I took the truck around the block to see if the taxi was still there, but it was gone. I knew where the pickup point was the same as the next guy, but it was obvious to me now that the C.O. had intended to leave everyone behind for dead. That made me the C.O. now.
I’d been the most junior member of the team, rank-wise. There’s nothing quite so shitty as a field promotion. The only way you get them is if the guy above you dies or is wounded badly enough that he cannot possibly perform his duty. The guy above you is supposed to be your friend as well as mission-mate. I’d gone zero for two on that this time. I’d been field promoted before, but this was the first time I’d had to promote myself.
Shifting gears was easy, working the clutch was agony. I had two small self-injectors in one of my fatigue pockets, and both were filled with morphine, presumably for just such a situation. Except that if I took the morphine, that left Sam to drive the truck. He was better off in the back with his wife, where they could try to help Nigel hold on. At least he said that he felt no pain at all, so he wasn’t hurting. Neither was Roger though.
I had changed the clips in my Colts, and I was biting down on a rolled piece of cotton to control the pain when I had to use the clutch. The Toyota taxi had been the real thing, old and decrepit, and my fervent hope was that this nice big army truck with its powerful diesel engine could beat the taxi to the extraction point. I hadn’t been thinking clearly when we’d started out.
It turned out that it had taken me approximately one and a half minutes to make it from the mound in the back yard to the front door. Ninety seconds. Ninety seconds and twelve dead. That was something I would think about when I had the luxury of having time to think. I only got shot once, and that was by accident as much as by purpose. I mean, the soldier who’d shot me had been trying to shoot me. That was his goal, after all. The fact that he’d shot me after I’d killed him didn’t ease the pain any.
The longer we drove, the more the shock wore off, the more I shook, and the more my leg hurt. It felt like someone was holding a blow-torch to it every time I used the clutch.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to use the clutch for very long. Sam had lived close to the outskirts of Al Sabeen, and after about ten minutes of negotiating the narrow back streets I hit the main road out of town. The question was, would there be an All-Points Bulletin out for the truck already, or did we still have some time to make speed on the main road before pulling off-road and doing it the hard way. I counted time in my head while I watched the needle on the speedometer inch up to about one hundred kilometres per hour, and hang there. I must have checked my watch about a hundred times. We’d hit the main road outside of town about twenty minutes after I’d begun my one-man massacre. Thirteen of those were spent driving in the truck. Which left only seven minutes from the time the Yemeni officer had killed Yousef, until we were all outbound in the truck. That included driving the jeep around the block and letting it roll into a ravine. Leaving no army vehicles at the scene. That was still time enough to get a police radio unit on the scene. We never even heard any sirens as we left. Which meant that nobody in that neighbourhood had called them. That just might buy us the time we needed.
Might, but then there was the C.O., and what the hell was his game? What it looked like, in retrospect, was that we were supposed to show up after the fact, and then go for extraction, with the sad story of the slaughter of one of our active people-in-place and his entire family. They were supposed to die. We just weren’t supposed to see it happen. That would explain why the C.O. wouldn’t let us go in. Something had snapped inside me when that bastard officer had shot Yousef. I kept the pedal on the floor the whole while I was trying to work this out. Aside from a bullet hole in my leg, I had taken out the entire complement of bad guys. What, eleven guys? No, twelve. And some I’d shot twice. I never did that before. I’d been issued medals for marksmanship until I refused to participate in the tournaments anymore. I always knew where my bullet was going when I fired. Always.
In past missions I’d been forced to kill. Twice. It was a nasty feeling, and it didn’t get any better with time, like everyone told me it would. Tonight didn’t feel like that at all. Tonight had been emotional all right but tucked away inside me like a small hot fire. The killing had been calculated and complete. The only time it had been strange was when I’d jumped from my position and started running for the house, and everything except me had turned into slow motion. Then I remembered the ‘zzip’ of a bullet just missing, passing by my head close enough to make that sound like a bumblebee at high speed. After that I remembered the ‘chuf’ of the silencer. Just like our silencer’s. Every type made, sounds different. That one had been one of ours. Someone had shot at me from behind. Only the C.O. would have had the nerve and/or the orders to do that. I suppose he could have justified it under ‘insubordination under fire’. But we’d have to get home safe and sound before that would wash. Shooting all the members of your team, and running for it, sounded like orders that wouldn’t come from the nastiest departments I knew of by then, and there were plenty of those.
According to the way he was thinking, he could make his way to the extraction point in the Toyota, making the least amount of fuss as possible, then take off with the pick-up crew as soon as they showed. He was counting on all three members of his team being dead, and that wasn’t quite the way it was. There was something else in the game tonight.
An Army of Yemen truck, with a gun-shot wound victim doing the planning and the driving, and carrying on as though he wasn’t handicapped by injury for one minute, thank you. One dead team member, one of their people-in-place, with his remaining family, his wife and baby son, as well as his dead son, and last but not least, one team member who’d been shot just like the first, but was hanging on, and doing pretty damn good under the circumstances, thank you once again.
