Sons of Valor Page 19

  Chunk opened and closed a fist. His upper arm ached, but not too bad. And his hand felt fine.

  Still—Lead by example.

  He nodded. “Yeah, just gotta check in with the Head Shed first, then you and I can go over together.”

  The Humvee was already rumbling off with Georgie and Antman, as the other SEALs began stowing their kits inside the open gate and behind the tall Hesco barriers. The compound—with its double row of chain-link fence topped with razor wire—looked more like a fenced-in junkyard than a high-tech base for America’s most elite warriors. Presently, it was occupied by the Army’s JSOC team, and Chunk’s guys were the guests. He watched as his SEALs swapped out spent magazines for fresh ones and slipped spares into cargo pockets—a habit from years and years in the suck. Then, with rifles slung, they lumbered over to the pickup trucks. Chunk recognized Yi behind the wheel of one, and one of the IT guys from the N2 Intel shop driving the other.

  Chunk gathered two kits over his right forearm, then one over the left, wincing as the plate carrier bumped into his upper arm. Come to think of it, his arm was burning like shit now. Riker was right to call him out on getting it checked. When the bullets stopped flying it took a long time for the adrenaline to boil off enough for an honest self-assessment. He often collapsed pain free and tired after an op, only to wake up the next day barely able to crawl out of bed. On one such occasion, he’d had a shoulder separation and two cracked ribs and not even thought to go to the docs the night before.

  After dropping the last of the kits, Riker secured the compound gate. It had been a couple of years since Chunk had been to J-bad, and he remembered this little compound within a compound, but back then he hadn’t been a Tier One operator and had not been permitted inside. Weird to finally be on the other side of this wire. With a nod to Riker, he headed off to talk to the CSO and Watts.

  “How are our guys, Chunk?” Captain Bowman asked, greeting him at the door to the TOC.

  “Antman is the wild card. Shrapnel from an RPG in his gut, but he’s stable. Provided there’s no organ damage, he’ll be okay.”

  “Is he operational?”

  Chunk shrugged. “We’ll see what the JSOC surgeons say. And Georgie got shot in the leg, but Morales thinks he’s gonna be fine. Still, I made everyone else go over to get checked out, and Riker and I’ll head over in a bit. Got time for a data dump first?”

  “This way,” Bowman said, nodding, then led him down the hall. At the end, he tapped in his personal code on the keypad, watched the reader turn yellow, then pressed his palm against the pad. The magnetic lock clicked and they entered the SCIF. It was much like the SCIF back in Tampa, but smaller. Still, it was a decadent technical luxury compared to what the compound’s outside appearance suggested. Watts was hunched over a laptop, but looked up immediately when he entered. He saw a symphony of emotions play over her face, but the concert ended with an angry, irritated stare. Whether it was more anger than irritation or vice versa, he couldn’t tell, but either way it was not the greeting he’d expected.

  “What’s up, Heels?” he said.

  “Why did you do that?” she snapped. No Hey, Chunk, are you okay? or Nice work out there surviving that maelstrom of bullets and death.

  “Why did I do what?” he replied, his smile fading.

  “Reduce our intelligence-rich target to its molecular components.”

  Chunk glanced at Bowman; it was still not clicking.

  “She’s talking about the Hellfire strike on Dewar’s you ordered at the end,” Bowman clarified, then took a seat across from him at the long wooden table.

  “An unscripted, emotion-driven decision that wiped out any hope of us obtaining actionable intelligence—hell, any intelligence at all—from inside those caves. What am I supposed to do now?” she said, red-faced and advancing on him.

  He resisted the unfamiliar urge to take a step back and stood his ground until she was standing toe-to-toe with him, hand on hips, left eyebrow cocked. He glanced at Bowman, who had his hands clasped on the table, just watching the show.

  All he needs is popcorn.

