He looked up at his three Asian contract killers and saw the same amateur equation with guns. Their names were probably Nguyyen, Pham, or Tran, but they went by Ben, Terry, and Vince. Vince, at the helm of the boat, was not a bad skipper, but Parsons could see he did not feel the boat. He drove it like a car, and had no respect for the sea. He would never have let him captain any boat he owned. He looked up at the sky; the moon was starting to show. He looked at his watch and saw it was 2:00 a.m. They were running late.
14
The Sea Ray 60 motored slowly to a stop two hundred yards from the shore of the target. Parsons and his team rowed the zodiac inflatable through calm waves while Parsons gave his companions instructions for the attack on Professors McAllen’s cabin
They reached the beach, pulled the inflatable up on the rocky surface, and quietly crept two hundred yards to the bottom of a cliff that sloped up to the house that was their objective. A small switchback trail led to the house at the top of the ridge about five hundred yards up. They stopped at the bottom of the trail, where Parsons instructed them to go up single file and to stop and cover for each other if necessary.
But the two young Asians didn’t listen. Instead, they grabbed their submachine guns and charged up the pathway. Parsons had a feeling the two kids were high on something. He would never know. There was a loud sound. It was a sound like earth moving, with fragments going skyward. A scream in stereo came from the two men. Parsons knew that sound. In Afghanistan, it was the sound of an IED; an improvised explosive device.
The darkness rained earth, blood, and something sharp and shiny. Parsons bent down and picked up the shiny fragments—clam, mussel, and oyster shells.
“Son of a bitch, he made an IED out of shells,” Parsons muttered to himself.
The next instant, he was hugging the earth. High velocity bullets whizzed by his ears. He could tell from the force of the bullets hitting the earth and from the trees exploding around him that someone up in the cabin above had a high-caliber sniper rifle. His mind went over the candidates for the rifle type and settled on the Barrett M82A1, the most commonly used and available sniper rifle in North America for recreation and the military. He was not pleased he had identified the weapon, because he knew that the presence of this weapon made his potential lifespan on earth very short.
To add to his dilemma, the distinct sound of two M16 machine guns made their familiar sound from the cabin above. Whoever was in the cabin had established a killing zone, and he and Fuentes were in it.
He rolled off the path and inched his way up to the bodies of the two young boys. They had been cut in half by the explosion. He made his way back to Fuentes, who was cowering in the bushes and firing off some rounds of his submachine gun up the path, but it was useless. The submachine gun had an effective range of seventy-five yards. The cabin was five hundred yards away. Fuentes was merely clipping tree leaves with his rounds.
Parsons could see that Fuentes was wild with fear. He was about to give him some instructions for a flanking maneuver—they could go up the cliff, one on the right and one on the left, to take out the attackers— but he never got the chance. Fuentes was on the run, heading for the inflatable raft on the beach. It was a suicide run of the desperate and scared.
Parsons yelled to him to run a zigzag pattern—to at least give the sniper a harder target—but Fuentes didn’t listen. He ran straight. A bullet hit Fuentes in the right leg, and his leg spun up in the air as if he had been kicked by a mule. A .50 caliber round will do that. Parsons yelled out to Fuentes to stay still. There was no reasoning with him. Fuentes crawled inch by inch; he was determined to get to the inflatable raft.
The sniper proceeded to use Fuentes for target practice. The left leg, the right arm, and then the left arm. Fuentes stopped moving. The sniper was good. Finally, the kill shot. Fuentes’s head exploded as the .50 caliber round found its mark.
Parsons had a decision to make. His mission to eliminate Professor McAllen was over, as McAllen or whoever was up there in the cabin with the high-tech weaponry had him outgunned. He could wait here on the beach until they finished him off, or he could head for the boat offshore. The inflatable was out of the question—swimming was his only option.
He wondered how long he could hold his breath underwater. He had practiced free diving in the Caribbean once. That was warm clear water in a relaxed atmosphere. There had been rum on the beach. Here there was a sniper up above, cold dark water and a jittery boat captain offshore. He did not like his chances, but at least he had some.
