“But … where are we going?” Curtis asked.
“South. We have an alternate means of extraction that will pick us up.”
The black CIA man shook his head. “No. South is desert. We get out in the open and they will have a chopper on your little rally point inside of ten minutes. The JSO has people inside the police and the air force. You three guys and your peashooters are going to be outmatched by a Hind with rocket pods.”
Kolt shrugged. Looked at Marris and then at Curtis. “Then we’ll need to disappear in five minutes, won’t we?”
Slapshot chuckled and then said, “Before we turn into pumpkins.”
Curtis looked utterly confused.
Kolt said, “Relax. We have air assets en route. We know what we’re doing. We’re frequent flyers.”
“Why the hell do I not know about these air assets?” Curtis asked.
Kolt nodded. “Not a clue. Take that up with your office.” Then he looked around the car, began eyeing Dr. Marris. “Tripwire looks like he’s about a deuce and a half. What are you, Curtis? ’Bout one-sixty-five soaking wet?”
Curtis recognized the reason behind the question. He just said softly, “Oh, God.”
* * *
Digger’s slick driving lost the two vans before he made it out of the congestion of the city, but Kolt had no illusions that the men in the vehicles had not reported to their superiors that the fleeing UN inspector and his protection force were heading out of town to the south.
They sped southeast on Ayn Zarah Road, passing fruit orchards and undeveloped land on both sides of the blacktop. Their tires kicked up dust that seemed to increase the farther they fled from the center of Tripoli.
Soon Digger made a hard left off of Ayn Zarah and onto a narrow paved road. As he cleared the intersection, a VW bus pulled out of a grove of fruit trees and rolled into the street behind him. The minibus stopped in the lane, effectively blocking any traffic off of Ayn Zarah. Two men climbed out of the VW and went around to the back, where they lifted the rear engine access panel of the vehicle.
“Bad guys?” Digger asked.
“Negative. They work for the airlines,” Kolt answered as he keyed his radio’s mic to make a commo check with the blocking force.
Digger floored it on the straight and empty road, raced a quarter mile up to the east, and then slowed and parked the car there so as to block both lanes of traffic.
“Hold it here!” Kolt instructed.
“What are we doing?” Curtis asked now, but Raynor held up a hand to listen to a radio transmission in his earpiece.
“Thirty seconds out,” said a small voice in his ear.
“Roger that,” Kolt said in response to the call, and then he transmitted to the men up the road pretending to work on their VW bus. “Blocker One, we secure?”
“You’re clear for now,” came the reply from one of the men up the road.
These men were from Air Cell, a unit of secret air assets operated by the United States government and available for clandestine work around the world. Air Cell had pulled Kolt and his mates out of a jam or two in his time in the Unit, and he trusted the pilots and support crew to get him out of his current predicament.
Marris started to ask again just what the hell was going on when a small blue and white high-winged single-engine aircraft appeared over the top of the VW bus up the road. It touched down on the empty road seconds later. It barely slowed after its wheels hit the pavement; instead it raced all the way up to the five men in the car blocking any traffic from the east, and then turned around, aiming its nose again to the west.
Over the loud buzz of the propeller, Raynor heard a transmission from Blocker One. “Unfriendlies inbound from the north! Two vans, hauling ass. ETA one mike.”
Kolt shouted to the car, “Shit. Bad guys will be here in one minute. Everyone double-time it on board the plane!”
Curtis and Slapshot did not need any prodding; they leapt from the car and climbed in back of the impossibly tight cabin of the plane.
Kolt pulled Marris from the car, but he would not walk forward. “I’ll guide you,” Raynor said as he pushed on the bigger man, but Marris did not budge. He was still hooded, and still in a noncompliant mood.
“Get in, Dr. Marris,” said Raynor, his hand tight on Marris’s jacket. Tight enough to insinuate that he would be dragged aboard the aircraft if he did not get in on his own power. The big man did not fight the American this time; he stumbled forward and then climbed into the aircraft, and Digger followed and strapped in next to him.
Kolt himself sat in the tiny copilot seat of the plane. He put on the headset stowed in front of him and spoke into the mic quickly. “Eleven hundred pounds, plus or minus fifty. We gonna be too heavy?”