  Chunk inhaled through his nose and, with as much composure as he could muster, said, “You are aware that my team was boxed in by a numerically superior force and took heavy fire from two directions? That’s called a crossfire, Watts, and for the uninitiated like yourself, it is a tactical fucking nightmare. We were fighting for our lives just to get back to the exfil point for extraction. I have two wounded SEALs en route to see the surgeons as we speak, both of whom are lucky to be alive.” But while he made his rebuttal, his mind was multitasking, reviewing the sequence of events that had happened almost too fast to catalogue at the time.

  Why did I order Stalker to nuke that cave? he wondered momentarily. Oh, I remember, because it was a friggin’ hive of assholes swarming out of the cracks and trying to kill my men.

  She let out a deep sigh and her expression softened, but only a little. “I know, I was watching and terrified for you guys, but then Stalker cleared a path for you to the exfil and hosed down the fighters to your south. There was nobody left, Chunk. We could have . . . I don’t know, done another op to sweep the cave or taken somebody off the X for questioning. But now, there’s nothing left up there but char. The signal intercept on this mountain was the only data point I had, remember? We have nothing to take us to the next step, and I’m no closer to finding the drone than I was before we ran the op.”

  One of the things Chunk had always prided himself on was his ability to resist letting his emotions get the better of him. The metaphor he liked to imagine was a lighthouse on a rocky island getting pounded by the surf—like the one they used in all the motivational posters. Yeah, that was him. Steadfast. Incorruptible. Unbreakable . . .

  But if that was true, then why was Watts get under his skin?

  “In the Teams, we trust our senior operator on the X to make the hard calls. We don’t armchair quarterback from the TOC. Not even my boss second-guessed my decision. But maybe more importantly,” he said, resisting the urge to step closer and speak down on her, “you work for me, not the other way around. You’re not at the NCTC anymore. Your job here is to generate and analyze intelligence to support our operations, not for us to generate intelligence to support your hunches. You copy that?”

  Watts’s face flushed, but she didn’t break eye contact. “I know that, Commander. I just . . . I just don’t want any more Americans getting blown up because we didn’t execute when we had the window of opportunity to do so. That drone is still out there, and we have no idea where it is, who’s operating it, or what their next target is.” With a little unexpected fire in her eyes, she added, “Do you copy that?”

  “That’s enough, Watts,” Bowman said in a calm, even tone. “We’re all very impressed with the sleuthing you did to get us here. The fact that we’re even having this conversation should speak volumes to you about how we value your input. But it goes both ways. I suggest you try taking off your spook hat for five minutes and swapping it for an operator helmet. These guys are the best operators in the world. They know the stakes. They know the mission. In the field, in the suck, they make the kinetic calls. Not you.”

  “I get it, but—”

  “Watts, can you give us the room for five minutes?” Bowman said. It wasn’t a question. “When you come back, we’ll talk about where we go next with this investigation. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Watts said, and only as she turned to leave did she finally notice Chunk’s blood-soaked left arm. “Oh my God, Chunk, you’re bleeding all over the place! Did you get shot . . . holy crap, why aren’t you in the hospital?”

  He forced a smile. “I’m good, Heels. It’s only a flesh wound,” he said in his best Texas version of a Monty Python British accent. But when she screwed up her face in confusion, he simply said, “It’s all good.”

  “The room, Watts,” Bowman said, and his gaze flicked from her to the door.

  “Yes, sir,” she said with a cordial nod and made for the door. At the threshold, she paused. Looking over her shoulder at Chunk, she said, “I will find them,” in a voice that made him believe her.

  He nodded at her, then took a seat across from Bowman, leaning all the way back in the chair while letting out a too-long groan.

  “Yeah, you got that right,” Bowman said with a knowing smile.

  Chunk rubbed his face, closed his eyes, and took a single deep cleansing breath.

  “You’re gonna need to fix that shit with Watts,” the CSO said.

  “I know,” he said through a sigh.

