During their sweep of the area, Roselli and Sterling had managed to verify by Mark I eyeball much of the data already acquired through satellite photos. Spy satellites were incredible reconnaissance tools, allowing you to see fantastic detail from a hundred miles up. Many in the Pentagon and in the U.S. intelligence community swore by the high-tech voyeurs, claiming that the age of HUMINT, of intelligence acquired by human agents on the ground, was all but dead.
Few SEALs thought that way, however. There were still too many things that satellites couldn't do… like keep a particular sentry under observation for hours at a time, or catch the pungent whiff of a Russian-made cigarette in the darkness. Checking out an objective personally taught you things about the target, and about the enemy, that you never could have gleamed from the bright, flat, and sterile slickness of a photograph.
The highway, Roselli and Sterling had discovered, was not patrolled or covered by either ambushes or electronic surveillance for at least a hundred meters in either direction. Four men were standing guard at the cutoff road winding sharply up the mountain northwest of the castle. That was a new twist, one added since the last set of satellite photos had been faxed across to the Jefferson, and reason enough for the manned sweep.
What any raid or hostage-rescue assault such as this one required more than anything else was intelligence. How many soldiers occupied the castle? How many were on duty… and where were the off-duty troops quartered? Were there other approaches besides the road leading up to the front gate? Were there machine guns or other heavy weapons on those parapets, or were the troops carrying small arms only? Were there reinforcements closer than the air base at Ohrid?
Many of those questions could be answered by satellite, but not all, and even the best orbital reconnaissance gave, not fact, but probability and guesswork. And the most important questions for this kind of mission could not be addressed by satellite at all. Where were the hostages being kept? Were they being held in the same room, or were they dispersed throughout the objective? How heavily were they guarded? Were they all at Gorazamak, or might some of them have been taken elsewhere for added security?
Roselli and Sterling approached the SEAL base camp south of the beach, a rocky niche tucked away behind boulders and pine trees, close enough to the water that they could hear the steady lap-lap-lap of the waves against the shore.
DeWitt's team was scouting the approaches to the castle itself. The remaining SEALs had been stowing their gear and laying out the markers, tetrahedral reflectors that would show up on a properly set multi-mode radar like tiny suns and guide in Alexander's second element. A four-man cordon had been thrown out around the beachhead, to give early warning of the approach of hostiles, And one man, Doc, was still missing.
Murdock was with Higgins and Kosciuszko, crouched over the sat-comm unit, speaking quietly into the microphone. "Copy that, Olympus," he was saying as Roselli and Sterling drew close. "We'll try to do our best to have things quiet by the time they get here. Alexander out."
"Skipper," Roselli said as Murdock handed the microphone back to Higgins. He slid the NVDs off his head and switched them off to save the batteries. "We're back."
"Let's have it, guys."
Quietly, turning a red-filtered flashlight on one of the NSA maps of the area faxed to them earlier from Washington, Roselli showed Murdock where he and Sterling had been. "Four sentries here," he said, pointing. "This part of the road is clear… and over here too. We made it as far up the hill above the main road as this part of the cliff. No other hostiles. No alarms. And no sign that we're expected."
"Okay," Murdock said, nodding. "Olympus says that Chariot is set to ride, but Achilles is late."
"Damn. How late, L-T?"
"We won't know until they get to San Vito, will we?" A grim smile showed in the darkness. "But we're to Charlie Mike."
Continue mission. "I'd damn well say we'd better. Shit, L-T, we're close enough to smell the tangos. If they told us to abort and extract, I'd be damned tempted to develop fucking radio trouble."
"You and me both, Razor." A rustle in the vegetation upslope, and the softly whispered sign and countersign, warned of DeWitt's return.
"Hello, L-T," DeWitt said softly. "You guys here having a picnic on the beach?"
"Pull up a rock, Two-Eyes. Whatcha find?"
DeWitt took the NSA map, pulled a pencil from his vest, and began pointing out the route his patrol had taken. "Two decent approaches, L-T, unless you're partial to going up the access road?"
"I don't think this time."
"Thought not. Okay, we got as far around the front of the castle as here. The structure really is built into the side of the mountain. The south slope isn't too bad… about thirty percent up through here, and we could climb that without too much difficulty. If we work our way up this cliff here, on the southeast corner, we could climb this rock face, fix lines to the edge about here, and rappel onto the outer ward wall."
"That's fine," Murdock said, studying the map. "Except that we'll be coming over the east wall, which seems to be where they expect us."
Gorazamak's weakness was the cliff rising behind its east wall, a tactical disadvantage that hadn't worried the Ottoman ruler who'd built it since the tower was little more than a police outpost on the road to Korc, not a bastion expected to withstand a siege. The bad guys inside could be counted on to have the wall beneath the eastern cliffs thoroughly covered with fire.
"Right. Well, the other approach could be tricky with all the ice and snow, but it's up this way." He pointed to a narrow ravine northwest of the outer castle wall and south of the access road. A stone bridge crossed the ravine just outside Gorazamak's gate tower. "Red says he could scale that, no sweat, and drop lines to the rest of us. The ravine is pretty narrow in through here, more like a chimney than anything else. We climb up and come out by the bridge."
"Right outside the main gate?"
"Two possibilities. We take out the guards at the front gate quietly and walk right in. Or we climb the wall here… or here. The gate tower sticks out from the wall about a meter or so. We could pull a ninja-of-the-night stunt and go right over the top without being seen. Advantage too is that the power lines for the place go in right here, next to the gate."
"They'll have a generator."
"Which probably hasn't been used for a while. It'll take time to find the damned thing and crank it up."
Murdock nodded. Roselli could almost hear the wheels turning. When the L-T had first taken command of Third Platoon, Roselli had had his doubts about the man. Shit, the guy was a ring-knocker, an Academy grad, and though that kind of crap might sit well with the bean-counters at the Navy Department, it didn't mean a hell of a lot in the field. Men had died in combat because their officers were too tight-assed to blend well with their men.
The Teams were just that… teams, and a man's background or wealth or family or political connections didn't cut him a damned thing when it came to that special warrior's brotherhood shared by all who'd gone through BUD/S and won their Budweisers.
Murdock was different. He cared for his men, loved his men… and they loved him back. It wasn't a thing that most SEALs could put into words; hell, they wouldn't even try. But Roselli had seen the look in Murdock's eyes when they'd reached the beach earlier and confirmed that Ellsworth was missing. At that moment, Roselli had known that he would follow Murdock anywhere, up the face of a sheer cliff, into a storm of automatic-weapons fire, straight into Hell if he had to. Because he cared for his people.
"You know," Murdock said softly, "it's just possible that we could manage both approaches. How about if we try this?"