Clear and Present Danger

  The going wasn’t so bad. The cover was not as dense as it had been in the lowlands, and there were fewer bugs. Maybe, he thought, the air was too thin for them, too. There were birds calling to one another, the usual forest chatter to mask the sounds of his unit’s approach—but there was damned little of that. Chavez had heard one guy slip and fall a hundred meters back, but only a Ninja would have noticed. He was able to cover half the distance in under an hour, stopping at a preplanned rally point for the rest of the squad to catch up.

  “So far, so good, jefe, ”he told Ramirez. “I ain’t seen nothing, not even a llama,” he added to show that he was at ease. “Little over three thousand more meters to go.”

  “Okay. Stop at the next checkpoint. Remember there might be folks out taking a stroll.”

  “Roger that, Cap’n.” Chavez took off at once. The rest started moving two minutes later.

  Ding moved more slowly now. The probability of contact increased with every step he took toward HOTEL. The druggies couldn’t be all that dumb, he warned himself. They had to have a little brains, and the people they used would be locals, people who’d grown up in this valley and knew its ways. And lots of them would have weapons. He was surprised how different it felt from the last time, but then he’d watched and evaluated his targets over a period of days. He didn’t even have a proper count on them, didn’t know how they were armed, didn’t know how good they were.

  Christ, this is real combat. We don’t know shit.

  But that’s what Ninja are for! he told himself, taking small comfort in his bravado.

  Time started doing strange things. Each single step seemed to take forever, but when he got to the final rally point, it hadn’t been all that long at all, had it? He could see the glow of the objective now, a vague green semicircle on the goggle display, but still there was no movement to be seen or heard in the woods. When he got to the last checkpoint, Chavez picked a tree and stood beside it, keeping his head up, swiveling left and right to gather as much information as possible. He thought he could hear things now. It came and went, but occasionally there was an odd, not-natural sound from the direction of the objective. It worried him that he didn’t really see anything as yet. Just that glow, but nothing else.

  “Anything?” Captain Ramirez asked in a whisper.

  “Listen.”

  “Yeah,” the captain said after a moment.

  The squad members dropped off their rucksacks and divided according to plan. Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles would advance directly toward HOTEL while the rest circled around to the left. Ingeles, the communications sergeant, had an M-203 grenade launcher slung under his rifle, Vega had the machine gun, and Chavez still had his silenced MP-5. Their job was overwatch. They would get in as close as possible to provide fire support for the actual assault. If anyone was in the way, it was Chavez’s job to drop him quietly. Ding led his group off first, while Captain Ramirez moved off a minute later. In the case of both groups, the interval between the men was tightened up to five meters. Another real danger now was confusion. If any of the soldiers lost contact with his comrades, or if an enemy sentry somehow got mixed up with their group, the results could be lethal to the mission and the men.

  The last five hundred meters took over half an hour. Ding’s overwatch position was clear on the map, but not so clear in the woods at night. Things always looked different at night, and even with the low-light goggles, things were just... different. In a distant sort of way, Chavez knew that he was having an attack of the jitters. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid, just that he felt much less certain now. He told himself every two or three minutes that he knew exactly what he was doing, and each time it worked—but only for a few minutes before the uncertainty hit him again. Logic told him that he was having what the manuals called a normal anxiety reaction. Chavez didn’t like it, but found that he could live with it. Just like the manuals said.

  He saw movement and froze. His left hand swung around his back, palm perpendicular to warn the two behind him to stop also. Again he kept his head up, trusting to his training. The human eye sees only movement at night, the manuals and his experience told him. Unless the opposition had goggles....

