Morning always held a special charm for Benjamin Scott. It was a curtain beyond which there was always a surprise. When he was growing up in Wabash, Indiana, it could mean he’d have to work his butt off in his dad’s general store. It could mean he’d learn new things or fall asleep at the dinner table because he was dead tired. It could mean a ball game in the park or chores around the house.
If it was a Sunday morning, it was usually a stew of good and bad. Every Sabbath began with church, but that usually led to a matinee at the local movie house, the Bijou. It was an old vaudeville theater that had become a movie theater full-time during the World War II. As a small boy, Benjamin would go with his granddad and sit on his knee and watch westerns and war movies and even jungle adventures and cheer with the men and women. Benjamin grew up wanting to be like Randolph Scott and Clark Gable and, of course, John Wayne. As a teenager in the 1950s he didn’t like the way Hollywood went negative on war, hand-wringing its way through combat in films like Paths of Glory and Pork Chop Hill. They showed the blood but not the glory.
As it turned out, both versions were right.
War was a heroic mess. He had experienced that in Vietnam, serving with the Thirty-first Infantry Regiment. They fought at Quang Ngai, Chu Lai, and up and down the Que Son Valley, keeping Viet-cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese regulars from occupying the coastal lowlands. The village of Hiep Duc was an especially wicked place, earning members of the allied Fourth Battalion two Medals of Honor for virtually the same battle a year apart. It was a nonstop, day-and-night, physical and emotional hell. It cost the lives of men, but so did most other endeavors. Driving cars, exploring space or the sea, taming lions, and studying volcanoes. Going to bars and even falling in love. The difference was that war built men and men built worlds. Scott believed that when he was a young lieutenant fighting in the jungles, carrying the idealism of those Sunday matinees in his heart and helping to make those heroic visions a reality. But the bloody reality was never far from his mind or any of his senses. Especially smell, which was something the movies missed. War reeked of gunpowder, mud, and rot. It was filthy with the stench of bodies and blood that had come from them, often days before you found them.
Then there was the morning he would never forget. The day he woke and met Gen. Augustine Dupre, head of the Fifty-fourth Air Intelligence Wing, Commandement de la Force Aérienne de Combat .
Scott had met a lot of top-of-the-line French soldiers, especially the men of Les Anges Vengeurs, the Avenging Angels, mercenaries who came to finish the job French withdrawal had left undone. But Dupre, the son of a Vichy collaborator—Dupre père had believed it was better to save lives by cooperating with the Nazis—was convinced that the job of intelligence was to prevent or subvert wars, not to wage them. Not a day passed without General Scott damning that coward and everyone who believed in appeasement.
And blackmail.
Scott tried not to think of that as he walked to the mission command center. It was morning and he hoped it would take him to a good day.
Scott had been getting his grandfather’s pocket watch cleaned at L.A.S.E.R.’s repair shop when he got the word that the unit was airborne. Granddad Scott’s watch had been with Scott through two wars. He believed, in some supernatural corner of his brain, that if the watch ever stopped, he would die.
The MSC was a roomy outhouse located next to the eyewash station at Hangar 24. It was large enough to house Scott and his communications officer, Corp. Evan Vandenburgh. A satellite dish was on the peak of the slate roof. Even though the drill would be taking place just two miles out to sea, well within normal radio and video range, protocol dictated that all communications had to come through a secure uplink. Scott had no problem with that. The digital images and sound gave the computer far more detail and flexibility during a mission. It also gave the computer more material to work with when Scott and L.A.S.E.R. did their postgame wrap-up.
Vandenburgh half-rose and saluted the general when he arrived. Rising fully would have necessitated removing the headset that allowed the corporal to listen to the team. That was not permitted. Once any member of L.A.S.E.R. had set out, the comm officer had to be in unbroken contact with the team leader. For the first two hours, that team had consisted only of Lt. Woodstock Black and Ensign Galvez. Now it consisted of eight members, including Woodstock, under the command of Major Bryan.
Eight of L.A.S.E.R.’s twenty-five members were being shuttled to sea by a Blackhawk helicopter, which was kept at their disposal for training and surgical rescues. For longer-range missions they would use a C-130K Hercules transport, which was large enough to carry the Blackhawk to wherever it was needed. It was large enough to host the World Series, Scott had once remarked to the team. That idea appealed to Dr. Moses Houston, their medic, who came from San Diego and felt his beloved Padres could use some hands-on SWAT-style rescuing.