  “You’re right to remind her that she works for you, and we can’t have her second-guessing operational decisions, but . . . that one is smart. She thinks differently than the other intel pogues. Her brain makes connections other people don’t see. I spoke with the head of NCTC when we were screening for this billet, and he says she’s a genius. They poached her from CIA to the Joint Terror Task Force because she was generating that kind of buzz as a newbie. ‘Elon Musk smart,’ I believe were his exact words.”

  “I know, she’s sharp.”

  “Well, keep in mind, she wasn’t even tasked to investigate the convoy hit. She did that all on her own—one hundred percent initiative—and then she had the balls to present her theory to the Vice President. We can’t shut that down. We need her smarts and critical eye, but it’s useless if she can’t tell you what she thinks. She needs to fall in line, but still be able to speak her mind—the same rules you apply to the rest of your guys. Make her part of the team. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir,” Chunk said. “You’re right. I’ll fix it.”

  Bowman kn
itted his fingers together, rested his hands on the table, and leaned in. “I, for one, think she’s right about this hunch, as you called it. We have OGA assets working this problem too, and while they were quick to dismiss her drone theory as crazy, no one is offering another explanation. After what we just witnessed on that mountain, I believe she has us on the right trail. If the Taliban have the capability to launch a drone, we have a serious, balance-shifting problem with global fucking implications. I can only imagine that the terrorist underground is watching very closely to see how we respond to this new development. If we fail to neutralize this threat quickly and completely, then every jihadi with cash in the bank is going to be lining up to buy Chinese drones.”

  “Understood.”

  “Now give me your thoughts and highlights for the after action, so we can get Watts in here and back to work.”

  CHAPTER 21

  the n2 “suite” in the tier one compound

  jalalabad, afghanistan

  0750 local time

  The rhythmic scratch of a mechanical pencil on paper was an elixir for Whitney’s nerves. She often did her best thinking while sketching, when both hemispheres of her brain were fully engaged. Strands of rope looped and crossed, playing hide and seek on the page as they became impossibly interwoven. The design was of her own creation, meticulously imagined, then brought to three-

  dimensional life as only someone who’d spent far too many hours contemplating and sketching knots could do. She pulled her hand away to look at the knot, then blew graphite dust off the page before continuing.

  I have to find a new thread to chase . . . but how? Where?

  The door opened and Petty Officer Yi walked in. Whitney looked up and acknowledged her with a close-lipped smile. Yi joined her at the table, parking her uber-petite body in the vacant chair beside her.

  “What are you sketching?” she asked, leaning on her elbows for a look.

  “A knot,” Whitney said, shading. Then, preempting the unspoken question, “Because I like knots.”

  Yi smiled at this. “It’s quite an intricate and complex knot.”

  “Intricate, yes. Complex, not so much.”

  “Well, it looks complex.”

  “To the untrained eye, but that’s an illusion. This knot is simple pattern repetition—seven interlocking trefoil knots.”

  “What’s a trefoil knot?”

  Whitney stopped sketching and rotated her forearm to show the other woman the triangular, beautifully inked three-lobed knot tattoo on the inside of her wrist.

  “It kind of looks like a clover leaf.”

  “That’s the origin of its name. Trefoil is the common name for Trifolium, which is the genus of three-leafed plants including clover . . . A trefoil knot is the simplest non-trivial knot.”

  “What’s a non-trivial knot?”

  “A knot that can’t be untied without cutting it.”

  “Oh, I see, it’s one continuous strand,” Yi said, tracing her fingertip through the air while looking at the tattoo.

  “Exactly. Trefoil knots are chiral.” Yi nodded, but Whitney could see from her woman’s expression that she wasn’t familiar with the word. “A figure has chirality when it’s not identical to its mirror image. For example, our hands are chiral,” Whitney explained holding up both hands—palms out, fingers up, and thumbs extended at right angles.

  After a moment, it clicked for Yi. “Oh, I see, it’s like how you can’t wear a glove from your right hand comfortably on your left hand just by flipping it around. The thumb gets all wonky.”

