Julie sat silently, saying nothing as we drove along. When I killed the engine and got out to listen, she stayed in her seat.
I stopped the Humvee in a brushy draw about a mile from the Osprey, reached for the Model 70, then snagged a canteen and hung it over my shoulder.
“May I come with you?” she asked.
“Sure.”
We stopped when we got to a low rise where we could see the V-22 and the area around it. I looked everything over with binoculars, then settled down at the base of a green bush that resembled greasewood, trying to get what shade there was. The temperature must have been ninety by that time.
“Aren’t we going down to the plane?”
“It’s safer here.”
Julie picked another bush and crawled under.
I was silently complimenting her on her ability to accept direction without question or explanation when she said, “You don’t take many chances, do you?”
“I try not to.”
“So you’re just going to kill these people, then get on with the rest of your life?”
I took a good look at her face. “If you’re going to chicken out,” I said, “do it now, so I don’t have to lie here sweating the program for the whole damned day.”
“I’m not going to chicken out. I just wondered if you were.”
“You said these people were terrorists, had blown up airliners. That still true?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I won’t lose any sleep over them.” I shifted around, got comfortable, kept the rifle just under my hands.
She met my eyes, and apparently decided this point needed a little more exploring. “I’m killing them because they killed my parents. You’re killing them for money.”
I sighed, tossed her the binoculars.
“Every few minutes, glass the area around the plane, then up on the ridge,” I told her. “Take your time, look at everything in your field of view, look for movement. Any kind of movement. And don’t let the sun glint off the binoculars.”
“How are we going to do it?” she asked as she stared through the glasses.
“Blowing the fort was a pipe dream, as you well know.”
She didn’t reply, just scanned with the binoculars.
“The best way to do it is to blow up the planes with the people on them.”
A grin crossed her face, then disappeared.
I rolled over, arranged the rifle just so, and settled down for a nap. I was so tired.
The sun had moved a good bit by the time I awakened. The air was stifling, with no detectable breeze. Julie was stretched out asleep, the binoculars in front of her. I used the barrel of the rifle to hook the strap and lift them, bring them over to me without making noise.
The land was empty, dead. Not a single creature stirred, not even a bird. The magnified images I could see through the binoculars shimmered in the heat.
Finally I put the thing down, sipped at the water in my canteen.
South Africa. Soon. Maybe I’d become a diamond prospector. There was a whole lot of interesting real estate in South Africa, or so I’d heard, and I intended to see it. Get a jeep and some camping gear and head out.
Julie’s crack about killing for money rankled, of course. The fact was that these people were terrorists, predators who preyed on the weak and defenseless. They had blown up an airliner. Take money for killing them? Yep. And glad to get it, too.
Julie had awakened and moved off into the brush out of sight to relieve herself when I spotted a man on top of the cliff, a few hundred yards to the right of the Osprey. I picked him up as I swept the top of the cliff with the binoculars.
I turned the focus wheel, tried to sharpen the dancing image. Too much heat.
It was a man, all right. Standing there with a rifle on a sling over his shoulder, surveying the desert with binoculars. Instinctively I backed up a trifle, ensured the binoculars were in shade so there would be no sun reflections off the glass or frame. And I glanced at the airplane.
It should be out of sight of the man due to the way the cliff outcropped between his position and the plane. I hoped. In any event he wasn’t looking at it.
I gritted my teeth, studied his image, tried by sheer strength of will to make it steadier in the glass. The distance between us was about six hundred yards, I estimated.
I put down the binoculars and slowly brought up the Model 70. I had a variable power scope on it which I habitually kept cranked to maximum magnification. The figure of the man leaped at me through the glass.
I put the crosshairs on his chest, studied him. Even through the shimmering air I could see the cloth he wore on his head and the headband that held it in place. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a shirt. And he was holding binoculars pointed precisely at me.
I heard a rustle behind me.
“Freeze, Julie,” I said, loud enough that she would plainly hear me.
She stopped.
I kept the scope on him, flicked off the safety. I had automatically assumed a shooting position when I raised the rifle. Now I wiggled my left elbow into the hard earth, settled the rifle in tighter against my shoulder.
He just stood there, looking right at us.
I only saw him because he was silhouetted on the skyline. In the shade under this brush we should be invisible to him. Should be.
Now he was scanning the horizon again. Since I had been watching he had not once looked down at the foot of the cliff upon which he was standing.
He was probably a city soldier, I decided. Hadn’t been trained to look close first, before he scanned terrain farther away.
After another long moment he turned away, began walking slowly along the top of the cliff to my right, away from the Osprey. I kept the crosshairs of the scope on him until he was completely out of sight. Only then did I put the safety back on and lower the rifle.
“You can come in now,” I said.
She crawled back under her bush.
“Did you see him?” I asked.
“Yes. Did he see the airplane?”
“I’m certain he didn’t.”
“How did he miss it?”
“It was just a little out of sight, I think. Even if he could have seen it, he never really looked in the right direction.”
“We were lucky,” she said.
