“Sorry, we don’t discuss what we do here very freely. That’s what special ops are all about.”
“A couple of days ago you were given some orders by Vice Admiral Cutter. You were in Panama then,” Murray said. “Before that you had flown armed troops into Colombia. First you took them into the coastal lowlands, then you pulled them out and reinserted them into the hill country, correct?”
“Sir, I cannot comment on that, and whatever inference you draw is yours, not mine.”
“I’m a cop, not a reporter. You’ve been given illegal orders. If you carry them out, you may be an accessory to a major felony charge.” Best to get things immediately on the table, Murray thought. It had the desired effect. Hearing from a senior FBI official that his orders might be illegal forced Johns to respond, though only a little bit.
“Sir, you’re asking me something I don’t know how to respond to.”
Murray reached into his bag and pulled out a manila envelope. He removed a photograph and handed it to Colonel Johns. “The man who gave you those orders, of course, was the President’s National Security Adviser. Before he met with you, he met with this guy. That is Colonel Félix Cortez. He used to be with the DGI, but now he’s working for the Drug Cartel as chief of security. He was instrumental in the Bogotá murders. Exactly what they agreed on we do not know, but I can tell you what we do know. There is a communications van over the Gaillard Cut that had been the radio link with the four teams on the ground. Cutter visited it and shut it down. Then he came to see you and ordered you to fly home and never talk about the mission. Now, you put all three of those things together and tell me if what you do come up with sounds like something you want to be part of.”
“I don’t know, sir.” Johns’ response was automatic, but his face had gone pink.
“Colonel, those teams have already taken casualties. It appears likely that the orders you were given might have been aimed at getting them all killed. People are out hunting them right now,” Ryan said. “We need your help to go get them out.”
“Who exactly are you, anyway?”
“CIA.”
“But it’s your goddamned operation!”
“No, it isn’t, but I won’t bore you with the details,” Jack said. “We need your help. Without it, those soldiers aren’t going to make it home. It’s that simple.”
“So you’re sending us back to clean up your mess. That’s the way it always is with you people, you send us out—”
“Actually,” Murray said, “we were planning to go with you. Part of the way anyway. How soon can you be in the air?”
“Tell me exactly what you want.” Murray did just that. Colonel Johns nodded and checked his watch.
“Ninety minutes.”
The MH-53J was far larger than the CH-46 that had nearly ended Ryan’s life at twenty-three, but no less frightening to him. He looked at the single rotor and remembered that they were making a long, over-water flight. The flight crew was businesslike and professional, hooking both civilians up to the intercom and telling them where to sit and what to do. Ryan was especially attentive to the ditching instructions. Murray kept looking at the miniguns, the impressive six-barrel gatlings set next to enormous hoppers of live shells. There were three for this flight. The helicopter lifted off just after four and headed southwest. As soon as they were airborne, Murray had a crewman attach him to the floor with a twenty-foot safety line so that he could walk around. The hatch at the rear of the aircraft was half open, and he walked back to watch the ocean pass beneath them. Ryan stayed put. The ride was better than the Marine Corps helicopters he remembered, but it still felt like sitting on a chandelier during an earthquake as the aircraft vibrated and oscillated beneath its enormous six-bladed rotor. He could look forward and see one of the pilots, just sitting there as comfortably as though at the wheel of a car. But, Ryan told himself, it wasn’t a car.
What he hadn’t anticipated was the midair refueling. He felt the aircraft increase power and take a slightly nose-up attitude. Then through the front window he saw the wing of another aircraft. Murray hastened forward to watch, standing behind the crew chief, Sergeant Zimmer. He and Ryan were both hooked into the intercom.
“What happens if you tangle with the hose?” Murray asked as they neared the drogue.
“I don’t know,” Colonel Johns answered coolly. “It’s never happened to me yet. You want to keep it quiet now, sir?”
