Free Soar by John Weisman Page B

operation. He’d been brought in by Ritzik, who had first worked with the young warrant officer during cold-weather combat-readiness exercises in the Sierra Nevada, three weeks after Ritzik had been pulled out of Afghanistan in March of 2002.
    Because the ops had been so rough in Afghanistan, Ritzik had pushed hard to change the SOAR’s training parameters. The 160 th had gone to Afghanistan using by-the-book training guidelines: pilots were not required to fly in visibilityof less than two miles and a ceiling of less than five hundred feet. But combat had forced the SOAR to deliver SpecOps troops in zero-zero conditions: zero visibility and zero ceiling (not to mention unpredictable downdrafts, crosswinds, and wind shears).
    Back at CAG, Ritzik argued that unless a unit trained the way it would fight, the training was essentially useless. Delta trained that way. So did most SEAL units. Ritzik maintained that SOAR’s pilots wanted to push the training envelope, but that a cabal of play-it-safe desk jockeys in the Army chief of staff’s office was holding them back, afraid of losing one of SOAR’s multimillion-dollar MH-53E aircraft. Ritzik took his case to the three-star who ran JSOC—the Joint Special Operations Command—at Fort Bragg. The result was an experimental, three-week, balls-to-the-wall, high-altitude training session under brutal weather conditions, sleep deprivation, and scores of zero-zero landings in rough terrain. It was during those twenty-one days that Ritzik and Rowdy Yates concluded WO-2 Michael Dunne was the best damn chopper pilot they’d ever seen.
    Which was why within a minute and a half after he’d spoken with Ritzik from Rockman’s office, Yates put in a call to the SOAR and had Dunne TDY’d to Bragg on a SECDEF Priority One.
    Yates’s draft op plan called for Mickey D to accompany the main contingent to Turkey. That way he could be briefed on the operation’s problems and add his input to the solution. At Diyarbakir, the CIA’s air base in southeastern Turkey, Ritzik and his people would pick up the last of their supplies, then fly on to Almaty, Kazakhstan.
    In Turkey, Mickey D would rendezvous with an unmarked, unscheduled transport from Fort Campbell, which he’d ride to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital. From there, he and a four-man Task Force 160 aircrew would fly the radar-defeatingcovert-ops Black Hawk chopper that was co-cooned in the transport to an old Soviet paratroop-battalion command post at Tokhtamysh, within twenty-five miles of the Chinese border. There, they’d install fuel bladders that would triple the chopper’s range, and wait for the signal to exfiltrate Ritzik’s unit. The two dozen battery-powered infrared strobes Dunn was bringing with him would allow Ritzik to guide him to the LZ without using conventional lights.
    Yates started for the door. “I gotta get out of here.” Halfway, he stopped cold. “Oh, crap—I forgot the RPGs.” Yates plucked up the handset and punched a series of numbers into it. “Keep me posted.” He looked up at the twenty-four-hour clock above the door. “Christ Almighty, we’re running out of time, Gino. I wish Loner’s ass was here with us, not up in D.C. playing with the suits. I don’t like working in a vacuum.”

5
SECDEF’s Limousine.
1155 Hours Local Time.
    SECDEF LOOKED UP from his meeting notes and switched off the limo’s right-rear reading light. He scribbled a telephone number on a Post-it, swiveled toward Ritzik, and handed it to him. “That’s my cell-phone number—the one my wife uses.” Rockman cracked a self-conscious grin. “She calls it my electronic leash. I pick it up—no one else.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Now you have it. It’s not a secure line, so be careful what you say. But you call me with an inventory—everything you need—within two hours, and I’ll see that it gets to Fort Bragg, or wherever else you want it sent, by the end of the day.”
    “Roger, Mr. Secretary.” Ritzik memorized the