  “Precisely,” Whitney said, then moved her hands to align the back of her right hand to the palm of her left so the fingers closed in the same direction but the thumbs were on opposite sides. She then rotated her left hand so that the backs of both hands were touching. Now the thumbs were aligned, but the fingers and thumbs bent in opposite directions. “No combination of rotations or translations will achieve symmetry with chiral pairs,” she explained.

  “I guess I basically understood that, but no one ever formally explained it, theoretically, I mean.”

  “Whether a configuration is chiral or achiral is fundamental to knot theory.”

  “Knot theory?” Yi repeated and screwed up her face. “Don’t tell me you’re some sort of math genius.”

  “No, I’m definitely not,” Whitney said with a laugh. “One day I decided I wanted to get a Celtic knot tattoo, so I started trying to sketch one. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to look right, so I looked up Celtic knots online. One twist led to another—no pun intended—and I discovered there’s this entire field called knot theory. Mathematicians and puzzle makers have studied knots for thousands of years.”

  “So basically, you’re a knot geek?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  “Cool,” Yi said, returning her attention to the sketch. “Now that I see the pattern, I think it’s kind of beautiful.”

  “For me, these knots are like a metaphor for working in the intelligence community. In order to properly draw a knot, you first have to understand how it’s woven, and if you understand that, then you can untangle it.”

  “Is that how you feel right now?”

  “Yeah.” Whitney sighed. “This case is just one giant knotted mess. I thought I was untangling it, but I don’t know . . . maybe I’ve been pulling on the wrong strand. What if we hit the wrong target? What if the Taliban doesn’t have a drone? What if they had nothing to do with the attack?”

  “The ‘what if’ game is one I try to never play. You can beat yourself up all day asking those sorts of questions, and it won’t change anything,” Yi chided. Her expression suggested she knew what she was talking about, no doubt from years of experience working intel for Special Warfare.

  “I know, but Chunk and the guys risked their lives because of our hunch. I can’t help thinking maybe I screwed up—trying to force a correlation between the convoy attack and the drone parts and Chinese missiles confiscated from that Pakistani freighter.”

  “If we continue that line of reasoning, that would mean the battle damage assessment done by the guys at Oceana was wrong. Also, we’ve looked at the other scenarios and ruled out a mortar attack, RPG, and a surface-to-surface missile strike. Instead of second-guessing your initial conclusion, why don’t we focus on trying to find the drone? The question I keep asking myself is where did it go after the strike?” Yi said.

  “Well, obviously poststrike they would want to fly it somewhere they could evade radar and try to land. The mountain valleys are a logical place to do that. Also, if the pilot flew it any direction but north, back toward the cave they were controlling it from, then he would eventually fly out of range and lose connectivity. The drone would cruise until it ran out of fuel, then crash, but we had people looking for drone wreckage, scouring the Afghan countryside, and we haven’t found anything.”

  “What about in the mountains?”

  “Bowman had eyes tasked to look for anything even remotely resembling a landing strip inside a hundred kilometer radius of the transmission site. The search turned up nothing.”

  “What about outside a hundred kilometers?”

  “Well, it’s kind of pointless to look outside a hundred kilometers,” Whitney said.

  “Why?”

  “Because a hundred kilometers is a reliable line of sight radius for a drone cruising at altitude. But try to land the drone and that range goes out the window. The moment the drone dipped below the mountain, they’d encounter interference. There’s no way they could have pulled off a landing in the Hindu Kush that was even a hundred kilometers out from the cave. And there’s no runway or wreckage in that valley below the Taliban stronghold we hit.”

  “All right, then there’s your answer.”

  “Huh? Explain, please.”

  “They didn’t land it in the Hindu Kush,” the petty officer said with a victorious smile. “They landed it somewhere else.”

  Whitney wasn’t sure whether to laugh or get angry with Yi, so she took a deep breath and said, “What do you mean somewhere else?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what we’ve got to figure out.”