First Sergeant Warren Cooke had been thinking that he wished he had more tape. This was the middle of his third tour with the Special Forces and in his experience it was the little things that tripped you up. Careful preparation could mean the difference between bringing your people home safe or in pieces.
He knew deep down that the team he had been training was almost ready to go operational. Almost. And that nagged at him. When the orders came down to get the team saddled up, he was surprised, but obeyed. He was, after all, a soldier. But he still worried.
He had taped his equipment down and secured his pants legs and sleeves so that there would be as little noise as possible when he moved through the underbrush. In an operation of this type, noise was your enemy. Battle rattle was as dangerous as any bad guy. He had been checking his people out as well. They had tried to emulate his actions, but needed a bit more practice. He wished he had more tape.
His A-Team had been working with the Filipino Special Forces for months now. It was the sort of training assignment that was nothing new for Special Forces troopers, but the rules of engagement in a post-9/11 world had made the work more interesting. Typically, you worked with the locals on things that were second nature in the Special Forces: stealth and fire discipline, careful planning, and cold precise execution in even the hottest of free-fire zones. Depending on where you were, the raw material you worked with varied greatly. In the Philippines, the soldiers Cooke worked with were bright and motivated, which was half the battle. There were rumors that their senior officers sold off some supplies on the black market, but that had little impact on Cooke and his daily job. The Filipinos were relatively small men, wearing jungle pattern camo and baseball hats that made them look like eager teenagers. But Cooke had to concede; they had the potential to develop into an effective fighting force. If they survived the mission.
The new rules of engagement meant that the A-Team members now had more opportunity to work directly with their Filipino counterparts in anti-terrorist operations. From Cooke’s perspective, this was a good thing. He had worked too long and hard with these troops to see them wasted. His presence might help them live long enough to learn their trade. Besides, whatever his reluctance, he knew that they would have to face the test of fire sometime— you could do all the practice drills you wanted but there was no substitute for what you could learn in actual combat. And, in cases where targets were confirmed terrorist elements—what they called CTEs—Cooke and the other SF troopers were authorized to use deadly force at their discretion.
So Cooke and two other Americans from the First Special Forces Group—Abruzessi and Barnes—were going along on this operation. Technically, they were observers and advisors, but any time he went into the field, he did so with the expectation that he’d be in a firefight. He had a silenced nine-millimeter automatic strapped to his leg, a combat knife on his harness, and three concussion grenades. A twelve-gauge combat shotgun hung, muzzle down, from his back, and an M-4 carbine with a folding sock was clipped to his front. It was the older model, with a rate of fire selections for single fire and short bursts. Cooke liked it that way. He knew troopers in Afghanistan with the newer, fully-auto option on the M-4 and they said it tended to overheat. Cooke liked to stick with what worked. His load was completed with ten, thirty-round magazines of ammunition, a radio transmitter that fed into an earplug, chemical sticks that glowed when twisted, and field dressings that made his harness pouches and the pockets of his fatigues bulge. A soft camelback canteen hung down his spine. Each time you went into an operation, the gear you carried seemed to multiply exponentially. It took a while to figure out what you really needed and how to stow it. Invariably, you ended up not using something or wishing you had something else. The trick was to strike a happy medium.
This operation had two objectives: the disruption of a terrorist cell affiliated with Abu Sayeff, and the collection of any intelligence regarding plans and personnel. But the data snatch was decidedly secondary. The Philippine government was looking for a dramatic strike against Muslim insurgents. This op was as much about PR value as it was about anything else. Filipino intelligence had been sniffing around a remote farmhouse on the northern Mindanao coast. Over the last few months, they’d verified its use as a center for local terrorist training. When a tip came in regarding a meeting that was to draw in the heads of local cells, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Yet, tonight’s mission made him uneasy. The planning felt rushed, particularly with the team just beginning to get its act together. Cooke had raised the issue of a delay to get some better intel, but he was ignored; they were going in anyway. The situation was a bit more fluid than Cooke was comfortable with, but very little was perfect in his world. He sighed.
