Birth of the Wolf (Wahaya)

by Peterson, J. B.

  The two men began to move slowly down the step wooded slope of the caldera. The last hundred and fifty meters before they got to the final wood line before the house, they moved on their bellies.

  As they had agreed to earlier, Dave scooted out on his belly to observe the barracks and Nick crawled closer to the house. It was 0100 hours.

  They met under the tree again at 0230. “There’s only one inside the house,” Nick said, “and I just heard him send three more up the trail to look for the three we took out. I’ve got one roving and two stationary guards on the house itself.”

  “I found three at the barracks, one inside the door and two roving. There’s three on the guesthouse in the garden where the women are being held,” Dave said.

  “Great, we’ve got two loose nimrods running around out here somewhere and we don’t know where they are -- provided Jose back up there could count.” Nick flicked an irritated glance up the caldera where their captive was taped to a tree. The light from the new patrol was less than a third the way up the trail.

  “We’re just going to have to assume they have two inside the house with the ladies,” Dave said, “we don’t have any choice and we’re just 'bout out of time. We may be lucky though, I didn’t see a single vehicle here. Maybe the other guards are in the vehicles.”

  “We’ve been doing this a long time, Dave, and we both know ‘maybe’ can get you killed.”

  “Oh hell, thunder and lightning was always my style anyway,” Dave said with a grin. “I don’t see that we have any choice other than to give up, an’ that ain’t happenin’ .”

  “Thunder and lightning it is then,” Nick said.

  * * * * *

  The important decisions having been made, the two men began to prepare for battle with easy, economical moves that were silent and wasted no energy. There was no time now for changes, each man would have to depend on his own resources, and his ability to deploy them.

  Nick crawled into the deep grass in front of the house, about sixty meters out. His primary firepower was the grenade launcher on his M-203…the grenades had to travel forty meters before they armed themselves.

  Silently, Nick taped his thirty round magazines together so he could reload quickly. He put one doubled magazine in each of the cargo pockets in his pants, and quietly taped one to the magazine already seated in the gun as well. With the Glock .22 out and close at hand, Nick had only to wait until after 0330 hours.

  He would signal the commencement of the attack with a burst from his rifle. What he really wanted was to catch the nimrod from inside the house checking the guards outside and having himself a smoke. At 0330, Nick took out the first of the stationary sentries with the Glock. The second sentry was asleep and never heard the muffled sound of his partner being shot -- nor did he waken to the sound of the next round penetrating just below his right ear.

  At 0337 Nick’s silent prayer was answered, and a tall lean man in white cotton pants and shirt came out on the porch, looked around, stretched, and scratched himself.

  The flare of a zippo lighter exposed his face just before Nick took him out with a three round burst from his rifle. Nick began to pump round after round of forty millimeter grenades into the main house.

  Before the first of the grenades had lit off, Dave had taken out the three sentries and was busy lobbing fragmentation grenades into the barracks as far inside as he could throw them. The four second delay fuses allowed him to toss several inside before the first one went off.

  Dave began to spray the inside of the barracks with rounds from the light machine gun he carried. The rock walls of the barracks made the place an inferno of explosion and murderous metal.

  Explosions to their left and right confused the guards on the guesthouse. The three of them were firing their AK-47s indiscriminately into the darkness. They never saw anyone at all, even though the two who survived swore later to Armando Conde that there were at least fifty uniformed men who had made the assault. A third man, the roving guard from the house, ran off into the woods with the two survivors.

  With no more explosions blasting or bullets flying, Dave hit the guesthouse door with a muscular shoulder and rolled into the front room with his Glock out and ready. Nick was right behind him, M-16 at the ready.

  There was one man in the living room that died before his weapon cleared its holster. The other guard came stumbling from the bathroom with his pants around his knees and a Beretta 92F in his hand. He died trying to pull his pants up.

  Nick looked down at his watch; it was 0339, a little less than one hundred twenty seconds into the attack. They rushed the bedroom where they found three women huddled together on a king sized bed rather than the two they had expected. They were all dressed in the white work clothes favored by the peasants, and they were barefoot.

  Nick and Dave herded them across the yard and into the tree line, Amanda babbling about not having her shoes and other assorted nonsense. Nick knew she was in shock, and he also knew it was more important to get some distance between them and the grounds than it was to shut her up right away.

  The sounds of the fire and the sporadic gunfire coming from the burning house assured them at least a few minutes of free travel before they would have to quiet down.

  He looked back and noticed that Cynthia was assisting a pretty blonde teenaged girl who was hobbling along on one good leg. Nick handed his rifle to Cynthia. “Your bio said you know how to handle one of these,” Nick growled, “do you?”

  Cynthia nodded.

  Nick reached down and lifted the teenager, throwing her over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “Watch your face,” he whispered hoarsely, “we’re going to be travelling through some pretty dense forest for the next little while.”

  Without another word he turned and started to walk up the steep side of the caldera as if he was out for a swift Sunday stroll. It was all Cynthia could do to keep up with him.

