But it wasn't just Garcia that had Murdock personally involved. There was Stepano, and the look on his face after he'd broken Vlachos that had made Murdock wonder if Stepano himself had been broken in some way. And there was the lingering feeling of being jerked around by the Greeks, and the knowledge that his people had been at risk because of traitors in their security force, and probably in their government as well.
And Murdock had also been thinking a lot about Nikki latrides during the past few hours, a nice girl from a small village who thought the Muslims living next door were "nice people" and "just plain folks." Most of the people in the Balkans, Murdock thought, must be pretty much the same, more than willing to get along with their neighbors so long as their neighbors were willing to get along with them. It was bastards like Vlachos and Mihajlovic and the Serbian rape gangs and the fanatic groups like the EMA and the kept proponents of "ethnic cleansing" that started wars and kept them going.
Maybe, when SEAL Seven paid a late-night visit to the occupants of Gorazamak, they could tip the balance just a wee bit in favor of the just plain folks.
At least that was the way Murdock was thinking about it, and that was why he was looking forward to this op, with all its dangers and all its uncertainties. Time after time in the past, he'd faced the certainty that the bad missions were the ones where people died or were crippled and no one could tell you why.
"This, gentlemen, is Gorazamak, seen from one hundred fifty miles up."
The room was dark, lit only by the glow off the slide-projection screen at the front, and crowded, an ad hoc theater for a highly classified slide show. The mission briefing was being held in Jefferson's CVIC, naval shorthand for "Carrier Intelligence Center," and inevitably pronounced "civic." Present, representing SEAL Seven, were Murdock, DeWitt, and Coburn. This time around, the gold-braid-heavy assembly had been crashed by several petty officers as well, both MacKenzie and Ben Kosciuszko for Third Platoon, and Hawkins as Coburn's chief aide.
Representing Carrier Battle Group 14 were Rear Admiral Douglas TwTant, the CBG commander, and Captain Jeremy Brandt, Jefferson's CO. Another four-striper in the room was Captain Joseph Stramaglia, the carrier's CAG, an outdated acronym that meant he was commander of the carrier's air wing. Other officers included men from Jefferson's Operations Department — from Intelligence, from Met, from Battle Ops. Squadron commanders were present as well.
At the moment, the floor had been turned over to Lieutenant Commander Arthur Lee, the air wing's intelligence officer, and he was going through a series of slides pulled from the latest batch of satellite photos transmitted to the carrier from NPIC, the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center in Washington.
"In this shot," Lee was saying, a telescoping metal pointer in his right hand casting a pencil-thin shadow across the screen, "you can get a pretty good idea of how steep this cliff is. Our shadow triangulations and radar mapping jibe on this one for a change. You've got about twenty meters from the water to the road, here, then another fifty meters of sheer rock, almost straight up, from the road to the objective."
He pressed a control button in his left hand, and with a ratcheting click-clunk, the picture changed. It was the same castle, obviously, but from a slightly higher angle, looking down at a ribbon of white beach at the foot of the cliff. The image was almost magically clear, a crisp black and white that showed minute details of leaves and branches, all in perfect focus. The perspective, looking down the cliff's face, was dizzying.
"This one shows the beach below the castle. It's not very wide, three meters maybe, and sandy. We think the sand was trucked in and dumped, back when the place was a rich-tourist mecca. Of course we can't show you, but the lake is extremely deep — over nine hundred feet out toward the center. Just imagine that cliff continuing, straight down, for the length of another three football fields. The water is remarkably clear. There are stories that you can see fish seventy feet down. For that reason alone, our combat team will have to approach at night."
Click-clunk.
"This is just east of the castle… the castle is out of the picture, down here. Woods. Steep slopes. These objects here… and here… and here are probably small bunkers. Since the sixteenth-century Ottomans didn't go in for such things, we can assume they were late additions." A polite ripple of laughter ran through the audience. "We can also assume that the castle's present tenants are expecting any assault to be made down off the mountain, through these woods, and across this crest, rather than up from the lake."
And that, Murdock thought, as he sat in a folding metal chair with arms and legs crossed, was a damned good assumption. Getting into that lake would take some damned world-class parachutist skills. Getting up to the castle out of the lake afterward would require world-class mountaineers… or mountain goats.
Well, SEALs could handle all of that, and more.
Click-clunk.
"Ah. This is one of my favorites. We're looking straight down into the courtyard here. It's a stone-floored, walled-in area approximately one hundred twenty meters north to south, forty meters east to west. This is the gate, in the northwest wall, and this is the bridge across the canyon right outside the wall. These, as you can see, are trucks, Soviet-style jeeps, and private automobiles. If you look close, you can see that, yes, we can read license plate numbers from orbit."
That raised another laugh.
"There are some interesting features about this one. Look over here, in this little cul-de-sac around behind the stables. It's hard to make out without enhancement, but bear with me. This, right here, is the top of a man's hat, an officer's billed cap. These are his shoulders… arms… The way he's standing, we think he must be facing the wall while he takes a leak. Notice the shoulder boards here… and here. Now, these aren't in color and our resolving power falls short of what we'd need to make out details of a uniform, but very few of the militias or the shooters of groups like the EMA go in for shoulder boards, or anything like a real uniform. Most of them wear hand-me-downs, old Soviet-issue, and shoulder boards are a pain so they're usually the first to go when things get ragged. What we think we have here is an officer, possibly in the Macedonian Army, but much more likely he's JNA. If so, that would tend to confirm the idea that we may be up against Serbian regulars here, who've infiltrated into Macedonia as part of this, this rather fantastic plot."
The lecture droned on. Murdock paid attention with a part of his mind, but all of the hard decisions had already been made. The five of them, him, Ed, Mac, Kos, and Captain Coburn, had worked out a rough operations plan after lunch yesterday, then fleshed it out with some of the boys in Battle Ops afterward. The plan had been approved by Tarrant, who'd passed it on to Washington with his own recommendation.
Details, countless details, remained to be hashed out, but it had looked like this one was going to be a go. Then the hold order had been flashed from Washington, and everything was left hanging in the air.
Planning had proceeded, however, with the assumption that a go order would be forthcoming. That final seal of approval from Fort Fudge, as the Pentagon was sometimes known, was always the real chain-jerker. People on the front line, from Admiral Tarrant down to the newest swabbie recruit in the carrier's snipe gang, tended to work well as a team. They knew their jobs and they knew their responsibilities, and they'd been trained to carry them out with a minimum of supervision from on high. It was the REMFing munchkins and bean-counters and shit-for-brains pencil-pushers in Washington that scared Murdock.