  And this one didn’t. The man-shape was almost a hundred meters away, moving slowly and casually through the trees between Chavez and the place where Chavez wanted to be. So simple a thing as that gave the man an early death sentence. Ding waved for Ingeles and Vega to stay put while he moved right, opposite his target’s current path to get behind him. Perversely, he moved quickly now. He had to be in place in another fifteen minutes. Using his goggles to select clear places, he set his feet as lightly as he could, moving almost at a normal walking speed. Pride surged past the anxiety now that he could see what he had to do. He made no sound at all, moving alone, crouched down, swiveling his head from his path to his target and back again. Within a minute he was in a good place. There was a worn path there. This was a path for the guard. The idiot stuck to a path, Chavez recognized. You didn’t do things like that and expect to live.

  He was coming back now, moving with slow, almost childish steps, his legs snapping out from the knees—but he moved quietly enough by walking on the worn path, Ding noticed belatedly. Maybe he wasn’t a total fool. His head was looking uphill. But his rifle was slung over his shoulder. Chavez let him approach, taking off his goggles when the man was looking away. The sudden loss of the display made him lose his target for a few seconds, and the edges of panic appeared in his consciousness, but Ding commanded them to be still. The man would reappear presently as he walked back to the south.

  He did, first as a spectral outline, then as a black mass walking down the worn corridor in the jungle. Ding crouched at the base of a tree, his weapon aimed at the man’s head, and let him come closer. Better to wait and get a sure kill. His selector switch was on the single-shot position. The man was ten meters away. Chavez wasn’t even breathing now. He aimed for the center of the man’s head and squeezed off a single round.

  The metallic sound of the H&K’s action cycling back and forth seemed incredibly loud, but the target dropped at once, just a muted clack from his own rifle as it hit the ground alongside the body. Chavez leaped forward, his submachine gun fixed on the target, but the man—it had been a man, after all—didn’t move. With his goggles back on, he could see the single hole right in the center of the nose, and the bullet had angled upward, ripping through the bottom of the brain for an instant, noiseless kill.

  Ninja! his mind exulted.

  He stood beside the body and looked uphill, holding his weapon high. All clear. A moment later the shapes of Vega and Ingeles appeared on the green image display, heading downhill. He turned, found a spot from which to observe the objective, and waited for them.

  There it was, seventy meters away. The glow from the gasoline lanterns blazed on his goggles, and he realized that he could take them off once and for all. There were more voices now. He could even catch the odd word. It was the bored, day-to-day talk of people doing a job. There was a splashing sound, almost like... what? Ding didn’t know, and it didn’t matter for the present. Their fire-support position was in view. There was just one little problem.

  It was oriented the wrong way. The trees that should have provided cover to their right flank instead prevented them from covering the objective. They’d planned the overwatch position in the wrong place, he decided. Chavez grimaced and made other plans, knowing that the captain would do the same. They found a spot almost as good fifteen meters away and oriented in the proper direction. He checked his watch. Nearly time. It was time to make his final, vital inspection of the objective.

  He counted twelve men. The center of the site was ... what looked like a portable bathtub. Two men were walking in it, crushing or stirring up or doing something to the curious-looking soup of coca leaves and... what was it they told us? he asked himself. Water and sulfuric acid? Something like that. Christ, he thought. Walking in fucking acid! The men doing that distastef
ul task took turns. He watched one change, and those who got out poured fresh water over their feet and calves. It must have hurt or burned or something, Ding realized. But their banter was good-natured enough, thirty meters away. One was talking about his girlfriend in rather crude terms, boasting of what she did for him and what he did to her.

  There were six men with rifles, all AKs. Christ, the whole world carries those goddamned things. They stood at the perimeter of the site, watching inward, however, rather than outward. One was smoking. There was a backpack by the lantern. One of the walkers said something to one of the gunmen and pulled a beer bottle out of it for himself, and another for the one who’d given him permission.

  Idiots! Ding told himself. The radio earpiece made three rasping dashes of static. Ramirez was in place and asking if Ding was ready. He keyed his radio two times in reply, then looked left and right. Vega had his SAW up on the bipod, and the canvas ammo pouch unzipped. Two hundred rounds were all ready, and a second pouch lay next to the first.

