Chapter 39
OASIS ONE, SAUDI ARABIA
SCOTT Coleman surveyed the rolling terrain that led northeast toward Baghdad just two hundred miles away as the crow flew.
The British and American outpost on which he was standing didn’t have an official name because it didn’t officially exist. Just a small military compound located directly atop the Saudi-Iraqi border.
A rock formation formed the base’s natural perimeter, and the outcropping jutted out over a sea of red sand like some sort of volcanic island.
Maybe this was why the rotating cadre of special operators who called the outpost home had given the base its unique name.
Oasis One.
Coleman turned from the window in the prefabricated-plywood structure known as a B-hut, or barracks hut, to the man standing next to him.
“You gonna tell me what’s bothering you or make me guess?”
Coleman buffered the question with a smile, but his sentiment was deadly serious.
Though the man had only served alongside him for a handful of months, he’d already become something of an expert on the commando’s mannerisms. When Elvis was egging on his hosts with SEAL jokes or making deprecating comments about the Army, life was good.
It was only when the Delta Force assaulter grew quiet that Coleman began to worry.
Elvis had been quiet for the last five minutes.
“Sorry, sir,” Elvis said as he looked up from the terrain board, “something from today’s rehearsal got me thinking.”
Coleman bit back the urge to order Elvis to just spit it out.
Coleman had been a SEAL for almost his entire naval career, and he now held the billet most coveted by his fellow naval commandos—commanding officer of SEAL Team 6.
As such, he was accustomed to the brutal honesty that was part and parcel of being a member of the special operations community.
Feedback was unvarnished, direct, and a regular occurrence.
Each SEAL under his command was expected to re-earn his place in the Navy’s top counterterrorism unit anew every single day.
If a SEAL had a problem with an operation’s concept, he was supposed to voice it, and this was doubly true for a senior enlisted man like Elvis.
Except Elvis wasn’t a SEAL.
Chris Baxter, call sign Elvis, was part of an Army-Navy exchange program.
In order to ensure the nation’s Tier 1 units operated from the same playbook regardless of their military branch, the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 had begun to rotate senior members for yearlong tours of duty.
Elvis had served in Delta Force for longer than Coleman had been a SEAL.
He was due for promotion to sergeant major, and rumor had it he was in the running to serve as the organization’s most senior enlisted member once he returned to Fort Bragg.
But Elvis’s technical and tactical prowess was only part of the reason he’d been selected to participate in the exchange program.
For all his quick wit and readiness to joke with his naval commando brethren, Elvis was very much aware that he was a stranger in a strange land.
SEAL Team 6 operators accepted him, but he was not one of them.
As such, Elvis was judicious with his criticism.
Perhaps too judicious.
Elvis frowned as he stared at the terrain board.
Though the commando’s flight suit fit neatly over a trim body, the assaulter didn’t have the weightlifter-style bulging muscles sported by many of Coleman’s SEALs.
Instead, Elvis had an endurance athlete’s lean build.
An endurance athlete who looked capable of knocking out one hundred pull-ups without breaking a sweat.
Elvis’s back and shoulders were disproportionally wide.
The kind of guy who could go head-to-head with the world’s best Iron Man athletes and then arm-wrestle them after the race.
He and Coleman made quite the pair.
Where Coleman’s blond hair, blue eyes, and boyish looks meant that he was constantly mistaken as a junior officer rather than SEAL Team 6’s CO, Elvis had been in special operations for half of his life and looked it.
His face was weather-beaten and wrinkled, the bags under his eyes were permanent features, his slicked-back hair was beginning to recede, and he walked with a slight limp due to a parachuting accident from early in his career.
Elvis’s years of service brought with them a wealth of knowledge and Coleman had learned to value his counsel.
“I don’t like the trigger,” Elvis said after several seconds of silence had elapsed.
Unlike his normal witty banter, these words came slowly, as if they’d been caught in his throat somewhere and had to be dragged loose.