The best we could do was to show up at the extraction point by surprise, meeting the outbound Scorpion choppers along with the compromised C.O., thereby disallowing any more falsehoods to be perpetrated. That would cause the tide-gates to overflow, no doubt.
The trick would be in guessing the place that the C.O. would pick for extraction, then go there and hide until the SAS came. Once the SAS crew was there, we were saved. If he picked somewhere different for the extraction at all. Maybe leaving the original location in place would simplify things for him. All he had to do was move the time up on them. The crew was ready to do the job. If they had a change of Takeoff Time, so what? It was like that every day for these guys. They didn’t run in a nine to five world, after all.
So, that had to be it. The same extraction point, but ASAP. All I had to do was get there first, and/or disarm and place into chained custody, one Full Bird Colonel, from the good old U.S. of bloody A.
One who had achieved that status at one of the youngest ages ever, with a track record going back to before the beginning of time. A field officer who taught the field instructors how to run their classes. Piece of cake.
At that minute I started looking for the mile makers on the side of the road, trying to determine where we were so I’d know when to make my turn off the highway. After all, I was the engineer. I should have been able to pinpoint our position within a few metres, if I’d had my laptop with the GPS. That was in the taxi with the C.O… no, not the C.O., the Colonel who was working more than one side. I was the C.O. now. The only good part was that the Colonel didn’t like computers much, and even though he would have the codes, he might not get it right away. He might not get it at all.
While we were coming in from the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, the chopper had hugged the ground, running in the huge ravines made by the dunes when they went in the right direction. With not much to do, I’d run the program for extraction, and memorized the longitude and latitude. Then I’d tried to place the position in my mind using the location of Sirwah as a reference point. There were no stars to navigate by, or we’d have been fine. The Desert or the Sea. When you have a clear n
ight and you want to know where you are, the fine art of celestial navigation came in damned handy.
It had worked out to about sixty kilometres east, and fourteen kilometres north of Sam’s house. That’s all I had to go by. That’s what we’d do.
I peered through the dark, trying to pick out the few mile markers still in place. The last one I’d seen had said forty-six. It was a risk staying on the highway, but if we went by the desert, we’d take too long. The Colonel would have sent the signal as soon as he got away from Sam’s place. I kept my foot jammed to the floor, the diesel engine was just a-hummin. It was funny that the truck being in such great mechanical condition, when it was clearly WW II vintage. I guess all it takes is a good mechanic with a loving touch.
The night was almost pitch black. There was a small bit of moonshine filtering through the cloud cover. The beams from the headlights of the truck hardly lit the road right in front of us. Two weak beams. Old style, not halogen. I was watching hard, and I still almost missed it. A mile marker. They were all in Arabic, but Arabic numbers were easy. Hell, that’s where we got ours, from them. I caught it as it flashed by, and it said fifty-three. I reset the trip odometer on the truck dash.
I hadn’t seen the Colonel yet, so he had to be ahead of us. Maybe pretty close. Or just maybe, he couldn’t run the program and do the math. No, that didn’t make sense. He was a full Colonel, and as such, had learned, endured, and triumphed in the end, over many obstacles. This one wouldn’t stump him.
There was no traffic whatsoever on the highway that night. Except for us. Nobody headed west, nobody headed east. I tried running with the lights off, and I could just see the median of the dual carriage way. Like our big split boulevards. I left the lights out and kept running with only the glow from the dashboard instruments. When I saw the odometer hit seven I slowed to a near-stop, and switched the lights back on, turning the truck to the median, I dropped it into low gear and inched our way across it. I heard a few scrapes and squeaks, but basically everything held as I crossed into the oncoming lanes. I stopped at the side of the road, before going into the wastelands here, I wanted to get some idea of how good or bad it might be for driving. The lights were practically useless, throwing their weak beams about fifty feet or so off into the desert. It looked as good as anywhere else from what I could see, so I inched her off the road, and onto the hard-packed sediment sand that made up that part of the country. I stopped the truck about one hundred feet from the road, turning off the lights, and went back from the rear of the truck to the highway, scraping and kicking the tire tracks as well as I could. Every step brought a lance of pain from my leg now, but it made me angrier, not weaker. When I got back to the truck I opened the flaps to see how everyone was doing.
Sam was good, for someone who’d just been through what he’d survived. Amazingly, Nigel was still conscious, but pretty weak. I told Sam about the plan.
It meant driving for as far as we could, and then sneaking up on the extraction point in order to get the drop on the Colonel. Sound carries pretty far in the desert, and does funny things. Like echoes, and coming from the wrong direction, or seeming to be coming from everywhere, or nowhere. It can also block sound completely, like when you get to the dunes. The dunes this far south were small, not like the dunes in the interior. They could rise slowly to a height of five hundred meters or more on the windward side, fairly packed, and slow to traverse, but possible. On the leeward side the drop down to the valley created in between the dunes was usually much steeper, and impossible to climb. The valley floors were sometimes navigable, and fourteen kilometres from here there were dunes. Small to medium small. We’d just have to see. I told Sam to get everyone as well strapped down as possible, I was going to run without lights, and hope that the slim amount of moonlight filtering through the clouds would be enough. It ended up taking us over two hours to make the fourteen-kilometer run. We dumped the truck when I got it hung up on a rock ledge on the left, and a soft spot of deep sand on the right side.
