“Weather’s going dogshit on us, Colonel,” she announced at once. “Adele is heading west again, doing twenty-five knots.”
“Can’t help the weather. Getting down and doing the snatch oughtn’t to be too bad.”
“Getting back might be kinda exciting, PJ,” Montaigne observed darkly.
“One thing at a time, Francie. And we do have that alternate place to land.”
“Colonel, even you aren’t that crazy.”
PJ turned to Ryan and shook his head. “Junior officers aren’t what they used to be.”
They stayed over water for most of the way down. Larson was as steady and confident as ever at the controls, but his eyes kept turning northeast. There was no mistaking it, the high, thin clouds that were the perennial harbinger of an approaching hurricane. Behind them was Adele, and she had already made another chapter in history. Born off the Cape Verdes, she’d streaked across the Atlantic at an average speed of seventeen knots, then stopped as soon as she’d entered the eastern Caribbean, lost power, gained it back, jinked north, west, even east once. There hadn’t been one this crazy since Joan, years before. Small as hurricanes went, and nowhere near the brutal power of a Camille, Adele was still a dangerous storm with seventy-five-knot winds. The only people who flew near tropical cyclones were dedicated hurricane-hunter aircraft flown by people for whom merely mortal danger was boring. It was not a place for a twin-engine Beechcraft, even with Chuck Yeager at the controls. Larson was already making plans. In case the mission didn’t go right, or the storm changed course yet again, he started picking fields to put down on, to refuel and head southeast around the gray maelstrom that was marching toward them. The air was smooth and still, deceptively so. The pilot wondered how many hours until it changed to something very different. And that was only one of the dangers he’d face.
Clark sat quietly in the right seat, staring forward, his face composed and inhumanly serene while his mind turned over faster than the Beech’s twin props. In front of the windshield he kept seeing faces, some living, some dead. He remembered past combat actions, past dangers, past fears, past escapes in which those faces had played their parts. Most of all he remembered the lessons, some learned in classrooms and lectures, but the important ones had come from his own experience. John Terence Clark was not a man who forgot things. Gradually he refreshed his memory on all the important lessons for this day, the ones about being alone in unfriendly territory. Then came the faces who’d play their part today. He looked at them, a few feet before his eyes, saw the expressions he expected them to wear, measuring the faces to understand the people who wore them. Finally came the plan of the day. He contemplated what he wanted to do and balanced that against the probable objectives of the opposition. He considered alternative plans and things that might go awry. When all that was done, he made himself stop. You could quickly get to the point that imagination became an enemy. Each segment of the operation was locked into its own little box which he’d open one at a time. He’d trust to his experience and instinct. But part of him wondered if – when – those qualities would fail him.
Sooner or later, Clark admitted to himself. But not today.
He always told himself that.
PJ’s mission briefing took two hours. He, Captain Willis, and Captain Montaigne worked out every detail – where they’d refuel, where the aircraft would orbit if something went wrong. Which routes to take if things went badly. Each crew member got full information. It was more than necessary; it was a moral obligation to the crew. They were risking their lives tonight. They had to know why. As always, Sergeant Zimmer had a few questions, and one important suggestion that was immediately incorporated in the plan. Then it was time to preflight the aircraft. Every system aboard each aircraft was fully checked out in a procedure that would last hours. Part of that was training for the new crewmen.
“What do you know about guns?” Zimmer asked Ryan.
“Never fired one of these babies.” Ryan’s hand stroked the handles of the minigun. A scaled-down version of the 20mm Vulcan cannon, it had a gang of six .30-caliber barrels that rotated clockwise under the power of an electrical motor, drawing shells from an enormous hopper to the left of the mount. It had two speed settings, 4,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute – 66 or 100 rounds per second. The bullets were almost half tracers. The reason for that was psychological. The fire from the weapon looked like a laser beam from a science-fiction movie, the very embodiment of death. It also made a fine way to aim the weapon, since Zimmer assured him that the muzzle blast would be the most blinding thing short of staring into a noon sun. He checked Ryan out on the whole system: where the switches were, how to stand, how to aim.
“What do you know about combat, sir?”
“Depends on what you mean,” Ryan replied.
“Combat is when people with guns are trying to kill you,” Zimmer explained patiently. “It’s dangerous.”
“I know. I’ve been there a few times. Let’s not dwell on that, okay? I’m already scared.” Ryan looked over his gun, out the door of the aircraft, wondering why he’d been such a damned fool to volunteer for this. But what choice did he have? Could he just send these men off to danger? If he did, how did that make him different from Cutter? Jack looked around the interior of the aircraft. It seemed so large and strong and safe, sitting here on the concrete floor of the hangar. But it was an aircraft designed for life in the troubled air of an unfriendly sky. It was a helicopter: Ryan especially hated helicopters.
“The funny thing is, probably no sweat on the mission,” Zimmer said after a moment. “Sir, we do our job right, it’s just a flight in and a flight back out.”
“That’s what I’m scared of, Sarge,” Ryan said, laughing mostly at himself.
They landed at Santagueda. Larson knew the man who ran the local flying service and talked him out of his Volkswagen Microvan. The two CIA officers drove north, and an hour later passed through the village of Anserma. They dallied here for half an hour, driving around until they found what they wanted to find: a few trucks heading in and out of a private dirt road and one expensive-looking car. CAPER had called it right, Clark saw, and it was the place he thought it was from the flight in. Having confirmed that, they moved out, heading north again for another hour and taking a side road into the mountains just outside of Vegas del Rio. Clark had his nose buried in a map, and Larson found a hilltop switchback at which to stop. That’s where the radio came out.
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE, over.” Nothing, despite five minutes of trying. Larson drove farther west, horsing the Microvan around cow paths as he struggled to find another high spot for Clark to try again. It was three in the afternoon, and their fifth attempt until they got a reply.
“KNIFE here. Over.”
“Chavez, this is Clark. Where the hell are you?” Clark asked, in Spanish, of course.
“Let’s talk awhile first.”
“You’re good, kid. We really could have used you in 3rd SOG.”
“Why should I trust you? Somebody cut us off, man. Somebody decided to leave us here.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Glad to hear it,” came the skeptical, bitter reply.
“Chavez, you’re talking over a radio net that might be compromised. If you got a map, we’re at the following set of coordinates,” Clark told him. “There’s two of us in a blue Volkswagen van. Check us out, take all the time you want.”
“I already have!” the radio told him.
Clark’s head spun around to see a man with an AK-47 twenty feet away.
“Let’s be real cool, people,” Sergeant Vega said. Three more men emerged from the treeline. One of them had a bloody bandage on his thigh. Chavez, too, had an AK slung over his shoulder, but he had held on to his silenced MP-5. He walked straight up to the van.
“Not bad, kid,” Clark told him. “How’d you know?”
“UHF radio. You had to transmit from a high spot, right? The map says there’s six of them. I heard you one other time, too, and I spotted you heading this way half an hour ago. Now what the fuck is going on?”
“First thing, let’s get that casualty treated.” Clark stepped out and handed Chavez his pistol, butt first. “I got a first-aid kit in the back.”
The wounded man was Sergeant Juardo, a rifleman from the 10th Mountain at Fort Drum. Clark opened the back of the van and helped load him aboard, then uncovered the wound.