He threw off his web belt and gun. He was grateful he asked for a wetsuit. He kept on the black sneakers as he would need them to manage the rocky beach. Then he started calculating, something he always did in battle when shells were exploding over terrain. He had two-hundred yards of beach to cover, and a two-hundred-yard swim.
He was a fast runner, but he had to outsmart the sniper, as he could never outrun him. What Parsons knew about the sniper rifle was that the bullet traveled at twenty-eight-hundred feet per second, and his fastest run in the one-hundred-yard dash was just over ten seconds. There would be a shortfall—the shortfall would be him.
He scanned the beach and saw some natural cover points—a large rock seventy-five yards away and driftwood just near the water’s edge. He needed to get to each without gaining some extra weight: the .50 caliber round. The rounds were a half inch in diameter and five inches long. He had seen the effectiveness of the bullets in Afghanistan. His body would explode into a pink mist if hit. He blocked the vision in his mind and started his run.
He ran a zigzag pattern, which is exactly what he had told Fuentes to do. The first shell exploded two yards behind him, and the beach rock showered him with shrapnel. He reached the rock as a second shell ricocheted off of it. His chest was heaving. He looked at the rock and saw it was a good five feet thick. The .50 caliber could pierce two feet of cinder block and inches of steel, and he had been lucky enough to hide behind a mass of rock large enough to stop the bullet.
His next goal was the large pile of driftwood by the beach. He had another seventy-five-yard run ahead of him. He looked at his watch. It was 3:00 a.m. He knew the full moonrise was at 3:43—he had to get off the beach before the additional moonlight gave the sniper an even better target. He started his calculations again, and this time he factored in the number of bullets left in the sniper rifle.
He was now positive the sniper was using a Barrett M82A1 sniper rifle as it had a ten-bullet magazine. He had counted two rounds in the woods, five rounds in Fuentes, and two had just missed him on the beach. The sniper had one more round before he had to change his magazine. That meant some precious seconds for him while the sniper made the change. Parsons could use all the seconds he could get. But he needed to get that tenth round fired. He took his black balaclava, attached it to a piece of driftwood, and extended it over the rock. He did not take time to feel the blast of air the shell made as it blasted through the balaclava—he was on the run.
By the time he hit the pile of driftwood on the shoreline, the sniper had reloaded. A shell exploded just inches from his heels as he vaulted himself over the wood and found shelter in a hollow of sand made by the sea. The sniper was now in rapid-fire mode. Shells punctured the large pieces of wood as if they were quarter-inch plywood. Parsons could only lie as low as his body would go in the depression in the sand and count the rounds. He forced his mind to count. The shell that almost took his foot off was one. There were six more in rapid succession, and then the sniper did a methodical firing of every three feet, looking for his poor, warm body behind the flimsy wood. There was number eight at the head of the wood, number nine just behind that, and number ten landed just inches from Parson’s head. It was time to leave.
He rolled over and over until he hit the water, then made his best imitation of a seal and crawled on his belly in the water until he could submerge. He knew that to swim underwater, he needed to swim slow and relaxed. He took only a small breath in so
as not to hyperventilate and create an imbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in his lungs. He had learned this in the Caribbean. The last thing he wanted to do was pass out, or have to come gasping to the surface for air.
He was hoping for some light wave action to hide his movements. The tide was starting to come in, which was creating some waves, and he thought the sniper would not find him too easily in the black water. He was wrong. Plumes of water erupted around him, and bullets shot past him underwater. He stopped swimming, knowing that snipers always tracked their targets and then set their sights on where they thought they were going to be. He was right. A bullet streamed through the water just inches ahead of him.
