by Peter Nealen
Ordinarily, Kirk wouldn’t have a problem with them. But he was watching them carefully, with a hand close to a weapon, in this case the suppressed Px4 on his lap.
They pulled around the villa, parking just outside the massive garage in the back, shielded by the low wall that circled the grounds. The vehicles shut off and the rest started getting out.
He didn’t say anything, keeping his teeth together behind his massive beard as he got out, but Kirk was starting to seriously doubt the wisdom of signing on with this outfit. Burgess had been enthusiastic enough, and he’d known Tom for a long time. He’d never expected Burgess to get involved without knowing things were solid. But this was downright shady.
Kirk wasn’t a neophyte. He’d been in Special Forces for a long time, and he knew well that irregular warfare regularly involved dealing with less than savory elements in a society. He’d even had to cut deals with local militias that he was pretty sure were dealing drugs.
But somehow, that all seemed different from this. He didn’t know all the details on Dalca, but that she was somehow more than just an international conglomerate’s CEO was pretty obvious; most CEOs didn’t kneecap people in houses after they’d just busted in with armed men.
As the rest of the Blackhearts got out, he joined them, keeping his pistol with him but leaving the rest of the gear in the vehicle. He kept near the back, watching and listening.
He knew he was committed. As Brannigan had pointed out, they had no other fallback. And that was the part that concerned him. He’d seen contracts go south that way before. Hell, he’d seen a convoy ordered into a known ambush zone for no good reason, aside from possibly the fact that the contracting company was going under financially.
If the contractors get killed, the company doesn’t have to pay.
So, he’d bide his time, wait, watch, and stay alive. He might be wrong; this might not be as ad hoc and shady an operation as it looked. After all, he’d gotten paid for the rescue of Sam Childress, when he’d signed on to go to Africa. But he still wasn’t sure.
Dalca got out of the van and walked around to meet them, as cool as if she’d just been out for drinks instead of maiming a man who was presumably getting worked over in the back of the van. “You’re down a vehicle, John,” she said.
“I noticed,” he replied, folding his arms. “It’s going to be a tight fit, but we’ll have to make do.”
She raised an eyebrow with a little, sardonic smile. “You don’t have to, you know.” She pointed toward a Range Rover over against the wall. “That one is fueled up and ready. Consider it another contribution to the cause. I’d even be willing to send a couple of my security people with you.”
“Not an option,” Brannigan replied. He smiled coldly, the expression never meeting his eyes. “Add two more untested shooters to a small team just before an op? I don’t think so.” The smile vanished. “This is my op. You’ve done more than your part. Better if what’s about to happen up north doesn’t get connected to your company.”
She laughed. “You really don’t think that I’d offer a vehicle for this sort of thing without making sure it was sterile, do you, John? Give me a little credit. I might not be an expert at your sort of work, but I know my way around deniability.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. I’m still not entirely sure what your angle is, here. I know, you’ve said that you just want to do a little good. I don’t entirely buy it, but I’ll let it go for now. But we’ll make do with the vehicles we’ve got, thanks.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself, John,” she said. “But I think you’re underestimating what I can bring to the table.”
“I’ll take that risk,” he replied. He turned to the rest of the Blackhearts. “Get some rest; we’ll head north just before sunset. We’ve got a long drive ahead, and it’s been a rough night.”
They started pulling rucks out of the vehicles, then. Kirk glanced at Brannigan, then at Dalca.
Maybe he’d misread the situation. Maybe this really was more like the kind of Special Forces work he’d been hoping to do when he’d joined the Army all those years ago. Risky, but rewarding.
Time would tell.
Chapter 13
The eastern sky was starting to get light when Brannigan got on the radio and called, “Surfer, Kodiak.”
“Send it, Kodiak,” Hancock replied from the Hilux behind them.
“See that draw at one o’clock?” Brannigan asked. “About a klick up?”
“The big one, with all the bushes in front of it?” Hancock asked after a moment.
“That’s it,” Brannigan said. “We’ll hold up short, let Woodsrunner and Pancho Villa take a look, and if it’s clear, we’ll set up in there.”
“Roger,” Hancock replied. A few minutes later, they were pulling to a stop at the base of the finger, both vehicles blacked out, and the drivers shut off the engines to make sure that no lights showed. They’d already unscrewed the bulbs in the ceiling lights, so when Flanagan and Gomez got out, the vehicles stayed dark.
They left their rucks behind; this was a leader’s recon, and they needed to stay quiet and agile. Chest rigs and ACE 52 rifles were it. Keeping a couple of yards between them, the two men slipped away across the desert floor.
Flanagan was not unaccustomed to altitude; he lived and hunted and fished in the mountains, after all. His cabin wasn’t nearly as high as Brannigan’s, but he was in good mountain shape. But the Altiplano was already kicking his ass.
They’d gotten barely a couple hundred yards before he was heaving for breath, his heart hammering in his chest. They were at over twelve thousand feet; less than a thousand feet below the altitude where jumpers required supplemental oxygen. It was brutal.
