The audience laughed again, including the CAG. Jefferson's air wing would be tasked with assuring American control of the skies for this operation… but the best air superiority in the world couldn't guarantee protection from one or two hedge-hopping and determined enemy pilots. And Murdock had to consider all possibilities.
"So in my opinion, extraction both of the ground team and of the hostages has got to be from the castle. That has the advantage of giving my boys a defensible perimeter while we're waiting for the extraction aircraft, and better cover for the hostages.
"As for how we do it, well, we've discussed STABO, SPIE, and STAR extractions, but there are problems with all of those. If we use STAR, we can only take them out one or two at a time. If we use STABO or SPIE, we could get more people out faster, but the fact that the hostages aren't trained would almost certainly lead to people getting tangled up, and possibly hurt."
He was discussing the three primary means of recovering people from the ground without having to land an aircraft, all of them first implemented in Vietnam. STAR — Surface To Air Recovery — was the well-known technique requiring the evacuee to wear a harness attached to a helium weather balloon, which was snagged in midair by a low-flying MC-13 °Combat Talon transport. The Army's STABO and the Navy's SPIE were means of inserting or extracting personnel using special harnesses attached to lines dangled beneath a helicopter.
"Besides," Murdock said with a grin, "none of those means of extraction is exactly in keeping with a congresswoman's sense of decorum and proper modesty." Laughter… and a smattering of applause. Murdock decided not to add that a STAR recovery would almost certainly have to be reserved for any of the hostages who were seriously wounded while they were being rescued. That was a very real possibility that the mission planners had to always keep at the backs of their minds.
"Absolutely the best extraction technique will be to use helos, coming in and landing right there in the castle's parking lot. It looks like that courtyard is just big enough for one helo to touch down at a time, especially if we move the cars out of the way. One chopper could take all the hostages, and then a second can move in and pick up the team when the first one's clear. We can wait to call the choppers in until the entire area is secure, so they don't have to face a hot LZ, and we'll have that beach below the castle as a backup, if a pickup in the courtyard proves impractical. There would be the usual hazards of flying out through hostile territory, especially after everyone in Europe figures out what's going down, but a couple of Pave Low IIIs ought to be stealthy enough to sneak in and sneak out again without getting tagged. Especially if the Navy does their part in the EW department, and if we have decent air cover off the carrier."
"I tend to agree," Admiral Tarrant said, "as does my ops staff. You can rest assured that I'll include your opinions in my next communication with Washington."
As they continued to discuss options, it struck Murdock what a monumental operation this actually was, a team effort involving some twelve thousand men aboard the seven ships of CBG-14, the pilots and ground crews of the Air Force Special Operations Squadron who would be responsible for inserting and recovering his men, the Delta team that would be hitting the hijacked aircraft at Skopje at the same time in order to avoid tipping off the opposition, and God alone knew how many thousands of other military and civilian personnel from Washington to Greece and back again who were working on this op, code-named Alexander.
Alexander, for the boy-king of Macedonia who'd conquered half the known world 2300 years before.
Murdock did not dwell on the thought that, while Alexander had been arguably the most spectacularly successful of all of history's conquerors and military figures, he had also died very young…
At 1825 hours, the word came through at last. Operation Alexander was go, and as originally planned.
The MC-13 °Combat Talon aircraft, a Hercules especially augmented and equipped for this type of covert, deep-penetration mission, was waiting for them when they arrived at the Italian air base. Painted jet black, without identifying marks or insignia, it seemed to be a part of the night as the SEALS gathered up their parachutes and weapons loadouts and started filing up the huge aircraft's rear ramp.
They'd left the Jefferson to pursue her endless circles at Gyro Station, flying the COD on a short hop across the mouth of the Adriatic to San Vito. The MC-130, one of four deployed south from Rhein-Main, Germany, had arrived at San Vito just ahead of them and was already fueled and ready to go. Another, with a Delta team aboard, had already left on a roundabout route that would take it to Skopje.
Each man in the SEAL platoon had his own way of facing the possibility of death or injury or capture in the coming mission, from Doc's wisecracks to Mac's single-minded professionalism to the L-T's habit of going the rounds of his men, talking quietly with each. During the flight into San Vito, the Professor had been reading Polybius's account of the rise of the Roman Empire, of all things, while Roselli perused a dog-eared copy of last month's Penthouse. Holt, Nicholson, and Fernandez had exercised the warrior's historical ability to sleep anywhere, any time, while Frazier had quietly written a letter to his wife. Most of the rest had cracked jokes, told stories, or gone over their gear and weapons yet again.
ET1 Josip Stepano had not said much since the SEALs had left Salonika yesterday morning. He knew the L-T was worried about him, and he'd done his best to reassure Murdock that he was fine. But after completing all of his checks of personal gear, weapons, ammo, and chute, Stepano had done very little over the past few hours but think… and remember. He wondered often just how much he had in common with the other SEALs of the Team, especially when it came to motivation.
The Navy SEALS had the reputation of being hard-hitting, hard-drinking, fast-living superwarriors — and for the most part the rep was a well-deserved one. SEALs themselves often claimed that their unit's acronym stood not for SEa, Air, and Land, but for Sleep, tAt, and Live it up. You couldn't live as close to the edge as SEALs did every day and not have a bit of wildness to work off once in a while. Still, it seemed sometimes to Stepano that his fellow SEALs were more concerned with their warriors' fraternity than they were with the old-fashioned concept of patriotism.
Stepano was a patriot in every sense of the word. He loved his adopted country as only one who has escaped the nightmare of tyranny can. In lighter moments he joked about his love affair with a government official's daughter, but those moments were rare, the memories of the state police pounding on his father's door that night too fresh and sharp. His session as interrogator with Vlachos had brought back some of those memories with a fresh and blood-bright clarity.
He was American now and fiercely proud of that fact. A citizen when he was eighteen, he'd joined the Navy three years later. Because of his language skills, he'd been granted special clearance after an exhaustive background check, and that had led him first to Navy Intelligence, then to the SEALS.
But a man could never entirely escape his roots, that deep-down sense of who he was and where he'd come from originally.
Maybe… maybe what he and the others were going to do tonight would make some small difference in his homeland.
For Stepano, this operation had become intensely personal.
16