  Chavez again nestled himself as close to a thick tree as he could and selected the farthest target. He figured the range to him at about eighty meters, a touch long for his weapon, too long for a head shot, he decided. He thumbed the selector to the burst setting, tucked the weapon in tight, and took careful aim through the diopter sight.

  Three rounds were ejected from the side of his weapon. The man’s face was surprised when two of them struck his chest. His breath came out in a rasping scream that caused heads to turn in his direction. Chavez shifted aim to another rifleman, whose gun was already coming off his shoulder. This one also took two or three hits, but that didn’t stop him from trying to get his weapon around.

  As soon as it appeared that fire might be returned, Vega opened up, transfixing that man with tracers from his machine gun, then shifting fire to two more armed men. One of them got a couple of rounds off, but they went high. The other, unarmed men reacted more slowly than the guards. Two started to run but were cut down by Vega’s stream of fire. The others fell to the ground and crawled. Two more armed men appeared—or their weapons did. The flaming signatures of automatic weapons appeared in the trees on the far side of the site, aimed up at the fire-support team. Exactly as planned.

  The assault element, led by Captain Ramirez, opened up from their right flank. The distinctive chatter of M-16 fire tore through the trees as Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles continued to pour fire into the objective and away from the incoming assault element. One of the people firing from the trees must have been hit. The muzzle flash from his weapon changed direction, blazing straight up. But two others turned and fired into the assault element before they went down. The soldiers were shooting at anything that moved now. One of the men who’d been walking in the tub tried to pick up a discarded rifle and didn’t make it. One stood and might have been trying to surrender, but his hands never got high enough before the squad’s other SAW lanced a line of tracers through his chest.

  Chavez and his team ceased fire to allow the assault element to enter the objective safely. Two of them finished off people who were still moving despite their wounds. Then everything stopped for a moment. The lantern still hissed and illuminated the area, but there was no other sound but the echoes of the shooting and the calls of outraged birds.

  Four soldiers checked out the dead. The rest of the assault element would now have formed a perimeter around the objective. Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles safed their weapons, collected their things, and moved in.

  What Chavez saw was thoroughly horrible. Two of the enemy were still alive, but wouldn’t be for long. One had fallen victim to Vega’s machine gun, and his abdomen was torn open. Both of the other’s legs had been nearly shot off and were bleeding rapidly onto the beaten dirt. The squad medic looked on without pity. Both died within a minute. The squad’s orders were a little vague on the issue of prisoners. No one could lawfully order American soldiers not to take prisoners, and the circumlocutions had been a problem for Captain Ramirez, but the message had gotten through. It was too fucking bad. But these people were involved in killing American kids with drugs, and that wasn’t exactly under the Rules of Land Warfare either, was it? It was too fucking bad. Besides, there were other things to worry about.

  Chavez had barely gotten into the site when he heard something. Everyone did. Someone was running away, straight downhill. Ramirez pointed to Ding, who immediately ran after him.

  He reached for his goggles and tried to hold them in his hand as he ran, then realized that running was probably a stupid thing to do. He stopped, held the goggles to his eyes, and spotted both a path and the running man. There were times for caution, and times for boldness. Instinct told him that this was one of the latter. Chavez raced down the path, trusting to his skills to keep his footing and rapidly catching up with the sound that was trying to get away. Inside three minutes he could hear the man’s thrashing and falling through the cover. Ding stopped and used his goggles again. Only a hundred meters ahead. He started running again, the blood hot in his veins. Fifty meters now. The man fell again. Ding slowed his approach. More attention to noise now, he told himself. This guy wasn’t going to get away. He left the path, moving at a tangent to his left, his movements looking like an elaborate dance step as he picked his way as quickly as he could. Every fifty yards he stopped and used his night scope. Whoever the man was, he’d tired and was moving more slowly. Chavez got ahead of him, curving back to his right and waiting on the path.