Ryan looked around for “facilities.” He saw what looked like a camper’s john, but getting to it meant taking his seat belt off. Jack decided against it. The refueling ended without incident, entirely due, Jack was sure, to his prayers.
Panache was cruising on her station in the Yucatan Channel, between Cuba and the Mexican Coast, following a racetrack pattern. There hadn’t been much in the way of activity since the cutter had gotten here, but the crew took comfort from the fact that they were back at sea. The great adventure at the moment was observing the new female crewmen. They had a new female ensign fresh from the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, and a half dozen others, mainly unrated seamen, but two petty officers, both electronics types, who, their peers grudgingly admitted, knew their jobs. Captain Wegener was watching the new ensign stand watch as junior officer of the deck. Like all new ensigns she was nervous and eager and a little scared, especially with the skipper on the bridge. She was also cute as a button, and that was something Wegener had never thought of an ensign before.
“Commanding officer, commanding officer,” the bulkhead speaker called. Wegener picked up the phone next to his bridge chair.
“Captain here. What is it?”
“Need you in the radio room, sir.”
“On the way.” Red Wegener rose from his chair. “Carry on,” he said on his way aft.
“Sir,” the petty officer told him in the radio shack, “we just got a transmission from an Air Force helo, says he’s got a person he has to drop off here. Says it’s secret, sir. I don’t have anything on my board about it, and ... well, sir, I didn’t know what to do, sir. So I called you.”
“Oh?” The woman handed him the microphone. Wegener depressed the transmit button. “This is Panache. Commanding officer speaking. Who am I talking to?”
“Panache, this is CAESAR. Helicopter inbound your position on a Sierra-Oscar. I have a drop-off for you, over.”
Sierra-Oscar meant some sort of special operation. Wegener thought for a moment, then decided that there wasn’t all that much to think about.
“Roger, CAESAR, say your ETA.”
“ETA one-zero minutes.”
“Roger, one-zero minutes. We’ll be waiting. Out.” Wegener handed the microphone back and returned to the bridge.
“Flight quarters,” he told the OOD. “Miss Walters, bring us to Hotel Corpin.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Things started happening quickly and smoothly. The bosun’s mate of the watch keyed the 1-MC: “Flight quarters, flight quarters, all hands man your flight-quarter stations. Smoking lamp is out topside.” Cigarettes sailed into the water and hands removed their caps, lest they be sucked into somebody’s engines. Ensign Walters looked to see where the wind was, and altered course accordingly, also increasing the cutter’s speed to fifteen knots, thus bringing the ship to Hotel Corpin, the proper course for flight operations. And all, she told herself proudly, without having to be told. Wegener turned away and grinned. It was one of many first steps in the career of a new officer. She’d actually known what to do and done it without help. For the captain it was like watching his child take a first step. Eager and smart.
“Christ, it’s a big one,” Riley said on the bridge wing. Wegener went out to watch.
The helicopter, he saw, was an Air Force -53, far larger than anything the Coast Guard had. The pilot brought it in from aft, then pivoted to fly sideways. Someone was attached to the rescue cable and lowered down to the waiting arms of four deck crewmen. The instant he was detached from the harness, the helicopter lowered its nos
e and moved off to the south. Quick and smooth, Red noted.
“Didn’t know we were getting company, sir,” Riley observed as he pulled out a cigar.
“We’re still at flight quarters, Chief!” Ensign Walters snapped from the wheelhouse.
“Yes, ma’am, beg pardon, I forgot,” the bosun responded with a crafty look at Wegener. Another test passed. She wasn’t afraid to yell at the master chief, even if he was older than her father.
“You can secure from flight quarters,” the CO told her. “I didn’t know either,” Wegener told Riley. “I’m going aft to see who it is.” He heard Ensign Walters give her orders, under the supervision of a lieutenant and a couple of chiefs.
The visitor, he saw as he approached the helo deck door, was stripping off a green flight suit, but didn’t appear to be carrying anything, which seemed odd. Then the man turned around, and it just got stranger.
