A Hymn Before Battle lota-1 Page 3

“I knew this would be hard on both of you,” said the general, smiling slightly, “and I thought about it before I called you. If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “I thought generals had aides to meet low-level flunkies like me,” said Mike, deliberately changing the subject.

  “Generals have aides to meet much higher level flunkies than you.” Jack frowned, taking the opportunity to leave it behind.

  “Well the heck with you then.” Mike laughed, handing the officer the box of cigars. “See if I cough up any more Ramars.”

  Even while on active duty, Specialist O’Neal and then-Lieutenant Colonel Horner had developed a close relationship. The colonel often treated Mike more like an aide-de-camp than a driver. The specialist, and later sergeant, was invited to eat with the colonel’s family and Horner explained many of the customs of the service and functions in the staff that would normally remain a mystery to a lowly enlisted man. Mike in turn increased the colonel’s computer literacy and introduced him to science fiction. The colonel took to it surprisingly well, considering that he had never read it before. Mike took great care however in the subject matter, starting with the great modern combat science fiction writers to pique his interest.

  After Mike left the service they continued to correspond and Mike followed Jack Horner’s career. They had lost touch in the last three years, mainly because of a disagreement over Mike’s career. After Mike completed college, Horner fully expected him to take a commission, and Mike wanted to work in web design and theory, while writing on the side. The colonel could not accept Mike’s reasoning and Mike could not accept Jack’s inability to take “no” for an answer.

  Mike sometimes felt that a career in the Army might have made more sense than civvie street, but he had seen too many officers’ lives strained to the breaking point by the demands of the service. When his time to reenlist came he got out instead and went to college. The pressure to take a commission, especially during the tough years when he was just getting started and after Cally came along had been hard on him and hard on his marriage. He had never told Jack but the implicit blackmail was what had caused Mike to sever their relationship.

  Sharon had experienced the problems that he only witnessed. Her first marriage to a naval aviator had ended in divorce, so she had no intention of letting Mike go back into the service. His brooding on the severance from Jack, in many ways like that of a son from a father, had distracted him from a discordant note: Jack’s rank.

  “Lieutenant general?” asked Mike in surprise. The morning sun glittered on the five-pointed stars of the new rank. The last Mike had heard, Horner was on the list for major general. Three-star rank should not have come for another few years.

  “Well, ‘when you care enough…’ ”

  O’Neal smiled at the reference. “What?” He retorted. “Given your well-known resemblance to Friedrich von Paulus, they decided major general wasn’t good enough for you?”

  “I was a major general until four days ago, Chief of Staff at the Eighteenth Airborne Corps—”

  “ADC-O. Congratulations.”

  “ — when I got yanked out for this.”

  “Isn’t that kind of fast to get ‘the advice and consent of the Senate’?”

  “It’s a brevet rank,” said the officer, impatiently, “but I have it on excellent authority it will be confirmed.” He frowned at some private joke.

  “I didn’t think you could frock—” Mike started to say.

  “That’ll have to wait, Mike.” The general cut him off, smiling slightly. “We have to get you briefed in and that will take a secure room.”

  Mike suddenly saw a familiar face that made him sure the conference was about science fiction. Across the lawn, surrounded by a sea of Navy black, was a prominent writer who specialized in naval combat.

  “Can you give me just a minute, sir? I want to talk to David,” he said pointing.

  General Horner looked over his shoulder, then turned back. “They’re probably taking him in for the same conversation; you two can talk after the meeting. We have a lot of ground to cover before then and it starts at nine.” He put an arm around Mike’s shoulders. “Come on, Mighty Mite, time to face the cannon.”

  * * *

  The secure conference room was windowless but it was probably on the exterior of the building; there was noticeable heat radiating from one wall. Another wall sported a painting of an Abrams tank cresting a berm, cannon spouting fire; the title was “Seventy-Three Easting.” Other than that the room was unadorned: not a plant, not a painting, not a scrap of paper. It smelled of dust and old secrets. Mike ended his perusal by grabbing one of the blue swivel chairs and relaxing as General Horner settled across from him. As the door swung shut, the general smiled, broadly. It gave him a strong resemblance to an angry tiger.