He slowed almost immediately, realizing that trying to keep to his normal patrolling pace was going to end in both of them passing out. And after another few yards, he looked back and paused, taking a knee and waiting for Gomez to catch up.
“Holy hell,” he whispered. Gomez just sank to a knee, his rifle laid across his thigh, and gasped for breath. From the tempo of his breathing, his silence wasn’t just Gomez’ normal taciturn nature. He was hurting already, and his home ranch wasn’t much lower than Flanagan’s cabin, even though it was on the Mexican border.
“This is gonna suck,” Gomez agreed after a moment. “Especially once we make contact.”
Flanagan nodded in the darkness. Any adversaries they met were probably going to be better acclimated, which meant their responses and endurance were going to be better.
It wasn’t an insurmountable problem. While he hadn’t been there, Flanagan recalled reading about the AFO teams that had gone into the Hindu Kush in the early days in Afghanistan, inserting at eight thousand feet and going up. Most of those men hadn’t been fully acclimated to the extreme altitudes there, either, but they’d still managed to kill Taliban in job lots.
They would just have to move carefully and plan ahead as best they could, picking their positions and their routes with a great deal of care. The distance between covered positions would have to be short, and they’d have to maneuver to their advantage ahead of time, and keep their eyes open and their heads on swivels.
“All right,” he whispered, as he felt his heart rate slow back down to something approaching normal. “Let’s move.” They only had so much darkness remaining to work with, and they were on the clock.
He got up and led out, keeping his pace slow and even, concentrating on breathing deeply and evenly as he slipped between the scrub toward the draw ahead.
They moved around the end of the finger and the draw opened up ahead of them, shrouded in shadow as the moon started to go down. Flanagan paused again and took a knee, scanning the blackness with his NVGs, listening carefully for any noise that might indicate the presence of an enemy or a civilian up there that might give their presence away.
Everything was dark and still. The only sounds that reached his ears were the faint whisper of the wind in the thin air and the t
humping of his own pulse. Even Gomez was silent, having taken a knee a little behind him and to his right, then going stock-still. Gomez was good at that, maybe even better than Flanagan himself.
They were both hunters, as much of men as of game. They never talked much, but Flanagan had found that Mario Gomez was something of a kindred spirit. They worked well together, without saying much to coordinate their movements. They each possessed a similar skillset and as such had similar thought processes. Each man could predict what the other was going to do, largely because he would do the same under the same circumstances.
After a few moments, he rose and continued forward. If there was anyone up there, they were either asleep, or lying in wait. He looked around slowly, judging his own position and plotting the rest of their route.
The terrain was rough, rocky and jumbled. The slope to his left was steep and barren. Below, the draw was a web of crisscrossing dry creek beds, studded with low, scrubby vegetation. The slope would give them better visibility, but if someone was back there with night vision or thermals, they’d be as exposed as bugs on a plate. He angled down into one of the creek beds. Gomez followed, nearly noiselessly.
The brush rose to either side of them as they stepped carefully up the sandy, rocky wash. It obscured their surroundings a little, but would also serve to conceal them from observation.
Even as slowly as they were moving, Flanagan’s heart was jackhammering, and he felt short of breath, fighting to keep from gasping and hyperventilating. Each step was laborious, even on the relatively gentle slope of the draw. The fact that he had to carefully place his foot to make the minimum amount of noise each time only added to the work he had to do.
It was cold; despite the time of year, and the fact that down in Salta it was almost always in the seventies to nineties, they were pushing thirteen thousand feet. He was still sweating from the sheer exertion, and was glad that he’d brought gloves, so his rifle wasn’t slippery in his hands.
He stopped suddenly, dropping to a knee and holding up a fist. Gomez stopped making noise behind him, going perfectly still.
Flanagan scanned the darkness ahead carefully, picking out the faint shapes in the shades of green that his PVS-14s cast everything in. He’d seen something, something that didn’t quite fit with the rugged terrain…
There it was. A low wall, just atop the short slope on the north bank of the wash. It was too low for a building, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. The dark and the limited depth perception through the night vision monocular made it hard to tell.
The presence of a man-made structure made the draw a potentially bad place to set up. They didn’t know what kind of relationship the Humanity Front might have with the local ranchers up there, but the Blackhearts couldn’t really take the risk that the bad guys might get a warning from a rancher or sheepherder. Given the Front’s reach and financial resources, the odds that they’d paid off the locals to keep them alerted to anyone out of the ordinary getting close to one of their hideaways seemed good.
Of course, until Bevan fled there, the Front probably hadn’t had much in the way of a need for security on the place. It was just an expensive vacation spot for their rich donors and presumably even richer controllers. Their primary concern was probably keeping would-be thieves away, and that was likely accomplished by fences and armed guards on the grounds themselves.
But Flanagan was an old hand at recon, and he didn’t assume such things. That wasn’t his job. Once a soldier started to assume that all was well, that was when he walked into an ambush. Or an IED.
He studied the barely-visible line of the wall ahead. Under other circumstances, he might abandon the recon altogether, scrubbing the draw as unsuitable, and go looking for another spot. There was, after all, another draw less than a klick to the southwest.
