Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

The crew chief nodded solemnly and then climbed aboard and slid the door closed. Sigler crouched low and hastened out from under the rotor wash as the idling turbines began whining louder.

He was halfway to the wreck when he saw a flash in the corner of his eye.

A small group of insurgents—or maybe it was just a lone fearless soul, hell-bent on earning his virgins in Paradise—had flanked them, circling around to the south of the crash site.

In the time it took him to turn his head, the RPG crossed the distance to its target.

The warhead—a PG-7VR tandem charge grenade—had been designed to destroy tanks with modern reactive armor. It did this by first exploding a small shaped charge that released a high-velocity jet of metal in a super-elastic state, which can cut through solid steel. The second, larger high-explosive charge would then penetrate deep into the wound and detonate inside the target.

The rocket snaked in under the rising helicopter’s rotors and struck below the exhaust vent on the port side. The shaped-charge blast cut through the Black Hawk’s exterior like it was made of tissue paper. A millisecond later, the three pounds of high-explosives in the main charge detonated, and Beehive Six-Four blew apart at the seams.





EIGHT


Washington, D.C.



The President’s palm came down on the tabletop with a resounding smack that echoed like a pistol-shot in the crypt-quiet Situation Room.

The operational command center in the White House basement was all but deserted. The President had only intended to observe the Delta team operation, and so he had eschewed the normal cadre of advisors, aides and support staff. The were only two other men in the room besides Boucher. Lieutenant General Roger Collins, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, was a thick, beefy man with puffy, red features and a poorly-kept secret love affair with the bottle. Collins’s aide was a compactly built man with a silver-gray buzzcut, colonel’s eagles on his epaulets and a black name plate that read ‘Keasling.’

Collins shook his head. “Well…shit.”

Boucher winced as the President’s eyes sent daggers through the air at the three-star general. “Shit? That’s all you’ve got? Shit?”

Domenick Boucher swallowed nervously and returned his gaze to the television screen, where the crisis was playing out in real-time. The feed was from an infrared camera mounted on a circling Predator UAV, and the images were rendered in an eerie inverted black and white, with the grayscale hues serving as an indication of temperature. The expanding cloud of white smoke that now occupied the space where one of the Army helicopters had been a moment before, could only mean one thing: the Black Hawk had become an inferno.

Until the President’s outburst, Boucher had felt as paralyzed as Collins. He’d watched in mute disbelief as the operation had fallen apart before his eyes, turning from a simple raid into a full blown battle. But Duncan’s anger galvanized him.

Focus, he thought. What are the priorities?

He’d never faced a crisis like this as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There was rarely a need for the DCIA to be hands-on, but Boucher had come up through the ranks and witnessed some of the nation’s worst moments from the other side of director’s desk.

I’ve got people in the field… He shook his head; Klein and the crypto consultant were on the helicopter that had taken off without warning. There was nothing he could do to help them; no way to reach them. Why? Why did that Black Hawk go rogue? Who was giving the orders?

He dug his cell phone from a pocket, then just as quickly put it away. The Situation Room was shielded; no radio signals could get in or out. He would have to make do with one of the hard-wired telephones, which like all the other technology in the Situation Room, was painfully obsolete and actually less secure than Boucher’s encrypted digital phone.

Collins was still fumbling for an answer. “Sir, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do.”

“You can get those men out of there.” The President’s voice was low and flat, a steel blade hissing from between clenched teeth.

The general, perhaps without thinking it through first, shook his head. “Mr. President, it’s not that simple. We’re not coordinating with Defense on this, and if we make that call, we’ll have to disclose the whole operation. We won’t be able to keep the mission a secret.”

“Do you think those men out there give a damn about that?”

“That’s what we pay them for, sir.”

Boucher wasn’t the only man in the room shocked into action. The general’s aide likewise leaped for a phone. The President’s eyes followed him, but he made no move to interfere or ask for an explanation; the man was doing something, and Boucher knew that counted for a lot in Duncan’s book.

Collins finally seemed to grasp the concept as well. He swiveled his chair toward Keasling. “Mike, get some CAS out there.”