“I’ll get us out of here,” the silver-haired pilot responded in his mic, and then he pushed the throttle all the way to 100 percent power.
Kolt pulled the little cabin door shut.
This Argentine-made Aero Boero AB-180 was ideal for STOL (short take-off and landing) work. It was a lightweight tail-dragger specially customized for clandestine duties, with a larger engine and a smaller gas tank.
With a total of six tiny seats, including the pilot’s, this mission was barely within the envelope for the aircraft’s capabilities.
The AB-180 picked up speed quickly, but as far as Raynor was concerned, they were getting dangerously close to the VW bus blocking their path ahead.
And just when Kolt felt confident that they would make it into the air and over the bus, the two rust-colored vans raced into the road in front of the VW. The enemy vehicles had made their way around the parked bus by driving right through the fruit orchard. They barreled down on the approaching single-engine aircraft, dust kicking up around their tires.
Behind the vans, the Air Cell support men darted into the orchard, leaving the VW right were it was parked. There was nothing more these two men could do but extricate themselves from the scene.
As the vans approached, the pilot spoke into his mic. “Somebody wants to play chicken.”
Kolt, asked, “What’s the plan, old-timer?”
The pilot did not move his hand from the throttle or turn his head toward the question. “I’ve got to fly this baby, so I’m going to keep my eyes open, but you might want to shut yours. This is going to be a might close.”
Raynor sank back in the chair and fastened his seat belt. He realized he was growing tired of dramatic air travel.
But he did not close his eyes. When the first of the vans and the nose of the AB-180 were less than one hundred feet from one another, the pilot pulled back on his stick, then drew it to the right. The plane’s nose lifted skyward and then the aircraft’s wings banked hard to the right. The plane climbed slowly into the air, and seemed to hang over the edge of the roadway and the orchard to the north of the road.
The two vans shot by to the left of the aircraft, the first one missing the low tail of the plane by fewer than eight feet.
Digger called from the back with nervous laughter, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
In the copilot’s seat, Kolt, a decade older than Digger, blew out a long sigh of relief.
* * *
The Air Cell pilot turned the plane to the southeast, and within minutes they were flying at five thousand feet over a landscape of desolate desert.
Unsure of who was sitting next to him, the hooded Canadian asked Slapshot, “What are you going to do with me now?”
“No idea, partner. Ask the tour director.” Slapshot placed a headset over Marris’s head and positioned the mic in front of his mouth. He put the push-to-talk button in Marris’s hand. “Press down and speak. All set!”
Marris keyed the mic and transmitted. “Where are we going?”
Curtis replied into his headset’s mic, reasserting his authority over the operation. He did his best to control his heavy breathing before speaking. “We are going to an airport nearby where we will climb aboard a larger aircraft. It will take you wherever you want to go.”
“I want to go back to Tripoli.”
Curtis sighed. “Except there. How about you take a vacation? We’ll fly you to Toronto. Once you get home you can come right back here if that’s what you want. But, just so you know, we are talking to our friends in your government there, as well as in the UN, and we will stress to them how dangerous it has become for you in Libya. You might have a little trouble getting back in.”
“You Americans are all bastards.”
“We are the bastards who just saved your life. Do your work from home. Please don’t stop. But try and keep from getting slashed to pieces for a while. The U.S.government is very fond of you, and we’d hate to lose you.”
“Fuck you, Curtis.”
Curtis pulled off his headset and concentrated on looking out the window at the horizon. He got nauseous on small planes, and needed to focus his attention on not spewing his lunch across the cabin.
* * *
They landed at Nanur Airport forty-five minutes later. The airfield was in the desert some two hundred kilometers southeast of Tripoli, and was in use by U.S. military and intelligence assets under agreement with the new government. As they touched down on the runway they saw a pair of aircraft on the tarmac waiting for them. A chic CIA Gulfstream business jet for Curtis and Marris and a dramatically less chic Air Force C-130 for the three Delta operators.
Kolt knew leaving a half dozen dead and wounded behind would make life extremely difficult for American intelligence here in Tripoli. Curtis’s job just became exponentially harder, but Kolt and his team had had no choice but to wipe out the would-be assassins, and Kolt and his team had no choice but to exfil the country immediately after so doing.
