SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Falcon

CHAPTER 1

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.

—Rabindranath Tagore

John and Lenora Rinehart had just watched their thirteen-year-old son Alex dresshimself for the first time. It was a special morning. Usually days at theRinehart house started with a delicate dance, determined by their son's moods.

Just because his son Alex was autistic didn't mean he wasn't smart, JohnRinehart reminded himself as his shoes met the uneven surface of the slate walkand he punched the electronic button that opened the door to his dark blue Saab900. His son was exceptional in the IQ department. But his brain's ability tocontrol the warp-speed flow of information, and his emotional impulses, was outof whack. When it didn't work the way Alex wanted it to, the boy got frustrated.And when he got frustrated, he got mad as hell. Screaming, beat-the-shit-out-of-whatever-he-could-get-his-hands-on angry sometimes.

Ask him to find the positive difference of the fourth power of two consecutivepositive integers that must be divisible by one more than twice the largerinteger? No problem. But little things like buttoning a shirt or fastening azipper often tripped him up.

"Little things ... little victories," forty-two-year-old John Rinehart said ashe reached across the console between the front seats and squeezed his wifeLena's hand.

She smiled past the straight black bangs that almost brushed her eyes and said,"I credit Alex's new school. It's been a major positive."

"Yes," John whispered back. His heart felt like it might leap out of his chestwith delight.

John felt things strongly. Like his son. Sometimes so strongly that it scaredhim and he, too, had to fight hard to control himself.

His half-Asian wife was the more emotionally balanced of the two. She understoodthat tomorrow morning might be completely different; that life with a child likeAlex was unpredictable at best.

John found it much harder to let go of the hope that his son would one day leada normal life. He kept looking for a path, or an unopened doorway in his son'spsyche, that would lead to that result. Which made sense, because part of whathe did for a living as the economic counselor at the U.S. embassy was to lookfor patterns of activity and use them to try to predict futureevents—Chinese-Thai trade, baht volatility, Thai-U.S. trading algorithms.

He was a brilliant man who studied the world and saw tendencies, vectors, roadstraveled, like the one he steered the highly polished car onto now, into theknot of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles on what the Thais called ThanonPhetchaburi.

He'd learned to expect the eight-mile ride to the embassy to take forty minutesbecause of the traffic, but he didn't mind. It gave him and his wife a chance tolisten to music and spend some quiet time together.

This morning he didn't want to think about the embassy where she also worked, asan administrative assistant in the CIA station. Nor did he want to consider theproblems he'd deal with when he got there.

Instead he listened as Stan Getz played a smooth, moving "Body and Soul" overthe stereo, and he hummed along, feeling unusually optimistic and calm. He evenentertained the possibility that when his tour in Thailand ended in a year, hewould return to teaching. Maybe even accept the position on the faculty ofUniversity of California, Berkeley that had been offered him a little whileback. Lena would like that.

The sky above was a murky, almost iridescent yellow. Bangkok was a surreal blendof staggeringly beautiful and disgusting, rich and poor, spiritual and depraved,all living pressed together. He found the yin-yang dynamic of the cityfascinating.

Adjusting the air-conditioning, he turned to his wife. "I'm proud of you,darling," he said.

"I'm proud of you. And Alex, too."

"Our Alex," he added.

Through the windshield John noticed a battered blue truck squeezing into thelittle space between his front bumper and the Nissan taxi four feet to theright. He applied the brake, hit the horn, then turned to his wife.

He noticed the way the light accentuated her cheekbones, then out of the cornerof his right eye glimpsed a motorcycle near the back bumper. Two helmets, bothblack with mirrored visors. The driver and rider looked like aliens.

Past the soaring saxophone solo and through the soundproof door panels, he hearda metal click. Seconds later the motorcycle roared past, narrowly avoiding abus.

He was thinking about the first time he had seen Lena, standing near theentrance to the Georgetown University library. She was a sophomore; he waspursuing a master's degree in economics.

He remembered how he had stopped to ask her for directions to White-GravenorHall even though he knew where it was. And how when she turned, he was struck byher beauty, and the strength and intelligence in her eyes.

John Rinehart opened his mouth to tell Lena how he had felt at that moment, howcertain he had been that something important was happening. But before he couldget the words out, the small but powerful explosive device that had beenmagnetically attached to the car's rear fender exploded, tearing through thechassis, igniting the high-octane fuel in the gas tank and causing the car toburst into flames.

John and Lenora Rinehart were dead within seconds. Another eight poor soulsriding bicycles and motorbikes in the vicinity also died. Twenty-three wereseriously injured.

