ROOSTER ONE. ROGER THAT. I copy egress, return to base.”
The Harrier flight leader sounded calm and professional as he was heard in real time over a satellite linkup straight into the Situation Room of the White House. Members of the National Security Council had been there for an hour, monitoring the Middleton rescue raid. Now they were immobilized in shock.
Lieutenant Commander Shari Towne brought both hands to her mouth, fighting not to cry out in anguish at what she heard. Both helicopters down. No signs of life. Unknown people moving in fast. KYLE! NO!
National Security Advisor Gerald Buchanan was at the head of the long table in his big chair, tapping a yellow pencil against a legal pad as he listened to the disembodied voice. This was something he had not counted on, and he was busy weighing the up sides and the down sides. He looked around at the military people and detected an advantage. Make it their fault.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Turner, was chewing a knuckle, and lines of thought creased his forehead. He was, after all, a Marine, although he represented all of the military services. He had previously been the Marine Corps commandant, so those were his men who had lost their lives. He was emotionally involved.
A definite advantage! Grab it! Buchanan, however, spoke quietly. “Your Marines failed, General, so we now have a situation.”
Turner had to agree. He had watched the crash via the satellite feed and had heard what the pilots had to say. “Yes, sir. It does appear the mission was unsuccessful.”
Buchanan did not follow up his first jab. He stared at the satellite picture of a glowing hot spot in the Syrian desert. He could remain the consummate professional. “A tragedy, but we must move ahead. I need to hear options. Right now.”
An admiral joined the conversation. “It’s too late for an emergency rescue extraction. A team of Special Forces would not be enough at this point, with the Syrian military obviously going on alert. I would expect the Syrians to be controlling the scene within hours. We would have to insert nothing less than an airborne battalion, and that probably would not be enough. They would soon be surrounded and chopped up without massive air cover, and that would really up the stakes.” He paused. Looked directly at General Turner, then Buchanan. “No further troop deployment is advisable.”
“You can’t just leave them there!” Shari Towne exclaimed, and all eyes in the room were drawn to her. She was the lowest-ranking officer present, in charge of nothing.
“Stay out of this, Lieutenant Commander,” the admiral, her immediate boss, growled impatiently.
Shari caught the warning and flipped the pages of a red three-ring binder. “Yes, sir.” She stopped at a page. “I was referring to the protocol in the operations manual.”
Nice recovery, girl, the admiral thought. He knew of her personal relationship with Kyle Swanson and that Swanson was on the mission, but he wanted her to shut up before she went too far. The admiral liked them both and believed that their personal life was no business of anyone else at the table.
“What would that be, Lieutenant Commander” asked Buchanan. Had he caught some distress in her voice? More than normal? Why?
“Standard operating procedures instruct the incineration of wreckage, just as the pilot suggested.”
“And how would that be accomplished?”
The air force general at the long table answered. “We can get some fast movers in there, either from the carrier in the Med or up out of Iraq, sterilize the area with napalm before the Syrians can plant ground-to-air missile batteries around it. We would have to move pronto.”
The admiral interrupted. “No use putting more of our people in jeopardy. We can spin up a Tomahawk on a ship in the Med and get it in there even faster, and the missile would have a bigger clout. That’s what the Marine mission commander recommends. He’s waiting for a decision.”
Buchanan kept tapping his pencil like a little metronome of menace, seconds ticking away in a crisis. “Why do we need to do that? What is the benefit?” he asked.
“There is a lot of sophisticated equipment and material aboard those helicopters, sir. Everything from secret commo gear to night-vision goggles. Crypto. Maps. Weapons. Even avionics. Maybe some classified papers. We have no way of knowing if it all was destroyed,” Hank Turner replied. “The Syrians will strip them bare, and we cannot take the chance of all that material falling into their hands.”
“So you people are telling me that now that rescuing General Middleton is beyond your reach, that disaster may be compounded by still yet a bigger disaster? Jesus Christ.”
Everyone noted that Buchanan had stopped tapping the pencil and had used the phrase “your reach,” not “our reach.”
“That sort of criticism is beside the point, Mr. Buchanan,” Turner responded, his voice terse, growing angry with the man he considered nothing more than a political predator. “Right now, we have to decide between a missile and a bombing run, and there’s not a minute to lose.”
Buchanan abruptly stood and buttoned his coat. “Very well. Then my decision is the third option, something that none of you suggested, I might add. We do nothing. We will not, repeat not, strike the wreckage with either the bombers or a missile.” He looked directly at Shari. “What was the protocol term that you used, Lieutenant Commander Towne? Incinerate? No, absolutely not. Sending a rescue attempt into Syria was one thing, but conducting an air strike on a sovereign nation that has not attacked us could be considered an act of war. God knows whether it could be contained.”
He gave a little bow to the woman from the State Department. “We have to go the diplomatic route now, ladies and gentlemen, and hope that State can pull the Pentagon’s nuts out of the fire.”
Shari’s last wall of reserve was cracking. She had to get back to her office before she broke into tears, and it would take every ounce of strength to make that short walk. But the professional side of her mind kept turning over her intuition. Something was not right. Buchanan had driven the point home hard that the military efforts had failed, but he had hardly mentioned the deaths of American Marines. There was no anger or sorrow. Why? She put the thought aside as the admiral stepped beside her and whispered, “Get out of here, Shari. Take the rest of the day off. We’ll let you know if we hear anything about Kyle.”
Buchanan walked back to his office mentally chalking up a most beneficial outcome. He had put those military morons in their places again, particularly the crew-cut, spit-and-polish General Turner. The raid had not gone as planned, but the unexpected crash of the helicopters had resulted in a total, dreadful, and irreversible failure that would be shown in the starkest light all over every news program in the world within a few hours. The world’s most professional and powerful military establishment had failed. Shades of the mess in the desert of Iran back in 1979.
This could definitely help the privatization act. With his office door closed, Gerald Buchanan rocked back in his chair and propped his feet on his desk. There was a broad smile on his face as he picked up his secure telephone to brief Gordon and Ruth Hazel that he had sidetracked the bombing run or any further rescue attempt. Those bodies would be coming home in flag-draped coffins. It would make great television.