by Tom Clancy
The last people off the C-5B were the Rainbow troopers, now dressed in multicolor BDU fatigues, their faces painted in green and brown camouflage makeup. Gearing came down last of all, a bag over his head so that he couldn’t see anything.
It turned out that they couldn’t get everyone aboard. Vega and four others were left behind to watch the helicopter lift off just at first light. The blinking strobes climbed into the air and headed northwest, while the soldiers groused at having to stand in the warm, humid air close to the transport. About that time, an automobile arrived at the aircraft with some forms for the flight crew to fill out. To the surprise of everyone present, no special note was made of the aircraft type. The paint job announced that it was a large, privately owned transport, and the airport personnel accepted this, since all the paperwork seemed to be properly filled out, and therefore had to be true and correct.
It was so much like Vietnam, Clark thought, riding in a helicopter over solid treetops of green. But he was not in a Huey this time, and it was nearly thirty years since his first exposure to combat operations. He couldn’t remember being very afraid—tense, yes, but not really afraid—and that struck him as remarkable, looking back now. He was holding one of the suppressed MP-10s, and now, riding in this chopper to battle, it was as though his youth had returned—until he turned to see the other troops aboard and remarked on how young they all looked, then reminded himself that they were, in the main, over thirty years of age, and that for them to look young meant that he had to be old. He put that unhappy thought aside and looked out the door past Sergeant Nance and his machine gun. The sky was lightening up now, too much light for them to use their night-vision goggles, but not enough to see very well. He wondered what the weather would be like here. They were right on the equator, and that was jungle down there, and it would be hot and damp, and down there under the trees would be snakes, insects, and the other creatures for whom this most inhospitable of places was indeed home—and they were welcome to it, John told them without words, out the door of the Night Hawk.
“How we doing, Malloy?” John asked over the intercom.
“Should have it in sight any second—there, see the lights dead ahead!”
“Got it.” Clark waved for the troops in the back to get ready. “Proceed as planned, Colonel Malloy.”
“Roger that, Six.” He held course and speed, on a heading of two-nine-six, seven hundred feet AGL—above ground level—and a speed of a hundred twenty knots. The lights in the distance seemed hugely out of place, but lights they were, just where the navigation system and the satellite photos said they would be. Soon the point source broke up into separate distinct sources.
“Okay, Gearing,” Clark was saying in the back. “We’re letting you go back to talk to your boss.”
“Oh?” the prisoner asked through the black cloth bag over his head.
“Yes,” John confirmed. “You’re delivering a message. If he surrenders to us, nobody gets hurt. If he doesn’t, things’ll get nasty. His only option is unconditional surrender. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah.” The head nodded inside the black bag.
The Night Hawk’s nose came up just as it approached the west end of the runway that some construction crew had carved into the jungle. Malloy made a fast landing, without allowing his wheels to touch the ground—standard procedure, lest there be mines there. Gearing was pushed out the door, and immediately the helicopter lifted back off, reversing course to the runway’s east end.
Gearing pulled the bag from his head and oriented himself, spotted the lights for Project Alternate, a facility he knew about but had never visited, and headed there without looking back.
At the east end, the Night Hawk again came in to hover a foot or so off the ground. The Rainbow troops leaped out, and the helicopter immediately climbed up for the return trip to Manaus, which would be made into the rising sun. Malloy and Harrison put on their sunglasses and held course, keeping a close watch on their fuel state. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment maintained its helos pretty well, the Marine thought, flexing his gloved hands on the controls. Just like the Air Force pukes in England.
Noonan was the first to get set up. All the troops ran immediately into the thick cover a scant hundred yards from the thick concrete pavement of the runway and headed west, wondering if Gearing had noted their separate arrival here. It took fully half an hour for them to make their way over a distance that, had they run it, would have taken scarcely ten minutes. For all that, Clark thought it was good time—and now he remembered the creepy feeling that came from being in the jungle, where the very air seemed alive with things hoping to suck one’s blood and give you whatever diseases would take your life as slowly and painfully as possible. How the hell had he endured the nineteen months he’d spent in Vietnam? Ten minutes here and he was ready to leave. Around him, massive hardwood trees reached two or three hundred feet to the sky to form the top canopy of this fetid place, with secondary trees reaching about a third that height, and yet another that stopped at fifty or so, with bushes and other plants at his feet. He could hear the sound of movement— whether his own people or animals he couldn’t be sure, though he knew that this environment supported all manner of life, most of it unfriendly to humans. His people spread out to the north, most of them plucking branches to tuck under the elastic bands that ran around their Kevlar helmets, the better to break up the outline of their unnatural shapes and improve their concealment.
The front door of the building was unlocked, Gearing found, amazed that this should be so. He walked into what appeared to be a residential building, entered an elevator, punched the topmost button and arrived on the fourth floor. Once there, it was just a matter of opening one of the double doors on the corridor and flipping on a light in what had to be the master suite. The bedroom doors were open, and he walked that way.