Before Thai police officials had finished their inspection of the site andcarted away the wreckage of the Saab 900, a similar magnetic device had killed aU.S. military attaché and his assistant in their car a half mile away. That sameday bombs placed by riders on motorcycles killed fifteen more U.S. and Israeliofficials in Rome, Athens, Mumbai, and Cairo.

The pain the bombings caused was incalculable—children denied fathers,wives turned into widows, friends and colleagues left questioning their faith inGod.

Alex Rinehart, on hearing the news that his parents had been killed, retreatedinside himself and refused to talk.

That night, 2,410 miles northwest of Bangkok, Navy SEAL Team Six leader ThomasCrocker wiped the snow from the goggles fastened to his FAST Ballistic Helmetand adjusted the seventy-five-pound pack on his back.

"This remind you of anything, boss?" his blond commo man, Davis, asked in agravelly voice behind him, little icicles clinging to the half-inch reddishgrowth on his jaw and chin."The Nightmare Before Christmas?" Crocker replied as he retaped thestraps on his backpack so they wouldn't make noise as he approached the target.His left hand burned from a frigid wind that whistled through the craggy rocksalong the ridge in southeastern Afghanistan.

"K2," Davis said, referring to a training climb Crocker had taken the team on,during which a female friend of his had died in an avalanche. Then, noticingthat his chief's left hand was bare, he asked, "What happened to your glove?"

"Lost it attending to Dog." Dog, a.k.a. Timothy L. Douglas, was the new guy whohad just completed Green Team. He trudged ahead of them favoring his left legand carrying "the pig"—SEALspeak for the MK43 Mod 0 machine gun, whichCrocker preferred to call "the nasty."

Dog, a former middle linebacker at the University of Tennessee, had slippedabout a half mile back as they were climbing and ripped a foot-long gash in hisright thigh, which Crocker had bandaged up.

"I got a spare pair," Davis said, white fog shooting from his mouth and mixingwith the condensation around them. He removed a pair of black cold-weathergloves from his drop leg pouch and handed them to Crocker.

"Colder than a witch's tit," the team leader groaned, shaking his exposed handto keep the blood moving, then slipping them on. "Thanks."

He was leading twelve men, all SEALs from Team Six, who had been at JalalabadAirfield chilling, listening to music, playing video games, reading, sleeping,shooting the shit, when the urgent message came over the radio that ObservationPost Memphis (OPM) was under attack. Two things made this significant andalarming: One, the difficulty of the terrain in the middle of the Hindu Kushrange combined with the blizzard made it impossible to reinforce the post by airor provide it with any sort of air support. People who had been to OPM referredto it as being "on the dark side of the moon." And two, five operators from Sixhad been dispatched to the post a week earlier and were now trapped and fightingfor their lives, along with a dozen marines, several national guardsmen fromPennsylvania, and a platoon of soldiers from the U.S. Army's 17th Infantry AlphaCompany.

As a general rule, when teammates are under attack, you don't sit back at basewith your thumb up your ass.

Adding to Crocker's sense of duty was the fact that one of the Team Sixoperators fighting for his life in OPM was his running partner NealStafford—a former cowboy from Waco, Texas, with two wild young boys and alovely wife named Alyssa, who was the best friend of Crocker's wife, Holly.Crocker's teenage daughter Jenny babysat for their kids.

All of this explained why Crocker had sought out the one helicopter pilot fromthe 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) who was crazy enough tobrave the fifty-mile-an-hour gusts and drop them off as high up the mountain aspossible, and why they had slowly been picking their way through the snow, ice,and rocks like goats. The 160th SOAR was also known as the Night Stalkers. Theirmotto: Night Stalkers don't quit.

Coming up the other side—the east side—was out of the question,since the whole Kunar Valley, and most of Nuristan Province, was firmly underTaliban control, and had been for over a year. Most Americans weren't aware thatthis part of Afghanistan was called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and flewa white flag with a mujahideen call-to-arms slogan scrawled on it.

Which begged the question Crocker had been asking himself for hours: what thefuck was OPM doing there in the first place? Someone in Jalalabad had told himthat a general had it built to monitor traffic along one of the most importantaccess roads to Kabul. Another person had told him that Iranians had been seenin the area.

Was OPM monitoring the movement of arms, heroin, Taliban fighters? Where wasthat general now? Sitting in some warm room with his feet up watching collegefootball?

Crocker stopped himself. It didn't matter now. All he cared about were the livesof the SEALs and other soldiers trapped at OPM, and helping to fight back theTaliban assault until the storm abated and rescue helicopters could pull themout.

Judging from the unrelenting ferocity of the storm, that might be a while.

