Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  I stood there in the darkness listening to the silence, trying to convince myself these guys were all in their beds sound asleep, that the miracle was real.

  No guts, no glory, I told myself, sucked it up, and slipped through the gate. I sifted my way past the Land Rover and began climbing the stairs.

  I didn’t go up those stairs slow as sap in a maple tree this time. I zipped up the steps, knife in one hand and pistol in the other. Maybe I just didn’t care. If they killed me, maybe that would be a blessing.

  The corridor on top was empty, and the door to the radio shack was still closed. I eased it open and peeked in. King Kong was still lying in a pool of his own blood on the floor, just the way I had left him.

  I pulled the door shut, then tiptoed along the corridor toward an alcove overlooking the courtyard.

  I heard a noise and crouched in the darkness.

  Someone snoring.

  The sound was coming from an open door on my left. At least two men.

  I eased past the door, moving as quietly as I could, until I reached the alcove.

  Nothing stirred in the quiet moment before dawn.

  From the rucksack hanging from my shoulder I removed three hand grenades, placed them on the floor near my feet.

  And I waited.

  Eight

  Dawn took its own sweet time arriving. I was sore, stiff, hungry, and I loathed myself. I was also so exhausted that I was having trouble thinking clearly. What was there about Julie that scared me?

  It wasn’t that she might kill me or leave me stranded in the desert surrounded by corpses. She didn’t strike me as the kind to double-cross anyone: If I was wrong about that I was dead and that was that. There was something else, something that didn’t fit, but tired as I was, I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  She stole the V-22, hired me to help her …

  Well, we would make it or we wouldn’t.

  I sat with my rifle on my lap, finger on the trigger, leaned back against the wall, closed my eyes just for a moment. I was so tired …

  I awakened with a jerk. Somewhere in the fort a door closed with a minor bang.

  The day was here, the sun was shining straight in through the openings in the wall.

  Someone was moving around. Another door slammed.

  I looked at my watch. The bombs should have gone off twenty minutes ago. I had been asleep over an hour.

  I slowly rose from the floor on which I had been sitting, so stiff and sore I could hardly move. I picked up the grenades and pocketed them. Moving as carefully and quietly as I could, I got up on the railing, put my leg up to climb onto the roof.

  The rifle slipped off my shoulder. I grabbed for the strap and was so sore I damn near dropped it.

  The courtyard was thirty feet below. I teetered on the railing, the rifle hanging by a strap from my right forearm, the rucksack dangling, every muscle I owned screaming in protest.

  Then I was safely up, pulling all that damn gear along with me.

  Taking my time, I spread out the gear, got out the grenades, and placed them where I could easily reach them.

  I took a long drink from my canteen, then screwed the lid back on and put it away.

  The radio that controlled the bombs was not large. I set the frequency very carefully, turned the thing on, and let the capacitor charge. When the green light came on, I gingerly set the radio aside.

  Three minutes later, a muffled bang from the bomb behind the shortwave radio slapped the air.

  I lay down on the roof and gripped the rifle.

  Running feet.

  Shouts. Shouts in Arabic.

  It didn’t take them long to zero in on the radio room. I heard running feet, several men, pounding along the corridor.

  They didn’t spend much time in there looking at the remains of King Kong or the shortwave. More shouts rang through the building.

  Julie Giraud and I had argued about what would happen next. I predicted that these guys would panic, would soon decide that the logical, best course of action was a fast plane ride back to civilization. I suspected they were bureaucrats at heart, string-pullers. Julie thought they might be warriors, that their first instinct would be to fight. We would soon see who was right.

  I could hear the voices bubbling out of the courtyard, then what sounded like orders given in a clean, calm voice. That would never do. I pulled the pin from a grenade, then threw it at the wall on the other side of the courtyard.

  The grenade struck the wall, made a noise that attracted the attention of the people below, then exploded just before it hit the ground.

  A scream. Moans.

  I tossed a second grenade, enjoyed the explosion, then hustled along the rooftop. I lay down beside a chimney in a place that allowed me to watch the rest of the roof and the area just beyond the main gate.

  From here I could also see the planes parked on the airfield, gleaming brightly in the morning sun.

  Someone stuck his head over the edge of the roof. He was gone too quick for me to get around, but I figured he would pop up again with a weapon of some kind, so I got the Model 70 pointed and flicked off the safety. Sure enough, fifteen seconds later the head popped back up and I squeezed off a shot. His body hit the pavement thirty feet below with a heavy plop.

  The Land Rover could not carry them all, of course. Still, I thought this crowd would go for it as if it were a lifeboat on the Titanic. I was not surprised to hear the engine start even though I had tossed two grenades into the courtyard where the vehicle was parked: The Rover was essentially impervious to shrapnel damage, and should run for a bit, at least, as long as the radiator remained intact.

  Angry shouts reached me. Apparently the Rover driver refused to wait for a full load.

  I kept my head down, waited until I heard the Rover clear the gate and start down the road. Then I pushed the button on the radio control.

  The explosion was quite satisfying. In about half a minute a column of smoke from the wreckage could be seen from where I lay.

