“Christ, what fuck-ups,” he observed, watching through his binoculars.
“Lemme see.” Vega got to watch just as one of them knocked a can down on his third try. “Hell, I could hit the damned things from here…”
“Point, this is Six, what the fuck is going on!” the radio squawked a moment later. Vega answered the call.
“Six, this is Point. Our friends are doing some plinkin’ again. Their axis of fire is away from us, sir. They’re punchin’ holes in some tin cans. They can’t shoot for shit, Cap’n.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Roger.” Ding set down the radio. “The Cap’n’s coming. I think the noise made him nervous.”
“He sure does worry a lot,” Vega noted.
“That’s what they pay officers for, ain’t it?”
Ramirez appeared three minutes later. Chavez made to hand over his binoculars, but the captain had brought his own pair this time. He fell to a prone position and got his glasses up just in time to watch another can go down.
“Oh.”
“Two cans, two full magazines,” Chavez explained. “They like to go rock-and-roll. I guess ammo’s cheap down here.”
Both of the guards were still smoking. The captain and the sergeant watched them laugh and joke as they shot. Probably, Ramirez thought, they’re as bored as we are. After the first aircraft, there had been no activity at all here at RENO, and soldiers like boredom even less than ordinary citizens. One of them – it was hard to tell them apart since they were roughly the same size and wore the same sort of clothing – inserted another magazine into his AK-47 and blazed off a ten-round burst. The little fountains of dirt walked up to the remaining can, but didn’t quite hit it.
“I didn’t know it would be this easy, sir,” Vega observed from behind the sights of his machine gun. “What a bunch of fuck-ups!”
“You think that way, Oso, you turn into one yourself,” Ramirez said seriously.
“Roger that, Cap’n, but I can’t help seein’ what I’m seein’.”
Ramirez softened his rebuke with a smile. “I suppose you’re right.”
The third can finally went down. They were averaging thirty rounds per target. Next the guards used their weapons to push the cans around the runway.
“You know,” Vega said after a moment, “I ain’t seen ’em clean their weapons yet.” For the squad members, cleaning their weapons was as regular a routine as morning and evening prayers were for clergymen.
“The AK’ll take a lot of abuse. It’s good for that,” Ramirez pointed out.
“Yes, sir.”
Finally the guards, too, grew bored. One of them retrieved the cans. As he was doing so, a truck appeared. With little in the way of warning, Chavez was surprised to note. The wind was wrong, but even so it hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t have at least a minute or two worth of warning. Something to remember. There were three people in the truck, one of whom was riding in the back. The driver dismounted and walked out to the two guards. In a moment he was pointing at the ground and yelling – they could hear it from five hundred yards away even though they hadn’t heard the truck, which really seemed strange.
“What’s that all about?” Vega asked.
Captain Ramirez laughed quietly. “FOD. He’s pissed off at the FOD.”
“Huh?” Vega asked.
“Foreign Object Damage. You suck one of those cartridge cases into an aircraft engine, like a turbine engine, and it’ll beat the hell out of it. Yeah – look, they’re picking up their brass.”
Chavez turned his binoculars back to the truck. “I see some boxes there, sir. Maybe we got a pickup tonight. How come no fuel cans – yeah! Captain, last time we were here, they didn’t fuel the airplane, did they?”
“The flight originates from a regular airstrip twenty miles off,” Ramirez explained. “Maybe they don’t have to top off… Does seem odd, though.”
“Maybe they got fuel drums in the shack… ?” Vega wondered.
Captain Ramirez grunted. He wanted to send a couple of men in close to check the area out, but his orders didn’t permit that. Their only patrolling was to check the airfield perimeter for additional security troops. They never got closer than four hundred meters to the cleared area, and it was always done with an eye on the two guards. His operational orders were not to take the slightest risk of making contact with the opposition. So they weren’t supposed to patrol the area even though it would have told them more about the opposition than they knew – would tell them things that they might need to know. That was just good basic soldiering, he thought, and the order not to do it was a dumb order, since it ran as many – or more – risks than it was supposed to avoid. But orders were still orders. Whoever had generated them didn’t know much about soldiering. It was Ramirez’s first experience with that phenomenon, since he, too, was not old enough to remember Vietnam.
“They’re gonna be out there all day,” Chavez said. It appeared that the truck driver was making them count their brass, and you never could find all of the damned things. Vega checked his watch.
“Sundown in two hours. Anybody wanna bet we’ll have business tonight? I got a hundred pesos says we get a plane before twenty-two hundred.”
“No bet,” Ramirez said. “The tall one by the truck just opened a box of flares.” The captain left. He had a radio call to make.
It had been a quiet couple of days at Corezal. Clark had just returned from a late lunch at the Fort Amador Officers’ Club – curiously, the head of the Panamanian Army had an office in the same building; most curious, since he was not overly popular with the U.S. military at the moment – followed by a brief siesta. Local customs, he decided, made sense. Especially sleeping through the hottest part of the day. The cold air of the van – the air conditioning was to protect the electronics gear, mainly from the oppressive humidity here – gave him the wakeup shock he needed.
Team KNIFE had scored on their first night with a single aircraft. Two of the other squads had also had hits, but one of the aircraft had made it all the way to its destination when the F-15 had lost its radar ten minutes after takeoff, much to everyone’s chagrin. But that was the sort of problem you had to expect with an operation this short of assets. Two for three wasn’t bad at all, especially when you considered what the odds had been like a bare month before, when the Customs people were lucky to bag a single aircraft in a month. One of the squads, moreover, had drawn a complete blank. Their airfield seemed totally inactive, contradicting intelligence data that had looked very promising only a week before. That also was a hazard of real-world operations.
“VARIABLE, this is KNIFE, over,” the speaker said without preamble.
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. We read you loud and clear. We are ready to copy, over.”
“We have activity at RENO. Possible pickup this evening. We will keep you advised. Over.”
“Roger, copy. We’ll be here. Out.”
One of the Operations people lifted the handset to another radio channel.
“EAGLE’S NEST, this is VARIABLE… Stand to… Roger. We’ll keep you posted. Out.” He set the instrument down and turned. “They’ll get everyone up. The fighter is back on line. Seems the radar was overdue for some part replacement or other. It’s up and running, and the Air Force offers its apology.”
“Damned well ought to,” the other Operations man grumbled.
“You guys ever think that maybe an operation can go too right?” Clark asked from his seat in the corner.
The senior one wanted to say something snotty, Clark saw, but knew better.
“They must know that something odd is happening. You don’t want to make it too obvious,” Clark explained for the other one. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. Might as well get another piece of that siesta, he told himself. It might be a long night.
Chavez got his wish just after sundown. It started to rain lightly, and clouds moving in from the west promised an even heavier downpour. The airfield crew set out their flares – quite a few more than the last time, he saw – and the aircraft arrived soon after that.
Rain made visibility difficult. It seemed to Chavez that someone ran a fuel hose out from the shack. Maybe there were some fuel drums in there, and maybe a hand-crank pump, but his ability to see the five or six hundred yards came and went with the rain. Something else happened. The truck drove down the center of the strip, and the driver tossed out at least ten additional flares to mark the centerline. The aircraft took off twenty minutes after it arrived, and Ramirez was already on his satellite radio.