But on the other hand…
He rose slowly and carefully, turning to his right and starting up the bank. Sand and gravel slid out from under his boots, and it was a struggle to clamber up out of the wash without making as much noise as a herd of wild horses. Gomez seemed to be much quieter on his way out, but that might have simply been a matter of perception. Noises a man makes himself in the dark seem far louder than any he hears from elsewhere.
Once up among the scrub, he paused again, watching and listening, straining his ears for the sound of men or animals moving around, possibly alerted by the noise the two of them had made scrambling out of the wash. But once again, he heard only silence.
This was why recon was not something everyone was cut out for. It required patience and caution, every bit as much as the physical stamina to keep going where other men would quit.
Keeping to a crouch among the scrub bushes, rolling his boots with each step to minimize the crunch of the sand and rocks beneath his weight, he moved toward the wall.
There was an opening just to his right, and he skirted around to come at it from one side. He paused right at the threshold, concealed from anyone inside, as Gomez moved up next to him.
The wall was short, only standing about four feet high. By then, Flanagan was convinced that it was a corral of some sort, rather than a building. It was built of dried mud, bits of it crumbling away as he brushed against it.
He rose carefully over the top, his rifle leveled, his eyes straining to see in the dim green illumination of his NVGs.
Nothing moved inside, but it was too dark to see; his NVGs required a certain amount of ambient light to amplify, and with the moon below the ridgeline above, all he could see was green-tinged blackness beneath the edge of the wall. Resting his rifle on the top of the wall, he reached up and turned on his PVS-14s’ IR illuminator, sweeping the corral with a cone of greenish white in his NVGs’ view.
It might have been a corral once upon a time. But now it was empty, part of the wall farther up the slope crumbled completely away, and a corner washed out. There were no tracks that he could see, no sign that it had been used or visited in a long time.
He let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding, and fished his radio out of his chest rig, turning it up slightly before lifting it to his lips. “Kodiak, Woodsrunner. Looks like we’ve got a good location. Bring it in.”
***
They got the vehicles inside the corral, which provided a little bit of extra concealment, though anyone looking down from the air or the ridgelines above wasn’t going to have a problem seeing a silver Hilux and a green Duster. To try to remedy that, Bianco, Jenkins, and Kirk started cutting some of the brush and piling it on and around the vehicles. They didn’t have camo netting, something that Santelli was muttering about as he and Hancock got security set up.
Flanagan and Gomez were kneeling at the wall, their rifles pointed up toward the ridgelines, taking a rest. The short reconnaissance had taken more out of both of them than they’d expected. Javakhishvili hauled their rucks over to them, along with a couple of bottles of water.
“Everybody needs to be pushing a lot of water,” he said quietly. “This altitude not only sucks to breathe in, but it’ll wring you out fast.”
Flanagan accepted the bottle, cracked it open while holding it against his rifle’s pistol grip, and chugged the whole thing, gasping as he finished. “Damn, the air doesn’t last as long up here.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Brannigan said as he came up and crouched down next to them. “Something we didn’t fully take into account in planning. But I think that we’ll be all right. We can rest for a few hours; I don’t think that Bevan knows we’re here, yet. Unless we completely missed a connection between those gangsters and the Humanity Front, they shouldn’t have any clue that we’re here for Bevan. Or that we even came this way.” He peered up at the sky, which might have been starting to get a little light in the east. “We’ll move slowly and carefully; there’s not enough cover up here to do anything else.” He looked over as Santelli joined them. “Security set, Carlo?”
“Yeah,” Santelli replied, sinking down to sit against the wall, hi
s rifle across his knees. He looked and sounded smoked. “Fifty percent?”
“I think we can go down to thirty percent for now,” Brannigan replied. “We’re still on the clock, and if anyone else is after Bevan, or if he’s got extra security on the way, we don’t want to wait too long. Go to thirty percent, two-hour shifts. Once everybody’s gotten some rest, we’ll start working our way closer to the target.” He looked at Flanagan. “Think you and Gomez are going to be good for another advance recon?” he asked.
Flanagan nodded. “We’ll be ready, boss,” he said.
“Good,” Brannigan said, moving up next to him and pointing his rifle up toward the ridge. “You get to go down first, then. I need both of you rested.”
***
Winter clambered into the hide alongside Beta, settling himself under the camouflage netting. The hide was a narrow crack in the rocks, and there was no way for two men of their size to be comfortable, but he wedged himself in as best he could and peered through his binoculars down the slope and across the valley.
Beta already had a spotting scope set up, with a honeycomb anti-reflection shield over the objective lens. Winter didn’t have such devices for his binoculars, so he’d covered most of the lenses with tape, leaving only slits to see out of. “Cat eyes” they were called, and it was a technique that many of his compatriots in the paramilitary side of the Organization would look down on; after all, they had more resources available than most national armies. Winter didn’t share their disdain; what worked, worked, and his focus was on accomplishing the mission, rather than how he looked doing it.
It was another way he stood out from the likes of Flint.
He found the target area after a moment’s scanning, and propped his elbows on his knees, steadying his view so that he could take stock.