“What do you think, Sarge? Do we risk the sand, or do I double back and clear any positions behind the tree-line?”
“Are you out of your mind, LT? Do you really mean to take an inflatable out into that storm?”
“What choice do we have? Diao’s people will be back here double-quick once they see I’m not in the wreckage.”
“If you’re right about Diao, then you can’t shoot any of ’em. Won’t that just confirm whatever story they mean to tell about friendly-fire?”
“Shit.”
Durant looked up at her, and when she glanced at him, she noticed a devilish gleam in his eye. “Is that your pig-sticker I see strapped to your back?”
His meaning was clear, and Emily cringed to hear it. He was right, of course. Sword wounds would hardly fit Diao’s scheme, and might even set it back, at least if his men saw them. But the prospect of cutting into men, of hacking and killing them with her hands… again – so much more gruesome than perforating them with steel pellets from a distance – was it really necessary? One look at Durant told her exactly how necessary it was, since Diao would hardly let him live if he found him. This realization did little to alleviate the pain he’d just brought to her mind. She felt the heat in her face as she turned this thought over, and began to resent the bearer of this news
“I read you loud and clear, Sarge.” She leaned over to kiss his forehead, hoping it would calm her own heart, and gestured to the shoreline. “Can you make it that far under your own steam, while I take care of some business?”
“Do what you have to do, LT, while I eat sand and haul my sorry ass to the damn boat.”
It was slow going at first, picking her way through the edge of a tropical rainforest, trying not to disturb the larger fronds that reached across whatever path she chose. Thankfully, the first few gun positions she came across were no longer manned, though they were clear enough even in the dark. Digging themselves in had crushed the foliage, and scorch marks showed where they’d fired the RPGs. A lighter clearing and a beaten path opened up on her left, halfway along the curving beachfront, and she moved more quickly, until she heard voices – the last gun position, four men stationed with an ancient, large-bore machine gun, at least 50 cal, mounted on a tripod.
“I can’t leave that thing here, or they’ll cut us down before we can even clear the breakers.”
The men spoke and laughed, completely unconcerned with stealth – if only she understood Cantonese better, they might give up much of their plan. Diao must have left them to watch for more birds, and it never occurred to any of them that she’d come this way, if she survived the crash. Standing next to a large trunk, no more than ten feet from the nearest man, the hand-held video screen they huddled around bathed them in light and made her nearly invisible. She contemplated them for a long moment. What was so captivating that they’d let their guard down so completely? Was it porn, or a video of loved ones back home? She couldn’t afford to let the difference matter, and her irritation at being denied such moral distinctions made her stomach churn.
No more time to deliberate on how to approach them – she kicked the closest man on the ear and sent him crashing into a tree, his neck bent at an improbable angle. Two others turned in time to see him slide to the ground, inert, and lunged for her, not thinking to reach for their weapons. Sidestepping one and wrenching his arm forcefully enough to drive him to the ground, she pivoted and kicked high to the back of the other man’s neck, sending him face first into the magazine of the machine gun, which tipped over with the impact. When he tried to right himself, maybe even fight back, disoriented and out of balance as he was, she slipped a side-kick under his chin, crushing his windpipe, and he ended up tangled in tripod legs, oozing blood over the barrel of the gun.
The last man had retained the presence of mind to grab his rifle and swing the barrel in her direction. But before he could fire, she drew the wakizashi over her shoulder and brought the blade crashing down through his elbow. He fell backwards, eyes fixed in terror, mouthing a silent scream and clutching what remained of his arm, as he kicked at the dirt in a futile effort to crab-walk out of her reach.
Emily pivoted at a sound and slashed across the throat of the man she’d wrenched to the ground. He’d managed to pick himself up and regain his footing just in time to meet his end, which turned out to be exceptionally grisly. Somehow, she’d cut more deeply than she intended, hacking through most of the muscles in his neck, the blade scraping the vertebrae at the top of his spine. She yanked it loose and watched him collapse like an accordion, his head lolling to the side in a fountain of blood.
