Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  She had a pen in her hand by that time. After she had signed the letter, I sealed it in the envelope, then folded the envelope and tucked it in my pocket beside the passport.

  “Okay, lady. I’m bought and paid for.”

  We made our plans over dinner. She drank one glass of wine, and I had a beer, then we both switched to mineral water. I told her I wanted my own pistol and rifles, a request she didn’t blink at. She agreed to fly into Dover Air Force Base on one of the regularly scheduled cargo runs, then take my duffel bag containing the weapons back to Germany with her.

  “What if someone wants to run the bag through a metal detector, or German customs wants to inspect it?”

  “My risk.”

  “I guess there are a few advantages to being a well-scrubbed, cleancut American girl.”

  “You can get away with a lot if you shave your legs.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  That was ten days ago. Now we were on our way. Tomorrow we were going to case the old fort and come up with a plan for doing in the assembled bad guys.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat of the Humvee sipping coffee and listening to the drone of the turboprops carrying us across the Mediterranean, I got the old combat feeling again.

  Yeah, this was really it.

  Only this time I was going to get paid for it.

  I finished the coffee, went back to the cockpit, and offered Julie a cup. She was intent on the computer screens.

  “Problems?” I asked.

  “I’m picking up early warning radar, but I think I’m too low for the Libyans to see me. There’s a fighter aloft too. I doubt if he can pick us out of ground return.”

  All that was outside my field of expertise. On this portion of the trip, I was merely a passenger.

  I saw the land appear on the radar presentation, watched it march down the scope toward us, as if we were stationary and the world was turning under us. It was a nice illusion. As we crossed the beach, I checked my watch. We were only a minute off our planned arrival time, which seemed to me to be a tribute to Julie’s piloting skills.

  The ride got bumpy over the desert. Even at night the thermals kept the air boiling. Julie Giraud took the plane off autopilot, hand-flew it. Trusting the autopilot in rough air so close to the ground was foolhardy.

  I got out the chart, used a little red spotlight mounted on the ceiling of the cockpit to study the lines and notes as we bounced along in turbulence.

  We had an hour and twenty minutes to go. Fuel to get out of the desert would have been a problem, so we had brought five hundred gallons in a portable tank in the cargo compartment. Tomorrow night we would use a hand pump to transfer that fuel into the plane’s tanks, enough to get us out of Africa when the time came.

  I sat back and watched her fly, trying not to think about the tasks and dangers ahead. At some point it doesn’t pay to worry about hazards you can’t do anything about. When you’ve taken all the precautions you can, then it’s time to think about something else.

  The landing site we had picked was seven miles from the Camel, at the base of what appeared on the chart to be a cliff. The elevation lines seemed to indicate a cliff of sixty or seventy feet in height.

  “How do you know that is a cliff?” I had asked Julie when she first showed the chart to me. In reply she pulled out two satellite photos. They had obviously been taken at different times of day, perhaps in different seasons or years, but they were obviously of the same piece of terrain. I compared them to the chart.

  There was a cliff all right, and apparently room to tuck the Osprey in against it, pretty much out of sight.

  “You want me to try to guess where you got these satellite photos?”

  “My friend in the CIA.”

  “And nobody is going to ask her any questions?”

  “Nope. She’s cool and she’s clean.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “She doesn’t have access to this stuff. She’s stealing it. They’ll only talk to people with access.”

  “Must be a bunch of stupes in the IG’s office there, huh.”

  She wouldn’t say any more.

  We destroyed the photos, of course, before we left the apartment she had rented for me. Still, the thought of Julie’s classmate in the CIA who could sell us down the river to save her own hide gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as we motored through the darkness over the desert.

  Julie had our destination dialed into the navigation computer, so the magic box was depicting our track and time to go. I sat there watching the miles and minutes tick down.

  With five miles to go, Julie began slowing the Osprey. And she flipped on the landing lights. Beams of light seared the darkness and revealed the yellow rock and sand and dirt of the deep desert.

  She began tilting the engines toward the vertical, which slowed us further and allowed the giant rotors to begin carrying a portion of our weight.

  When the last mile ticked off the computer and we crossed the cliff line, the Osprey was down to fifty knots. Julie brought the V-22 into a hover and used the landing lights to explore our hiding place. Some small boulders, not too many, and the terrain under the cliff was relatively flat.

  After a careful circuit and inspection, Julie set the Osprey down, shut down the engines.

  The silence was startling as we took off our helmets.

  Now she shut down the aircraft battery and all the cockpit lights went off.

  “We’re here,” she said with a sigh of relief.

  “You really intend to go through with this, don’t you?”

  “Don’t tell me you still have doubts, Charlie Dean.”

  “Okay. I won’t.”

  She snapped on a flashlight and led the way back through the cargo bay. She opened the rear door and we stepped out onto the godforsaken soil of the Sahara. We used a flashlight to inspect our position.

  “I could get it a little closer to the cliff, but I doubt if it’s worth the effort.”

  “Let’s get to work,” I said. I was tired of sitting.

