The Callsign (2 page)

"Reaper, I'm coming up. You got an anchor?" "Yeah. Inside the third floor window. It's open now. You see it?"

I flipped over the wall and landed softly on my feet in the alley. I could see the old window cracked a smidgen, a small pen.light flashing.

"I got it. Retro, what's your status?"

"Working it now. They just confirmed entry with headquarters on the scanner. From the radio calls, they're searching the first floor slow and methodical."

I went to the corner and started to climb, using the rough-hewn granite blocks as hand-and footholds. I'd reached the second floor when Retro called again.

"They've found the busted door. They're now focused on it and the stairwell leading up." "Jesus Christ! What the hell are you doing? Trip the damn alarm."

"I'm working it. The door has four different locks and is steel plate. You want me to go out front and chuck a rock through the window?"

"Get it done. Now." I kept climbing. I began wondering whether we should try subduing the cops in order to escape, knowing I was pushing a seriously bad idea.

I reached the third floor and was pulled in by Reaper. Kranz said, "Got the intel."

Like that would make up for the disaster we were in. The guy didn't even realize the stakes he had created, as if the cops them.selves were part of the exercise.

I said nothing to him, simply whispering to Reaper, "Where's the anchor? I need to put in a full loop so we can retrieve the rope once we're on the ground."

He showed me an old cast-iron radiator, long dead but still in.stalled, and I looped the rope through it, feeding it out the win.dow until both halves of the line draped down the sixty feet to the ground, no knots involved. I was turning to get Kranz out first when I saw a light flash from the stairwell.

Shit. They're coming up.

I hissed, "Get your ass out of here. Slide down the rope."

Kranz said, "I don't have any gloves."

Jesus. That means there are fingerprints all over the place.

I grabbed his collar, jerked him to my face and said in a low whisper, "Get your ass out of here. I don't give a shit if you leave your palms on the rope. Get out, or I'm going to fucking throw you out."

His eyes wide, he nodded and climbed through the window.

"Reaper," I whispered, "you think you can disarm that cop without injuring him?" He glanced at the light and said, "Pike, I don't know. I go for it and miss, I'll have to hurt him to keep him from shooting me." He watched the beam, now bobbing brighter, and said, "Shit. I don't know."

I slowly nodded, understanding that the decision was mine. I leaned out the window and saw Kranz was close enough to let go and jump.

"Get out the window. Get away. Jesse is stationed for pickup. If I'm not out, get Kurt on the line. Let him know I've been arrested."

Reaper looked at the window, then at me and said, "I'll do it. I can take him down.'' I smiled, taking a liking to my only squid. "Yeah, I'm sure you could. With the help of some Army guys. Get out."

He started to say something else, and the light flashed into the room for the first time, a small glimmer that meant the guy was now on our floor. I pointed to the window and moved to the blind side of the door.

Reaper disappeared from view, and I remembered the rope. If I were caught now, they'd know I wasn't alone. But I would need it for a hasty exit. Once I disabled this guy if I disabled this guy I couldn't afford a slow building climb. I would need speed above all else.

Man, this exercise is really sucking.

From the hallway, the reflection of the flashlight bounced through the room again, this time much brighter, and I pressed myself against the wall. I saw it splash into the room proper and felt my pulse race, the adrenaline flowing through me.

I moved into a fighting crouch, waiting for him to breach the door, when the alarm from the gallery pierced the night. The flashlight paused, the police officer's radio exploding in a cacophony of voices.

And then it disappeared back down the stairwell.

Colonel Kurt Hale turned from the computer screen and shouted behind him, "Mike, for the love of God, tell those guys to quit hammering!"

"Sir, if you want the renovations done quickly, I can't keep shutting them down every time you need to talk on the phone."

Kurt squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his temples. When he opened them again, Mike saw the danger lurking behind his scowl and scurried out of the office, yelling at the construction crew. When it was quiet again, Kurt said, "Okay, Pike, continue."

