Black Hawk Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stories copied and posted in the hangar. That
     sort of thing just fired the guys up more, but to the public, and to Washington officials
     keenly concerned about how things played on CNN, the task force was so far a bust. They
     had been handed what seemed like a simple assignment, capture the tinhorn Somali warlord
     Mohamed Farrah Aidid or, failing that, take down his organization, and for six weeks now,
     they'd had precious little visible success. Patience was wearing thin, and pressure for
     progress was mounting.
    Just that morning Garrison had been stewing about it in his office. It was like trying to
     hit a curveball blindfolded. Here he had a force of men be could drop on a building--any
     building--in Mogadishu with just a few minutes' notice. These weren't just any men. They
     were faster, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than any soldiers in the world.
    Point out a target building and the D-boys could take it down so fast that the bad guys
     inside would be hog-tied before the sound of the flashbang grenades and door charges had
     stopped ringing in their ears. They could herd the whole mess of them out by truck or
     helicopter before the neighborhood militia even had a chance to pull on its pants.
     Garrison's force could do alt this and even videotape the whole operation in color for
     training purposes (and to show off a little back at the Pentagon), but they couldn't do
     any of these things unless their spies on the ground pointed them at the right goddamn
     house.
    For three nights running they had geared up to launch at a house where Aidid was either
     present or about to be (so the general's spies told him). Every time they had failed to
     nail it down.
    Garrison knew from day one that intelligence was going to be a problem. The original plan
     had called for a daring, well-placed lead Somali spy, and the head of the CIA's local
     operation, to present Aidid an elegant hand-carved cane soon after Task Force Ranger
     arrived. Embedded in the bead of the cane was a homing beacon. It seemed like a sure thing
     until, on Garrison's first day in-country, Lieutenant Colonel Dave McKnight, his chief of
     staff, informed him that their lead informant had shot himself in the head playing Russian
     roulette. It was the kind of idiotic macho thing guys did when they'd lived too long on
     the edge.
    “He's not dead,” McKnight told the general, “but we're fucked.”
    When you worked with the locals there were going to be setbacks. Few people knew this
     better than Garrison, who was the picture of American military machismo with his gray crew
     cut, desert camouflage fatigues, and combat boots, a 9 mm pistol strapped to a shoulder
     holster and that unlit half cigar jammed perpetually in the side of his mouth. Garrison
     had been living by the sword now for about three decades. He was one of the least-known
     important army officers in America. He had run covert operations all over the world-Asia,
     the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South America, the Caribbean. One thing all
     these missions had in common was they required cooperation from the locals.
    They also demanded a low threshold for bullshit. The general was a bemused cynic. He had
     seen just about everything, and didn't expect much-except from his men. His gruff
     informality suited an officer who had begun his career not as a military academy graduate,
     but a buck private. He served two tours in Vietnam, part of it helping to run the
     infamously brutal Phoenix program, which ferreted out and killed Viet Cong village
     leaders. That was enough to iron the idealism out of anybody. Garrison had risen to
     general without exercising the more politic demands of generalship, which called for
     graceful euphemism and frequent obfuscation. He was a blunt realist who avoided the pomp
     and pretense of upper-echelon military life. Soldiering was about fighting. It was about
     killing people before