Sigler considered repeating himself, but then thought better of it. There was no telling how long it would be before help arrived; as long as Aleman was willing and able to pull a trigger, there was no reason not to keep him in the game.
As the last of the litters was loaded onto the Black Hawk, the crew chief leaned in. “If we dump some weight and get real cozy, we might be able to get everyone on.”
“Dump some weight? You mean like the guns and all the ammo?”
The crew chief shrugged. “I didn’t say it would be pretty.”
The Black Hawk was rated to carry a maximum of eleven troops along with its crew of four. Dropping the armaments and other extraneous equipment might allow them to stretch that limit a bit, as would leaving the bodies of the dead behind, but Sigler didn’t like the math. “Just hurry back.”
The crew chief nodded solemnly and then climbed aboard and slid the door closed. Sigler crouched low and hastened out from under the rotor wash as the idling turbines began whining louder.
He was halfway to the wreck when he saw a flash in the corner of his eye.
A small group of insurgents — or maybe it was just a lone fearless soul, hell-bent on earning his virgins in Paradise — had flanked them, circling around to the south of the crash site.
In the time it took him to turn his head, the RPG crossed the distance to its target.
The warhead — a PG-7VR tandem charge grenade — had been designed to destroy tanks with modern reactive armor. It did this by first exploding a small shaped charge that released a high-velocity jet of metal in a super-elastic state, which can cut through solid steel. The second, larger high-explosive charge would then penetrate deep into the wound and detonate inside the target.
The rocket snaked in under the rising helicopter’s rotors and struck below the exhaust vent on the port side. The shaped-charge blast cut through the Black Hawk’s exterior like it was made of tissue paper. A millisecond later, the three pounds of high-explosives in the main charge detonated, and Beehive Six-Four blew apart at the seams.
EIGHT
The President’s palm came down on the tabletop with a resounding smack that echoed like a pistol-shot in the crypt-quiet Situation Room.
The operational command center in the White House basement was all but deserted. The President had only intended to observe the Delta team operation, and so he had eschewed the normal cadre of advisors, aides and support staff. The were only two other men in the room besides Boucher. Lieutenant General Roger Collins, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, was a thick, beefy man with puffy, red features and a poorly-kept secret love affair with the bottle. Collins’s aide was a compactly built man with a silver-gray buzzcut, colonel’s eagles on his epaulets and a black name plate that read ‘Keasling.’
Collins shook his head. “Well…shit.”
Boucher winced as the President’s eyes sent daggers through the air at the three-star general. “Shit? That’s all you’ve got? Shit?”
Domenick Boucher swallowed nervously and returned his gaze to the television screen, where the crisis was playing out in real-time. The feed was from an infrared camera mounted on a circling Predator UAV, and the images were rendered in an eerie inverted black and white, with the grayscale hues serving as an indication of temperature. The expanding cloud of white smoke that now occupied the space where one of the Army helicopters had been a moment before, could only mean one thing: the Black Hawk had become an inferno.
Until the President’s outburst, Boucher had felt as paralyzed as Collins. He’d watched in mute disbelief as the operation had fallen apart before his eyes, turning from a simple raid into a full blown battle. But Duncan’s anger galvanized him.
Focus, he thought. What are the priorities?
He’d never faced a crisis like this as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There was rarely a need for the DCIA to be hands-on, but Boucher had come up through the ranks and witnessed some of the nation’s worst moments from the other side of director’s desk.
I’ve got people in the field… He shook his head; Klein and the crypto consultant were on the helicopter that had taken off without warning. There was nothing he could do to help them; no way to reach them. Why? Why did that Black Hawk go rogue? Who was giving the orders?
He dug his cell phone from a pocket, then just as quickly put it away. The Situation Room was shielded; no radio signals could get in or out. He would have to make do with one of the hard-wired telephones, which like all the other technology in the Situation Room, was painfully obsolete and actually less secure than Boucher’s encrypted digital phone.
Collins was still fumbling for an answer. “Sir, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do.”
“You can get those men out of there.” The President’s voice was low and flat, a steel blade hissing from between clenched teeth.
The general, perhaps without thinking it through first, shook his head. “Mr. President, it’s not that simple. We’re not coordinating with Defense on this, and if we make that call, we’ll have to disclose the whole operation. We won’t be able to keep the mission a secret.”
“Do you think those men out there give a damn about that?”
“That’s what we pay them for, sir.”
Boucher wasn’t the only man in the room shocked into action. The general’s aide likewise leaped for a phone. The President’s eyes followed him, but he made no move to interfere or ask for an explanation; the man was doing something, and Boucher knew that counted for a lot in Duncan’s book.
Collins finally seemed to grasp the concept as well. He swiveled his chair toward Keasling. “Mike, get some CAS out there.”
Keasling looked up but didn’t pull the receiver away from his mouth. “Calling the Air Force now, sir.”
“Doesn’t the 160th have attack choppers?” intoned the President, somewhat mollified. “Little Birds?”
Boucher recalled that Duncan had seen the Army’s special operations helicopters in action when he’d served in Mogadishu, nearly two decades earlier.
Keasling didn’t seem the least bit nonplussed. “With respect, Mr. President, I think the Night Stalkers need to be grounded.”
Collins was indignant. “Mike, what the hell?”
Keasling pointed to one of the screens that showed an air traffic control radar map of Central Iraq. “Beehive Six-Six has gone AWOL. I don’t know who’s in command of that aircraft or what they’re doing, but I’d say there’s a better than even chance that at least one of the crew is involved in this action.”
The announcement stunned Boucher. That was the piece of this puzzle that refused to fit. Someone had set a trap for the Delta team, that much was obvious, but the ambush at the site was only part of the equation; someone had been working from within their ranks to make sure that Cipher element was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He heard a voice in his ear and realized his telephone call to the Director of Operations had finally gone through. “This is Boucher,” he said in a low whisper. “We have a situation involving operations with Cipher element. I need all hands on deck.”
There was a moment of silence at the other end, and Boucher could imagine the DO biting back a river of questions. “Understood. I’ll sound the alarm. Will you be joining us?”
“Not sure. I’m with the President now. I’ll either meet you there or set up a conference call.”
The President quickly grasped the import of Keasling’s statement. “You think there are others involved?”