“I’m sorry about this,” she said to the man whose arm she’d severed, speaking in Mandarin. “I can’t leave you here, and maybe it’s better this way for you, too.” The wakizashi slipped beneath the armor plate protecting his chest and found enough vital organs to ease him out of this world. Surveying the scene – three men dead, one about to die, if he wasn’t dead already – she noticed the video screen lying nearby, where the commotion had deposited it, and smashed it so as not to have to settle the question of what had so fascinated them.
It took a moment or two to collect whatever grenades they carried and strap them to the receiver assembly of the big gun. She rigged a cord to pull the pins from a distance and ran for all she was worth. Bursting from the foliage, she glanced right and saw Durant resting on all fours halfway to the Zodiac, and from deeper in the forest she heard the sound of more soldiers – Diao’s men – moving through underbrush.
“Cover and pray, Sarge,” she said, and threw herself on top of him just as the grenades went off. It took longer than she thought safe to pick herself up and pull him onto her shoulder. “We’re out of time.”
A few yards in front of the line of breakers, which had only grown since she’d formulated her plan, Durant leaned on the rubber gunwale, and Emily tossed the M4 she’d scavenged earlier into the boat, so that the two of them could push past the breakers. As soon as the first wave picked it up, she got behind Durant and shoved him up and over so she could follow the undertow out before heaving herself in. Once they’d cleared the rough water and were in deep enough to run the engine, she pulled herself into the boat and propped Durant securely against the portside tube, and turned directly into the storm.
“Take the tiller.” She wrapped his hand around the bar as the waves tossed the boat around. “Hold her steady.”
“Where are we headed?”
“Out there.” She jerked a thumb toward a dark bank of thunderheads, which looked like they might begin to swirl.
“Oh, shit.”
“Just don’t roll us over, Sarge. I need to take care of some business.” She scrambled along the bucking floorboards, rounding up the M4 and the grenade belt.
“What kind of ammo are you packing?”
“It looks like three High-Explosive rounds and a Star Parachute round.”
“Wait until we’re farther out,” Durant yelled over the wind. Muzzle flashes appeared at the treeline as they crested what felt like a four-foot swell and pitched down the other side, the propeller screaming above the wind whenever a wave levered it out of the water. “Fire the SP round at a hundred fifty yards. Aim high so it hangs for awhile and blinds ’em.”
“The wind may blow it over the trees.”
“It doesn’t matter… a low shot won’t be any use to us.”
“Check, Sarge.”
“Remember, you still can’t shoot anyone.”
“This totally sucks. These assholes killed Tunafish, and my whole crew, not to mention Farah...”
“…and Oleschenko and the rest of my squad.”
She knew that vengeance means nothing to the dead, and Durant probably understood this, too. But it was comforting, and maybe even helped focus her attention on the task, to imagine that killing these men would ease their friends’ passage.
The Zodiac nose-dived into a trough, which at least gave them cover from gunfire, as harrowing as the down-a
ngle seemed, with the next crest looming even higher. One needed a sort of faith in the generosity of the waves – they wouldn’t break this far out, and their tiny bark could ride them back up again. When the Zodiac crested the next wave, and the wind whipped her hair loose from its ponytail, Emily fired the SP over the beach and shielded her eyes. Durant had been right: the round ignited at a few hundred feet up, and once the parachute deployed, it drifted down for the next twenty or thirty seconds. Emily fired the HE rounds at the remaining Zodiacs, hoping to destroy them, or at least hold Diao’s people at bay, if anyone was crazy enough to follow them out. Each time they crested another wave, she sprayed the beach with bullets until she’d emptied all the clips, by which time they were probably out of range
A lightning bolt sizzled the air a few dozen yards to her right and lit up the scene, letting her glimpse a line of waves stretching to the horizon.