The six-seat tail-dragger shut down its engine, Kolt slapped the Air Cell stunt pilot on the back for a job well done, and then he climbed out of the AB-180 and legged it a few hundred yards across the tarmac with his teammates to his awaiting C-130.
As he started up the ramp into the Hercules he saw Curtis jogging over to talk to him. Kolt sent Digger and Slapshot into the cargo hold to get strapped in for the long flight back to Bragg, and he waited for the CIA man to make it over.
Curtis stuck a hand out and Kolt shook it. “Sorry I snapped at you back there. I was wound up pretty tight.”
“It’s forgotten.” It wasn’t, not really, but Kolt had been working on his attitude lately, and it seemed like the professional thing to say.
Curtis then asked, “Was the deadly force unavoidable?”
Raynor did not hesitate. “Yes.”
Curtis stared back at Raynor through mirrored aviator sunglasses. “It’s going to make things tough for us. Half dozen goons down. It’s not going to look to anyone like a UN official made a run for it on his own. Parties are going to know CIA was involved.”
Kolt shrugged. “It couldn’t be avoided. You handed me shit and bread and I made the best-tasting shit sandwich I could with the time you gave me in the kitchen.”
Curtis did not smile at the metaphor. Kolt just looked at his own reflection in the man’s aviators.
Curtis said, “It’s going to make an incident.”
“If you’re looking for help to soften your cable traffic to Langley, I’m the wrong guy, Curtis. Bottom line: Tripwire is alive.”
Curtis was becoming more combative. “Yeah, but you were supposed to keep it low-key.”
“Maybe it would have been more low-key if Marris was dead in the street because we
didn’t
engage those assassins.”
Curtis said, “I just need to know you had no other options.”
Kolt wanted to snap back at the guy. He wanted to say that he had told him twice that it
was
his only option, and if Curtis wanted to second-guess men risking themselves for his operation, maybe next time Curtis should either come up with a better plan or else do the dangerous shit himself.
But that was the old Kolt. The new Kolt held his tongue. But he also held the CIA man’s stare. After the staring contest continued for a few more seconds, he asked, “Was there anything else?”
“No.”
Kolt turned away and headed up the ramp of the C-130 without another word.
Digger, Slapshot, and Kolt sat next to one another on the webbed seats attached to the fuselage of the Hercules. A group of conventional soldiers, engineers who had been working on infrastructure projects in Libya, sat toward the front of the cargo hold dressed in desert camo, chatting among themselves about their impending leave. The young men all stared at the hairy men in local clothing sitting in back near the ramp, wondering who the hell they were.
The three Delta men did not engage the others in conversation.
“Hey, boss?” Slapshot called out over the whine of the four big Pratt & Whitneys as the plane began taxiing toward the runway.
“Yeah?”
“Just once, I’d freakin’
love
to rescue some hot blonde with a big rack who is so full of appreciation that she can’t keep her hands off of me.”
Kolt smiled, leaned back against the cold and hard fuselage. Draped his turban over his eyes and shut them tight for the flight home. “You should have joined the SEALs.
They
get all the flashy gigs.”
NINE
Fort Bragg, just west of Fayetteville, North Carolina, is named for Braxton Bragg, a nineteenth-century North Carolina native who graduated from West Point, fought in the Second Seminole War and the Mexican–American War, and served as a general in the Confederate Army in the Civil War.
The base reaches into four counties of central North Carolina and it is the longtime home of the 82nd Airborne Division as well as the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) and many other units. But Bragg is most known for the numerous super-secret organizations that operate in the shadows. They pockmark the rolling hills throughout the 251 square miles of government-owned property.
And somewhere out there, tucked into a relatively tiny portion of those 251 square miles, lies the home of Delta Force.
As Delta Force began its initial activation process in the late 1970s, it acquired the “Stockade,” a former military detention facility located on the north post. They remained there till the mid-eighties, when they moved to their current location northwest of the main post and most definitely off the beaten path. A Unit member can drive to work and barely see another soldier. A Delta operator can go throughout his workweek on base without seeing any 82nd Airborne or Special Forces personnel, even if he’s running in the backwoods and in the numerous training and maneuver areas.