  I stayed put. I was in a good defensive position, what happened next was up to the crowd below.

  The sun climbed higher in the sky and on the roof of that old fort, the temperature soared. I was sweating pretty good by then, was exhausted and hungry … Finally I had had enough. I crawled over to one of the cooking chimneys and stood up.

  They were going down the road in knots of threes and fours. With the binoculars I counted them. Twenty-eight.

  There was no way to know if that was all of them.

  Crouching, I made my way to the courtyard side, where I could look down in, and listen.

  No sound but the wind, which was out of the west at about fifteen knots, a typical desert day this time of year.

  After a couple minutes of this, I inched my head over the edge for a look. Three bodies lay sprawled in the courtyard.

  I had a fifty-foot rope in the rucksack. I tied one end around a chimney and tossed it over the wall on the side away from the main gate. Then I clambered over.

  Safely on the ground, I kept close to the wall, out of sight of the openings above me. On the north side the edge of the ridge was close, about forty yards. I got opposite that point, gripped my rifle with both hands, and ran for it.

  No shots.

  Safely under the ledge, I sat down, caught my breath, and had a drink of water.

  If there was anyone still in the fort waiting to ambush me, he could wait until doomsday for all I cared.

  I moved downslope and around the ridge about a hundred yards to a place where I could see the runway and the airplanes and the road.

  The figures were still distinct in my binoculars, walking briskly.

  What would they do when they got to the airplanes? They would find the bodies of three men who died violently and three sabotaged airplanes. Three of the airplanes would appear to be intact.

  The possibility that the intact airplanes were sabotaged would of course occur to them. I argued that they would not get in those plane
s, but would hunker down and wait until some of their friends came looking for them. Of course, the only food and water they had would be in the planes or what they had carried from the fort, but they could comfortably sit tight for a couple of days.

  We couldn’t. If the Libyan military found us, the Osprey would be MiG-meat and we would be doomed.

  A thorough, careful preflight of the bizjets would turn up the bombs, of course. We needed to panic these people, not give them the time to search the jets or find holes to crawl into.

  Panic was Julie’s job.

  She had grinned when I told her how she would have to do it.

  I used the binoculars to check the progress of the walking men. They were about a mile away now, approaching the mat where the airplanes were parked. The laggards were hurrying to catch up with the leaders. Apparently no one wanted to take the chance that he might be left behind.

  Great outfit, that.

  The head of the column had just reached the jets when I heard the Osprey. It was behind me, coming down the ridge.

  In seconds it shot over the fort, which was to my left, and dived toward the runway.

  Julie was a fine pilot, and the Osprey was an extraordinary machine. She kept the engines horizontal and made a high-speed pass over the bizjets, clearing the tail of the middle one by about fifty feet. I watched the whole show through my binoculars.

  She gave the terrorists a good look at the U.S. Marine Corps markings on the plane.

  The Osprey went out about a mile and began the transition to rotor-borne flight. I watched it slow, watched the engines tilt up, then watched it drop to just a few feet above the desert.

  Julie kept the plane moving forward just fast enough to stay out of the tremendous dust cloud that the rotors kicked up, a speed of about twenty knots, I estimated.

  She came slowly down the runway. Through the binoculars I saw the muzzle flashes as she squeezed off a burst from the flex Fifty. I knew she planned to shoot at one of the disabled jets, see if she could set it afire. The fuel tanks would still contain fuel vapor and oxygen, so a high-powered bullet in the right place should find something to ignite.

  Swinging the binoculars to the planes, I was pleasantly surprised to see one erupt in flame.

  Yep.

  The Osprey accelerated. Julie rotated the engines down and climbed away.

  The terrorists didn’t know how many enemies they faced. Nor how many Ospreys were about. They were lightly armed and not equipped for a desert firefight, so they had limited options. Apparently that was the way they figured it too, because in less than a minute the first jet taxied out. Another came right behind it. The third was a few seconds late, but it taxied onto the runway before the first reached the end and turned around.

  The first plane had to wait for the other two. There was just room on the narrow strip for each of them to turn, but there was no pullout, no way for one plane to get out of the way of the other two. The first two had to wait until the last plane to leave the mat turned around in front of them.

  Finally all three had turned and were sitting one behind the other, pointing west into the wind. The first plane rolled. Ten seconds later the second followed. The third waited maybe fifteen seconds, then it began rolling.

  The first plane broke ground as Julie Giraud came screaming in from the east at a hundred feet above the ground. The Osprey looked to be flying almost flat out, which Julie said was about 270 knots.

  She overtook the jets just as the third one broke ground.

  She had moved a bit in front of it, still ripping along, when the second and third plane exploded. Looking through the binoculars, it looked as if the nose came off each plane. The damaged fuselages tilted down and smashed into the ground, making surprisingly little dust when they hit.

  The first plane, a Lear I think, seemed undamaged.

  The bomb must have failed to explode.

  The pilot of the bizjet had his wheels retracted now, was accelerating with the nose down. But not fast enough. Julie Giraud was overtaking nicely.