John Brightling’s eyes reported the sudden blaze of light from the sitting room. He opened them and saw—
“What the hell are you doing here, Wil?”
“They brought me down, John.”
“Who brought you down?”
“The people who captured me in Sydney,” Gearing explained.
“What?” It was a little much for so early in the morning. Brightling stood and put on the robe next to the bed.
“John, what is it?” Carol asked from her side of the bed.
“Nothing, honey, just relax.” John went to the sitting room, pulling the doors closed as he did so.
“What the fuck is going on, Wil?”
“They’re here, John.”
“Who’s here?”
“The counterterror people, the ones who went to Australia, the ones who arrested me. They’re here, John!” Gearing told him, looking around the room, thoroughly disoriented by all the traveling he’d done and not sure of much of anything at the moment.
“Here? Where? In the building?”
“No.” Gearing shook his head. “They dropped me off by helicopter. Their boss is a guy named Clark. He said to tell you that you have to surrender—unconditional surrender, John.”
“Or else what?” Brightling demanded.
“Or else they’re going to come in and get us!”
“Really?” This was no way to be awakened. Brightling had spent two hundred million dollars to build this place—labor costs were low in Brazil—and he considered Project Alternate a fortress, and more than that, a fortress that would have taken months to locate. Armed men—here, right now—demanding his surrender? What was this?
Okay, he thought. First he called Bill Henriksen’s room and told him to come upstairs. Next he lit up his computer. There was no e-mail telling him that anyone had spoken with his flight crews. So, nobody had told anyone where they were. So, how the hell had anyone found out? And who the hell was here? And what the hell did they want? Sending someone he knew in to demand their surrender seemed like something from a movie.
“What is it, John?” Henriksen asked. Then
he looked at the other man in the room: “Wil, how did you get here?”
Brightling held up his hand for silence, trying to think while Gearing and Henriksen exchanged information. He switched off the room lights, looked out the large windows for signs of activity, and saw nothing at all.
“How many?” Bill was asking.
“Ten or fifteen soldiers,” Gearing replied. “Are you going to do what they—are you going to surrender to them?” the former colonel asked.
“Hell, no!” John Brightling snarled. “Bill, what they’re doing, is it legal?”
“No, not really. I don’t think it is, anyway.”
“Okay, let’s get our people up and armed.”
“Right,” the security chief said dubiously. He left the room for the main lobby, whose desk controlled the public-address system in the complex.
“Oh, baby, talk to me,” Noonan said. The newest version of the DKL people-finding system was up and running now. He’d spotted two of the receiver units about three hundred yards apart. Each had a transmitter that reported to a receiving unit that was in turn wired to his laptop computer.
The DKL system tracked the electromagnetic field generated by the beating of the human heart. This was, it had been discovered, a unique signal. The initial items sold by the company had merely indicated the direction of the signals they received, but the new ones had been improved with parabolic antennas to increase their effective range now to fifteen hundred meters, and, by triangulation, to give fairly exact positions—accurate to from two to four meters. Clark was looking down at the computer screen. It showed blips indicating people evenly spaced in their rooms in the headquarters/residential building.
“Boy, this would have been useful in Eye-Corps back when I was a kid,” John breathed. Each of the Rainbow troopers had a GPS locator built into his personal radio transceiver, and these, also, reported to the computer, giving Noonan and Clark exact locations for their own people, and locations also on those in the building to their left.
“Yeah, that’s why I got excited about this puppy,” the FBI agent noted. “I can’t tell you what floor they’re on, but look, they’ve all started moving. I guess somebody woke them up.”
“Command, this is Bear,” Clark’s radio crackled.
“Bear, Command. Where are you?”
“Five minutes out. Where do you want me to make my delivery?”
“Same place as before. Let’s keep you out of the line of fire. Tell Vega and the rest that we are on the north side of the runway. My command post is a hundred meters north of the treeline. We’ll talk them in from there.”
“Roger that, Command. Bear out.”
“This must be an elevator,” Noonan said, pointing at the screen. Six blips converged on a single point, stayed together for half a minute or so, then diverged. A number of blips were gathering in one place, probably a lobby of some sort. Then they started moving north and converged again.
“I like this one,” Dave Dawson said, hefting his G3 rifle. The black German-made weapon had fine balance and excellent sights. He’d been the site-security chief in Kansas, another true believer who didn’t relish the idea of flying back to America in federal custody and spending the rest of his life at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary—a part of Kansas for which he had little love. “What do we do now, Bill?”
“Okay, we split into pairs. Everybody gets one of these.” Henriksen started passing over handheld radios. “Think. Don’t shoot until we tell you to. Use your heads.”
“Okay, Bill. I’ll show these bastards what a hunter can do,” Killgore observed, liking the feel of his rifle as well and pairing off with Kirk Maclean.
