly honest.
But what he was doing was something else-a weird form of beating other people to the punch, or keeping himself in line. Maybe it was guilt left over from some of the wild things he’d done as a kid.
Anger begat anxiety, which turned into self-questioning, and then became no-holds-barred self-criticism.
He knew the vicious circle, because he’d traveled it many times. The outcome was always the same. Dizzying mental exhaustion. Emptiness at the pit of his stomach. A feeling of being unworthy and incomplete.
Some wise man had said: You can accomplish amazing feats of bravery and travel to the farthest reaches of the earth, but you can’t escape yourself. Or something like that.
The truth in those words chafed at Crocker, who twisted in the upholstered seat. Akil, buckled in beside him, could literally feel the heat radiating from the team leader’s body.
“What’s going on with you, boss? You look like you’re about to explode,” Akil remarked, tossing aside the copy of People with Sandra Bullock on the cover. Leave it to him to find the one magazine on the plane filled with photos of beautiful women.
Crocker grasped the armrest as the jet banked sharply. “I’ll get over it, Akil. I’m just a little…annoyed.”
“Why? Because we didn’t get Zaman?”
“Something like that.”
The plane started to descend through dense white clouds.
“Sniveling coward hides under a burka, pretending to be a woman,” Akil remarked. “Which means sooner or later we get to make him our bitch.”
Sometimes Akil’s devil-may-care attitude cut right through the bull.
Crocker grinned. “It’s that asshole Donaldson from the Agency.”
Akil frowned. “Where was he when we were in the shit?”
“In a meeting, probably, sipping a cappuccino.”
“Or jerking someone off. Next time, tell him to go fuck himself.”
Bursts of wind tossed the DC-9 from side to side. Crocker imagined circling back to Islamabad, finding Donaldson, and beating the living shit out of him.
But what would that accomplish, except getting him brought up on charges?
He turned to face the clouds churning outside his window and muttered: “Pencil-pushers like him make a career of second-guessing other people’s work. What is their purpose beyond that?”
“Boss, he’s not important. Forget him. Just another Washington parasite. The city’s swarming with them.”
“They get in our way. Live off the blood and sweat of others. Bureaucrats and fucking power junkies,” Crocker continued to vent.
“They whine a lot, but the next time they’re ready to nail some terrorists, who are they going to call?”
“Us, I hope.”
“We’re like the Ghostbusters. Only we eradicate fanatics with automatic weapons and WMDs.”
Sharp gray mountains poked through the cumulus clouds. Nanga Parbat, the world’s ninth-highest peak, better known as Killer Mountain, glistened brilliantly in the distance. The view of the mountains momentarily pulled Crocker’s mind away from Donaldson. One of the things he loved about climbing was the opportunity it afforded to free his mind of the garbage that ate at him.
The work schedule usually provided the SEAL operators with a two-month OCONUS (outside the continental United States) deployment period, followed by two months of Special Skills training, followed by two months of standby. Crocker had convinced his ST-6 commanding officer to allow him to take his crew to the mountains as part of their two-month Special Skills rotation. Having them enter Pakistan as climbers not only provided a convenient cover for the AZ mission, the climb itself would afford Crocker’s men some much-needed downtime. They’d been going hard the last five-plus months-deploying on one op after another, with no Special Skills training or standby.
The jet hit another air pocket and fell five hundred feet.
Akiclass="underline" “You think the pilot knows what he’s doing?”
Some kid’s DVD player was blasting “Baby” by Justin Bieber, proof that his music had reached every corner of the earth.
Suddenly they saw tin roofs gleam through the swirling mist, which magically dissipated to reveal a valley of deep, luxurious green.
Seatbacks up. Buckles secured. The landing gear groaned as it locked into place.
As they neared an asphalt runway, Akil checked the altimeter on his watch. “Eight thousand one hundred and eighty-nine feet.”
Earlier in his career, Crocker had been part of a joint SEAL-Agency mission to La Paz, Bolivia, located at 13,000 feet. Most of the team spent the first two days sick and suffering from massive headaches because they landed without a chance to acclimatize.
He planned for his current team to climb approximately 10,000 feet beyond that, without supplemental oxygen. But they would be taking the ascent in stages.
The plane twisted violently right, seconds before it touched down.
“Hold on!”
Crocker, Akil, and Davis and Mancini, a row behind them, bounced in their seats and were tossed from side to side. A dark-skinned Tibetan-looking woman seated across the aisle leaned forward and threw up on her red flats.
Crocker passed her a headband that he kept in his backpack to clean herself with. She didn’t want to take it.
“Go ahead. You need it more than I do,” he said in English.
She nodded and replied: “Shukran.” (Thank you.)
“Aafwaan.” (You’re welcome.)
Outside the little concrete terminal, Crocker breathed the thin air tinged with the smell of burning charcoal, then caught his reflection in the building’s plate-glass window.
The modern world wasn’t an easy place for a warrior with a conscience to find his way.
A girl had been killed and Zaman had escaped.
As the assault leader of ST-6/Blue, Tom Crocker carried a large responsibility on his shoulders-not just for his team, but for the millions of Americans it was their job to protect. Lou Donaldson was right. Zaman probably was planning more attacks against Americans.
Crocker badly wanted another shot at him. But he literally had to climb a mountain first.
Crocker had faced many extreme physical challenges in his decades as a SEAL: jungle ops in the Amazon, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Bolivia, and Panama; air assaults in Grenada and Afghanistan; grueling mountain runs in Ethiopia and Korea; desert gunfights in the Middle East; and undercover ops in Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia.
Terrorists generally didn’t have much to lose. Many of them had experienced day-to-day combat, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, and the pangs of starvation. That’s why he always pushed his men to strengthen and further develop their combat mind-set. They needed to believe they could take on the most perilous, difficult enemy, and prevail.