He came up, took a breath, and dived deeper. He knew he could not go deep enough to avoid a bullet, but he was hoping he would be harder to hit in the water due to the angle of deflection. He swam for some forty to fifty yards before surfacing again. He could see the boat; it was twenty yards away. Vincent was running back and forth on the back of it, shouting in Vietnamese. He had no idea who was in the water and was obviously hoping it was one of his gang members. He threw a long, trailing rope into the water.
With every last bit of energy he grabbed the rope. Vincent hit the throttle on the boat, and Parsons was body surfing in the wake. He knew that they had to get beyond the sniper’s effective range, which was two thousand yards, and they were at only one thousand yards, in the kill range of any sniper. Plumes of water erupted around him as they sped out to sea, and several shots rang out as they hit the boat.
Parsons held on tightly, trying to keep his head above water, bouncing from wave to wave and trying not to suck in sea water; finally the boat slowed. They were some two miles out to sea. Parsons swam to the back of the boat and hauled his battered body onto the deck. Vincent stared down at him. It was not a welcoming look. Parsons looked at his watch; it was 3:30 a.m. The whole fuckup on the beach had lasted less than one hour.
The supposedly mild-mannered professor had hit them with improvised explosive devices, M16 machine guns, and surgical sniper fire. He had left three men dead on a beach. Parsons had never left a man behind in any operation. He needed to get on the phone with Cordele. Something had gone extremely wrong with their intelligence. He got up off the deck and made his way past the glowering Vincent to the cabin to change out of his wetsuit into his spare dry clothes and to find his cell phone.
In the cabin overlooking the beach, from which Parsons had just escaped with his life, stood Professor Alistair McAllen. He was dressed in battle fatigues and a bulletproof vest with an M16 strapped over his shoulder. He held a pair of night vision binoculars in his hands.
He looked the very image of a field commander. Had anyone done an extensive background check on this mild-mannered professor, he or she would have found that he had done a tour in Vietnam. The Canadian-born McAllen had fallen hard for a lovely American girl in the Marine Corp, and had joined the Marines to be close to her— unfortunately the love did not outlast the war. Who knew love could lead to war, he had thought at the time. From the Marines, he had moved to Special Forces.
Three men stood beside him. All similar in age, sixty-odd years old, they had all done tours with McAllen. There was Sebastian Germaine, a small, wiry senior who had manned the sniper rifle with precision. He had just turned sixty but looked a spry fifty. His long, braided hair made him look like a young Willy Nelson. There was Percy Stronach, the demolitions expert, a feisty, thickset man close to seventy who looked like a retired prize fighter, and Theo Martin, with the refined looks of retired banker in his late sixties, who had guarded the flank. He also held an M16. Sebastian was the youngest of the group.
They gazed down to the beach. The Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle was still smoking. They looked at one another and smiled. It had been some thirty-six years since their last combat in Vietnam. They had all done tours on the Ho Chi Minh trail, raiding Viet Cong supply lines. And they had just now repelled invaders who had come to kill their friend McAllen.
They started to break down their weapons and stow their gear for travel. They would leave the cabin, the bodies, and head for a new location on another island. They knew they had at least a half hour before the RCMP would arrive. The sound of large caliber weapons and explosions would have any smart officer calling for backup. The backup, they knew, would have to come from the cities of Victoria or Vancouver by helicopter. They had time. They would be gone in the next five minutes.
They made their way down to the beach. Sebastian stopped and disarmed the other three IEDs he had made and left small flags so the RCMP demolition squads could finish the job. They checked the bodies of the two young men and then came upon the body of Fuentes on the beach.
“That is some good shot grouping,” McAllen said, looking over at Sebastian.
“You know, I’d thought I’d lost my touch, but you know the old saying: just like riding a bicycle,” Sebastian replied. He was standing beside McAllen. They looked over Fuentes like they were checking a target on the firing range.
“Hey Mac.” Theo came up alongside the two men admiring Sebastian’s kill. “This brought back the old feelings, you know, where your stomach goes from ice water to burning fire. I felt the old clarity of battle kick in.”
“Yeah, no shit, there’s nothing like a fire fight to hone ones instincts,” McAllen said.
