Grant Blackwood - Dead or Alive

The second book in the Jack Ryan, Jr. series, 2010

LIGHT TROOPS-an Eleven-Bravo light infantryman, according the United States Armys MOS (military occupational specialty) system-are supposed to be pretty spit-and-polish troops with spotless uniforms and clean-shaven faces, but First Sergeant Sam Driscoll wasnt one of those anymore, and hadnt been for some time. The concept of camouflage often involved more than patterned BDUs. No, wait, they werent called that anymore, were they? Now they were called Army combat uniforms, ACUs. Same, same.

Driscolls beard was fully four inches long, with enough flecks of white in it that his men had taken to calling him Santa-rather annoying to a man hardly thirty-six years old, but when most of your compatriots were an average of ten years younger than you Oh, well. Could be worse. Could be Pops or Gramps.

He was even more annoyed to have long hair. It was dark and shaggy and greasy, and his beard coarse, which was useful here, where the facial hair was important to his cover and the local people rarely bothered with haircuts. His dress was entirely local in character, and this was true of his team as well. There were fifteen of them. Their company commander, a captain, was down with a broken leg from a misstep-which was all it took to sideline you in this terrain-sitting on a hilltop and waiting for the Chinook to evac him, along with one of the teams two medics whod stayed behind to make sure he didnt go into shock. That left Driscoll in command for the mission. He didnt mind. He had more time in the field than Captain Wilson had, though the captain had a college degree, and Driscoll didnt have his yet. One thing at a time. He had to survive this deployment still, and after that he could go back to his classes at the University of Georgia. Funny, he thought, that it had taken him nearly three decades to start enjoying school. Well, hell, better late than never, he supposed.

He was tired, the kind of mind-numbing, bone-grinding fatigue Rangers knew only too well. He knew how to sleep like a dog on a granite block with only a rifle stock for a pillow, knew how to stay alert when his brain and body were screaming at him to lie down. Problem was, now that he was closer to forty than thirty, he felt the aches and pains a little more than he had when he was twenty, and it took twice as long to work out the kinks in the morning. Then again, those aches were offset by wisdom and experience. Hed learned over the years that despite it being a clich, it was in fact mind over matter. Hed learned to largely block out pain, which was a handy skill when you were leading much younger men whose packs undoubtedly felt much lighter on their shoulders than Driscolls did on his own. Life, he decided, was all about trade-offs.

Theyd been in the hills for two days, all of it on the move, sleeping two to three hours a night. He was part of the special operations team of the 75th Ranger Regiment, based permanently at Fort Benning, Georgia, where there was a nice NCO club with good beer on tap. By closing his eyes and concentrating, he imagined he could still taste the cold beer, but that moment passed quickly. He had to focus here, every second. They were fifteen thousand feet above sea level, in the Hindu Kush mountains, in that gray zone that was both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and neither-at least to the locals. Lines on maps didnt make borders, Driscoll knew, especially in Indian country like this. Hed check his GPS equipment to be sure of his position, but latitude and longitude really didnt matter to his mission. What mattered was where they were headed, regardless of where it fell on the map.

The local population knew little about borders, and didnt especially care. For them reality was which tribe you were in, which family you were a part of, and which flavor of Muslim you were. Here memories lasted a hundred years, and the stories even longer. And grudges even longer than that. The locals still boasted that their ancestors had driven Alexander the Great out of the country, and some of them still remembered the names of the warriors who had bested the Macedonian spearmen who had up until then conquered every other place theyd wandered into. Most of all, though, the locals spoke of the Russians, and how many of those theyd killed, mostly by ambush, some with knives, face-to-face. They smiled and laughed with those stories, legends passed on from father to son. Driscoll doubted the Russian soldiers who made it out of Afghanistan did much laughing about the experience. No, sir, these were not nice folks, he knew. They were scary-tough, hardened by weather, war, famine, and just generally trying to stay alive in a country that seemed to be doing its best to kill you most of the time. Driscoll knew he ought to feel some sympathy for them. God had just dealt them a bad hand, and maybe that wasnt their fault, but it wasnt Driscolls fault, either, nor his concern. They were enemies of Driscolls country, and the powers-that-be had pointed the stick at them and ordered Go, and so here they were. That was the central truth of the moment, the reason he was in these goddamned mountains.

One more ridge was the other central truth, especially here, it seemed. Theyd legged it fifteen klicks, almost all of it uphill and over sharp rock and scree, since theyd hopped off the CH-47 Chinook helicopter, a Delta variant, the only one at their disposal that could handle the altitude here.

There the ridgeline. Fifty meters.

Driscoll slowed his pace. He was walking point, leading the patrol as the senior NCO present, with his men stretched out a hundred meters to his rear, alert, eyes sweeping left and right, up and down, M4 carbines at ready-low and trained at their sectors. They expected there to be a few sentries on the ridgeline. The locals might be uneducated in the traditional sense, but they werent stupid by any measure, which was why the Rangers were running this op at night-zero-one-forty-four, or a quarter to two in the morning-according to his digital watch. No moon tonight, and high clouds thick enough to block whatever light came from the stars. Good hunting weather, he thought.

His eyes traced more down than up. He didnt want to make any noise, and noise came from the feet. One damned rock, kicked loose and rolling down the hillside, could betray them all. Couldnt have that, could he? Couldnt waste the three days and fifteen miles it had taken them to get this close.

Twenty meters to the ridgeline. Sixty feet.

His eyes searched the line for movement. Nothing close. A few more steps, looking left and right, his noise-suppressed carbine cradled to his chest at ready-low, finger resting lightly on the trigger, just enough to know it was there.

It was hard to explain to people how hard this was, how tiring and debilitating-far more so than a fifteen-mile hike in the woods-knowing there might be someone with an AK-47 in his hands and his finger on a trigger, the selector switch set to full auto, ready to cut your ass in half. His men would take care of such a person, but that wouldnt do him any good, Driscoll knew. Still, he consoled himself, if it happened, the odds were that he wouldnt even know it. Hed dispatched enough enemies to know how it worked: One moment youre stepping forward, eyes scanning ahead, ears tuned, listening for danger the next nothing. Death.

Driscoll knew the rule out here, in the badlands, in the dead of night: Slow is fast. Move slow, walk slow, step carefully. It had served him well lo these many years.

Just six months earlier hed finished third in the Best Ranger Competition, the Super Bowl of special operations troops. Driscoll and Captain Wilson, in fact, entered as Team 21. The captain had to be pissed at the broken leg. He was a pretty good Ranger, Driscoll thought, but a broken tibia was a broken tibia. When a bone broke, there wasnt a whole hell of a lot to be done about it. A torn muscle hurt like hell but got better rapidly. On the other hand, a broken bone had to knit and mend, and that meant lying on your back for a few weeks at an Army hospital before the docs let you put weight on it again. Then you had to learn to run again, after you relearned how to walk. What a pain in the ass that would be Hed been lucky in his career, having suffered nothing worse than a twisted ankle, a broken pinkie, and a bone-bruised hip, none of which had sidelined him for much longer than a week. Not so much as a bullet or shrapnel graze. The Ranger gods had smiled on him for sure.