“Well?”
“The new engine, sir. It just came apart on us—looks like a total compressor failure. Sounds worse. I’m going to have to give it a look to see if it damaged anything else,” Zimmer reported.
“Did you have any problem putting it in?”
“Negative. It went just like the book says, sir. That’s the second time with this lot of engines, sir. The contractor’s fucking up somewhere with those new composite turbine blades. That’s going to down-check the whole engine run until we identify the problem, ground every bird that’s using them, us, the Navy, Army, everybody.” The new engine design used turbine-compressor blades made from ceramic instead of steel. It was lighter—you could carry a little more gas—and cheaper—you could buy a few more engines—than the old way, and contractor tests had shown the new version to be just as reliable—until they had reached line service, that is. The first failure had been blamed on an ingested bird, but two Navy choppers using this engine had gone down at sea without a trace. Zimmer was right. Every aircraft with this engine installed would be grounded until the problem was understood and fixed.
“Oh, that’s just great, Buck,” Johns said. “The other spare we brought down?”
“Take a guess, sir,” Zimmer suggested. “I can have ’em send us an old rebuilt one down.”
“Tell me what you think.”
“I think we go for a rebuilt, or maybe yank one from another bird back at Hurlburt.”
“Get on the horn as soon as I cool her down,” the colonel ordered. “I want two good engines down here ASAP.”
“Yes, sir.” The crewmen shared looks on the other issue. What about the people they were supposed to support?
His name was Esteves, and he, too, was a staff sergeant, Eleven-Bravo, U.S. Army. Before all this had started, he’d also been part of the recon unit of the 5th Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, First Brigade of the 25th “Tropical Lightning” Infantry Division (Light), based at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Young, tough, and proud like every other SHOWBOAT soldier, he was also tired and frustrated. And at the moment, sick. Something he’d eaten, or maybe drunk. When the time came, he’d check in with the squad medic and get some pills to handle it, but right now his bowels rumbled and his arms felt weaker than he would have liked. They’d been in the field exactly twenty-seven minutes less than Team KNIFE, but they hadn’t made any contact at all since trashing that little airfield. They’d found six processing sites, four of them very recently used, but all of them devoid of people. Esteves wanted to get on the scoreboard, as he was sure the other squads were doing. Like Chavez he’d grown up in a gang area, and unlike him had been deeply involved with one until fate had shaken him loose long enough to join the Army. Also unlike Chavez, he’d once used drugs, until his sister had OD’d on a needle of overrich heroin. He’d been there, seen her life just stop as though someone had pulled the plug from a wall socket. He’d found that dealer the next night, and joined the Army to escape the murder rap, not ever thinking that he’d become a professional soldier, never dreaming that there were opportunities in life beyond car washes and family-assistance checks. He’d leapt at this chance to get even with the scum who had killed his sister and enslaved his people. But he hadn’t yet killed one, hadn’t yet gotten on the scoreboard. Fatigue and frustration were a deadly combination in the face of the enemy.
Finally, he thought. He saw the glow of the fire from half a klick away. He did what he was supposed to do, calling his sighting into his captain, waiting for the squad to form up in two teams, then moving in to take out the ten or so men who were doing their idiot dance in acid. Tired and eager though he was, discipline was still the central fact of his life. He led his section of two other men to a good fire-support position while the captain took charge of the assault element. The very moment he was certain that tonight would be different, it became so.
There was no bathtub, no backpacks full of leaves, but there were fifteen men with weapons. He tapped the danger signal on his radio but got no reply. Though he didn’t know it, a branch had broken the antenna off his radio ten minutes earlier. He stood, trying to decide what to do, looking around for some sign, some clue, while the two soldiers at his side wondered what the hell was the matter. Then his stomach cramped up on him again. Esteves doubled over, tripped on a root, and dropped his weapon. It didn’t go off, but the buttstock hit the ground hard enough that the bolt jerked back and forth one time with a metallic clack. That was when he discovered that twenty feet away was another man whose presence he hadn’t yet detected.
This man was awake, massaging his aching calves so that he could get some sleep. He was startled by the noise. A man who liked to hunt, his first reaction was disbelief. How could anyone be out there? He’d made sure that none of his fellows had gone beyond his lookout position, but that sound was man-made and could have come only from a weapon of some sort. His team had already been warned of some brushes with—whoever the hell they were, they had killed the people who were supposed to kill them, which surprised and worried this one. The sudden noise had startled him at first, but that emotion was immediately followed by fright. He moved his rifle to his left and fired off a whole magazine. Four rounds hit Esteves, who died slowly enough to scream a curse at destiny. His two teammates hosed down the area from which the fire had come, killing the man loudly and messily, but by that time the others around the fire were up and running, and the assault element wasn’t yet in place. The captain’s reaction to the noise was the logical one. His support team had been ambushed, and he had to get in to the objective to take the heat off of them. The fire-support element shifted fire to the encampment, and soon learned that there were other men about. Most of them ran away from the fire and blundered into the assault element, which was racing in the opposite direction.
