Without remorse - Tom Clancy [71]
'Lay down,' the nurse ordered. Before he could object, she had a thermometer in his mouth and was taking his pulse. Then she checked his blood pressure. The numbers she put on the chart were 98.4, 64, and 105/60. The last two were especially surprising, she thought. Whatever else she might say about the patient, he was rapidly getting himself back into shape. She wondered what the urgency was.
One more week, Kelly thought after she left. Got to get this damned arm working.
'So what have you found out for us?' Maxwell asked.
'Good news and bad news,' Greer replied. 'The good news is that the opposition has very little in the way of regular ground forces within response distance of the objective. We have ID's three battalions. Two are training to go south. One just returned from Eye Corps. It's pretty beat-up, in the process of reconstituting. The usual TO and E. Not much in the way of heavy weapons. What mechanized formations they have are well away from here.'
'And the bad news?' Admiral Podulski asked.
'Do I have to tell you? Enough triple-A along the coast to turn the sky black. SA-2 batteries here, here, and probably here, too. It's dangerous there for fast-movers, Cas. For helicopters? One or two rescue birds, sure, it's doable, but a large lift will be real dicey. We went all over this when we scoped our kingpin, remember?'
'It's only thirty miles from the beach.'
'Fifteen or twenty minutes in a helo, flying in a straight line, which they will not be able to do, Cas. I went over the threat maps myself. The best route I can identify - it's your area, Cas, but I do know a little, okay? - is twenty-five minutes, and I wouldn't want to fly it in daylight.'
'We can use -52s to blast a corridor through,' Podulski suggested. He'd never been the most subtle man in the world.
'I thought you wanted to keep this small,' Greer observed. 'Look, the real bad news is that there isn't much enthusiasm for this kind of mission anywhere. kingpin failed-'
'That wasn't our fault!' Podulski objected.
'I know that, Cas,' Greer said patiently. Podulski had always been a passionate advocate.
'It ought to be doable,' Cas growled.
All three men hovered over the reconnaisance photos. It was a good collection, two from satellites, two from SR-71 Blackbirds, and three very recent low-obliques from Buffalo Hunter drones. The camp was two hundred metres square, an exact square in fact, undoubtedly fitting exactly the diagram in some East Bloc manual for building secure facilities. Each corner had a guard tower, each of which was exactly ten meters in height. Each tower had a tin roof to keep the rain off the NVA-standard-issue RPD light machine gun, an obsolete Russian design. Inside the wire were three large buildings and two small ones. Inside one of the large buildings were, they believed, twenty American officers, all lieutenant-colonel/commander rank or higher, for this was a special camp.
It was the Buffalo Hunter photos that had first come to Greer's attention. One was good enough to have identified a face, Colonel Robin Zacharias, USAF. His F-I05G Wild Weasel had been shot down eight months earlier; he and his weapons-systems operator had been reported killed by the North Vietnamese. Even a picture of his body had been published. This camp, whose code name, sender green, was known to fewer than fifty men and women, was separate from the better-known Hanoi Hilton, which had been visited by American citizens and where, since the spectacular but unsuccessful Operation kingpin raid on the camp at Song Tay, nearly all American POWs had been concentrated. Out of the way, located in the most unlikely of places, not acknowledged in any way, sender green was ominous. However the war would turn out, America wanted her pilots back. Here was a place whose very existence suggested that some would never be returned. A statistical study of losses had shown an ominous irregularity: flight officers of relatively high rank were reported killed at a higher rate than those of lower