by Tom Clancy
The weapon jerked slightly in his grip, but the double-looped sling kept it firmly in place. The target dropped. He moved the gun right even as it fell. The next target was spinning around in surprise, giving him a dull white circle of reflected moonlight to aim at. Another burst. There had hardly been any noise at all. Chavez waited, moving his weapon back and forth across the two bodies, but there was no movement.
Chavez darted out of the trees. One of the bodies clutched an AK-47. He kicked it loose and pulled a penlight from his breast pocket, shining it on the targets. One had taken all three rounds in the back of the head. The other had only caught two, but both through the forehead. The second one’s face showed surprise. The first one no longer had a face. The sergeant knelt by the bodies and looked around for further movement and activity. Chavez’s only immediate emotion was one of elation. Everything he’d learned and practiced—it all worked! Not exactly easy, but it wasn’t a big deal, really.
Ninja really does own the night.
Ramirez came over a moment later. There was only one thing he could say.
“Nice work, Sergeant. Check out the shack.” He activated his radio. “This is Six. Targets down, move in.”
The squad was over to the shack in a couple of minutes. As was the usual practice with armies, they clustered around the bodies of the dead guards, getting their first sample of what war was really all about. The intelligence specialist went through their pockets while the captain got the squad spread out in a defensive perimeter.
“Nothing much here,” the intel sergeant told his boss.
“Let’s go see the shack.” Chavez had made sure that there was no additional guard whom they might have overlooked. Ramirez found four gasoline drums and a hand-crank pump. A carton of cigarettes was sitting on one of the gasoline drums, evoking a withering comment from the captain. There was some canned food on a few rough-cut shelves, and a two-roll pack of toilet paper. No books, documents, or maps. A well-thumbed deck of cards was the only other thing found.
“How you wanna booby-trap it?” the intelligence sergeant asked. He was also a former Green Beret, and an expert on setting booby traps.
“Three-way.”
“’Kay.” It was easily done. He dug a small depression in the dirt floor with his hands, taking some wood scraps to firm up the sides. A one-pound block of C-4 plastic explosive—the whole world used it—went snugly into the hole. He inserted two electrical detonators and a pressure switch like the one used for a land mine. The control wires were run along the dirt floor to switches at the door and window, and were set as to be invisible to outside inspection. The sergeant buried the wires under an inch of dirt. Satisfied, he rocked the drum around, bringing it down gently on the pressure switch. If someone opened the door or the window, the C-4 would go off directly underneath a fifty-five-gallon drum of aviation gasoline, with predictable results. Better still, if someone were very clever indeed and defeated the electrical detonators on the door and window, he would then follow the wires to the oil drums in order to recover the explosives for his own later use ... and that very clever person would be removed from the other team. Anyone could kill a dumb enemy. Killing the smart ones required artistry.
“All set up, sir. Let’s make sure nobody goes near the shack from now on, sir,” the intelligence sergeant told his captain.
“Roger that.” The word went out at once. Two men dragged the bodies into the center of the field, and after that, they all settled down to wait for the helicopter. Ramirez redeployed his men to keep the area secured, but the main object of concern now was to have every man inventory his gear to make sure that nothing was left behind.
PJ handled the refueling. The good visibility helped, but would also help if there were anyone on the surface looking for them. The drogue played out from the wing tank of the MC-130E Combat Talon on the end of a reinforced rubber hose, and the Pave Low’s refueling probe extended telescopically, stabbing into the center of it. Though it was often observed that having a helicopter refuel in this way seemed a madly unnatural act—the probe and drogue met twelve feet under the edge of the rotor arc, and contact between blade tips and hose meant certain death for the helicopter crew—the Pave Low crews always responded that it was a very natural act indeed, and one in which, of course, they had ample practice. That didn’t alter the fact that Colonel Johns and Captain Willis concentrated to a remarkable degree for the whole procedure, and didn’t utter a single unnecessary syllable until it was over.