Cooke was a soldier, however, and he kept the feeling off his face and out of his voice. The strike force had offloaded from trucks, and while the Filipinos checked their gear, he went over procedure one more time. “Okay,” Cooke began, gesturing to the two other Green Berets, Abruzessi and Barnes, and unfolding a map. “Here’s the target. It’s three clicks down this artery from the main road. It sits on about two cleared acres. Three hundred meters north of the building is the river, which is navigable right down to the coast. Activity is equally divided between the road and the dock there. You can see the ocean from the dock—approximately eighty meters. We can expect them to have a boat moored there tonight.” Joe Abruzessi—Joey Z—nodded along with the narrative. Barnes didn’t move anything but his eyes.
“We’ve got three insertion points. Joey, you’re with the squad approaching from upriver, heading to this point . . . ” his finger came down on the map and Abruzessi picked up the narrative.
“I got the GPS coordinates as well as visuals. Once there, we move inland to cover the eastern flank of the clearing and the boat dock.”
“Me and the other team approach from the west and do the same on the other flank,” Barnes added.
“I come in from the south and set up as a blocking force where the road enters the clearing,” Cooke said. In his mind, he could envisage it—a large V with the point flattened and its broad opening toward the river. The farmhouse sat in the middle of the V. “Your people with LGs clear on their role?”
Barnes and Joey Z nodded. The LGs—long guns—were the snipers. Barnes’ squad was to eliminate the boat crew. Abruzessi’s was to cover the route down to the dock. The idea was to have Cooke’s people secure the building and provide any retreating terrorists with the idea that they could escape via the river. But escape would only come in one of two ways. Any armed resistance was to be met with lethal force. Those who surrendered would face a hard season of interrogation by the Philippine Secret Service. Cooke didn’t think either option was too great.
“Okay,” Cooke said. “My main concern here is fire discipline.” It wasn’t an indictment against the Filipinos. The plain fact of the matter was that any time you got a bunch of young, aggressive men together and armed them with high velocity firearms, they posed as great a danger to each other as to the enemy. “We’ll sweep in from the south. I’m hoping we can get in there before they know what’s happening. But keep your heads down. Walls will not provide cover—rounds will go right through them and keep going. If the bad guys move toward the docks, make sure your people keep within the planned fields of fire.
“We’ve got command affirmation on CTE status, so our presence in the field is a go,” Cooke continued. “Fifteen to twenty people in the building. All bad actors. Lieutenant Aguilar is in nominal command of the op. He’s been outstanding during his training with us. Basically, we do this with them by the numbers, and try to keep them from making major mistakes, but we can take whatever action we determine is necessary if the wheels come off.”
“Outstanding,” Abruzessi said. “This is much better than Columbia.” It was his first tour with the First SFG, which had its primary field of operations in Asia. The three men looked at each other and silently agreed. They had all been shot at more than once. It was nice to be able to shoot back.
The two elements that made Cooke uneasy on any operation were the insertion and the extraction. Target approach was always a challenge; the slightest thing could give you away. Extraction had a different dynamic and was often more hairy, but this night they were in a nominally friendly environment and he wasn’t too worried about that. His focus was on the approach. He and the Filipino Special Forces’ troopers moved with exquisite care as they made their way through the forest that surrounded the farmhouse.
You never took the road. That was rule number one. The Filipino Lieutenant Aguilar had kept his group together fifty meters in from one side of the dirt road that led north from the main highway. The bush was alive with noise. Tree leaves rustled in the breeze, small animals scurried about in the underbrush, insects whirred and hummed, and the careful passage of nine heavily armed men was swallowed up in the night noise of a tropical forest.
At one point, the buzz of a small motorbike froze them in their tracks. They could hear it getting louder as it made its way toward them down the dirt road, the beam of light from its headlamp bouncing among the trees. The soldiers sank silently to the ground in a smooth ripple. Cooke watched their reaction with approval. The sound of the motorbike faded as it approached the main road. Cooke hoped the blocking force there snapped the rider up without too much fuss.
