Page 7 of Denied Access
The amber lager glided across his tongue before disappearing down his throat in a pleasant rush. Many, many times he’d questioned his life choices, usually when he was bent over double with a hundred-pound rucksack on his back and boot-deep in mud or snow, with moisture dripping from the brim of his boonie hat. Those were the days when he wondered why he’d ever thought it a good idea to drop out of law school in favor of earning the coveted Green Beret.
And then there were days like today.
“This ain’t a bad gig.”
Joe nodded and wiped the beer remnants from his lips with the back of his hand. “Almost makes the last twelve months worth it, right?”
His companion, a tall, slender man with a mop of brown hair, paused before answering. “Jury’s still out on that one.”
Joe nodded again and took another swig of beer to hide his smile. His grin was partly because he was pleased that the young recruit had answered correctly, but also due to the man’s thick Bronx accent. His companion could have played an extra inGoodfellas.
At just twenty-one, David McCloskey was barely old enough to drink beer in his native New York. Had he chosen a normal vocation such as plumbing, David would now be in the third year of his apprenticeship program and still functioning under a master plumber’s watchful eye. If he’d stayed in college, where he’d been majoring in theater, David might be auditioning for a coveted role on Broadway.
David had chosen differently.
Instead he’d decided to serve his country first in the Navy as a cryptologic technician and then by volunteering for one of the most demanding and least-known units within Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. The organization went by several names, each meant to be more confusing than the last, but among its initiates it was simply called the Unit. The selection process boasted an attrition rate of around 75 percent, while the operator training course, or OTC, that followed graduated less than half the recruits who began.
As Joe had remarked more than once, the training was supposed to be hard because the Unit’s unique mission was equally challenging—something David had learned firsthand over the last ten days. As Joe’s first team sergeant had told him when he’d first reported to Tenth Special Forces Group as a newbie Green Beret, the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.
But he didn’t say that to David.
This was partly because he was trying to avoid the label of crotchety old team sergeant. But only partly. The real reason was that at that moment he was more interested in something else.
The disagreement brewing in the far corner of the bar.
“What are they saying?” Joe said, nodding toward the group.
The pub in which the pair were seated could most charitably be described asintimate. A pair of large picture windows at the front of the room helped to disabuse the stereotype of a dimly lit bar, but the rest of the establishment’s features were more traditional. A freestanding structure of brown, scarred wood served as the room’s centerpiece. Two busy bartenders dispensed alcohol from behind the islandof oak, and serving glasses hung upside down from racks above their heads.
Patrons gathered in twos and threes around circular tables of the sort that would have looked more at home in a drawing room than the neighborhood bar. Illumination came courtesy of a trio of glittering chandeliers, and music was delivered by a retro turnstile upon which was propped an album cover displaying Bob Marley’s smiling face. On a good night, the space probably held thirty customers.
Tonight, Joe counted half that.
Most of the customers were quietly talking over glasses of frothy beer. Most, but not all. In the opposite corner of the bar, four seated men were vigorously arguing with two newcomers standing over them. Though he couldn’t put his finger on why, Joe had a feeling what they were discussing might be important. To his credit, David didn’t turn in his chair toward the loud voices. Instead he set his beer on the table and slouched as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
It was an act.
David might have demonstrated the physical and mental fortitude required to join the ranks of a Tier One unit, but beneath his bushy beard and shaggy hair, he was still a twenty-one-year-old kid. When he was really concentrating, the former thespian scrunched up his nose. At the moment, he looked like he’d just bitten into a grapefruit.
“Everyone’s speaking Russian, but I hear two distinct dialects.”
Joe knew they were speaking Russian.
Army Special Forces commandos were unique among the greater special operations community in that every Green Beret attended language school as part of their postselection training known as the Q Course. Tenth Special Forces Group’s area of responsibility included both Europe and the Soviet Union. As such, Joe had spent several months studying Russian after completing the Q Course. He worked hard to maintain conversational proficiency, but he was by no means fluent.
David was in another league altogether.
As the son of a Polish father who’d traded in his ethnic name for one he considered more American and a Russian mother, David had grown up in a home in which multiple languages were spoken. His family had immigrated to the United States when he was in elementary school, and he’d added English to his repertoire within months of landing in New York City. As was often the case with first-generation immigrants, David fiercely loved his adopted homeland. When the money he’d saved for college had dried up, it had been an easy decision to express this love through national service.
He’d disclosed his polyglot abilities to a Navy recruiter, who in turn had pitched him on the job of cryptologic technician interpretive—a billet tasked with collecting and translating foreign communications. David’s sterling work had brought him to the attention of yet another recruiter. This one from the Unit. The secretive organization was built around pairing special operators like Joe with linguists who had signal-intercept experience like David.
In a mission that was a Unit staple, the two men had spent the last week emplacing clandestine devices around the periphery of the former Soviet air force base located in the Latvian city of Lociki, about nine miles to the northeast of Daugavpils proper. The low-profile receivers were designed to intercept radio communications and telemetry transmitted by the Russian fighter-bomber squadron that called the airstrip home. The MiGs were capable of carrying nuclear weapons and the American intelligence agencies that provided the Unit’s operational taskings wanted to keep tabs on the aircraft in an effort to decipher Moscow’s thinking.
Like many Baltic states, Latvia was still on unsteady ground with its former parent nation. Tensions had erupted a little over a year prior when Soviet paramilitary forces had attempted to brutally suppress a series of dissident protests that had engulfed the Latvian city of Riga. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Russian paramilitary units continued to attack Latvian border stations, killing several Latvians in the process.
While emplacing the clandestine receivers was his primarymission, Joe’s overall tasking was to develop intelligence. Many in the West feared that Latvia was on the brink of an armed conflict with its Russian agitators. As such, Joe’s secondary objective was to gather on-the-ground insight into how the ethnic Russian people who called eastern Latvia home might respond to an armed Russian incursion. At the moment, his operational sixth sense was telling him that the conversation across the room might be useful in that regard.
Which was where David came in.