  Mike’s scowl deepened. “It’s that bad?” Horner only smiled like that when the fecal matter had well and truly hit the fan. The last time O’Neal had seen that smile was the beginning of a very unpleasant experience. It suddenly made him sorry he had given up tobacco.

  “Worse,” said the general. “Mike, this is not for dissemination, whether you choose to stay or not. I need your word on that right now.” He leaned back in his swivel chair, affecting a relaxed posture but with tension screaming in every line.

  “Okay,” said Mike and leaned forward. It suddenly seemed like a perfect time to reacquire a habit. He opened his recent gift to the general and extracted a cigar without asking.

  Horner leaned forward in his chair and lit the cigar at the former NCO’s lifted eyebrow. Then he leaned back and continued the briefing.

  “You and about every other son of a bitch who’s ever worn a uniform is about to be recalled.” The smile never left his face and there was now a hint of teeth to it.

  Mike was so stunned he forgot to draw on the cigar. He felt his stomach lurch and broke out in a cold sweat. “What the hell’s happening? Did we go to war with China or something?” He started to draw on the flame but the combination of surprise and trying to light a cigar caused him to choke. He put the cigar down in frustration and leaned forward.

  “I can’t get into why until the meeting,” said the general, putting away his lighter. “But, right now, I’ve got a blank check. I can bring you in on a direct commission…”

  “Is this about that again? I—” Mike leaned back and almost started to rise. The statement could not have been more inflammatory given their previous arguments.

  “Hear me out, dammit. You can come back, now, as an officer, and make a difference working with me or in a few months you’ll be called back anyway as just another mortar sergeant.” The general extracted his own Honduran from the box and lit it expertly, in direct defiance of the building’s no-smoking regulation. They had both learned the hard way, and in many ways together, when to pay attention to the niceties and when the little stuff went out the window.

  “Jesus, sir, you just sprang this on me.” Mike’s normal frown had deepened to the point it seemed it would split his face as his jaw muscles clenched and released. “I’ve got a life, you know? What about my family, my wife? Sharon is going to go absolutely ballistic!”

  “I checked. Sharon’s a former naval officer, she’ll get called up, too.” The silver-haired officer leaned back and watched his former and hopefully future subordinate’s reaction through the fragrant smoke.

  “Jesus Christ on a crutch, Jack!” Mike shouted, throwing up his hands in frustration. “What about Michelle and Cally? Who takes care of them?”

  “That is what one of the teams at this conference will be working on,” said Horner, waiting for the inevitable reaction to subside.

  “Can Sharon and I get stationed together?” asked Mike. He motioned for and caught the tossed lighter and relit the Ramar. For the first time in three years he took a deep draw on a cigar and let the nicotine bleed some of the tension off. Then he blew out an angry stream of smoke.

  “Probably not… I don’t kn
ow. None of that has been worked out, yet. Everything is on its ear right now and that’s what this conference is about: straightening everything out.” Horner looked around for a moment then made an ashtray out of a sheet of paper. He flicked his developing ash into it and set it in the middle of the conference table.

  “What gives? I know, you can’t tell me, right? OPSEC?” Mike studied the glowing end of his cigar then took another draw.

  “I can’t and I won’t play twenty questions.” General Horner stabbed the conference table with a finger and pinned his former subordinate with a glare. “Here’s the deal,” he continued, blowing out another fragrant cloud. The room had rapidly filled with cigar smoke. “This conference will last three days. I can hold you as a tech rep, for a really stupid amount of money, for the conference, maybe a week. But that is only if you agree to take a commission now. Further, we’ll be locked in for quite a while afterwards, maybe a couple of months and any communications with home will be monitored and censored…”

  “Hold it, you also didn’t say anything about a goddamn lock-in!” Mike snapped, his face stony.