  Ding had nearly miscalculated. He’d just gotten his weapon up when the shape appeared, and the sergeant fired on instinct from a range of ten feet into his chest. The man fell against Chavez with a despairing groan. Ding threw the body off and fired another burst into his chest. There was no other sound.

  “Jesus,” the sergeant said. He knelt to catch his breath. Whom had he killed? He put the scope back on his head and looked down.

  The man was barefoot. He wore the simple cotton shirt and pants of... Chavez had just killed a peasant, one of those poor dumb bastards who danced in the coca soup. Wasn’t that something to be proud of?

  The exhilaration that often follows a successful combat operation left him like the air released from a toy balloon. Some poor bastard—didn’t even have shoes on. The druggies hired ‘em to hump their shit up the hills, paid ’em half of nothing to do the dirty, nasty work of pre-refining the leaves.

  His belt was unbuckled. He’d been off in the bushes taking a dump when the shooting started, and only wanted to get away, but his half-mast pants had made it a futile effort. He was about Ding’s age, smaller and more lightly built, but puffy around the face from the starchy diet of the local peasant farmers. An ordinary face, it still bore the signs of the fear and panic and pain with which his death had come. He hadn’t been armed. He’d been part of the casual labor. He’d died because he’d been in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  It was not something for Chavez to be proud of. He keyed his radio.

  “Six, this is Point. I got him. Just one.”

  “Need help?”

  “Negative. I can handle it.” Chavez hoisted the body on his shoulder for the climb back to the objective. It took ten exhausting minutes, but that was part of the job. Ding felt the man’s blood oozing from the six holes in his chest, staining the back of his khaki shirt. Maybe staining more than that.

  By the time he got back, the bodies had all been laid side by side and searched. There were many sacks of coca leaves, several additional jars of acid, and a total of fourteen dead men when Chavez dumped his at the end of the line.

  “You look a little punked out,” Vega observed.

  “Ain’t as big as you, Oso,” Ding gasped out in reply.

  There were two small radios, and various other personal things to catalog, but nothing of real military value. A few men cast eyes on the pack full of beers, but no one made the expected “Miller Time!” joke. If there had been radio codes, they were in the head of whoever had been the boss here. There was no way
of telling who he might have been; in death all men look alike. The bodies were all dressed more or less the same, except for the webbed pistol belts of the armed men. All in all, it was rather a sad thing to see. Some people who had been alive half an hour earlier were no longer so. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to be said about the mission.

  Most importantly, there were no casualties to the squad, though Sergeant Guerra had gotten a scare from a close burst. Ramirez completed his inspection of the site, then got his men ready to leave. Chavez again took the lead.

  It was a tough uphill climb, and it gave Captain Ramirez time to think. It was, he realized, something that he ought to have thought about a hell of a lot sooner:

  What is this mission all about? To Ramirez, mission now meant the purpose for their being here in the Colombian highlands, not just the job of taking this place out.

  He understood that watching the airfields had the direct effect of stopping flights of drugs into the United States. They’d performed covert reconnaissance, and people were making tactical use of the intelligence information which they’d developed. Not only was it simple—but it also made sense. But what the hell were they doing now? His squad had just executed a picture-perfect small-unit raid. The men could not have done better—aided by the inept performance of the enemy, of course.

  That was going to change. The enemy was going to learn damned fast from this. Their security would be better. They would learn that much even before they figured out what was going on. A blown-away processing site was all the information they needed to learn that they had to improve their physical security arrangements.

  What had the attack actually accomplished? A few hundred pounds of coca leaves would not be processed tonight. He didn’t have instructions to cart the leaves away, and even if he had, there was no ready means of destroying them except by fire, and he wasn’t stupid enough to light a fire on a mountainside at night, orders or not. What they had accomplished tonight was... nothing. Nothing at all, really. There were tons of coca leaves, and scores—perhaps hundreds—of refining sites. They hadn’t made a dent in the trade tonight, not even a dimple.