“Where are they looking, over.”
“Just jerkin’ off, sir. Over.”
“Keep me posted,” Captain Ramirez ordered.
“Roger. Out.” Chavez went back to his glasses. One of them waved toward the top. Three others headed that way with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“Wassa matta, wittle baby don wanna cwime da widdle fucking hill?” Ding asked. Though Guerra didn’t know it, he was quoting his first platoon sergeant from Korea. “I think they’re gettin’ tired, Paco.”
“Good. Maybe they’ll go home.”
They were tired, all right. The three took their own sweet time going up. Once there, they shouted down that they hadn’t seen anyone. Below them, the others stood mostly in the clearing, just stood there like fools, Ding noted in some surprise. Confidence was a good thing in a soldier, but that wasn’t confidence, and those weren’t soldiers. About the time the three climbers were halfway down, clouds blotted out the sun. Almost immediately thereafter rain started to fall. A major tropical thunderstorm had built up on the western side of the mountain. Two minutes behind the rain came lightning. One bolt struck the summit, right where the climbers had been. It hung there for a surprisingly long fraction of a second like the finger of an angry god. Then others started hitting everywhere, and the rain started falling in earnest. What had been unrestricted visibility was now a radius of four hundred meters at most, expanding and contracting with the march of the opaque, wet curtains. Chavez and Guerra traded a concerned look. Their mission was look-and-listen, but now they couldn’t see very far and could hear less. Worse, even after the storm passed, the ground around them would be wet. Leaves and twigs wouldn’t crackle when people stepped on them. Humidity in the air would absorb sound. The inept clowns they’d been watching could therefore approach much closer to the outpost without notice. On the other hand, if the squad had to move, it could move faster with a lower risk of detection, for the same reasons. As always, the environment was neutral, giving advantage only to those who knew how to take it, and sometimes imposing the same handicaps on both sides.
The storm lasted all afternoon, dropping several inches of rain. Lightning touched down within a hundred yards of the sergeants, an experience new to both and as frightening as an artillery barrage, with its sudden burst of light and noise. After that it was just wet, cold, and miserable as the temperature dropped into the upper fifties.
“Ding, look left front,” Guerra whispered urgently.
“Oh, fuck!” Chavez didn’t have to ask aloud how they’d gotten this close. With their hearing still affected by the thunder, and the whole mountain sodden, there were two men, not two hundred meters away.
“Six, this is Point, we got a pair of gomers two hundred meters southeast of us,” Guerra reported to his captain. “Stand by. Over.”
“Roger, standing by,” Ramirez answered. “Be cool, Paco.”
Guerra keyed his transmit switch by way of reply.
Chavez moved very slowly, bringing his weapon closer to a firing position, making sure the safety was on but leaving his thumb on the lever. He knew that they were the nearest thing to invisible, well concealed in ground cover and sapling trees. Each man had his war paint on, and even from fifty feet away they would look like part of the environment. They had to keep still, since the human eye is very effective at detecting movement, but as long as they did, they were invisible. This was a very practical demonstration of why the Army trained people to be disciplined. Both sergeants wished they had their camouflage fatigues, but it was a little late to worry about that, and the khaki cloth was brown with rain and mud anyway. By unspoken agreement, each man watched a discrete sector so that they wouldn’t have to turn their heads very much. They knew that they could speak if they did so in whispers, but they would do so only for really important information.
“I hear something behind us,” Chavez said ten minutes later.
“Better look,” Guerra answered.
Ding had to take his time, over thirty seconds to rotate his body and head.
“Uh-oh.” There were several men putting bedrolls down on the ground. “Stayin’ for the night.”
It was clear what had happened. The people they’d been watching had continued their patrol routine and ended up straddling the observation post with their night camp. They could now see or hear over twenty men.
“This is gonna be a fun night,” Guerra whispered.
“Yeah, and I gotta take a leak, too.” It was a feeble attempt at a joke. Ding looked up at the sky. The rainfall was down to sprinkles now, but the clouds were just as thick. It would be dark a little early, maybe in two hours.
The enemy was spread out in three groups, which wasn’t entirely stupid, but each group built fires for cooking, which was. They were also noisy, talking as though they were sitting down for a meal in some village cantina. That was good news for Chavez and Guerra. It allowed them to use their radio again.
“Six, this is Point, over.”
“Six here.”
“Six, uh…” Chavez hesitated. “The bad guys have set up their camp all around us. They don’t know we’re here.”
“Tell me what you want to do.”
“Nothin’ right now. I think maybe we can walk on out when it gets dark. We’ll let you know when.”
“Roger. Out.”
“Walk on out?” Guerra whispered.
“No sense gettin’ him all worried, Paco.”
“Hey, ‘mano, I’m fucking worried.”
“Bein’ worried don’t help.”
There were still no answers. Ryan left his office after what appeared to have been a normal day’s work of catching up on correspondence and reports. Not much work had actually been accomplished, however. There were too many distractions that simply hadn’t gone away.
He told his driver to head for Bethesda. He hadn’t called ahead, but going there would not seem to be too much out of the ordinary. The security watch on the VTP suite was as strong as ever, but they all knew Ryan. The one by the door gave him a sorrowful shake of the head as he reached for the door. Ryan caught that signal clearly enough. He stopped and composed himself before going in. Greer didn’t need to see shock on the faces of his visitors. But shock was what Jack felt.
He was barely a hundred pounds now, a scarecrow that had once been a man, a professional naval officer who’d commanded ships and led men in the service of their country. Fifty years of government service lay wasting away on the hospital bed. It was more than the death of a man. It was the death of an age, of a standard of behavior. Fifty years of experience and wisdom and judgment were slipping away. Jack took his seat next to the bed and waved the security officer out of the room.
“Hey, boss.”
His eyes opened.
Now what do I say? How are you feeling? There’s something to say to a dying man!
“How was the trip, Jack?” The voice was weak.
“Belgium was okay. Everybody sends regards. Friday I got to brief Fowler, like you did the last time.”
“What do you think of him?”
“I think he needs some help on foreign policy.”
A smile: “So do I. Gives a nice speech, though.”
“I didn’t exactly hit it off with one of his aides, Elliot, the gal from Bennington. Obnoxious as hell. If her man wins, she says, I retire.” That was really the wrong thing to say. Greer tried to move but couldn’t.
“Then you find her, and kiss and make up. If you have to kiss her ass at noon on the Bennington quad, you do that. When are you going to learn to bend that stiff Irish neck of yours? Ask Basil sometime how much he likes the people he has to work for. Your duty is to serve the country, Jack, not just the people you happen to like.” A blow from a professional boxer could not have stung worse.
“Yes, sir. You’re right. I still have a lot to learn.”
“Learn fast, boy. I haven’t got many lessons left.”
“Don’t say that, Admiral.” The line was delivered like the plea of a child.
“It’s my time, Jack. Some men I served with died off Savo Island fifty years ago, or at Leyte, or lots of other parts of ocean. I’ve been a lot luckier than they were, but it’s my time. And it’s your turn to take over for me. I want you to take my place, Jack.”
“I do need some advice, Admiral.”
“Colombia?”
“I could ask how you know, but I won’t.”
“When a man like Arthur Moore won’t look you in the eye, you know that something is wrong. He was in here Saturday and he wouldn’t look me in the eye.”