  “Debate is not allowed about the lock-in so don’t even go there, it’s been ordered by the President. Or you can go home and in a few months get orders to report to Benning as a sergeant.” Jack leaned back and softened his tone. “But if you come on board now Sharon will get the tech rep check in a week — I can disburse it out of Team funds — and after that you’ll be making O-2’s salary and benefits including medical and housing, and so on.” Jack cocked his head and waited for an answer.

  “Sir, look, I’m working on a career here… ” Mike twiddled the cigar and contemplated the top of the conference table. He found himself unable to meet Horner’s gaze.

  “Mike, do not kick me in the teeth. I would not have requested you if you were stupid. I will make this as plain as I can within the limits of my orders: I need you on my team.” He stabbed the table again. “Not to put too fine a point on it, your country needs you. Not writing science fiction or making web pages, but doing science fiction. Our kind.”

  “Doing… ?” Then it hit him. The other writer specialized in naval sagas. Space naval sagas, not “wet” navy.

  Mike closed his eyes. When he opened them he was staring into a set of blue eyes as cold as the deep between the stars.

  * * *

  The earth is full of anger,

  The seas are dark with wrath,

  The nations in their harness

  Go up against our path:

  Ere yet we loose the legions —

  Ere yet we draw the blade,

  Jehovah of the Thunders,

  Lord God of Battles, aid!

  —Kipling

  2

  Ft. Bragg, NC Sol III

  0911 EDT March 16th, 2001 ad

  The secure phone on the broad wooden desk of the commander, Joint Special Operations Command, buzzed and he tossed the file he was annotating onto the pile of similar documents.

  “JSOC—” pronounced Jay-Sock ” — General Taylor.” The room was tastefully decorated with an impressive “I love me” wall of battle decorations, paintings of notable battles and commission photographs. The carpeting was deep, rich blue and the wallpaper was matching but the view was pure walls. The room resided deep within a featureless concrete building, one of several, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  Joint Special Operations Command was founded out of disaster. During the Tehran Hostage Crisis, the inability of the services to coordinate was critical in the debacle at Desert One. Special operations require depths of coordination and training that the regular services could not supply. As just one example, the forecasters for Desert One were not told precisely where the flights would go and, therefore, could not warn the planners about the dust storms the helicopters encountered. The Marine pilots, while capable and valiant to a normal level, were under-trained for a mission of that intensity, leading to the “pilot error” crashes at the site and other failures.

  These critical failures of communication, intelligence and training, the cornerstones of any military, crystallized a movement to centralize the various services’ special operations groups under one umbrella organization. Joint Special Operations was the child of that movement. It was from JSOC that such high-quality actions as the Special Forces and Ranger raids in Panama, the Force Recon insertion into Baghdad and the SEAL diversion during the assault in Desert Storm drew their planning and implementation.

  Now, the Joint Special Operations Command was a mature unit, ready to provide the right forces at the right time for special operations anywhere on the globe. But they were about to be tasked for a mission outside those parameters.

  “General Taylor, it’s Trayner,” said the cold voice on the phone.

  “And what can JSOC do for the Vice Chief of Staff, today?” asked General Taylor, leaning back and staring unseeing at the picture on the far wall: a line of blue-clad soldiers charging out of a mist against a similar line of soldiers clad in gray.

  “It’s an awkward tasking,” said the VCA. “I need one of your people. I’m going to give you the specifications and you tell me who I need. Also, this should be obvious since I’m stepping all over procedure, this is as ‘black’ as it gets. Are we clear on that?” “Black” operations are so secret sometimes they never happened. There are no records and no reports, only results. Politicians, even presidents, hate black operations.

  “Capice, sir,” the commander replied, wondering what the fuss was. This was SOCOM’s meat and drink. “What are the specifications for this oh-so-special individual?” he asked. He picked up a letter opener off his desk and started to balance it on the tip of his index finger.