  Dave was about twenty meters ahead of them, dragging a still muttering Amanda Dunn behind him. In moments there was nothing to indicate they had moved through the forest. Even the insects that had hushed at their passing had begun to make their normal nighttime noises again.

  Nick insisted that they move at least halfway up the steep slope before they stopped to rest and check on the women. Cynthia helped Amanda to calm down and the teenager sat and sniffed quietly.

  Nick knelt at the teenager’s feet and inspected the leg she had been limping on. It wasn’t bad, she had cut her foot on some broken glass when they had left the house.

  Nick cursed silently as he pulled his first aid pack from his pistol belt. An open cut in the most bio diverse environment he had ever seen was an invitation to infection or parasite invasion. In this tropical environment either could rapidly become fatal.

  “This is going to hurt,” he told the girl, “and there’s nothing I can do to stop the pain. If I don’t clean this thoroughly and do it right now, you could be going to your next prom with a wooden leg.”

  He grinned at her to ease the sting of his words. He opened a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  “I need you to pull the edges apart, like this,” he said, showing her. The girl winced at the pain, but she did as she was told.

  The moonlight was bright enough for Nick to see that she was pretty, and very young -- fifteen or sixteen if he was forced to guess.

  “What’s your name?” he asked gently as he poured a more than generous amount of the peroxide into the long shallow cut.

  “Abbie,” she said through gritted teeth, “Abbie Landon.”

  “As in Representative Landon of the House Armed Services Committee?” a surprised Nick asked.

  Her eyes large and luminous, Abbie nodded.

  “We weren’t told you were missing,” Nick said apologetically. “We didn’t even know.”

  Abbie giggled. “They didn’t know either. I knew this was about daddy when it happened. I had them convinced I was somebody else and that they had gotten the wrong person.”
r />   “Jesus kid, you could have been killed -- or worse, these people are really bad news.”

  “I’ll say,” she frowned. “They were all kind of handsy, always trying to cop a feel until they fed those two guys to the jaguars -- that was gross.”

  Nick looked inquisitively over to Cynthia and she nodded. Nick made a mental note to ask her about it later.

  He dressed the cut and looked around for something they could use to cover all the women’s feet. They would never make it out of here unless something could be done to help them to walk faster.

  Nick looked around and found a palm tree. At the base of the tree, he found what he had been looking for. The curved ends of palm fronds where they attach to the tree are broad and slightly curved. He stripped off his tee shirt and quickly cut it into six pieces as equally as he could. Wrapping Abbie’s feet with two strips, he fitted two of the palm frond ends by trimming them with his knife.

  The wood of the palm frond was thick and fibrous, and Nick knew he would be a long time at the whetstone when he got home, if they got home, to return the razor edge to his knife.

  After he was satisfied with the fit, he used the thick roll of hundred mile an hour tape to cover the cotton tee shirt strips. He covered the palm frond soles on the bottom covered with the tape as well. He sat back and surveyed his handiwork, and asked Abbie to walk a few steps in them.

  Nick repeated the chore two more times, quickly and efficiently, and they were ready to move out again.

  While Nick tended the women, Dave had used the satellite phone to contact General Swain. He reported both the success of their primary mission. He also told the General about Representative Landon’s daughter, that she was safe as well.

  General Swain advised that he would try to lay on an extraction mission for any special forces unit in the area. This had not been preplanned, but after Dave had explained their forced use of “thunder and lightning tactics”, the General agreed with Dave that Tarapoto was probably no longer safe for them.

  The two quickly agreed on a pick up point on the west side of the river -- about two miles through thick lowland jungle from the outside base of the caldera. Dave was to call back in six hours to verify the extraction, or to get a different time or location.

  As Nick would say, the situation was “fluid” until the general could make contact with a special forces unit in the area.

  After a brief exchange of information couched in military jargon and references to things years past that the women didn’t understand a word of, Nick and Dave got the three women on their feet and started moving up the steep slope again. Even with the foot covering, Abbie was dragging them down, and Nick once again threw her over his shoulder after handing his weapon to Cynthia.

  They reached the summit as the sun was rising, much faster than Nick had anticipated. They checked through their binoculars and they could see the ruins of the villa smoldering still. There were three vehicles there now, and quite a few men with weapons present.

  * * * * *

  “We need to get moving Dave. If he has access to a chopper we’re going to have to go to ground until dark.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said, “and Conde has money more money than he knows what to do with. Wonder why the general can send in a bird with active duty Special Forces types now, when he had to send us in here for the client?”

  “Abbie,” Nick nodded in the girl’s direction. “Her father is an active elected member of the House of Representatives. I don’t know why she wasn’t reported kidnapped -- unless they thought she was a runaway or something. Kidnapping her changed this whole ball game.

  "Peru has to send in their military now or face possible direct U.S. Military intervention. Since you called Swain, there’s been one helluva wakeup call in D.C. I’m just hoping we can stay out of the spotlight until the big shots decide whose ballgame it is. In the meantime, we need to either get off this topless volcano or find a place we can defend until help gets here.”