"We got the beddown location from the real-estate office and placed a beacon on his car last night, but I'm not sure we can execute a hit in one cycle of darkness."

"Didn't you get the intel dump from the targeting cell? Didn't they neck down his probable activities?" Kurt saw Pike scowl over the VPN, then heard, "Can I speak freely here, sir?"

"By all means."

Pike turned to look behind him, ensuring he was alone, then said, "This whole exercise is a cluster-fuck."

Kurt felt like he'd been slapped.

Pike continued. "I know you set it up, putting in the roleplayers and inventing the scenario, but there's too many fake things, which are leading to false confidence. I mean, we go through our entire mission profile to figure out where the target lives so we can develop a pattern of life, then intel hands us his future location on a silver platter, making that whole mission worthless. It should take us weeks or months to figure out his pattern of life, and we get it handed to us. It isn't realistic."

Kurt said, "Come on, Pike, I can't run an exercise for two months."

"I know, I know, but there's got to be a happy medium. I mean, the exfil plan is dictating my operation. I'm told a boat exfil for the target at oh-two-hundred tomorrow, but I don't even know if I'll have the target. It's canned. Way too canned. I need to make my men think. To solve problems. Not sit back and wait on headquarters to feed us the answer."

"Whoa. Hold on," Kurt said. "Have you ever been on an exercise that duplicated combat? Ever? I can't invent the variables that will happen in combat and still maintain control over the exercise. You know that. Especially with this unit. Compromise on an exercise is the same as compromise for real. We have nothing to fall back on."

"That's not what I meant. This one actually did duplicate com.bat exactly for the reasons you just stated. The stakes became very, very high. It's just that you never used to hand us answers. Back in the unit you trusted us to solve the problem, and enjoyed making the problem hard. It's like you threw these teams together and don't trust them."

Kurt was considering what to say when Pike's next words gave him pause. "And I'm with you. I'm not sure I trust the team you gave me either."

"What do you mean?"

Pike relayed last night's activities, ending with, "You forced me to take this double-oh superspy as a two IC, and he's show.ing his ass."

"Pike, we're not in the unit anymore," Kurt countered. "We have a much, much harder mission and we're going to need to leverage the expertise. It's not all door-kicking, and the CIA guys know that arena better than us."

"Bullshit! He might know the tactics, but his judgment is shit. Send me, Retro, and Bull to the damn training courses. This isn't rocket science."

"I don't have time to do that. I'm under some pressure to get operational. Bottom line: I expect you to lead. Get him to do what you want. It's no different than the leadership challenges you had in the Ranger regiment."

"Jesus, sir! That was a long time ago with way less sensitive missions than what you're asking me to do now."

Kurt bristled at the exchange, letting a little of the pressure he was experiencing seep out. "End of discussion, damn it. I've got a target and I'm briefing the Oversight Council in an hour. I'm trying to get Alpha authority to send you overseas. You want me to pick the other team?"

The Taskforce called each phase of the operation a different letter of the Greek alphabet, with alpha being the initial introduction of forces. Which, to this point, had never happened. The pixilation of the screen did nothing to hide Pike's surprise.

"A live target? No exercise?"

"Yes. In Yemen. An easy one. A confidence target. No kill/capture on the terrorist."

"What's his status?"

"He's a passport guy. Someone that knows the identities for

operational terrorists. We don't want to take him out and spike that he's blown. We just want his computer." "And you think we're ready to do that? Operational cover's ready?"

"You tell me."

Pike paused, and Kurt could see he was torn. Soldiers like him were few and far between. Ones that would always run to the sound of the guns, always want to be on the X in the middle of the mission. But one who also had the intellect and judgment to back off when necessary, to assess and explore both friendly and enemy weaknesses which is why he had been recruited in the first place. Kurt knew Pike would make a call he believed in, just as he had with the exercise.