General Scott shut the door and stood behind Vandenburgh. The general preferred to stand during drills and missions. If he sat, he just bopped his knees up and down and made people anxious, which affected their performance. Standing only intimidated them, which affected their performance, too, but in a positive way.
The general watched the twenty-one-inch monitor. The color video, showing the inside of the helicopter, was being shot with Major Bryan’s helmet-mounted microlens camera. The optics weighed 1.75 ounces and were run from a small pack on his back. A four-inch antenna provided the uplink. Every team member had a camera, and Vandenburgh could jump between them as necessary. The corporal could also do frame-grabs from the video, which enabled team members at the command post to analyze situations in detail. If members stood side by side, the corporal could even generate three-dimensional images of whatever they were seeing. That helped the computer to pick out routes through fires, building collapses, and other situations where the dust was too thick for human eyes to see. Vandenburgh could usually remove dust from images by boosting obscured light sources and color.
The red lights were lit over the buttons on his control panel, which meant Vandenburgh had already run the tests and all the cameras were functioning. General Scott reached for a headset as well as a cardioid mini-microphone hooked to the radio unit. He slipped on the earloops so he could listen and clipped the microphone to his lapel. During a mission, he was the only outsider in contact with L.A.S.E.R. Unlike the omnidirectional units used by the crew—which gathered surrounding conversation and sounds and sent them home for recording and analysis—the general’s microphone was set to pick up only his voice. The unit also dampened sounds beyond a radius of one hundred millimeters. That prevented comments made by the comm officer or anyone else in the room from bleeding into the broadcast. The general’s voice was piped directly into the helmets of each team member. The transmission program was such that the general’s remarks came through the left ear while local conversation came through the right. In loud situations, the microphones were often the only way team members could hear each other. Unless Scott saw a danger the field unit was missing, he was careful not to distract the team members when they were in a hot zone.
The general greeted Bryan and wished him well. He said nothing else. There was no kidding before a mission. Some field commanders like to keep their teams relaxed. Not Major Bryan. Once the plane, chopper, or truck left the base, it was a humor-free zone. Maps and blueprints were reviewed, gear was checked and triple-checked, video was studied, and outside activities such as reading or listening to music, or even staring out the window, were prohibited.
The Blackhawk reached the target, an old destroyer. The 1939 vessel was going to be sunk for retrieval practice. The air force had developed new automated reflotation devices that could be worked remotely. They wanted to test them in a relatively level area of the sea where the robots could be retrieved if they malfunctioned. General Scott got permission from the project commander in Washington to let him sink the destroyer.
Lieutenant Black had gone out in a patrol boat just after dawn. She and another scuba diver from L.A.S.E.R.—her protégé, Ensign Davis Galvez—had planted explosives in the anchored destroyer. Woody set the charges to blow remotely from a keypunch unit she carried with her. Major Bryan wanted his team to go aboard while the ship was sinking so they could experience the shifting decks, the changing pitch, and the rising water. Their goal was to rescue four dummies that were trapped in the engine room.
General Scott’s heart began to jog. It always did before his team went into action. L.A.S.E.R. was his child, dearer to him than anything except his wife and reputation. And at times, in the small hours of the night, he stared at the ceiling and realized—unhappily, but undeniably—that L.A.S.E.R. mattered more in certain ways. It was a true extension of how he saw himself, dedicated and unafraid. Except while he had been tested, L.A.S.E.R. had not. Drills were careful simulations. They were not reality.
A countdown clock was on the shelf in front of Scott. The digital clock was sandwiched between a backup computer and a secure phone that would ring the office of Comdr. Noah Adams, the NASCC executive officer. The phone was there in case they had an emergency and needed air or naval support. It had never happened in the nine months L.A.S.E.R. had been in existence, but Adams had a summary of every training mission, on his computer, whenever the team went out. If a crisis did occur, he would be able to order the appropriate response.
With his pulse throbbing even faster, Scott watched as the chopper reached the target. He could see the open door through Bryan’s camera. He experienced the same rush he used to feel before leaving a utility chopper in Vietnam. Up until he would actually exit the UH-1 Huey, his body would feel like bagged lightning. As soon as he hit the grass or beach or mud, the internal charge was transformed into function.
Here, it was different. He was a soldier who wasn’t going on a mission. He was a father throwing his baby into surging seawater.
He was an armchair general who couldn’t even sit down.