Tengu. John Donohue
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the wiser about what was disturbing him, I returned home tired, but uneasy. Off in the distance, muted thunder rolled across the heavens and the air pulsed with an energy that, although unseen, made the skin along my shoulders and neck tingle in trepidation.
First Sergeant Warren Cooke had been thinking that he wished he had more tape. This was the middle of his third tour with the Special Forces and in his experience it was the little things that tripped you up. Careful preparation could mean the difference between bringing your people home safe or in pieces.
He knew deep down that the team he had been training was almost ready to go operational. Almost. And that nagged at him. When the orders came down to get the team saddled up, he was surprised, but obeyed. He was, after all, a soldier. But he still worried.
He had taped his equipment down and secured his pants legs and sleeves so that there would be as little noise as possible when he moved through the underbrush. In an operation of this type, noise was your enemy. Battle rattle was as dangerous as any bad guy. He had been checking his people out as well. They had tried to emulate his actions, but needed a bit more practice. He wished he had more tape.
His A-Team had been working with the Filipino Special Forces for months now. It was the sort of training assignment that was nothing new for Special Forces troopers, but the rules of engagement in a post-9/11 world had made the work more interesting. Typically, you worked with the locals on things that were second nature in the Special Forces: stealth and fire discipline, careful planning, and cold precise execution in even the hottest of free-fire zones. Depending on where you were, the raw material you worked with varied greatly. In the Philippines, the soldiers Cooke worked with were bright and motivated, which was half the battle. There were rumors that their senior officers sold off some supplies on the black market, but that had little impact on Cooke and his daily job. The Filipinos were relatively small men, wearing jungle pattern camo and baseball hats that made them look like eager teenagers. But Cooke had to concede; they had the potential to develop into an effective fighting force. If they survived the mission.
The new rules of engagement meant that the A-Team members now had more opportunity to work directly with their Filipino counterparts in anti-terrorist operations. From Cooke’s perspective, this was a good thing. He had worked too long and hard with these troops to see them wasted. His presence might help them live long enough to learn their trade. Besides, whatever his reluctance, he knew that they would have to face the test of fire sometime— you could do all the practice drills you wanted but there was no substitute for what you could learn in actual combat. And, in cases where targets were confirmed terrorist elements—what they called CTEs—Cooke and the other SF troopers were authorized to use deadly force at their discretion.
So Cooke and two other Americans from the First Special Forces Group—Abruzessi and Barnes—were going along on this operation. Technically, they were observers and advisors, but any time he went into the field, he did so with the expectation that he’d be in a firefight. He had a silenced nine-millimeter automatic strapped to his leg, a combat knife on his harness, and three concussion grenades. A twelve-gauge combat shotgun hung, muzzle down, from his back, and an M-4 carbine with a folding sock was clipped to his front. It was the older model, with a rate of fire selections for single fire and short bursts. Cooke liked it that way. He knew troopers in Afghanistan with the newer, fully-auto option on the M-4 and they said it tended to overheat. Cooke liked to stick with what worked. His load was completed with ten, thirty-round magazines of ammunition, a radio transmitter that fed into an earplug, chemical sticks that glowed when twisted, and field dressings that made his harness pouches and the pockets of his fatigues bulge. A soft camelback canteen hung down his spine. Each time you went into an operation, the gear you carried seemed to multiply exponentially. It took a while to figure out what you really needed and how to stow it. Invariably, you ended up not using something or wishing you had something else. The trick was to strike a happy medium.
This operation had two objectives: the disruption of a terrorist cell affiliated with Abu Sayeff, and the collection of any intelligence regarding plans and personnel. But the data snatch was decidedly secondary. The Philippine government was looking for a dramatic strike against Muslim insurgents. This op was as much about PR value as it was about anything else. Filipino intelligence had been sniffing around a remote farmhouse on the northern Mindanao coast. Over the last few months, they’d verified its use as a center for local terrorist training. When a tip came in regarding a meeting that was to draw in the heads of local cells, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Yet, tonight’s mission made him uneasy. The planning felt rushed, particularly with the team just beginning to get its act together. Cooke had raised the issue of a delay to get some better intel, but he was ignored; they were going in anyway. The situation was a bit more fluid than Cooke was comfortable with, but very little was perfect in his world. He sighed.
Cooke was a soldier, however, and he kept the feeling off his face and out of his voice. The strike force had offloaded from trucks, and while the Filipinos checked their gear, he went over procedure one more time. “Okay,” Cooke began, gesturing to the two other Green Berets, Abruzessi and Barnes, and unfolding a map. “Here’s the target. It’s three clicks down this artery from the main road. It sits on about two cleared acres. Three hundred meters north of the building is the river, which is navigable right down to the coast. Activity is equally divided between the road and the dock there. You can see the ocean from the dock—approximately eighty meters. We can expect them to have a boat moored there tonight.” Joe Abruzessi—Joey Z—nodded along with the narrative. Barnes didn’t move anything but his eyes.
“We’ve got three insertion points. Joey, you’re with the squad approaching from upriver, heading to this point . . . ” his finger came down on the map and Abruzessi picked up the narrative.
“I got the GPS coordinates as well as visuals. Once there, we move inland to cover the eastern flank of the clearing and the boat dock.”
“Me and the other team approach from the west and do the same on the other flank,” Barnes added.
“I come in from the south and set up as a blocking force where the road enters the clearing,” Cooke said. In his mind, he could envisage it—a large V with the point flattened and its broad opening toward the river. The farmhouse sat in the middle of the V. “Your people with LGs clear on their role?”
Barnes and Joey Z nodded. The LGs—long guns—were the snipers. Barnes’ squad was to eliminate the boat crew. Abruzessi’s was to cover the route down to the dock. The idea was to have Cooke’s people secure the building and provide any retreating terrorists with the idea that they could escape via the river. But escape would only come in one of two ways. Any armed resistance was to be met with lethal force. Those who surrendered would face a hard season of interrogation by the Philippine Secret Service. Cooke didn’t think either option was too great.
“Okay,” Cooke said. “My main concern here is fire discipline.” It wasn’t an indictment against the Filipinos. The plain fact of the matter was that any time you got a bunch of young, aggressive men together and armed them with high velocity firearms, they posed as great a danger to each other as to the enemy. “We’ll sweep in from the south. I’m hoping we can get in there before they know what’s happening. But keep your heads down. Walls will not provide cover—rounds will go right through them and keep going. If the bad guys move toward the docks, make sure your people keep within the planned fields of fire.
“We’ve got command affirmation on CTE status, so our presence in the field is a go,” Cooke continued. “Fifteen to twenty people in the building. All bad actors. Lieutenant Aguilar is in nominal command of the op. He’s been outstanding during his training with us. Basically, we do this with them by the numbers, and try to keep them from making major mistakes, but we can take whatever action we determine is necessary if the wheels come off.”
“Outstanding,” Abruzessi said. “This is much better than Columbia.” It was his first tour with the First SFG, which had its primary field of operations in Asia. The three men looked at each other