Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Combat Ops by David Michaels Page A

hero.”
    “All this is making my brain explode,” said Treehorn. “I need a bullet and a target. I’m easy to please. The rest of it is bullshit.”
    “Captain, I know Harruck’s your friend,” began Ramirez, “but we weren’t sent here to build a school. If  this is a good old-fashioned militia training op, I can deal with that, too. But we can’t be tiptoeing around and still get our job done.”
    “I know. And there’s no reason we should get caught up in all this. I want to go back out there tonight, gather more intel, and proceed on mission.”
    “We’ve got the drones but still no way to talk to them,” said Hume. “Waiting on new gear. Could be a few more days.”
    I cursed. “Then we’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Radios, binoculars, NVGs, it’s not like we didn’t train that way,” I said.
    “You going to tell Harruck?” asked Treehorn.
    “No choice. We still need company support. He wanted me to call Keating and delay our mission. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d rather get the job done and get the hell out of here as soon as possible.”
    “So just lie to him,” said Treehorn. I thought about that.
    And I wondered if maybe I was just being a selfish bastard, but my guys felt the same way, so I lied and told Harruck no go. Our mission remained unchanged. We needed to find and capture Zahed.
    “Don’t you understand?” he asked me, raising his voice when I returned to his office later in the day. “This is eight months’ worth of work finally coming together, and you want to screw it up just to nail that fat bastard who’ll be replaced by his second in command! If we don’t reach some kind of an agreement, nothing will happen.”
    “They didn’t send me here to debate the politics, Simon. They sent me to get a guy, and you can’t blame me for doing that. I understand your mission here. All I’m asking is that you understand mine. If I can capture Zahed and they get him to talk, he could turn the tide for us.”
    “Okay, yeah, I get it now. I understand how you’re going to incite them and create an even more volatile situ ation, as evidenced by today’s attack. And at the same time that I’m trying to earn the locals’ trust, you’re piss ing them off by hunting down one fool who in the grand scheme of things means nothing. He’s a local yokel. You’re making him sound like Bin Laden.”
    I balled my hands into fists. “You’re assuming that I can’t demoralize them, that I can’t get the whole leader ship party, that no matter what I do it’s going to be sta tus quo over there.”
    “That’s right, because that’s the way it’s been here. If we’re going to change anything, it has to be big and swift, and we need to do it together—if we leave them out, we’re doomed to fail.”
    I couldn’t face him any more and looked to the door. “Scott—”
    I took a deep breath. “I understand now why you didn’t become a Ghost.”
    “Don’t be this way.”
    “Sorry, I’m not like you, Simon. I’m a soldier.” “Wow, what the hell was that?”
    I faced him and spoke slowly . . . for effect. “What I see here is us building another welfare state, socialism at  its finest, but remember what Margaret Thatcher said: ‘Socialism only works until you run out of other people’s money.’ I’m not ready to negotiate with these bastards.” “Captain,” he snapped. “I’ll be contacting the gen eral. I’ll take this all the way up. There’s just too much at  stake here. Nothing personal.”
    “That’s fine. You won’t like the answer you get. We’re doing a recon tonight. I’ll need company support. I’ll expect you to provide it. Check the registry, Captain.”

SIX

    Without our Cross-Coms, satellite uplinks and down links, and targeting computers, we were, for all intents and purposes, traditional old-school combatants relying on our scopes and skills. We did, however, have one nice toy well suited for Afghanistan: the XM-25, a laser-