The soldiers waited, breathing quietly in the moist darkness. No sound from the main road.
Good
. Aguilar motioned the advance, and it began again. They were using night vision goggles, and they were familiar enough with them to move without too much of the exaggerated head movements that people tended to use when they first wore them. It made navigation easier, but when the point man came back to report the building in sight, Cooke and Aguilar flipped their goggles up to confer.
“We are set, Sergeant,” Aguilar breathed, avoiding the sibilant tones of a whisper. Cooke nodded, even though it was doubtful Aguilar could see him. Aside from the darkness, Cooke’s skin was dark brown and covered with face paint to decrease the sheen of perspiration that might catch light. Cooke had a fleeting thought,
this is a long way from Detroit
, but he pushed it aside and waited for Aguilar to continue.
The young officer flipped a cover off a luminous watch face. The other teams were to report in sometime in the next twenty minutes or so. The squad knelt in a defensive arc, keeping good noise discipline. Cooke nodded again in satisfaction. They had developed the knack of the good soldier; they knew how to wait in silence.
He felt the sweat sliding down the curve in his back. He sipped quietly from his camelback and listened impassively as a mosquito whined by his ear. The troops were equally still, and he liked the fact that they seemed contained and ready. After a while, he heard the squelch of the radio in his earpiece. One squelch for Alpha. The east force was in place. Not ten seconds latter, two squelches on the radio told them Bravo had arrived on the other side of the V.
A soft touch on his shoulder from Aguilar warned Cooke that his troopers were on the move. They crept to the edge of the clearing, flankers out. They all scanned intently with their night goggles, looking in the washed out green for the bright optical signatures that would reveal sentries. They waited and watched for movement.
The building was constructed of some sort of adobe, big enough for multiple rooms. A veranda faced them, and their view of the door was partially blocked by the overhanging tin roof. They would have to be careful with the approach; the wooden floor of the veranda could give them away. Windows spilled light out into the night. Cooke could hear the sound of a generator from the rear of the building. It sounded like a diesel engine to him and he sniffed the air, almost imagining he could detect the exhaust’s odor. He had grown up in the city, and diesel always smelled like home. He let the fleeting thought fade away and stayed focused on the here and now. He swept the target, looking, feeling. He sampled the air for the telltale smell of a sentry’s tobacco. But nothing registered. Mostly, he smelled the rich dirt smell of decaying things, his own sweat, and the faint scent of oiled metal.
Aguilar pulled them back from the edge of the clearing and into a circle. Cooke looked at him without saying anything. There was enough ambient light this close to the clearing for him to see. The young Filipino spoke to his men in a quiet, calm voice, giving final orders: “You two men around the building to cut the generator on my command. Sergeant Bantay, take Gumato and Inclan to the front door to blow it. The rest of the squad—line up to pile in the entrance while the targets are still stunned by the explosion.” Aguilar glanced at Cooke only once, and the older American nodded slightly in encouragement. Aguilar squelched his transmitter four times, sending the agreed signal for the assault to Alpha and Bravo.
Aguilar’s team slipped across the clearing. Two men whipped around the corner, going for the generator. Cooke could hear voices inside. This was the moment of greatest risk—the moment before the assault, when the team was outside the building, exposed in the clearing. They waited for the interior to be plunged into darkness. Cooke could feel his heart beating faintly. The Filipino troopers were crouched and ready, waiting. Cooke wished they’d pull the plug on that generator. Aguilar was whispering into his microphone. Cooke came up to him. “What?”
“The generator is in a locked shed. They cannot get in.”
Shit. The aerial surveillance photos hadn’t been angled enough to reveal that sort of detail. It’s always the little things. “They’ll have to blow it,” Cooke told the Lieutenant. The message was relayed. As the others waited, the soldiers charged with assaulting the door inched slowly toward it, easing across the veranda.