Had there been a proper after-action report, the first comment would have been that control was lost on both sides. The captain leading the squad had reacted precipitously, and, leading from the front instead of laying back to think about it, he was one of the first men killed. The rest of the squad was now leaderless but didn’t know it. The prowess of the individual soldiers was undiminished, of course, but soldiers are first, last, always, members of teams, each a living, thinking organism whose total strength is far greater than the sum of its parts. Without leadership to direct them, they fell back on training, but that was confused by the sound and the dark. Both groups of men were now intermixed, and the Colombians’ lack of training and leadership was less important now as the battle was fought by individuals on one side, and by mutually supporting pairs on the other. It lasted under five confused and bloody minutes. The pairs “won.” They killed with abandon and efficiency, then crawled away, eventually rising to race to their rally point while those enemies left alive continued to shoot, mostly at each other. Only five made it to the rally point, three from the assault element and Esteves’ two from the support element. Half of the squad was dead, including the captain, the medic, and the radioman. The soldiers still didn’t know what they’d run into—through a communications foul-up they hadn’t been warned of the Cartel’s operations against them. What they did know was bad enough. They headed back to their base camp, collected their packs, and moved out.
The Colombians knew less and more. They knew that they had killed five Americans—they hadn’t found Esteves yet—and that they had lost twenty-six, some of them probably to their own fire. They didn’t know if any had gotten away, didn’t know the strength of the unit that had attacked them, didn’t even know that they had in fact been attacked by Americans at all—the weapons they recovered were mainly American, but the M-16 was popular throughout South America. They, like the men they’d chased away, knew that something terrible had happened. Mainly they grouped together and sat down and threw up and experienced postcombat shock, having learned for the first time that the mere possession of an automatic weapon didn’t make one into a god. Shock was gradually replaced by rage as they collected their de
ad.
Team BANNER—what was left of it—didn’t have that luxury. They didn’t have time to think about who had won and who had lost. Each of them had learned a shocking lesson about combat. Someone with a better education might have pointed out that the world was not deterministic, but each of the five men from BANNER consoled himself with the bleakest of soldierly observations: Shit happens.
24.
Ground Rules
CLARK AND LARSON started off well before dawn, heading south again in their borrowed Subaru four-wheel-drive wagon. In the front was a briefcase. In the back were a few boxes of rocks, under which were two Beretta automatics whose muzzles were threaded for silencers. It was a pity to abuse the guns by placing all those rocks in the same box, but neither man figured to take the weapons home after the job was completed, and both fervently hoped that they wouldn’t be needed in any way.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Larson asked after an hour or so of silence.
“I was kind of hoping that you’d know. Something unusual.”
“Seeing people walk around with guns down here isn’t terribly unusual, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Organized activity?”
“That, too, but it does give us something to think about. We won’t be seeing much military activity,” Larson said.
“Why?”
“Guerrillas raided a small army post again last night—heard it on the radio this morning. Either M-19 or FARC is getting frisky.”
“Cortez,” Clark said at once.
“Yeah, that makes sense. Pull all the official heat in a different direction.”
“I’m going to have to meet that boy,” Mr. Clark told the passing scenery.
“And?” Larson asked.
“And what do you think? The bastard was part of a plot to kill one of our ambassadors, the Director of the FBI, and the Administrator of DEA, plus a driver and assorted bodyguards. He’s a terrorist.”
“Take him back?”
“Do I look like a cop?” Clark responded.
“Look, man, we don’t—”
“I do. By the way, have you forgotten those two bombs? I believe you were there.”
“That was—”
“Different?” Clark chuckled. “That’s what they always say, ‘But that’s different.’ Larson, I didn’t go to Dartmouth like you did, and maybe the difference is lost on me.”
“This isn’t the fucking movies!” Larson said angrily.
“Carlos, if this was the movies, you’d be a blond with big tits and a loose blouse. You know, I’ve been in this business since you were driving cars made by Matchbox, and I’ve never got laid on the job. Never. Not once. Hardly seems fair.” He might have added that he was married and took it seriously, but why confuse the lad? He had accomplished what he’d intended. Larson smiled. The tension was broken.
“I guess maybe I got you there, Mr. Clark.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone till the end of the week—European run. I left a message in three places—I mean, the message for her to bug out. Soon as she gets back, she hops the next bird for Miami.”
“Good. This one is complicated enough. When it’s all over, marry the girl, settle down, raise a family.”
“I’ve thought about that. What about—I mean, is it fair to—”
“The job you’re in is less dangerous statistically than running a liquor store in a big city. They all raise families. What holds you together on a big job in a faraway place is the knowledge that there is somebody to come back to. You can trust me on that one, son.”
“But for the moment we’re in the area you want to look at. Now what do we do?”