“These, too.” Henriksen opened another door, revealing camouflage jackets and pants for them to wear.
“What can we do to protect ourselves, Bill?” Steve Berg asked.
“We can kill the fuckers!” Killgore replied. “They’re not cops, they’re not here to arrest us, are they, Bill?”
“Well, no, and they haven’t identified themselves, and so the law is—the law is unclear on this one, guys.”
“And we’re in a foreign country anyway. So those guys are probably breaking the fucking law to be here, and if people want to attack us with guns we can defend ourselves, right?” Ben Farmer asked.
“You know what you’re doing?” Berg asked Farmer.
“Ex-Marine, baby. Light weapons, line-grunt, yeah, I know what’s happening out there.” Farmer looked confident, and was as angry as the rest of them at the upset of their plans.
“Okay, people, I am in command, okay?” Henriksen said to them. He had thirty armed men now. That would have to be enough. “We make them come to us. If you see somebody advancing toward you with a weapon, you take the bastard out. But be patient! Let them in close. Don’t waste ammo. Let’s see if we can discourage them. They can’t stay here long without supplies, and they only have one helicopter to—”
“Look!” Maclean said. A mile and a half away, the black helo landed at the far end of the runway. Three or four people ran from it into the woods.
“Okay, be careful, people, and think before you act.”
“Let’s do it,” Killgore said aggressively, waving to Maclean to follow him out the door.
“They’re leaving the building,” Noonan said. “Looks like thirty or so.” He looked up to orient himself on the terrain. “They’re heading into the woods—figuring to ambush us, maybe?”
“We’ll see about that. Team-2, this is Command,” Clark said into his tactical radio.
“-2 Lead here, Command,” Chavez replied. “I can see people running out of the building. They appear to be armed with shoulder weapons.”
“Roger that. Okay, Ding, we will proceed as briefed.”
“Understood, Command. Let me get organized here.” Team-2 was intact, except for the absence of Julio Vega, who’d just arrived on the second helicopter delivery. Chavez got onto his radio and paired his people off with their normal partners, extending his line northward into the forest, and keeping himself at the hinge point on the southern end of the line. The Team-1 people would be the operational reserve, assigned directly to John Clark at the command post.
Noonan watched the Team-2 shooters move. Each friendly blip was identified by a letter so that he’d know them by name. “John,” he asked, “when do we go weapons-free?”
“Patience, Tim,” Six replied.
Noonan was kneeling on the damp ground, with his laptop computer sitting on a fallen tree. The battery was supposed to be good for five hours, and he had two spares in his pack.
Pierce and Loiselle took the lead, heading half a kilometer into the jungle. It wasn’t a first for either of them. Mike Pierce had worked in Peru twice, and Loiselle had been to Africa three separate times. The familiarity with the environmental conditions was not the same thing as comfort. Both worried about snakes as much as the armed people heading their way, sure that this forest was replete with them, either poisonous or willing to eat them whole. The temperature was rising, and both soldiers were sweating under their camo makeup. After ten minutes, they found a nice spot, with a standing tree and a fallen one next to it, with a decent field of fire.
“They’ve got radios,” Noonan reported. “Want me to take them away?” He had his jammer set up already.
Clark shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s listen in to them for a while.”
“Fair enough.” The FBI agent flipped the radio scanner to the speaker setting.
“This is some place,” one voice said. “Look at these trees, man.”
“Yeah, big, ain’t they?”
“What kind of trees?” a third asked.
“The kind somebody can hide behind and shoot your ass from!” a more serious voice pointed out. “Killgore and Maclean, keep moving north about half a mile, find a place, and sit still there!”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, Bill,” the third voice agreed.
“Listen up everybody,” “Bill’s” voice told them. “
Don’t clutter up these radios, okay? Report in when I call you or when you see something important. Otherwise keep them clear!”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“You say so, Bill.”
“Roger.”
“I can’t see shit,” a fifth responded.
“Then find a place where you can!” another helpful voice suggested.
“They’re in pairs, moving close together, most of ’em,” Noonan said, staring down at his screen. “This pair is heading right for Mike and Louis.”
Clark looked down at the screen. “Pierce and Loiselle, this is Command. You have two targets approaching you from the south, distance about two-fifty meters.”
“Roger, Command. Pierce copies.”
Sergeant Pierce settled into his spot, looking south, letting his eyes sweep back and forth through a ninety-degree arc. Six feet away, Loiselle did the same, starting to relax as far as the environment was concerned, and tensing with the approach of enemies.
Dr. John Killgore knew the woods and knew hunting. He moved slowly and carefully now, with every step looking down to assure quiet footing, then up and around to examine the landscape for a human shape. They’d be coming in to get us, he thought, and so he and Maclean would find good spots to shoot them from, just like hunting deer, picking a place in the shadows where you could belly up and wait for the game to come. Another couple of hundred yards, he thought, would be about right.