“Breakaway, breakaway,” PJ said as he backed off the drogue and withdrew his probe. He pulled up on the collective and eased back on the stick to pull his rotors up and away from the hose. On command, the MC-130E climbed to a comfortable cruising altitude, where it would circle until the helicopter returned for another fill-up. The Pave Low III turned for the beach, heading down to cross at an unpopulated point.
“Uh-oh,” Chavez whispered to himself when he heard the noise. It was the laboring sound of a V-8 engine that needed service, and a new muffler. It was getting louder by the second.
“Six, this is Point, over,” he called urgently.
“Six here. Go,” Captain Ramirez replied.
“We got company coming in. Sounds like a truck, sir.”
“KNIFE, this is Six,” Ramirez reacted immediately. “Pull back to the west side. Take your covering positions. Point, fall back now!”
“On the way.” Chavez left his listening post on the dirt road and raced back past the shack—he gave it a wide berth—and across the landing strip. There he found Ramirez and Guerra pulling the dead guards toward the far treeline. He helped the captain carry his burden into cover, then came back to assist the operations sergeant. They made the shelter of the trees with twenty seconds to spare.
The pickup traveled with lights ablaze. The glow snaked left and right along the trail, glowing through the underbrush before coming out just next to the shack. The truck stopped, and you could almost see the puzzlement even before the engine was switched off and the men dismounted. As soon as the lights were off, Chavez activated his night goggles. As before, there were four, two from the cab and two from the back. The driver was evidently the boss. He looked around in obvious anger. A moment later he shouted something, then pointed to one of the people who’d jumped out of the back of the truck. One of them walked straight to the shack—
—“Oh, shit!” Ramirez keyed his radio switch. “Everybody get down!” he ordered unnecessarily—
—and wrenched open the door.
A gasoline drum rocketed upward like a space launch, leaving a cone of white flame behind as it blasted through the top of the shack. Flames from the other drums spread laterally. The one who’d opened the door was a silhouette of black, as though he’d just opened the front door of hell, but only for an instant before he vanished in the spreading flames. Two of his companions vanished into the same white-yellow mass. The third was on the edge of the initial blast, and started running away, directly toward the soldiers, before the falling gasoline from the flying drum splashed on him and he became a stick figure made of fire who lasted only ten steps. The circle of flames was forty yards wide, its center composed of four men whose high-pitched screams were distinct above the low-frequency roar of the blaze. Next the truck’s fuel tank added its own punctuation to the explosion. There were perhaps two hundred gallons of gasoline afire, sending up a mushroom cloud illuminated by the flames below. In less than a minute the ammunition in various firearms cooked off, sounding like firecrackers within the roaring flames. Only the afternoon’s heavy rain prevented the fire from spreading rapidly into the forest.
Chavez realized that he was lying next to the intelligence specialist.
“Nice work on the booby trap.”
“Wish the fuckers coulda waited.” The screaming was over by now.
“Yeah.”
“Everybody check in,” Ramirez ordered over the radio. They all did. Nobody was hurt.
The fire died down quickly. The a
viation gasoline had been spread thinly over a wide area, and burned rapidly. Within three minutes all that was left was a wide scorched area defined by a perimeter of burning grass and bushes. The truck was a blackened skeleton, its loadbed still alight from the box of flares. They’d continue to burn for quite a while.
“What the hell was that?” Captain Willis wondered in the left seat of the helicopter. They’d just made their first pickup, and on climbing back to cruising altitude, the glow on the horizon looked like a sunrise on their infrared vision systems.
“Plane crash, maybe—that’s right on the bearing to the last pickup,” Colonel Johns realized belatedly.
“Super.”
“Buck, be advised we have possible hostile activity at Pickup Four.”
“Right, Colonel,” Sergeant Zimmer replied curtly.
With that observation, Colonel Johns continued the mission. He’d find out what he needed to know soon enough. One thing at a time.