“Well, it was a little one sided, but it felt good,” Theo said.
“Yeah, it always feels good when the other guy dies,” McAllen said. He looked out to sea.
“Damn straight,” Theo said. They moved away from the body and headed for the beach, where they found the inflatable left by their attackers. “Hey let’s use this, saves us waiting for Grace to come ashore with her raft.” Theo said as he began loading his weapon into the boat.
A twenty-eight foot Bayliner came into view. They blinked lights at each other, and the men dug their paddles in and made their way towards the boat. At the helm was the love of their lives, Grace Fairchild. Grace was in her mid-fifties, five foot five, and nice and round. Her long, once shiny black hair was streaked with gray, but her dark eyes shined as if there were a coal fire burning somewhere deep inside her.
The men met Grace when she was in her twenties, a young, Native hippie girl panhandling for change outside a bar in downtown Victoria. The men had washed up on the shores of Vancouver Island after finding America to be less than welcoming after their exploits in Vietnam. They had performed well in an unpopular war, but hey were spit on, yelled at, and involved in far too many fights back home. Although they got the best licks in, their police incident sheet grew. McAllen had suggested they chill out in Canada.
Chill they had. The amazing Grace Fairchild, who claimed that her tribe, the Nootka, had been the first to greet Captain Cook in 1778, had been the first one to really make the young ex-military boys feel welcome.
Grace led the boys from the perils of downtown Victoria to a place called Salt Spring Island. In a traditional teepee, she began a cleansing of their minds and spirits that would set them on a better path—the one they stayed on for many years.
She started their spiritual cleansing with sweat lodges, and then moved to chanting under the stars and magic mushrooms, lots of magic mushrooms. The young men hallucinated for days, and then Grace brought them back to reality with love. She brought three of her lovely young lady friends into the group and ensured that the young men got laid three to four times a day. To relieve the toxins and get rid of the anger in the Chakras, she told them.
The therapy worked. After a summer of magic mushrooms, good organic food, and getting good loving, the young men let go of their anger and became in love with the entire universe.
McAllen then went on to complete his degrees in chemistry, Theo set up a string of successful oyster farms, Percy became a renowned boat builder, and Sebastian began mixing music for rock stars. They had been saved from themselves, and Grace, was and always would be, their saving Grace.
The men came a
longside Grace’s boat in the inflatable raft, and one by one, they threw their gear in and jumped on board the Bayliner. They each gave Grace a long embrace and a kiss.
“Well, boys, I don’t know what the hell you’ve been up to, but I do know we need to get out of here fast,” Grace said as she looked around.
“What you have seen is the first strike of the S.F.O.S.B,” said McAllen, looking around at his old companions.
“What’s that?” asked Grace.
“SPECIAL FORCES OLD SONS O’ BITCHES,” McAllen said with a laugh.
Grace looked at her men, whom she once nurtured. She just smiled that beautiful smile of hers and hit the throttle on the Bayliner. Galiano Island started to disappear in the boat’s wake. The four men stood together looking back over the stern. They had done the same in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam—now they were in action again. This time there would be no turning back, no politicians to pull the plug. The game was on.
The line was busy when Parsons first tried reaching Cordele on the phone. He changed out of his wet suit into dry clothes and started looked for his spare knife. It was missing.
His cell phone rang. “What happened?” Cordele asked when Parsons answered.
“How did you know something was up?” Parsons asked. He had a strange feeling about his situation.
“Your Captain Vincent called his boss, said the mission got fucked up and that you left his two friends on the beach. I just got off the phone with his very pissed boss—he wants your blood and one million bucks.”
“Shit, this just gets better, doesn’t it,” Parsons said. He was walking around the cabin looking for anything he might use as a weapon. He could feel the boat slowing down.
“Well, I suggest that when that boat gets into harbor you’re not on it, as I don’t think you’re going to get a good reception. What the hell happened out there?”
Polar Bear Dawn Page 7