Fortunately, that was only three kilometers from our destination. Those were the hardest three kilometers I’ve ever walked. I carried Roger, Sam carried Yousef, and Samira helped Nigel keep on his feet, and carried the baby too. When we got there, we were beyond exhaustion.
I could see that there was a good spot for coming and going, in the valley created by a couple of fairly good sized dunes. The valley floor was about knee deep in powdery sand, though, except for a spot just about where I would have put the fourteen Klicks marker. That meant that there had been landings here before. The powerful downdraft from the blades of the Scorpion choppers had cleared the spot down to the sedimentary base. Checking my watch, I could see that we were three hours early for the scheduled pickup. If the Colonel had called for an early extraction, then it had either happened already, and he’d beaten us here, or it was about to happen and maybe he was here somewhere, even now as I checked the scene out. Watching, waiting. He had the night scope, I was sure of that. I’d dropped it from my hands as I began my run of death. If I were him, after I’d put a bullet into Roger, and Nigel, I’d have picked up the night scope on my way back out the rear. He also had a silencer for his pistol.
I had everyone spread out on both sides of the small valley. This was where our rescue would come. Unless I was wrong. We were getting closer to daylight with each passing hour, so for the Scorpion chopper pilots, the sooner the better. If they’d received a change of time, they’d be only too happy to oblige. Our original pickup time had been set close to dawn. They’d be fighting visual contact as well as radar on the way home, the way it had been mapped out in the beginning. Now, who knew? Maybe they’d been and gone.
As soon as I had the group more or less settled, I turned my attention to the problem of the Colonel. Would he be here? That was the question. Why had he tried to kill the team members? That would come later. Maybe he was working for a third party all along. Maybe they had an extraction ready for him, and this one would go off as scheduled. Nice and neat, just three hours to wait. Nigel might not make it for another three hours. I had to know if the Colonel was here. He could be buried in the sand ten feet from me and I wouldn’t know it.
I needed a ruse. I was getting pretty weak by now. I could probably use a few litres of plasma. Coffee and doughnuts sounded good too. I was drifting. Not good.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, I concluded that the best hiding place, by far, was under the powder sand of the valley floor. The Scorpion would be able to read the infrared heat signature through the sand like it wasn’t there. We were all positioned about one hundred yards from the landing spot, just around a curve in the valley.
All of a sudden it seemed that someone had turned on the lights. There was a break in the cloud cover large enough to light up the landing area with moonlight, which seemed like high-powered spotlights after the virtual blackness of the past few hours. I looked up at the sky, and saw that the break was large, and the three-quarter moon was almost directly overhead. It was now or never. Every little peak in the sand was casting a shadow.
I lay down in the soft powdery sand, and immediately sank about a foot or more into it. I wriggled under a little more, leaving only my head above the sand. I inched my way around the curve using two hands and one knee. My left leg was getting to be pretty useless. Except for the pain, it wasn’t doing much of anything for me.
I made it around the curve and stopped, staying stock still, listening and watching. I searched out the shadows, and looked for the hand of Mother Nature in them. Nature works contrarily compared to the way man does. The result is a difference, and that’s what I was looking for. I stayed motionless for three minutes by my count that first time. Then I would crawl another ten yards and repeat the process. From the second time on, I waited five minutes before moving forward again.
My biggest fear was passing the Colonel, and taking a round in the back of my head while I was searching forward. I changed to a zig-zag pattern about twenty yards fro
m my starting point, just around the curve of the dune. The leeward side of the dunes was on the left, and the windward side was on the right. A man could climb upwards on the right side, albeit slow and hard. The left was off limits. You could drown in the sand easily by trying to climb a leeward slope.
But not on the right. A man could climb the right. The powdery sand in the valley floor was cold against my body, especially where it had worked its way in against my skin. In other words, everywhere.
Focus. I started looking up the first ten yards of the windward dune, as well as the valley floor. It felt like I was in Mordor and tracking Saruman the White, the Evil Wizard.
In the end, he would have had me, but he moved. A small move, but I heard it, and that sent the message to my eyes, and I saw the residual effects of that small move out of the corner of my left eye. A few grains of powder sand, dribbling down the side of a smooth small mound in the sand, about twelve feet directly to my left, on an exact ninety-degree angle. The mound was only about an inch and a half high. Not high enough for sand falls, which happen all the time on the bigger mounds, and the wind was a steady four to five knots, unwaveringly steady. The grains of sand were acted on by a force that went against the small pressure of the breeze. It was the Colonel. It had to be.
The concept of total body control is one that escapes some people. Others understand only too well what total body control is about, but are unable to effectively utilize it in real-life situations. You can pass as many survival courses as they can throw at you, but in the final analysis, they are your own people. They pretend that they want to kill you in the training, but they never do. That’s what makes it different.
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 42