by Tom Clancy
Three hundred meters away, Clark used the computer screen and the radios to get his people moving to good spots. This new capability was incredible. Like radar, he could spot people long before he or anyone else could see or hear them. This new electronic toy would be an astounding blessing to every soldier who ever made use of it . . .
“Here we go,” Noonan said quietly, like a commentator at a golf tournament, tapping the screen.
“Pierce and Loiselle, this is Command, you have two approaching targets just east of south, approaching at about two hundred meters.”
“Roger, Command. Can we engage?” Pierce asked. At his perch, Loiselle was looking at him instead of his direct front.
“Affirmative,” Clark replied. Then: “Rainbow, this is Six. Weapons-free. I repeat, we are weapons-free at this time.”
“Roger that, I copy weapons-free.” Pierce acknowledged.
“Let’s wait till we can get both of ’em, Louis,” Pierce whispered.
“D’accord,” Sergeant Loiselle agreed. Both men looked to their south, eyes sharp and ears listening for the first snapped twig.
This wasn’t so bad, Killgore thought. He’d hunted in worse country, far noisier country. There were no pine needles here to make that annoying swishing sound that deer could hear from half a time zone away. Plenty of shadows, little in the way of direct sunlight. Except for the bugs, he might have even been comfortable here. But the bugs were murder. The next time he came out, he’d try to spray some repellent, the physician thought, as he moved forward slowly. The branch of a bush was in his way. He used his left hand to move it, lest he make noise by walking through it.
There, Pierce saw. A bush branch had just moved, and there wasn’t a breath of wind down there to make that happen.
“Louis,” he whispered. When the Frenchman turned, Pierce held up one finger and pointed. Loiselle nodded and returned to looking forward.
“I have a visual target,” Pierce reported over his radio. “One target, a hundred fifty meters to my south.”
Maclean was less comfortable on his feet than he would have been on horseback. He did his best to mimic the way John Killgore was moving, however, though both keeping quiet and keeping up were proving to be incompatible. He tripped over an exposed root and fell, making noise, then swearing quietly before he stood.
“Bonjour,” Loiselle whispered to himself. It was as though the noise had switched on a light of sorts. In any case, Sergeant Loiselle now saw a man-shape moving in the shadows, about one hundred fifty meters away. “Mike?” he whispered, pointing to where his target was.
“Okay, Louis,” Pierce responded. “Let them get closer, man.”
“Yes.”
Both men shouldered their MP-10s, though the range was a little too far as yet.
If there was anything larger than an insect moving, Killgore thought, he couldn’t hear it. There were supposed to be jaguars in this jungle, leopard-size hunting cats whose pelts would make a nice throw rug, he thought, and the 7.62mm NATO round this rifle fired should be more than adequate for that purpose. Probably night hunters, though, and hard to stalk. But what about the capybaras, the largest rat in the world, supposed to be good to eat despite its biological family—they were supposed to feed during the day, weren’t they? There was so much for his eyes to see here, so much visual clutter, and his eyes weren’t used to it yet. Okay, he’d find a place to sit still, so that his eyes could learn a pattern of light and darkness and then note the change in it that denoted something that didn’t belong. There’s a good spot, he thought, a fallen tree and a standing one . . .
“Come on in, sweetheart,” Pierce whispered to himself. At one hundred yards, he thought, that would be close enough. He’d have to hold a little high, like for the target’s chin, and the natural drop of the bullet would place the rounds in the upper chest. A head shot would be nicer, but the distance was a little too far for that, and he wanted to be careful.
Killgore whistled and waved to Maclean, pointing forward. Kirk nodded agreement. His initial enthusiasm for this job was fading rapidly. The jungle wasn’t quite what he expected, and being out here with people trying to attack him didn’t make the surroundings any more attractive. He found himself, strangely, thinking of that singles bar in New York, the darkened room and loud dance music, such a strange environment . . . and the women he’d found there. It was too bad, really, what had happened to them. They were—had been—people after all. But worst of all, their deaths had not had any meaning. At least, had the Project moved forward, their sacrifice would have counted for something, but now . . . but now it was just a failure, and here he was in the fucking jungle holding a loaded rifle, looking for people who wanted to do to him what he’d done. . . .
“Louis, you got your target?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, let’s do it,” Pierce called in a raspy voice, and with that he tightened his grip on the MP-10, centered the target on the sights, and squeezed the trigger gently. The immediate result was the gentle puff-puff-puff sound of the three shots, the somewhat louder metallic sound of the cycling of the submachine gun’s action, and then the impact of all three rounds on the target. He saw the man’s mouth spring open, and then the figure fell. His ears reported similar sounds from his left. Pierce left his spot and ran forward, his weapon up, with Loiselle in close support.
Killgore’s mind didn’t have time to analyze what had happened to him, just the impacts to his chest, and now he was looking straight up into the treetops, where there were small cracks of blue and white from the distant sky. He tried to say something, but he wasn’t breathing very well at the moment, and when he turned his head a few inches, there was no one there to see. Where was Kirk? he wondered, but found himself unable to move his body to—he’d been shot? The pain was real but strangely distant, and he lowered his head to see blood on his chest and—
—who was that in camouflage clothing, his face painted green and brown?
