Without remorse - Tom Clancy [89]
'Nobody ever said it was going to be easy.'
'If you loop around here, you can use this ridge-line to mask your approach, but you have to hop the river somewhere ... here, and you run into that flak trap ... and that one's even worse, 'cording to these notations.'
'Did SEALs plan air missions over there, Chief?' Maxwell asked, somewhat amused, only to be surprised at the reply.
'Sir, 3rd SOG was always short of officers. They kept getting shot up. I was the group operations officer for two months, and we all knew how to plan insertions. We had to, that was the most dangerous part of most missions. Don't take this wrong, sir, but even enlisted men know how to think.'
Maxwell bristled a little. 'I never said they didn't.'
Kelly managed a grin. 'Not all officers are as enlightened as you are, sir.' He looked back down at the map. 'You plan this sort of thing backwards. You start with what do you need on the objective, then you backtrack to find out how you get it all there.'
'Save that for later. Tell me about the river valley,' Maxwell ordered.
Fifty hours, Kelly remembered, picked up from Danang by helo, deposited aboard the submarine USS Skate, which then had moved Kelly right into the surprisingly deep estuary of that damned stinking river, fighting his way up against the current behind an electrically powered sea-scooter, which was still there, probably, unless some fisherman had snagged a line on it, staying underwater until his air tanks gave out, and he remembered how frightening it was not to be able to hide under the rippled surface. When he couldn't do that, when it had been too dangerous to move, hiding under weeds on the bank, watching traffic move on the river road, hearing the ripping thunder of the flak batteries on the hilltops, wondering what some 37mm fire could do to him if some North Vietnamese boy scout stumbled across him and let his father know. And now this flag officer was asking him how to risk the lives of other men in the same place, trusting him, much as Pam had, to know what to do. That sudden thought chilled the retired chief bosun's mate.
'It's not a really nice place, sir. I mean, your son saw a lot of it, too.'
'Not from your perspective,' Maxwell pointed out.
And that was true, Kelly remembered. Little Dutch had bellied up in a nice thick place, using his radio only on alternate hours, waiting for Snake to come and fetch him while he nursed a broken leg in silent agony, and listened to the same triple-A batteries that had splashed his A-6 hammer the sky at other men trying to take out the same bridge that his own bombs had missed. Fifty hours, Kelly remembered, no rest, no sleep, just fear and the mission.
'How much time, sir?'
'We're not sure. Honestly, I'm not sure if we can get the mission green-lighted. When we have a plan, then we can present it. When it's approved, we can assemble assets, and train, and execute.'
'Weather considerations?' Kelly asked.
'The mission has to go in the fall, this fall, or maybe it'll never go.'
'You say these guys will never come back unless we get them?'
'No other reason for them to set this place up in the way they did,' Maxwell replied.
'Admiral, I'm pretty good, but I'm just an enlisted guy, remember?'
'You're the only person who's been close to the place.' The Admiral collected the photographs and the maps. He handed Kelly a fresh set of the latter. 'You turned down OCS three times. I'd like to know why, John.'
'You want the truth? It would have meant going back. I pushed my luck enough.'
Maxwell accepted that at face value, silently wishing that his best source of local information had accumulated the rank to match his expertise, but Maxwell also remembered flying combat missions off the old Enterprise with enlisted pilots, at least one of whom