Crocker held up his right fist, indicating to the men that he wanted them tohuddle around him. Facing him were twelve grizzled faces caked with ice andsnow. Aside from his core five, which included Davis (commo), Ritchie(demolitions), Mancini (equipment and weapons), Cal (sniper), and Akil (maps andlogistics), there were machine gunners Dog and Yale, Gabe, Langer, Jake,Chauncey, and Phillips.

"How you doing, Dog?" Crocker asked over the muffled sounds of warfare echoingup from the other side of the mountain.

"Hurtin' a little and embarrassed, but ready to kick some ass."

"I like that attitude."

As long as Dog was physically and mentally strong enough to set up and operatethe twenty-pound, gas-operated, belt-fed, air-cooled killing machine (capable offiring as many as fourteen 7.62 caliber rounds per second) he cradled in hisarms, Crocker didn't care how much discomfort he was in. To his mind, pain wasweakness leaving the body.

"Refuel. Rehydrate," Crocker barked. "In a few minutes we're gonna reach the topof this ice cube and enter the shit. I want us all to stick together until I sayotherwise. Maintain three-sixty security. Visibility is terrible. I don't wantus shooting at one another. Any questions? Any problems?"

Several of the SEALs shook their heads.

Cal, the sniper, spoke up. "This peashooter ain't gonna do a whole lot of goodin this weather, boss," he said, slapping the MK11 Mod 0 sniper weapons systemhe carried slung across his back.

"Manny's got an extra MP7. He'll lend it to you. Right, Manny?"

"A round of beers at the Guadalajara when we get back," Mancini said. TheGuadalajara was a popular watering hole close to the SEAL base in VirginiaBeach.

"With nachos," Ritchie added.

Crocker said, "Davis, call the post commander. Tell him we're approaching fromthe northwest ridge."

A marine corporal back at Jalalabad had explained to him that the only possibleland approach to OPM was along the northwest ridge, then down rope ladders thathad been rigged along the rocks that formed the back wall of the base.

"Roger, boss," Davis responded.

Guys squeezed energy gel into their mouths, wolfed down energy bars, and gulpedwater from their CamelBaks. Crocker checked his Garmin 450t GPS with a preloaded3-D map of the area and confirmed that they were within four hundred yards ofthe observation post. Visibility was so bad he couldn't see more than four feetahead.

Davis pointed at him, and seconds later a transmission from the marine major incharge of OPM blared through the F3 radio transmitter in Crocker's helmet.

"Tango-six-two, this is Memphis-five-central. I thank the Holy Father for yourassistance. Condition double-red here. Need medevac, immediate support. Takingheavy casualties. Two of our guard stations have already been overrun!"

Crocker thought it was both strange and alarming that Neal Stafford was at thepost. Last time he had seen him he was halfway around the world, tossing aminiature football to his two young sons on the front lawn of his house inVirginia. Now, as he considered how Neal's safety might affect Neal's family andthe tender network of relationships and emotions that connected Neal's life tohis own, he felt a responsibility to get him out of OPM unharmed.

"Memphis-five-central, we'll soon be approaching along the northwest ridge,"Crocker responded. "Alert your perimeter. Is the path clear? Over." He'd beentrained to compartmentalize his feelings in order to effectively do this job.

"Tango-six-two, we're under attack from the east and the south. Keep followingthe ridge. I'll send two men out to meet you. They'll disarm the alarms and showyou the way down. Do you copy?"

"Copy, Memphis. Have them whistle. Three short blasts in succession, so we knowit's them."

"Three short whistles. Copy, Tango. Welcome and Godspeed. Over and out."

Crocker saw the wary look on some of the men's faces and barked, "Be sure tostay alert and stick together!"

"And don't feed the trolls," Akil added.

"You've got the wrong continent," Mancini growled back. "Trolls are mythologicalbeings from Scandinavian folklore."

Akil shook his head. "Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm serious. When you say shit, get it right."

Crocker had taken a mere twenty steps along the snow-covered trail at the top ofthe ridge when the first rounds of automatic fire whizzed by, and he shouted tohis men to hold fire and take cover behind nearby rocks and boulders. Then thefiring picked up and was augmented by a barrage of missiles, mortars, andpropelled grenades.

Pieces of hot metal hissed into the snow and ice. Explosions lit up the craggylandscape nearby, but visibility was still limited.

Crocker was high on adrenaline. His mind worked at warp speed, measuringdistance, speed, the sequence of information, and making calculations. Somethingwas very wrong.

"Should we return fire, boss?" asked Davis, crouched to his right.

"Negative!" Crocker shouted.

From somewhere behind him Dog muttered, "This situation is double fucked."

"Double fucked or not, we'll accomplish the mission." Then Crocker spoke intohis headset: "Hold your fire. We don't want to give away our position. Pull backto the other side of the ridge."