"No way, Eric," Austin interjected. 'That's going to skew the risk parameters in our ops analysis. We'd have to scrap our computer simulation and virtually start over. Hell, that alone could take us three hours."
All those fancy analyses are best employed wiping your bum, Nichols heard himself thinking, almost but not quite out loud. We've got nobody on the ground, so we're working with satellite intel, and SIGINT—which ain't giving us shit 'cause those bastards aren't talking on their radios.
"Let me make sure I heard it right a minute ago," Nichols went on. "We can't just take out the launch vehicles, a surgical strike, because there's a chance there could be nuclear material on board?"
"You've got it right. I'd hoped not to have to tell you. So consider this Classified. The whole op has been jacked up to a Vega One. We've never had anything that serious before."
That's nuclear, Nichols told himself. Well, he figured, why not. If the terrorists did have a bomb.
“This damned thing is hot," Austin continued. "They don't get any hotter. So there's no way in hell I'm going to go around procedures. If you and your boys don't do this clean, it's going to mean our next command, yours and mine, will be somewhere within sight of Tierra del Fuego. If there's a nuclear incident here, the Greek government would probably tear up our mutual-defense treaty and convert the base at Souda into a souvlaki stand. Am I making myself clear?"
"If I hear you right, what you're saying is, no way can we afford to fuck this one up."
"I've always admired your quick grasp of the salient points in a briefing. So, we're going to do this by the goddamn book; we're going to dot every goddamn 'i' and cross every goddamn 't' and get every goddamn detail of this op, right down to the color of our goddamn shoelaces, approved, signed off, and ass-kissed in triplicate. That Iranian hostage disaster did not exactly make a lot of careers. Again I ask you, Eric, am I getting the fuck through?"
"In skywriting. The only small problem I see, sir, is that while everybody is carefully protecting their pension, those assholes on the island may start slaughtering hostages, or put this 'nuclear material'—which I have just learned about in such a timely fashion—into goddamn orbit. And then my Deltas are going to be in the middle of a shitstorm they easily could have prevented if they'd been given the chance. They're my boys, and I don't really take kindly to that happening. Sir." He reached in his breast pocket for a cigar, the chewing of which was his usual response to stress.
"So what exactly do you propose we do?" Austin asked.