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 meringue, and several diapers – those were from the wrong house: the officer next door to the Cutters had his new granddaughter visiting.
“Bingo,” a technician said. His gloved hand held up a computer disk. Even with the gloves, he held it on opposite corners and dropped it into an extended plastic baggie. O’Day took the bag and walked upstairs to latent prints.
Two senior technicians were working overtime tonight. They’d cheated somewhat, of course. They already had a copy of Admiral Cutter’s fingerprints from the central print index – all military personnel are printed as a matter of course upon their enlistment – along with their entire bag of tricks, which included a laser.
“What was it in?” one of them asked.
“On top of some newspapers,” O’Day replied.
“Aha! No extraneous grease, and good insulation against the heat. There may be a chance.” The technician removed the disk from the clear bag and went to work. It took ten minutes, while O’Day paced the room.
“I got a thumbprint with eight points on the front side, and what is probably a smudged ring finger on the back side with one good point and one very marginal one. There is one completely different set, but it’s too smudged to identify. It’s a different pattern, though, has to be a different person.”
O’Day figured that that was more than he’d had the right to expect under the circumstances. A fingerprint identification ordinarily required ten individual points – the irregularities that constituted the art of fingerprint identification – but that number had always been arbitrary. The inspector was certain that Cutter had handled this computer disk, even if a jury might not be completely sure, if that time ever came. Now it was time to see what was on it, and for that he headed to a different lab.