Coleman resisted the urge to jump in, even though the rebuke stung.
It took courage for a man to critique his commanding officer, and even more so when that man was a liaison from another military service.
It was the equivalent of staying at someone’s home as a guest and then criticizing their choice in carpeting.
“Your guys’ actions on the objective were spot-on,” Elvis continued, “but there’s too much room for error with the trigger.
If the convoy heads southwest toward the Trebil border crossing instead of northwest to Al Waleed, we’ll be left scratching our armpits while the chemical weapons get away.
We need eyes on the intersection where Route 1 and Route 11 cross.
Persistent eyes that aren’t dependent on jet fuel or an orbital window. ”
The assaulter crossed his arms after he finished. Despite his lean build, Elvis’s forearms rippled. Coleman wondered if he cracked a bowl of walnuts each night before bed.
“I see what you mean,” Coleman said.
He did.
He had also felt uneasy with this part of the plan.
Or to be more honest, the monstrosity that the plan had become.
Chemical weapons were no small matter, and Coleman understood the need to ensure that the munitions were properly and permanently disabled.
While dropping a pair of laser-guided bombs from a high-flying and invisible-to-radar F-117 Nighthawk or B-2 Spirit was the lowest-risk option, it also meant that the intelligence gained was essentially zero.
And if weather or something equally pernicious affected the aircraft’s ability to see the target, the WMDs would slip away.
Though technology had progressed by leaps and bounds even from the marvels displayed during America’s routing of Iraq just a handful of years earlier, no-fail missions more often than not still required boots on the ground.
Though hostage rescue and counterterrorism operations generated all the headlines, no-fail missions were the real rationale for the vast amounts of time and money required to create national special mission units.
SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force existed so that when an unforeseen contingency smacked the president in the face, he had a cadre of warriors willing and able to mitigate the new threat, whatever form it might take.
But commanding the real-world equivalent of TV’s Impossible Missions Force was a double-edged sword. Once they learned that units capable of doing the impossible existed, politicians inevitably began to dream up impossible missions for them to undertake.
This goat rope was fast becoming exhibit one.
“The sensitive site exploitation during phase two is the real problem,” Elvis said, gesturing to a section of the terrain board just to the west of the objective. “It ties our hands by negating one of our biggest strengths—the ability to call an audible.”
Coleman nodded, venting his frustration through a closer examination of the terrain board as if the model somehow held the answers.
Like everything in SEAL Team 6, from the armorers who serviced the commandos’ weapons, to the maintainers who kept the fleet of nonstandard vehicles operational, to the weather forecasters who could provide ambient and expected conditions for any location on planet earth, the intelligence specialists who’d constructed the terrain board were top-notch.
The stretch of abandoned desert to the southwest of Route 1 where Coleman intended to interdict the weapons convoy had been replicated to a miniature scale with frightening accuracy to include the area’s wadis, goat trails, and dry riverbeds.
At its most simplistic, a terrain board was a sort of sandbox on which an operation’s most pertinent data could be constructed.
Sort of like a three-dimensional map, a well-constructed terrain board allowed the mission’s participants to discuss their actions on the objective while gathered around a facsimile of the surroundings.
The terrain board Coleman was standing in front of wasn’t just well constructed.
It could have been the set for a stop-action movie.
Measuring twenty feet long by ten feet wide, it allowed Coleman to view the action from any cardinal direction.
It held no secrets.
That was part of the problem.
“It all comes down to the C-130s,” Coleman said, giving voice to the issue that had been nagging him since the order had come down to expand the mission’s scope from just destroying the convoy to seizing some of the chemical munitions.
“We need a flat stretch of desert big enough to land the aircraft that’s also drivable from Route 1 so we can load at least one convoy vehicle.
That constraint really dictates where we can interdict the weapons. ”
“Yep,” Elvis said. “I’m no stranger to mission creep, but this one’s a doozy. Neutralizing the weapons wasn’t enough. Now they want us to steal them too?”