Thirty minutes after the explosion, the fire was down enough that the intelligence sergeant donned his gloves and moved in to try to recover his triggering devices. He found part of one, but the idea, though good, was hopeless. The bodies were left in place, and no attempt was made to search them. Though IDs might have been recovered—leather wallets resist fire reasonably well—their absence would have been noticed. Again the airfield guards were dragged to the center of the northern part of the runway, which was to have been the pickup point anyway. Ramirez redeployed his men to guard against the possibility that someone might have noticed the fire and reported it to someone else. The next concern was the courier flight that was probably heading in tonight. Their experience told them that it was still over two hours away—but they’d seen only one full cycle, and that was a thin basis for making any sort of prediction.
What if the airplane comes in? Ramirez asked himself. He’d already considered the possibility, but now it was an immediate threat.
The crew of that aircraft could not be allowed to report to anyone that they’d seen a large helicopter. On the other hand, leaving bullet holes in the airplane would be almost as clear a message of what had happened.
For that matter, Ramirez asked himself, why the hell were we ordered to kill those two poor bastards and leave from here instead of the preplanned exfiltration point?
So, what if an airplane comes in?
He didn’t have an answer. Without the flares to mark the strip it wouldn’t land. Moreover, one of the new arrivals had brought a small VHF radio. The druggies were smart enough that they’d have radio codes to assure the flight crew that the airfield was safe. So, what if the aircraft just orbited? Which it probably would do. Might the helicopter shoot it down? What if it tried and missed? What if? What if?
Before insertion, Ramirez had thought that the mission had been exquisitely planned, with every contingency thought out—as it had, but halfway through their planned stay they were being yanked out, and the plan had been trashed. What dickhead had decided to do that?
What the hell is going on? he demanded of himself. His men looked to him for information and knowledge and leadership and assurance. He had to pretend that everything was all right, that he was in control. It was all a lie, of course. His greater overall knowledge of the operation only increased his ignorance of the real situation. He was used to being moved around like a chess piece. That was the job of a junior officer—but this was real. There were six dead men to prove it.
“KNIFE, this is NIGHT HAWK, over,” his high-frequency radio crackled.
“HAWK, this is KNIFE. LZ is the northern edge of RENO. Standing by for extraction, over.”
“Bravo X-Ray, over.”
Colonel Johns was interrogating for possible trouble. Juliet Zulu was the coded response indicating that they were in enemy hands and that a pickup was impossible. Charlie Foxtrot meant that there was active contact, but that they could still be gotten out. Lima Whiskey was the all-clear signal.
“Lima Whiskey, over.”
“Say again, KNIFE, over.”
“Lima Whiskey, over.”
“Roger, copy. We are three minutes out.”
“Hot guns,” PJ ordered his flight crew. Sergeant Zimmer left his instruments to take the right-side gun position. He activated the power to his six-barreled minigun. The newest version of the Gatling gun of yore began spinning, ready to draw shells from the hopper to Zimmer’s left.
“Ready right,” he reported over the intercom.
“Ready left,” Bean said on the other side.
Both men scanned the trees with their night-vision goggles, looking for anything that might be hostile.
“I got a strobe light at ten o’clock,” Willis told PJ.
“I see it. Christ—what happened here?”
As the Sikorsky slowed, the four bodies were clearly visible around what had once been a simple wooden shack ... and there was a truck, too. Team KNIFE was right where it was supposed to be, however. And they had two bodies as well.
“Looks clear, Buck.”
“Roger, PJ.” Zimmer left his gun on and headed aft. Sergeant Bean could jump to the opposite gun station if he had to, but it was Zimmer’s job to get a count on the last pickup. He did his best to avoid stepping on people as he moved, but the soldiers understood when his feet landed on several of them. Soldiers are typically quite forgiving toward those who lift them out of hostile territory.
Chavez kept his strobe on until the helicopter touched down, then ran to join his squad. He found Captain Ramirez standing by the ramp, counting them off as they raced aboard. Ding waited his turn, then the captain’s hand thumped down on his shoulder.