And who are you? Sergeant Pierce wondered. His three rounds had sprinkled across the chest, missing the heart but ripping into the upper lungs and major blood vessels. The eyes were still looking, focused on him.
“Wrong playground, partner,” he said softly, and then life left the eyes, and he bent down to collect the man’s rifle. It was a nice one, Pierce saw, slinging it across his back. Then he looked left to see Loiselle holding an identical rifle in one hand and waving his hand across his throat. His target was bloodily dead, too.
“Hey, you can even tell when they get killed,” Noonan said. When the hearts stopped, so did the signals the DKL gadget tracked. Cool, Timothy thought.
“Pierce and Loiselle, this is command. We copy you took down two targets.”
“That’s affirmative,” Pierce answered. “Anything else close to us?”
“Pierce,” Noonan replied, “two more about two hundred meters south of your current position. This pair is still moving eastward slowly, they’re heading toward McTyler and Patterson.”
“Pierce, this is Command. Sit tight,” Clark ordered.
“Roger, Command.” Next Pierce picked up the radio his target had been carrying, leaving it on. With nothing else to do, he fished into the man’s pants. So, he saw a minute later, he had just killed John Killgore, M.D., of Binghamton, New York. Who were you? he wanted to ask the body, but this Killgore fellow would answer no more questions, and who was to say that the answers would have made any sense?
“Okay, people, everybody check in,” the citizens band walkie-talkie said over Noonan’s scanner unit.
Henriksen was just inside the treeline, hoping that his people had the brains to sit still once they found good spots. He worried about the incoming soldiers, if that’s what they were. The Project people were a little too eager and a little too dumb. His radio crackled with voices acknowledging his order, except for two.
“Killgore and Maclean, report in.” Nothing. “John, Kirk, where the hell are you?”
“That’s the pair w
e took out,” Pierce called into Command. “Want me to let him know?”
“Negative, Pierce, you know better than that!” Clark replied angrily.
“No sense of humor, our chief,” Loiselle observed to his partner, with a Gallic shrug.
“Who’s closest to them?” the voice on the radio asked next.
“Me and Dawson,” another voice answered.
“Okay, Berg and Dawson, move north, take your time, and see what you can see, okay?”
“Okay, Bill,” yet another voice said.
“More business coming our way, Louis,” Pierce said.
“Oui,” Loiselle agreed. He pointed. “That tree, Mike.” It had to be three meters across at the base, Pierce saw. You could build a house from the lumber from just that one. A big house, too.
“Pierce and Loiselle, Command, two targets just started moving toward you, almost due south, they’re close together.”
Dave Dawson was a man trained in the United States Army fifteen years before, and he knew enough to be worried. He told Berg to stay close behind him, and the scientist did, as Dawson led the way.
“Command, Patterson, I have movement to my direct front, about two hundred meters out.”
“That’s about right,” Noonan said. “They’re heading straight for Mike and Louis.”
“Patterson, Command, let ’em go.”
“Roger,” Hank Patterson acknowledged.
“This isn’t very fair,” Noonan observed, looking up from his tactical picture.
“Timothy, ‘fair’ means I bring all my people home alive. Fuck the others,” Clark responded.
“You say so, boss,” the FBI agent agreed. Together, he and Clark watched the blips move toward the ones labeled L and P. Five minutes after that, both of the unidentified blips dropped off the screen and did not return.
“That’s two more kills for the our guys, John.”
“Jesus, this thing’s magic,” Clark said after Pierce and Loiselle called in to confirm what the instrument had already told them.
“Chavez to Command.”
“Okay, Ding, go,” Clark responded.
“Can we use that instrument to move in on them?”
“I think so. Tim, can we steer our guys in behind them, like?”
“Sure. I can see where everybody is, just a question of keeping them well clear until we bend ’em around and bring them in close.”
“Domingo, Noonan says he can do this, but it’ll take time to do it right, and you guys’ll have to use your heads.”
“I’ll do the best I can, jefe,” Chavez called back.
It was twenty minutes before Henriksen tried to raise Dawson and Berg, only to find that they were not answering. There was something bad happening out there, but he didn’t have a clue. Dawson was a former soldier, and Killgore an experienced and skilled hunter—and yet they’d fallen off the earth without a trace? What was happening here? There were soldiers out there, yes, but nobody was that good. He had little choice but to leave his people out there.
Patterson moved first, along with Scotty McTyler, heading west-northwest for three hundred meters, then turning south, moving slowly and silently, blessing the surprisingly bare ground in the forest—the ground got little sunlight to allow grass to grow here. Steve Lincoln and George Tomlinson also moved as a team, steering around two bad-guy blips to their north, and maneuvering right behind them.
“We have our targets,” McTyler reported in his Scottish burr. On Noonan’s screen they appeared to be less than a hundred meters away, directly behind them.
“Take ’em down,” Clark ordered.