  Through the binoculars I saw the telltale wisp of smoke from the nose of the Osprey. She was using the gun.

  The Lear continued to accelerate, now began to widen the distance between it and the trailing Osprey.

  “It’s going to get away,” I whispered. The words were just out of my mouth when the thing caught fire.

  Trailing black smoke, the Lear did a slow roll over onto its back. The nose came down. The roll continued, but before the pilot could level the wings the plane smeared itself across the earth in a gout of fire and smoke.

  Nine

  Julie Giraud landed the Osprey on the runway near the sabotaged planes. When I walked up she was sitting in the shade under the left wing with an M-16 across her lap.

  She had undoubtedly searched the area before I arrived, made sure no one had missed the plane rides to hell. Fire had spread to the other sabotaged airplanes, and now all three were burning. Black smoke tailed away on the desert wind.

  “So how does it feel?” I asked as I settled onto the ground beside her.

  “Damn good, thank you very much.”

  The heat was building, a fierce dry heat that sucked the moisture right out of you. I got out my canteen and drained the thing.

  “How do you feel?” she asked after a bit, just to be polite.

  “Exhausted and dirty.”

  “I could use a bath too.”

  “The dirty I feel ain’t gonna wash off.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I’m breaking your heart.” I got to my feet. “Let’s get this thing back to the cliff and covered with camouflage netting. Then we can sleep.”

  She nodded, got up, led the way into the machine.

  We were spreading the net over the top of the plane when we heard a jet.

  “Getting company,” I said.

  Julie was standing on top of the Osprey. Now she shaded her eyes, looked north, tried to spot the plane that we heard.

  She saw it first, another bizjet. That was a relief to me—a fighter might have spotted the Osprey and strafed it.

  “Help me get the net off it,” she demanded, and began tossing armloads of net onto the ground.

  “Are you tired of living?”

  “Anyone coming to visit that crowd of baby-killers is a terrorist himself.”

  “So you’re going to kill them?”

  “If I can. Now drag that net out of my way!”

  I gathered a double armful and picked it up. Julie climbed down, almost dived through the door into the machine. It took me a couple minutes to drag the net clear, and took Julie about that long to get the engines started and the plane ready to fly.

  The instant I gave a thumb-up, she applied power and lifted off.

  I hid my face so I wouldn’t get dirt in my eyes.

  Away she went in a cloud of dirt.

  She shot the plane down. The pilot landed, then tried to take off when he saw the Osprey and the burned-out jets. Julie Giraud used the flex Fifty on him and turned the jet into a fireball a hundred yards off the end of the runway.

  When she landed I got busy with the net, spreading it out.

  “You are the craziest goddamn broad I ever met,” I told her. “You are no better than these terrorists. You’re just like them.”

  “Bullshit,” she said contemptuously.

  “You don’t know who the hell you just killed. For all you know you may have killed a planeload of oil-company geologists.”

  “Whoever it was was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Just like your parents.”

  “Somebody has to take on the predators,” she shouted at me. “They feed on us. If we don’t fight back, they’ll eat us all.”

  I let her have the last word. I was sick of her and sick of me and wished to Christ I had never left Van Nuys.

  I got a little sleep that afternoon in the shade under a wing, but I had too much on my mind to do more than doze. Darkness finally cam
e and we took the net off the plane for the last time. We left the net, the Humvee, the trailer, everything. I put all the stuff we didn’t need over and around the trailer as tightly as I could, then put a chemical fuse in the last of the C-4 in the trailer and set it to blow in six hours.

  When we lifted off, I didn’t even bother to look at the Camel, the old fortress. I never wanted to see any of this again.

  She flew west on autopilot, a few hundred feet above the desert floor. There were mountain ranges ahead of us. She used the night-vision goggles to spot them and climbed when the terrain forced her to. I dozed beside her in the copilot’s seat.

  Hours later she shook me awake. Out the window ahead I could see the lights of Tangier.

  She had the plane on autopilot, flying toward the city. We went aft, put on coveralls, helped each other don backpacks and parachutes, then she waddled forward to check how the plane was flying.

  The idea was to fly over the city from east to west, jump over the western edge of the city and let the plane fly on, out to sea. When the fuel in the plane was exhausted it would go into the ocean, probably break up and sink.

  Meanwhile we would be on our way via commercial airliner. I had my American passports in my backpack—my real one and Robert Arnold’s—and a plane ticket to South Africa. I hadn’t asked Julie where she was going when we hit the ground because I didn’t want to know. By that point I hoped to God I never set eyes on her again.

  She lowered the tailgate, and I walked out on it. She was looking out one of the windows. She held up a hand, signaling me to get ready. I could just glimpse lights.

  Now she came over to stand beside me. “Fifteen seconds,” she shouted and looked at her watch. I looked at mine too.

  I must have relaxed for just a second, because the next thing I knew she pushed me and I was going out, reaching for her. She was inches beyond my grasp.

  Then I was out of the plane and falling through the darkness.

  Needless to say, I never saw Julie Giraud again. I landed on a rocky slope, a sheep pasture I think, on the edge of town and gathered up the parachute. She was nowhere in sight.