  First she went back to the cockpit and tilted the engines down to the cruise position. The plane would be easier to camouflage with the engines down. We would rotate the engines back to the vertical position when the time came to leave.

  Next we unloaded the Humvee and trailer, then the cargo we had tied down in piles on the floor of the plane. I carried the water jugs out myself, taking care to place them where they wouldn’t fall over.

  The last thing we removed from the plane was the camouflage netting. We unrolled it, then began draping it over the airplane. We both had to get up on top of the plane to get the net over the tail and engine nacelles. Obviously we couldn’t cover the blade of each rotor that stuck straight up, so we cut holes in the net for them.

  It took us almost two hours of intense effort to get the net completely rigged. We treated ourselves to a drink of water.

  “We sure can’t get out of here in a hurry,” I remarked.

  “I swore on the altar of God I would kill the men who killed my parents. We aren’t going anywhere until we do it.”

  “Yeah.”

  I finished my drink, then unhooked the trailer from the Humvee and dug out my night-vision goggles. I uncased my Model 70 and chambered a round, put on the safety, then got into the driver’s seat and laid it across my lap.

  “We can’t plant explosives until tomorrow night,” she said.

  “I know that. But I want a look at that place now. You coming?”

  She got her night-vision goggles and climbed into the passenger seat. I took the time to fire up the GPS and key in our destination, then started the Humvee and plugged in my night-vision goggles. It was like someone turned on the light. I could see the cliff and the plane and the stones as if the sun were shining on an overcast day.

  I put the Humvee in gear and rolled.

  Four

  The Camel sat on a granite ridge that humped up out of the desert floor. On the ea
stern side of the ridge, in the low place scooped out by the wind, there was an oasis, a small pond of muddy water, a few palm trees, and a cluster of mud huts. According to Julie’s CIA sister, a few dozen nomads lived here seasonally. Standing on the hood of the Humvee, which was parked on a gentle rise a mile east of the oasis, I could just see the tops of the palms and a few of the huts. No heat source flared up when I switched to infrared.

  The old fort was a shattered hulk upon the skyline, brooding and massive. The structure itself wasn’t large, but perched there on that granite promontory it was a presence.

  I slowly did a 360-degree turn, sweeping the desert.

  Nothing moved. I saw only rock and hard-packed earth, here and there a scraggly desert plant. The wind had long ago swept away the sand.

  Finally I got down off the hood of the Humvee. Julie was standing there with her arms crossed looking cold, although the temperature was at least sixty.

  “I want you to drive this thing back into that draw, and just sit and wait. I’m going to walk over there and eyeball it up.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Couple hours after dawn, probably. I want to make sure there are no people there, and I want to see it in the daylight.”

  “Can’t we just wait until tonight to check it out?”

  “I’m not going to spend a day not knowing what in hell is over the hill. I didn’t get to be this old by taking foolish risks. Drive down there and wait for me.”

  She got in the Humvee and did as I asked.

  I adjusted my night-vision goggles, tucked the Model 70 under my arm and started hiking.

  I had decided on South Africa. After this was over, I was going to try South Africa. I figured it would be middling difficult for the Arabs to root me out there. I had never been to South Africa, but from everything I had seen and heard the country sounded like it might have a future now that they had made a start at solving the racial problem. South Africa. My image of the place had a bit of a Wild West flavor that appealed to my sporting instincts.

  Not that I really have any sporting instincts. Those all got squeezed out of me in Vietnam. I’d rather shoot the bastards in the back than in the front: It’s safer.

  The CIA and FBI? They could find me anywhere, if they wanted to. The theft of a V-22 wasn’t likely to escape their notice, but I didn’t think the violent death of some terrorists would inspire those folks to put in a lot of overtime. I figured a fellow who stayed out of sight would soon be out of mind too.

  With three million dollars in my jeans, staying out of sight would be a pleasure.

  That’s the way I had it figured, anyhow. As I walked across the desert hardpan toward the huts by the mudhole, I confess, I was thinking again about South Africa, which made me angry.

  Concentrate, I told myself. Stay focused. Stay alive.

  I was glad the desert here was free of sand. I was leaving no tracks in the hard-packed earth and stone of the desert floor that I could see or feel with my fingers, which relieved me somewhat.

  I took my time approaching the huts from downwind. No dogs that I could see, no vehicles, no sign of people. The place looked deserted.

  And was. Not a soul around. I checked all five of the huts, looked in the sheds. Not even a goat or puppy.

  There were marks of livestock by the water hole. Only six inches of water, I estimated, at the deepest part. At the widest place the pond was perhaps thirty feet across, about the size of an Iowa farm pond but with less water.

  The cliff loomed above the back of the water hole. Sure enough, I found a trail. I started climbing.

  The top of the ridge was about three hundred feet above the surrounding terrain. I huffed and puffed a bit getting up there. On top there was a bit of a breeze blowing, a warm, dry desert breeze that felt delicious at that hour of the night.

  I found a vantage point and examined the fort through the night-vision goggles, looked all around in every direction. To the west I could see the paved strip of the airport reflecting the starlight, so it appeared faintly luminescent. It too was empty. No people, no planes, no vehicles, no movement, just stone and great empty places.

