Chavez led off twenty minutes later. The idea was to keep as high on the mountain as they could. The opposition had shown a tendency to camp out lower down, and this way they stood the best chance of keeping clear. As always he was to avoid anything that looked like habitation. That meant giving a wide berth to the coffee plantations and associated villages, but that was what they had been doing anyway. They also had to move as fast as caution allowed, which meant that caution was downgraded. It was something often done in exercises, always with confidence. Ding’s confidence in that sort of thing had also been downgraded by his experience in the field. The good news, as far as he was concerned, was that Ramirez was acting like an officer again. Probably he’d just been tired, too.
One nice thing about being close to the coffee plantations was that the cover wasn’t so thick. People went into the woods to get fuel for their fires, and that thinned things out quite a bit. What effects it had on erosion wasn’t Chavez’s concern. That helped him to go faster, and he was covering nearly two kilometers per hour, which was far faster than he’d expected. By midnight his legs were telling him about every meter. Fatigue, he was learning again, was a cumulative factor. It took more than one day’s rest to slough off all of its effects, no matter what sort of shape you were in. He wondered if the altitude wasn’t also to blame. In any case he was still fighting to keep up the pace, to keep alert, to remember the path he was supposed to follow. Infantry operations are far more demanding intellectually than most people realize, and intellect is ever the first victim of fatigue.
He remembered a small village on the map, about half a klick from where he was at the moment, downhill. He’d taken the right turn at a landmark a klick back – he’d rechecked it at the rally point where they’d rested forty minutes earlier. He could hear noise from that direction. It seemed odd. The local peasants worked hard on the coffee plantations, he’d been told. They should have been asleep by now. Ding missed the obvious signal. He didn’t miss the scream – more of a pant, really, the sort of sound made when –
He switched on his night scope and saw a figure running toward him. He couldn’t tell – then he could. It was a girl, moving with considerable skill through the cover. Behind her was the noise of someone running after her with less skill. Chavez tapped the danger signal on his radio. Behind him everyone stopped and waited for his all-clear.
There wouldn’t be one. The girl tripped and changed directions. A few seconds later she tripped again and landed right at Chavez’s feet.
The sergeant clamped his left hand across her mouth. His other hand put a finger to his lips in the universal sign to be quiet. Her eyes went wide and white as she saw him – or more properly, didn’t see him, just a mélange of camouflage paint that looked like something from a horror movie.
“Señorita, you have nothing to fear from me. I am a soldier. I do not molest women. Who is chasing you?” He removed his hand and hoped that she wouldn’t scream.
But she couldn’t even if she had wanted to, instead gasping out her reply. She’d run too far too fast. “One of their ‘soldiers,’ the men with guns. I -”
His hand went back on her mouth as the crashing sound came closer.
“Where are you?” the voice crooned.
Shit!
“Run that way,” Chavez told her, pointing. “Do not stop and do not look back. Go!”
The girl took off and the man made for the noise. He ran right past Ding Chavez and precisely one foot farther. The sergeant clasped his hand across the man’s face and took him down, pulling the head back as he did so. Just as both men hit the ground, Ding’s combat knife made a single lateral cut. He was surprised by the noise. Escaping air from the windpipe combined with the spurting blood to make a gurgling sound that made him cringe. The man struggled for a few futile seconds, then went limp. The victim had a knife of his own, and Chavez set it in the wound. He hoped the girl wouldn’t be blamed for it, but he’d done all that he could as far as she was concerned. Captain Ramirez showed up a minute later and was not very pleased.
“Didn’t have much choice, sir,” Chavez said in his own defense. Actually he felt rather proud of himself. After all, protecting the weak was the job of the soldier, wasn’t it?
“Move your ass outa here!”
The squad moved especially fast to clear the area, but if anyone came looking for the amorous sleepwalker, no one heard anything to suggest it. It was the last incident of the night. They arrived at the preplanned stopover point just before dawn. Ramirez set up his radio and called in.
“Roger, KNIFE, we copy your position and your objective. We do not as yet have confirmation for the extraction. Please call back around eighteen hundred Lima. We ought to have things set up by then. Over.”
“Roger, will call back at eighteen hundred. KNIFE out.”
“Shame about BANNER,” one communicator said to the other.
“These things do happen.”
“Your name Johns?”
“That’s right,” the colonel said without turning at once. He’d just come back from a test flight. The new-actually rebuilt five-year-old-engine worked just fine. The Pave Low III was back in business. Colonel Johns turned to see to whom he was talking.
“Do you recognize me?” Admiral Cutter asked curtly. He was wearing his full uniform for a change. He hadn’t done that in months, but the three stars on each braided shoulder board gleamed in the morning sun, along with his ribbons and surface-warfare officer’s badge. In fact, the general effect of the undress-white uniform was quite overpowering, right down to the white buck shoes. Just as he had planned.
“Yes, sir, I do. Please excuse me, sir.”
“Your orders have been changed, Colonel. You are to return to your stateside base as soon as possible. That means today,” Cutter emphasized.
“But what about -”
“That will be taken care of through other means. Do I have to tell you whose authority I speak with?”
“No, sir, you do not.”
“You will not discuss this matter with anyone. That means nobody, anywhere, ever. Do you require any further instructions, Colonel?”
“No, sir, your orders are quite clear.”
“Very well.” Cutter turned and walked back to the staff car, which drove off at once. His next stop was a hilltop near the Gaillard Cut. There was a communications van there. Cutter walked right past the armed guard – he wore a Marine uniform but was a civilian – and into the van, where he made a similar speech. Cutter was surprised to learn that moving the van would be difficult and would require a helicopter, since the van was too large to be pulled down the little service road. He was, however, able to order them to shut down, and he’d see about getting a helicopter to lift the van out. Until then they would stay put and not do anything. Their security was blown, he explained, and further transmissions would only further endanger the people with whom they communicated. He got agreement on that, too, and left. He boarded his aircraft at eleven in the morning. He’d be home in Washington for supper.
Mark Bright was there just after lunch. He handed his film cassettes over to a lab expert and proceeded to Dan Murray’s busy office, where he reported what he had seen.
“I don’t know who he met with, but maybe you’ll recognize the face. How about the Amex number?”
“It’s a CIA account that he’s had access to for the past two years. This is the first time he’s used it, though. The local guy faxed us a copy so we could run the signature. Forensics has already given us a handwriting match,” Murray said. “You look a little tuckered.”
“I don’t know why – hell, I must have slept three hours in the past day and a half. I’ve done my D.C. time. Mobile was supposed to be a nice vacation.”
Murray grinned. “Welcome back to the unreal world of Washington.”
“I had to get some help to pull this off,” Bright said next.
“Like what?” Murray wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Air Force personnel, intel and CID types. I told ’em this was code-word material, and, hell, even if I had told them everything I know, which I didn’t, I don’t know what the story is myself. I take responsibility, of course, but if I hadn’t done it, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the shots.”