I grunted. It was too hot to discuss philosophy. I lay there under my bush wondering just how crazy ol’ Julie Giraud really was.
“If he had seen the plane, Charlie Dean, would you have shot him?”
What a question!
“You’re damned right,” I muttered, more than a little disgusted. “If he had seen the plane, I would have shot him and piled you into the cockpit and made you get us the hell out of here before all the Indians in the world showed up to help with the pleasant chore of lifting our hair. These guys are playing for keeps, lady. You and me had better be on the same sheet of music or we will be well and truly fucked.”
Every muscle in her face tensed. “We’re not leaving,” she snarled, “until those sons of bitches are dead. All of them. Every last one.”
She was over the edge.
A wave of cold fear swept over me. It was bad enough being on the edge of a shooting situation; now my backup was around the bend. If she went down or freaked out, how in the hell was I going to get off this rock pile?
“I’ve been trying to decide,” she continued, “if you really have the balls for this, Charlie Dean, or if you’re going to turn tail on me when crunch time comes and run like a rabbit. You’re old: You look old, you sound old. Maybe you had the balls years ago, maybe you don’t anymore.”
From the leg pocket of her flight suit she pulled a small automatic, a .380 from the looks of it. She held it where I could see it, pointed it more or less in my direction. “Grow yourself another set of balls, Charlie Dean. Nobody is running out.”
I tossed her the binoculars. “Call me if they come back,” I said. I put the rifle beside me and lay down.
Sure, I thought about what a dumb ass I was. Three million bucks!—I was going to have to earn every damned dollar.
Hoo boy.
Okay, I’ll admit it: I knew she was crazy that first day in Van Nuys.
I made a conscious effort to relax. The earth was warm, the air was hot, and I was exhausted. I was asleep in nothing flat.
The sun was about to set when I awoke. My binoculars were on the sand beside me and Julie Giraud was nowhere in sight. I used the scope on the rifle to examine the Osprey and the cliff behind it.
I spotted her in seconds, moving around under the plane. No one else visible.
While we had a little light, I went back for the Humvee. I crawled up on it, taking my time, ensuring that no one was there waiting for me.
When we left it that morning we had piled some dead brush on the hood and top of the vehicle, so I pulled that off before I climbed in.
Taking it slow so I wouldn’t raise dust, I drove the mile or so to the Osprey. I got there just as the last rays of the sun vanished.
I backed up to the trailer and we attached it to the Humvee.
“Want to tell me your plan, Charlie Dean?” she asked. “Or do you have one?”
As I repacked the contents of the trailer I told her how I wanted to do it. Amazingly, she agreed readily.
She was certainly hard to figure. One minute I thought she was a real person, complete with a conscience and the intellectual realization that even the enemy were human beings, then the next second she was a female Rambo, ready to gut them all, one by one.
She helped me make up C-4 bombs, rig the detonators and radio controls. I did the first one, she watched intently, then she did one on her own. I checked it, and she got everything right.
“Don’t take any unnecessary chances tonight,” I said. “I want you alive and well when this is over so you can fly me out of here.”
She merely nodded. It was impossible to guess what she might have been thinking.
I wasn’t about to tell her that I had flown helicopters in Vietnam. I was never a rated pilot, but I was young and curious, so the pilots often let me practice under their supervision. I had watched her with the Osprey and thought that I could probably fly it if absolutely necessary. The key would be to use the checklist and take plenty of time. If I could get it started, I thought I could fly it out. There were parachutes in the thing, so I would not need to land it.
I didn’t say any of this to her, of course.
We had a packet of radio receivers and detonators—I counted them—enough for six bombs. If I set them all on the same frequency I could blow up six planes with one push of the button. If I could get the bombs aboard six planes without being discovered.
What if there were more than six planes? Well, I had some pyrotechnic fuses, which seemed impractical to use on an airplane, and some chemical fuses. In the cargo bay of the Osprey I examined the chemical fuses by flashlight. Eight hours seemed to be the maximum setting.
The problem was that I didn’t know when the bad guys planned to leave.
As I was meditating on fuses and bombs, I went outside and walked around the Osprey. There was a turreted three-barreled fifty-caliber machine gun in the nose of the thing. Air Force Ospreys didn’t carry stingers like this, but this one belonged to the Marine Corps, or did until twenty-four hours ago.
I opened the service bay. Gleaming brass in the feed trays reflected the dim evening light.
Julie was standing right behind me. “I stole this one because it had the gun,” she remarked. “Less range than the Air Force birds, but the gun sold me.”
“Maximum firepower is always a good choice.”
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
We discussed contingencies as we wired up the transfer pump in the bladder fuel tank we had chained down in the cargo bay. We used the aircraft’s battery to power the pump, so all we had to do was watch as three thousand pounds of jet fuel was transferred into the aircraft’s tanks.
My plan had bombs, bullets, and a small river of blood—we hoped—just the kind of tale that appealed to Julie Giraud. She even allowed herself a tight smile.
Me? I had a cold knot in the pit of my stomach and I was sweating.