“Howdy, Captain,” Murray said.
“What gives?”
“You got a nice quiet place to talk?”
“Come along.” They were in Wegener’s cabin shortly thereafter.
“I figure I owe you for a couple of favors,” he said. “You could have given me a bad time over that dumb stunt we pulled. Thanks for the tip on the lawyer, too. What he told me was pretty scary—but it turns out that I didn’t talk to him until after the two bastards were killed. Last time I ever do something that dumb,” Wegener promised. “You’re here to collect, right?”
“Good guess.”
“So what’s going on? You don’t just borrow one of those special-ops helos for a personal favor.”
“I need you to be someplace tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
Murray pulled an envelope from his pocket. “These coordinates. I have the radio plan, too.” Murray gave him a few more details.
“You did this yourself, didn’t you?” the captain said.
“Yeah, why?”
“Because you ought to have checked the weather.”
27.
The Battle
of Ninja Hill
ARMIES HAVE HABITS. These often appear strange or even downright crazy to outsiders, but for all of them there is an underlying purpose, learned over the four millennia in which men have fought one another in an organized fashion. Mainly the lessons learned are negative ones. Whenever men are killed for no good purpose, it is the business of armies to learn from the mistake and ensure that it will never happen again. Of course, such mistakes are repeated as often in the profession of arms as in any other, but also as in all professions, the really good practitioners are those who never forget fundamentals. Captain Ramirez was one of these. Though the captain had learned that he had too much sentiment, that the loss of life which was part and parcel of his chosen way of life was too difficult a burden to bear, he still remembered the other lessons, one of which was reinforced by the most recent and unpleasant discovery. He still expected to be picked up tonight by the Air Force helicopter, and felt reasonably sure that he had evaded the teams set out to hunt Team KNIFE, but he remembered all the lessons of the past when soldiers died because the unexpected happened, because they took things for granted, because they forgot the fundamentals.
The fundamental rule here was that a unit in a fixed location was always vulnerable, and to reduce that vulnerability, the intelligent commander prepared a defense plan. Ramirez remembered that, and hadn’t lost a keen eye for terrain. He didn’t think that anyone would come to trouble his men that night, but he had already prepared for that eventuality.
His deployments reflected the threat, which he evaluated as a very large but relatively untrained force, and his two special advantages: first, that all of his men had radios, and second, that there were three silenced weapons at his disposal. Ramirez hoped that they wouldn’t come calling, but if they did, he planned to give them a whole series of nasty surprises.
Each of his men was part of a two-man team for mutual support—there is nothing so fearful as to be alone in a combat action, and the effectiveness of any soldier is multiplied many times over merely by having a single comrade at his side. Each pair had dug three holes—called Primary, Alternate, and Supplementary—as part of three separate defensive networks, all of them camouflaged and carefully sited to be mutually supporting. Where possible, fire lanes were cleared, but always on oblique lines so that the fire would take the attacker from the side, not the front, and part of the plan was to force the attacker to move in a direction anticipated by the Team. Finally, if everything broke down, there were three preplanned escape routes and corresponding rally points. His men kept busy all day, digging their holes, preparing their positions, siting their remaining claymore mines, until their rest periods were occupied only with sleep and not conversation. But he couldn’t keep himself quite that busy, and couldn’t keep himself from thinking.
Through the day things kept getting worse. The radio link was never reestablished, and every time Ramirez came up at a scheduled time and heard nothing, the thinner became his explanations for it. He could no longer wave it off as an equipment or power failure at the downlink. Throughout the afternoon he told himself that it was impossible they were cut off, and he never even considered the possibility that they had been cut off, but the nagging thought grew louder in the back of his mind that he and his men were alone, far from home, facing a potential threat with only what they had carried in on their own backs.