“Ten!” he heard as he leaped over several bodies on the ramp. He heard the number again from the big Air Force sergeant, then: “Eleven! Go-go-go!” as the captain came aboard.
The helicopter lifted off immediately. Chavez fell hard onto the steel deck, where Vega grabbed him. Ramirez came down next to him, then rose and followed Zimmer forward.
“What happened here?” PJ asked Ramirez a minute later. The infantry officer filled him in quickly. Colonel Johns increased power somewhat and kept low, which he would have done anyway. He ordered Zimmer to stay at the ramp for two minutes, watching for a possible aircraft, but it never appeared. Buck came forward, killed power to his gun, and resumed his vigil with the flight instruments. Within ten minutes they were “feet-wet,” over the water, looking for their tanker to top off for the flight back to Panama. In the back, the infantrymen buckled into place and promptly began dropping off to sleep.
But not Chavez and Vega, who found themselves sitting next to six bodies, lying together on the ramp. Even for professional soldiers—one of whom had done some of the killing—it was a grisly sight. But not as bad as the explosions. Neither had ever seen pictures of people burning to death, and even for druggies, they agreed, it was a bad way out.
The helicopter ride became rough as the Pave Low entered the propwash from the tanker, but it was soon over. A few minutes after that, Sergeant Bean—the little one, as Chavez thought of him—came aft, walking carefully over the soldiers. He clipped his safety belt to a fitting on the deck, then spoke into his helmet microphone. Nodding, he went aft to the ramp. Bean motioned to Chavez for a hand. Ding grabbed the man’s belt at the waist and watched him kick the bodies off the edge of the ramp. It seemed kind of cold, but then, the scout reflected, it no longer mattered to the druggies. He didn’t look aft to see them hit the water, but instead settled back down for a nap.
A hundred miles behind them, a twin-engined private plane circled over where the landing strip—known to the flight crew simply as Number Six—was still marked by a vaguely circular array of flames. They could see where the clearing was, but the airstrip itself wasn’t marked with flares, and without that visual reference a landing attempt would have been madness. Frustrated, yet also relieved because they knew what had happened to a number of flights over the previous two weeks, they turned back for their regular a
irfield. On landing they made a telephone call.
Cortez had risked a direct flight from Panama to Medellín, though he did place the charge on an as-yet unused credit card so that the name couldn’t be tracked. He drove his personal car to his home and immediately tried to contact Escobedo, only to discover that he was at his hilltop hacienda. Félix didn’t have the energy to drive that far this, late on a long day, nor would he entrust a substantive conversation to a cellular phone, despite all the assurances about how safe those channels were. Tired, angry, and frustrated for a dozen reasons, he poured himself a stiff drink and went off to bed. All that effort wasted, he swore at the darkness. He’d never be able to use Moira again. Would never call her, never talk to her, never see her. And the fact that his last “performance” with her had ended in failure, caused by his fears at what he’d thought—correctly!—his boss had done, merely put more genuine emotion into his profanities.
Before dawn a half-dozen trucks visited a half-dozen different airfields. Two groups of men died fiery deaths. A third entered the airfield shack and found exactly what they’d expected to find: nothing. The other three found their airstrips entirely normal, the guards in place, content and bored with the monotony of their duties. When two of the trucks failed to return, others were sent out after them, and the necessary information quickly found its way to Medellin. Cortez was awakened by the phone and given new travel orders.
In Panama, all of the infantrymen were still asleep. They’d be allowed to stand down for a full day, and sleep in air-conditioned comfort—under heavy blankets-after hot showers and meals which, if not especially tasty, were at least different from the MREs they’d had for the preceding week. The four officers, however, were awakened early and taken elsewhere for a new briefing. Operation SHOWBOAT, they learned, had taken a very serious turn. They also learned why, and the source of their new orders was as exhilarating as it was troubling.