  Dave looked over the few grenades and the small amount of ammo he had left for the SAW. “I hope you’ve got more than I do Nick, ‘cause if you don’t we gotta put our running shoes on.”

  “We have to run. It never pays to wait on the babysitters in Washington.”

  They tended to the women, giving them water to drink and self-heated rations. They divided what they had left among the three women, taking nothing for themselves. There was native fruit everywhere, but there was no time to collect it right now.

  They carefully wiped the women’s hands clean to keep away the insects. They explained what was happening and why. Nick threw Abbie across his shoulder again and took off at a half trot down through the trees on the outside of the caldera.

  “We have to hurry ladies,” Nick grunted. Abbie didn’t really weigh much, and her soft hands on the rippling muscles of his back told him she was enjoying this ride a little more than he wanted her to.

  Abbie wasn’t the only one admiring Nick in the bright light of that morning. Nick’s body was the product of forty years of athletic prowess and dedication to his personal fitness as a warrior. Other men stayed fit for their professions, with Nick it was more of a religion.

  The massive Cherokee’s bronzed body was more than impressive glistening in the sun with a light coat of sweat, and his natural good looks usually drew attention to him anyway.

  Cynthia Cohen was transfixed as she watched him lope down the side of the mountain, carrying Abbie as if she weighed no more than a handkerchief. He bounded over logs and went through rough spots with the grace of a running deer. Even Amanda Dunn got a little flutter as she watched him.

  Dave made up the tail end of the little group and he sighed deeply as he watched the women ogling Nick. Nick always got the chicks -- some things never changed.

  In spite of the steady half trot that Nick maintained, it took them more than two hours to reach the river at the base of Conde’s mountain retreat. The women were exhausted and barely able to stand. Dave was a soaked and sweating mess. Nick looked as if he had just come in from a Sunday stroll.

  Nick dropped all his equipment under a fallen log except the Glock, and indicated to Dave with hand signals to get everyone concealed until he returned. Nick went off to recon the river bank.

  In fifteen minutes Nick was back, and he didn’t look happy. He sat down next to Dave and tossed him a handful of Lucumas he had picked on the way back from the river.

  “We’re going to be here a while ladies, and it’s important that you eat these. You need to rest and build up your strength for the last stretch.

  Conde has boats in the river looking for us. The good news is that they only have small arms. There are no mounted machine guns. They’re covering the river in both directions, and I’ll be going back in a little bit to check their pattern.”

  “Dave, there’s a three rope bridge about a half klick from here. If I was them I’d put one or two men on this side of the river to catch anyone trying to cross there, and keep the boats patrolling. If we’re going to reach that pickup zone in time, we’ve got to cross this river.

  "It’s flowing too fast to swim it with the ladies and besides with the parasites and pirhanna in there, we be foolish to even try it. There’s also no way to take the men out of the boats without trashing the boats, so that’s out.”

  Nick cut half a Lucuma off and put it in his mouth. He chewed reflectively for a moment and stood up.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said. Looking down at the waterproof chronometer on his wrist, Nick started to move. “Half a klick down the river bank -- parallel to the path and meet me there in twenty minutes.” He told Dave as he turned around.

  Nick picked up his gear from beneath the fallen log and shook it to remove any unwanted visitors, and strapped it all back on. In seconds he simply vanished into the trees.

  “How does he do that?” Cynthia asked, “I’ve never seen anyone move like that.”

  “Nick’s an honest to god legend in Special Forces ma’am,” D
ave said. “I’ve known him for eighteen years, and he’s always been like that.”

  Amanda spoke up for the first time. “You gentlemen are in the Army?”

  “No ma’am,” Dave said, “we’re retired. I’d guess you would call us independent contractors now.”

  “He’s some kind of Indian,” Cynthia mused.

  “Cherokee ma’am,” Dave said, “but that’s part of the legend too.”

  Amanda, Cynthia, and Abbie looked at him quizzically. “This’ll have to be fast,” Dave said. "He’d kill me if he knew I was telling this story again, but in a nutshell, it’s the legend of Nick Harris.”

  * * * * *

  “I was just about to graduate from sniper school with a bunch of Marines and Army Rangers and we were all gung ho from the training. We believed that we were the sharpest, most alert and elite troopers in the world -- absolutely invincible.

  "We were standing around taking a break and listening to a conversation between a Marine General, a Rear Admiral from the SEALs, and a Bull Colonel from Special Forces. Everyone was impressed with the demonstration and were talking very highly about the graduates.

  "I could tell from the look on the SF Colonel’s face that he was up to something when he suddenly told the group that as long as the new troops didn’t have to face any Ghost Warriors that they would serve just fine. The Admiral and the General looked a little annoyed at a lowly Army Colonel raining on their parade, especially one of those ragtag, unorthodox hoodlums from Special Forces.

  "The Colonel went on to say that Ghost Warriors had been known to infiltrate enemy positions in broad daylight, totally undetected, and then disappear as if they had never been there.

  "To make a long story short, the Admiral and General all but called the Colonel a bald faced liar, and the Colonel said he could prove it was true. A bet was made and the Colonel borrowed my radio and called Nick.