Skibicki immediately began barking commands, moving people about until they had enough room between each soldier to do the exercises. Then they began: pushups, situps, crunches — a whole regimen of muscle-numbing work.
Boomer had thought he was in shape, but the older man put them through exercises Boomer hadn’t done since he’d gone to scuba school several years ago. He noted Sergeant Vasquez at the front of the PT formation.
She was quite an impressive figure in shorts and T-shirt as she pumped out pushups, the muscles in her arms rippling from the exertion.
In twenty minutes, they were done. Skibicki reformed the unit and returned it to Colonel Falk. The XO gave instructions for the various ability group runs and dismissed the soldiers to finish the physical training on their own. He waved for Boomer to come over as the groups dispersed.
“I’d like you to meet our sergeant major,” Falk said, indicating Skibicki.
“This is Major Boomer Watson. Major, Sergeant Major Skibicki.”
“Sir,” Skibicki extended a callused hand. Boomer met the hard grip and they stared at each other for a second before the sergeant major let go.
“Skibicki’s the man you need if there’s anything you want,” Falk said.
He pushed a button on his watch.
“Well, I’ve got to get running.” With that, the Colonel took off, his skinny legs carrying him rapidly away.
“Where are you in from, if you don’t mind me asking?” Skibicki said.
“I’d prefer not to say,” Boomer replied.
Skibicki nodded to himself, accepting the sentence as a fact rather than a rebuke. Boomer figured Skibicki could find out more about him with one phone call using the NCO old boy network than he himself could tell him.
Skibicki cocked his head like an old dog trying to remember a scent.
“Was your father in the service?” he asked.
Boomer nodded. “Yes.”
“Mike Watson? Special Forces?”
“Yes.”
Skibicki nodded.
“I thought so. I served with him in Vietnam. He was a good man. He saved my life.”
Boomer stiffened. He’d never met anyone who’d known his dad in Vietnam. He’d read the official notification of death and pored over the Medal of Honor citation numerous times, but the pieces of paper gave him little information.
“Were you with him when he was killed?”
Skibicki grimaced and tapped the left side of his head where Boomer had noticed the slight depression in the skull.
“I got hit in the head during that mission. Damn near killed me. Now I got a steel plate. I was a young E-Five, full of piss and vinegar on my first tour with Special Forces.
Your dad got me out of there still breathing.”
Boomer leaned forward.
“I’d like to talk with you about my dad. I never really knew him or what happened.”
Skibicki nodded.
“You were what — nine, ten? — when he died?”
“Ten.”
“I remember him having pictures of his wife and son in the team house at the launch site. He was a good man.”
Skibicki idly rubbed the side of his head.
“Are you sure you want to know what happened?”
“Of course I want to know,” Boomer said.
The sergeant major looked at him hard.
“You know the saying’let sleeping dogs sleep?” or something like that.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you don’t want to know what happened to your dad.”
Boomer returned the sergeant major’s look, his body stiffening.
“I want to know.”
Skibicki nodded “OK.
“You’re going to be here a while, right? We’ll talk. Right now, we need to finish PT.”
“Sir, there’s an encrypted message for the commander in here,” Boomer held out the one-inch binder that he’d picked up from the Fort Shafter Secure Communication/ Intelligence Facility (SCIF). The binder contained all the classified messages for the TASOSC received during the past twenty-four hours.
“All the rest is routine traffic decoded by the SCIF and I’ve Xeroxed copies and put them in the appropriate boxes.”
Lieutenant Colonel Falk looked up from the mound of paperwork that always covered his desk. He turned around and pulled open the drawer of a secure file cabinet behind him. Falk removed a small pad and tossed it to Boomer.
“Break out the message and give me a hard copy to put in the CO’s reading file.” He noted Boomer’s surprise.
“I know that isn’t the way it’s supposed to be done, but Colonel Coulder’s time is too important — or at least that’s what he thinks — to be wasted on breaking out messages, and he delegated it to me, and I’m delegating it to you.
Like you said yesterday, you do have a TS Q clearance.
He’s got a briefing at 0900 in the conference room and I don’t have time right now.”
“Yes, sir,” Boomer said, taking the onetime pad with him to his desk in the next tunnel. Sergeant major Skibicki wasn’t in from PT, and Boomer was anxious to talk to him.
Boomer sat down and matched up the page number on the pad to the indicator at the start of the message. A onetime pad consists of sheets of six-letter groups. Boomer took the unintelligible six-letter groups on the actual message, matched them with the randomly generated groups on the onetime pad and, using a tri graph which had standard three-letter combinations, he was able to decipher the message.
Despite all the advances in technology, a onetime pad was still the most secure way to send a message because there were only two copies of the pads in existence-the sender had one and the receiver had one.
Because the pad letters were randomly generated by a computer, there was no “code” involved that could eventually be broken down.
The only problem, thus Boomer’s surprise, was that the owner of the onetime pad was supposed to be the one decoding the message. Having someone else do it was a breach of security. Boomer knew that on A teams, detachment commanders sometimes gave the team pads to their communications sergeants to make message sending and receiving easier because commo men had the three letter groups on the tri graph memorized, but he’d never agreed with that policy. He also wondered why the TASOSC commander was even using a onetime pad given the sophisticated transmitting and receiving machinery available at the Fort Shafter SCIF. An A Team used the pads because they only had a limited capability to carry encrypting machinery — thus the code itself had to be unbreakable. At fixed stations like Fort Shafter, the encryption usually was in the sending and receiving technology.
The letters flowed out under Boomer’s pencil and the message slowly took form. He was surprised to see a Javis report appear — a format for a water drop zone report used by Special Forces.
Boomer took the deciphered six letter groups and made sense of them on another sheet of paper:
TO: COMMANDER FOURTH TASOSC
FROM: TASK FORCE REAPER JAVIS
MESSAGE CITE ZERO ONE SIX FOUR THREE AAA GUMBO SHARK BBB FOUR TWO ECHO JULIET SEVEN FOUR FIVE EIGHT EIGHT ZERO CCC ONE EIGHT SIX DEG COAST GUARD LIGHT ONE POINT EIGHT KILOMETERS
DDD ONE ZERO ZERO BY SEVEN TWO ZERO AXIS ZERO ZERO SIX DEG
EEE ONE TWO ZERO DASH EIGHT ZERO FFP ZERO ZERO SIX DEG GGG EIGHT ZERO TO ONE TWO ZERO MOUNTAINS HHH IR STROBE MARK RP
III INFILTRATION FOURTEEN PERSONNEL TWO BUNDLE JJJ DTG TWO DECEMBER ONE TWO ZERO ZERO ZULU
As Boomer finished, a shadow appeared over his desk.
He looked up into the cold gray eyes of the full-bird colonel he’d glimpsed at a distance during PT. Boomer glanced down at the nametag on the man’s starched fatigues and confirmed the identification: coulder “What are you doing, major?” The voice was the same high-pitched one he’d heard coming from Coulder’s office the previous day.
Boomer snapped to his feet, holding out the piece of paper on which he had just written the formatted message.