“Okay, I get the message,” she said, rising up from her knees to stare down the storm.
Durant looked at her through half closed eyes, struggling to stay alert on the tiller. “What the hell was that? I mean, doesn’t lightning normally hit things like us on the water?”
“I guess it found a better conductor over there. Can you hold the tiller a little longer while I see what kind of supplies we have in this boat?”
Chapter 19
Borrowing a Seaplane
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do,” Admiral Crichton said. “Captain Diao reported a friendly fire incident, and three of his men have the wounds to confirm it.”
“How convenient,” Theo said in a low growl. “They have flesh wounds and we have six dead Marines, including Oleschenko.”
“Don’t forget a downed Phrog, with its entire crew lost,” Perry added.
“If only we could pin that on them.” Theo fumed, staring at the map spread out on the table.
“All that matters is the ordinance we found on the scene,” Crichton said. “Not to mention the active terrorist base you found in the caves under that mountain.
“One old Soviet 12.7mm doesn’t mean anything,” Theo said. “I’m sure the Chinese can acquire as many of those as they want. The more interesting question is how it got blown up in the first place.”
“I still have my doubts about that base,” Perry added. “Ongpin was a little to anxious to get us out of there.”
“I feel the same way about all of it, but my hands are tied.” Crichton snapped his laptop shut and stared down at the same map, brow furrowed with frustration. “My orders come from SECNAV, and his come from the top. We have to let the Chinese leave the ship, and close down Operation Seabreeze.”
“How soon can we start the search for our two missing Marines?” Theo asked.
“They are presumed lost at sea.”
“With all due respect, sir, that doesn’t make any sense,” Perry said. “The Phrog crashed several hundred yards inland with its crew intact except for…”
“This also comes from the top, Lieutenant Commander. I know you have a personal connection to her, but…”
“Do you actually think she fell out of her own bird, sir?”
“No, of course not. But these are political decisions, and the Phillipine government does not want the BHR stirring up trouble down here, and neither does SECNAV, not while we’re negotiating a new base agreement for Subic Bay and the other stations down south.” The Admiral pushed back from his desk and got up to pace the room. “If only you could give me something concrete to bring to the Joint Chiefs, then maybe SECNAV…”
“Her weapon was not recovered in the wreckage,” Perry offered. “We found it a few hundred yards south, along the western ridge.”
“You know as well as I do, SECNAV will say it could have fallen out in flight.”
“Can we at least have more time to search the crash site?” Theo asked.
“Not unless you mean to search in the dark. We set sail tomorrow morning, at first light.” Crichton rubbed his chin and considered Theo and Perry from a new angle. “I knew her father. He pulled me out of a few scrapes back in the old days. I’d like to find her alive as much as anyone. All formalities aside, tell me what makes you so sure she’s still alive. Man to man… is it just a gut instinct, or wishful thinking, or something more substantial?”
“It’s Durant,” Theo said, without a moment’s hesitation. “He didn’t just disappear. His unit was shot up and his body hasn’t been found.”
“So, he pulled her from the wreckage… then what?”
“Or she rescued him,” Perry said. “They’re very close, those two. He only put in for a transfer from Quantico to be of service to her. He had a cushy post back home.”
“I think they took off in a Zodiac. One of them is still unaccounted for.”
“Probably blown away in the storm,” Crichton said. “Even if it wasn’t, even if they took it, do you really think they could have survived out on the open sea? The Harrier squadron already worked a gridsearch to the southwest this morning. If they were out there, that’s where the storm would have carried them.”
They didn’t back down, Crichton observed after they were gone, even though Hankinson’s shoulders slumped toward the end. But these are SEALs. They’re used to pulling out improbable successes through sheer determination. Once they’d been choppered back to the BHR, Crichton opened his laptop again and waited for a response.
“I don’t know why I should trust you,” he said. “If you screw this up, it means early retirement for me.”