“Start prowling the side roads. Don’t go too fast.” Clark cranked down his window and started smelling the air. Next he opened his briefcase and pulled out a topographical map. He grew quiet for several minutes, getting his brain in synch with the situation. There were soldiers up there, trained men in Indian country, being hunted and trying to evade contact. He had to get himself in the proper frame of mind, alternately looking at the terrain and the map. “God, I’d kill for the right kind of radio right now.” Your fault, Johnny, Clark told himself. You should have demanded it. You should have told Ritter that there had to be someone on the ground to liaise with the soldiers instead of trying to run it through a satellite link like it was a goddamned staff study.
“Just to talk to them?”
“Look, kid, how much security you seen so far?”
“Why, none.”
“Right. With a radio I could call them down out of the hills and we could pick them up, clean them up, and drive ’em to the fucking airport for the flight home,” Clark said, the frustration manifest in his voice.
“That’s craz—Jesus, you’re right. This situation really is crazy.” The realization dawned on Larson, and he was amazed that he’d misinterpreted the situation so completely.
“Make a note—this is what happens when you run an op out of D.C. instead of running it from the field. Remember that. You might be a supervisor someday. Ritter thinks like a spymaster instead of a line-animal like me, and he’s been out of the field too long. That’s the biggest problem at Langley: the guys who run the show have forgotten what it’s like out here, and the rules have changed a lot since they serviced all their dead-drops in Budapest. Moreover, this is a very different situation from what they think it is. This isn’t intelligence-gathering. It’s low-intensity warfare. You gotta know when not to be covert, too. This sort of thing is a whole new ball game.”
“They didn’t cover this sort of thing at The Farm.”
“That’s no surprise. Most of the instructors there are a bunch of old—” Clark stopped. “Slow down some.”
“What is it?”
“Stop the car.”
Larson did as he was told, pulling off the gravel surface. Clark jumped out with his briefcase, which seemed very strange indeed, and took the ignition keys as he did so. His next move was open the back, then to toss the keys back to Larson. Clark dug into one of the boxes, past the samples of gold-bearing rock, and came out with his Beretta and silencer. He was wearing a bush jacket, and the gun disappeared nicely in the small of his back, silencer and all. Then he waved to Larson to stay put and follow him slowly in the car. Clark started walking with his map and a photograph in his hands. There was a bend in the road; just around it was a truck. Near the truck were some armed men. He was looking at his map when they shouted, and his head came up in obvious surprise. A man jerked his AK in a way that required no words: Come here at once or be shot.
Larson was overcome with the urge to wet his pants, but Clark waved for him to follow and walked confidently to the truck. Its loadbed was covered with a tarp, but Clark already knew what was under it. He’d smelled it. That was why he’d stopped around the bend.
“Good day,” he said to the nearest one with a rifle.
“You have picked a bad day to be on the road, my friend.”
“He told me you would be out here. I have permission,” Clark replied.
“What? Permission? Whose permission?”
“Señor Escobedo, of course,” Larson heard him say.
Jesus, this isn’t happening, please tell me this isn’t happening!
“Who are you?” the man said with a mixture of anger and wariness.
“I am a prospector. I am looking for gold. Here,” Clark said, turning his photo around. “This area I have marked, I think there is gold here. Of course I would not come here without permission of Señor Escobedo, and he told me to tell those I met that I am here under his protection.”
“Gold—you look for gold?” another man said as he came up. The first one deferred to him, and Clark figured he was talking to the boss now.
“Sí. Come, I will show you.” Clark led them to the back of the Subaru and pulled two rocks from the cardboard box. “My driver there is Señor Larson. He introduced me to Señor Escobedo. If you know Señor Escobedo—you must kn
ow him, no?”
The man clearly didn’t know what to do or think. Clark was speaking in good Spanish, with a trace of accent, and talking as normally as though he were asking directions from a policeman.
“Here, you see this?” Clark said, pointing to the rock. “That is gold. This may be the biggest find since Pizarro. I think Señor Escobedo and his friends will buy all of this land.”
“They did not tell me of this,” the man temporized.
“Of course. It is a secret. And I must warn you, señor, not to speak of it to anyone or you will surely speak to Señor Escobedo!”
Bladder control was a major problem for Larson now.
“When are we leaving?” someone called from the truck.
Clark looked around while the two gunmen tried to decide what to do. A driver and perhaps one other in the truck. He didn’t hear or see anyone else. He started walking toward it. Two more steps and he saw what he’d needed and feared to see. Sticking out from under the edge of the tarp was the front sight assembly of an M-16A2 rifle. What he had to do was decided in less than a second. Even to Clark it was amazing how the old habits kept coming back.
“Stop!” the leader said.
“Can I load my samples on your truck?” Clark asked without turning. “To take to Señor Escobedo? He will be very pleased to see what I have found, I promise you,” Clark added.
The two men ran to catch up with him, their rifles dangling from their hands as they did so. They’d gotten within ten feet when he turned. As he did so, his right hand remained fixed in space, and took the Beretta from his waistband while his left hand fluttered the map and photo. Neither one saw it coming, Larson realized. He was so smooth....