SIX
We Finished loading the Humvee and the trailer attached to it before sunset and ate MREs in the twilight. As soon as it was dark, we donned our night-vision goggles and drove toward the oasis. I stopped often to get up on the vehicle’s hood, the best vantage point around, and take a squint in all directions.
I parked the vehicle at the foot of the trail. “If I’m not back in an hour and a half, they’ve caught me,” I told Julie Giraud. I smeared my face with grease to cut the white shine, checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, then did my neck and the back of my hands.
“If they catch you,” she said, “I won’t pay you the rest of the money.”
“Women are too maudlin to be good soldiers,” I told her. “You’ve got to stop this cloying sentimentality. Save the tears for the twenty-five-year reunion.”
When I was as invisible as I was going to get, I hoisted a rucksack that I had packed that evening, put the M-16 over my shoulder, and started up the trail.
Every now and then I switched the goggles from ambient light to infrared and looked for telltale heat sources. I spotted some small mammal, too small to be human. I continued up the ridge, wondering how any critters managed to make a living in this godforsaken desert.
The temperature had dropped significantly from the high during the afternoon. I estimated the air was still at eighty degrees, but it would soon go below seventy. Even the earth was cooling, although not as quickly as the air.
I topped the ridge slowly, on the alert for security patrols. Before we committed ourselves to a course of action, we had to know how many security people were prowling around.
No one in sight now.
I got off to one side of the trail, just in case, and walked toward the old fortress, the Camel. Tonight light shone from several of the structure’s windows, light visible for many miles in that clean desert air.
I was still at least five hundred yards from the walls when I first heard the hum of the generator, barely audible at that distance. The noise gradually increased as I approached the structure. When I was about fifty yards from the wall, I circled the fort to a vantage point where I could see the main gate, the gate where I entered on my last visit. It was standing open. A guard with an assault rifle sat on a stool near the gate; he was quite clear in the goggles. He was sitting under an overhang of the wall at a place where he could watch the road that led off the ridge, the road to the oasis and the airfield. He was not wearing any night-vision aid, just sitting in the darkness under the wall.
The drone of the gasoline generator meant that he could hear nothing. Of course, it handicapped me as well.
I continued around the structure, crossing the road at a spot out of sight of the man at the gate. Taking my time, slipping through the sparse brush as carefully as possible, I inspected every foot of the wall. The main gate was the only entrance I noticed on my first visit, yet I wanted to be sure.
A man strolled on top of the wall on the side opposite the main gate; the instant I saw him I dropped motionless to the ground. Seconds passed as he continued to walk, then finally he reversed his course. When he disappeared from view I scurried over to a rock outcrop and crouched under it, with my body out of sight from the wall.
If he had an infrared scope or any kind of ambient light collector, he could have seen me lying on the open ground.
I crouched there waiting for something to happen. If they came streaming out of the main gate, they could trap me on the point of this ridge, hunt me down at their leisure.
As I waited I discovered that the M-16 was already in my hands. I had removed it from my shoulder automatically, without thinking.
Several minutes passed as I waited, listening to the hypnotic drone of the generator, waiting for somethin
g to happen. Anything.
Finally a head became visible on top of the wall. The sentry again, still strolling aimlessly. He leaned against the wall for a while, then disappeared.
Now I hurried along, completed my circumnavigation of the fort.
I saw only the two men, one on the gate and the man who had been walking the walls. Although I had seen the man on the wall twice, I was convinced it was the same person. And I was certain there was only one entrance to the fort, the main gate.
I had to go through that gate so I was going to have to take out the guard. I was going to have to do it soon, then hope I could get in and out before his absence from his post was noticed or someone came to relieve him. Taking chances like that wasn’t the best way to live to spend that three million dollars, that’s for sure, but we didn’t have the time or resources to minimize the risk. I was going to have to have some luck here or we had no chance to pull off this thing.
This whole goddamn expedition was half-baked, I reflected, and certainly no credit to me. Man, why didn’t I think of poisoning their water supply when we were brainstorming in Germany?
In my favor was the fact that these people didn’t seem very worried about their safety or anything else. A generator snoring away, only two guards? An open gate?
I worked my way to the wall, then turned and crept toward the guard. The generator hid the sounds I made as I crept along. He was facing the road.
I got about ten feet from him and froze. He was facing away from me at a slight angle, but if I tried to get closer, he was going to pick me up in his peripheral vision. I sensed it, so I froze.
He changed his position on the stool, played with the rifle on his knees, looked at the myriad of stars that hung just over our heads. Finally he stood and stretched. For an instant he turned away from me. I covered the distance in two bounds, wrapped my arm around his mouth, and jammed my knife into his back up to the hilt.
The knife went between his ribs right into his heart. Two convulsive tremors, then he was dead.
I carried him and his rifle off into the darkness. He weighed maybe one-eighty, as near as I could tell.
One of the outcroppings that formed the edge of the top of the ridge would keep him hidden from anyone but a determined searcher. After I stashed the body, I hurried back to the gate. I took off my night-vision goggles, waited for my eyes to adjust. I took off my rifle, leaned it against the wall out of sight.
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