“You know as well as I do, it’s the same reason I’m going to trust you,” the familiar, husky, female voice crackled over a secure line. “It’s because of her.”
“Fine.” Crichton resisted the urge to cross himself on hearing those words, as if they were a sweet balm to his troubled heart. “As soon as your bird lands, I’ll set you up with Hankinson, and you can brief him. The two of you are going off the books, no official position, no standing with the Filipinos, and no one to bail you out if you get in too deep. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. Do we have a contact in Palawan?”
“I’ve arranged for an officer at NS Ulugan Bay to coordinate with you. She’s working on finding you a seaplane.”
“Is this someone we can trust?”
“Yes, but I think it’s gonna be more a matter of getting her to trust you.”
“What about weapons?”
“You’ll have to improvise. She’s got no authorization to recquisition any ordinance, not without alerting SECNAV to your mission.”
* * *
“I don’t see why the Admiral couldn’t just chopper us over from the BHR last night?” Perry tried to stretch the kink out of his shoulder, standing next to a twin-engine island-hopper on the tarmac of an airstrip in Berong. “Did we really need to steam twelve hours north in order to panhandle our way back down here?”
Connie didn’t hear any of his griping, having collected her pack and set off to find transport. He was left hauling the other bags she’d insisted on bringing, one a silver-sided briefcase, the other one oblong and heavy, with a sticker that implied it contained fishing equipment.
“Hey, the jitney’s are this way.”
“A car will take too long,” she called over her shoulder and walked on. “The only road winds through the mountains.”
When he finally caught up to her at the door of a ramshackle hangar at the far end of the only runway, she was in the middle of negotiations with a little man in blue coveralls and a mouth sparse in teeth.
“Puerto Princesa is fifty thousand pisos,” the little man said, eyeing the two of them suspiciously. “Plus expenses.”
“Ulugan Bay?” Connie said, rising up to her full height, which raised her head several inches above his.
“Hundred thousand.”
“We want to leave now.” Connie gestured to a brightly-colored helicopter across a grassy field.
“No pilot now. You leave in three hours.”
“Two hundred thousan
d if we leave now.”
“No pilot. No leave now.” He gestured to a shack behind one of the main hangars on the airstrip, which could have been either a restaurant, an informal pilot’s lounge or a brothel, if one judged only by external appearances.
“Five thousand US if we leave now,” Connie said, reaching into the pocket of her jacket to extract a wad of hundred dollar bills, “…and five hundred for you if you go find the pilot, now.” She peeled off five crisp, hundred dollar bills and waved them in front of his eyes. He tried to look unimpressed, but the dilation of his pupils indicated otherwise.
“Wait here,” he cried, when Connie made a gesture suggesting she was about to look for another helicopter ride. The little man snatched at the money and ran off in the direction of restaurant-pilot’s lounge-brothel.
“There goes five hundred bucks you’ll never see again.” Perry struck a non-chalant pose, leaning against the hangar door, but wondering all the while how they were going to pay for any of this trip. It hadn’t occurred to him that finances might prove a sticky point when he accepted the Admiral’s offer to give him a week’s leave for unspecified purposes. Perhaps he’d imagined all the pesky logistical problems would simply work themselves out. He resisted the urge to reach for his wallet and count out for himself the hundred forty seven dollars he already knew it contained.
The little man returned within a few minutes, grinning ear to ear and trailing a larger, younger man who sported a stylishly weathered, leather “flyer’s” jacket and a resentful expression, as if to announce to everyone that he had something he’d rather be doing. Large as he was compared to the little man (who turned out to be his grandfather), he wasn’t quite as tall as Connie, and certainly nowhere near Perry’s dimensions, and once he come close enough to realize the size difference wasn’t in his advantage, his demeanor inclined somewhat more steeply towards hospitality, though with some reservation for the bargaining power a touch of suspicion could provide.
Girl Rides the Wind Page 20