  I took off the goggles and turned them off to save the battery, then waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The stars were so close in that clear dry air it seemed as if I could reach up and touch them. To the east the sky was lightening up.

  As the dawn slowly chased away the night, I worked my way toward the fort, which was about a third of a mile from where the trail topped the ridge. Fortunately there were head-high clumps of desert brush tucked into the nooks and crannies of the granite, so I tried to stay under cover as much as possible. By the time the sun poked its head over the earth’s rim I was standing under the wall of the fort.

  I listened.

  All I could hear was the whisper of the wind.

  I found a road and a gate, which wasn’t locked. After all, how many people are running around out here in this wasteland?

  Taking my time, I sneaked in. I had the rifle off my shoulder and leveled, with my thumb on the safety and my finger on the trigger.

  A Land Rover was parked in the courtyard. It had a couple five-gallon cans strapped to the back of it and was caked with dirt and dust. The tires were relatively new, sporting plenty of tread.

  When I was satisfied no one was in the courtyard, I stepped over to the Land Rover. The keys were in the ignition.

  I slipped into a doorway and stood there listening.

  Back when I was young, I was small and wiry and stupid enough to crawl through Viet Cong tunnels looking for bad guys. I had nightmares about that experience for years.

  Somewhere in this pile of rock was at least one person, perhaps more. But where?

  The old fort was quiet as a tomb. Just when I thought there was nothing to hear, I heard something … a scratching …

  I examined the courtyard again. There, on a second-story window ledge, a bird.

  It flew.

  I hung the rifle over my shoulder on its sling and got out my knife. With the knife in my right hand, cutting edge up, I began exploring.

  The old fort had some modern sleeping quarters, cooking facilities, and meeting rooms. There were electric lights plugged into wall sockets. In one of the lower rooms I found a gasoline-powered generator. Forty gallons of gasoline in plastic five-gallon cans sat in the next room.

  In a tower on the top floor, in a room with a magnificent view through glass windows, sat a first-class, state-of-the-art shortwave radio. I had seen the antenna as I walked toward the fort: It was on the roof above this room. I was examining the radio, wondering if I should try to disable it, when I heard a nearby door slam.

  Scurrying to the door of the room, I stood frozen, listening with my ear close to the wall.

  The other person in the fort was making no attempt to be quiet, which made me feel better. He obviously thought he was very much alone. And it was just one person, close, right down the hallway.

  Try as I might, I could only hear the one person, a man, opening and closing drawers, scooting something—a chair probably—across a stone floor, now slamming another door shut.

  Even as I watched he came out of one of the doors and walked away from me to the stairs I had used coming up. Good thing I didn’t open the door to look into his room!

  I got a glimpse of him crossing the courtyard, going toward the gasoline generator.

  Unwilling to move, I stood there until I heard the generator start. The hum of the gasoline engine settled into a steady drone. A lightbulb above the table upon which the radio sat illuminated.

  I trotted down the hallway to the room the man had come out of. I eased the door open and glanced in. Empty.

  The next room was also a bedroom, also empty, so I went in and closed the door.

  I was standing back from the window, watching, fifteen minutes later when the man walked out of a doorway to the courtyard almost directly opposite the room I was in, got into the Land Rover, an
d started it.

  He drove out through the open gate trailing a wispy plume of dust. I went to another window, an outside one, and waited. In a moment I got a glimpse of the Land Rover on the road to the airport.

  In the courtyard against one wall stood a water tank on legs, with plastic lines leading away to the kitchen area. I opened the fill cap and looked in. I estimated the tank contained fifty gallons of water. Apparently people using this facility brought water with them, poured it into this tank, then used it sparingly.

  I stood in the courtyard looking at the water tank, cursing under my breath. The best way to kill these people would be to poison their water with some kind of delayed-action poison that would take twenty-four hours to work, so everyone would have an opportunity to ingest some. Julie Giraud could have fucked a chemist and got us some poison. I should have thought of the water tank.

  Too late now.

  Damn!

  Before I had a chance to cuss very much, I heard a jet. The engine noise was rapidly getting louder. I dived for cover.

  Seconds later a jet airplane went right over the fort, less than a hundred feet above the radio antenna.

  Staying low, I scurried up the staircase to the top of the ramparts and took a look. A small passenger jet was circling to land at the airport.

  I double-timed down the staircase and hotfooted it out the gate and along the trail leading to the path down to the oasis, keeping my eye on the sky in case another jet should appear.

  It took me about half an hour to get back to the oasis, and another fifteen minutes to reach the place where Julie was waiting in the Humvee. Of course I didn’t just charge right up to the Humvee. Still well out of sight of the vehicle, I stopped, lay down, and caught my breath.

  When I quit blowing, I circled the area where the Humvee should have been, came at it from the east. At first I didn’t see her. I could see the vehicle, but she wasn’t in sight.

  I settled down to wait.

  Another jet went over, apparently slowing to land on the other side of the ridge.