The helicopter landed back at the same facility it had only left two days before, taxiing into the hangar whose door was immediately closed. The MC-130 that had accompanied them down was similarly hidden. Ryan was exhausted by the flight and walked off with wobbly legs to find Clark waiting. The one really good piece of news was that Cutter had neglected to take the simple expedient of meeting with the base commander, never thinking that his orders would be disregarded. As a result, the reappearance of the special-operations aircraft was just another odd occurrence, and one green helicopter—in shadows they looked black—was pretty much the same as another.
Jack returned to the aircraft after making a trip to the rest room and drinking about a quart of water from the cooler. Introductions had already been explained, and he saw that Colonel Johns had hit it off with Mr. Clark.
“Third SOG, eh?”
“That’s right, Colonel,” Clark said. “I never made it into Laos myself, but you guys saved a few of our asses. I’ve been with the Agency ever since—well, almost,” Clark corrected himself.
“I don’t even know where to go. That Navy prick had us destroy all our maps. Zimmer remembers some of the radio freqs, but—”
“I got the freqs,” Clark said.
“Fine, but we still have to find ’em. Even with tanker support, I don’t have the legs to do a real search. There’s a lot of country down there, and the altitude murders our fuel consumption. What’s the opposition like?”
“Lots of people with AKs. Oughta sound familiar.”
PJ grimaced. “It does. I got three minis. Without any air support ...”
“You guessed right: you are the air support. I’d hold on to the miniguns. Okay, the exfiltration sites were agreed upon beforehand?” Clark asked.
“Yeah—a primary and two backups for each team, total of twelve.”
“We have to assume that they are known to the enemy. The job for tonight is finding ’em and getting them somewhere else that we know about and they don’t. Then tomorrow night you can fly in for the pickup.”
“And from there out.... The FBI guy wants us to land on that little boat. I’m worried about Adele. The last weather report I saw at noon had it heading north toward Cuba. I want to update that.”
“I just did,” Larson said as he rejoined the group. “Adele is heading west again, and she made hurricane an hour ago. Core winds are now seventy-five.”
“Oh, shit,” Colonel Johns observed. “How fast is she moving?”
“It’s going to be close for tomorrow night, but no problem for our flight
this evening.”
“What flight is that, now?”
“Larson and I are going to hop down to locate the teams.” Clark pulled a radio out of what had been Murray’s bag. “We fly up and down the valley, talking on these. With luck we’ll get contact.”
“You must really believe in luck, son,” Johns said.
O‘Day reflected that the life of an FBI agent wasn’t always as glamorous as people thought. There was also the little problem that with less than twenty agents on the case he couldn’t assign this distasteful task to a junior agent. But the case had enough of those problems. They hadn’t even considered getting a search warrant yet, and sneaking into Cutter’s quarters without legal authorization—something that the Bureau seldom did anymore—was impossible. Cutter’s wife had just gotten back and was bossing her staff of stewards around like a woman to the manor born. On the other hand, the Supreme Court had ruled a few years before that trash-searching didn’t require the sanction of a court. That fact enabled Pat O’Day to get the best upper-body workout he’d had in years. Now he could barely raise his arms after having loaded a few tons of malodorous garbage bags into the back of a white-painted trash truck. It might have been one of several cans. The VIP section of Fort Myer was still a military post; even the trash cans had to be set up just so, and in this case, two homes shared each stopping place for the equally well-organized trash contractor. O‘Day had marked the bags before loading them into the back of the truck, and as a result, fifteen garbage bags were now sitting in one of the Bureau’s many laboratories, though not one that was part of the tourist route, since the FBI shows only its best face to those who tour the Hoover Building, the nice, clean, antiseptic labs. The only good news was that the ventilation system was good, and there were several cans of air freshener around to disguise the smells that got past the technicians’ surgical masks. O’Day himself felt as though a squadron of bluebottle flies would follow him for the rest of his life. The search took an hour as the garbage was processed across a white tabletop of imitation marble, about four days’ worth of coffee grinds and half-eaten croissants, decomposing merengue, and several diapers—those were from the wrong house: the officer next door to the Cutters had his new granddaughter visiting.