Both men were facing east, away from the Rainbow troopers, one sheltering behind a tree and the other lying on the ground.
The standing one was Mark Waterhouse. Patterson took careful aim and loosed his three-round burst. The impacts pushed him against the tree, and he dropped his rifle, which clattered to the ground. That caused the lying one to turn, and grip his own rifle tighter when he was hit, and the reflexive action of his hand held the trigger down, resulting in ten rounds fired on full-automatic into the forest.
“Oh, shit,” Patterson said over the radio. “That was mine. His rifle must’ve been set on rock-and-roll, Command.”
“What was that, what was that—who fired?” Henriksen called over the radio.
It only made things easier for Tomlinson and Lincoln. Both of their targets jumped up and looked to their left, bringing both into plain view. Both went down an instant later, and a few minutes after that the command voice on the enemy radio circuit called for another status check. It now came up eight names short.
By this time, Rainbow was more behind than in front of Henriksen’s people, steered into place by Noonan’s computer-tricorder rig.
“Can you get me on their radio?” Clark asked the FBI agent.
“Easy,” Noonan replied, flipping a switch and plugging a microphone in. “Here.”
“Hi, there,” Clark said over the CB frequency. “That’s eight of your people down.”
“Who is this?”
“Is your name Henriksen?” John asked next.
“Who the hell is this?” the voice demanded.
“I’m the guy who’s killing your people. We’ve taken eight of them down. Looks like you have twenty-two more out here. Want I should kill some more?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“The name’s Clark, John Clark. Who are you?”
“William Henriksen!” the voice shouted back.
“Oh, okay, you’re the former Bureau guy. I suppose you saw Wil Gearing this morning. Anyway.” Clark paused. “I’m only going to say this once: Put your weapons down, walk into the open, and surrender, and we won’t shoot any more of you. Otherwise, we’ll take down every single one, Bill.”
There was a long silence. Clark wondered what the voice on the other end would do, but after a minute he did what John expected.
“Listen up, everybody, listen up. Pull back to the building right now! Everybody move back right now!”
“Rainbow, this is Six, expect movement back to the building complex right now. Weapons are free,” he added over the encrypted tactical radios.
The panic in Henriksen’s radio call turned out to be contagious. Immediately they heard the thrashing sound of people running in the woods, through bushes, taking direct if not quiet paths back toward the open to which many ran without thinking.
That made an easy shot for Homer Johnston. One green-clad man broke from the trees and ran down the grassy part next to the runway. The weapon he carried made him an enemy, and Johnston dispatched a single round that went between his shoulder blades. The man took one more stumbling step and went down. “Rifle Two-One, I got one north of the runway!” the sniper called in.
It was more direct for Chavez. Ding was sheltering behind a hardwood tree when he heard the noises coming his way from two people he’d been stalking alone. When he figured they were about fifty meters away, he stepped around the tree trunk, to see that they were heading the other way. Chavez sidestepped left and spotted one, and brought his MP-10 to his shoulder. The running man saw him and tried to bring up his rifle. He even managed to fire, but right into the ground, before taking a burst in the face and falling like a sack of beans. The man behind him skidded to a stop and looked at where Chavez was standing.
“Drop the fucking rifle!” Ding screamed at him, but the man either didn’t hear or didn’t listen. His rifle started coming up, too, but as with his companion, he never made it. “Chavez here, I just dropped two.” The excitement of the moment masked the shame of how easy it had been. This was pure murder.
It was like keeping score for Clark, like some sort of horrid gladiatorial game. The unknown blips on the screen of Noonan’s computer started disappearing as their hearts stopped and with them the electronic signals they generated. In another few minutes, he counted four of the thirty signals they’d originally tracked, and those were running back to the building.
“Christ, Bill, what happened out there?” Brightling demanded at the main entrance.
“They slaughtered us like fucking sheep, man. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“This is John Clark calling for William Henriksen,” the radio crackled.
“Yeah?”
“Okay, one last time, surrender right now, or else we come in after you.”
“Come and fucking get us!” Henriksen screamed in reply.
“Vega, start doing some windows,” Clark ordered in a calm voice.
“Roger that, Command,” Oso replied. He lifted the shoulder stock of his M-60 machine gun and started on the second floor. The weapon traced right to left, shattering glass as the line of tracers darted across the intervening distance into the building.
“Pierce and Loiselle, you and Connolly head northwest into the other buildings. Start taking stuff down.”
“Roger, Command,” Pierce replied.
The survivors from the forest party were trying to shoot back, mainly at empty air, but making noise in the lobby of the headquarters building. Carol Brightling was screaming now. The glass from the upstairs windows cascaded like a waterfall in front of their faces.
“Make them stop!” Carol cried loudly.
“Give me the radio,” Brightling said. Henriksen handed it to him.
“Cease firing. This is John Brightling, cease firing, everybody. That means you, too, Clark, okay?”
In a few seconds, it stopped, which proved harder for the Project people, since Rainbow had only one weapon firing, and Oso stopped immediately on being ordered to.