  “NCO or officer,” continued the VCA, “to put together a team, mono-service or joint, for unspecified reconnaissance in hostile territory and environment outside the continental United States.”

  Taylor scratched the back of his neck and changed his stare to the picture of a tropical beach on his desk. A much younger, bronzed Taylor had his arm around the waist of a skinny laughing blonde. He appeared to be trying to cop a feel. “That’s pretty damn vague General, except the ‘hostile’ part.” He flipped the letter opener in the air. It landed point down in a cork target just to the left of his monitor, obviously placed there for that very reason. He paid it no attention, assuming the letter opener knew where it was going.

  “Don’t fish, Jim,” snapped the VCA. “This is as black as midnight; that’s straight from National Command Authority, the President. It wasn’t even from the SECDEF or SECARMY, they’re out of the loop. I was given this tasking personally by the NCA.”

  “Jesus, this is deep shit,” snorted Taylor. He thought for a moment then laughed, “Okay. Mosovich.”

  “Shit, I knew you’d say that,” the other general growled. “The sergeant major’ll shit a brick.”

  “He’s your sergeant major, not mine,” Taylor laughed again. “You want black reconnaissance in hostile territory, Mosovich is the Man. I notice you don’t suggest Bobby-boy,” General Taylor continued smugly.

  “He hates to be called that,” said the VCA, resignedly. It was an old and worn argument. “Okay, okay, put him TDY to my office. Tell ’im to sneak by the sergeant major if he’s so damn stealthy.” The phone clicked in Taylor’s ear.

  “You wanted to see me, General?”

  At the quietly spoken words the report the Vice Chief of Staff had been reading flew upward in a blizzard of paper. In the three days since his call to the JSOC commander, Trayner had hardly left his office. When Command Sergeant Major Jacob “Jake the Snake” Mosovich had entered his office or how long he had been sitting quietly on the Vice Chief of Staff’s couch was a mystery. The startle factor and long hours caused the VCA’s temper to snap.

  “God damn you, you, you, fucking juvenile delinquent! How long have you been sitting there?” he shouted, slapping his desk. All it did was hurt his hand; the implied reprimand slid off Mosovich like rain off a roof.
“And have you ever heard of reporting properly?” the officer snarled. He started to reassemble the file as if it were the shredded remains of his temper.

  “I’ve been here since 0500, sir, about twenty minutes before you got here.” Jake’s scar-seamed face split in an uncharacteristic grin, “General Taylor told me to avoid Bobby-Boy.”

  Sergeant Major Mosovich was a thirty-year veteran of covert special operations. Five feet seven inches tall and a hundred fifty pounds soaking wet, his head was almost totally bald, one side of it scar tissue, but his dress green uniform was virtually unadorned. He sported few decorations for valor and his open military record, his 201 file, listed him with limited time in combat: a few actions in Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm and Somalia. For all that, and the total lack of any official Purple Hearts, his face was pockmarked with black pits, indicative of unextracted shrapnel, and his body was covered in the ropy scars made by metal when it violates the human body. His medical file, as opposed to his 201, had so much data on trauma repair and recovery it could be used as a textbook. He had spent his whole career, except a first tour with the 82nd Airborne, in special operations, moving from Special Forces to Delta Force and eventually back. No matter where he was, officially, he always seemed to be somewhere else and he had a permanent tan from tropical suns. Over the years he had amassed quite a retirement fund from temporary duty pay and he never went anywhere, anymore, unless it was at max per diem.

  The necessity to avoid the Sergeant Major of the Army stemmed from an unfortunate incident the year before at the Association of the United States Army annual convention at the Washington Sheraton.

  Once a senior NCO reaches a certain rank, all the positions are technically equal. Obviously, however, there is a certain prestige to the Command Sergeant Major position of, say, Third Army as opposed to Third Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colorado. But the higher prestige positions do not necessarily go to the sergeant majors with the most time in grade or combat experience, but rather to the sergeant majors who are willing to expend the political energy or have the patronage and desire.