"Sir, you remember when you had us all read about the formation of the OSS? Saying there were parallels with today's fight? Well, there are. The OSS grew too fast and tried to do too much initially. They made a lot of mistakes, but nobody was looking because it was World War Two. We don't have that luxury."

"So you're saying let this guy go?"

"No. I'm saying we need to learn from OSS's mistakes. From our mistakes. The success or failure of this organization won't be with the widgets or the cover. It will be with the men. Sooner or later we're going to be called upon to snatch a guy in a sovereign country without a trace, and we can't do that with teams made up of someone else's idea of what right looks like."

"Meaning?"

"I'll go get this guy's computer. I'm pretty sure we can do that. But when this is done, we need to establish some assessment and selection criteria. Something created by us for us."

Inwardly, Kurt breathed a sigh of relief and realized he had been trying to do too much on his own. He hadn't trusted his men, precisely because of the reasons Pike had stated. Outside of the ones he had personally recruited, like Pike, he had no idea of their capabilities.

But he did know the capabilities of some. And it was time to leverage that.

Inside the parking garage under his office, Kurt waited in his car on his deputy commander, absently watching some workers cementing a brass placard next to a door.

Blaisdell Consulting.
A simple bit of camouflage that hid what really went on upstairs. Just like the Office of Strategic Services's building on E. Street in World War II.

Pike had been right about the OSS. While they eventually had become very effective, initially they made a tremendous amount of mistakes, most centered on bad ideas propagated by people who didn't have the skills for the arena they were entering. People who had been selected solely because of friendships or prior working relationships. The one area that had proven successful was Operation Jedburgh, in which Special Forces had parachuted behind enemy lines into France, Belgium, and Holland. Those teams had gone through a rigorous selection process prior to becoming operational, a fact that hammered home what Pike had said.

He saw George W olffe through the glass of the door and pulled the car around. Soon they were crossing the Roosevelt Bridge, leaving Clarendon behind and entering Washington, D.C., with George engaging in small talk.

Getting bogged down in traffic, Kurt stopped the chitchat with a pointed question. "How were the CIA guys picked for Project Prometheus? Who made those decisions?"

Although he had come over from the CIA's National Clandestine Service, George Wolffe had been handpicked by Kurt and was a close friend as well as second-in-command of the entire project. The question caught him off guard.

"Why? Is there a manning issue?"

"I don't know. Might be. Could also just be a little bit of wolfpack infighting for alpha male."

"Well, unlike you, I didn't get to handpick from the NCS. I nominated and then was told who was coming over. I could have vetoed, but that would have just left an open spot. The power brokers who are read on to this project aren't exactly one hundred percent supportive. They think we're stomping on their turf."

"So how do you know if the guy's worth a shit? What's the cut line? No offense, but my guys have all been through multiple assessment and selection courses to get to where they were before I asked them to join. How does the CIA do that? Is it just the course at the Farm?"

"No. It's more of a performance check after that. Seeing how they act under pressure in situations that I felt we would encounter. There aren't any tea-and-crumpet guys on the list. All were picked from hardship tours. Who's this about?"

"Kranz. Pike thinks he has some judgment issues. What do you think?"

George said nothing for a moment, choosing his words. "He's one of the guys that was forced on me as a replacement for my choice, who was 'unavailable.' He's done some seriously dangerous work in his career, but I don't really know him. After checking, the word I got back was that he was a little bit of a blowhard, but competent."

Kurt pulled up to the West Wing security gate of the White House and said, "Competent may not be enough for what we're asking him to do."

* * *

Kurt fidgeted at the head of the table, waiting on President Payton Warren before starting his briefing. He went over in his mind what he was going to say at this meeting, the first Oversight Council conference where he would ask permission to launch a team.

Already seated when he arrived, the secretary of defense and the secretary of state had tried to get an inside look, but Kurt had begged off. The director of central intelligence had simply said hello to George, then remained silent.

Five minutes past the appointed time, President Warren entered the White House situation room, followed by his national security advisor, Alexander Palmer.